Longshot: Practices and Theories of Artistic Research

The collaborative seminar is combined with a lecture series focusing on long-term artistic research practices and artistic procedures of re-historicization. Every two weeks, artists, art philosophers, media activists and collectives are invited to the KHM library to present their various approaches and to engage in a direct exchange with students and an interested public in a workshop setting. In complementary reading sessions, significant voices from the field of theory production are discussed.

It's about the decentralization and de-skilling of hegemonic historiography, such as in Sci-Fi settings. The artistic research that we will be discussing in the seminar operates between/with entanglements, forms intergenerational coalitions and reveals silenced, submerged practices. Archival images are activated, artistic hubs beyond the Eurocentric gaze are sought out, and the experiences of forced migration or of poverty taken into account.

Such de-historicizations are queering the structures of normalization and coloniality. Last but not least, the protagonists of artistic research provide vulnerable learning spaces, perhaps for thinking about historical knowledge and its process-based production, which strives to distance itself from the structures of reproduction (Holert).

The seminar further includes a field trip to Utrecht, where we will visit the BAK - an art venue that offers an important roof for artistic research, not least with its residency program.

Reading matter:

Tom Holert, Eva Mayer & Eran Schaerf, Irit Rogoff, Gabi Ngcobo u. a.

Books:

Tom Holert/ Maria Hjavajova (Eds.): Marion von Osten: Once We Were Artists, Utrecht, 2017.

Maria Hlavajova/ Jil Winder/ Binna Choi (Eds.): On Knowledge Production: A Critical Reader in Contemporary Art, Utrecht, 2008.

Jochen Volz/ Gabi Ngcobo (Eds.), We Are Many: Art, the Political and Multiple Truths, London, 2019.

Yvette Mutumba/ Gabi Ngcobo (Eds.), A Labour of Love, Bielefeld, 2016.