Nameless Science
Curated by Henk Slager
December 10, 2008 - January 31, 2009
@ apexart
291 Churchstreet, New York, NY
Opening reception:
Wednesday, December 10, 6-8 pm
With projects by Ricardo Basbaum (Brazil), Jan Kaila (Finland), Irene Kopelman (The Netherlands), Matts Leiderstam (Sweden), Ronan McCrea (Ireland), Sarah Pierce (UK/USA), and Morten Torgersrud (Norway).
Related Symposium: December 12
@The Cooper Union
(Wollman Auditorium),
51 Astor Place, New York, NY
The debate on artistic research emerging worldwide in the field of visual art for some five years now tends to focus on what artistic research could be or should be. As a consequence of that debate, artistic research as a yet undefined sanctuary for creative experiment and knowledge production is prone to the danger of being absorbed by an intellectually crippling academic discourse on how the specificity of research-based art as a novel modus operandi could be defined and framed. That tendency is comparable to what happened in the 1990s with the initially so radically formulated anti-disciplinary cultural studies. Such academic debate that ultimately seems to be focused particularly on institutional and managerial results–and is, moreover, connected in Europe time and again with the so-called Bologna rules, i.e. the introduction of a bachelor, master, and PhD structure in art education–provides very little insight in the specific qualities of the artistic research process as such. Therefore, it is more than urgent to approach research practices from the perspective of the artistic profession implying entirely different and also more intrinsic views.
In that context, the project Nameless Science aims at expanding the artistic research debate while showing the concrete outcome of seven best artistic research practices in PhD projects. These actual projects will demonstrate that the form of research taking place through the practice of visual art is, in fact, much more dynamic than is common within the traditional academic bastions still characterized by distinct and clear fields and disciplines. (read more)