a 12-hour (performative)
reflection on artistic research
A SPACE
IN A PLACE
IT IS NOT
December 5th 2025, 12pm to 12am
Academy of Fine Arts in Prague
Veletržní 826/61, Prague 7
www.avu.cz
December 5th 2025, 12pm to 12am
Academy of Fine Arts in Prague Veletržní 826/61, Prague 7
a 12-hour (performative) reflection on artistic research
4th of December 2025, 4pm to 9 pm, Academy of Fine Arts Prague, Veletržní
organised by the AVU Department of Doctoral Research
Conference
The fourth edition of the AVU 12h (Performative) Reflection on Artistic Research explores the zones of absence that emerge when travelling between different fields. Starting from the assumption that the investigative demands of research always lead one, to a certain extent, to venturing out of the familiar towards unknown routes, the conference asks what spaces remain hollow in interdisciplinary dialogues, and how artistic investigations can navigate these spaces. It brings into question the possible exchanges between art and other disciplines, as well as the unfinished dialogues between various artistic traditions, asking how understandings of performance shift between visual art, dance, theatre and music; how drawing unfolds between object, notation or scientific exploration, and how the same idea might inhabit different areas of research in sometimes divergent ways.
Curated by Irina Gheorghe, Anetta Mona Chișa and Lamija Čehajić.
The 12-hour (Performative) Reflection on Artistic Research proposes an experimental format at the intersection between a conference, a performance marathon and a sculptural engagement with space, unfolding over the course of a full day. It explores what it means to investigate not about art but through art: how this investigation can be carried out, how it can be presented, how it can produce knowledge and in what relationship this knowledge finds itself to other disciplines, and to a broader social context.
Contributors
Vladimír Kokolia
Prof. Vladimír Kokolia is a visual artist working predominantly in the mediums of painting, drawing and printmaking. In 1990, he was the first laureate of the Jindřich Chalupecký Award. In the 1980’s, he founded an experimental rock band called E. Between 1992 and June 2025, Vladimír Kokolia headed the Printmaking 2 studio at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague.
Handedness
A line has two sides.
What’s more, it has a front side and a back side.
But…
Gernot Wieland
Gernot Wieland is an artist whose work spans short films, drawings, installations, ceramics and lecture-performances. His narratives are constructed through idiosyncratic and often absurd combinations of images and language, blending autobiographical and fictional elements into poetic, dreamlike spaces. Wieland constructs a deeply emotional and singular world where memories hover between truth and fiction. His first-person narratives weave together the personal with the political and slowly develop into a humourous analysis of social norms and repressive dynamics. Solo exhibitions include Musée d’art moderne et contemporain de Saint-Étienne, France; KH Künstler:innenhaus Bremen, Germany; Argos, Brussels, Belgium; Belmacz Gallery, London, UK; Kindl – Centre of Contemporary Arts, Berlin, Germany; Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen, Switzerland; Salzburger Kunstverein, Salzburg, Austria; Quartz Studio, Turin, Italy; Berlinische Galerie, Museum of Modern Art, Berlin, Germany, among others.
Cimabue’s Way to Rome
The lecture performance “Cimabue’s Way to Rome” is accompanied by mythical figures and childhood heroes, narrations about the Town Musicians of Bremen, psychoanalytical sessions, the history of poverty, and political events.
…but then this Flemish guy who painted a child that came too close to the sun and fell into the sea. Everyone stands around, untouched, no one is capable of developing a feeling. In the exact middle of this painting there is an ass of a sheep and the face of this bored shepherd. This Flemish painter described my upbringing and my country in one single painting. Then our teacher urged us to also copy this picture, but I only made a potato print of the sheep’s ass, and never again have I described my country better…
Anne-Françoise Schmid
Anne-Françoise Schmid is a philosopher working among scientists (EPFL, INSA, INRA, Mines ParisTech) and among artists (the vimeo film Letre, philosophical scripts on lost films, collaborations with Robin Mackay, Alice Lucy Rekab, Benoît Maire, Gallien Dejean, Ivan Liovik Ebel). She is a specialist on Poincaré and an editor of the works of Russell and Couturat. Her central concern is knowing how to avoid exclusions—whether the exclusion of emerging scientific methods she observed in laboratories and research centers, or the exclusion of certain philosophies in the name of the supremacy of a particular one. She has articulated the general hypotheses of epistemology and has worked on models and modeling in relation to the interdisciplinarity of the sciences.
Her current work aims to develop a philosophical style not “within” but “with” philosophies in their multiplicity, through experimental and fictional texts, in order to clarify what philosophical invention is.
Some Reflections on the Concept of Hypothesis
The term hypothesis is sometimes forgotten in works on the philosophy of science—for example, in the Dictionary of the History and Philosophy of Science (PUF, edited by D. Lecourt), which refers instead to “conjecture”, a quite different notion. One reason for this omission may be that the hypothesis always seems to disappear: if it is verified, it becomes a law; if it is not, it is abandoned. Its existence appears fragile—it no longer exists in the results but belongs to the past stage of a process.
Some scientists and philosophers, however, have not followed this interpretation. Leibniz believed that the hypothesis was necessary for addressing phenomena involving the infinite. Poincaré wrote his first philosophical book under the title Science and Hypothesis. In it, the hypothesis takes on a dynamic and heuristic meaning—something also found in the work of Poincaré’s English counterpart and critic, Bertrand Russell.
In epistemology, attention to the role of hypothesis has reshaped the relationships between science, epistemology, and philosophy.
In logic, the work of Jacques Herbrand made it possible to articulate operations and relations through a reflection on hypotheses.
In philosophy, the hypothesis only took on its full meaning once it was accepted that philosophies must be treated by taking into account their rightful multiplicity and not merely one particular philosophy. This multiplicity does not lead to relativism but rather to a hypothesis: philosophy does not co-construct reality; reality precedes it. Within this framework, hypothesis and fiction assume a new and essential role in philosophical invention.
Ran Jiao
Ran Jiao is a Chinese interdisciplinary performance-maker, director, and performer based in Prague, Czech Republic. She works between theatre and dance, and her works lie in the intersection of movement, text, and costume. Her work often moves through site-specific and participatory formats, resisting clear categories while provoking social, ecological, and political reflections. A graduate of DAMU, she has collaborated with prominent festivals and institutions in the Czech Republic, including the Bazaar Festival of Dance and Performance, Tanec Praha, Prague Quadrennial, New stage of National Theatre Czech Republic and The National Gallery Prague.
Spider, Turtle, We
Quiet observation of small species can change our perspective. A spider in a bathroom. Everyday reality intersects with an imaginary world where spiders dance to survive, overlooked beings celebrate their existence, and a turtle suddenly appears. Through costumed bodies and a moving installation, the performance leads spectators on a journey in which they cease to be human and imagine life as other kinds of species. Confronted with these creatures, they experience contradictory feelings: curiosity is clouded by fear of the unknown, confusion intersects with empathy, and everything comes together in a series of introspective questions: Who is the real monster? Whose fear is real and whose is not?
Performed by Ran Jiao, Jovita Siu, Matthew Rogers, Sai Morikawa, Elia Moretti.
Ben Woodard
Ben Woodard received his PhD in Theory and Criticism from Western University in 2016. From 2017–2020 he was a postdoctoral researcher at the IPK (Institute of Philosophy and Sciences of Art) at Leuphana University where he completed a habilitation on the analytic/continental divide in the history of philosophy. Since 2020 Ben has lectured at the Melbourne School of Continental Philosophy, the School of Materialist Research, and the New Centre for Research and Practice.
In broad terms, his work focuses on the relationship between naturalism and idealism in the long 19th century. More specifically, his current project focuses on the politicization of biology by way of eugenics, statistics, and the neglect of historical concepts in biological research. Ben also writes on science fiction, horror film, and literature and is a translator of French philosophy.
He is the author of numerous articles and five books: Slime Dynamics: Generation, Mutation and the Creep of Life (2012), On an Ungrounded Earth: Towards a New Geophilosophy (2013), Schelling’s Naturalism: Motion, Space, and the Volition of Thought (2019), F.H. Bradley and the History of Philosophy: Animating a Lost Idealism (2025) and Uninhabited: Science Fiction and the Decolonial (2025).
The Legend of Thought House
Philosophy is generally an exercise in generality – it seeks to either problematize unquestioned prepositions (‘what do you mean by x?’) or it seeks to enchant or re-enchant the world (‘let’s build an ontology based on y’). In the former analytic tradition philosophy re-purposes the obvious in the name of coherence, or in the latter continental form, philosophy extends certain concepts to the edge of breaking to show how much we in fact do not know. But what happens to the generic image of thought not only when it moves between these traditions but when it moves between disciplines outside these traditions?
This brief talk uses the metaphor of the house to try and spatialize the different capacities for thought within a general understanding of thinking. By placing the historicizing element of metaphilosophy into stasis, the hope is that thought can be seen in its effectiveness regardless of praxis or medium. Put otherwise, does philosophy describe the place where thought lives or does it merely haunt that place of generality?
Patrik Pelikan
Patrik Pelikán combines his artistic practice with masonry. In the gallery context, this dual approach manifests itself in the form of installations that translate building principles into an artistic language, using the tools and materials of masonry (primer, coating, “proto-wall”, freestanding wall, etc.). In his craft-based commissions, he explores alternative ways of thinking and working—approaches that might otherwise be excluded by established conventions (lintel/arch, flatness/protrusion, hydraulic/air binders, and so on).
In his PhD project Beyond the Zenith of Mastery, he conceives of the wall as an experimental structure—a site where different working approaches can be tested and where the boundaries between artistic and craft ambitions, between the ordinary and the exceptional, can be both revealed and erased. Alongside the walls themselves, the project also examines the relationship between the builder and the built, reflecting on the act of construction through building diaries and asking a speculative question: what might the walls say if they were given a voice?
FACADE SHOW /// THREE LEVELS
We watch the bricklayer.
We see more beneath his hands than in his whole body. What is he processing?
He throws the wet mortar onto the board and levels it with the lath.
He checks it with the laser.
We see several layers — the base surface, the vertical laser cut, and the spreading of a new, flattened layer of mortar.
The new layer doesn’t quite reach the laser; it rather licks it.
The hands don’t use only the lath — the straightedge — they also compress the mortar with the trowels.
Another pair of hands joins in.
The surface changes — from roughly leveled to smoothed, and slightly rounded.
Light reveals the curves. “Is it a mistake?” asks the laser.
The bricklayers are looking for a way out.
They have to decide what the facade can show.
Unlike a brick, where all the sides are the same, in a built wall we can immediately identify the front and the back — a kind of nape or forehead. The face of the wall — the facade — has the quality that it does not always show what lies behind. Instead, we project our own expectations onto it: is it flat, decorative, or curved? What does it represent, and does it deceive us? Its effect depends on a frontal view — which is why we rarely see it in profile.
Here, however, the facade is turned sideways: in section and under side light, it reveals not only its possible imperfections, but above all allows us to perceive the facade as an event.
Mel E. Logan
Mel E. Logan is a Vienna-based artist whose pioneering work in sound sculpture and performance has secured her international standing. A founding member of the Electronic music and fine art crossover genre Electroclash, she co-built the iconic collective Chicks on Speed while studying painting at Munich’s Akademie der Bildenden Künste in the 1990s. Logan’s practice seamlessly traverses the boundaries between the visual and the sonic. Her work utilizes unique tools to investigate subjects through technological and ecological translation. Antennas have been a part of her practice since 2020 when she built an installation for the Deutscheliteraturmuseum Marbach am Necker. For this she also collaborated with a local chorus youth chorus who performed a series of songs with antenna pieces playing. Logan is represented by Galerie Gisela Clement in Bonn and holds the position of Senior Artist at the University of Applied Arts Vienna (Die Angewandte).
Photo: Kevin Abusch 2025
Antenna in the Mud
Interactive Sonic Sculpture of Four Antennas to be Activated by the Visitors
A four channel audio player of music compositions is performed by the visitors by way of bodily movements close to the antennas, activating the electromagnetic waves to trigger sound. The four antennas are built in the shapes of 3d printed meteorite shapes. These are enlargements of scans from the Naturhistorisches Museum, which has an extensive meteorite collection.
The compositions are a series of sound pieces created using microbial activity as the basis, they include bio rhythm of pulsating heart beats, insect sounds sonification of microscopic video material, AI generated insect sounds, field recordings looped into overlapping sections.
Antenna in the Mud encourages humans working together. In order to hear the whole composition, the sculpture requires collaboration between four people activating the four Antennas.
Slavomíra Ondrušová
Slavomíra Ondrušová completed her master’s and doctoral studies at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Bratislava. She focuses primarily on drawing and illustration, teaching, and exhibiting. She perceives drawing as a living process that transcends traditional concepts. She perceives it as a means of visual thinking, which she simultaneously transforms into spatial and object formats and connects with the surrounding world and people. In the past, she published a magazine on contemporary drawing, X, together with Milan Vagač. She currently works as an assistant professor in the Printmaking 1 studio at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague, where she also lives and works.
Decompre(se)ssion
time for a slow collective viewing of drawings and lines made during the day as a space for decompression and reflection.
Peter Kolárčik
Peter Kolárčik is a musician, a graduate of the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague (AVU), and currently also a technical producer at AVU Veletržní. In his musical, artistic, and podcast projects he focuses on themes of (artistic) labour and its conditions, the inaccessibility of housing, and broader reflections on everyday experience within a system built on the accumulation of capital.
I DON’T WORK HERE
Actually, I do.
But not for the duration of this performance.
Or presentation.
Or lecture.
Or concert?
Réka Bucsi
Réka Bucsi is a Hungarian animation filmmaker and visual artist. She graduated with a Master’s degree in animation from Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design in 2013. Reka’s graduation film ‚Symphony no. 42‘ was shortlisted for the Oscars in 2014. Her films were screened at various film festivals, including all of them premiering at the Berlinale Shorts Competition and further playing in competition at Sundance, Ottawa, AFI Fest, BFI London Film Festival and twice at SXSW. Réka’s short film ‚LOVE‘ was nominated for Best Short Film at the European Film Awards. She became a European Film Academy Member in 2017. Her short film ‚Solar Walk‘ won the Audi Short Film Award at the Berlinale in 2018.
Portrait image source: IMDb
Solar Walk
Flags are planted. Hands are held. First steps are taken on new worlds. And then the giant lets out a stream of black piss and pees a brand new universe. Reason enough for the two creatures who landed in the new spot with the giant to jump into the vast blackness. Love in outer space. They become one with the new world. Solar Walk follows the journey of individuals and their creations in space.
In its series of sequences and situations, Solar Walk recalls the liberating effect of automatic writing, which was employed by the surrealists in the 1920s as the basis for a new kind of creativity. They saw automatic writing as a possibility to activate the unconscious, spontaneous, dream-like and repressed elements of human inspiration. Space as a place for reflecting on one’s own behaviour and the question of perception. Every action is only then meaningful when something is truly created or when one is really taking care of someone else. Every action is only existent from the perspective of the individual itself. ‘Whoever you are. Where you are. And whatever you are. You are in the middle,’ Alan Watts reflects in David OReilly’s Everything (Berlinale Shorts 2017). Bucsi pursues this question further, entering into a dialogue.
Text by Maike Mia Höhne
Madalina Dan
Mădălina Dan is a choreographer and performer, one of the established creators of contemporary dance in Romania. She is active on international stages, but also very present and involved in the local choreographic context. She creates complex contents and working methodologies that she shares in contexts that become spaces of communication, exploring connections between people, collectives and ideas. She is a graduate of the “Floria Capsali” Choreography High School in Bucharest and of the National University of Theatrical and Cinematographic Arts in Bucharest – Choreography section; she also graduated from UNATC with a Master in dramatic writing. Between 1998 and 2003 she was a member of the dance company “Oleg Danovski” in Constanta. She was guest artist to the Herberger Institute, School of Dance (Arizona State University). Between 2014-2016 she studied in Berlin at HZT (Hochschulübergreifende Zentrum Tanz Berlin) in the SoDA (Solo/Dance/Authorship) master program. In 2015 she received the CNDB Award, and in 2016 she is Associate Artist of the National Center for Dance Bucharest.
Photo credit: Roland Váczi
Ex-peau-sition
In Ex-peau-sition, the visitor/ participant is invited to receive a tactile choreography performed on one own’s body inspired by different contemporary and historical sculptures. The artwork was conceived and presented for the first time in the exhibition “Brancusi. Sublimation of Form” at BOZAR, Brussels as part of the Europalia 2019 Arts Festival and was later exapanded for the exhibition framework of “after SCULPTURE / SCULPTURE after” Cazarma U in Timișoara. The project is an extension of The Agency of Touch (2016-2025), the framework of Mădălina Dan’s ample artistic research on tactility. The Agency of Touch uses touch, body awareness, and connectivity as artistic “service” in various contexts: artistic, social, cultural. It is temporarily activated in artistic contexts: festivals, galleries, apartments, research workshops, as well as in medical and social environments: care centers, hospitals, retirement homes, children’s camps. The new tactile approach in Ex-peau-sition is a re-contextualisation of sculptural works from a corporeal and sensorial perspective. It concentrates on other sensory components than the visual and turns the viewer into a subject and the contemplative into experiential. The juxtaposition of the tactile sphere with the tradition of sculpture is aimed at a deterritorialization of the gaze, focusing mainly on the sensory perception, experience and the integration of the senses through the body, by suspending contemplation and aesthetic representation. Themes such as form, dynamics, volume, texture, materiality are transferred and translated into the non-visual, the tactile and the sensory.
Concept and performance: Mădălina Dan
Sound design: Lala Misosniky, Joëlle Marie McGovern
Jiri Adámek Austerlitz
Jiří Adámek Austerlitz is a theatre author and director. He studied theatre directing at the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague, where he has been teaching since 2011. He founded his theatre company BocaLoca Lab in 2006. He has developed an original type of experimental theatre, in which he blends musically composed structures, the dominance of vocal expression, and an unusual approach to language. He is focused on the relationship between inanimate objects and humans and his work has been influenced by visual art. He regularly cooperates with various Czech theatres and the Czech Radio. Working as a librettist and director, he has created new operas with composers Martin Smolka, Michal Nejtek and Petr Hora. Adámek has worked in the Neuköllner Oper in Berlin (Changemakers, 2011). With Smolka, he has also created a staged concerto Vor dem Gesetz for Ascolta, for a German music ensemble (2019). He has been awarded various prizes in the Czech Republic and abroad, especially for Ticks Ticks Politics (2006), From the Jungle Book (2007), The Europeans (2008), and The Lists of Infinity (2014). His radio piece Ears game (2019) was awarded the Karl Sczuka Preis (SWR), the Prix Bohemia award (CZ) and the Gran Prix Nova (RO). Another radio piece, Mother of God, banish Putin (2025), was awarded Prix Europe special commendation (2025). During the time of isolation of the covid era, he decided to affix the original Jewish name of his father´s family, Austerlitz.
Photo credits: Kamil Košun
Jiří Adámek Austerlitz’s contribution is a collaboration with Fedir Kis and students from the third year of bachelor acting program at the Alternative and Puppet department at the Theatre Faculty of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague (DAMU): Eliška Čadová, Barbora Chrpová, Cyril Janeček, Adéla Kulhavá, Alexander Moberg, Šimon Ludvíček, Adam Trčka and Lucie Trilčová.
Conference Vocalisations
We enter the situation of the performative conference through subtle acoustic and performative interventions. The students–performers step into an unfamiliar environment and respond to the current mood and constellation with their own impulses. Their vocal expression is based on gibberish, childlike playfulness, and rhythmic patterns, reminding us of the creative sources that sometimes get lost under the weight of intellectual positions and ethical responsibility.
Food event Intermedia
Students of the Intermedia II Studio (AVU), under the guidance of Dušan Zahoranský, Pavla Sceranková and Roman Štětina
The Intermedia Studio II takes into account the full range of possible materials and media that help artists give voice to their vision. Working intermedially means perceiving the qualities offered by the combination of traditional and new techniques. The work in the studio is focused on the demands this freedom places on the artist. Additionally, work in space is emphasised at the studio.
How Many Artists Does It Take to Grow a Cucumber?
How Many Cucumbers Does It Take to Grow an Artist?
Performative food event
A project by students of the Intermedia II Studio at AVU approaches “catering” as an artistic framework of care, attention, and co-presence.The feast transforms into a living installation and ecological ritual where food becomes a medium of relations between people, plants, and the environment. The event follows the project Seedliště – a greenhouse and community laboratory at AVU – and expands its idea of cyclical growth, fermentation, and sharing.
Panel contributors
Jakub Podgorný is an astrophysicist, currently a post-doctoral researcher at the Astronomical Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences. He finished a PhD at the University of Strasbourg (France) and Charles University (CU) in 2023 in Theoretical Physics, Astronomy and Astrophysics, previously studying a master’s at CU and KU Leuven (Belgium). His primary research focuses on X-rays from compact objects, such as black holes and neutron stars, polarisation and general relativity. Although he mostly works in theory, he has led several large observational campaigns (some with 100+ researchers), in particular with the IXPE mission (NASA, since 2021), where he is a scientific participant. He published as the first or one of the primary authors in rank-A journals, including Science and Nature Astronomy. For his individual efforts, he received, e.g., the Czech Head Prize in 2024 (doctorandus natural sciences), and for collective efforts with the IXPE team, e.g., the Bruno Rossi Prize in 2024 of the American Astronomical Society. Jakub Podgorný is one of the initiators of the interdisciplinary project Rendezvous Problem: Formulations on the Optimal Ways for Art and Science to Meet, a collaboration between LARGE AVU Velrybí srdce, z.s. In 2023, he initiated the Conference on Nothing in Arts and Science.
Markéta Magidová is a visual artist and film director. In her work, she explores themes such as children’s imagination, gender or social norms, and the relationship between mythology and the present. Her animated films, digital images, and sculptures create a space both for new worlds and for reflections on our existing world. Selected exhibitions include Dictionary of Imaginary Places, Gregor Podnar Gallery, Vienna; Divination from a Night Sky Partially Obscured by Clouds, Prague City Gallery, Prague; That’s Not a Fairy, That’s a Mum, Prague City Gallery, Prague; Loop Infinity Down to Side, Centre for Contemporary Art FUTURA, Prague, 4th Moscow International Biennale for Young Art, Moscow. Markéta Magidová is the editor-in chief of ArteActa: A Journal of Performing Arts and Artistic Research at the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague.
Mel E. Logan is a Vienna-based artist whose pioneering work in sound sculpture and performance has secured her international standing. A founding member of the Electronic music and fine art crossover genre Electroclash, she co-built the iconic collective Chicks on Speed while studying painting at Munich’s Akademie der Bildenden Künste in the 1990s. Logan’s practice seamlessly traverses the boundaries between the visual and the sonic. Her work utilises unique tools to investigate subjects through technological and ecological translation. Antennas have been a part of her practice since 2020 when she built an installation for the Deutscheliteraturmuseum Marbach am Necker. For this she also collaborated with a local chorus youth chorus who performed a series of songs with antenna pieces playing. Logan is represented by Galerie Gisela Clement in Bonn and holds the position of Senior Artist at the University of Applied Arts Vienna (Die Angewandte).
Ben Woodard received his PhD in Theory and Criticism from Western University in 2016. From 2017–2020 he was a postdoctoral researcher at the IPK (Institute of Philosophy and Sciences of Art) at Leuphana University where he completed a habilitation on the analytic/continental divide in the history of philosophy. Since 2020 Ben has lectured at the Melbourne School of Continental Philosophy, the School of Materialist Research, and the New Centre for Research and Practice.
In broad terms, his work focuses on the relationship between naturalism and idealism in the long 19th century. More specifically, his current project focuses on the politicization of biology by way of eugenics, statistics, and the neglect of historical concepts in biological research. Ben also writes on science fiction, horror film, and literature and is a translator of French philosophy. He is the author of numerous articles and five books: Slime Dynamics: Generation, Mutation and the Creep of Life (2012), On an Ungrounded Earth: Towards a New Geophilosophy (2013), Schelling’s Naturalism: Motion, Space, and the Volition of Thought (2019), F.H. Bradley and the History of Philosophy: Animating a Lost Idealism (2025) and Uninhabited: Science Fiction and the Decolonial (2025).
Doctoral Symposium
We Know More Than We Can Tell
AVU Doctoral Symposium 2025
December 4, 2025 from 4:00 PM
AVU Veletržní
In conjunction with this year’s 12-hour (Performative) Reflection on Artistic Research, the AVU Doctoral Symposium will take place on December 4th under the title We Know More Than We Can Tell.
Moving through the layers of everyday realities requires an ability to perceive and understand different languages. Making sense of where we are is a continuous act of translation, in which meanings emerge and fade depending on who translates, why, for whom. Language is a shifting field of relations: to understand what language is, we must also ask where it flows and with whom it shares space.
Within artistic research, a dynamic tension often unfolds between verbal and aesthetic language. Words can help bridge the space between artistic practice and reflection – making the research process present, contextualized, and comprehensible to others. Yet words can also become fog machines, obscuring and dispersing meanings until everything, including ourselves, gets lost in translation.
This year’s AVU Doctoral Symposium explores language as a malleable terrain – a space where diverse forms of knowing emerge from the tensions between intuition and rationality, intention and serendipity, signal and noise. In resonance with Polanyi’s insight that “We know more than we can tell”*, we seek to examine how to capture the ineffable, see through the fog, and express that which resists naming.
What meanings reside in the interstices of seemingly disparate linguistic forms and modes – such as artistic and scientific, verbal and embodied, visual and multisensory, human and more-than-human?
*Polanyi, Michael (1967) The tacit dimension. Garden City. NY Doubleday.
Program
This year’s symposium will feature a six-hour program of performances, lectures, sound walks, workshops, and a short film. Presenting their work will be: Julie Černá, Marie Čtveráčková | Mary C, Catherine Dormor, Berta Doubková, Cristina Maldonado, Hana Chmelíková & Lucie Nováčková. The detailed program will be announced soon.
The AVU Doctoral Symposium is co-organised annually by the Department of Doctoral Research and doctoral students. This year’s program was prepared by Markéta Dolejšová, Hana Chmelíková, Lucie Nováčková & Johana Novotná.
More information here:
Schedule
12:00 – 15:30 BLOCK I
Opening, welcoming words
Vladimír Kokolia, Handedness, performative talk
Gernot Wieland, Cimabue’s Way to Rome, lecture performance
Anne-Françoise Schmid, Some Reflections on the Concept of Hypothesis, lecture
13:45 – 14:15 Coffee break
Ran Jiao, Spider, Turtle, We, performance
Ben Woodard, The Legend of Thought House, lecture
15:30 – 16:30 Lunch
16:30 – 18:00 BLOCK II
Patrik Pelikán, Facade Show /// Three Levels, live transmission from SPZ Gallery
Mel E. Logan, Antenna in the Mud, sound installation and performance
17:30 – 18:00 Apero
18:00 – 20:00 BLOCK III
Dislocated Practices and Epistemic Drift: Panel discussion with theoretical astrophysicists Oldřich Semerák and Jakub Podgorný, philosopher Ben Woodard, artist and editor-in-chief of Arte Acta journal Markéta Magidová and artist Mel E. Logan, moderated by Irina Gheorghe
20:00 – 22:00 Dinner and performative food event
How Many Artists Does It Take to Grow a Cucumber?
How Many Cucumbers Does It Take to Grow an Artist?
Students from the Intermedia 2 Studio with pedagogues Roman Štětina, Pavla Sceranková and Dušan Zahoranský
22:00-00:00 BLOCK IV
Slavomíra Ondrušová, Decompre(se)ssion, performative drawing
Peter Kolárčik, I DON’T WORK HERE, performative lecture
Réka Bucsi, Solar Walk, film screening
Wrap up, conclusions
Between 12:00 -14:00 and 16:30 – 18:30 Mădălina Dan, Ex-peau-sition, one-on-one tactile choreographies. In order to register please send an email to irina.gheorghe@avu.cz and indicate your preferred time from the following: 12:15, 12:45, 13:15, 13:45, 16:30, 17:00, 17:30, 18:00, 18:30, 19:00.
Between 18:00 and 00:00 Conference Vocalisations will be presented intermittently by Jiri Adámek Austerlitz (CZ) in collaboration with Fedir Kis (CZ) and DAMU students Eliška Čadová, Barbora Chrpová, Cyril Janeček, Adéla Kulhavá, Alexander Moberg, Šimon Ludvíček, Adam Trčka and Lucie Trilčová.
December 4, 2025 from 4:00 PM, AVU Veletržní
We Know More Than We Can Tell: AVU Doctoral Symposium 2025
In conjunction with this year’s 12-hour (Performative) Reflection on Artistic Research, the AVU Doctoral Symposium will take place on December 4th under the title We Know More Than We Can Tell:
About LARGE
LARGE is a department that represents and supports artistic research activities at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague. It is dedicated to exploring what it means to investigate not about art but through art: how this investigation can be carried out, how it can produce knowledge and in what relationship this knowledge finds itself to other disciplines, and to a broader social context. As such, LARGE is focused on interrogating the specificities of research conducted through artistic practice and thinking: its methods, its possible systems of evaluation and presentation, as well as the contradictions inherent in the process. Taking seriously the idea that artistic research must often produce not only its content but also its form, methods and sharing practices, LARGE places particular focus on the exploration of art specific presentation formats in research.
The activities of LARGE include, in addition to the international conference A 12-hour (Performative) Reflection on Artistic Research, courses and seminars, publications (such as the upcoming periodical Velké: Journal for Artistic Investigation, whose pilot issue was launched in 2024, the upcoming Handbook of Artistic Investigation, due to be published in early 2026); methodological documents, such as the “Principles for Evaluating Artistic Doctorates at AVU”, as well as a series of interdisciplinary performative presentations bringing together artists and physicists under the title Rendezvous Problem: Formulations on the Possible Ways for Art and Science to Meet.
LARGE promotes research that:
- is grounded in artistic practice and is rooted in its unique character
- seeks to achieve both disciplinary depth and interdisciplinary breadth
- contributes significantly to professional artistic practice
LARGE pursues the following goals:
- to improve the academic standing of artistic research at AVU through courses, events and publications
- to support artistic doctorates and their supervision through consultations and workshops
- to contribute to a better integration of AVU artistic research outcomes in an international context through publications and events
- to interrogate the ways in which research can be an integral part of artistic practice and artistic practice a key component of research
- to contribute to conceptualising methodological tools for a better integration of artistic doctorates in an academic environment through studies on methodologies and evaluation criteria, both within AVU and at the levels of national academic and governmental bodies
- to provide a competent point of contact for the public, the artistic community and the academic community in relation to the subject of artistic research
- to develop platforms for exploring interdisciplinarity in artistic research, both nationally and internationall
- to promote and implement the Research Catalogue platform
People
Irina Gheorghe Ph.D.
Assistant Professor, Head of LARGE AVU
irina.gheorghe@avu.cz
Mgr. art. Magdaléna Stanová Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
magdalena.stanova@avu.cz
Artistic Research
LARGE focuses on artistic research understood as an in-depth investigation driven by artistic practice. Rather than placing emphasis on the adjective “artistic” as a method which can be equally deployed across several disciplines, LARGE is concerned primarily with the generative role of the art practice in (artistic) research: its unique capacity to create new aesthetic and conceptual spaces, to suggest and imagine alternatives to existing realities, and ultimately to produce forms of knowledge not in response to other fields but alongside them, with equal epistemological value.
While interdisciplinary exchange can – and often does – play a crucial role in the process, LARGE proposes a perspective in which the contribution of artistic research to the sphere of art itself is not disregarded in favour of a consideration of its involvement in the discourse of other disciplines, or in the dialogues between them.
Due to its focus on research driven by art practice, LARGE acknowledges the possibility for a rigorous artistic inquiry not to be formulated exclusively through text, and consider instead an expanded linguistic approach, from visual language to verbal language.