What if
We all
Knew?
November 15th 2024,
from 12 pm to 12 am
Academy of Fine Arts in Prague
Veletržní 826/61, Prague 7
www.avu.cz
reflection on artistic research
Starting from the speculative possibilities of a “what if“ proposal, the event aims to imagine what hypothetical communities of knowledge might be catalysed by research in the arts. How is a collective “we” brought together by common ways of knowing, and how are these ways communicated inside and outside the group? What is the role of language in this communication and in what relationship does it find itself with non linguistic artistic media? How are the knowledge, competences and skills of multiple communities and sub-communities of researchers in different artistic fields evaluated and what are, in turn, the collectives of suitable peers to carry out such an evaluation? The third edition of the 12-hour performative reflection on artistic research will explore these questions, interrogating not only how a certain “we” might know what “you” don’t know, or “you” might be able to do what “we” are not, but also how this knowledge might be performed beyond description, explanation or illustration.
Proposing a format at the intersection between a conference, a performance marathon, a series of lectures and a sculptural engagement with space, the event unfolding over the course of 12 hours aims to reflect on the intersections between artistic research, performative modes of presentation and knowledge dissemination.
The conference will be held in English.
Contributors
Chloe Brenan
Chloe Brenan, artist, TU Dublin
Chloe Brenan is a visual artist from rural Ireland working primarily with film, photography, language and publication format. She creates careful examinations of the poetic haptics of daily life, paying close attention to subjects and processes on the edge of perception that call into question boundaries between bodies, environments and wider structures of power. Her work is informed by feminist and new materialist epistemologies. She is currently undertaking an interdisciplinary, practice-based PhD at TU Dublin. She teaches in the Department of Sculpture and Expanded Practice at NCAD, Dublin.
Photo credit: Casey Walshe
Chloe Brenan
A Stick in a Dark Room
performance lecture
A film screening and audio visual performance revolving around orchards, interferences, opacities and erasures.
Alice Chauchat and Jennifer Lacey
Alice Chauchat, dancer and choreographer, Berlin
Alice Chauchat’s activities range from dancing to choreographing to teaching to supporting peers to making up structures for thinking and developing together to writing to directing institutions to pondering through dance practice on politics and ethics of alterity and togetherness, processing the knowledge and complexity of collaborative practices, or simply being in the world with other people, into choreographic forms.
Since 2014, Alice has been developing research into the ethics of intimacy through radical difference. From dance, she activates correlated notions such as not knowing, tending towards or approximating, to investigate the qualities of engagement they generate. This ongoing research produces a collection of scores, choreographic concepts and performances. It takes place in dance studios, on stage, in urban space and in text form.
Photo by Claudio Rincon.
Jennifer Lacey, dancer and choreographer, Stockholm University of the Arts
Jennifer Lacey is a New York dance artist, filtered through 20 years in Paris and now pooling in Stockholm. Her constant project is a renegotiation of production methods, generating pieces that are always based in dancing but don’t always look like dance. She creates works that propose an inventive and playful hermeneutics of bodies and their environments.
Often co-signing and collaborating, the products of her activity unbind dance from the spectacular whilst still investing in the multiple ways that the performative can manifest, effect and communicate. Her works have been produced and staged internationally in theatres, museums, galleries, workshops and publications. She is a recipient of a Doris Duke Impact Fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellowship. She is an assistant professor in Choreography at Stockholm University of the Arts and runs the MA in choreography.
Alice Chauchat and Jennifer Lacey
Knowing without Understanding
Suspended between the wish to protect dance(ing) from explanatory ironing and the activity of positioning aesthetic practice as a field of knowledge, we converse. This conversation is based on an online document that is constantly enriched and transformed (mostly in public) on dance and on our respective commitments in academic contexts. It grows from friendship and trust which allow us to enjoy groping around and dancing it out, patiently and insistently.
Anna Daučíková and Christina Della Giustina
Anna Daučíková, artist, Prague
Anna Daučíková lives and works in Prague. Alongside her artistic work she was a co-founder and activist in several women NGOs and in 1990s a spokesperson for LGBT rights in Slovakia. Her academic career includes teaching at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design Bratislava and the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague.
Since 1991 she has exhibited internationally: 2024 – Tate Modern, East Tank, London; Chronoplasticity Raven Row, London; Jam Factory Art Center, In Memory of the Memory, Lviv, Ukraine, 2023 – #kyivbiennial23, Augarten, Vienna; 1939–2021: The End of Black and White Era, National Gallery Prague; 2022 – Secession, Vienna; Artium Museoa, Vitoria-Gasteiz; 2021 – ESOK Biennial Jakarta; 14th Baltic Triennial, Vilnius; PLATO Ostrava; Mental Body, at Whitman-Walker Corner, Washington DC; Compassion Fatigue Is Over, Rudolfinum, Prague; 2020 – DYKWTCA, Whitman-Walker Corner, Washington; 2019 – Schering Stiftung Art Price holder´s exhibition at KW – Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin; Slovak National Gallery Bratislava; Tirana Patience, Museum of Socialist Realism, Tirana; Sleeping with a Vengeance, Dreaming of the Life, Wuerrtembergische KunstVerein, Stuttgart; 2018 – FOR with Assaf Evron, Neubauer Collegium, Chicago; 2017 – documenta 14, Athens/Kassel; 2016 – Gallery Futura, Prague; 2015 – Kiyv Biennial/School of Kyiv; 2009 – Gender Check – Femininity and Masculinity in the Art of Eastern Europe, MUMOK, Vienna.
Christina Della Giustina, artist, HKU University of the Arts Utrecht
Christina Della Giustina is an Amsterdam-based artist. She completed her doctoral studies at Slade School of Fine Art, University College London, UK, and is a lecturer and the course leader of the Master Fine Art Program at HKU University of the Arts, Utrecht, NL. Christina studied Philosophy, Art History and Linguistics at University Zürich, CH, and Fine Art and Political Theory at the Jan van Eyck Academy, Maastricht, NL.
Her artistic research practice deals with relationships and generates trans-disciplinary collaborations across disciplinary boundaries, opening up dialogue between scientific, spiritual and sound-based modes of working. In her sustained collaborations with scientists, musicians, indigenous researchers, students etc. Christina works with sound, light, performance, composition, improvisation, drawing and writing. Her extended research project you are variations (2011 – 2019) studies the arborescent water cycle. It processes climate data from scientific long-term-monitoring research differently. It composes it as a musical score and enacts this score collaboratively through light and sound environments. Its method resides in an ecology of translation.
Christina’s work has been shown at a.o. Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin; Woburn-Research-Centre UCL, Goldsmith University and Chisenhale-Dance-Space, London; Colloredo-Mansfeld-Palace and Villa-Šhaloun, Prague; JAMU and Theater-na-Orlí, Brno; NIMK, puntWG and Gallery Soledad-Senlle, Amsterdam; Tent, Rotterdam; Museum de Fundatie, Zwolle; Academy Gallery, Utrecht; Rangasthala, Rangoli Metro-Art-Centre, Bengaluru; Shanghai Contemporary Art-Biennale; RIXC Art-Science Festival Riga; Intern. Art-Triennial Lublin; ZHdK, WSL, EMPA, Old- and New Botanical Gardens, Shedhalle, Kunsthalle and Cabaret Voltaire, Zürich; Tinguely Museum and Bird’s Eye, Basel, etc.
Anna Daučíková and Christina Della Giustina
To Whom Do You Listen?
In Order that the Light Can Work
Subtitle: becoming – LARGE
The present performance is the result of and at the same time just a phase within an ongoing dialogue between Anča Daučíková and Christina Della Giustina. Joining ears and voices in discourse – and that is also to say, losing one’s ears and voice – is an attempt not only to formulate, but to practice processes related to and constituent of artistic research.
To Whom Do You Listen? In Order that the Light Can Work is the study of the resonant spaces between speaker and listener, between the lived presence and the presence of an archival, between body, breath and language, between speech and silence, in-between researchers and addressees and their realm of references. The performance is an attempt to move out of ‘active – passive’ dualism, to un-focus on ‘either – or’, in order to allow for a different mode of attention: an attunement that explores planes of perception and thought beyond preconceived assumptions of identity, position and linguistic categorizations, distinctions and separations. By tuning in to simultaneity and mutuality, by attuning to the relation itself – including its gaps, voids, and delays in constant malleability and fluidity – is this relation an organism? Alive? And generative?
Re-searching, listening, voicing, moving, doing, understanding, feeling, acting, becoming
EARN Methods working group
EARN Methodology working group (Maibritt Borgen, Vytautas Michelkevičius, Henk Slager, Maria Topolčanská, Iris van der Tuin, Mick Wilson)
The EARN Methodology working group approaches the theme of method as an “in-between” site or moment where divergent research undertakings can usefully meet and exchange, an in-between space that enables dialogues within and beyond the artistic research domain. The basic premise of our work is that there are genealogies of method discourse other than the Cartesian (and Diltheyan), and that method talk can have utility without producing claims for universality nor proposing familiar dichotomies of subject/object – theory/practice – means/ends etc.
EARN Methodology working group (Maibritt Borgen, Vytautas Michelkevičius, Henk Slager, Maria Topolčanská, Iris van der Tuin, Mick Wilson)
Doing Evaluation
In this short presentation and discussion, forum members of the EARN Working Group on Method will consider how questions of evaluation are currently being approached in different ways across the broad spectrum of artistic research and creative practice-based research. Taking as a point of departure the recent working proposal Principles of Evaluating Artistic Research at AVU from LARGE (Laboratory for Art, Research and Graduate Education AVU), Maibritt Borgen, Vytautas Michelkevicius, Henk Slager and Iris van der Tuin will offer some perspectives on these issues based on recent and current work in this broad area.
Søren Kjærgaard
Søren Kjærgaard, pianist and composer, Rhythmic Music Conservatory
Søren Kjærgaard is a Danish pianist, composer, improviser, artistic researcher and educator, currently holding a position as Associate Professor, Vice Principal, and Head of Educations, Research & Development at the Rhythmic Music Conservatory in Copenhagen. His work orients across a variety of settings that playfully intersects listening and improvisation. In his artistic research, Kjærgaard has investigated multilayeredness as a conceptual ground for solo performance practice. He has worked with the transpositionality of sonic identity and investigated diffractive methodologies in cross-disciplinary and collaborative formats, along with approaches to disseminating that aim to share embodied sonic knowledge in performative formats. Søren Kjærgaard has produced a growing discography of albums as a leader and recorded and performed with a wide range of musicians across the world.
Søren Kjærgaard
Interferences
What potential lies in the interferences between dissemination and performance, between retrospection and improvisation, between play and replay? And how can these seemingly disparate approaches converge into a multi-layered, hybrid format where insights are not being re-presented but played out, performed live, in sound, on film? These are some of the core issues at work in the artistic research practice of pianist Søren Kjærgaard, which seek to situate the researching artist in multiple transpositions: performatively, physically, sonically, visually, virtually. In this regard, interference is to be understood as an impulse, a signal of disturbance that fluctuates in-between formats, clouding clarity, dis-orienting the research, yet allowing for a different approach of the artist-researcher to disseminate knowing-thinking-in-action while being in immediate interplay with the research material. Hoping to contribute to how artist-researchers, can work dynamically across the various conditions of their practice, the purpose is to share approaches of how to document and disseminate these processes in more hybrid and performative forms of communication. In Kjærgaard’s own work, this has led to the development of the video keyboard: an audio-visual keyboard sampler that resembles the 88 keys of the piano but is built on an altogether different technology. Where each key contains a sample of a previously documented event, which can be dialed up and played out in an instant. The vast archives of documentation across sound recording, handwritten sketches, voice memos, drawings, graphic design, text, photo, and video, thus become a virtual memory map that awaits new circuitry, and thus, situative of a field of forces that awaits to be (re)experienced. As the physical limitations of the relation player-piano are massively expanded, a new set of problems arise: How to navigate this ‘time machine’? What are the (dis)orientation strategies in playing across this virtual map of materials as an improviser, in the attempt to re-actualize and share research through experience?
Shona Macnaughton
Shona Macnaughton, Creative Discharge/ Public Consultation, Northumbria University
Shona Macnaughton is an artist who works mostly in performance, each live event is structured around a state, institutional or labour process. Shona’s work interrogates contemporary aesthetics, giving attention to the political history of languages, and the sites in which they are housed. Most performances are site specific and include a self-reflective exploration of the artist’s relationship with a given public. Identifying fundamentals of character, both in individual subjects and in wider social bodies, the artist uses comedic tools to isolate and exaggerate these aspects, not only for comic effect, but to highlight the mechanisms that create these effects. Her practice centres around pushing the everyday banalities of contemporary neoliberal logic into something, not only absurd, but often bordering on the pathalogical.
Shona has performed and exhibited nationally and internationally in visual art venues, theatres, public space and online platforms. She is currently undertaking practice-based PhD research at Northumbria University, Newcastle, UK, investigating legacies of feminist care in the contemporary cultural sphere by re-performing the techniques of women’s health activism materials.
Selected previous projects include: Here To Deliver, performed internationally, commissioned by Edinburgh University’s Contemporary Art Collection 2020; Progressive, solo presentation at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, 2019; Mandatory Reconsideration, Parse Journal, Gothenburg, Sweden 2019; We Nurture, Collective, Edinburgh 2018-19; The Universal School Girl, Jerwood Space, London, 2016.
Shona Macnaughton
Creative Discharge/ Public Consultation
Based on three different ways of creating perspectives, with competing feminist value systems, the performance is composed of three layers of citation; a feminist health page supplement on how to find your cervix, writing on the late painter Carol Rhodes’s work and an instructional YouTube video on how to pose for OnlyFans, the performance structure will be based on the subscription for content model. A ‘private’ citation layer of the script revealed underneath a ‘public’ free layer. The surface performance gradually becomes its shadow other.
Ronan McCrea
Ronan McCrea, artist, TU Dublin
Ronan McCrea is an artist working across photography, installation and moving image. He and is currently a lecturer in Fine Art at Technological University Dublin. McCrea has exhibited internationally for over thirty years and in 2005 was one of the artists that represented Ireland at 51st Venice Biennale. In 2011 he completed his doctoral research on the notion of Celluloid Materiality that drew on experimental film, film theory, the photographic, and projection conducted under the supervision of artist Willie Doherty at University of Ulster, Belfast. He is currently working on a long term project centring on fatigue, exhaustion and municipal ‘waste-to-energy’ facilities.
Ronan McCrea
Film Material
For the 2025 LARGE conference, McCrea will introduce and screen a digital re-presentation of his 16mm work Film Material (2016). This is a hand made film-work splicing salvaged instructional films and drawing on tropes of 1970s avant-garde Structural Film to re-constitute the literal and figurative fragments into new formations, and affinities between pedagogy, avant-garde film and the shared desire for subject formation. This work was the most concrete artistic result of doctoral research completed five years previously.
Film Material is screened with the intention to resonate with the conference’s reflections on issue of evaluation. McCrea proposes attention also be paid to the (non-institutional) value and evaluation of doctoral and artistic research over the longer duration of artistic development, where outcomes, connections and breakthroughs have a necessarily uneven development. As artists we are playing the long game.
Lina Michelkevičė and Vytautas Michelkevičius
Lina Michelkevičė and Vytautas Michelkevičius, researchers, Vilnius Academy of Arts
Lina Michelkevičė and Vytautas Michelkevičius are researchers and editors based in Vilnius, Lithuania. Both working at Vilnius Academy of Arts, Lina as Senior Researcher in the Institute of Art Research and Vytautas as Head of Photography and Media Art Department and programme leader of Art Doctoral Studies, they engage both in separate and joint research and/or curatorial projects. They share a long-lasting on and off interest in maps and diagrams as a way of thinking and representation, that so far has resulted in several exhibitions, workshops, symposia papers, and books Mapping Lithuanian Photography: Histories and Archives (co-edited with Agnė Narušytė, 2007) and Atlas of Diagrammatic Imagination: Maps in Research, Art and Education (2019). They enjoy collecting and digging into creative diagrams, occasionally also drawing themselves or collaborating with artists and drawers.
Lina Michelkevičė and Vytautas Michelkevičius
Diagramming Session
therapeutic workshop
What if we all knew that diagramming may be an effective tool for tension release, self-exploration and intellectual and emotional exchange?
We propose to replace a typical conference round-up with therapeutic sharing via drawing and diagramming. You are invited to share your insights, emotions, enthusiasm, fatigue, approval, disappointment or future propositions in this collective doodling/mapping session. All means will be provided, but you are very welcome to bring your own as well! In the meanwhile, a few performative insights on diagramming in art, research and education, and how long a single diagram may be, will come from our side. The session takes off from our co-edited book Atlas of Diagrammatic Imagination: Maps in Research, Art and Education (2019).
Magda Stanová
Magda Stanová, artist, Academy of Fine Arts in Prague
Magda Stanová is a multidisciplinary artist with background in new genres and photography. Her research-based practice results in artistic forms like visual essays and lecture shows. She smuggles performative lectures into academic conferences and a drawn theory of photography into photographic festivals. She looks into cognitive sciences for ideas about creative process and perception of art and combines them with the experience of an artist. She is also an assistant professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague, where she teaches doctoral-level classes related to artistic research.
Magda Stanová
Mind Wandering During Lectures
lecture
A short drawing-based lecture about how the attention of the members of the audience diverges and converges with that of the lecturer.
Roman Štětina
Roman Štětina, artist, Academy of Fine Arts Prague
Roman Štětina graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague in 2015 after spending two years on the Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main in the classes Judith Hopf and Douglas Gordon. Since 2016, he has worked at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague as a teaching assistant in the studio of Dušan Zahoranský and Pavla Sceranková. He is currently completing his doctoral studies on the role of ekphrasis in contemporary art and art education
Roman Štětina’s work investigates the ways in which broadcast media including film, television and radio are created. His videos, installations and sculptures foreground the props, studios and technologies that are otherwise hidden behind the sounds and images received by an audience. This does not involve displaying the “unseen”, but rather the staging of typical production methods like editing or creating disruptions in absurd contexts.
Roman Štětina has shown his work in exhibitions around the world including at the Trafó Gallery in Budapest in 2020, Tenderpixel in London in 2019, National Gallery in Prague in 2018, Spike Island in Bristol in 2016, NEST in Den Haag in 2016, MNAC in Bucharest in 2016, Manifesta 11 in Zurich in 2016 and James Cohan Gallery in New York in 2015. His films and video works were presented at International Film Festival Karlovy Vary, LUX London, Close_up Film Centre London, Anthology Film Archives in New York, Delfina Foundation London, PAF Olomouc, IDFF Ji.hlava, goEAST Wiesbaden, Modern Art Oxford, etc.
Roman Štětina
Therapy by Description
The jamming podcast Radio Frakce was launched in the Intermedia II studio at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague as a response to a pandemic situation in which it was impossible to meet collectively. In response to the impossibility of physically exhibiting the works during the winter klauzura, two episodes were created in the spring of 2021, which took the form of a guided tour through an exhibition of imaginary klauzura works that existed only in the form of a description. This simple game fascinated us to such an extent that we seriously questioned whether it made sense to create in any other way than this.
It was a very liberating form of creation for all of us at that time. The freedom this way of working offered us was all the more tempting the more we were gripped by global pandemic situation. We could create almost without constraints – we didn’t need a budget, we weren’t burdened by feasibility, technicalities, legislation and, after all, we didn’t have to obey the laws of physics. We could exhibit on the planet BPM 37093, fifty light years away from Earth, as well as in levitating spaces in the middle of the void or in sunflower fields in Ukraine. It seemed that our only limitation was our language and our own imagination. It soon became clear that something was holding us back after all, and we had to find a way to turn it off.
Nik Timková and Zuzana Žabková
björnsonova w/ Zuzana Žabková, Nik Timková, artists, Academy of Fine Arts Prague
The shapeshifting entity and collective björnsonova has been very convincingly managing to bring out the softest parts of us while bluntly addressing radical steps needed for achieving actual change for a better and more mindful environment and coexistence. They have been seducing our intimate thoughts, comforting our fears, building pathways, channeling girlhood, playing nostalgic tunes, performing magic, believing in miracles and composing the soundtrack to their own picture. With their glossary they will allow for the veil between the tangible and the mystical to become sheer once again, and invite you to join them on a quest for answers about past, present, future, love, loss, victory, money, home, travel, and whatever else your needy heart desires. On this journey we will revisit texts and language assigned to inhuman entities, objects and beings, activated through a glossary combining autofiction, research, quotations and fun facts, channeled by björnsonova and her counterparts. The glossary by Tamara Antonijević, Tanja Sljivar, Lucia Kvočáková, Lucie Mičíková, Nik Timková and Zuzana Žabková, besides the magical stories, anecdotes and confessions, will also function as a fortune telling tool which will be guiding us through its pages on a quest for answers.
(Jelisaveta Rapaić)
björnsonova w/ Zuzana Žabková, Nik Timková
…you will lose your mind (a sequel)
Inspired by the #magicresistance movement, #bindtrump, and the spells from Linda Stupart’s book Virus, on February 2, 2024, during one of the last events at Bratislava’s Kunsthalle, Healed from 2015, we invited everyone to join us in creating a SIGIL TO BIND THE MALICIOUS AND HOSTILE PRACTICES OF THE MINISTRY OF CULTURE. The sigil became our shared action, meant to echo every Friday at midnight until we feel a shift in the energy. With each midnight gathering, we seek to transform our collective powerlessness into strength, creating space for a more helpful future.
Now, we call upon you for the next step: on November 15, 2024, as part of the What if We All Knew conference, a sequel to this event, titled …you will lose your mind, will take place as midnight approaches. This time, we will come together to renew the sigil, revitalize our shared energy, and once more summon the strength of the collective to decisively reject the current practices of the Ministry of Culture in Slovakia. Together, we can confront our fears and compose a new soundtrack for our shared existence. Let this be the spell that unites us in the quest for a more compassionate and visionary cultural future.
Aleš Zapletal and the Painting 2 Studio
Aleš Zapletal
Together with students from the Painting II Studio: Klára Hartlová, Marika Krčmářová, Barbora Štýblová, Yelyzaveta Ulianova and Natálie Želeva
And UMPRUM students: František Bulička, Šenay Kobak and Antonie Zichová
Aleš Zapletal
Together with students from the Painting II Studio: Klára Hartlová, Marika Krčmářová, Barbora Štýblová, Yelyzaveta Ulianova and Natálie Želeva
And UMPRUM students: František Bulička, Šenay Kobak and Antonie Zichová
Dinner Table
Students of the Painting Studio 2 at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague have prepared a performative feast that blurs the lines between painting, installation, and dining happening. At the heart of their work is the theme of collaboration itself, exploring the dynamics of aesthetic and practical decision-making within a group. The event features specially crafted ceramic tableware and a painting that may even be completed by the audience. Organic shapes—evocative of a collective body of its creators or the internal organs of its participants—gradually reveal their stories and mysteries as the day unfolds.
Ellen Røed
Ellen Røed, artist and educator, Stockholm University of the Arts
Operating as artist and educator, Ellen Røed has been questioning and exploring performative, material and networked aspects of images, and their relationship to sound, place and time. Since 2016 she is professor in film and media at Stockholm University of the Arts where she has been responsible for the PhD programme and the profile area Art, Technology and Materiality. She is now the Rector.
Schedule
What if We All Knew?
– a 12-hour (performative) reflection on artistic research
– 15th of November 2024, Academy of Fine Arts in Prague
AVU Veletržní, Veletržní 826/61, 170 00 Prague 7
12:00-15:00 BLOCK I
Opening, welcome
Roman Štětina, Therapy by Description, performative lecture
Ronan McCrea, Film Material, screening and talk
Alice Chauchat & Jennifer Lacey, Knowing without Understanding, lecture performance
Coffee break
Søren Kjærgaard, Interferences, video keyboard lecture performance
15:00-16:00 Lunch
16:00-18:00 BLOCK II
EARN Method working group (Maibritt Borgen, Vytautas Michelkevičius, Henk Slager, Maria Topolčanská, Iris van der Tuin, Mick Wilson), Doing Evaluation, panel
Magda Stanová, Mind Wandering During Lectures, lecture
Coffee break
Anna Daučíková & Christina Della Giustina, To Whom Do You Listen? In Order that the Light Can Work (Becoming – LARGE), performance
18:00-18:30 Apero
Velké publication launch: the new artistic research magazine of LARGE
18:30-20:00 BLOCK III
Chloe Brenan, A Stick in a Dark Room, screening and performative lecture
Anna Daučíková, Christina Della Giustina, Søren Kjærgaard, Ronan McCrea, Ellen Røed, Presentation Formats and Assessment Strategies, panel discussion
20:00-21:30 From Dinner to Display (Dining Happening), Aleš Zapletal & Student collective from AVU Painting 2 Studio (Klára Hartlová, Marika Krčmářová, Barbora Štýblová, Yelyzaveta Ulianova, Natálie Želeva) and UMPRUM (František Bulička, Šenay Kobak, Antonie Zichová)
21:30-00:00 BLOCK IV
Lina Michelkevičė & Vytautas Michelkevičius, Diagramming Session, therapeutic workshop
Shona Macnaughton, Creative Discharge/ Public Consultation, performance
björnsonova w/ Zuzana Žabková and Nik Timková, …you will lose your mind (a sequel), performative divinatory reading
About LARGE
LARGE AVU – The Laboratory for Art, Research and Graduate Education at AVU
LARGE (The Laboratory for Art, Research and Graduate Education) is a department that represents artistic research activities at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague. The research concept of the university is thus expanded to include a platform that promotes and supports the importance of practice-led research in visual arts, explore its relationship to other disciplines and the broader social context, both locally and internationally.
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 that provided by other disciplines. As such, LARGE is focused on interrogating the specificities of research through art: 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 is research that has to produce not only its content but also its form, methodology and presentation formats, LARGE places particular focus on the investigation, development and sharing of art specific presentation formats in research.
The activities of LARGE include, in addition to courses, seminars and guest lectures: organising the international conference A 12-hour (Performative) Reflection on Artistic Research, which has been taking place yearly at AVU beginning with 2022, publications (such as the upcoming Handbook of Artistic Investigation, due to be published in 2025 and and Velké, a journal due to be published bianually beginning with November 2024), as well as a series of performative presentations bringing together artists and scientists every month at AVU under the title Rendezvous Problem: Formulations on the Possible Ways for Art and Science to Meet, beginning with October 2024.
LARGE promotes research that:
- is grounded in artistic practice;
- is rooted in the unique character of art;
- 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 (training, grants, events, publications)
- to interrogate the ways in which research can be integrated into practice and practice into research
- to promote artistic doctorates and their supervision within practical doctoral programmes
- to support research groups alongside or within existing departments at AVU
- to adapt the structures for evaluating artistic research both within AVU and at the levels of 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 inform about projects, publications and discourses in the field of artistic research and education
- to promote and implement the Research Catalogue platform.
LARGE was initiated as a project focused on artistic research by the Vice-Rectorate for Art and Research of the Academy of Fine Arts Prague in 2022. Beginning with 2024 it was established as a new department led by Dr. Irina Gheorghe.
People
Irina Gheorghe Ph.D.
Assistant Professor, Head of LARGE AVU
Mgr. art. Magdaléna Stanová Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Contact
Veletržní 826/61
170 00 Praha 7-Holešovice
November 15th 2024, from 12 pm to 12 am
Academy of Fine Arts in Prague Veletržní 826/61, Prague 7
a 12-hour (performative) reflection on artistic research
Starting from the speculative possibilities of a “what if“ proposal, the event aims to imagine what hypothetical communities of knowledge might be catalysed by research in the arts. How is a collective “we” brought together by common ways of knowing, and how are these ways communicated inside and outside the group? What is the role of language in this communication and in what relationship does it find itself with non linguistic artistic media? How are the knowledge, competences and skills of multiple communities and sub-communities of researchers in different artistic fields evaluated and what are, in turn, the collectives of suitable peers to carry out such an evaluation? The third edition of the 12-hour performative reflection on artistic research will explore these questions, interrogating not only how a certain “we” might know what “you” don’t know, or “you” might be able to do what “we” are not, but also how this knowledge might be performed beyond description, explanation or illustration.
Proposing a format at the intersection between a conference, a performance marathon, a series of lectures and a sculptural engagement with space, the event unfolding over the course of 12 hours aims to reflect on the intersections between artistic research, performative modes of presentation and knowledge dissemination.
The conference will be held in English.
Contributors
Chloe Brenan
Chloe Brenan, artist, TU Dublin
Chloe Brenan is a visual artist from rural Ireland working primarily with film, photography, language and publication format. She creates careful examinations of the poetic haptics of daily life, paying close attention to subjects and processes on the edge of perception that call into question boundaries between bodies, environments and wider structures of power. Her work is informed by feminist and new materialist epistemologies. She is currently undertaking an interdisciplinary, practice-based PhD at TU Dublin. She teaches in the Department of Sculpture and Expanded Practice at NCAD, Dublin.
Photo credit: Casey Walshe
Chloe Brenan
A Stick in a Dark Room
performance lecture
A film screening and audio visual performance revolving around orchards, interferences, opacities and erasures.
Alice Chauchat and Jennifer Lacey
Alice Chauchat, dancer and choreographer, Berlin
Alice Chauchat’s activities range from dancing to choreographing to teaching to supporting peers to making up structures for thinking and developing together to writing to directing institutions to pondering through dance practice on politics and ethics of alterity and togetherness, processing the knowledge and complexity of collaborative practices, or simply being in the world with other people, into choreographic forms.
Since 2014, Alice has been developing research into the ethics of intimacy through radical difference. From dance, she activates correlated notions such as not knowing, tending towards or approximating, to investigate the qualities of engagement they generate. This ongoing research produces a collection of scores, choreographic concepts and performances. It takes place in dance studios, on stage, in urban space and in text form.
Photo by Claudio Rincon.
Jennifer Lacey, dancer and choreographer, Stockholm University of the Arts
Jennifer Lacey is a New York dance artist, filtered through 20 years in Paris and now pooling in Stockholm. Her constant project is a renegotiation of production methods, generating pieces that are always based in dancing but don’t always look like dance. She creates works that propose an inventive and playful hermeneutics of bodies and their environments.
Often co-signing and collaborating, the products of her activity unbind dance from the spectacular whilst still investing in the multiple ways that the performative can manifest, effect and communicate. Her works have been produced and staged internationally in theatres, museums, galleries, workshops and publications. She is a recipient of a Doris Duke Impact Fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellowship. She is an assistant professor in Choreography at Stockholm University of the Arts and runs the MA in choreography.
Alice Chauchat and Jennifer Lacey
Knowing without Understanding
Suspended between the wish to protect dance(ing) from explanatory ironing and the activity of positioning aesthetic practice as a field of knowledge, we converse. This conversation is based on an online document that is constantly enriched and transformed (mostly in public) on dance and on our respective commitments in academic contexts. It grows from friendship and trust which allow us to enjoy groping around and dancing it out, patiently and insistently.
Anna Daučíková and Christina Della Giustina
Anna Daučíková, artist, Prague
Anna Daučíková lives and works in Prague. Alongside her artistic work she was a co-founder and activist in several women NGOs and in 1990s a spokesperson for LGBT rights in Slovakia. Her academic career includes teaching at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design Bratislava and the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague.
Since 1991 she has exhibited internationally: 2024 – Tate Modern, East Tank, London; Chronoplasticity Raven Row, London; Jam Factory Art Center, In Memory of the Memory, Lviv, Ukraine, 2023 – #kyivbiennial23, Augarten, Vienna; 1939–2021: The End of Black and White Era, National Gallery Prague; 2022 – Secession, Vienna; Artium Museoa, Vitoria-Gasteiz; 2021 – ESOK Biennial Jakarta; 14th Baltic Triennial, Vilnius; PLATO Ostrava; Mental Body, at Whitman-Walker Corner, Washington DC; Compassion Fatigue Is Over, Rudolfinum, Prague; 2020 – DYKWTCA, Whitman-Walker Corner, Washington; 2019 – Schering Stiftung Art Price holder´s exhibition at KW – Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin; Slovak National Gallery Bratislava; Tirana Patience, Museum of Socialist Realism, Tirana; Sleeping with a Vengeance, Dreaming of the Life, Wuerrtembergische KunstVerein, Stuttgart; 2018 – FOR with Assaf Evron, Neubauer Collegium, Chicago; 2017 – documenta 14, Athens/Kassel; 2016 – Gallery Futura, Prague; 2015 – Kiyv Biennial/School of Kyiv; 2009 – Gender Check – Femininity and Masculinity in the Art of Eastern Europe, MUMOK, Vienna.
Christina Della Giustina, artist, HKU University of the Arts Utrecht
Christina Della Giustina is an Amsterdam-based artist. She completed her doctoral studies at Slade School of Fine Art, University College London, UK, and is a lecturer and the course leader of the Master Fine Art Program at HKU University of the Arts, Utrecht, NL. Christina studied Philosophy, Art History and Linguistics at University Zürich, CH, and Fine Art and Political Theory at the Jan van Eyck Academy, Maastricht, NL.
Her artistic research practice deals with relationships and generates trans-disciplinary collaborations across disciplinary boundaries, opening up dialogue between scientific, spiritual and sound-based modes of working. In her sustained collaborations with scientists, musicians, indigenous researchers, students etc. Christina works with sound, light, performance, composition, improvisation, drawing and writing. Her extended research project you are variations (2011 – 2019) studies the arborescent water cycle. It processes climate data from scientific long-term-monitoring research differently. It composes it as a musical score and enacts this score collaboratively through light and sound environments. Its method resides in an ecology of translation.
Christina’s work has been shown at a.o. Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin; Woburn-Research-Centre UCL, Goldsmith University and Chisenhale-Dance-Space, London; Colloredo-Mansfeld-Palace and Villa-Šhaloun, Prague; JAMU and Theater-na-Orlí, Brno; NIMK, puntWG and Gallery Soledad-Senlle, Amsterdam; Tent, Rotterdam; Museum de Fundatie, Zwolle; Academy Gallery, Utrecht; Rangasthala, Rangoli Metro-Art-Centre, Bengaluru; Shanghai Contemporary Art-Biennale; RIXC Art-Science Festival Riga; Intern. Art-Triennial Lublin; ZHdK, WSL, EMPA, Old- and New Botanical Gardens, Shedhalle, Kunsthalle and Cabaret Voltaire, Zürich; Tinguely Museum and Bird’s Eye, Basel, etc.
Anna Daučíková and Christina Della Giustina
To Whom Do You Listen?
In Order that the Light Can Work
Subtitle: becoming – LARGE
The present performance is the result of and at the same time just a phase within an ongoing dialogue between Anča Daučíková and Christina Della Giustina. Joining ears and voices in discourse – and that is also to say, losing one’s ears and voice – is an attempt not only to formulate, but to practice processes related to and constituent of artistic research.
To Whom Do You Listen? In Order that the Light Can Work is the study of the resonant spaces between speaker and listener, between the lived presence and the presence of an archival, between body, breath and language, between speech and silence, in-between researchers and addressees and their realm of references. The performance is an attempt to move out of ‘active – passive’ dualism, to un-focus on ‘either – or’, in order to allow for a different mode of attention: an attunement that explores planes of perception and thought beyond preconceived assumptions of identity, position and linguistic categorizations, distinctions and separations. By tuning in to simultaneity and mutuality, by attuning to the relation itself – including its gaps, voids, and delays in constant malleability and fluidity – is this relation an organism? Alive? And generative?
Re-searching, listening, voicing, moving, doing, understanding, feeling, acting, becoming
EARN Methods working group
EARN Methodology working group (Maibritt Borgen, Vytautas Michelkevičius, Henk Slager, Maria Topolčanská, Iris van der Tuin, Mick Wilson)
The EARN Methodology working group approaches the theme of method as an “in-between” site or moment where divergent research undertakings can usefully meet and exchange, an in-between space that enables dialogues within and beyond the artistic research domain. The basic premise of our work is that there are genealogies of method discourse other than the Cartesian (and Diltheyan), and that method talk can have utility without producing claims for universality nor proposing familiar dichotomies of subject/object – theory/practice – means/ends etc.
EARN Methodology working group (Maibritt Borgen, Vytautas Michelkevičius, Henk Slager, Maria Topolčanská, Iris van der Tuin, Mick Wilson)
Doing Evaluation
In this short presentation and discussion, forum members of the EARN Working Group on Method will consider how questions of evaluation are currently being approached in different ways across the broad spectrum of artistic research and creative practice-based research. Taking as a point of departure the recent working proposal Principles of Evaluating Artistic Research at AVU from LARGE (Laboratory for Art, Research and Graduate Education AVU), Maibritt Borgen, Vytautas Michelkevicius, Henk Slager and Iris van der Tuin will offer some perspectives on these issues based on recent and current work in this broad area.
Søren Kjærgaard
Søren Kjærgaard, pianist and composer, Rhythmic Music Conservatory
Søren Kjærgaard is a Danish pianist, composer, improviser, artistic researcher and educator, currently holding a position as Associate Professor, Vice Principal, and Head of Educations, Research & Development at the Rhythmic Music Conservatory in Copenhagen. His work orients across a variety of settings that playfully intersects listening and improvisation. In his artistic research, Kjærgaard has investigated multilayeredness as a conceptual ground for solo performance practice. He has worked with the transpositionality of sonic identity and investigated diffractive methodologies in cross-disciplinary and collaborative formats, along with approaches to disseminating that aim to share embodied sonic knowledge in performative formats. Søren Kjærgaard has produced a growing discography of albums as a leader and recorded and performed with a wide range of musicians across the world.
Søren Kjærgaard
Interferences
What potential lies in the interferences between dissemination and performance, between retrospection and improvisation, between play and replay? And how can these seemingly disparate approaches converge into a multi-layered, hybrid format where insights are not being re-presented but played out, performed live, in sound, on film? These are some of the core issues at work in the artistic research practice of pianist Søren Kjærgaard, which seek to situate the researching artist in multiple transpositions: performatively, physically, sonically, visually, virtually. In this regard, interference is to be understood as an impulse, a signal of disturbance that fluctuates in-between formats, clouding clarity, dis-orienting the research, yet allowing for a different approach of the artist-researcher to disseminate knowing-thinking-in-action while being in immediate interplay with the research material. Hoping to contribute to how artist-researchers, can work dynamically across the various conditions of their practice, the purpose is to share approaches of how to document and disseminate these processes in more hybrid and performative forms of communication. In Kjærgaard’s own work, this has led to the development of the video keyboard: an audio-visual keyboard sampler that resembles the 88 keys of the piano but is built on an altogether different technology. Where each key contains a sample of a previously documented event, which can be dialed up and played out in an instant. The vast archives of documentation across sound recording, handwritten sketches, voice memos, drawings, graphic design, text, photo, and video, thus become a virtual memory map that awaits new circuitry, and thus, situative of a field of forces that awaits to be (re)experienced. As the physical limitations of the relation player-piano are massively expanded, a new set of problems arise: How to navigate this ‘time machine’? What are the (dis)orientation strategies in playing across this virtual map of materials as an improviser, in the attempt to re-actualize and share research through experience?
Shona Macnaughton
Shona Macnaughton, artist, Northumbria University
Shona Macnaughton is an artist who works mostly in performance, each live event is structured around a state, institutional or labour process. Shona’s work interrogates contemporary aesthetics, giving attention to the political history of languages, and the sites in which they are housed. Most performances are site specific and include a self-reflective exploration of the artist’s relationship with a given public. Identifying fundamentals of character, both in individual subjects and in wider social bodies, the artist uses comedic tools to isolate and exaggerate these aspects, not only for comic effect, but to highlight the mechanisms that create these effects. Her practice centres around pushing the everyday banalities of contemporary neoliberal logic into something, not only absurd, but often bordering on the pathalogical.
Shona has performed and exhibited nationally and internationally in visual art venues, theatres, public space and online platforms. She is currently undertaking practice-based PhD research at Northumbria University, Newcastle, UK, investigating legacies of feminist care in the contemporary cultural sphere by re-performing the techniques of women’s health activism materials.
Selected previous projects include: Here To Deliver, performed internationally, commissioned by Edinburgh University’s Contemporary Art Collection 2020; Progressive, solo presentation at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, 2019; Mandatory Reconsideration, Parse Journal, Gothenburg, Sweden 2019; We Nurture, Collective, Edinburgh 2018-19; The Universal School Girl, Jerwood Space, London, 2016.
Shona Macnaughton
Creative Discharge
Based on three different ways of creating perspectives, with competing feminist value systems, the performance is composed of three layers of citation; a feminist health page supplement on how to find your cervix, writing on the late painter Carol Rhodes’s work and an instructional YouTube video on how to pose for OnlyFans, the performance structure will be based on the subscription for content model. A ‘private’ citation layer of the script revealed underneath a ‘public’ free layer. The surface performance gradually becomes its shadow other.
Ronan McCrea
Ronan McCrea, artist, TU Dublin
Ronan McCrea is an artist working across photography, installation and moving image. He and is currently a lecturer in Fine Art at Technological University Dublin. McCrea has exhibited internationally for over thirty years and in 2005 was one of the artists that represented Ireland at 51st Venice Biennale. In 2011 he completed his doctoral research on the notion of Celluloid Materiality that drew on experimental film, film theory, the photographic, and projection conducted under the supervision of artist Willie Doherty at University of Ulster, Belfast. He is currently working on a long term project centring on fatigue, exhaustion and municipal ‘waste-to-energy’ facilities.
Ronan McCrea
Film Material
For the 2025 LARGE conference, McCrea will introduce and screen a digital re-presentation of his 16mm work Film Material (2016). This is a hand made film-work splicing salvaged instructional films and drawing on tropes of 1970s avant-garde Structural Film to re-constitute the literal and figurative fragments into new formations, and affinities between pedagogy, avant-garde film and the shared desire for subject formation. This work was the most concrete artistic result of doctoral research completed five years previously.
Film Material is screened with the intention to resonate with the conference’s reflections on issue of evaluation. McCrea proposes attention also be paid to the (non-institutional) value and evaluation of doctoral and artistic research over the longer duration of artistic development, where outcomes, connections and breakthroughs have a necessarily uneven development. As artists we are playing the long game.
Lina Michelkevičė and Vytautas Michelkevičius
Lina Michelkevičė and Vytautas Michelkevičius, researchers, Vilnius Academy of Arts
Lina Michelkevičė and Vytautas Michelkevičius are researchers and editors based in Vilnius, Lithuania. Both working at Vilnius Academy of Arts, Lina as Senior Researcher in the Institute of Art Research and Vytautas as Head of Photography and Media Art Department and programme leader of Art Doctoral Studies, they engage both in separate and joint research and/or curatorial projects. They share a long-lasting on and off interest in maps and diagrams as a way of thinking and representation, that so far has resulted in several exhibitions, workshops, symposia papers, and books Mapping Lithuanian Photography: Histories and Archives (co-edited with Agnė Narušytė, 2007) and Atlas of Diagrammatic Imagination: Maps in Research, Art and Education (2019). They enjoy collecting and digging into creative diagrams, occasionally also drawing themselves or collaborating with artists and drawers.
Lina Michelkevičė and Vytautas Michelkevičius
Diagramming Session
therapeutic workshop
What if we all knew that diagramming may be an effective tool for tension release, self-exploration and intellectual and emotional exchange?
We propose to replace a typical conference round-up with therapeutic sharing via drawing and diagramming. You are invited to share your insights, emotions, enthusiasm, fatigue, approval, disappointment or future propositions in this collective doodling/mapping session. All means will be provided, but you are very welcome to bring your own as well! In the meanwhile, a few performative insights on diagramming in art, research and education, and how long a single diagram may be, will come from our side. The session takes off from our co-edited book Atlas of Diagrammatic Imagination: Maps in Research, Art and Education (2019).
Magda Stanová
Magda Stanová, artist, Academy of Fine Arts in Prague
Magda Stanová is a multidisciplinary artist with background in new genres and photography. Her research-based practice results in artistic forms like visual essays and lecture shows. She smuggles performative lectures into academic conferences and a drawn theory of photography into photographic festivals. She looks into cognitive sciences for ideas about creative process and perception of art and combines them with the experience of an artist. She is also an assistant professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague, where she teaches doctoral-level classes related to artistic research.
Magda Stanová
Mind Wandering During Lectures
lecture
A short drawing-based lecture about how the attention of the members of the audience diverges and converges with that of the lecturer.
Roman Štětina
Roman Štětina, artist, Academy of Fine Arts Prague
Roman Štětina graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague in 2015 after spending two years on the Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main in the classes Judith Hopf and Douglas Gordon. Since 2016, he has worked at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague as a teaching assistant in the studio of Dušan Zahoranský and Pavla Sceranková. He is currently completing his doctoral studies on the role of ekphrasis in contemporary art and art education.
Roman Štětina’s work investigates the ways in which broadcast media including film, television and radio are created. His videos, installations and sculptures foreground the props, studios and technologies that are otherwise hidden behind the sounds and images received by an audience. This does not involve displaying the “unseen”, but rather the staging of typical production methods like editing or creating disruptions in absurd contexts.
Roman Štětina has shown his work in exhibitions around the world including at the Trafó Gallery in Budapest in 2020, Tenderpixel in London in 2019, National Gallery in Prague in 2018, Spike Island in Bristol in 2016, NEST in Den Haag in 2016, MNAC in Bucharest in 2016, Manifesta 11 in Zurich in 2016 and James Cohan Gallery in New York in 2015. His films and video works were presented at International Film Festival Karlovy Vary, LUX London, Close_up Film Centre London, Anthology Film Archives in New York, Delfina Foundation London, PAF Olomouc, IDFF Ji.hlava, goEAST Wiesbaden, Modern Art Oxford, etc.
Roman Štětina
Therapy by Description
The jamming podcast Radio Frakce was launched in the Intermedia II studio at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague as a response to a pandemic situation in which it was impossible to meet collectively. In response to the impossibility of physically exhibiting the works during the winter klauzura, two episodes were created in the spring of 2021, which took the form of a guided tour through an exhibition of imaginary klauzura works that existed only in the form of a description. This simple game fascinated us to such an extent that we seriously questioned whether it made sense to create in any other way than this.
It was a very liberating form of creation for all of us at that time. The freedom this way of working offered us was all the more tempting the more we were gripped by global pandemic situation. We could create almost without constraints – we didn’t need a budget, we weren’t burdened by feasibility, technicalities, legislation and, after all, we didn’t have to obey the laws of physics. We could exhibit on the planet BPM 37093, fifty light years away from Earth, as well as in levitating spaces in the middle of the void or in sunflower fields in Ukraine. It seemed that our only limitation was our language and our own imagination. It soon became clear that something was holding us back after all, and we had to find a way to turn it off.
Nik Timková and Zuzana Žabková
björnsonova w/ Zuzana Žabková, Nik Timková, artists, Academy of Fine Arts Prague
The shapeshifting entity and collective björnsonova has been very convincingly managing to bring out the softest parts of us while bluntly addressing radical steps needed for achieving actual change for a better and more mindful environment and coexistence. They have been seducing our intimate thoughts, comforting our fears, building pathways, channeling girlhood, playing nostalgic tunes, performing magic, believing in miracles and composing the soundtrack to their own picture. With their glossary they will allow for the veil between the tangible and the mystical to become sheer once again, and invite you to join them on a quest for answers about past, present, future, love, loss, victory, money, home, travel, and whatever else your needy heart desires. On this journey we will revisit texts and language assigned to inhuman entities, objects and beings, activated through a glossary combining autofiction, research, quotations and fun facts, channeled by björnsonova and her counterparts. The glossary by Tamara Antonijević, Tanja Sljivar, Lucia Kvočáková, Lucie Mičíková, Nik Timková and Zuzana Žabková, besides the magical stories, anecdotes and confessions, will also function as a fortune telling tool which will be guiding us through its pages on a quest for answers.
(Jelisaveta Rapaić)
björnsonova w/ Zuzana Žabková, Nik Timková
…you will lose your mind (a sequel)
Inspired by the #magicresistance movement, #bindtrump, and the spells from Linda Stupart’s book Virus, on February 2, 2024, during one of the last events at Bratislava’s Kunsthalle, Healed from 2015, we invited everyone to join us in creating a SIGIL TO BIND THE MALICIOUS AND HOSTILE PRACTICES OF THE MINISTRY OF CULTURE. The sigil became our shared action, meant to echo every Friday at midnight until we feel a shift in the energy. With each midnight gathering, we seek to transform our collective powerlessness into strength, creating space for a more helpful future.
Now, we call upon you for the next step: on November 15, 2024, as part of the What if We All Knew conference, a sequel to this event, titled …you will lose your mind, will take place as midnight approaches. This time, we will come together to renew the sigil, revitalize our shared energy, and once more summon the strength of the collective to decisively reject the current practices of the Ministry of Culture in Slovakia. Together, we can confront our fears and compose a new soundtrack for our shared existence. Let this be the spell that unites us in the quest for a more compassionate and visionary cultural future.
Aleš Zapletal and the Painting 2 Studio
Aleš Zapletal
Together with students from the Painting II Studio: Klára Hartlová, Marika Krčmářová, Barbora Štýblová, Yelyzaveta Ulianova and Natálie Želeva
And UMPRUM students: František Bulička, Šenay Kobak and Antonie Zichová
Aleš Zapletal
Together with students from the Painting II Studio: Klára Hartlová, Marika Krčmářová, Barbora Štýblová, Yelyzaveta Ulianova and Natálie Želeva
And UMPRUM students: František Bulička, Šenay Kobak and Antonie Zichová
Dinner Table
Students of the Painting Studio 2 at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague have prepared a performative feast that blurs the lines between painting, installation, and dining happening. At the heart of their work is the theme of collaboration itself, exploring the dynamics of aesthetic and practical decision-making within a group. The event features specially crafted ceramic tableware and a painting that may even be completed by the audience. Organic shapes—evocative of a collective body of its creators or the internal organs of its participants—gradually reveal their stories and mysteries as the day unfolds.
Schedule
What if We All Knew?
– a 12-hour (performative) reflection on artistic research
– 15th of November 2024, Academy of Fine Arts in Prague
AVU Veletržní, Veletržní 826/61, 170 00 Prague 7
12:00-15:00 BLOCK I
Opening, welcome
Roman Štětina, Therapy by Description, performative lecture
Ronan McCrea, Film Material, screening and talk
Alice Chauchat & Jennifer Lacey, Knowing without Understanding, lecture performance
Coffee break
Søren Kjærgaard, Interferences, video keyboard lecture performance
15:00-16:00 Lunch
16:00-18:00 BLOCK II
EARN Method working group (Maibritt Borgen, Vytautas Michelkevičius, Henk Slager, Maria Topolčanská, Iris van der Tuin, Mick Wilson), Doing Evaluation, panel
Magda Stanová, Mind Wandering During Lectures, lecture
Coffee break
Anna Daučíková & Christina Della Giustina, To Whom Do You Listen? In Order that the Light Can Work (Becoming – LARGE), performance
18:00-18:30 Apero
Velké publication launch: the new artistic research magazine of LARGE
18:30-20:00 BLOCK III
Chloe Brenan, A Stick in a Dark Room, screening and performative lecture
Anna Daučíková, Christina Della Giustina, Søren Kjærgaard, Ronan McCrea, Presentation Formats and Assessment Strategies, panel discussion
20:00-21:30 From Dinner to Display (Dining Happening), Aleš Zapletal & Student collective from AVU Painting 2 Studio (Klára Hartlová, Marika Krčmářová, Barbora Štýblová, Yelyzaveta Ulianova, Natálie Želeva) and UMPRUM (František Bulička, Šenay Kobak, Antonie Zichová)
21:30-00:00 BLOCK IV
Lina Michelkevičė & Vytautas Michelkevičius, Diagramming Session, therapeutic workshop
Shona Macnaughton, Creative Discharge, performance
björnsonova w/ Zuzana Žabková and Nik Timková, …you will lose your mind (a sequel), performative divinatory reading
Stream video
About LARGE
LARGE AVU – The Laboratory for Art, Research and Graduate Education at AVU
LARGE (The Laboratory for Art, Research and Graduate Education) is a department that represents artistic research activities at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague. The research concept of the university is thus expanded to include a platform that promotes and supports the importance of practice-led research in visual arts, explore its relationship to other disciplines and the broader social context, both locally and internationally.
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 that provided by other disciplines. As such, LARGE is focused on interrogating the specificities of research through art: 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 is research that has to produce not only its content but also its form, methodology and presentation formats, LARGE places particular focus on the investigation, development and sharing of art specific presentation formats in research.
The activities of LARGE include, in addition to courses, seminars and guest lectures: organising the international conference A 12-hour (Performative) Reflection on Artistic Research, which has been taking place yearly at AVU beginning with 2022, publications (such as the upcoming Handbook of Artistic Investigation, due to be published in 2025 and and Velké, a journal due to be published bianually beginning with November 2024), as well as a series of performative presentations bringing together artists and scientists every month at AVU under the title Rendezvous Problem: Formulations on the Possible Ways for Art and Science to Meet, beginning with October 2024.
LARGE promotes research that:
- is grounded in artistic practice;
- is rooted in the unique character of art;
- 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 (training, grants, events, publications)
- to interrogate the ways in which research can be integrated into practice and practice into research
- to promote artistic doctorates and their supervision within practical doctoral programmes
- to support research groups alongside or within existing departments at AVU
- to adapt the structures for evaluating artistic research both within AVU and at the levels of 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 inform about projects, publications and discourses in the field of artistic research and education
- to promote and implement the Research Catalogue platform.
LARGE was initiated as a project focused on artistic research by the Vice-Rectorate for Art and Research of the Academy of Fine Arts Prague in 2022. Beginning with 2024 it was established as a new department led by Dr. Irina Gheorghe.
People
Irina Gheorghe Ph.D.
Assistant Professor, Head of LARGE AVU
Mgr. art. Magdaléna Stanová Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Contact
Veletržní 826/61
170 00 Praha 7-Holešovice