8.naomi_rincon_gallardo.sonnet_of_vermin — Naomi Ríncon Gallardo, Sonnet of Vermin, 2022. Video HD. 19’02”. Photo: Gesner Melchor. Rincón Gallardo is CAPIm’s inaugural Senior Researcher during Fall 2024.

Associated Research: Decolonial Curatorial Methodology

Myriam Amroun and Natasha Marie Llorens propose curatorial practice as a form of artistic research that goes beyond “metaphorizing decolonization.” The project has four principle aims: to centre the knowledge produced by the practice of curating (rather than that which it simply presents in the exhibition); to experiment with infrastructures that support “minor transnational” relationality; to experiment with institutional scale in relation to the exhibition; to work from and between two important margins of the European project—the Nordic region and North Africa—in an embodied manner that nevertheless acknowledges their distance from both.

Please read an interview on the project aims with KKH staff here. Llorens recently published this essay, which is based on the application and gives the full background from the project.

Course: On Friendship and the Political Imaginary

This course explores the intersections of politics, affiliation, and the ontology of friendship, particularly within contemporary art practices, theories, and institutions. The course combines online workshops and lectures with face-to-face intensives held at various locations across Europe, and takes place in from September to December each year with an application period in each Spring.

Welcome to CAPIm

The Centre for Art and the Political Imaginary is committed to interdisciplinary practice and research in the meeting between contemporary art and the future of politics. Based at two institutions of higher education in art: HDK-Valand and Kungl. Konsthögskolan, the Centre’s aim is to facilitate connections between research and education through an engagement with experimental approaches. It is the first Swedish Centre of Excellence in the field of Artistic Research.

The activities of the Centre are organised around four conceptual strands guiding the construction of innovative educational and research frameworks. Climate Imaginaries engage with radical ecological change and environmental futures. Historical Imaginaries addresses decolonial approaches to collective memory and nationalist representations, as well as non-aligned movements and intensifying globalisation. Democratic Imaginaries takes its point of departure from the polarisation of the public sphere and emerging forms of illiberalism. Technological Imaginaries is focused on the interactions between art and technological developments and their resulting projections of possible futures.

The Centre is co-chaired by Prof. Mick Wilson and Prof. Natasha Marie Llorens, who together with Prof. Jyoti Mistry and Dr. Axel Andersson form its steering committee.

Summer School: “For a Justice to Come”

“For a Justice to Come” is a bi-annual Summer School for artists, curators, designers, and others whose work engages with the aesthetics of imagination. Its thematic framework is grounded in the work of French philosopher Jaques Derrida, who argued that justice must remain an idea that haunts and decentres the institutions that claim to arbitrate it. Derrida’s notion of justice does not and will not emerge from allegiance to established centres of power.