Research

A collaboration between the Public Art Agency Sweden and CAPIm on a series of online seminars that consider how artists and artists’ organisations navigate policy change and wider instabilities in government agendas for culture. The series will look at various national contexts in Europe with recent concrete examples of political upheaval that change policy conditions and impact the autonomy of the arts field.

Myriam Amroun and Natasha Marie Llorens propose curatorial practice as artistic research that moves beyond “metaphorizing decolonization.” The project centres curatorial knowledge, experiments with minor transnational infrastructures and institutional scale, and works between the Nordic region and North Africa as two margins of the European project.

This VR Exploratory Lab investigates how civilian-produced images can support democratic values when used as evidence of historical and political injustice. Shifting focus from the individual filmmaker to collective filmmaking, the project explores how archival records and social media fragments can be read, testified to, and assembled into cinematic interpretations of reality and justice-making.

Looking at the Woman in a Bomb Blast is an experimental ekphrasis and a work of art writing that explores power, desire, looking, and their expression in art. Centred on F. E. McWilliam’s 1974 bronze sculpture of a young woman thrown backwards by a bomb blast, the volume uses different voices to unfold the histories of pain, death, sexuality, and visual pleasure condensed in the figure. This is a CAPIm associated initiative.

This research project is part of CAPIm’s core programme and seeks to construct a broad overview of the different ways in which “imaginary”, “political imaginary” and related terms are used in artistic research and across a range of other disciplines and practices …

Led by Dr. Glenn Loughran (TU Dublin), Night Study engages artists and educators with the politics of adult education and public pedagogy, seeking alternative spaces for educational thought beyond the university curriculum. Beginning as a series of online seminars in collaboration with L’Internationale Online, it draws on subversive and emancipatory educational traditions through collective study of Lewis and Hyland’s “The Antifascist Politics of Studying” and Tyson Lewis’s Walter Benjamin’s Antifascist Education.

This ongoing strand of enquiry and experimentation engages with the innovative practices that emerge within the space of editorial and publishing work that are informed by and generated from artistic research. Initiated through a series of seminars and workshops the goal is to build a resource for artistic researchers and practitioners to support and enable further experimentation in creative and critical publishing. 

This research strand, part of Democratic Imaginaries, emerged from shared interests among researchers gathered for the Researching Imaginaries blended intensive programme in Gothenburg in May 2025. It aims to develop a more precise understanding of organisational imaginaries, drawing on institutional critique, social theory, art practice, organisational and planning studies, and recent debates on infrastructure in art and curatorial discourse.

This artistic research project in public art led by artist Kerstin Bergendal investigates the urban imaginaries and imaginaries of place that are at work in a key urban site of the cityscape of Gothenburg, Götaplatsen. The project entails conversations with “narrators” of the city to produce an (as yet unspecified) intervention into the extended site of Götaplatsen.

This associated project is a bi-national comparative study of educational practices and experiences in 3rd Cycle artistic research training. The goal is to provide systematic and reliable insight into, the actual practices and experiences of PhD holders, candidates, and supervisors of 3rd cycle programs in the arts …

This artistic research project explores how artistic practice can make political phenomena operating at extreme spatial and temporal scales perceptible, from global production chains and telecommunications networks to geological deep time. Through artworks that challenge and intensify our sense of scale, the project investigates how art might reconfigure political imagination and redistribute understandings of responsibility, causality, and agency.

This research project explores the intersection of art and political organization. Through case studies of art collectives and autonomous cultural centers, the research investigates how art creates spaces for communal recognition and free expression, fostering political imagination that resists state repression and authoritarianism.

This research project explores the exclusion of the dead from community with the living within the imaginaries of colonial-modernity. The inquiry begins from how colonial-modernity has produced a fundamental dichotomy between the living and the dead: the living are, the dead are not. While the dead may persist materially as corpses or remains, they are otherwise often assigned to non-being. Understanding colonial-modernity as the entanglement of modernisation and colonisation, the project asks how artistic practices might imagine other relations between the living and the dead.

CAPIm aligns with the Swedish Research council’s broad and inclusive approach in defining research on artistic grounds in all established and emerging artistic fields. Our mission as a Centre of Excellence is to contribute to the construction of this sector and support its contribution to education through our focus on the political imaginary. We seek to make CAPIm a home for the different arts and specialisations that span the wide expanse of artistic research through our own activities, those of associated partners and wide national and international networks.  

Our mission encompasses an interrogation of the discursive genealogies of artistic research as well as the political imaginary manifested by each genealogy. We aim to explore the premises and consequences of diverse interpretations of the field, rather than prioritizing one definition. Such interpretations include the partially contradictory views that 1) artistic research is a radically distinct knowledge practice, 2) it can be recognized in all art practices in which research plays a central role (whether inside or outside higher education), and 3) artistic research can be defined as an institutional field that is both funded by and integrated into higher arts education, regardless of its form. 

CAPIm is committed to the idea that artistic research is part of artistic practice. The fact that artistic research arises through a dialogue (and conflict) with a host of knowledge formats, institutions and traditions notwithstanding, we belong to the world(s) of art.