Research

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 including anthropology; art theory; cultural studies; curatorial practice; history; literary studies; philosophy; political theory; and social theory. Based on a preliminary survey the working assumption is that there is a wide plurality of concepts, figures, discourses and practices in play, and that there is no one common referent in play. The project will describe lines of development and divergent usage rather than seek to produce a singular finalised definition in each case.

This associated project is a bi-national comparative study of educational practices and experiences in 3rd Cycle artistic research training that is jointly realised by Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB) and Gothenburg University (GU). The goal of this project is to provide systematic and reliable information about, and insight into, the actual practices and experiences of PhD holders, candidates, and supervisors of 3rd cycle programs in the arts. The project has been initiated by Prof. Walter Ysebaert (VUB) and Prof. Mick Wilson (HDK-Valand) and the doctoral researcher is Emiliano Battista.

This artistic research project explores the capacity of artistic practice to conceptualise, and make sensible, political phenomena operating at extreme spatio-temporal scales, such as high-turnover, globalised, production chains, international, tele-communication networks, and deep-time, geological activity. It considers spatio-temporal differentiation as a fundamental imaginative faculty that preconditions perception and understanding. However, as various theories of the sublime suggest, human imagination struggles to comprehend phenomena at highly differentiated, non-human scales. These difficulties contribute to crises of political imagination in globalised and planetary politics, in which issues may appear too vast, complex, and disorientating to be effectively addressed. If artistic practice can indeed contribute to the reconfiguring of political imaginaries, this project puts art to work at the very limits of imagination. Through the creation and analysis of artistic works that challenge or intensify spatio-temporal awareness, this research will investigate how a political aesthetics of scale may redistribute ethico-political sensibilities of responsibility, causality, and agency.  

Led by Dr. Glenn Loughran (TU Dublin), this research strand aims to engage artists and educators around the politics of adult education and public pedagogy in contemporary society, seeking an alternative space for educational thought outside the university curricular structure. Night Study begins as a series of online seminars that draws upon the history of subversive educational forms, their emancipatory traditions and the need for collective study. This collective study begins with a reading of Lewis and Hyland’s (2022) paper “The Antifascist Politics of Studioing” and Tyson Lewis’s (2020) book Walter Benjamin’s Antifascist Education: From Riddles to Radio. Night Study is also realised in collaboration with L’Internationale Online.

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.

This research project explores the intersection of art and political organization with a focus on how artistic practices contribute to shaping political futures through collective action. Building on historical continuities of resistance and revolt, the research takes its point of departure from the 1943 revolt in Maschito, Italy, a small Arbëreshë village. On September 15, 1943, the women of Maschito led a spontaneous uprising against fascist authorities. They organized barricades, communication networks, and strikes, effectively putting the fascist forces to flight and proclaiming the Republic of Maschito. 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 is funded by the University of Gothenburg and led by Prof. Mick Wilson and it explores the exclusion of the dead from community with the living within the imaginaries of colonial-modernity. The inquiry begins from the observation that distinctions made within colonial-modernity between the living and the dead have tended toward a fundamental dichotomy. While the dead may be understood to persist materially in the form of the corpse, other than these remains the dead appear most often assigned to a space of non-being: The living are / the dead are not. This term colonial-modernity indicates an understanding of modernisation and colonisation as integral to each other. where the distinctions between these have tended toward a fundamental dichotomy. The project considers how the relations between the living and the dead may be differently understood and imagined through the agency of artistic practices. 

This artistic research project in public art led by artist Kerstin Bergendal is funded through Gothenburg City Stadsmiljöforvaltning and curated by Göteborg Konst 2024. The project 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. One of the key outputs of the project will be a book on the methodologies used and their emergence within artistic practices over the last two decades, to be released in 2027/8.  Prof. Mick Wilson joins the research process with the intention to build a series of research seminars and teaching materials from this research project. This project is also realised in collaboration with GPS400: Centre for Collaborative Visual Research at the University of Gothenburg.

This VR Exploratory Lab project investigates how images produced by civilians may revitalise democratic values in society when used as evidence of historical and political injustices. The approach shifts the centrality of the filmmaker in the production process to explore collective filmmaking practices as a method to facilitate justice making. Events or traces of events are captured in the proliferation of  social media images; these function as evidence that requires close reading and/or testimony by witnesses to produce meanings that are intrinsic (or not) to confirm the veracity of images. The exploratory labs undertake to investigate the indexical (authentic) images created by civilians from archival records and social media fragments from the world function to produce a cinematic interpretation of reality. 

Looking at the Woman in a Bomb Blast is an experimental ekphrasis: a unique piece of art writing, exploring power, desire, and looking, and the way they come together and find expression in art. It’s also a confrontation with artistic and erotic obsession. A slender young woman falls backwards, blown off her feet by a bomb. Frozen in time, her bare legs stick up, her hands grasping the air. Her face is covered by a page from a newspaper. People approach to look at her, bending down to study the folds of her dress, the immature curve of her thigh, her neat toes, splayed in surprise. The woman is a sculpture, made by the Irish artist F. E. McWilliam in 1974. In this bronze figure’s awkwardly graceful near-death contortions, entire histories of pain, death, sex and visual pleasure have been condensed. This volume uses different voices to unravel these histories. This is a CAPIm associated initiative.