Join online: “Propositions” lectures at summer school Supervising Artistic and Practice-Based Research

The Summer School, Supervising Artistic and Practice-Based Research, takes place at BAK, basis voor actuele kunst, Utrecht from August 21–25, 2023. It convenes with PhD and postdoc supervisors from across Europe and beyond to reflect on and challenge the existing formal educational pathways for artistic and practice-based research, with the goal of articulating the shared horizon. It is part of the academic curriculum of Utrecht Summer School, and is organized as a collaborative effort of School of Communication and Culture—Aesthetics and Culture, Aarhus University, Aarhus; The Laboratory for Art Research, The Schools of Visual Arts, The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, Copenhagen; Utrecht University, Utrecht; and BAK, Utrecht.

The school is structured as a series of gatherings around practices and propositions. While practices take form of enclosed onsite encounters, propositions—which evolve as a series of online morning keynote lectures—are open for the public to join digitally.

Practices are participant-driven conversations on the pressure points between the experimental politico-qualitative theoretical and pedagogical models and the economico-quantitative regimes of monitoring, evaluation, financialization, and managerialism. These sessions aim to rethink the key questions around urgent social, economic, and ecological challenges and to cast them forward into pedagogical formats and supervision, in order to sustain a generative learning and research space for art and its practitioners.

Propositions evolve as a series of morning keynote lectures followed by discussion. Open to the public online, the daily keynotes include, in the order of appearance: “Exceptional Us” by Andrea Phillips (BxNU Institute, Northumbria University, Newcastle and BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead); “‘F*ck You and Your Footnotes’: On Some Tropes in the Rhetorical Situation of Supervision” by Mick Wilson (HDK-Valand—Academy of Art and Design, University of Gothenburg, Gothenburg); “Art(istic) Research PhD Projects and their Holistic Agency” by Christa-Maria Lerm Hayes (University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam); “Versioning Research” by Geoff Cox (London South Bank University, London); and “Becoming Method(ology)” by Barbara Bolt (Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne, Melbourne). For full program and the streaming link, please visit bakonline.org.

The summer school aims toward developing the collective and collaborative mappings of practices and propositions into a toolkit for researchers, supervisors, and evaluators, which will provide concrete pathways for pedagogical approaches to—and commitments of artistic and practice-based research toward—societal and planetary urgencies of our era. These efforts build on a toolkit draft “Setting and reflecting on the conditions from within: A prospective and retrospective toolkit for artistic and practice-based researchers and their supervisors,” developed as a collaboration between Utrecht University, The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, and Aarhus University in 2021 and 2022, taking inspiration from and in dialogue with Barbara Bolt, and funded by the Novo Nordisk Foundation Visiting Professorship in Art & Art History 2021.

Supervising Artistic and Practice-Based Research is organized by Maibritt Borgen, Irene Calabuch Mirón, Maria Hlavajova, Jacob Lund, Henk Slager, and Iris van der Tuin.

BAK’s main partner in the field of education and research is HKU University of the Arts, Utrecht. 

BAK’s activities have been made possible through financial contributions by the Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture and Science and the City of Utrecht. 

​Utrecht University
The Laboratory for Art Research, The Schools of Visual Arts, The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts
School of Communication and Culture—Aesthetics and Culture, Aarhus University