Application deadline: November 15, 2026
HDK-Valand's doctoral programme in artistic practice is pleased to announce a series of events open to the public, some in-person, some online and some blended.
Avery F. Gordon: special guest presentation
November 4, 2026 6:30–7:30pm CET
This online public lecture (in association with CAPIm) moderated by Prof. Andrea Phillips, is a joint initiative of two research seminar groups—Mapping the Political Imaginary, and We that swarm among the living and the dead. Avery F. Gordon is Visiting Professor Birkbeck School of Law University of London and Professor Emerita University of California Santa Barbara, and is is a writer, educator and radio producer who living in London. This special guest presentation has been organised by the two research groups in response to Gordon's foundational contribution in the (1997) Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination to questions of haunting and the imaginary.
Participation is free booking required.
The Distribution Effect: Cassettes, Archives, Video and Alternative Cultures of Circulation
November 8, 2026
The Distribution Effect is a one-day in-person public cultural event that explores distribution as integral to artistic production and not a mere ancillary consideration within artistic production. Three creative scenarios of distribution will be presented at Bio Valand, HDK-Valand Academy, University of Gothenburg. These three collaborative projects address variously moving between cassette piracy in working-class Naples; the autonomous infrastructures of Italian social centres; and the industrial pop-culture phenomenon of the independent music video. Together, these three projects ask a shared question: what happens when distribution stops being understood as the final stage of cultural production and is recognised as a political and artistic practice in itself? The event emerges from the doctoral course Distribution within Artistic Practice, led by Vincenzo Estremo (HDK-Valand/NABA) with an international cohort of students from several different academies across Europe.
Participation is free, however places are limited so booking required. In person event, no online access.
Half-way Home: PhD research symposium
November 9–10, 2026
This blended research symposium, an associated initiative of CAPIm, comprises a set of doctoral research projects being presented as the second year of study is coming to an end. This is primarily a research education event for PhD researchers and guest researchers from NABA Milan and HfK Bremen who are studying through the Artistic Practice PhD syllabus at HDK-Valand, University of Gothenburg. The disciplines presented include contemporary art, curating, pedagogy and design.
Participation is free, however places are limited so booking required. Online and in-person event
Steven Henry Madoff—The Power of the Unseparate: Artistic Precedents for the Coming Collective
November 10, 2026 6–7:30pm CET
Keynote presentation by Steven Henry Madoff in the Glasshouse, HDK-Valand. Prof. Madoff is the founding chair of the MA Curatorial Practice program at the School of Visual Arts in New York and is series editor for Thoughts on Curating from Sternberg Press. The invitation to be our 2026 keynote is in response to his most recent book the (2025) Unseparate: Modernism, Interdisciplinary Art, and Network Aesthetics, Stanford University Press.
Participation is free however booking required.
Nicholas Mirzoeff on Self-Organisation
November 16, 2026 5:30-7pm
As part of the Self-Organisation in Contemporary Arts open webinar series, our special guest speaker Prof. Nicholas Mirzoeff will address self-organisation via the non-human spontaneous organising inherent to murmurations. This is an associated initiative of CAPIm.
Participation is free however booking required.
Doctoral courses open for application: October 15–November 15, 2026
These courses are free and will be delivered online in the spring semester 2027. There is a limited number of spaces for external doctoral researchers. Applicants should provide evidence that they are registered on a doctoral programme. Applications will open from October 15 and close a month later. These course are specifcially designed for researchers working through an artistic practice. Introduction to PhD in Artistic Practice Basic Course 2: On research methods and research design Ethnography for Creative Practice
