2026 International Forum on Artistic Research

As the largest conference on practice-based research within the arts, the 2026 International Forum on Artistic Research brings together leading practitioners, scholars and policymakers across the entire range of arts-based disciplines. Hosted by the Institute for Creativity at the University of Galway in Ireland, it is the 17th conference of the Society for Artistic Research (SAR). This year’s conference will feature over 100 sessions with more than 170 contributors, including presentations, keynotes, workshops, roundtables, laboratories, performances, experimental formats and posters, while also offering dedicated slots organised by SAR’s Special Interest Groups. 

The Institute for Creativity will be officially launched as a new research institute at the University of Galway during the opening of the conference. It provides an ideal context for the Forum’s concern with how artistic research forges unique relationships between disciplines, practices, institutions and publics. Its location in Galway, on Ireland’s Atlantic seaboard, gives the conference a particular resonance with questions of language, cultural memory and place-based knowledge.

Opening on June 23, the Forum coincides with Oíche Shin Seáin / St John’s Eve, traditionally marked in the west of Ireland by midsummer bonfires. Associated with protection, purification and transition, these fires mark the survival of a conceptual world in which ritual, seasonal change, language and collective memory remain bound together. This context gives concrete form to the Forum’s central concern.

Under the title Endangered Conceptual Worlds, the International Forum on Artistic Research 2026 at the University of Galway explores how artistic research engages with endangered conceptual worlds and minoritised languages. It considers precarious forms of knowledge as epistemic resources and practical potentials: cultural sedimentations shared between generations and across contexts that provide unique ways of making and being in the world.

These forms of knowledge are often complex yet fragile, dominated, exploited, and threatened. The drive of platform capitalism to optimise human behaviour for economic ends, the homogenising forces set free within synthetic realities and the pressure of aesthetic and narrative standardisation have put the very idea of diversity and creativity at risk—not only theoretically and politically, but practically.

However, conceptual worlds and minoritised languages sustain and provide valuable counter-models to the all-encompassing tendencies of maximisation, simplification and instrumentalisation. They counteract the algorithmic and affordance-driven flattening of linguistic and cultural heterogeneity; they have become emblematic of what is at stake in broader struggles over which forms of knowledge are valued, and why. 

By opening horizons within and across academic disciplines, institutional and non-institutional environments, artistic research is uniquely positioned not only to investigate and celebrate the value of non-hegemonic knowledges and languages, but also to challenge its own isolation. Embracing the anti-hegemonic potential of endangered conceptual worlds and minoritised languages, the 2026 Forum highlights the connectivity of artistic research, unpacks its conceptual foundations, and explores how its methods, practices and insights can be transposed and translated into other contexts.