KFHVA05 V25 Att undersöka imaginärer
Researching Imaginaries
Last updated 11 May 2025
This doctoral level course is realized in partnership with the Hungarian University of Fine Arts, Budapest (Magyar Képzőművészeti Egyetem, HUFA) the Jan Matejko Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków (Akademia Sztuk Pięknych im. Jana Matejki w Krakowie, ASP). It is also done in collaboration with the University of the Arts, Bremen (Hochschule für Künste Bremen, HfK) and with Nuova Accademia Di Bella Art, Milan (NABA) with guest researchers from other institutions.
It is enabled by an ERASMUS + programme blended intensive (BIPS). It is an associated initiative of the Centre for Art & the Political Imaginary (CAPIm)
ZOOM address for online meetings: https://gu-se.zoom.us/j/66100386495
Introduce yourself: If you would like to share a short bio about yourself and a link to examples of your work online, or some images of you work you can use this folder here to share them here:
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1-6bTloYM0Nitt8Qccg6jaKEy83-27kFe?usp=sharing
or you can just add a link to this page beside your name:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1O2ryvzoYGDU9fBv3qcXYZSSjCyW_L859EDF80HlR2Wk/edit?usp=sharing
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Padlet for the intensive 19 to 23 May (wider public)
https://padlet.com/smallfatman/researching_imaginaries_intensive
Padlet for the course in general
(open to course participants only)
https://padlet.com/smallfatman/researching_imaginaries
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SCHEDULE
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scroll down to the end, for previous sessions
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Tues 17 June 2025
14:00-15:00 Online wrap up seminar, and participant feedback session.
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PREVIOUS SESSIONS
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Wed 5 Feb 2025 14:30-17:00 cet
Introducing Imaginaries
14:30-15:45 Welcome and round
- What is the difference between “imagination” and “imaginary”?
- Why do people doing artistic research projects sometimes make use of these terms?
- Where do these terms come from?
16:00-17:00 What do I have to do in this shared doctoral course?
- Introducing your current work in one of the future sessions
- About the guest speakers
- Participating in the programme in Gothenburg
- Sharing your references with others
- Some material that you are asked to look at in preparation for the sessions.
Guests duirng the course will include: Dr. Åsa Sonjasdotter, Daniela Zambrano Almidón, Dharmendra Prasad, Dr. Pujita Guha, Dr. Nuno Sacramento Dr. Nick Aikens, Dr. Kerry Guinan, Michele Masucci, Prof. Andrea Phillips, Prof. Charles Esche and others.
SLIDES USED IN THE SESSION HERE
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Wed 19 Feb 2025 14:30-17:00 cet
Ecological Imaginaries
Advance viewing: https://vimeo.com/952026026/fc8e26c976?share=copy
password (may not alwaws be needed): Cultivating_Abundance
Introducing a collective artistic research process that re-negotiates the collapse of cological systems. Invited guests Åsa Sonjasdotter, Daniela Zambrano Almidón, Dharmendra Prasad and Pujita Guha introduce their work and an artistic research project that they are developing “Dialogue Across – Refiguring Abundance” This research looks for ways to use imagination as a tool for reparative activation in rural situations of eco systems loss and collapse. Using artistic methods such as story telling, drawing, visual mapping, and assemblage to mobilise sensory memory and knowledge among inhabitants of communities living through the collapse of ecological systems on three different continents: Bihar in India; Huánuco in Peru; and Scania in Sweden.
14:30-15:45 Guests present
15:45-16:00 Short beak
16:00-17:00 Open discussion
You are asked to look at the film Cultivating Abundance in advance. Link and password will be shared in advance.
Introducing the guests.
Dr. Åsa Sonjasdotter
Artist, re-searcher, writer, and social organiser, living on the island of Ven, Sweden, and in the city of Berlin, Germany, Sonjasdotter’s artistic work is driven by an urge to engage in material-narrative processes for the unmaking of violent relations through food and land. Having grown up between monoculture farm fields in the highly industrialised farm region of South Scandinavia, she has an embodied experience of what such relations does to the people, the habitats, the waters, and the soil. Further, it was in this region that a ‘universally applicable’ technique for monoculture plant breeding was invented. This technique provides the base for legislations imposed by globally operating seed corporations aiming at criminalizing the use of peasants’ seeds. The topic is elaborated in the 2022 film Cultivating Abundance– Away from Monoculture, made in dialogue with the seed association Allkorn (Common Grains) and plant breeder Hans Larsson. For about two decades, Sonjasdotter has worked on the restoration of peasant knowledges and food relations following the migratory trajectories of potatoes, a plant that is an important food provider to smallholders in my community. However, the path of this plant – thriving and becoming edible to humans in socialites with farmers in the Andes since millennia – follows painful trajectories of slavery, looting, and exploitation. Together with artist, researcher, and activist Daniela Zambrano Almidón, Sonjasdotter works to restore relations and narratives of food and farming away from this violent path. You can see Åsa's doctoral work here.
Daniela Zambrano Almidón is a Quechua researcher and interdisciplinary artist with a career dedicated to artistic projects and research on Andean eco-nomic, technological, and relational processes, as well as decolonization and memory. Their work spans various formats, including agricultural and relational art, performance, textiles, video, installation, and artistic mediation. They hold a Master’s degree in Art in Context from the Berlin University of the Arts (UDK) and a Bachelor’s degree in Fine Arts and Visual Arts with an emphasis on Sculpture and Interdisciplinary Art from the National School of Fine Arts of Peru. Since 2014, they have led Tejiendo Caminos, a decentralized intercultural art project that brings together Indigenous community leaders, environmental activists, and traditional artists. This project, founded and directed by them, aims to strengthen cultural connections and foster dialogue through art.
Dharmendra Prasad
Dharmendra Prasad lives and works between Assam and Bihar, India. Prasad’s work deals with how marginalized groups live with agrarian life in India, and the coming of plantation based capitalism in the contemporary. He moves through threshing floors, and barren groves, collects and works with mud, hay, straw, wood and fodder and whatever is left in these farms and fields. Prasad runs the artistic, community project Harvest School that gathers families, farmers, craftsmen, fishermen, urban youth, and non-human agencies to unlearn imperial attitudes; colonial, nationalistic and industrial practices. The pedagogy revolves around workshops, display, deep observations, actions and toil of the eco – rural contexts (wetlands, forests, agricultural fields, threshing floors and other harvest sites) to experience non-capital ways of living – planting seeds for better future. Dharmendra Prasad is as well a member of the Assam based Anga Art Collective.
Pujita Guha
Pujita Guha is an educator, writer, and curator. Her interests always circle around environmental, land and forested places and relations, indigenous thought and politics, and contemporary art in Asia and elsewhere. Between 2018-2023, Guha co-founded and co-organized Forest Curriculum, a curatorial and artistic platform to engage in questions of forests and other environments, and knowledge formation, in south and southeast Asia. Currently, Guha is a co-curator for Hosting Lands, an experimental exhibition project on questions of land, access and belonging, primarily situated in Denmark. Guha will defend her dissertation Forested Media in June 2025 at the Film and Media Studies department at University of California Santa Barbara. Forested Media looks at how indigenous communities work, and live, with media to express their knowledge and experiences of forests. And how they imagine ethical futures and forge relations with other species amidst it. Guha has published extensively in academic journals such as Cultural Politics, South Asian History and Culture, IIC Quarterly, and more. Guha has contributed with chapters to books such as The Persistence of the Cold War Imaginaries, edited by John Beck and Ryan Bishop, 2024; Film Studies: An Introduction, edited by Vebhuti Duggal, Bindu Menon, and Spandan Bhattacharya, 2022, as well as she has contributed to art journals and more.
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Wed 12 Mar 2025 14:30-17:00 cet
14:30-15:00 planning intensive week
15:00-15:30 first participant to present their work
15:30-16:00 break
16:00-17:00 Guest speaker Dr. Naomi Rincón-Gallardo
Dr. Naomi Rincón-Gallardo: Visual artist living and working between Mexico City and Oaxaca. From a decolonial-cuir perspective, her research-driven critical-mythical dreamlike worldmakings address the creation of counter-worlds in neocolonial settings. In her work she integrates her interests in theater games, popular music, Mesoamerican cosmologies, speculative fiction, vernacular festivities and crafts, decolonial feminisms and queer of color critique. She completed the PhD in Practice Program at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. Recent shows and performative screenings include: Tzitzimime Trilogy, la Casa Encendida Madrid (2023). 59th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia (2022). 34th Bienal de São Paulo (2021). A Trilogy of Caves, 2020 (Solo Show) Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Oaxaca. May your thunder break the sky, 2020 (Solo Show) Kunstraum Innsbruck, 11 Berlin Biennale, 2020. Heavy Blood, 2019, (Solo Show) Museo Experimental El Eco, Mexico City. En Cuatro Patas, 2018, (Performative Screening) Pacific Standard Time. L.A.L.A. The Broad Museum, Los Ángeles. FEMSA Biennial. We have Never beenContemporary, 2018, Zacatecas. The Formaldehyde Trip, 2017 (Performative screening) Performance in Progress. SF MOMA, San Francisco CA.
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Wed 30 Apr 2025 14:30-17:15* cet
some participants presenting work
14:30-14:55 Anna Heymowska
14:55-15:20 Monika Gabriela Dorniak
15:20-15:45 Maria Karpushina
15:45-16:00 short break
16:00-16:25 Outline of the intensive week 19 to 23 May; information for those who do not travel, and for those who do; and the practical work - image, performance, audio;
16:25-16:50 Karolina Halatek
16:50-17:15 Special Guest Presentation: Mariusz Soltysik
Mariusz Soltysik is a lecturer at the Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow (Poland) on the Intermedia Faculty, working with a primary focus is on the human being – subjected to an overwhelming flow of stimuli and information, entangled in cultural, social, and technological contexts in the era of the Anthropocene. For each project, he creates a unique, interdisciplinary database, which is visualized using various media – developing intermedia works, extensive transmedia projects, and site-specific realizations. He has presented his works in more than 100 national and mostly international exhibitions, e.g. in Belgium, France, Ireland, Iceland, Germany, Sweden, Italy, as well as in Australia, India, Taiwan, Chile and the USA. In 2019,he received a grant from The School of Art and Visual Studies, University of Kentucky, with the support of the Donovan Foundation Grant. He has participated in 14 foreign residency schemes and is the author of international projects, such as “systeMY / systemUS” or “HUB or SC (h) AB”, presented during the Mediations Biennale 2010 in Poznań. Originator and co-curator of international exhibitions entitled “CamouFLASH” which took place in Łódź (2007), as well as in Dresden (Germany, 2008) and Poznań during the Mediations Biennale in 2008. He was the curator of the Light Move Festival 2012 (international event) in Łódź, Poland.
He has authored multimedia presentations, e.g. on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the Warsaw Autumn Festival, or the visualisation of the synagogue on Wolborska Street in Łódź on the occasion of the 69th anniversary of the liquidation of the Litzmannstadt Ghetto. He is also co-author, together with Maciej Świerkocki, of a graphic novel “Lost Souls” published by the Marek Edelman Dialogue Centrum in Łódź in 2014.
Tuesday 6 May 2025 14:30-17:40* cet
Organisational Imaginaries
Special guest speaker, Dr. Nuno Sacramento is a Mozambiquean-Portuguese curator, and the Director of Peacock Visual Arts and the Worm. He has lived in Scotland for the last two decades. Nuno has a wealth of experience in curation, and organisational leadership. He is a graduate of DeAppel Foundation, Amsterdam, and has a PhD by practice in Visual Arts from DJCAD. Between 2010 and 2016 he was Director of the Scottish Sculpture Workshop, Lumsden. Nuno has expertise in the areas of research, project curation, fundraising, writing, and lecturing.
14:30-14:45 What is meant by “organisational imaginaries”?
14:45-15:45 Guest speaker: Nuno Sacramento presents his work running an organsiation supporting artists to produce work and the New Aberdeen Bestiary.
15:45-16:00 Short beak
some participants presenting work
16:00-16:25 Anita Araujo
16:25-16:50 Anna Dasović
16:50-17:15 Andrea Steves
17:15-17:40 Nóra Szabó
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Wednesday 7 May 16:00-17:30 (optional)
Political Imaginaries
A special presentation introducing a major two-year research project exploring the role of the terms “imagine” “imaginary” and “political imaginary” in artistic research, contemporary art and across a range of other disciplines, with the research team Dr. Nick Aikens, Dr. Kerry Guinan, and Michele Masucci.
16:00-16:10 Welcome, introductions from the team
16:10-16:30 Mick, Short overview: CAPIm
16:30-16:45 Kerry, First steps in the mapping process
16:45-17:00 Michele, Embodied and performative approaches
17:00-17:15 Nick, Intersections of exhibition-making, research and the political imaginary.
17:15-17:30 Discussion and next steps.
Dr. Nick Aikens is a curator, researcher, editor and educator. He is the Managing Editor and Research Responsible for L’Internationale Online. He assumed his role in August 2023 as part of the four-year, EU funded project ’Museum of the Commons’. Nick completed his PhD on Rewinding Internationalism. An Exhibitionary Inquiry on the Political Imaginary and he was previously Curator at the Van Abbemuseum (2012–2023) where he worked on numerous exhibitions and publications as well as leading the research programme Deviant Practice (2016–2019). He was a tutor and course leader at the Dutch Art Institute in Arnhem (2012–2019) and Guest Professor in the department of Exhibitions and Scenography at Karlsruhe University (2023–2024).
Dr. Kerry Guinan is an artist and researcher working across a variety of media, including installation, performance, participatory art, and networked art, to critically reveal power relations in local and global systems. Her practice-based PhD at the Limerick School of Art and Design, Ireland critically defined her artistic methodology of demystifying globalised systems of capitalist production, engaging the theoretical frameworks of Gothic Marxism, socially engaged art practice, and Brechtian theatre, among others. Recent projects include Cosmic Debris, a residency and exhibition at the National Space Centre and Greywood Arts, Cork, Ireland (2024), curating 'Apocalypse Anxieties', a group exhibition responding to a Cold-War-era, government, nuclear bunker in Athlone, Ireland, and creating The Red Thread (2022), a live installation of sewing machines in the post-industrial setting of The Complex gallery, Dublin, which were operated remotely—and in real time—by garment workers in a factory in Bengaluru, India. Guinan also curated Tactical Magic the 2019 TULCA Festival of Visual Arts, Galway, Ireland.
Michele Masucci is an artist, researcher and lecturer in writing and artistic research at the Royal Institute of Art. Masucci is a PhD candidate in Critical Theory from the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna (expected in 2025) and is pursuing a PhD in Medical Science at Karolinska Institutet (expected in 2025). They have completed a Bachelor's degree in Philosophy from Södertörn University and a Master in Fine Arts and Post Master in Art & Architecture from the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm. Masucci is pursuing research entitled Territories of Imagination: "The Republic of Maschito", which examines how artistic practices intersect with political movements. One focus is the 1943 revolt in Maschito, Italy, during which women led the resistance against fascism to briefly establish a partisan republic.
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Monday 19 May-Friday 23 May in Gothenburg
Intensive 5 day workshop
Enter your details for food and for hospitality here:
Each day begins with practical work - with sub-groups working with sound, image and performance - and ends with a presentation by a special guest followed by a some refreshments and snacks. Details will be provided in the online session that takes place on 30 April 2025.
Special guests include:
Prof. Charles Esche is a curator and writer living between Edinburgh, Scotland; Eindhoven, Netherlands and Sao Paulo, Brazil. Until recenty he was director of the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, and co-editorial director and co-founder with Mark Lewis of Afterall Journal and Books based at Central Saint Martins, London. In 2014 he curated the Sao Paulo Biennale with a team of seven. In addition to his institutional curating, he has (co-) curated a number of major international exhibitions including U3 Triennale, Ljubljana (2011); Riwaq Biennale, Ramallah with Reem Fadda (2007 & 2009); Istanbul Biennale with Vasif Kortun (2005); Gwangju Biennale with Hou Hanru (2002); Amateur Gothenburg with Mark Kremer and Adam Szymczyk (2000). He teaches on the Exhibition Studies MRes course at Central Saint Martins and the De Appel Curatorial Course, Amsterdam. From 2000-2004 he was director of Rooseum, Malmö, Sweden and before that worked at protoacademy, Edinburgh and Tramway, Glasgow.
Prof. Andrea Phillips is BALTIC Professor and Director of BxNU Research Institute, Northumbria University & BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art. Prof. Phillips lectures and writes about the economic and social construction of public value within contemporary art, the manipulation of forms of participation and the potential of forms of political, architectural and social reorganisation within artistic and curatorial culture. In my current role she has developed a collaborative space in Newcastle called the Experimental Studio where people from different disciplines – from the university, the BALTIC and from outside these institutions – can come together and test out ideas in a safe setting.
Prof. Kerstin Mey completed her PhD in art theory/aesthetics at the Humboldt University of Berlin, Germany and is currently Professor of Visual Culture at University of Limerick. Prof. Mey previously held a number of leadership positions in Higher Education across research, academic transformation, internationalisation and organisational change programmes including President of the University of Limerick, and Dean of the Westminster School of Media, Arts and Design, University of Westminster. Among many distinguished roles, she was a member of the Austrian Science Board; Vice Chair of the Executive of the Council for Higher Education in Art and Design (CHEAD, UK); and a member of the Supervisory Board of the European Centre for Press and Media Freedom. Prof. Mey has published widely on contemporary art, applied aesthetics and related areas. Prof. Mey has an enduring research interests in models of creative practice and collaboration and their underlying hierarchies of values particularly in the context of social transformation processes towards sustainability and regeneration. She uses her extensive experience for building innovative and often multi-disciplinary partnerships between academic institutions, industry, government and civil society to advance knowledge and create lasting societal impact.
Prof. Cătălin Gheorghe is a theoretician, curator and editor based in Iași, Romania. He teaches 'Theories and Practices of Artistic Research', 'Curatorial Studies and Practices', 'Applicative Visual Studies', and 'Aesthetics of Visual Arts' at “George Enescu” National University of the Arts in Iași. He is the editor of 'Vector – critical research in context' publication series (since 2005) and the curator of 'Vector – studio for art practices and debates' (since 2007), which is a platform for critical research and art production based on the understanding of art as experimental journalism. Since 2004 he held a series of talks, based on critical research and curatorial practices, at art schools and institutions in Aarhus, Bucharest, Budapest, Kishinev, Cluj-Napoca, Copenhagen, Helsinki, Iaşi, Innsbruck, Kassel, Kyiv, London, Madrid, Manchester, Malmö, Paris, Vaasa, Vienna, Zürich. As a curator he produced, also in collaboration, a series of projects for Periferic Biennial (Iaşi), Stadtturmgalerie (Innsbruck), documenta12magazine (Kassel), International Contemporary Art Center (Bucharest), Frieze Projects 2010 (London), Salzburger Kunstverein, Projects & Spaces (Viennartfair 2011), Preview Berlin 2011, Camera Plus. Biennial of Contemporary Photography and Moving Image in Iași (2016), French Institute in Romania, National Museum of Contemporary Art (Bucharest). Fields of interest: critical artistic research, curatorial critical practices, art as experimental journalism, contemporary art (political) theories, xeno-spaces, xeno-practices, trans(ex)positions, post-capitalism. See: vector.org.ro
Prof. Szabolcs KissPál, (1967 Marosvásárhely, Romania) has been living in Budapest since 1993. He works in various media, from photography and video to installation, objects, and public interventions. His main field of interest lies at the intersection between audiovisual and communication media, visual arts, and sociopolitical issues. He has lectured at in various European universities, including in the UK, Austria, Finland and Germany, and in 2013-15 led the Studio Art and Social Justice of the Intermedia Department of the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Bratislava, Slovakia. Currently he is an associate professor in the Intermedia Department of the University of Fine Arts Budapest. His works have been presented at various institutions (Venice Biennale; ISCP, New York; NCCA, Moscow; Prague Biennial, OFF-Biennale Budapest; Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam; Seoul International Media Art Biennale, among others) and can be found in several public and private collections (Ludwig Museum for Contemporary Art, Budapest; National Museum of Contemporary Art, Bucharest; Muzeum Współczesne Wrocław; Kadist Art Foundation, Paris). The artist developed a collaborative activist practice between 2012 and 2015, establishing and maintaining the NO MMA multilingual blog about Hungarian culture and politics (nemma.noblogs.org). KissPál is one of the founders of the protest groups Free Artist and Living Memorial.
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