Challenging Institutionalization: A Propositional Toolkit for Doing Supervision of Artistic and Practice-Based Research

Interrogating the existing formal educational pathways for artistic and practice-based research.

Challenging Institutionalization explores the heterogeneous processes of PhD and postdoc supervision in the arts to formulate shared horizons.

The publication is structured around a series of lectures and conversations that took place at the 2023 Supervising Artistic and Practice-Based Research summer school at BAK (basis voor actuele kunst) in Utrecht. The school brought together students and PhD and postdoc supervisors to reflect on and challenge the existing formal educational pathways for artistic and practice-based research. Keynote propositions were provided by Barbara Bolt (Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne), Geoff Cox (London South Bank University), Christa-Maria Lerm Hayes (University of Amsterdam), Andrea Phillips (BxNU Institute), and Mick Wilson (HDK-Valand - Academy of Art and Design). Participants engaged in topics around pedagogical formats and generative kinship; queering methodologies, knowledge, and institutional preconditions; archipelagic thinking and decolonial frameworks; criticality and community within institutional preconditions; modes of critical self-reflection and positionality; the interface(s) of ＂writing＂ and ＂practice,＂ and the urgent interfaces of artistic research and art activism in a period of environmental collapse.

This publication consolidates the school’s collective mappings into a constructive toolkit for researchers, supervisors, and evaluators, which will provide concrete pathways for pedagogical approaches to the societal and planetary urgencies of our era.

Copublished with the Centre for Research in Artistic Practice under Contemporary Conditions at Aarhus University.

Contributors
Barbara Bolt, Maibritt Borgen, Geoff Cox, Laura Guy, Maria Hlavajova, Maureen de Jager, Kalen Wing Ki Lee, Christa-Maria Lerm Hayes, Glenn Loughran, Jacob Lund, Mari Mäkiranta, Andrea Phillips, Henk Slager, Alexandra Regan Toland, Iris van der Tuin, Mick Wilson

Maibritt Borgen is Associate Professor of art theory and Head of the Laboratory for Arts Research at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, School of Visual Arts. Jacob Lund is Associate Professor of Aesthetics and Culture and Director of Centre for Research in Artistic Practice under Contemporary Conditions at the School of Communication and Culture, Aarhus University. Henk Slager is Professor of Artistic Research (Finnish Academy of Fine Art) and as Dean of MaHKU Utrecht. Iris van der Tuin is Professor of Theory of Cultural Inquiry in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Utrecht University, where she is also university-wide Dean for Interdisciplinary Education.