Research Transformation
an autotheoretical lecture by Cătălin Gheorghe
based on a book mediation event
Saturday, December 16, 2023, at 5 p.m.
tranzit.ro/ Iasi
Address: Greenhouse, Str. Sf. Atanasie nr. 25, Iași
Book mediation:
Catalin Gheorghe, Transformarea cercetării. Noi estetici aplicate în practica cercetării artistice critice (Research transformation. New aesthetics applied in the practice of critical artistic research), tranzit.ro/Iași, Iași, 2022, ISBN 978-606-94455-9-4
The book describes the condition of research transformation in the direction of artistic and curatorial research that has also become a political argument for changing the institutional status of art academies into art universities. In the act of analyzing this transformation, a series of statements are considered in relation with the mission of artistic research to produce knowledge, the understanding of critical artistic research as a form of experimental and alternative journalism, the ideological relationship between artistic research and creative industries in the field of art education, the development of professional coordinates of curatorial research, and the applicability of new types of research-based aesthetics, presenting specific characteristics of recessional, accelerationist, obsolescent, transitional, decolonial, and urgency aesthetics.
In the last decade there has been extended talks in increasingly wide circles about the possibility of understanding artistic research as a form of investigation complementary to scientific research that would involve new ways of knowing and producing new possible worlds. While in scientific research the interest in factuality predominates, being related to the verification practices of modelling and contestation, prediction and testing, in artistic research the interest in creativity generated by reflexivity on the research process is the dominant preoccupation. Modelling is done on the basis of a hypothesis, which also requires the activation of a work of the imagination.
The transformation of research has occurred gradually, on the one hand in relation to the demands of scientific rationality and on the other in relation to the demands of neoliberal cultural policies. Thus, scientific research expanded into forms of artistic research and curatorial research, and cultural policies came to be contested through applied aesthetics, interested in reflecting on social and economic changes.
Cătălin Gheorghe is a theoretician, curator, editor and Professor of Curatorial Research and Practice at “George Enescu” National University of the Arts in Iași, Romania. He is the editor of Vector – critical research in context publication series (recently publishing “Learning by curating. Current trajectories in critical curatorial research”, edited [2022], “Exhibitionary Acts of Political Imagination”, co-edited with Mick Wilson [2021]). He is also curator of Vector – studio for art practices and debates, which is a platform for critical research and art production based on the understanding of art as experimental journalism. He is a member of WG5 Curatorial Studies Workshop of EARN (Extended Artistic Research Network) [www.artresearch.network]. His explorational interests are elaborated around critical artistic research, curatorial critical practices, art as experimental journalism, contemporary art (political) theories, xeno-spaces, xeno-practices, trans(ex)positions, post-capitalism [www.vector.org.ro].
The main partner of tranzit.ro is ERSTE Stiftung.
