Research group:
Site – narrative - materiality (working title) 

The understanding of these key concepts is crucial to contemporary art, but also as a 'genre' of art where art and artistic research has a potential to link into other research disciplines and society at large. Horizon Europe’s focus on cultural heritage is connected to these issues as we would claim that site is a cultural carrier of narratives and constituted and formed by its materiality.

The research methodology and group model are drawing upon the rhetorical method, situating a landscape and then looking at it from many perspectives and vantage points (topos). This approach has proven very effective and fruitful for interdisciplinary research and education. The methodology and group development are nurturing inclusiveness (multi-perspective, multi-voices). The research group will have a rhizomic approach to how the content and formats are developed. The aim is to establish a discursive common plattform for individual researchers and research projects to be connected, challenged, interfaced, expanded and developed.  

Currently connected research projects: 

Beyond Heritage
It will be fine
Matter, Gesture, Soul

Research group initiator: 
Professor Anne Helen Mydland
Funded by KMDs strategic funds 2022
 

Research group:
The Agenda Group (working title) 

The Agenda Group (working title) is a research group (forskningsgruppe) based at KMD, connecting artistic practices "with an agenda". The group enables crossover methods rather than media specificity, allowing space for different participants. "An agenda" is here understood as an aspect of socially engaged art practices. This relates to people, narratives and history alike and is about our shared values and contribution to society as artists. The engagement relates to issues outside of the artistic context and investigates how these issues might be mediated and moderated with artistic means.

The Agenda Group is open for all kinds of artistic practices, but the focus of the discussions will be on artistic practice "as crucial to both individual and societal change and development" (KMD Strategic Plan). The relationality between art and society is never as simple as it seems and these reflections involves the thinking of intensity in addition to formats, translation and displacement. In this sense the agenda of an artistic project is crucial to the understanding of its implications.

The Agenda Group is a pragmatic platform to connect various members of staff at KMD (artistic-researchers, post-docs, PhD’s and maybe even MA-students). The main purpose is to meet regularly, presenting and discussing the artistic research of each of the group members. An internal critical agenda. 

Research group initiator: Professor Frans Jacobi
Group members: Jill Halstead, LM Sanchez Cardona, David Rych, Budhaditya Chattopadhyay, Ingrid Cogne, Frans Jacobi, Kesia Decote
 

Research group:
Mixed Reality Encounters

Mixed Reality Encounters is a newly established inter-disciplinary research group that looks at novel technologies specific to interactive design and data and digital interaction within performative installation. The primary interest for this group is exploring the specific encounter between artwork and spectator / participant / user / audience. The group brings together practitioners working across methods, materials, artistic expressions and professional backgrounds, functioning as a platform for exchange between the members, and secondarily as an actor to advance this area of research within the Art Faculty at KMD. Through our individual and collective artistic research, generating artworks and contributing to the field of new media, design and performance, the group will critically reflect upon the ethical implications of technology, interaction and participation and its impact on society, politics and culture.

Mixed Reality Encounters is a platform for shared research, discussions, workshops, research trips and knowledge production. It is a collaboration between the Department of Contemporary Art and the Department of Design at KMD.

Research group initiator: Associate Professor Nicola Gunn in Performance and Time-based Art
Group members: Research Fellows Sidsel Christensen, Marieke Verbiesen and Marte Teigen
 

Research group:
Unsettling Hierarchies in Art Education

It’s fairly obvious what it means to decolonize a museum, but what it means to decolonize the academy is less obvious. Decolonization certainly demands that we respect the histories, lived experiences, voices, cultures and perspectives of all our students. But does it also require us to engage with issues of power, including the ways that hierarchical assumptions and inequalities influence classroom dynamics?

– Steven Mintz, "Decolonizing the Academy: Who’s afraid of the call to decolonize higher education?," 2021

The principal danger of the classroom is its implicit hierarchy. Dangerous to whom? To every last one. Hierarchy contorts and diminishes the possibilities of the lives that labor within it.

– Jesse Ball, “Notes on My Dunce Cap,” 2015

Through dialogue, reading, and presentations, this research group brings together artists and educators invested in the past, present, and future of creative pedagogy.

Using an open and fluid membership policy, the group explores the following questions: Where do we observe hierarchies emerging in pedagogical contexts, and what is their effect? How can one actively unsettle hierarchies in their teaching practice, both within the curriculum and within the structure of the classroom? In what ways can we imagine a radical reversal of pedagogical hierarchies, and what would this look like in tangible terms? 

The group specifically investigates the unique perspectives artists bring to this inquiry, asking which traditions within art education are important to maintain, and which we should seek to transcend. Together, the group seeks to identify educational environments that are truly radical, and how such models can be extended to confront broader social hierarchies and inequalities.

Research group initiator: Chloe Lewis, Associate Professor – Sculpture / Co-Head of Education