IASS – Iasi Arts Summer School
Emancipative Research.
Critical perspectives in curatorial and artistic research
Organized by: Doctoral School of Visual Arts @ UNAGE Iași (Romania)
Location: Faculty of Visual Arts and Design, Iași
Guest Lecturers: Charles Esche, Maria Hlavajova, Ronald Kolb
Mediation by: Prof. Cătălin Gheorghe (curator and Director of the Doctoral School of Visual Arts at “George Enescu” National University of the Arts in Iași, Romania).
The school is open for free attendance, even for anyone engaged in the art community (living in or passing through Iași), not only for the doctoral students from UNAGE Iași.
The activities are neither streamed nor recorded.
For more info, please contact: catalin.gheorghe@unage.ro
PROGRAM OVERVIEW
Module 1 (September 3, 2025)
Advanced Lecture and Open Research Workshop: Charles Esche (curator, writer, professor of contemporary art and curating at University of the Arts, London)
- 12:00 – 14:00 Advanced Lecture and Discussions
- 14:00 – 16:00 Lunch Break
- 16:00 – 18:00 Open Research Workshop
Module 2 (September 4, 2025)
Advanced Lecture and Open Research Workshop: Maria Hlavajova (curator, researcher, founding artistic director of BAK, basis voor actuele kunst, Utrecht)
- 10:00 – 12:00 Advanced Lecture and Discussions
- 12:00 – 14:00 Lunch Break
- 14:00 – 16:00 Open Research Workshop
Module 3 (September 5, 2025)
Advanced Lecture and Open Research Workshop: Ronald Kolb (curator, Artistic Director of M.1 at the Arthur Boskamp-Stiftung, Hohenlockstedt and lecturer of curatorial practice in continuing education at the Zurich University of the Arts at Zurich University of the Arts)
- 10:00 – 12:00 Advanced Lecture and Discussions
- 12:00 – 14:00 Lunch Break
- 14:00 – 16:00 Open Research Workshop
Argument
Beyond positivism and academism, and in contradiction with different forms of political determinism (such as autarchic, nationalistic or neoliberalist worldviews), ‘research’ would free itself from dogmas and economic justifications, finding new ways to escape complications of centralisation, obscure desires of domestication and commodification, and neo-colonial or ultra-modern imperatives to rule and devour everything which is still alive.
Under the pressure of a managerial and cannibalistic class, self-colonised scholars are making naive conformist efforts to legitimate and integrate ‘artistic research’ at the level of funding policies that are controlled by advanced neoliberalist oligo-ideologies implicated in agonistic processes to implement hierarchies, praising (labor) market at the top level, in order to organize the social life as a (self)consumerist algorithmic organism.
Divergent reactions should contradict predetermined trajectories mediated by exclusionary forms of extraction, exploitation, and oppression, creating new spaces for life-breathing and world-building from the emancipatory perspective of caring for a better understanding of social imagination beyond rituals that feed the cult for quantification, measurement, and financialization of research. Research should be re-emancipated, re-learned, re-positioned, re-traced, re-invigorated.
Location
Located in Iasi, the most northeastern city in Romania, only 20 kms far from the Eastern border of the European Union, The National University of Arts in Iasi is the oldest art academy in Romania.
Despite its peripheral location, Iasi is the former capital of the Kingdom of Moldavia, a city rich in history and with a rapidly evolving economy and cultural life. During the 2000s, it was the home of the first biennial of contemporary art from Romania, Periferic.