Advanced Lecture and Open Research Workshop:
Anetta Mona Chișa, Markéta Dolejšová, Irina Gheorghe
- 11:00 – 13:00 Advanced Lecture and Discussions
- 13:00 – 15:00 Lunch Break
- 15:00 – 17:00 Open Research Workshop
NIGHTMARES OF THE INTERDISCIPLINARY
(advanced lecture)
Interdisciplinarity is often presented as a remedy for the limits of any one field, yet its promise can conceal a familiar arrangement: one field sets the question, pace and criteria, while another supplies sensibility or awe. This lecture considers the nightmares that arise when collaboration smooths differences too quickly, extracts methods from their ethical and institutional conditions, or turns one practice into a service for another. Drawing on examples from AVU’s doctoral Methods course, the AVU Research Groups programme, and the work of the Multispecies Ecologies & Practices group, together with wider debates on interdisciplinarity, it argues that interdisciplinarity need not abolish expertise. Its value lies in constructing accountable encounters between distinct ways of knowing and doing. We will ask how methods can shift our attention, opening different routes of investigation and making room for what may otherwise remain unnoticed. The lecture invites participants to consider where their methods might meet, resist or productively trouble one another.
CROSSING PATHS. ENACTING METHODS
(open research workshop)
Let’s take the institutional philosophy of BAK—thinking about how things are, imagining how they could be otherwise, and enacting these imaginaries to life—as a possible definition of artistic and curatorial research. From within this understanding of research as a post-disciplinary inquiry entwining critical epistemologies, creative practices, and tactics of making things public, we will examine the latter—“making public.” Together, we will speculate on how to bring our work outside of intellectual enclosures and contribute to the mobilizations of public life in defense of equality and social justice. We will use the lens of disillusionment—albeit in the positive sense, as “letting go of illusions” (R. Solnit)—to work both against and in spite of the contemporary socio-political dynamics of blatant right-wing populism.
Biography
Anetta Mona Chișa is an artist working across installation, sculpture, video, performance and text, both individually and through long-term collaborations. Her practice grows from sustained engagement with materials—including plaster, asphalt, tin and dust—which she approaches as agents with their own behaviours, durations and forms of resistance. She describes this embodied mode of material knowledge as synhylic experience. Her work explores how matter participates in shaping perception, agency, labour and sociopolitical relations. Rather than merely representing the world, art becomes for her a way of entering into relation with it, enabling intuitive leaps, alternative visions and heightened receptivity to the richness of matter and life. She serves as Vice-Rector for Internationalisation and Research at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague. Her work has been presented at the Romanian Pavilion of the 54th Venice Biennale, Kunsthalle Bratislava, n.b.k. Berlin, GAK Bremen, Cukrarna Ljubljana, mumok Vienna, Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, MOCA Miami and The Power Plant Toronto, among others.
Markéta Dolejšová is a practice-based researcher working with multispecies ecologies and feral methodologies, at the intersections of art, design, and environmental inquiry. She is currently affiliated as an Assistant Professor at The Academy of Fine Arts in Prague where she acts as the Head of Doctoral Research Department and leads the Multispecies Ecologies & Practices research group. She co-founded several art and design research initiatives including the Uroboros festival, the Open Forest Collective, the Feeding Food Futures network, and the Ars Biologica Independent Studies programme. In 2020-22, she worked with the CreaTures – Creative Practices for Transformational Futures consortium, where she led the Laboratory of Experimental Productions.
Irina Gheorghe is an artist who works primarily with performance, in combination with installation, photography, film or drawing. Her work addresses themes such as absence, displacement and disappearance, often engaging with entities or spaces inaccessible to observation through ephemeral artistic media. She also works as part of The Bureau of Melodramatic Research. She currently teaches at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague, where she leads the Artistic Research Department LARGE and coordinates the Alien Languages Research Group. Her work was shown at the Kunstverein am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz Berlin, Künstlerhaus Bremen, Suprainfinit Gallery Bucharest, Swimming Pool Sofia, Ivan Gallery Bucharest, National Museum of Contemporary Art Bucharest, Centre for Contemporary Art Derry, Glasgow International, Pratt Manhattan Gallery New York, Times Museum Guangzhou, HOME Manchester, Salonul de Proiecte Bucharest, Contemporary Art Centre Vilnius, among others.