Advanced Lecture and Open Research Workshop
Guests
Anetta Mona Chișa(visual artist and Vice-Rector for Internationalization and Research at AVU, Academy of Fine Arts in Prague)
Markéta Dolejšová (practice-based researcher, Head of Doctoral Research Department at AVU, Academy of Fine Arts in Prague)
Irina Gheorghe (visual artist and Head of LARGE – Artistic Research Department at AVU, Academy of Fine Arts in Prague)
- 11:00 – 13:00 Advanced Lecture and Discussions
- 13:00 – 15:00 Lunch Break
- 15:00 – 17:00 Open Research Workshop
HANDBOOK OF ARTISTS INVESTIGATION
(advanced lecture)
The upcoming publication Handbook of Artistic Investigation proposes a perspective from the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague on the challenges and contradictions of research in art. It introduces the alternative term of “artistic investigation” as a practice both narrower and wider than that of artistic research and interrogates how artistic investigations can be carried out while at the same time pursuing an artistic investigation within its pages. Constructed around a precise colour code translating a conceptual structure into a visual logic, the Handbook uses the format and aesthetics of a technical manual to bring together textual reflections on the procedures of artistic inquiry and visual embodiments thereof. The lecture follows the conceptual and visual structure of the book both in its overall proposition and in its specific explorations: Irina Gheorghe will present the ‘black’, ‘yellow’ and ‘blue’ domains of artistic investigation, Markéta Dolejšová will bring it into the concrete environment of the dark forest as a space where partial intelligibility becomes productive and Anetta Mona Chişa will extract from the natural world the figures of the kitten and the earthworm, transforming them into metaphors for the roles of artist and researchers, intertwined but never fully equivalent.
THE ASSESSMENT COLLAGE
(open research workshop)
The question of assessment in artistic research is one of the most contested. Formats are often deployed that are unsuitable to artistic practice: text-centred criteria, peer-review systems devised for other disciplines, and evaluation metrics that fail to accommodate studio methods.
This workshop responds through collage—a compositional strategy that takes apart and rearranges, allowing heterogeneous and even incompatible elements to remain in a provisional relation. Rather than forcing different forms of knowledge into a single measure, collage can expose the joins, gaps and disagreements between them.
Participants will test different evaluation frameworks against their own and each other’s research: the Handbook’s colour codes, conceptual figures from its chapters, and AVU’s doctoral evaluation guidelines. Each framework becomes physical material (cards, cutouts, paper) used to construct a collage of how a project can be seen, assessed and possibly misread.
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.