platform for critical artistic research

As a working platform of collaborative and autnomous initiatives on contemporary art practice, AAR aims at critically reflecting on the current curatorial through and as practice based research: Cooperations with networks, organisations, artists, and institutions form its concept and materialize contents.

A critical, artistic and curatorial practice does not only dedicate itself to the politics of these phenomena and how these are to be esthetically converted, but asks how “political” learning, with which we today are evidently engaged and faced, can be confronted in a strategic reflecting-critical and rhetorical way in the practice of exhibition. This is concerned with understanding art in the context of its situational, always political and discursively positioned practice as well as with in which way this novel form of position and context scrutinizing research can contribute to an understanding of art as ones inherent epistemology. Hito Steyerl‘s text “Politics of Art: Contemporary Art and the Transition to Democracy“ (2011) introduces as following: “A standard way of relating politics to art assumes that art represents political issues in one way or another. But there is a much more interesting perspective: The politics of the field of art as a place to work“. To what extent the practicing, salvaging, representing of practice, as well as its research thus are inscribed in the congruity and consistence of a global industry of commodification, and how project-art simultaneously becomes a factor in sales - these aspects lead to my question on which strategies of artistic and curatorial practice can hereon soundly answer.

In the light of controversy around decentralization and deterritorialisation, of multidisciplinarity of position and multiple concepts of identity, in the interest for aesthetics of informal markets of art production, which design the museum into a project space and question the commodification of the novel knowledge industry…it becomes apparent that ideologies of hyper-capitalistic interests are inscribed into art practice and become visible in production, utilization, as well as representation.

Discourse in the context of comprehensive knowledge reflection in art shows that this connection has become, in practice and theory, a more than relevant field for critical, reflective, time-related, artistic and curatorial practice. In which way these questions are being reflected becomes apparent through Art Research in practice, for today art production does not function detached from its agents, who not only are a part of it, but also want to understand art as a part of the system, which steers and guides them through discourse. There’s no doubt one can learn from the museum. To which extent, then, am I actually produced to respond to these developements? How am I situated within an interrelated network of structures art production operates within? How do institution and academia again respond to practice as research and is this knowledge reflection as discourse, as I wish to call it, universally valid? Or, how again is it inscribed in a postcolonial conflicted terrain of authorship in utterance?

The aesthetics of artistic research counts amongst the greatest challenges of today’s production of exhibitions. The artistic engagement with time-related media must be geared in an interdisciplinary way. The politics of reflective practice of the “Educational Turn” at art schools aim at a transmedially conceived understanding about the various parameters of artistic production, which allows for an meta-reflective approach to these decentralized contexts: its title speaks of the practicing of art in the present; which means a practical approach to both acute and current problems in contemporary art practice. Through practice and theory, political art becomes the concern of its own inherent critique, in order to be able to show- who these humans are, living in such a world full of antagonism.

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How does the curatorial form cotemporaneity and vice versa? This platform presents and conceptualizes projects which reflect and respond to artistic research; with a particular focus on the role of the institution in presenting and exhibiting research-based knowledge. Projects are interested in the conception of artistic research; how it effects the ways artists use knowledge in art practice, and how it may engage in a critical and political space upon the art work through artistic resarch. How may we critically approach art practice in order not to remain confined within a critical realm without facing consequences? Indeed, forms of presentation and documentation play a significant role, which I would like to invest in the light of “criticality“ – spaces of reflexion through participation within the research format. In its context this platform considers projects which conceive artistic research as a method to invest in the relationsship between practice and critique. These projects are situated at the interfaces between artistic practice, its practice-based knowledge reflection and research in visual cultures and cultural studies.

text: Johanna Bruckner