Research: Practitioner | Curator | Educator
 |
Editor: Marquard Smith Publisher: Vilnius Academy of Arts Press Release date: 2020 ISBN 978-609-447-341-8 |
As artists, designers, curators, critics, educators, and academics, what is ‘research’ for us in the second and third decades of the 21st century? Do we conduct research? What do we do when we do it, how do we do it, and what makes up this doing? What is done, and what needs to be done? As practitioners, do we think about practice-as-research, and about research as practice, and if so, how so? Is research perhaps even a praxis; which is to say, is it an act, a doing action, an embodying and enacting of ideas, an act of engaging politically and ethically? What is the nature (or what are the modalities) of the work that we as researchers do, if indeed we consider ourselves researchers, and, if not, why not? And how have recent shifts in paradigms of knowledge generation and distribution – in the art and design school, the museum and gallery, and the creative and cultural industries more generally – transformed profoundly what we as researchers do, how we do it, and to what end? Ultimately, given our shared interest in practice, practice-led or practice-based research, research-led or research-based practice, and in artistic research, how might research – and research as a process – be embodied in and articulated by way of art, design, history/theory, writerly, and curatorial projects? And, how might such research give rise to new knowledges, engender knowledge differently, and precipitate things divergent from or other than knowledge?
Decolonizing: The Curriculum, the Museum, and the Mind
 |
Editor: Marquard Smith |
The Decolonizing debate is raging passionately!
It’s raging in our public institutions, in our universities and art schools, and on the streets. Artists, designers, academics, critics, curators, educators, and activists internationally are demanding a decolonizing of the museum, a decolonizing of the curriculum, a decolonizing of knowledge, and a decolonizing of the mind.
Why? Because as ‘inventions’ of the West’s global blueprint, museums, institutions of higher education, and the worlds of art and design are always already aligned with the logic of coloniality. We can be glad, then, about the emergence of decolonizing perspectives and practices from different continents, territories, and geographies; all the more urgent in our fraught political moment. Such challenges and possibilities flow from the Americas of the South, the post-Soviet, ends of the British Empire, and elsewhere, amplifying the voices of the oppressed, and enabling us to see and think, educate, write, curate, and know otherwise.
To decolonize, then, is to democratise.
So what are the benefits of this decolonizing impulse, its rhetoric, activism, its protest? What does it really mean – conceptually and practically even – for the museum and its collection, the art school and the university’s curriculum, the mind, and knowledge itself to decolonize? And what might a decolonizing aesthetics, politics, and ethics be and do?
These words were included in the public programmes announcement for an event on ‘decolonizing’ at Lithuania’s Nacionalinė dailės galerija, the National Gallery of Art in Vilnius, an event co-organised with Vilnius Academy of Arts. It was the second of five related events organised by the Academy in the academic year 2018-19; three of the five events, including the one on decolonizing, were collaborations with the Gallery. That event forms the basis of this publication.
'Do the Right Thing' exhibition catalogue, Titanikas Gallery, Vilnius
 |
Editor: Marquard Smith Publisher: Vilnius Academy of Arts Press Release date: 2019 |
