Artistic Research: Assemblages of Methodologies, Epistemologies and the Arts

The PhD in Practice program “Artistic Research: Assemblages of Epistemology, Methodology And The Arts” at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna is a structured postgraduate degree program that combines scholarly and artistic research. The PhD in Practice program produces research at the intersection of epistemology, methodology and the arts. As one of its key tasks, the program has searched for assemblages that contain epistemological premises, methodological strategies and artistic practices within one consistent and coherent concept. In a variety of different formats (text, video, installation, performance and public event) the program proposes a research agenda to explore and extend selected assemblages (e.g. opacity, chronopolitics, dispossession) further, contributing to an understanding of research as a means to produce different knowledge and to produce knowledge differently.

The PhD in Practice has a very competitive admission procedure, in which the candidates from all over the world have to pass a two-step admission process. The core subject of this program is the specific productivity of artistic processes and strategies as research , as well as the participants’ critical reflection on their own artistic practice, which can be both the method and subject matter of artistic research.

The program offers regular workshops for PhD candidates to expand, deepen and improve their existing competencies. These workshops are geared to the specific conditions of doctoral studies at art universities and enable the PhD candidates to acquire key academic competencies as well as transferrable skills for the optimal advancement and qualification of young arts-based researchers.

The uniqueness of the program results from a number of factors. The program addresses artists as well as other cultural producers engaging in arts-based research. The program’s residency scheme, which is characterized by the obligatory attendance of all PhD researchers and faculty members during the monthly focus weeks, enables an in-depth engagement in the program's structure. Finally, in contrast to non-structured doctoral programs, the PhD in Practice gives the PhD researchers the opportunity to form a sustainable networking structure within their own peer group.

Current PhD projects in the framework of the doc.funds project

Cohort 2018:

• Caitlin Berrigan (United States): Imaginary Explosions: The media, measurement, and industry of volcanism as cultural imaginaries of catastrophe and planetary plasticity (working title)
• Virginie Bobin (France): The Fabrics of Untranslability (working title)
• Eliana Otta (Peru): Lost & Shared: A laboratory for collective mourning, towards affective and transformative politics (working title)
• Volha Sasnouskaya (Belarus): Forms of politizacion of dance and movement practices in the post socialist contexts (working title)
• Ujjval Utkarsh (India): The Revolution is Everyday (working title)

Cohort 2019:

• Rehema Chachage (Tanzania): Meli Mpya (New Shippment): Refiguring/Reworking the Archive and its Methodology (working title)
• Serena Lee (Canada): Be water, my friend (working title)
• Azar Mahmoudian Esfahani (Iran): How in the spirit of experimental art schools, might culture be reimagined as a social projects today? (working title)
• Aykan Safoğlu (Germany): Feeling Indebted, Passing as German: Affective and aesthetic regimes of indebtedness as a 20th Century German educational product of Istanbul (working title)