FEINART enables a fluid and flexible working relationship between the Beneficiaries as centres of critical research in the areas of art and political philosophy, curatorial studies/arts administration and art theory/cultural theory, and the POs as centres of excellence in the development of socially engaged practice (providing a wide range of practical and practical-theoretical training).
ESR PhD PROJECTS
ESR Project 1 (art and political philosophy)
Socially Necessary Labour: Countering the Regime of Speculative Capital. A Decolonial Case Study from the Central-Eastern European Semi-Peripheries in the Age of Illiberal Democracy
Informed by world-systems analyses, Erlich scrutinises the Central and Eastern European (CEE) region’s economic and socio-political trajectories from the 1980’s till the present day to show the emergence and solidification of a liberal (cultural) hegemony and the ways in which it has been challenged (and replaced) by the formation of illiberal regimes, focusing on Hungary and Poland. Erlich advocates for using the term postartistic practices and implements a decolonial approach via grounding his work on the scholarly achievements of social theorists from the (semi)peripheries.
Director of Studies: Prof John Roberts
Early-Stage Researcher: Gabor Erlich
Faculty of Arts, Business and Social Sciences
University of Wolverhampton, UK
Secondments:
ESR Project 2 (art theory and practice)
Socially Engaged Computing: Techne, Ethics and Buddhist Metaphysics
In response to the blooming of AI ethics industry, this research questions seeming pragmatic simplicity ethics would suggest. Do numbers have morality? Can machines compute human excellency or flourishing? Are data our essence– if not, what are we? This research argues that we are experiencing the reprograsmming of metaphysics imposed by the tech industry, through various forms of technological artefacts, such as social media, VR, NFT, predictive modelling and generative AI etc. How can we formulate a new code of ethics in the computational age, while the concepts of self, others and the world are constantly in flux? Hence, it is essential to re-visit Buddhist philosophy for its unique placing of metaphysics, ethics and aesthetic experience in close proximity. By surveying the history and philosophy of (alternative) computing through the Buddhist lens, one may find a future that is worth living in.
Director of Studies: Prof John Roberts
Early-Stage Researcher: Piu-Wai Chan
Faculty of Arts, Business and Social Sciences
University of Wolverhampton, UK
Secondments:
ESR Project 3 (art theory and practice)
Impact of post-display and participatory art on the future of public art institutions in Europe
This PhD project aims to develop understanding of new modes of reception of art not based on conventional forms of production and display.
Director of Studies: Prof John Roberts
Early-Stage Researcher: Maria Mkrtycheva
Faculty of Arts, Business and Social Sciences
University of Wolverhampton, UK
Secondments:
ESR Project 4 (art theory/cultural theory)
Emerging Liveable Futures: An exploration of ow social-aesthetic practices redefine democratic agency
As western democracies and governments demonstrate a lack of ‘response-ability’ facing the multiple crises of the 21st century and lose public legitimacy, the societal role and significance of cultural and artistic practices are changing. Their increased social, political, and activist impact in recent years of socially engaged art through its direct engagement with feminist, decolonial, and ecological movements, indicates a search and desire for creating systemic change and regenerating social and ecological webs of solidarity. By doing so, these practices implicitly and explicitly address the structures that prevent capitalist democracies from pursuing social, environmental, and epistemic justice. My thesis focuses on the concept of democratic agency as a multi-dimensional nodal point for an interdisciplinary analysis of the changing societal function of cultural and artistic practices in a time of unprecedented crisis. It specifically explores the redefinition and activation of democratic agency through social-aesthetic practices amidst the structural constraints of late capitalist democracies.
Director of Studies: Prof Jón Ólafsson
Early-Stage Researcher: Jenny Fadranski
School of Humanities
University of Iceland, Iceland
Secondments:
ESR Project 5 (art and political philosophy)
Abstract Ecstatic Worlds: Aesthetic Practices As Non-Deterministic Relations Between Multiple Selves and Multiple Others
This research project aims to locate the ongoing process of modernisation in thought, where thought is one of multiple facets of collective negotiation of future possibilities, and where modernisation is the continuous iterative removal of a body from its constitutive entanglement with its environment. To do that, I explore ways in which individuated thought and knowledge can be related to the world they distinguish themselves from, without the mediation and validation of structures geared towards the management of production and the conservation, and orchestration of tension that creates the need for production. By doing so I hope to first, study the shifting position of an external observer in relation to an independently unfolding environment from which it is formed. Second, contribute to the (always already) urgent radical tradition of rethinking the tools of analysis and knowledge production adopted to understand the interconnected social, political, and economic, structures of oppression, and the interlocked abstract structures that refigure life as fields of production.
Director of Studies: Prof. Björn Þorsteinsson
Early-Stage Researcher: Claude Nassar
School of Humanities
University of Iceland, Iceland
Secondments:
ESR Project 6 (art theory/cultural theory)
Title of the Dissertation: Artist-Run Spaces in Iceland: Neoliberal Restructuring of the Artistic Field in the Aftermath of the Economic Crash
Following on from the pervasive changes in the field of art and culture under neoliberal capitalism, which also coincided with the multiple crises, this study analyses how artist-run spaces in Iceland have responded or adopted to the contemporary conditions promoted by rising neoliberal agendas and adjustment policies especially in the aftermath of the economic crash.
It also maps out the present circumstances and the characteristics of artist-run spaces in Iceland, and further questions possible pathways for transition towards a more sustainable, equitable and fair arts ecosystem across Iceland, and beyond, as well as the lived (im)/possibilities of the existing models in building alternatives to neoliberal restructuring processes.
Director of Studies: Prof. Benedikt Hjartarson
Early-Stage Researcher: Bilge Hasdemir
School of Humanities
University of Iceland, Iceland
Secondments:
ESR Project 7 (curatorial studies/arts administration)
The public body and EU liberal future: Pathways for a supporting infrastructure.
Artists’ strategies for coping with, resisting, or working beyond a (material, social, political) reality are the practical expression of the reflexive negotiation between their artistic desire and critical thought with the conditions therein. As such, strategies lend entrance to learning how artists view their condition, while production is their response.
This research project survey the artistic and organisational practices of ‘public bodies’ – small-scale artist organisations that focus their socio-political production on the body. Drawing integratively from Jacque Ranciére’s view of the body as a receiver of sensible distributions in aesthetic-political regimes and George E. Marcus’ assertion that emotion is distinct yet vital to reason, I understand the body as a site where personal sensuous knowledge and public action intertwine.
Following an examination of the models of supporting infrastructure for art production in Athens, Stockholm, and Bucharest, I discuss with artists about their motivations and methodologies, linking them to available conditions. In my reading of their accounts, I draw from social and political theories around citizenship, art, and social action. Conscious of the looming limitations on democratic rights in the current rise of fascism and illiberal “democracies” in Europe, I intend to indicate a future framework for EU cultural policy which takes into critical consideration the aims of the EU and builds toward a supporting infrastructure for ‘public bodies’.
Director of Studies: Prof Dr Franz Schultheis
Early-Stage Researcher: Noa Mamrud
Faculty of Communication & Culture
Zeppelin Universität gGmbH, Germany
Secondments:
ESR Project 8 (curatorial studies/arts administration)
Infrastructures of the Public Sphere: A Study of Politically and Socially Engaged Curatorial Practice
This research focuses on a range of socially engaged curatorial practices in Germany and beyond that engage with the politics and infrastructures of the public sphere in the contemporary moment. These relate to ecological destruction and migration, political polarisation and the rise of far-right movements, the effects of rampant real estate speculation and gentrification in cities and rural regions, as well as the economic redevelopment of deindustrialised areas. The study is located on the intersection of political philosophy and curatorial studies and grounded in practice and collaboration across different artistic fields in my home country of Iceland. Informed by Beatrice von Bismarck’s (2022) notion of the curatorial; Oliver Marcharcht’s (2011, 2019) conflictual aesthetics, Marina Vishmidt’s infrastructural critique (2016, 2022) and critical theory more broadly, I ask how the programs, aesthetics, and resources of socially engaged curatorial practices are affected by their political engagement and how this engagement in turns qualifies the curatorial.
Director of Studies: Prof Dr Karen van den Berg
Early-Stage Researcher: Marteinn Sindri Jónsson
Faculty of Communication & Culture
Zeppelin Universität gGmbH, Germany
Secondments:
ESR Project 9 (art theory and practice)
Pedagogies of the art-proximate’: alternative practices of learning in and through contemporary art
My research starts from the contemporary moment, in which the continued proliferation of artistic projects that call themselves ‘academies’, ‘universities’, or ‘schools’, converges with the widening of artistic remits in the face of austerity measures and funding declines across Europe, and a neoliberal emphasis on education as a solution, and thereby policy priority, for societal issues. I explore and redefine concepts of learning, teaching, knowledge and education as they are (re)formulated and resisted in what I call art-proximate practices. Art-proximate practices also function as art (this ‘also’ draws from Forensic Architecture’s formulation of their practice as ‘also’ art). Art-proximate practices do so by drawing on artistic methods, histories of art, and the resources art can reach, without delimiting themselves solely to art as a field of engagement or positionality.
I draw artistic and activist practices into conversation with decolonial thought, current education theory, and art history. These practices include the Zapatistas, educational protests of the 2010s, alternative art schools, and the work of Jeanne van Heeswijk. Through these conversations, I trace methods through which art can be used as a strategic location to engage in (new) forms of public learning.
Director of Studies: Prof Dr Karen van den Berg
Early-Stage Researcher: Sophie Mak-Schram
Faculty of Communication & Culture
Zeppelin Universität gGmbH, Germany
Secondments:
ESR Project 10 (art theory and practice)
Elsewhere East: Socially engaged and digital network culture
The research topic I chose for my PhD project is inspired by my own curatorial work and my observations of different political systems that raised my concerns about ideology conveyed by art. It made me more sensitive towards representations of power, and raised my awareness of practices that pretend to make the world a better place in the name of democracy and social engagement but run the risk of repeating imperialist patterns. Against this background, my PhD research focuses on the question: Can socially engaged art act through digital networks without falling prey to ideological concepts? The thesis aims to discuss how alternative models of socially engaged art can be defined and function within the post-communist context. National regions considered as an initial reference are: Hungary, Poland, Czech Republic, Croatia, Slovenia, Slovakia, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. The thesis aims to analyse digital networks in terms of their social agenda involving voices from less known theorists of the post-soviet space asking questions such as: Which historical narratives and developments are debated in relation to historical precursors of socially engaged art and digital network art in Eastern Europe? What is the meaning of these today? Which places, practices, actors, and theorists played a role? I am interested in understanding how the perception and use of digital networks has transformed itself from the digital to the post-digital and to what extent post-socialism is still relevant today.
Director of Studies: Prof Dr Karen van den Berg
Early-Stage Researcher: Anna Fech
Faculty of Communication & Culture
Zeppelin Universität gGmbH, Germany
Secondments:
ESR Project 11 (curatorial studies and arts administration)
Gender, Affect and Art’s Alternative Workplaces: A Feminist Critique of Instituting and Socially Engaged Paradigms in Europe
In a system of production characterised by rampant precarisation and casualisation of work relationships and a political context marked by a rise in nationalist authoritarian politics, a feminist critique of socially engaged art practices might open up to other analytical trajectories that challenge their extant role and function. Through a feminist analysis of the (art) labour patterns produced and reinforced in socially-driven milieus, I posit to re-politicise both the discourses of social reproduction and social engagement in the arts away from processes of pacification and governmental instrumentalisation. By identifying the archetype of post-Fordist production in the unwaged female worker and a privileged site of struggle and value extraction in social reproduction, my research works through the contradictions characterising socially engaged art contexts and the independent art sector, together with the modes of subjectivation they foster. The main expected outcome is the elaboration of a feminist critique capable of recognising and historicising the influence of women’s labour, understood in its double-edged connotation as a site of exploitation and resistance, on the development and reproduction of the art sector. Furthermore, I aim to develop a critical discourse that challenges the social and material institutions that support these contexts and the gendered labour they enforce.
Director of Studies: Dr Angela Dimitrakaki
Early-Stage Researcher: Fabiola Fiocco
Edinburgh College of Art
University of Edinburgh, UK
Secondments: