Profile areas
About the profile areas
The area Artistic Practices is built on the practices and research that are conducted within the research specialisations film and media, choreography, opera and performing arts at Stockholm University of the Arts (SKH), which constitute the research education subject Performative and Mediated Practices. The research specialisations have been strengthened and expanded by four thematic profile areas of research:
- Concept and composition
- Art, Technology, Materiality
- Bodily and vocal practices
- Site, event, encounter
These profiles represent strategic initiatives and they aim for creating opportunities for synergies within the research field, for development and broadening of transdisciplinary and thematic hybrids between research in the different specialisations. They are not necessarily tied to research topics or artistic areas and disciplines, but are primarily characterized by a cross- or transdisciplinary approach. Each area opens up for critical and creative thinking about hierarchies, power relations, conventions and norms regarding both creation processes, aesthetic and other values, as well as social categorizations and layouts. The profiles' descriptions should be seen as living and open definitions of issues that can attract and inspire research projects and research issues.
The profile areas constitute the research centre at SKH and each profile is led by a professor. The profile areas are used as tools/lenses for interdisciplinary discussion and development of all research conducted within the university.
Interdisciplinary research seminars are carried out once a week where researchers discuss their ongoing projects cutting across specialisation boundaries, raising common lines of enquiry and developing cross-disciplinary approaches. Since many of the artistic practices that doctoral candidates, senior researchers and MA students work with are carried out in collective art forms, collaboration is often an integral part of both the research process and the presentation of the research.
Further artistic fields, such as in fine art, music or design, are also included through different types of collaborations. Examples of this include exploring locations and conditions for art’s encounters and interactions with the audience, researching the conditions and possibilities specific artistic concepts have for creativity, researching how embodied knowledge can be studied and communicated, problematising the meaning of materials and technologies in interpretative processes. This can also be seen in the research that is being presented during the yearly research week.
The combination of the profile areas with increasing specialisation within our artistic disciplines creates an environment for emerging innovation and cutting-edge education programmes and research.
Concept and Composition
This profile area highlights and articulates questions around the initiation, formation, implementation and documentation of creative and artistic processes. The area includes inquiries about question formation, methods, experimentation, dramaturgy, lineage and influence.
Question formation
Concept and Composition is where questions about aesthetics and ethics are equally important, and where the linking of ideas is as much about asking questions as it is about researching their answers. Composition is looked at as a process and practice but also but as a question; “what does it mean to compose"? Concept and Composition provides an opportunity for developing new forms and methods of documentation to deepen the breadth and reach of the research.
Concepts
The development of concepts allows for articulation of tacit knowledge and expertise and prompts critical review and dissemination of knowledge. Conceptualization enables an examination of how artistic approaches shape language and vice versa. Concepts may emerge as the result of a process of investigation and may be the critical thought expressed by a performance/event.
Terminology
The formation of ideas and terminology, dramaturgical/narrative structures, interpretation, methodologies and documentation are key concepts, as are the area’s overarching critical terms – concepts and composition – which are understood and activated in the widest possible sense. This area integrates an exploration of the synergies and frictions that result from encounters between different disciplines, art forms, interpretations and performance traditions.
Responsible for the profile area
Kent Olofsson, Professor of Performing Arts for the Profile Area Concept and Composition
Art, Technology, Materiality
This profile area takes as it starting point that humans are connected to the world and to each other through material entanglements and invites an exploration of these relationships.
Material thinking
The profile area serves as a context for questioning the nature of the materiality of artistic practice and its implications. It enables discussions on what occurs in and through artistic practice, in the interplay between making and thinking where knowledge and meaning is acquired through engaging in the world, with other beings as well as through materials and things. Here, objects are considered active and co-creating rather than discovered or revealed.
Performativity
Materials and technological devices are interrogated in relation to this interplay between making and thinking, according to what they do, how they form significant interconnections. Ongoing research is in particular interested in how cameras and other devices activate particular kinds of networks. It explores how technical devices enable forms of conversations with both material entities, place, and other agents, and how they enable relevant forms of inquiry. Technological devices are considered as tools for engagement, imaginative tools that connects the known and the unimaginable, activate relationships between here and there, then and now.
Unstable processes
This profile area addresses the artistic development of technological and material processes, and technological extensions or material challenges to existing artistic practices. It activates a framework of projects, experiments and discourses that explores artistic practice as a way of bringing elements into relationship with each other and that critically engages with the material and technical conditions involved.
Ecological entanglement
This profile area invites reflection and research from a perspective on the world where the human is not always the privileged position. Considering interconnections with and between material matter enables and requires a reconsideration of how humans are connected in the world as well as of the concept of nature and the impact of technology in society.
Responsible for the profile area
Sheryl Doruff, Professor in Film and Media
Bodily and Vocal Practices
This profile area explores techniques, methods and systems for the articulation, interpretation and communication of creative ideas and visions through the use of body and voice.
Its central questions concern notions of interpretation and physical performance; however, an aspect of this research also entails pedagogical and didactic approaches, forms of knowledge, as well as issues of sustainability in artistic and other forms of practice. Both individual and collective processes become objects of research. These may arise out of a variety of materials, compositions and contexts. Related modes of critical inquiry enable thinking of the body and voice in terms of social and political space, which in turn brings to light the ways in which corporeal practice expresses conventions, norms and coded systems, while creating the potential to challenge and re-evaluate them. Ultimately, research in this area investigates the interplay between practice, technique and interpretation, and develops knowledge of the ways in which these processes can be verbalised and communicated to others.
Interpretation and Performance (gestaltung)
Vocal and bodily practices are basic prerequisites for individual and/or collective gestaltung work. This work may include notations, drafts, compositions, texts, improvisations, scores, artistic visions and concepts, as well as psychological or abstract contexts and relationships. All of these are conceivable starting points for research into how practice, technology and gestaltung work and interact.
The Body and Voice as Social and Political Space
This area invites the raising of issues concerning how the body and the voice express conventions, norms and coded systems. These may be of a technological nature but they also work as social and political signals or messages that the research can investigate, challenge and review using a gender-aware, norm-critical and intersectional approach.
Sustainability Perspective
This profile area may contribute to the development of anatomical, ergonomic, bodily and vocal practices. By connecting the development of these practices to a performance expression and critical reflection, the foundations may be laid for a lifelong and sustainable artistic practice. Psychological sustainability?
Linguistic Articulation
This area’s unspoken knowledge may be articulated linguistically and conveyed by means of various techniques and systems including pedagogical and didactic skills and approaches.
Responsible for the profile area
John-Paul Zaccarini, Professor of Performing Arts for the profile area Bodily and Vocal Practices
Site, Event, Encounter
This profile area explores the interplay between art and society, considering the 'in flux' nature of participation in contemporary art practices and the many contexts and conditions in which 21st Century artists work.
In this profile area, focus is on the shifting constellations of relationships, practices and processes that develop between the various devisors, performers and participants in an artistic practice, process or event. Research in this profile area includes critical explorations of art created in/with/for the public realm, encounters with audience, methods and modes of interactivity in physical/virtual spaces and the transforming roles and responsibilities of the artist at work in society today. Questions of public/private space, power relations, norm criticality, and the consideration of ethics in relation to aesthetics are key notions, alongside a commitment to framing critical dialogue about art within the broader cultural context.
Context and Conditions
The profile area frames critical questions around the influence of art on society and vice versa, including research examining gender, race and class consciousness, notions of inclusivity and privilege, and artistic practices that explore activism, sustainability and solidarity. What are the various roles and responsibilities art, artists and publics play in the current cultural, social and political context?
Relationships and Processes
This profile area investigates the protean nature of the relationships between all of the participants in any given artistic practice. The definition of 'participants' in this profile area includes people and things. Research into ‘who’ or ‘what’ creates art is integral, including examinations of the particular ways in which an artistic process transforms the relationships between the public, the artist, the artistic work/event and the place it happens in.
Spatiality and Temporality
The profile area includes research into ways in which art practices might create, seek out and/or identify new physical, media or virtual spaces and how the practice affects - and interacts with – the various spatial and temporal conditions it may encounter.
Situated-ness
The profile area explores the notion of 'situating' an artistic research project. What are the organisational conditions necessary in order to actualize a specific artistic practice, project or event? This includes the various parameters, relationships, critical discourses and research processes that are required for the development, generation and transmission of a 'situated' artistic practice or project.
Responsible for the profile area
Rebecca Hilton, Professor of Choreography for the Profile Area Site, Event, Encounter.
