Pluriversities. Knowledge Production and Learning Practices in Art Spaces since 2000
This dissertation project investigates artistic and curatorial learning formats and practices of knowledge production in art spaces founded after 2000. Specifically, it looks at academic programs, research libraries, publication practices, and research-based exhibitions in the four art spaces BAK basis voor actuele kunst (Utrecht), RAW Material Company (Dakar), Savvy Contemporary (Berlin), and the School of Engaged Art (St. Petersburg). How have these artist-run spaces used the sphere of art to create infrastructures for knowledge production that were perceived as absent from a »Western« canon read as dominant? What alliances between postcolonial and post-Soviet positions emerge in these discursive spaces? And how have they, in turn, contributed to the proliferation of the notion of art as knowledge production over the past two decades?
Olga Schubert is a cultural worker and editor at Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW) in Berlin and a PhD Candidate in Applied Cultural Studies at University of the Arts Linz, supervised by Karin Harrasser and Jasmin Mersmann. At HKW, she co-curated the project New Alphabet School (2019–2022); the festival New Alphabet – Opening Days (2019); and the lecture series and publication project Dictionary of Now (2015–19). As a freelance curator, she organized the exhibitions alles zur zeit – Über den Takt, der unser Leben bestimmt (2017) at Vögele Cultural Center and Irregulars – Economies of Deviation (2013) and 50 Jahre neue Gesellschaft – Arbeitsgruppe Kunst (2019) at nGbK Berlin. Her co-edited publications include Instituting – Space-making, Refusal, and Organizing in the Arts and Beyond (forthcoming 2023), New Alphabet School (forthcoming 2023) and Wörterbuch der Gegenwart (2019). Her essay »100 Years of Now« and the Temporality of Curatorial Research was published in 2019. She studied Comparative Literature and Art History at the Freie Universität Berlin and holds an M.A. in Contemporary Approaches to English Studies from Goldsmiths College London.
mit Gigi Argyropoulou und Kostas Tzimoulis (Hg.), Instituting – Space-Making, Refusal, and Organizing in the Arts and Beyond, Berlin 2023 (im Erscheinen); mit Gigi Argyropoulou, Mahmoud Al-Shaer, Rahul Gudipudi (Hg.), The New Alphabet School – Practices of Knowledge Production in Art, Activism and Collective Research, Berlin 2023 (im Erscheinen); »#SituatedKnowledges«, in: Elena Zanichelli und Valeria Schulte-Fischedick (Hg.), wie:// sprechen wir #feminismus? // neue globale Herausforderungen – ein Glossar, (=Zeitschrift für Geschlechterforschung und visuelle Kultur Nr. 70, Februar 2022), S. 149–152; gem. mit Bernd Scherer und Stefan Aue (Hg.), Wörterbuch der Gegenwart, Berlin 2019.
The past thirty years have witnessed an immense increase in self-organized academy programs and schools in the arts. Artistic practice is now often labelled »knowledge production« and exhibitions no longer show art objects, but instead enable processes of gathering and learning.