Doing Research

In December 2011, dOCUMENTA (13) and EARN (European Artistic Research Network) started preparatory talks in Kassel about how a collaborative project could be developed. The talks made clear that the casualness of how the notion of research is used today also causes the usual confusion of concepts. Is research merely conducted within institutional environments or does it have a broader – connotative – range? What does it mean for the self-awareness of artists to understand and present their practice as research-based? And last but not least, does the concept of research lead to an expansion of artistic practices of does it merely limit them?
In order to arrive at an evaluation of the concept of research, the teams chose two institutional perspectives: the perspective of artists who organize “activated” research projects for dOCUMENTA (13) and the perspective of artists who are engaged in a PhD in Fine Art within the various academic environments of the art school – specifically at institutions participating in the EARN network. As an introduction to the research workshops and the Doing Research symposium, an inquiry was set up that thirteen “activated research” organizers and thirteen PhD artists responded to.