Troubling Research. Performing Knowledge in the Arts

Welcome address and introduction | Andrea B. Braidt (Vice-Rector for Art and Research), Johanna Schaffer and Simonetta Ferfoglia (Troubling Research), Michaela Glanz (WWTF)

Participants: Carola Dertnig, Teresa Maria Diaz Nerio, Diedrich Diederichsen, Simonetta Ferfoglia, Simone Forti, Patricia Grzonka, Ugo Guarino, Nina Herlitschka, Tom Holert, Carrie Lambert Beatty, Anita Moser, Gina Pane, Heinrich Pichler, Johannes Porsch, Nicole Sabella, Johanna Schaffer, Janine Maria Schneider, Stefanie Seibold,
Axel Stockburger, Tanja Widmann, Maria Ziegelböck

You sometimes need a label that does not necessarily provide an instrument for locating anything but may be used like a screwdriver to open something within an institution. (Simonetta Ferfoglia, gangart)

The exhibition Troubling Research. Performing Knowledge in the Arts presents results of investigations, discussions, and other processes that have taken place at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna in the context of the interdisciplinary research project of the same name supported by the WWTF. The artists and theorists participating in the project deal with the institutional desire for modes of cooperation between art and science, putting the new disciplinary formation that presently establishes itself under the name of "artistic research" or "art-based research" at art universities under pressure in argumentatively aesthetic terms.

Focusing on the 1960s and 1970s, Tom Holert examines the genealogy of the research concept in postwar art and aims at a historiographic (re)construction of the currently rather ahistoric discourses on establishing forms of "artistic research."

Carola Dertnig's research contribution centers on the specific mode of artistically exploring performativity in regard to the Judson Dance Theater in New York between 1962 and 1964. Concerning this subject, a symposium titled This sentence is now being performed as well as a workshop with the American choreographer Simone Forti and students of the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna were held in the fall of 2010.

gangart , i.e. Simonetta Ferfoglia und Heinrich Pichler , chose the Italian anti-psychiatry movement of the 1970s, and specifically the artist Ugo Guarino's work, as their subject to examine the criticism of institutions and participatory approaches of these positions and relate them to present-day developments.

Stefanie Seibold's critical examination of Gina Pane's performances concentrates on the significance and accessibility of (picture) archives, the interpretation of their material, and the production of meaning through selection, display, and restaging.

Johannes Porsch transposes the discursive field spanning from Jacques Lacan's texts based on Edgar Allan Poe's The Purloined Letter to Jacques Derrida and Barbara Johnston into a model for the development of performative strategies.

Axel Stockburger's contribution deals with the production of specific forms of "knowledge" in pop-cultural fan communities to be presently observed in China in the cultural milieu of cosplay, anime, and computer games.

Diedrich Diederichsen directs his attention to the punk fanzine Search&Destroy that has been renamed ReSearch and reflects on how dissent between different works and aesthetic strategies presents and organizes itself.

Johanna Schaffer has chosen the various project partners' research activities as the issue of her inquiry; she relies on interviews to find out which possibilities the concept of "artistic research" offers to the individual participants and what is blocked and made impossible by it.

Firther Infromation: www.troublingresearch.net