Tuning into Research at the KABK Graduation Show 2023
Design Lector Alice Twemlow in conversation with Masters students about the research processes that shaped their graduating projects.
Research plays a pivotal role in the generation of most KABK graduating projects and yet, since its registers can be subtle, its presence often goes unnoticed. During this year’s Graduation Show we invited you to tune into the research frequency of a selection of Masters projects, and learn about the wide array of research methods, urgencies, processes, attitudes, and dilemmas that informed and shaped them.
Long hours in the workshops, dark moments down research rabbit holes, and the joy of unexpected breakthroughs—in their own words, and in conversation with KABK Design Lector Alice Twemlow, these emerging artists and designers shared why, when and how they have engaged with research and to what extent they expected it to be a part of their post-graduation practices. A QR code was positioned next to their graduation projects allowing visitors to access the research stories.
Featured researchers:
Lisette Alberti, Master Non Linear Narrative, talks about some ways to approach a prison as a research object, the extent to which a building is an archive, and the relationship between historical re-enactment and performative justice.
Christine Hvidt Grønborg, Master Art Science, discusses the need to preserve life in the soil and how spending hours among the tree roots allows access to long-term listening as a research method.
Ritvik Khushu, Master Industrial Design, expands on his approach to re-membering occluded South Asian colonial fragments, re-threading into relation beings and senses, and the role of the imagination in design research.
Pavel Pavlov, Master Type & Media, shares how his love of the arcane practice of metal punch cutting, the idiosyncrasies of his native Bulgarian Cyrillic alphabet, and the joys of historical typographic research fed the creation of his type family ‘Panik / Kalm’.
Marieke Peeters, Master Artistic Research, reveals her fascination for creepy wallpaper, her tendency to seek refuge in horror as a genre and paradigm, and how critical feminist perspectives inform her graduating project.
Charlotte Savine, Master Interior Architecture, talks about how she studied the ornamentation and learned the craft traditions in both the Hungarian and British lineages of her family history, her new understanding of how making can be research, and how craft practices can inform the production of space.
Alexey Yurenev, Master Photography & Society, on how an individual sense of a missing memory left in the wake of his WW2 veteran grandfather’s death connects to the broader phenomenon of missing memories in post-war Russian society, and how a layered and multi-media approach to photography research might help to fill such voids, including in the aftermath of the war in Ukraine.
