The Artistic Research Symposium series is organised by the BA Fine Arts department of the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague. It aims to contextualise contemporary research practices and urgent artistic discourses, by offering KABK students, teachers and the public the opportunity to critically reflect upon current tendencies in contemporary art practices and artistic research.
Body As Proxy is a pilot of a series of artistic research symposia that we aim to organise in the coming years one symposium with a different theme every study year.
Locations
Lectures and Panel talk: Auditorium
Workshops: Gallery 1, 2 and 3 and more to be announced
Reflections: Auditorium
Attendees
Symposium, Workshops and Reflections are mandatory for 3rd year Fine Arts students, and voluntary for 2nd and 4th year students.
This event is fully booked
Program
22-25 February 2022
Artistic Research Symposium Body as Proxy
Artistic Research Symposium: BODY AS PROXY
Global paradigm shifts and developments, such as climate change, COVID-19 pandemic, technological developments and mass migration, are inviting contemporary artists and theoreticians to rethink the notions of embodiment and what role the human body might play in relation to technology, ecology, activism and our daily lives.
In his essay ‘Art, Technology and Humanism’, Boris Groys argues that the “artificial bodies are already in a state of a slow-motion explosion, similar to the final scene of Michelangelo Antonioni’s film ‘Zabriskie Point’(1970)”*. On the other hand, feminist thinker Julia Kristeva argues in her seminal text ‘Powers of Horror: An Essay of Abjection’, that traumatic experiences influence us both mentally and as a body, calling our reality a "corporeal reality” in which the distinction between self, body and other are breaking.
Informed by these theories, the symposium focuses on the human body as a proxy for political and institutional critique as well as a space for research. How are these massive changes of our times influencing artists’ perception and experience of the human body as a space for proxy? Which strategies, methods and concepts are artists deploying in relation to the body as a space for proxy?
Theory and studio practice tutors, and students of the Fine Arts department participate in the symposium by actively engaging with the theme of the symposium in the forms of lectures, workshops and didactic approaches.
The Artistic Research Symposium is organised by Tatjana Macic, artist and tutor of Artistic Research at the BA Fine Arts, KABK. Tatjana teaches the Exhibition Research Lab, an elective organized by the Lectorate Art Theory and Practice.
The elective is available for the KABK students and students at Leiden University. She is also co-head together with Maarten Cornel, of the academy-wide program Research & Discourse at KABK which is spearheaded by Fenna Hup, the deputy director of education at KABK.
