Imaginative Investigations, 27 February – 18 March 2017

Grand Parade

Next week sees the launch at Grand Parade of Imaginative Investigations, an exhibition of work from fourteen research students in the arts, accompanied by a PechaKucha-style event and private view on 8 March. If you’ve ever wondered what it takes to put on an exhibition, check out the post below from one of the organisers, final-stage PhD student, Uschi Klein.

Best of luck to all those exhibiting and well done on all your amazing hard work. We hope to see you, and other doctoral students, at Grand Parade!

How we organised our exhibition

by Uschi Klein

The idea to organise an exhibition for practice-led research students developed in early September 2016, when Ekua, Lujain and I attended a photography conference in London. Soon after, I sent an email to Arts, Design and Media PhD and MRes students in order to see if the idea for an exhibition was popular amongst our peers. And yes, it was! I received about 20 emails from research students stating their interest in taking part; some of them already had work ready that they wanted to exhibit. It was really exciting and encouraging to see this interest, so I emailed the gallery people to enquire about gallery space at Grand Parade. I didn’t hear back from them for a few weeks, but was very pleased when they offered us space to exhibit our work at Grand Parade, and even happier when I learned that our show would run parallel to George Hardie’s exhibition. What an honour, but of course also a lot of work that needed to be done in order to organise this exhibition, the accompanying research event and the private view. Indeed, similar to the show, research students expressed an interest in presenting their work at a separate research event. Considering the different approaches to art and creative practices, the event was a natural addition to the exhibition, and a great opportunity to bring the research students together so they could present and discuss their work.

Once the date was set and the room was booked for the research event, I focused on the exhibition itself, which included meeting with gallery staff to ensure I communicated important things to the students. Around mid January, I received the proposals from the students, which sparked off another wave of excitement in me; the creative practices that they proposed to exhibit were wide-ranging, and I started to look forward to seeing everyone’s work in just a few weeks time. Reading the different proposals also reaffirmed that this exhibition was a good idea.

The curation of the work was somewhat restricted in the space we were given, since those showing videos needed screens, which could only be positioned in areas with electricity. Others had similar requests that limited the spaces they could use. However, these restrictions didn’t necessarily mean individuals were compromised in what they could show, but it did make curating the exhibition a lot easier. Anya, an MRes student, offered to create the exhibition catalogue, for which I was very grateful. With the art and creative works curated, and the catalogue and labels designed, I couldn’t wait to see the exhibition.

We were very lucky. The idea for a research student exhibition won support from a number of people across the College and Doctoral College, especially since it was a student-led initiative. I was very keen to see this project come to fruition; there had not been a show displaying artworks or elements of creative practices that form part of PhD students’ research since 2008. It was therefore about time it would happen again!

***

About the exhibition

Creative Practice as Research

Imaginative investigators are working beyond the restriction of defined discipline parameters and are guided by questions, issues, and abstractions where new knowledge is seen as a function of creation and critiquing human experience (Sullivan, 2005:181).

In the groundbreaking book, Art Practice as Research: Inquiry in the Visual Arts, the artist, educator and writer Graham Sullivan provides strong evidence on the transformative potential of practice-based research (2005).

These include approaches from empiricist, interpretative and critical traditions. Key to making in systems is the exploration of interactions and intersections; making in communities is about communication, connection and interpretation. Making in cultures acknowledges dissonance, collaboration, criticality and the visual. Images and artefacts are interrogated as ‘visual sources of knowledge’ (2005:158) or activated to challenge ‘perceptions through visual encounters’ (2005:150). Questioning, self-reflexivity, dialogue and critical engagement are part of these processes (Haysom, 2005).

Sullivan explores the communicative capacity of artists and practitioners as theorists and relates transformative, reflexive, relational, site-based research practices. He considers art and creative practices as research that are ‘grounded in traditions of making [and] can be seen as a viable way to reveal the kind of artistic knowledge that [has] the capacity to change us’ (2005:180).

Imaginative Investigations Exhibition Catalogue (PDF)

Key Dates

27th February – 18th March: Exhibition (Grand Parade reception area, G4 corridor and cafe foyer)

8 March, 4 – 6 pm, M2 (Grand Parade): PechaKucha-style event with discussion at the end. (If you’d like to attend, please email Uschi Klein.)

8 March, 6 – 8 pm: Private View (Grand Parade cafe).