Emancipative Research. Critical perspectives in curatorial and artistic research, 3 September | Event in Iasi

Emancipative Research. Critical perspectives in curatorial and artistic research

Iasi Arts Summer School

Highlights

Wed, 03 Sep, 2025 at 12:00 pm

Sărăriei, no 189, 700451 Iasi, Romania

Advertisement

Date & Location

Wed, 03 Sep, 2025 at 12:00 pm - Fri, 05 Sep, 2025 at 04:00 pm (EEST)

Sărăriei, no 189, 700451 Iasi

Șoseaua Sărărie 28, 700452 Iași, România, Iasi, Romania

Save location for easier access

Only get lost while having fun, not on the road!

About the event

Emancipative Research. Critical perspectives in curatorial and artistic research
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
IASS – Iasi Arts Summer School
September 3-5, 2025

Organized by Doctoral School of Visual Arts @ UNAGE Iași (Romania)
Location: Faculty of Visual Arts and Design, Iași

-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Theme of IASS 2025:
Emancipative Research. Critical perspectives in curatorial and artistic research

-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Guest Lecturers: Charles Esche, Maria Hlavajova, Ronald Kolb

-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Program

Module 1 (September 3, 2025):
Advanced Lecture and Open Research Workshop: Charles Esche (curator, writer, professor of contemporary art and curating at University of the Arts, London)
12:00 - 14:00 Advanced Lecture and Discussions
14:00 - 16:00 Lunch Break
16:00 - 18:00 Open Research Workshop

Module 2 (September 4, 2025):
Advanced Lecture and Open Research Workshop: Maria Hlavajova (curator, researcher, founding artistic director of BAK, basis voor actuele kunst, Utrecht)
10:00 - 12:00 Advanced Lecture and Discussions
12:00 - 14:00 Lunch Break
14:00 - 16:00 Open Research Workshop

Module 3 (September 5, 2025):
Advanced Lecture and Open Research Workshop: Ronald Kolb (curator, Artistic Director of M.1 at the Arthur Boskamp-Stiftung, Hohenlockstedt and lecturer of curatorial practice in continuing education at the Zurich University of the Arts at Zurich University of the Arts)
10:00 - 12:00 Advanced Lecture and Discussions
12:00 - 14:00 Lunch Break
14:00 - 16:00 Open Research Workshop

-------------------------------------------------------------------------

Mediation by Prof. Cătălin Gheorghe (curator and Director of the Doctoral School of Visual Arts at “George Enescu” National University of the Arts in Iași, Romania).

The school is open for free attendance, even for anyone engaged in the art community (living in or passing through Iași), not only for the doctoral students from UNAGE Iași.

The activities are neither streamed nor recorded.

For more info, please contact: Y2F0YWxpbiAhIGdoZW9yZ2hlIHwgdW5hZ2UgISBybw==

www.artsummerschool.ro (to be updated in September 2025)
www.facebook.com/iasiartssummerschool

-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Argument:

Beyond positivism and academism, and in contradiction with different forms of political determinism (such as autarchic, nationalistic or neoliberalist worldviews), ‘research’ would free itself from dogmas and economic justifications, finding new ways to escape complications of centralisation, obscure desires of domestication and commodification, and neo-colonial or ultra-modern imperatives to rule and devour everything which is still alive.

Under the pressure of a managerial and cannibalistic class, self-colonised scholars are making naive conformist efforts to legitimate and integrate 'artistic research' at the level of funding policies that are controlled by advanced neoliberalist oligo-ideologies implicated in agonistic processes to implement hierarchies, praising (labor) market at the top level, in order to organize the social life as a (self)consumerist algorithmic organism.

Divergent reactions should contradict predetermined trajectories mediated by exclusionary forms of extraction, exploitation, and oppression, creating new spaces for life-breathing and world-building from the emancipatory perspective of caring for a better understanding of social imagination beyond rituals that feed the cult for quantification, measurement, and financialization of research. Research should be re-emancipated, re-learned, re-positioned, re-traced, re-invigorated.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------
September 3, 2025

CHARLES ESCHE
DEMODERNISING TO DECOLONISE
(advanced lecture)

This talk will explore possible responses to the question of decolonising or coming to terms with the colonial past from the position of western Europe. Economically and politically, but also culturally and philosophically, coloniality had an outsize influence of thinking and behaviour in the colonising territories of western Europe. While being complicit in a genocide and facing a changing world order, western Europe can no longer be satisfied that its modernist pluralism and capacity for self-critique might restore some semblance of ethical standards. Museums and art institutions have served as places where that pluralism and self-critique have traditionally played out and therefore their reaction to current conditions is (going to be) important. This talk will discuss some of the options towards demodernising as one possible, partial response by discussing the history of the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven as an example.


CHARLES ESCHE
ARTISTS VS MUSEUMS AND ART SPACES
(open research workshop)

What kind of expectations do artists have of museums, and museums of artists? What are the pressures on institutions presenting and collecting art that impact on the relationship and are there ways for artists to negotiate better conditions and ways in which their work is received by different publics? In the workshop, we will have a broad discussion about how artistic work is valued by state and private institutions. I would hope to hear about positive and negative experiences from the participants, so that we can together find the right questions and ways to understand these two ‘friendly enemies’ in different cultural and economic contexts.


Biography
CHARLES ESCHE is a writer and curator based in Amsterdam. His academic and cultural focus is on the consequences of decolonial theory for his western Europe home and its relations with other parts of Europe, Eurasia and the world. He is currently writing about and developing with others the concept of demodernising as a way to approach this challenge. Charles is advisor at the Jan van Eyck Academy, Maastricht and professor of contemporary art and curating at University of the Arts, London, where he works in the Afterall research centre. He will be a resident at Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris in 2026. He has published quite extensively in peer reviewed and other journals on museums and exhibitions including Documenta 15/Lumbung 1 in Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art, on Anti-Fascist monuments in Third Text and on Demodernising in multiple titles. His latest book publications are The Museum is Multiple, Van Abbemuseum, 2024 and Art and Its Worlds, Afterall and Koenig Press, 2021. He is writing a book on Demodern Thinking with Sandi Hilal and Alessandro Petti to be published by Duke University Press in 2026.
Until 2024 he was director of the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, The Netherlands. Among international exhibitions, he has (co-)curated Soils, Van Abbemuseum, 2024; The Meeting That Never Was, MO Museum, Vilnius, 2022; Hurting and Healing, Tensta Konsthall, Stockholm, 2022; Power and Other Things, Europalia, BOZAR, Brussels 2017; Art Turns, Word Turns; Museum MACAN, Jakarta 2017; Neither Forward nor Back, Jakarta Biennale 2015; How to Talk about Things that don’t Exist, 31st Sao Paulo Bienal 2014, Ideal for Living, U3 Triennale, Ljubljana 2011; Play Van Abbe, 2009-11, RIWAQ Biennale, Palestine, 2007 and 2009; Istanbul, Istanbul Biennale, 2005 and Gwangju Biennale, 2002, Tate Triennial, 2000.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------
September 4, 2025

MARIA HLAVAJOVA
TOWARD THE NOT-YET: INSTITUTING/EXTITUTING OTHERWISE
(advanced lecture)

In this lecture, Hlavajova explores the notions of instituting and extituting otherwise as the processes of aesthetico-political institutional reordering in the face of the current conditions of “impossibility.” Centering on the project Trainings for the Not-Yet, co-convened by BAK and artist Jeanne van Heeswijk in 2019 and 2020 as “an exhibition as a series of trainings for a future of being together otherwise,” she speculates how the artistic practices of thinking how things are, imagining how things could be otherwise, and collective tactical embodying of these imaginaries—as if that were possible—entangle with what is “yet-to come.”


MARIA HLAVAJOVA
LETTING GO OF ILLUSIONS
(open research workshop)

Let’s take the institutional philosophy of BAK—thinking about how things are, imagining how they could be otherwise, and enacting these imaginaries to life—as a possible definition of artistic and curatorial research. From within this understanding of research as a post-disciplinary inquiry entwining critical epistemologies, creative practices, and tactics of making things public, we will examine the latter—“making public.” Together, we will speculate on how to bring our work outside of intellectual enclosures and contribute to the mobilizations of public life in defense of equality and social justice. We will use the lens of disillusionment—albeit in the positive sense, as “letting go of illusions” (R. Solnit)—to work both against and in spite of the contemporary socio-political dynamics of blatant right-wing populism.


Biography
MARIA HLAVAJOVA is an organizer, researcher, pedagogue, curator, and founding artistic director of BAK, basis voor actuele kunst, Utrecht (from 2000 till 2025). Between 2008 and 2016, she was research and artistic director of the international collaborative research, exhibition, and education project FORMER WEST, which culminated in the publication Former West: Art and the Contemporary After 1989 (which she co-edited with Simon Sheikh, 2016). Hlavajova has instigated and (co-)organized numerous projects at BAK and beyond, and (co-)edited a number of publications on art and political imagination. In addition, she is co-founder (with Kathrin Rhomberg) of the tranzit network and member of numerous advisory and supervisory boards. Hlavajova holds honorary doctorate from University of Gothenburg (2024). She lives in Amsterdam.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------
September 5, 2025

RONALD KOLB
POST-EXHIBITIONARY PRACTICES. FROM DISCIPLINARY POWER TO GOVERNMENTAL ASSEMBLAGES IN THE EXHIBITIONARY COMPLEX
(advanced lecture)

In my lecture, I will outline the changing infrastructural challenges in the exhibitionary complex. I will follow a shift in the curatorial discourse shaped by Foucault’s concept of disciplinary power (as prominently carried out by Tony Bennett) toward forms of non-institutionalised governing practices (‘governmentality’). This trajectory highlights how exhibiting may help open up active social spaces for negotiation and (self-)critical knowledge production within transversal contact zones – and how such spaces may open possibilities for emancipatory research in the spirit of situated knowledges.


RONALD KOLB
A RELATIONSHIP-ORIENTED VIEW OF EXHIBITION HISTORY
(open research workshop)

The workshop will follow loosely my analytical toolkit, designed to outline relational categories that enable the analysis of exhibitionary projects, both within and outside art institutions. What can be done with exhibitionary practice is taken to task by reconfiguring the notions of audience, art institutions, different cultural producers, the economic background and the infrastructural dimension that binds them all together.
Task for participants: please bring a picture of an exhibition view (historical or contemporary) showing exhibits, viewers and the spatial setting.


Biography
Dr. RONALD KOLB (PhD) is Artistic Director of M.1 at the Arthur Boskamp-Stiftung, Hohenlockstedt, for the 2025/26 cycle. As an independent curator, transdisciplinary researcher and lecturer, he focuses on curatorial practices at the intersection of art, knowledge and society. He teaches curatorial practice in continuing education at the Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK) and is co-editor of the web journal On-Curating.org. In 2024, he completed his doctorate at the University of Reading with a dissertation entitled Curating as Governmental Practices. Post-exhibitionary Practices under Translocal Conditions in Governmental Constellations. A central feature of his work is the choreography of exhibitions and teaching formats as participatory spaces of knowledge. This is evident in the international events and exhibitions he has (co-)organised, including ‘Learning for Life,’ a festival and workshop programme for the Merz Academy Stuttgart (2018), ‘Situated Knowledges - Art and Curating on the Move,’ a digital event with Tai Kwun Contemporary, HK, and the Migros Museum (2021), the summer school ‘Commoning Curatorial and Artistic Education’ for documenta fifteen (2022), the study trip "Post-/Exhibitionary Practices: Art and Curating in Expanded Ecological Thought‘ and the international exhibition project ’Into the Rhythm", a collaboration with the ARKO Art Center, Seoul, which also took place at the Gwangju Biennale 2024. His interdisciplinary approach combines curatorial research with experimental formats of mediation and promotes dialogue between art, theory and social practice.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------

IASS is realised with the financial support of CNFIS, through the grant CNFIS-FDI-2025-F-0091.

IASS is endorsed by ICMA (Institute for Multidisciplinary Research in Art, UNAGE Iași), Center for Applied Aesthetics and Research-based practices (CeAR), and Vector Studio.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------


Also check out other Arts events in Iasi, Workshops in Iasi, Exhibitions in Iasi.

interested
Stay in the loop for updates and never miss a thing. Are you interested?
Yes
No

Ticket Info

To stay informed about ticket information or to know if tickets are not required, click the 'Notify me' button below.

Advertisement

Nearby Hotels

Sărăriei, no 189, 700451 Iasi, Romania, Șoseaua Sărărie 28, 700452 Iași, România, Iasi, Romania
Get updates and reminders

Host Details

Iasi Arts Summer School

Iasi Arts Summer School

Are you the host? Claim Event

Advertisement
Emancipative Research. Critical perspectives in curatorial and artistic research, 3 September | Event in Iasi
Emancipative Research. Critical perspectives in curatorial and artistic research
Wed, 03 Sep, 2025 at 12:00 pm