Doctoral studies

'Research as Praxis' discussions

Moderator: Dr Marquard Smith Professor of Artistic Research at Vilnius Academy of Arts; Editor-in-Chief, Journal of Visual Culture; and Programme Leader, MA Museums & Galleries in Education, UCL Institute of Education, London.
The event is organised by Vilnius Academy of Arts in collaboration with National Gallery of Art.

Presentation of Gilda Williams' book "How to Write about Contemporary Art"

22nd February
Vilnius Book Fair

Contributors: Dr Gilda Williams, Dr Marquard Smith, Dr Agnė Narušytė

Organizer: Vilniaus dailės akademijos leidykla

How to Write About Contemporary Art is the definitive guide to writing engagingly about the art of our time. Invaluable for students, arts professionals and other aspiring writers, the book first navigates readers through the key elements of style and content, from the aims and structure of a piece to its tone and language. Brimming with practical tips that range across the complete spectrum of art-writing, the second part of the book is organized around its specific forms, including academic essays; press releases and news articles; texts for auction and exhibition catalogues, gallery guides and wall labels; op-ed journalism and exhibition reviews; and writing for websites and blogs.

Gilda Williams is a London correspondent for Artforum and lecturer at Goldsmiths College and Sotheby’s Institute of Art, London. From 1994 to 2005 she was Editor and then Commissioning Editor at Phaidon Press. She is a former managing editor at Flash Art International and her writing has appeared in Tate Etc., Parkett, Art Monthly, Art in America and Time Out. Williams is author of The Gothic (2007) and has contributed to catalogues for exhibitions at the Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, the 48th Venice Biennale, and the Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum, Rotterdam, among others.

From the left: dr. Gilda Williams, dr. Marquard Smith, dr. Agnė Narušytė

Decolonising

7th December 2018

Contributors include:

Dr Almira Ousmanova is Professor at the European Humanities University. She has published extensively on convergences of cultural practices, Feminist Studies, Film and Media Studies, Political Philosophy, and studies of the Soviet and Post-Soviet condition, Almira is also a curator and programmer, and runs the Laboratory for Studies of Visual Culture and Contemporary Studies: http://www.viscultstudies.org

Dr Danah Abdulla is a designer, educator and research. She is Senior Lecturer in Communication Design at Brunel University London, a founding member of the decolonising design platform, and the founder of Kalimat Magazine.

Dr Michelle Williams Gamaker is a moving image/performance artist and activist, co-founder of the Women of Colour Index Reading Group, and member of Fine Art staff at Goldsmiths College, University of London.

Dr Ieva Mazūraitė-Novickienė is a curator at the Art Information Centre, National Gallery of Art, Vilnius, Lithuania. A researcher of soviet period Lithuanian Photography, she is author of articles: Mazūraitė-Novickienė, I. „The analyses of photography concept in the discourse of Lithuanian photography of 1960’s“, in: Acta Academiae Artium Vilnensis. 2014. T. 75, p. 89–102; Mazūraitė-Novickienė, I. „Medium of photography as artistic problem in late soviet Lithuanian photography“, in: Menotyra. 2016. T. 23. Nr. 4, p. 73–87. Curated exhibitions (selected): ’A Place of Images. Lithuanian Photography in Illustrated Magazines of the 1960s-70s.’ (2013) and retrospective of Algimantas Kunčius “Visual Scripts” (2015).

The Decolonising debate is raging passionately!
It’s raging in our public institutions, in our universities and art schools, and on the streets. Artists, designers, academics, critics, curators, educators, and activists internationally are demanding a decolonising of the museum, a decolonising of the curriculum, a decolonising of knowledge, a decolonising of the mind.

Why? Because as ‘inventions’ of the West’s global blueprint, museums, institutions of higher education, and the worlds of art and design are always already aligned with the logic of coloniality.

The decolonialising perspectives and practices from different continents, territories, and geographies are thus necessary and welcome; and all the more urgent in our fraught political moment. Such challenges and possibilities flow from the Americas of the South, the post-Soviet states, the ends of the British Empire, and elsewhere, amplifying alternative voices, and enabling us to see and think, educate, write, curate, and know otherwise.

To decolonise, then, is to democratise.

So what are the benefits of this decolonising impulse, its rhetoric, activism, its protests? What does it really mean – conceptually and practically even - for the museum and its collection, the art school and the university’s curriculum, the mind, and knowledge itself to decolonise? And what might a decolonising aesthetics, politics, and ethics be and do?

From the left: prof. dr. Almira Ousmanova, dr. Danah Abdulla, dr. Michelle Williams Gamaker, dr. Ieva Mazūraitė-Novickienė

Research: Practitioner | Curator | Educator

26th October 2018

Contributors include: Professor Tom Corby (artist, Associate Dean of Research, Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London); Dr Lolita Jablonskienė (National Gallery of Art/VAA); Dr Emily Pringle (Head of Learning Practice and Research, Tate, London); Assoc. Prof. Dr. Žygimantas Augustinas (VAA); Assoc. Prof. Dr. Vytautas Michelkevičius (VAA).