The event focuses on academic artistic approaches that consider new forms of knowledge production, as well as society’s response to climate disasters, pandemic scenarios and crumbling systems. The conference will begin with a 24-hour online session, the »Long Conversation«, which will be followed by in-person events in Weimar. The online session is intended as a way for artistic researchers from around the world to participate across time zones and to present their work. The following days’ in-person events at the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar will provide an opportunity to get to know one another, exchange professional perspectives in panels and discussions, and participate in workshops.

The diversity of the keynote speakers reflects the diversity of topics in artistic research. The conference kicks off on Thursday, 30 June 2022 with an online lecture by Otso Lähdeoja, Professor of Artistic Research at the University of the Arts Helsinki. Professor Lähdeoja’s »Intermediary Reflections« lecture will explore the connection between art and the intermediary. The composer and electronic musician works in the field of digital arts and combines exploratory creative work with academic research in a mutually dependent loop. Through this work, Professor Lähdeoja’s research topics open up broader, cross-disciplinary questions on human intersubjectivity and transindividual cognition, as well as the interplay between society and technology.

Sound artist Camille Norment is the scheduled keynote speaker on Friday, 1 July 2022. Her installations, performances and compositions explore the idea of »cultural psychoacoustics« as both an aesthetic and a conceptual framework, investigating socio-cultural phenomena through sound and music. Norment aims to create emancipatory spaces through her work and is interested in sonic perceptual experiences as socio-culturally coded, semiotic settings, and the speculative rehearing of sound objects.

On Saturday, 2 July 2022, visual artist Berhanu Ashagrie Deribew will explore the next topic with the keynote talk »Loss and the possibility of imagining a different ›We‹«. His artistic practice focusses primarily on themes of loss and dispossession. Deribew is currently working on a research project that experiments with the concept and questions of care work, as well as mourning as an aesthetic, and pedagogical and political elements under precarious socio-political conditions. His creative production process is research and process based and is carried out outside of the studio.

Rachel Armstrong and Rolf Hughes will round off the programme on Sunday, 3 July 2022. Their lecture »Metabolising the Dead: The Politics of Energy« is dedicated to the human exploitation of energy sources and contrasts this with redox reactions in nature. Complex metabolic transformations take place in natural environments, such as soil, and are carried out in bio-electrical-physical-chemical exchange processes that are and were essential to our planet. The lecture asks the question of what happens when we destroy the ability of the soil to engage in this process — namely returning spent matter to the web of life. Armstrong and Hughes are both instructors at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (Belgium) in the Faculty of Architecture: Rachel Armstrong is a Professor of Regenerative Architecture and Rolf Hughes is a Professor in the Epistemology of Design-Led Research.

The complete programme and additional details on the conference can be found at https://sar2022.uni-weimar.de
Ticket prices start at 30 euros for the online programme / 85 euros for the in-person events and are available at https://www.lyyti.fi/reg/13_Internationale_Konferenz_fur_Kunstlerische_Forschung_7700 

13th SAR International Conference on Artistic Research
30 June to 3 July 2022

Thursday, 30 June 2022: online
Friday, 1 July to Sunday, 3 July: in-person

Location:
Bauhaus-Universität Weimar
99423 Weimar

About SAR:
The Society for Artistic Research was founded in 2010 in Bern by artists, researchers and academics from all over the world. It is the only international society for artistic research in the world. Members of the Society include individuals as well as academic and non-academic institutions around the world. The Bauhaus-Universität Weimar Faculty of Art and Design has been a member of the SAR since 2019 and will be hosting the 13th annual conference.

Details on the conference and programme can be found at https://sar2022.uni-weimar.de
The conference will be held in English.

For further information, contact the conference organisers via e-mail at sar22[at]uni-weimar.de.