Research Platform
At PASS, we place great emphasis on ensuring close links between the research conducted at the centre and the teaching, seminars, workshops and other activities we organise. Here you will find an overview of the strategic research tracks that particularly concern us and are reflected in most of our collaborations and educational activities. You will also find a list of ongoing research projects carried out by staff at the centre.
Cross-Cutting Research Strands
Instituting Otherwise – Working Conditions
This strand explores the conditions of production and dissemination of work and knowledge in the visual arts, to develop and support curatorial and artistic methodologies and strategies for sustainable and equality-oriented working conditions. Such a reassessment seeks to understand how infrastructures and changing societal conditions impact the creation, sharing, remuneration and accessibility of knowledge. Socio-political conditions and larger-scale power dynamics influence self-organisation in the 'overdeveloped' world, both in terms of individual practices as well as group structures: this carries personal costs with epistemic consequences. Here we attend to the thinking of artists, art spaces and institutions: how they emerge, how they work and how they self-reflexively transform and adapt.
Remaking Memory
This strand critically interrogates and reimagines the multiple ways in which artists, curators and academics do memory work differently; engaging variously with 'the writing of history' and 'the matter of history' as it is represented in museums, archives, and heritage understandings. It aims to explore innovative approaches to curating, archiving, and interpreting cultural and colonial legacies by emphasizing the interplay between memory, making and materiality. This research engenders and uncovers new methodologies for presenting and presenting the past.
Critical Environments
In the context of global and planetary challenges and related geopolitical conflicts, this strand attends to an urgent field of inquiry which encompasses the intertwined historical antecedents of current conditions. It examines how art and other creative practices respond to climate change, the effects of extractivism, traumas of war, forced migration, and dramatically altered living conditions. Building upon the fact that artistic practices often presage by decades of understandings of environmental and situational criticalities, this strand seeks to explore historical as well as contemporary practices suggesting sustainable forms of coexistence within the Earth's ‘critical zone’ – the fragile layer of our planet where human and non-human life, water, air and soil interact.
Practicing Radical Pedagogies
This research strand operates to investigate, connect, and develop educational theory, collective learning and art studies. It aims to explore how practices of radical pedagogies can challenge and rethink educational and institutional structures in the wider field of art through deeply integrating research, co-learning and teaching. It will promote self-reflexive critical thinking and formulations for social justice, as well as encourage dialogue on commoning, activation of discomforts, relational reciprocities, and ethics of care in both formal and informal learning contexts across the field.
Making Public
Knowledge-producing practices in the visual arts are multivalent and produce everything from exhibitions to artworks, peer-reviewed articles, soundscapes, artists' books, podcasts, installations, performances and videos among others. This 'making public' exposes the methodological differences and inherent hierarchisation between knowledge forms across the visual arts. This strand aims to critically re-evaluate, share and expand forms of justification and valuation in both art and academia. It necessitates the strategic development of alternative modes of assessment, working with practitioners to realign the diverse ways research is perceived, conducted, and valued across various contexts, environments, practices, and media.
Research Projects of PASS
Research Lead: Kathrine Bolt Rasmussen
Many politically driven art institutions are currently turning their attention to the concept of ‘the commons’ and commoning as a verb and as an active, equality-oriented practice. Commoning is presented as an alternative to the usual way of reproducing the art institution by building infrastructures; one that makes it possible to share resources and prefiguratively facilitating a different way of being together. This project – which is a collaboration between the self-organised art space Astrid Noack’s Atelier (ANA) and PASS – asks what ‘we’ can learn from these commoning-oriented art experiments with an eye to the opportunities as well as the challenges and limitations that are emerging in these practices.
Research Strands: Instituting Otherwise – Working Conditions, Practicing Radical Pedagogies
Research Lead: Anne Julie Arnfred
This research project investigates how exhibitions constitute an alternative to peer-reviewed articles and could thus be validated as academic contributions. Critically exploring how Danish art museums and exhibition venues measure research and the knowledge creation processes entailed in exhibition production, it examines what processes are considered to be 'research' as well as how and why different processes entailed in exhibition making are valued and evaluated. A rethinking of which practices are assessed as part of knowledge production could redefine the future of museum research, expanding our understanding of alignments across academic research, exhibition making, and publishing.
Research Strands: Instituting Otherwise - Working Conditions, Practicing Radical Pedagogies; Making Public
Research Lead: Stine Hebert
This project critically investigates modes of reactivation for archival material in artistic, curatorial, and institutional contexts. The research is situated as a collaboration between the non-profit art space HEIRLOOM center for art and archives and PASS, in an exploration of the kind of institutional infrastructures that are needed on the art scene to better facilitate the collection, discovery and understanding of this kind of material. Through exhibitions, publications and teaching, the project explores methods, practices, and strategies for revisiting archival material in parallel with examining the ongoing negotiations of meanings and values involved in caring for and opening up archives.
Research Strands: Instituting Otherwise - Working Conditions; Remaking Memory, Practicing Radical Pedagogies
Research Lead: Martha Fleming
Unpicking the work of the everyday in collecting institutions, this project will identify and articulate epistemes in such processes, reassembling the practices of museums, archives and libraries to reveal them as a coherent set of research methodologies and tools in producing and co-producing knowledge. However complex collections are historically, colonially and canonically, the practices of collection professionals constitute interconnected methodologies with direct correlations across core disciplines in the arts, social sciences, humanities, and beyond. Their deployment in a collecting institution context can be seen to demonstrate meaningful relations between such methods as research – not simply as a set of mechanical, organisational or operational processes.
Research Strands: Instituting Otherwise - Working Conditions; Remaking Memory
Research Lead: Mikkel Bogh
Since the late Middle Ages infrastructures of communication and transport have been crucial to the production of images, just as images themselves have been a means of spreading ideas and practices. At the same time, alternative lines of flight, fugitivity and migration have been explored by artists who have chosen or been forced to take routes other than those offered by colonial capitalism. The project aims to trace such routes and ways of moving over a longer period of time and understand how the mesh of institutional practices, individual pathways, geopolitical regimes, landscapes and conflict zones have influenced the flow of artists, works, ideas and materials.
Research Strands: Remaking Memory; Critical Environments
Research Lead: Rosa Marie Frang
A podcast can be an art piece. With the aim of re-thinking the hierarchies between artistic and university-based knowledge production, I am creating a podcast where I talk with artists and curators pursuing PhD’s. As an artist, I work with time-based public art in an expanded field – performing as myself and with reality as a stage – and with particular focus on societal power dynamics. By challenging the distinction between the private, professional, political and poetic, and in a context of an authenticity-hungry mass-mediated society, I investigate the possibilities that exist in insisting on the artists’ voice as both knowledge and resistance.
Research Strands: Making Public, Instituting Otherwise - Working Conditions, Practicing Radical Pedagogies