LAB

Close Attention seeks to learn from artistic methods and practices that prioritise working site-responsively, and that demonstrate profound listening across multiple ways of knowing and being. 

This research focuses on:

• Place-based artistic practices that operate through sustained attention.
• How these practices materialise particular modes of knowing and relating 
• The material, temporal, and affective conditions that enable (or prevent) transformation

This focus area is facilitated by Rose Brander.

Dance/Post-Dance explores the role of dance within the institution of contemporary art. It addresses key concepts such as dance, medium specificity, the post-conceptual, protest, ritual and ecstasy. The questions that guide the activities are: What concept of dance can be retained from contemporary dance works presented in exhibitions and museums in recent decades? In what ways might dance have become a medium of use-value for contemporary artists in a post-medium condition? How has dance been employed in decolonial art practices in recent years? How have dance — with its references to physical labour, ecstatic states, and synchronous movement — been used to mobilise images of protest and labour? This focus area is facilitated  by Josefine Wikström.

Plural Ecologies explores how marginalised communities, differentiated by race, caste, class, gender, and Global South positionality, navigate ecological crisis while resisting universalising frameworks such as the Anthropocene. This focus area is transdisciplinary in nature and is particularly concerned with the tensions and convergences between posthumanist and decolonial positions, asking whether these frameworks conflict irreconcilably or whether marginalised communities generate alternative ontologies and epistemologies that transcend this theoretical impasse. The questions that guide its activities are: How do Indigenous cosmologies, Black ecological thought, and Third World environmental movements articulate human/more-than-human relationships in ways that bypass dominant theoretical frameworks? This focus area is facilitated by Ram Krishna Ranjan. 

Autumn 2026 – Spring 2027

Rebellious Methodologies explores “messy” methodologies within artistic research, where anti-colonial chronologies and practices are shared, enacted, and set in motion. These methodologies think and work across different texts, places, disciplines, ideas, and temporalities, involving, for example, collaboration, imagination, fabulation, incompleteness, and “mash-up” methodologies.

When hierarchies of reference are disrupted, different voices move through the archive, and colonial structures are destabilized, established academic methods and systems of knowledge are challenged as well. What happens when we read across materials and move freely between the article, the drawing, the theory, the score, the song, the story, or the map? When we tell, share, try out, listen, and relate in multifarious ways, sometimes through silences and gaps? When different bodies, spaces, voices, histories, and memories are brought together and set into play?

Here, messiness creates a space that Black Studies and anti-colonial thinkers have worked with from different points of departure, and which brings with it the ”uncomfortably generous and the contingent, but also the imprecise”. In Rebellious Methodologies, we seek to engage with such approaches to and forms of artistic research practice, and to share what they might make possible.

This focus area is facilitated by Cecilia Lagerström.

Technological Wisdom investigates cosmological technologies. It considers how the scientific structure of the universe, in particular the organisation of space and time, impacts the design and application of what could be called vitalizing technologies, namely, technologies which exist outside of corporate capitalist logic, infrastructure and imaginary and which subsequently generate deep existential energies capable of strengthening diverse and complex practices of life and death. This focus area is facilitated by Cathryn Klasto.