Critical Practices Research Group

Description

Looking across the areas of art, design and curation, the Critical Practices Research Group at Winchester School of Art is engaged in a wide range of critical, social and collaborative practices, alongside sustained enquiry of historical and theoretical debates.

The group takes an expansive view of practice. It draws together art and design practitioners, theorists, writers and curators from across the School, and involves collaborations with other departments in the University and with various partners from across and outside of academia.

• Re: Making: Exploring and challenging how people relate to materials, processes, objects, form, function, communication, curation, exchange and viewership, the group provides a forum to explore and share in different methods, perspectives and fields of critical and creative practices.
• Modern to Contemporary: Philosophical, political, and historical enquiries into art, design and visual culture, from the modern to the contemporary, are brought into focus through the pursuit of sustained contemporary practices and critique, encompassing sculpture, painting, film-making, writing, performance, product design, digital design, fashion, textiles, and a range of social art and design practices, along with interdisciplinary collaborations connecting with aspects of science, technology and archeology.
• Practice-Theory: The group fosters practice-as-research and research-as-practice, so acknowledging an intricate set of centrifugal and centripetal forces, which take members both toward and away from disciplined ways of understanding and fashioning the world. Members look, ponder, write and make, always prompting practical forms, engagements, and processes. Moving well beyond any divide of practice/theory, members can usefully pair the Greek praktike not with a single term for theory, but two philosophical terms: theoria (contemplation) and theoros (participation), the latter emphasizing an act of witness and participation in an event or activity. Together these terms help members consider a more fluid notion of practice and theory, or practice-theory, whereby the two are inextricably intertwined, one impossible without the other. Members are always inherently placed in a practice of thinking and a thinking of practice.

Offers funding

No, this infrastructure does not provide funding.

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University affiliation(s)

University of Southampton
Southampton