Profile areas

About the profile areas

The Profile Areas support the practical and conceptual development of the research area - Artistic Practices, and function as subject specific and inter-subjective meeting places. They work to temporarily situate an artistic research enquiry or process, offering a specific relation to, or perspective on the practice or project, while at the same time developing the cross-, inter-, and transdisciplinary research environment at SKH. Each Profile Area is connected to a professorship, so the focus, spirit and address of each area shifts over time in relation to the prevailing professor. This ensures that the profile areas remain mutable, reconfigurable, and responsive, never tied to a specific subject area, research topic or artistic discipline.

The Profile Areas also work to connect research and education at SKH. They manifest in relation to all three degree cycles, particularly doctoral studies , and are used to curate the Wednesday research seminar series , the annual SKH research week  and the biannual international artistic research conference, Alliances and Commonalities. 

• Concept and composition
• Art, Technology, Materiality
• Bodily and vocal practices
• Site, event, encounter

Concept and Composition

This profile area highlights and articulates questions around the initiation, formation, implementation and documentation of creative and artistic processes. The area includes inquiries about question formation, methods, experimentation, dramaturgy, lineage and influence.

Question formation

Concept and Composition is where questions about aesthetics and ethics are equally important, and where the linking of ideas is as much about asking questions as it is about researching their answers.  Composition is looked at as a process and practice but also but as a question; “what does it mean to compose"?  Concept and Composition provides an opportunity for developing new forms and methods of documentation to deepen the breadth and reach of the research.

Concepts

The development of concepts allows for articulation of tacit knowledge and expertise and prompts critical review and dissemination of knowledge.  Conceptualization enables an examination of how artistic approaches shape language and vice versa.  Concepts may emerge as the result of a process of investigation and may be the critical thought expressed by a performance/event. 

Terminology

The formation of ideas and terminology, dramaturgical/narrative structures, interpretation, methodologies and documentation are key concepts, as are the area’s overarching critical terms – concepts and composition – which are understood and activated in the widest possible sense.  This area integrates an exploration of the synergies and frictions that result from encounters between different disciplines, art forms, interpretations and performance traditions.

Responsible for the profile area
Kent Olofsson, Professor of Performing Arts

Art, Technology, Materiality

This profile area takes as it starting point that humans are connected to the world and to each other through material entanglements and invites an exploration of these relationships.

Material thinking

The profile area serves as a context for questioning the nature of the materiality of artistic practice and its implications. It enables discussions on what occurs in and through artistic practice, in the interplay between making and thinking where knowledge and meaning is acquired through engaging in the world, with other beings as well as through materials and things. Here, objects are considered active and co-creating rather than discovered or revealed.

Performativity

Materials and technological devices are interrogated in relation to this interplay between making and thinking, according to what they do, how they form significant interconnections. Ongoing research is in particular interested in how cameras and other devices activate particular kinds of networks. It explores how technical devices enable forms of conversations with both material entities, place, and other agents, and how they enable relevant forms of inquiry. Technological devices are considered as tools for engagement, imaginative tools that connects the known and the unimaginable, activate relationships between here and there, then and now.

Unstable processes

This profile area addresses the artistic development of technological and material processes, and technological extensions or material challenges to existing artistic practices. It activates a framework of projects, experiments and discourses that explores artistic practice as a way of bringing elements into relationship with each other and that critically engages with the material and technical conditions involved.

Ecological entanglement

This profile area invites reflection and research from a perspective on the world where the human is not always the privileged position. Considering interconnections with and between material matter enables and requires a reconsideration of how humans are connected in the world as well as of the concept of nature and the impact of technology in society.

Responsible for the profile area
Petra Bauer, Professor of Film and Media

Bodily and Vocal Practices

This profile area explores techniques, methods and systems for the articulation, interpretation and communication of creative ideas and visions through the use of body and voice.

Its central questions concern notions of interpretation and physical performance; however, an aspect of this research also entails pedagogical and didactic approaches, forms of knowledge, as well as issues of sustainability in artistic and other forms of practice. Both individual and collective processes become objects of research. These may arise out of a variety of materials, compositions and contexts. Related modes of critical inquiry enable thinking of the body and voice in terms of social and political space, which in turn brings to light the ways in which corporeal practice expresses conventions, norms and coded systems, while creating the potential to challenge and re-evaluate them. Ultimately, research in this area investigates the interplay between practice, technique and interpretation, and develops knowledge of the ways in which these processes can be verbalised and communicated to others.

Interpretation and Performance (gestaltung)

Vocal and bodily practices are basic prerequisites for individual and/or collective gestaltung work. This work may include notations, drafts, compositions, texts, improvisations, scores, artistic visions and concepts, as well as psychological or abstract contexts and relationships. All of these are conceivable starting points for research into how practice, technology and gestaltung work and interact.

The Body and Voice as Social and Political Space

This area invites the raising of issues concerning how the body and the voice express conventions, norms and coded systems. These may be of a technological nature but they also work as social and political signals or messages that the research can investigate, challenge and review using a gender-aware, norm-critical and intersectional approach.

Sustainability Perspective

This profile area may contribute to the development of anatomical, ergonomic, bodily and vocal practices. By connecting the development of these practices to a performance expression and critical reflection, the foundations may be laid for a lifelong and sustainable artistic practice. Psychological sustainability?

Linguistic Articulation

This area’s unspoken knowledge may be articulated linguistically and conveyed by means of various techniques and systems including pedagogical and didactic skills and approaches.

Responsible for the profile area
John-Paul Zaccarini, Professor of Performing Arts

Site, Event, Encounter

This profile area explores the interplay between art and society, considering the 'in flux' nature of participation in contemporary art practices and the many contexts and conditions in which 21st Century artists work.

In this profile area, focus is on the shifting constellations of relationships, practices and processes that develop between the various devisors, performers and participants in an artistic practice, process or event. Research in this profile area includes critical explorations of art created in/with/for the public realm, encounters with audience, methods and modes of interactivity in physical/virtual spaces and the transforming roles and responsibilities of the artist at work in society today. Questions of public/private space, power relations, norm criticality, and the consideration of ethics in relation to aesthetics are key notions, alongside a commitment to framing critical dialogue about art within the broader cultural context.

Context and Conditions

The profile area frames critical questions around the influence of art on society and vice versa, including research examining gender, race and class consciousness, notions of inclusivity and privilege, and artistic practices that explore activism, sustainability and solidarity. What are the various roles and responsibilities art, artists and publics play in the current cultural, social and political context?

Relationships and Processes

This profile area investigates the protean nature of the relationships between all of the participants in any given artistic practice. The definition of 'participants' in this profile area includes people and things. Research into ‘who’ or ‘what’ creates art is integral, including examinations of the particular ways in which an artistic process transforms the relationships between the public, the artist, the artistic work/event and the place it happens in.

Spatiality and Temporality

The profile area includes research into ways in which art practices might create, seek out and/or identify new physical, media or virtual spaces and how the practice affects - and interacts with – the various spatial and temporal conditions it may encounter.

Situated-ness

The profile area explores the notion of 'situating' an artistic research project. What are the organisational conditions necessary in order to actualize a specific artistic practice, project or event? This includes the various parameters, relationships, critical discourses and research processes that are required for the development, generation and transmission of a 'situated' artistic practice or project.

Responsible for the profile area
Rebecca Hilton, Professor of Choreography