Exploring artistic research in arts education: a student-led interactive session

Breakout Session 1: Wednesday, 18 June (16:30 - 18:30)
Demi van Kuijk, Moreen Crandel, Arno Korteweg, Melissa Schipper, Veerle Supheert, Tess Kruijer, HKU University of the Arts Utrecht, the Netherlands

Artistic research is not just about strict academic methods: it is personal. It starts with a question, a curiosity, a lived experience. But how do we take it further, and connect what fascinates us personally to the broader societal impact of our research, and its professional relevance within arts education? In this interactive session, the life-integrated nature of artistic research is uncovered: it is shaped by our identities, emotions, and environments. But connecting these layers can be challenging: how can personal insights turn into critical, politically engaged research and be balanced with the responsibilities of being an educator? Through a participatory discussion, participants collectively explore how artistic research can connect the personal to the professional and political, reshaping the way we teach and learn in the arts. By positioning this session as a work-in-progress, students, educators, and researchers are invited to co-create new approaches to research in arts education – ones that are deeply integrated with life itself.

Essaying a personal perspective in artistic research

Breakout Session 2: Thursday, 19 June (09:30 - 11:30)
Emily Huurdeman, Fontys Academy of the Arts, Tilburg, The Netherlands

Artistic research is a field where the relationship between the subjectivity of the arts and the objectivity of research are combined. Like the artistic researcher, the essayist is often positioned in the tension between the experiential and the intellectual, which can often clash within academia. Life-integrated learning could be a contemporary description of Montaigne’s essays dating from 1580, where personal, artistic, and intellectual knowledge are combined. The essay could be considered radical because of its fragmentary, enigmatic, and non-dogmatic character, but it is, in fact, a radically traditional form with a multitude of forms of expression. Focusing on essaying as an un-methodical method (Huurdeman, 2022), the workshop will explore this topic from personal (experiential), artistic (sensorial), and cognitive (research) perspectives. The session will start with a lecture performance exploring the personal potential of essaying, followed by a workshop, where participants will collaboratively collect and generate knowledge fragments and place them on a performative map.

Carrier Bags: Curiosity for Media Theory

Breakout Session 2: Thursday, 19 June (09:30 - 11:30)
Denise Helene Sumi, Valerie Messini , University of Applied Arts Vienna, Austria

This interdisciplinary seminar overcomes a formalised media theory curriculum, interweaving the theoretical, the speculative, and the material. Viewing learning as a process of becoming, it emphasises students' endemic knowledge and creativity, empowering them to co-create content and participate in the dissemination of knowledge. The seminar aims to bridge the fields of pedagogy, art, media theory, and academia, highlighting the need for more speculative research. Overcoming textual outputs, the session focuses on spatial and bodily experiences of knowledge, transcending conventional methods of the classroom. By highlighting contextual transfer and presenting outcomes for a wider audience, the seminar becomes a learning experience in itself, where students acknowledge their own practice and develop skills that are crucial for life beyond academia. This session rethinks education methods echoing Paolo Freire's words: “Knowledge emerges only through invention and re-invention, through the restless, impatient, continuing, hopeful inquiry human beings pursue in the world, with the world, and with each other.”

Play Date

Breakout Session 3: Thursday, 19 June (12:00 - 13:00)
Victori Feger, Miron Konurbaev, Florens Deichmann

Play is a powerful tool for self-discovery, communication, and knowledge production. Fiction in games allows us to explore complex themes and spark curiosity about subjects we might never have considered before, learning instinctively, and making overwhelming topics approachable. This session invites participants to engage in a collaborative experience that highlights the potential of games as a pedagogical tool. During the first phase of the workshop, participants will contribute a question and receive a personal response from the group. In the second phase participants will explore various ways to pass on this knowledge through play. Using a set of creative restraints each group will design a mini-game that translates their topic into an interactive format. Focusing on the collaborative process of experimentation, rather than polished outcomes, this session will show participants how play nurtures engagement, deepens understanding, and makes learning fun. Because, at the end of the day—playing is fun, duh!

I was moved - A practical workshop for artists and pedagogues

Breakout Session 5: Friday, 20 June (10:00 - 11:30)
Linn Hilda Lamberg, Stockholm University of the Arts, Sweden

This hands-on workshop will focus on methods for exploring authorship and collegial curiosity. The method presented is part of the research project “in weakness” and applicable to both artistic collaborations and artistic pedagogy. Open to practitioners of any artistic discipline, including solo artists and established constellations, the workshop aims to offer a simple yet effective way to explore one's own authorship from an audience's perspective in a curious and tender manner, preventing inhibitions due to performance anxiety and self-censorship. This session will offer a collegial language through which colleagues and peers can be approached with honest curiosity, allowing shared interests and collaborations to form through attraction rather than compromise. Additionally, the research project “in weakness” will be showcased, presenting experiences from working within relational art forms to offer a directing practice based on conscious subjectivity rather than claimed subjectivity, and deliberate sensitivity instead of attempts at control.