Working Groups

EARN – EXPANDED ARTISTIC RESEARCH NETWORK

WORKING GROUPS

EARN comprises a series of working groups that each organise their own strands of activity designed to promote the development of research dialogue and exchange around key thematics and issues.

If you are interested in participating in any of the working groups please contact the relevant Working Group facilitator listed on the working group page. Each Working Group began with a membership that built upon the original network of ten academic institutions that comprised EARN until we re-organized our network in 2020-1, but now we have an open membership structure not restricted by institutional affiliation.

BACKGROUND

About 15 years ago, at a series of meetings held between 2004-2006, the European Artistic Research Network (EARN) was founded: a collaboration of ten European art academies that drew attention to the significance of artistic research for contemporary art, as well as for higher arts education. The discussion often focused on the development and evaluation of PhD programs in Fine Art.

Not only were thematically organized conferences held annually, but there was also regular collaboration with leading platforms for the dissemination of contemporary art (such as Manifesta, Documenta, and Venice Biennale).

In 2018 we determined that a significant part of the previously formulated ambitions and goals of the network had been achieved. After all, artistic research has acquired a degree of acceptance within the institutional environments of the art academy, the university and the wider art system. The PhD Fine Art programme has become a common trajectory at many academies around the world. Artistic research is a familiar topic within the (exhibition) practices of contemporary art and speaking in terms of research within the contemporary art field is no longer exceptional.

Therefore, by that late 2010s it was time to rethink the network and its purposes. To this end, a series of think-tank meetings took place in 2019. This led to the following structural reorganization:

EARN would no longer stand for an exclusive organization of ten European academies, but would regroup in the coming years as an Expanded Artistic Research Network. In concrete terms, this means a beginning with a more dynamic organizational form based on the (relatively autonomous) activities of multiple working groups.

These working groups (whose fields of attention were established during the afore-mentioned think tank meetings) focus on themes and issues that reflect more substantively on artistic research (not the format of the PhD or other institutional arrangements to support reserach.) The groups gather around research concerns that are urgent and meaningful for the different participants, such as methodologies, bodies, value, politics or aesthetics, curatorial issues, and climate and ecological crisis.

At the EARN conference in Utrecht January 2021-The Postresearch Condition-these working groups presented their strategic agendas for the first time in the form of workshops and seminars. Between 2021 and 2023 we have focused our energies on building viable research groupings that have a coherent research development agenda. Each working group decides its own programme of work, with a typical approach of making one public event/communication yearly, where current research is shared with colleagues and wider publics.