Seminar/Conference
Artistic Research Week 2026: Spaces to Remember – Times to Reconcile
To research also means to remember: As researchers deepen their experience, collect insights, and gather intelligence, they work towards expanding a shared knowledge base. This base should be accessible to everyone. It is a collective memory that will cease to exist if we don’t keep contributing to it and protect it, by taking care of archives, libraries, and other homes of shared knowledge.
What media do the arts choose to use when they take on the task of research and remembrance? Does it have to be written language? Is knowledge only valid when converted into the modern scientific idiom of hard data? What other modes of remembering findings and communicating insights can the arts bring to the table?
Industrial modernity keeps on unleashing forces of indiscriminate destruction, against people, cultures and the planet itself. Powerless as the witnesses to boundless violence may first be made to feel, can the arts still be a space to turn to, where atrocities will be remembered and attempts at repair may be made? How can socially sensitive art practices facilitate environments of social and cultural reconciliation?
The daily upkeep of the house of memory and reconciliation may not seem like a heroic feat. Still it takes a worldwide culture of research to sustain this effort. Especially now that the future of art and research is threatened by a turn towards remilitarization and corporate power. It’s high time to restate our values: What knowledge do we create in the arts? How do we do so? And for whom? How can we work towards a future where the arts continue to honor and safeguard the spirit of research, remembrance and repair?
Programme TBA