Mikkel Bogh: From Studio to Academia and back again. On the interfaces between two kinds of knowledge production and the possibility of a third place for research

Over the last twenty years, a growing number of artists and curators have received PhD degrees with 'theses' that combine practice-based and theoretical research. The trend is a divisive one. While more artists and curators see opportunities to explore and delve deeper into aspects of their own practice through a PhD program, the development is met with resistance and concern from both academic and artistic quarters: Won't it lead to poorer scholarship by people without academic training and/or to a more boring and academic art practice devoid of the unevenness and unpredictability that we value most in art? In this lecture, I will look at the relationship between (artistic, curatorial, and other) practice and knowledge production based on concrete examples of practice-based research from recent years, not to take sides in a battle, but to better understand the basis for talking about knowledge grounded in practice, or perhaps about something like a new humanistic knowledge practice.

Bio:
Mikkel Bogh is a professor of art history and head of the Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Practice-based Art Studies at the University of Copenhagen. From 2005 to 2014 he served as the Rector at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen and from 2014 to 2023 he was the Director of SMK, the National Gallery of Denmark. He is the author of Closer. Intimacies in Art 1730-1930, SMK 2016 and co-curated the 2023 exhibition Baroque. Out of Darkness at SMK.

• Æstetisk Seminar program F2024
• Æstetisk Seminar plakat F2024

Æstetisk Seminar F2024 er tilrettelagt af Morten Kyndrup og Thomas Rosendal, Institut for Kommunikation og Kultur, Aarhus Universitet.