In her recently published volume Reclaiming Artistic Research (Hatje Cantz, 2019) Lucy Cotter argues that artistic research needs to be salvaged from the shadows of academic definitions and institutional debates. In this lecture she will foreground how art’s ways of knowing and unknowing open up through attention to form, through play, and through the ability and desire to question the terms of the many discourses it engages with, rather than providing supplementary knowledge. Challenging the bias towards linguistic articulation, she will highlight how ideas emerge through material, conceptual and embodied ways of working and celebrate the stubborn singularity of artistic thinking.

Lucy Cotter’s multidisciplinary practice explores aesthetics, politics, and the unknown through art critical writings, curating, ficto-theory and lecture performances. A regular contributor to journals such as Flash Art, Frieze, Mousse and Third Text, she is currently working on a new book, Art Knowledge: Between the Known and the Unknown, and an experimental play The Entangled Museum, which circles around issues of restitution, cultural beliefs and the limits of acceptable knowledge. She was curator of the Dutch Pavilion at the 57th Venice Biennale (2017), and, most recently, The Unknown Artist at the Center for Contemporary Art and Culture, Portland, OR, USA (2020).

The lecture will be held in English.

Registration