Introducing Aram Lee & Yazan Khalili

Aram Lee’s artistic practice involves performative events, film and video installations, in which she reinterprets materials found within institutions. This research-driven practice seeks to relocate their role and purpose, challenges diasporic amnesia, and releases impure, other-wordly or false fictions from the institutions. Institutional instruments, such as archival objects in museums, are empowered to speak for themselves. This way, Lee seeks to dissolve cultural predominance and visualize new structures.In 2021 She founded “when site lost the plot”, the space dedicated to exploring the topography of site specific identity through contemporary art. She questions what site and location means in relation to displacement, climate change, and digital space. Working with in-between identities, using site as fiction preceded by plots going beyond it.

 Yazan Khalili is a phd candidate at ASCA, UvA as part of Imaginart group. He is an artist, architect, and a cultural producer. His practice frames landscapes, institutions, and social and technological phenomena as politicized entities. His practice engages with the settler colonial question, whether in Palestine or elsewhere. He has worked extensively on surveillance related technologies such as facial recognition and its links with indigenous masks and European recognition of who is human during European colonization. He is interested in structures, institutional as well as other, and how those structures are built, and how they perform. This aspect can be traced both in his work at Khalil Sakakini Cultural Center, in Ramallah where during his tenure there, he was affirmatively critiquing funding and the foundations of a cultural institution under settler colonialism. He is the co-founder of Radio Alhara, and the Question of Funding collectives.

General Information — ARRG 23-24 

• Dates: December 1st, February 9th, April 5th, June 7th
• Coordinators: Colin Sterling, Pırıltı Onukar (pirilti.onukar@student.uva.nl), Leyla Sünnenwold
• Registration: Register via email to Pırıltı Onukar
• Credits: It is possible to receive 2 Research School credits for attending every session (for Research Master students) 

The Artistic Research Research Group seeks to promote an  exchange of ideas between artists and scholars from a wide range of fields and disciplines. As an emerging trans-disciplinary field of inquiry,Artistic Research typically unfolds through  discursive forms of communication and dialogue in parallel with non-discursive, artistic practice(s). This enables researchers/makers coming from fine arts, design, dance, film, performance art, theatre and music to share and compare processes of production, methodologies and results with the academic community. Furthermore, The outcomes of Artistic Research strive to make different modes of knowledge production visible in  academic and societal contexts. A series of seminars are organized yearly to promote the exchange of ideas and experiences among artistic researchers and those interested in the field. During the seminars two or more artistic researchers will be invited to share their practice with the participants of the seminars. The participants include PhD Candidates, but also those who have already completed their PhDs and would like to keep discussing their research within a community of like-minded artists/scholars. Those interested in potentially pursuing academic study are also welcome to join, including Research Master students who wish to attain first-hand knowledge of the discipline.