Research: Practitioner | Curator | Educator

"Research: Practitioner | Curator | Educator" is a co-authored book that identifies where we’re at and where we might be going vis-à-vis the idea of research in the art school, higher education, museums and galleries, and the creative and cultural industries more generally. By way of this book, the authors want to ask why and how specific modes of practice (artistic practice, curating, and practices of pedagogy) operate, and what particular kinds of knowledges artistic research, the curatorial, and the educator generate and disseminate. Concerned for ‘practice’ in our knowledge-based polis, where knowledge – which includes practice as knowledge – is institutionalized and instrumentalized, at the same time we’re interested in the potentialities of how ‘[practice] might be comprehended and described as a specific mode of generating and disseminating knowledge’, and ‘the particular kind of knowledge that can be produced within the artistic realm by… practitioners… who operate in its various places and spaces’, as contributor Tom Holert puts it so eloquently.

Throughout "Research: Practitioner | Curator | Educator" we foreground, celebrate, and question the idea of research, and especially as it relates to the figure of the practitioner, curator, and educator as researcher (as well as to practice, curating, and educating themselves as research and as praxis). As such, the book is hopefully useful for PhD students in art schools internationally, and those working across the Arts and Humanities in institutions of higher education, as well as additional publics engaged critically with the arts and culture.

Contributors: Dr Žygimantas Augustinas (artist and Associate Professor, Vilnius Academy of Arts); Professor Tom Corby (artist, and Associate Dean [Research], Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, University of the Arts, London); Dr Tom Holert (artist, critic, and co-founder of the Harun Farocki Institut, Berlin); Dr Lolita Jablonskienė (Senior Curator, National Gallery of Art, Lithuania); Dr Vytautas Michelkevičius (curator, and Associate Professor, Vilnius Academy of Arts); Dr Ieva Pleikienė (Pro-Rector of Studies, Vilnius Academy of Arts); Dr Emily Pringle (Head of Research, Tate); and Dr Marquard Smith (Professor of Artistic Research, Vilnius Academy of Arts, and Programme Leader, MA Museums & Galleries in Education, UCL, London).

This book is the third in a Series of collaborations between Vilnius Academy of Arts, Lithuania, and the National Gallery of Art, Lithuania. The titles of the four books in the Series are (1) Research: Practitioner | Curator | Educator (2) Decolonising: the Museum, the Curriculum, and the Mind (3) Do The Right Thing, and (4) What If? The Future of History in Post-Truth Times.