For four years now,
MaHKUzine. Journal of Artistic Research has been a platform for reflection and discussion in the context of the international situation of artistic research and graduate art education. The MaHKUzine platform always interacts with debates and programs of the Utrecht Graduate School of Visual Art and Design (MaHKU) where the school is a test department investigating, generating, and probing research-based curricula for its Master of Arts programs. However, testing in this sense is not a traditional, immanent, academic ceremony, but rather an effect of a research environment and its collaborations with professional partners in the field. How to deal with the implications of research-based art education is always a core issue in those collaborations.
The
Becoming Bologna Project, a satellite program of the Venice Biennale 2009, is an example of testing in professional collaboration (with the European Artistic Research Network, Sint-Lukas Brussels and IUAV Venice) a research-based project. In the Tolentini corridor sixteen wall posters were presented as interventions in public space connected with topical PhD research projects. During the Biennale opening week, the presented projects were discussed in a two-day symposium where also the situation and position of graduate art education and its connection with research-based projects were part of the debates. Daniel Birnbaum, artistic director of the 2009 edition of the Venice Biennale, opened the symposium with a keynote statement.
In the context of the Utrecht Consortium, MaHKU and local partners engaged in 2009 in various research activities where DARE (the one-week
Dutch Artistic Research Event, co-curated by Mika Hannula) was again the yearly point of culmination.
Urban Knowledge was the theme of
DARE 4, referring to an investigation of the specific perspectives art deploys in order to understand and rethink our current urban environments and their complexities.
DARE 4 (a series of exhibitions and an international symposium) underscored how context-responsive projects are a novel and prolific perspective for the Utrecht Consortium and its intended research focusing on the interconnection between experimental exhibition models and artistic knowledge production. In a
DARE 4 related research essay, Natalia Calderon explores public space from a Mouffian agonist point of view while deploying a process of mapping. Calderon's space of confrontations and encounters ultimately leads to knowledge of the "terra infirma", the difference, the unknown.
The issue of the specificity of artistic knowledge production continues to be of major importance in recent MaHKU activities. In one of MaHKU's Utrecht Research Lectures, James Elkins inquires how the concept of artistic knowledge is understood in various ways by artists and philosophers and how that affects art education. A major issue we should deal with refers to "what artists are taught, how they are taught, and why they are taught the things we teach them", says Elkins.
The questions posed underscore time and again the urgency of a further reflection on the phenomenon of artistic knowledge. Thus MaHKU organized the expert meeting
Epistemic Encounters, where the characteristics of artistic knowledge and its role in graduate art education has been tackled from three different perspectives. First, the artist perspective. Hito Steyerl deals with the disciplining character of a discipline in artistic research. Does the danger lurk that we will ultimately have an aesthetics of administration and a cognitive capitalism? Second, the institutional perspective. Tom Holert notices that the concept of "knowledge production" turned art academies into reliable partners in dialogue with academic knowledge networks. However, at the same time art academies search for a form of agency enabling to continuously withdraw from commodification processes. Third, the perspective of knowledge networks. Chris Wainwright delves into collaboration networks such as the European League of Institutes of the Arts (ELIA) and investigates how they contribute, initiate, and incite a dialogue creating opportunities for artistic research across Europe. Thus, they engage in shaping the development, production, and application of creative "new knowledge" within a variety of institutional and public contexts.
Editorial Board MaHKUzine: Annette W. Balkema, Arjen Mulder, Henk Slager.
Download MaHKUzine, Journal of Artistic Research, Issue 8, here:
http://www.mahku.nl/research/mahkuzine8.html
More information about MaHKU's Master of Arts (Fine Art and Design) and Research Programs:
http://www.mahku.nl 
