Irit Rogoff explores the ‘research turn’ within art and curating and of how research has moved from being a contextual activity that grounds production and exhibition of art, to a mode of inhabiting the art world in its own right. The claim for the shift in our understanding of research is that what previously had been a form of working from ‘inherited knowledges’, we are currently thinking about research as ‘working from conditions’. Our conditions are daily impacted by precarity, scarcity, sustainability, security and financialisation – these necessarily impact subjects, methodologies and audiences of research. The centrality of contemporary art practices in developing new forms and expressions of research, grounded in invention and speculation rather than in proof and verification, is at the heart of this ‘turn’.

This keynote concluded the first day of the conference Architectures of Education at Nottingham Contemporary, 7-9 November 2019. This event was a three-day programme with presentations, workshops, keynotes and screening reflecting on cultures and architectures of education today, and speculate about what futures may lay on the horizons of knowledge production.

Moderation

Carolina Rito is Professor of Creative Practice Research in the Centre of Arts, Memory and Communities at Coventry University.