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Critical Practices

The Critical Practices strand brings together practitioner-researchers in the fields of visual arts, the curatorial, and performance arts interested in working across disciplines and exploring innovative and speculative interdisciplinary enquiries that address and intervene in the world around us. It is led by Professor Carolina Rito.

Theme overview

Our research engages with visual, aural, haptic and textual materials to critically address the ways we produce knowledge and engage with contemporary societal primacies.

Our research advances new and speculative practice research, contributing to international debates in the field and demonstrating the potentialities of the curatorial and the arts to enable ground-breaking cultural practices in the academic field and beyond.

The strand welcomes academics and doctoral researchers to contribute to our renowned research ecology and to foster a programme based on the development of practice as a site for knowledge production. The Doctoral Programme aims to recruit both researchers in practice research and cultural practitioners (artists, curators, musicians, performers, among others).

Our main areas of research are:

  • Practice research in the arts and the curatorial
  • Curatorial studies
  • Visual arts
  • Exhibitionary practices
  • Curating
  • Critical epistemologies
  • Visual cultures
  • Critical theory
  • Performance and music studies

Example projects

Critical Practices Talks

The Critical Practices Talks is a series of monthly conversations curated by Carolina Rito with researchers and practitioners in the fields of art, curating, critical theory and museum studies.

Assembly and Frequently Asked Questions

For over 15 years Anthony Luvera has created long-term projects with homeless people in cities and towns across the UK, including London, Colchester, Belfast, and Brighton.

Institution as Praxis

Institution as Praxis is a research project that examines new modes of knowledge production and research in the field of visual culture, art, and the curatorial.

Black Arts Movement

This project explores the unique and exceptional role of Coventry and the Midlands in the foundation of the British Black Art Movement in the 1980s.

Drawing Conversations

The Drawing Conversations symposia, exhibitions and publications are convened by Professor Jill Journeaux.

Pavilion

Drawing on a range of sources, this body of work aims to address the embodiment and experience of time in the suburban environment.

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