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The Ph.D / M.Res program in Advanced Practices (Department of Visual Cultures, Goldsmiths) is a far reaching and coordinated project to understand and articulate a vocabulary to describe and re value composite practices across the arts, humanities and social sciences. At its heart is an understanding that research, previously understood to be preparatory, is in fact the main event and increasingly the very subject of practices.

These practices operate differently than inter or multi disciplinarity, being multi positional, creating new relations between knowledges and operating through newly invented methods. Advanced Practices are unique in moving methods and protocols from arts practices across to modes of study seen to be more empirical, more material and more analytical, and allowing these to reconceptualise themselves.

The political drive of the project is spurred by the increasing managerialism of knowledge production, its subjection to narrow models of evaluation and the demands for research and practice to result in predictable and legible outcomes. The project’s aim is to launch a platform for the revaluation of value, to stress the incommensurability of practice driven research to outcome imperatives. How to produce an understanding of the shifting tectonics of research and the actual working of paradigm shifts is the main drive of the project.




Introduction to ‘Advanced Practices’ – Irit Rogoff, Professor of Visual Cultures

Presentation by Annie Fletcher, Director of IMMA Dublin
Response by Adrian Heathfield, Professor of Visual Cultures

Presentation by Elisa Storelli, Artist
Response by Adnan Madani, Lecturer in Visual Cultures

Presentation by Marcus Coates, Artist
Response by Simon O’Sullivan, Professor of Art Theory and Practice





Irit Rogoff
Professor of Visual Cultures

Professor Irit Rogoff is one of the initiators of the transdisciplinary field of Visual Culture and founders of the Visual Cultures department at Goldsmiths. Rogoff works between academic teaching, theoretical writing, curatorial projects and organizing public study. Together with Nora Sternfeld, Stefano Harney, Adrian Heathfield, Louis Moreno and Massimiliano Mollona, she formed the freethought collective in 2011.


Annie Fletcher
Director IMMA Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin

Annie Fletcher is a curator, she graduated De Appel Curatorial Program and Goldsmiths MA in Contemporary Art Theory. She worked as Chief Curator of the Vanabbemuseum in Eindhoven NL before becoming director of IMMA in 2020. As part of her expansive practice Fletcher co-founded the platform “If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution” which commissions work, collaborates with artists and organises displays and public events.
https://imma.ie/about/overview/director/


Elisa Storelli
Artist

Elisa Storelli is a swiss italian artist based between Brissago and Berlin. Her practice – Chronomorphology – is dedicated to the artistic investigation of time. Her numerous ‘time’ installations deal with the malleability of time and with the probes that one set of time locations send into other worlds out in the galaxy. Storelli’s work has been shown at Kunsthaus Zürich; Changwon Sculpture Biennale 2022; GAK, Bremen; CCA Ujazdowski Castle, Warsaw; Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin; among others.
http://elisastorelli.ch/


Marcus Coates
Artist

Marcus Coates is a contemporary artist living in London. By exploring the lived realities of people, animals and nature, Marcus Coates attempts to understand how we relate to each other and the world around us. He re-enacts states of being – a process of radical empathy – to question what it means to be alive now, our history and future. Solo exhibitions include Between Stories, Kate MacGarry, London (2024); Conference for the Birds, Cherryburn Cottage, Northumberland, UK (2023); The Directors, Artangel, London, UK (2022); The Animal That Therefore I Am, OCAT Institute, Beijing, China (2020); The Last of Its Kind, Workplace Gallery, London, UK (2018); Dawn Chorus, Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona, Spain (2015); The Trip, Serpentine Gallery, London, UK (2010). Coates was nominated for the Fourth Plinth in 2013.
https://www.katemacgarry.com/artists/36-marcus-coates/





Simon O’Sullivan
Professor of Art Theory and Practice

Simon O’Sullivan is a theorist and artist working at the intersection of contemporary art practice, performance and continental philosophy. He has published widely in these areas, often in relation to Deleuze and Guattari and, more recently in relation to fictioning and myth-work. His most recent monographs are From Magic and Myth-Work to Care and Repair (2024) and (written with David Burrows) Fictioning: The Myth-Functions of Contemporary Art and Philosophy (2019).
https://www.gold.ac.uk/visual-cultures/s-osullivan/


Adnan Madani
Lecturer in Visual Cultures

Dr. Adnan Madani is an artist, writer and curator interested in contemporary subjectivities in relation to philosophies of globalization, religious/secular life and intercultural encounter. Other areas of specialisation include contemporary South Asian art and popular urban cultures in Pakistan. With Jean-Paul Martinon, Madani co-authored a book Visual Cultures as World-Forming (2024), co-published by Sternberg Press and Goldsmiths, University of London.
https://www.gold.ac.uk/visual-cultures/staff/madani-adnan/


Adrian Heathfield
Professor of Visual Cultures

Adrian Heathfield writes on, curates and creates performance. He is the author of Out of Now, a monograph on the artist Tehching Hsieh, editor of four books (Things That Go through Your Mind When Falling, Ally, Live: Art and Performance, Small Acts) and co-editor of the collections Perform, Repeat, Record and Shattered Anatomies. He co-curated the Live Culture events at Tate Modern, London (2003). He was curator of Doing Time, the Taiwan Pavilion at the 57th Venice Biennale (2017), attaché for the Biennale of Sydney (2016) and with freethought, an artistic director of the 2016 Bergen Assembly.
https://www.gold.ac.uk/visual-cultures/staff/heathfield-adrian/



The conference is supported by CHASE and the Department of Visual Cultures.


Statement from the Organisers:
This symposium and its participants stand in solidarity with the UCU’s call for a global academic boycott of Goldsmiths in light of the ongoing major redundancies, in support of staff and students. We are here on campus today to raise awareness of this unprecedented assault on both our intellectual culture and our thriving student life. We also ask you to consider donating to our strike fund, which will help us resist the proposed cuts, and protect the livelihoods and futures of all of us who are dedicated to continuing what makes Goldsmiths special.