The postdoc position that I hold in the overall research project Artistic Practice under Contemporary Conditions, is, according to the call, supposed to address “the concept of knowledge in relation to artistic practice.” As stated in the call, the shift from modern art to contemporary art has enforced an increased focus on how artistic practices can generate knowledge through archival, documentary, or research-based work. As Tom Holert^[1]1Holert, Tom: Knowledge Beside Itself: Contemporary Art's Epistemic Politics (London: Sternberg Press, 2020). argues, knowledge has become a central component or competence within contemporary art to an extent where it often overshadows modern aesthetic categories like beauty, style and genre. As such, much contemporary art is characterised by its insistence on taking active part in on-going epistemic negotiations. In the global “post-truth era,” where fake news, AI generated information as well as mechanism of hyper capitalism has problematized modern ideals of “pure” scientific knowledge, contemporary artistic practices seem capable of problematizing the very forms, infrastructures, and relations through which knowledge comes into being and by generating alternative knowledge forms, infrastructures, and relations.

As a part of this, my current project holds an interest in the multifarious and multifaceted contemporary artistic phenomena labelled under the umbrella of artistic research, practice-based research, practice-led research, or creative practice research. These – still debated and in no way exhaustive – designations appear intuitively relevant in the context of the artistic practices that I work with. Most of these practices rely on research-like methods, they are informed by theoretical debates and terminology, they are explicitly invested in epistemic reflections, and many of the artists that interest me live professional lives stretched out between precarious employment in art institutions and academic institutions.

Yet, my agenda in this entry is not to suggest a definition of either “knowledge,” “alternative knowledge,” “artistic research,” or “practice-based research.” Rather, I wish to ventilate some thoughts that have haunted me since I began reading about and working with these terms and the practices that inform them. Despite any controversies over what to call these practices, it appears commonly agreed upon that they operate in ways that are radically different from something, from research as we know it, from ordinary, thinking-based, or perhaps theory-based, research.

I have a background in Middle Eastern studies and am intellectually spoon-fed on Edward Said. This implies that I have an ingrained attunement (and scepticism) towards all forms of de-othering: the often-seamless ways in which we as humans, genders, neighbours, professions, nations, continents, or even entire planetary systems tend to produce ourselves for ourselves by opposing ourselves to our inescapable “other,” although this “other” often remains a vague silhouette within our given world view. What I am trying to say is: I believe that if I am to say anything analytically relevant about artistic research/ practice-based research, I must necessarily also be able to determine and communicate the practices that constitutes "ordinary research” as something more than a vague silhouette.

For me, humanistic research in general finds its raison d'être by virtue of its ability to capture, provoke, and translate significant relations in particular situations; between subjects and their spatial-temporal circumstances, subjects and objects, subjects and subjects. Humanistic researchers are, so to speak, good at being human: at meeting the relations and situations in which they take part with sensitivity, engaging in dialogue with them, and socialising the potential significance of these relations and situations, that ideally stretches beyond the individual relation or situation and grasps towards something more generalizable.

Consequently, I would say that the core practice of humanistic research in general, and particularly the core practice of art research, is analysis. However, I find that we have a relatively poor language to understand the different processes and gestures which together constitute ordinary analysis within art research today. As laid out by, among many others, Jacob Lund, contemporary artistic practices function through dynamic processes of transitivity, where the artistic is no longer separated from the non-artistic as something fundamentally different. In addition, decades of feminist scholarship, decolonial thinking, relational aesthetics, performance studies, affect theory, and new materialism, among many other theoretical perspectives, have taught art researchers that there exists no universal truth, no disembodied analytic subject, or disinterested analytical situation. Such a double-sided structure of analysis with potentially boundless artistic practices on the one hand, and an unstable, situated analytic subject on the other forces us not to be satisfied with an analytical practice that treats both the object of analysis, the subject of analysis, and the analytic situation in which they relate to each other as something inherently stable or pre circumscribed.

Therefore, I believe that the key form of practice within ordinary (art) research today is to skillfully compose analytic relations and situations in a way that puts the inherent agency of the knowledge-generating subject to the forefront. Our task as art researchers is not to reclaim the heirloom of pure, scientific knowledge as a counterpart to “alternative” knowledge practices. Rather, our task is accurately to practise and explicate how to compose an object of analysis (delimiting an object or subject in space and time), how to compose ourselves as the knowledge-generating subject (situating ourselves in relation to this delimited spatial-temporal object of analysis), and how to compose analytic situations in which significant and potentially generalizable relations between object and interpreter can arise.