Troubling Research. Performing Knowledge in the Arts, responds to the WWTF Art(s)&Sciences call by interrogating the very conditions of the current upsurge of the art/research articulation. The project shifts attention from defining (and eventually solving) a problem to that of rendering a “problematic”. A core feature of this problematic concerns the fact that the place, status, and function of any claim to “research” are discursively and socially produced and therefore ultimately contestable.

The insight in the “ubiquitous, taken-for-granted, and axiomatic quality of research” (Arjun Appadurai) enables the questioning of the “strange and wonderful practice” known as research, its “cultural presumptions” and its “ethic”. Following on this track of reasoning and aligning with the tradition of Institutional Critique in the arts, Troubling Research aims at unsettling any existing consensus concerning the nature of arts-based research and the art/science relationship. It achieves this by establishing a – deliberately – diversified cluster of artistic and research practices (represented by the research partners), the commonality of which is constituted in working through the potential of the problematic to be excavated and/or developed in the course of the project. Accounting for a multiplicity of diverging perspectives, the participating researchers will work, independently and as a collaborative entity, towards a reconsideration of the interdependence of the categories of art and research assumed by the current politics and economy-driven research orientation within the European art education system.

Troubling Research. Project description (2009) – long version

Troubling Research’s contribution to Texte Zur Kunst, Issue no. 82 / June 2011 ‘Artistic Research’