Research

Below are some examples of past and current projects and initiatives.

Our aim is to create opportunities for artists and academics to pursue experimental, open-ended projects that are fully two-way exchanges with mutually transformative effects. 

Current Initiatives

• Music Futures: a perfect example of how artistic/academic encounters can lead to transformative knowledge and the development of a new interdisciplinary field.
   
• SAVA Creative Fellows: Benera + Estefán: Their research-driven practice examines hidden patterns in historical, social, and geopolitical narratives through installation, video, and performance. Titled ‘Prospecting S.A.’, their research at the IAS explores the overshadowed Romanian-African joint economic ventures and their legacies.
   
• IAS Creative Fellowships 2023: Encounters: Creative Practice as Research Method with Carolin Meyer and Amit Chaudhuri

Past Projects and Events

• IAS Creative Fellowships 2019/20: The City Dionysia - Narrating Wasteland in Urban Life with Nicola Baldwin / New Old English - Performance, Poetry, Practice with Rowan Evans and Maisie Newman
   
• IAS Creative Fellowships 2020/21: An Art Practice Predicated on the Unknowable with Mariah Whelan / I am as brown as brown can be with Mataio Austin Dean
   
• IAS Creative Fellowships 2021/22: Encounters: Mapping the Future of Creative Arts & Humanities with Rachel Briscoe, Simon Farid, Tassos Stevens, Debbie Hannan and Rhianna Ilube
   
• COSS Artist-in-Residence: Dr Sarah Fortais was a member of the mission crew on the UK's first analogue space mission (21-23 May 2022) and creatively explored the simulated outer space environment, questioning how can artistic practice draw connections between living off-world and life on Earth.
   
• Creaction: Creative Critical Interventions for Social Justice: In these sessions, participants responded in various ways to the ‘keywords’ of borders / discipline(s) / social justice / trans-formations. They also discussed their creative critical processes.
   
• Freud and Antiquity: Shaping Understanding for Museums, Museum Visitors, Psychoanalysts and Creative Artists. Professor Miriam Leonard’s research on the importance of antiquity for Sigmund Freud led her to devise and curate a major exhibition in 2019 on Freud and Egypt at the Freud Museum in London in collaboration with the Petrie Museum at UCL. The exhibition inspired a new play by the award-winning playwright Michael Eaton and poems and short stories in the literary magazine Pericles at Play (readership 13,986).
   
• SELCS Theatre Projects, coordinated and directed by Dr Marta Niccolai (Italian Studies), was inaugurated in the academic year 2018-2019. Its aims to provide a pathway for student-staff public engagement and student-staff-led activities, and to establish a more direct correlation between our academic and our creative practice within the School.
   
• UCL Art Museum has initiated collaborative projects with contemporary artists and other partners through commissions, residencies and curatorial collaboration, linking current research at UCL across the disciplines with the collections and a wide range of audiences, including David Blackmore (2016, 2017) Liz Rideal Splicing Time (2017), Lisa Gornick, Lisa Gornick Regrets (2017), Tai Shani,  Spirit of Slade Ladies Past (2018), Robert Mead (2019)