TrAIN

Current PhDs

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  Alev Adil

  Current PhD - A Poetics of Exile: the place of memory in the new media environment

  A Poetics of Exile: the place of memory in the new media environment
  Find out more about Alev Adil

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  Sara Angel Guerrero Rippberger

  Current PhD

  Performing Art & Post-Identity: Artist Groups in Latin American and Arab Cities, 2003-2011
  Find out more about Sara Angel Guerrero Rippberger

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  Jessica Carden

  Current PhD - TrAIN Student

  Contemporary Visual Representations of the Non-White Figure in the Arctic Landscape: British Colonial Constructions of the ‘Heart of Whiteness’ and the Black-White Binary as Fetish
  Find out more about Jessica Carden

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  Maria Christoforatou

  Current PhD

  The notion of home in representations of displacement: How is
  the contemporary discourse on displacement being constructed in visual art and
  contemporary theoretical practice?
  Find out more about Maria Christoforatou

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  Helen Couchman

  Current PhD - The concept of ‘The Gift’ in relation to the landscape and urban renewal

  The concept of ‘The Gift’ in relation to the landscape and urban renewal</b
  Find out more about Helen Couchman

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  Cameron Haynes

  Current PhD

  Interrupting the Invisible: Can photographic images act as a third layer of our consciousness?
  Find out more about Cameron Haynes

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  Pamela Kember

  Current PhD

  My research focuses on tracing the worlds of a small, but significant group of artists who were all nationals, born in Hong Kong, yet have lived and continue to create work mainly outside of their place of origin: Paul Chan (USA), Suki Chan (UK),Simon Leung (US), and John Young (AUS).
  Find out more about Pamela Kember

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  Ana Laura Lopez de la Torre

  Current PhD

  My research project is an in depth study of community-based art practice. In the context of my research this term is defined as a strand of social practice in which the artist or cultural worker has a commitment and declared investment in the communities affiliated to a specific location, on a long-term and fairly exclusive basis. In this, community-based practice is explicitly distinguished from a socially-engaged practice, which I characterise by both the itinerancy of the artist, and by a greater degree of involvement in commissioning processes and contemporary art institutional contexts. By focusing on the documentation and analysis of an under-theorised strand of social practice, this study makes a contribution to the critical understanding of the history and modes of artistic operation within this field.
  Find out more about Ana Laura Lopez de la Torre

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  Ope Lori

  Current PhD

  Image Making and the Oppositional Gaze: Re- Visualizing Western Representations of Race and Gender in the Female Body 1980 – 2010
  Find out more about Ope Lori

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  Anne Luther

  Current PhD

  Collecting Networks and Contemporary Art Production.
  Find out more about Anne Luther

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  Caroline Menezes

  Current PhD - Curatorship and the mapping the ‘artistic project’ of post-Duchampian art in Brazil and the UK in the late 20thC

  My research focuses on the problem of re-exhibiting a post-Duchampian artwork. Post-Duchampian practices can be defined as those that make regular use of abstract concepts as the key instrument for creative production rather than a tangible medium. The primary aim of this research is to configure a clearer understanding of the dynamics of the post-Duchampian art, in order to promote the artistic experience initially proposed by the artwork, and in so doing revealing something that could be called an artistic project. The artistic project dwells in the artist’s intentions, in the social and historical contents and finally, in the way the artwork was received/reviewed by the ordinary and specialized audience. How can we contextualized an artwork in order to be closer to its artistic project? This question is the basic discussion of my thesis in which I intend to identify instances where the artistic project can be recovered by an analytical process. Thus, a further core aim is to propose a curatorial strategy which could deliver the integrity of the artistic experience when the artwork is shown in another place or time distinct from the primary exhibition, particularly when it is re-introduced in a transnational contexts.
  Find out more about Caroline Menezes

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  Piotr Splawski

  Current PhD - AHRC Studentship for the project Forgotten Japonisme

  I was born and grew up in Poland. In 1994, I moved to London, which has been my home ever since. I studied English at the University of Gdańsk, Poland; Japanese (BA) and History of Art & Archaeology (MA) at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. As part of my BA course I spent a year at Kyoto University of Foreign Studies in Japan. My MA was de facto a course in East Asian, especially Japanese, art history, whereas the final dissertation was a study of an Edo-period pictorial biography of the Zen Priest Dogen Kigen from the National Museum in Cracow, Poland. My interest in Japan, its art and Japonisme, started at SOAS, and has continued to develop.
  It was my MA supervisor Dr John Carpenter, who directed my attention to Polish Japonisme. In 2007, I was awarded the AHRC PhD Studentship attached to the TrAIN project ‘Forgotten Japonisme: The Taste for Japanese Art in Britain and the USA, 1920s-1950s’. My doctoral research, led by Prof Toshio Watanabe, Dr Yuko Kikuchi and Rebecca Salter, looks at two secondary and relatively late brands of Japonisme: American and Polish (1890-1940). A special emphasis is given to the presence and significance of a taste for Japan in the art education at the Cracow Academy of Fine Arts, as well as in the Japanese-inspired ‘synthetic’ approach to art pedagogy launched and practiced in the USA by Arthur Wesley Dow. Concentrating mainly on painting and graphic arts, I investigate how Japanese art and aesthetics continued to function as an inspirational force in the West beyond 1918 despite a significant shift in the political climate. Thus a secondary aim of this project is to provide an insight into the political nature of Japonisme and therefore Orientalism in general.
  Find out more about Piotr Splawski

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  Nicola Stylianou

  Current PhD - Producing and collecting for Empire: African textiles within the V&A Museum

  Despite billing itself as “the world’s greatest museum of art and design, with collections unrivalled in their scope and diversity” during the nineteenth and most of the twentieth century it was the V&A’s general policy not to collect African artefacts. This was largely due to a curatorial division between objects associated with “art” and “ethnography.” During the nineteenth century African objects were seen as being of ethnographic rather than artistic interest and were therefore not actively collected by the V&A, a museum of art and design. However, a large number of objects from or relating to Africa have come into the V&A’s collection, across all departments, since the museums inception.
  Find out more about Nicola Stylianou

• Suzana Vaz

  Current PhD - Body/mind practices and creative process. The Japanese Gutai group and the Brazilian Post-Neoconcrete artists

  My research consists of a comparative view between the work and creative processes of two avant-garde groups, whose activity developed contemporaneously from the 1950s to the 70s. The Gutai group in Japan and Post-Neoconcrete artists in Brazil have important affinities, namely the intent to use concrete experience to access creative potency, the absence of an artistic protocol, and the insertion of avant-garde procedures into a cultural background of transpersonal references. This last aspect places the individual in a continuum of body, mind and environment, but also preserves deeply rooted practices that bond the body/mind complex to a wider field of existence.
  Find out more about Suzana Vaz

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  Madeline Yale

  Current PhD

  My research is about the development of the Middle Eastern contemporary photographic art market from 2001-2013. What constitutes the Middle East is a large historical and theoretical question; the region’s identity is heavily disputed and constantly reinterpreted. Relatedly, the emergent Middle Eastern photography art market composes itself and is composed in a number of different, contested ways. The transnational circulation of photographic art objects and images within distinct yet overlapping art historical, commercial and curatorial realms serves as a prism for exploring the Middle East’s heterogeneous makeup, where exists heightened individual, cultural and nationalistic negotiations.
  Find out more about Madeline Yale