TrAIN - Directory - Current PhDs

Ajaykumar

Current PhD - Technology, Art, and Being: an ontological investigation, with reference to the rock cut edifices of Ellora, Tadao Ando’s Water Temple, and contemporary technological practice

My research and art work concerns not the art object primarily but the potential for creation of what might be described as a ‘sublime’ world that manifests in an ephemeral space between an art object and a spectator’s experiencing of it, where art works come into being through the ‘play’ of others. My research therefore concerns how we inter-act socially, with the world around us. I create little worlds – special spaces or places – to contact our playful nature, our imagination, and our feelings about the significance and the sacredness of our lives and our relationships, with our relationship with others as much as with objects and with ourselves.
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Alev Adil

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

Nicosia, a medieval walled city in Cyprus, was divided by a ‘green line’ in 1964, again in 1974, and remains the last divided capital city in Europe. While the border between the two communities was opened in 2003 the Greek and Turkish Cypriot communities live separated by a ‘dead zone’. Using film, photography and poetry I will create a website in order to explore how political discourse, autobiography, collective and individual memory, negotiate the recollection of war and the aftermath of trauma.
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Voon Pow Bartlett

Current PhD - The relational and quotidian in contemporary urban China

My research addresses the work of contemporary Chinese artists based in Beijing, whose work is both formed in negotiation with a global audience and influenced by a historically and culturally specific form of urban development. The tide of economic progress in China has a direct impact on daily life and continues to fuel the art world, raising issues of authenticity, authority and ownership.
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Helena Capkova

Current PhD - Interpreting Japan : Central European Architecture and Design 1920 – 1940

Central Europe has historically been an area with rich cultural networks and significant centres such as Prague, Berlin or Vienna. These centres were cultural melting pots with multilingual and multicultural environments accommodating a mixture of nationalities. The art conversations and exchanges there were transnational and even included non-European participants, such as the Chinese, Turkish and the Japanese. Helena`s preliminary study shows that Japan played one of the key roles as a source of inspiration for a large group of artists and theoreticians who took active part in international discourses. Helena`s PhD. research focuses on the perception of Japanese art and aesthetics in Central Europe and on the incorporation of that perception in architecture and design during the period of 1920 – 1940. For this study the area of Central Europe covers mainly Germany, Czechoslovakia and Austria. Her aim is to investigate the nature of the transnational dialogue between different cultures such as Japan and Central Europe and to examine the dynamics of its communication Also, the analysis of how the perception of Japanese art and aesthetics of the period was interpreted or translated into the architecture and design is included in this research.
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Shu-fang Huang

Current PhD - The Traces of a Traveller, Textile-Based Narrative

Textiles possess plasticity, changeability and intimacy. Used by artists to represent symbolic or metaphorical meaning, this material has been become a privileged medium for expressing creative ideas. By the abstraction of textile vocabulary, the potential of a textile language, and by implication textile narrative, has been developed. Pamela Johnson for example suggests that ‘cloth is an intimate medium, and a medium of intimate memory’ (1999); and Shuna Rendel proposes that ‘the element of touch connects the relationship between the artist and their materials’ (1997). My own practice-based research is inspired by the tactile language of textile, and its potential to connect with memory and environmental traces.
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Cindy Lisica

Current PhD - Beyond Consumption: the Art and Merchandise of a Superflat Generation

My research examines Superflat art and theory, conceived by Takashi Murakami (b. Tokyo, 1962), as a model for cross-cultural exchange via artists Chiho Aoshima, Takashi Murakami and Aya Takano. By merging Japanese and Western cultural concepts, the synthesis of ideas and layering of identities have produced a new form of hybrid and hyper Pop art. This investigation links Superflat to the work of American Pop and neo-Pop artists Andy Warhol and Jeff Koons and explores how Superflat art functions within and contributes to the already distorted area between parallel structures, such as high and low, art and commerce, or East and West.
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Jenny Lu

Current PhD - Between Homes: Examining the notion of the unheimlich in art practice and its relationship to post-colonial identity and contemporary society in Taiwan

My research focuses on the notion of the ‘being not at home’ in relation to identity confusion, post-colonial society and artistic practice. Exploring Sigmund Freud’s concept of the ‘uncanny’ (unheimlich), I argue that in contemporary society, obtaining the feeling of ‘being at home’ is impossible, and the ‘unheimlich’ is therefore a common experience. I consider how artists deliver a sense of the ‘unheimlich’ in their work and how this creates feelings of unease in the viewer. I examine work produced by contemporary artists, and focus especially on artists who live in Taiwan, including Chen Chieh-jen and Wu Mali.
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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.
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Piotr Splawski

Current PhD - AHRC Studentship for the project Forgotten Japonisme

Piotr Splawski has recently commenced his PhD research after being awarded the AHRC Studentship attached to the TrAIN project Forgotten Japonisme. In common with research being carried out by others involved in this project, he aims to challenge a widely accepted, yet tacit, conviction that negative attitudes towards Japan in the West between 1920 and 1960 inhibited the development of the taste for Japan. In investigating evidence to the contrary, he will focus manifestations of Japonisme in American and Polish painting and graphic arts of the interwar years.
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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.
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Erika Tan

Current PhD - Circumventing Closure: Transnational Manoeuvre(ing)s

My line of inquiry is to investigate the potential of the transnational and translational as artistic and curatorial strategies, to intervene within received narratives of nation, community, citizenship and identity both within and across communities. Based primarily in the UK, but originally from Singapore, my status as an artist is often framed by current UK ‘cultural diversity’ and ‘inclusion’ directives, as issued by the DCMS (Department of Culture, Media, and Sport), and interpreted by The Arts Council England and its funding recipients (where further interpretation takes place).
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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