TrAIN - Directory - Current PhDs

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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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, Indian 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. Helena`s PhD. project was recently awarded a full AHRC funding (2008 – 2011).
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Helen Couchman

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

I am interested in the reciprocity and exchange between inhabitants, developers, architects and governments who develop our environment and will certainly change our cities and thus our future society. Through my art practice (photography, print-making, drawing, installation) I am exploring the notions of an ideal way of negotiating how communities live. What communities have to let go of in order to move towards what is promised to be an improved future. I am interested by landscapes where the view is fast changing and in the reasons for and immediate outcome of such dramatic changes.
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Rossella Emanuele

Current PhD - Current PhD - Marking the borders of the Self through the art making process.

The intention for my practice-based research is to create an innovative body of work, the trajectory of which parallels the work of artists of the Sixties and Seventies such as Anna Maria Maiolino, Lygia Clark and Ana Mendieta and of contemporary artists such as Rivane Neuenschwander and Mona Hatoum. The project intends to contribute to the ongoing debate on strategies for a re-interpretation of the thinking of Process Art Movements of the Sixties and Seventies, in the light of theoretical critical debates on contemporary art.
My interest in locating parallels between the trajectory of my practice and the afore mentioned artists emerges from the realization that certain conceptual interests, and the processes they entail, converge in such individual artistic practices, developed in different historical periods and in different parts of the world. Beyond a question of simply pertaining to the current revived interest in Process Art Movements of Sixties and Seventies, this convergence raises important questions with regard to the historical context of these artists in relation to my own. This emphasises a need to map out a genealogy of my work – as representative of an artist who operates within the current context of both national and international contemporary art practice and theoretical debates – in relation to theirs.
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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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Ope Lori

Current PhD

Image Making and the Oppositional Gaze: Re- Visualizing Western Representations of Race and Gender in the Female Body 1980 – 2010
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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

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.
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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.
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Madeline Yale

Current PhD

My research explores the recent global proliferation of photographic artworks from the Cooperation Council for the Arab States of the Gulf (GCC). Established in 1981, the GCC is a region of heightened economic and population growth, attributable to the discovery of vast petroleum reserves and its establishment as a tourist destination. Historically comprised of semi-nomadic traders, it now has one of the highest net migration rates and foreign-born populations in the world, yet it has closed citizenship policies. Governed by Islamic Law, the GCC is influenced by capitalist principles and economic incentives for the pursuit of personal wealth.
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