Exhibition | 25.11.2011 – 31.12.2011
Venue | xhibit, exhibition rooms of the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, Schillerplatz 3, 1010 Vienna

Opening hours: Tue-Sun 10 am – 6 pm
Closed on the 24. and 25.12.2011, open to the public on the 26.12.2011

Participants: Carola Dertnig, Teresa Maria Diaz Nerio (DAI alumnus), Diedrich Diederichsen, Simonetta Ferfoglia, Simone Forti, Patricia Grzonka, Ugo Guarino, Nina Herlitschka, Tom Holert, Carrie Lambert Beatty, Anita Moser, Gina Pane, Heinrich Pichler, Johannes Porsch, Nicole Sabella, Johanna Schaffer, Janine Maria Schneider, Stefanie Seibold, Axel Stockburger, Tanja Widmann, Maria Ziegelböck
You sometimes need a label that does not necessarily provide an instrument for locating anything but may be used like a screwdriver to open something within an institution. (Simonetta Ferfoglia, gangart)
The exhibition Troubling Research. Performing Knowledge in the Arts presents results of investigations, discussions, and other processes that have taken place at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna in the context of the interdisciplinary research project of the same name supported by the WWTF. The artists and theorists participating in the project deal with the institutional desire for modes of cooperation between art and science, putting the new disciplinary formation that presently establishes itself under the name of “artistic research” or “art-based research” at art universities under pressure in argumentatively aesthetic terms.
Troubling Research 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 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 to question the "strange and wonderful practice" known as research, its "cultural presumptions" and its "ethic". 
Following on this track of reasoning and aligning with the Institutional Critique tradition 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 through establishing a - deliberately - diversified cluster of artistic and research practices (represented by the participating researchers) the commonality of which will be constituted by 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 an alleged interdependence of the categories of art and research assumed by the current politics and economy-driven research orientation within the European system of higher education in the arts. 
An exhibition as part of an interdisciplinary research project supported by the WWTF in the context of the Art(s)&Sciences Call 2009.