Postdoc position in Contemporary Art Studies

The Department of Art History, Aesthetics & Culture and Museology within the School of Communication and Culture at Aarhus University invites applications for a postdoctoral position affiliated with the research project Artistic Practice under Contemporary Conditions. The position has been made possible by a Novo Nordisk Foundation Investigator Grant to Associate Professor Jacob Lund.

The postdoc position is a full-time, two-year fixed-term position, and begins on 15 October 2022 or as soon as possible thereafter.

The School of Communication and Culture is committed to diversity and encourages all qualified applicants to apply regardless of their personal background.

Project
The project Artistic Practice under Contemporary Conditions is a theoretical and analytical investigation of the relationship between artistic practice and the socio-political context in which it takes place. It is guided by the hypotheses that this relationship has undergone substantial changes during an art historical shift from modern art to contemporary art and that the discipline of art history needs to revise traditional notions of its historicity, categories of work and artistic autonomy in order to catch up with the phenomenon of contemporary art, which often escapes these notions. Rather than defining what contemporary art is, the purpose is to explore how contemporary artistic practices create meaning in relation to the non-artistic societal reality in and on which they operate. The focus is on exploring and describing how the very diverse practices and works we collect under the name of “contemporary art” function as art, and on what qualifies them as artistic. The working language of the project is English. Read an extended description of the project here .

Postdoc profile
We are looking for an applicant to deliver an individual postdoc project under the auspices of the overall project while contributing to the collective task of developing insights into contemporary artistic practices. The proposed project should address:

The concept of knowledge in relation to artistic practice
The overall project aims to develop analytical approaches that are able to think with contemporary art. This endeavour is connected to an increased focus on the knowledge that artistic practices are capable of generating, for instance, through archival and documentary work. Knowledge, along with research, has become a central area of competence within contemporary art that seemingly overshadows traditional aesthetic categories like beauty, style and genre, which have previously organised and filtered the production and understanding of art (cf. Tom Holert). To a much larger extent than before, contemporary art claims an active epistemic function and takes an active part in determining what can be understood as knowledge, which forms it can take, whom and what this knowledge is made for, and under which conditions. 

The postdoc will carry out a project in relation to research questions such as: How is knowledge generated through artistic practice? Which kind of knowledge? How does it differ from traditional scientific knowledge? How can it challenge and/or cooperate with existing knowledge and ways of generating knowledge? How is it made communicable? What forms, infrastructures and relations does it enter into or form part of?