Becoming Research

In this article, Irit Rogoff explores the ‘Research Turn’ within art and curating and of how research has moved from being a contextual activity that grounds production and exhibition of art, to a mode of inhabiting the art world in its own right. The claim for the shift in our understanding of research is that what previously had been a form of working from ‘inherited knowledges’, we are currently thinking about research as ‘working from conditions’. Our conditions are daily impacted by precarity, scarcity, sustainability, security and financialisation - these necessarily impact subjects, methodologies and audiences of research. The centrality of contemporary arts practices in developing new forms and expressions of research, grounded in invention and speculation rather than in proof and verification, is at the heart of this ‘turn’