UmArts Research Centre

16/09/2025

Umeå Academy of Fine Arts is hiring a new Professor - Deadline 30 September. We are very excited that the new Prof will work with UmArts to establish a doctoral program in artistic research

The Academy of Fine Arts is part of the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at Umeå University and is located at the Artistic Campus. With approximately 75 students, around ten employees, and many guest l

01/10/2024

We are so excited to announce the full program for Hurricanes and Scaffolding- Symposium on Artistic Research. We received over 100 abstracts from the Open call with a large international spread of proposals from 26 countries. This rich program contains diverse talks, panel debates convened by UmArts Postdocs, conversations, show and tell sessions and insightful keynotes and much more.
We hope that as many people as possible have the opportunity to participate. Registration is now open. Be sure to register as soon as possible to secure your place.

UmArts is hosting the symposium on Artistic Research in collaboration with the Swedish Research Council.

11/09/2024

Join us at UmArts for a unique afternoon this Friday 13 September!

12.00-15.00 Welcome to an Open Studio Event and artist talk -Wandering Room #01- “A Game Without Rules”.
13.00 Artist talk by UmArts Researcher in Residence Nisrine Boukhari
The Wandering Room is a conceptual flux space Nisrine developed during her research residency at UmArts Research Centre. It is a temporary site where ideas, thoughts, and experiences are ever-changing and nonlinear, driven by the mind-wandering state. Participants can engage with the suggested concept through perceptual drift, associative thinking, and individual tactics.

15.00-17.00 Um…Crits
For this session we will dig into ways of working with the history of your field. How do you use the architecture/design/craft or art history in your own research and production? The session will be led by guest Artist and Researcher EvaMarie Lindahl.

20.00-21.30 Expired User Session- Galleri Verkligheten
UmArts Researcher in Residence Zeno Gries invites you to a séance at Gallery Verkligheten in the ongoing exhibition ”Out of the Invisible.”
The event has a limited number of 10 spots, and you can sign up using the form below. Welcome!

https://forms.gle/6XZmVCDztQqTmNZM7
It will be a safe space for discourse, discussion and experimentation.
Bring one question for the dead.

Hope to see you there!

27/05/2024

There is still time to submit your proposal. Deadline June 1

24/04/2024

Open Call: Hurricanes and Scaffolding - Symposium on Artistic Research, 4 - 6 December 2024

This year the Swedish Research Council Symposium on Artistic Research explores the dynamic interplay between more-than-human forces and culturally resilient structures. Drawing inspiration from Nora N. Khan's contrasting concepts of "hurricanes and scaffolding" as developed in her essay "Towards a Poetics of Artificial Super Intelligence", we invite researchers in the field of art to identify the frameworks, practices, perspectives and themes that art can bring to the broader discourses of society, environment, technology and politics.

The symposium is organised in close collaboration with UmArts, Umeå University, and offers a platform for participation and engagement where different kinds of contributions together may enrich a critical and creative dialogue on artistic research.

We welcome proposals for presentations, panels, exhibitions or performances that can take the artistic knowledge development further.

Submission Guidelines
The symposium will allow for five different types of presentations:

Lecture: 15 minute oral presentation of ongoing or completed research.
Conversation: Presentation and discussion of research in an interactive session with other researchers with a similar focus.
Show-and-Tell: Presentation based on some kind of artefact describing your research process.
Posters: Presentation of ongoing or completed research in the form of a poster (or similar).
Other: If you have another proposal for a presentation format, please submit an abstract describing what you want to do.

You will be asked to submit the following:

Short abstract of max 150 words.
Extended abstract. Free layout in pdf-format, oxford style of referencing, with complementary materials (e.g. video) provided as url.
A selection of accepted submissions will be invited to publish extended versions in a special issue in the artistic research journal Parse.

Please visit link to submit your proposal.
https://www.appinconf.com/kas/Abstract?projectName=hs2024

Important dates
15 May 2024 - deadline for submission. Submission via link.

15 June 2024 - Notification of acceptance.

15 September 2024 - Detailed programme announced.

25 November 2024 - Deadline for registration.

4 - 6 December 2024 - Conference in Umeå

Practical information
Participation in the symposium is free of charge.
For climate reasons we recommend travelling by train, please see SJ.se.


Organizer: UmArts, Umeå School of Architecture, Umeå Institute of Design, Umeå Academy of Fine Arts, Creative Studies (Teacher Education), Bildmuseet

11/03/2024

Our postdoc Tarsh Bates is hosting an exciting workshop in Berlin on March 17. For more info on how to join see text below.

15/02/2024

Welcome to our new postdoctoral research fellows Daniel Shanken, Young Suk Lee and Mike Lukaszuk who joined our AI and Art working group at UmArts this week to plan future projects along with Guest Curator Sarah Cook. We are also running the Octopus Club reading group which is open to all - now reading ‘The Maniac’ by Benjamín Labatut about the life of John von Neumann contrasted with ‘Klara and the Bomb’ by artist Crystal Bennes, about Klara von Neumann.

06/02/2024

UmArts now has a full staff team to run our Research Studio and support our Postdoctoral Research Fellows, Small Visionary Projects and Artist Researchers in Residence. Our team includes the brilliant as Deputy Director, Sarah Cook Guest Professor , Clara West and Emelie El-Habta Research Co-ordinators. We work with 5 departments including and the Department of Creative Studies in Education. As well of lots of research partners such as -hs . It’s going to be an exciting year! Sign up for our newsletter on our website- link in bio.

01/02/2024

FrAIday Talk with Sarah Cook in conversation with Paola Torres, 2 February 12:15 pm - 13:00 pm, on zoom

Curator Sarah Cook will introduce the challenges and intrigues of commissioning new art and exhibitions which investigate the fast changing aesthetics of Art and AI.

Paola Torres is a doctoral candidate in Stockholm (Stockholms Konstnärliga Högskola), an artist, curator and researcher. She will be in conversation with Sarah Cook about curating the exhibition Sentient Machines together with Chat-GPT-3, and about the Futureless Festival and the ideas and goals behind it.

For more information and to get the Zoom link, visit the link in our bio.

21/01/2024

On the last day of the Collaborative Arctic Nordic Atlas research installation we had such an interesting conversation with Kieth Larson and Alejandro Haiek Coll about mapping northern Sweden exploring the different scales of image data that reveal historical and recent evidence of human impact on the environment. Starting to unpack the rhetorics of nature, violence and justice in the representation of the Arctic. Thank you for everyone who joined the conversation. .public.machinery

19/01/2024

Join us at UmArts tomorrow, January 20th, for the closing day of the Nordic Arctic Atlas exhibition. From 13:00 to 14:00 Keith Larsson, Director of the Arctic Research Centre, will be in conversation with the featured artist Alejandro Haiek Coll about his research process for the installation at UmArts.

The exhibition is open from 12:00 -16:00