Research-Creation? Part I

Making Sense of Contemporary Art and Research

Mar 28, 2025

Scientist Working in a Lab. The History Trust of South Australian, South Australian Government. Wikimedia Commons.

“Research-based art” and “arts-based research” are two terms that have puzzled me of late. Perhaps it is the word “research” that causes the mental itch that needs to be scratched. “Research” brings to mind petri-dishes, test tubes, and white-coated scientists; images that are antithetical to the idea of the artist.

What triggered my musing on this subject was how the word “research” keeps cropping up in current writing about contemporary art. Kapwani Kiwanga, for example, one of Canada’s top contemporary artists, is constantly valorized for her “research-based practice,”1 Mexican artist, Tania Candiani is extolled for her “deep research,”2 and Australian artist, Mel O’Callaghan is recognized for employing “transdisciplinary creative research” to explore “the urgent problems of our time.”3 “Research” is also a term favoured in arts funding, at least in Canada. The federal arts funding organization, Canada Council for the Arts, for example, awards artists “Research and Creation” grants to support their “creative research, creation and project development.”4 Words like “research,” “project,” and “development” suggest a concerted exploration of some sort of problem or question, not unlike the activity of a scientist. I wondered then why the practice of research has become such a valued asset for contemporary art and artists.

A few weeks after pondering this question, I was in a used-bookstore where I happened upon a thick, hard-covered academic text, Handbook of Arts-Based Research. I paid the very low price of $5.00 and took the book home. I expected to find some answers to my question, instead the book turned my question around. The book, as the title suggests, is about “arts-based research” rather than “research-based art.” Arts-based research, the “Preface” explains, is “an umbrella term for a variety of approaches to research that employ the creative arts.”5 In other words, a form of academic research that uses art as a research tool rather than using research to make art. I realized I now had two questions: Why is “research” valued in contemporary art, and why is art valued as research in academia? In this post, I address the first question and leave the second question for a subsequent post.

Research-based art, it turns out, is not a recent phenomenon. Art historian and critic, Claire Bishop explains that research-based art emerged in the 1970s. She gives as examples the work of Mary Kelly and Hans Haacke.6 From 1973 to 1979, Mary Kelly conducted a study, much like an auto-ethnography project, of her experience of becoming and being a mother. Kelly presented her findings in the 1976 exhibition, Post-Partum Document. The exhibition consisted of framed artworks that incorporated Kelly’s documentation of this experience – objects, writing, and traces of the birth and care of her child. Here the “research” and its physical evidence inspired Kelly in her creative practice, but also became the actual artwork.

In another example, Hans Haacke researched the “fraudulent activities” of one of Manhattan’s biggest slum landlords. He exhibited his findings, along with photos of the derelict buildings owned by the landlord, in a work titled, Shapolsky et al. Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, a Real-Time Social System, as of May 1, 1971, at the Guggenheim in 1971. Neatly arranged and hung on the walls of the museum, Haacke’s artwork, like Kelly's, is both the “research" and the art. Neither artist called their work “research” or “research-based art” at the time. It is the word “research” that appears to be the new addition to current art discourse.

As Bishop and others have explained, the term “research-based art” (along with variant terms like research-creation, artistic research) began to emerge in the 1990s along with the academicization of art education.7 Master of Fine Art degrees were added to university curriculum in the early decades of the twentieth century. These programs gradually retreated from teaching actual applied skills like how to paint or how to cast or carve a sculpture. They replaced this training with an emphasis on theorization and academic writing. To earn an MFA degree, students are now expected to complete a written academic thesis in addition to developing a body of artwork during their two years of study. In the 1990s, universities began to add PhD programs for visual artists. Again, to fit into academic expectations, artists are required to complete an approved research project. Now, as Bishop points out, “research-based art is a global phenomenon” and “inseparable from the rise of doctoral programmes for artists in the West.” (48)

The development of research-based art was also encouraged by the decline of formalist aesthetics and the growing valorization of conceptual art since the 1960s. Conceptual art championed the idea rather than the form of an artwork. Duchamp’s readymades set the precedent by provoking the viewer into considering what can and cannot be art; the aesthetic appearance of the object was no longer important. By the 1960s, the art object came to be valued more for its meaning (or sometimes non-meaning) than its visual form. In the 1970s and 1980s, conceptual art collided with the critical theories of post-modernism. The work of theorists like Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Donna Haraway, Edward Said, and Julie Kristeva encouraged artists to persistently deconstruct knowledge and show how political power operates in all social institutions and practices, including in the Art World. Artists turned to using their art to expose the “truth” behind the lie of Western institutions and practices. What emerged was a valorization of art that says something, that reveals some hidden truth, and inspires a new understanding of a historical or contemporary situation. “Research” now provides the tool for digging into and unearthing this truth.

In keeping with this deconstructive approach, artist-researchers have used their art to challenge the "master narratives" of the past and to question the veracity of knowledge itself. Bishop identifies several types of research-based art that have emerged since the 1990s, each one offering a “different understanding of what constitutes knowledge”(76) and each placing different expectations on the viewer.

In one approach, artists lay out the evidence of their research on the gallery walls, on tables, and video monitors and do not provide a definitive “truth.” Unlike Kelly and Haacke’s work there is also little emphasis on aesthetic presentation. Instead, the gallery is the laboratory where the viewer is invited to sift through material and become a "fellow researcher"(56). For example, in her 1992 installation, Import/Export Funk Office, Renée Green displayed all of her primary research — notes, documents, and hours of video interviews — on the topic of "the reception of African American hip-hop culture in Germany"(56). The viewer was left to explore the evidence and draw their own interpretation of its significance.

In another example, the revealed truth is even more elusive as the artist may fabricate some of the evidence. Bishop gives as an example, Mario García Torres' work, Share-e Naw Wanderings (A Film Treatment) (2006). In this work, García Torres researched the history of Italian artist, Alighiero Boetti's sojourn in Afghanistan where he operated a hotel. In narrative texts and videos, Garcia Torres relates how Boetti relocated to Kabul in 1977 but then integrates this narrative with a fictional tale of his own-supposed visit to Kabul in 2001. In this way, the artist questions conventional truth by showing that there may also be an alternate narrative to any story.

Some research-based art remains quite simple. For example, artists “search” rather than "research" some item of interest and then display these as a way to emphasize how "knowledge is the aggregation of pre-existing data" (76). American artist, Zoe Leonard, for example, exhibited a wall of collected Niagara Falls postcards in You See I Am Here After All (2008), leaving the viewer to thread these together in their own narrative. In another example, Danish artist, Henrik Olesen collected and exhibited images of homosexual activities from the past in Some Gay-Lesbian Artists and/or Artists Relevant to Homo-Social Culture Born between, c. 1300-1870. Here, again, the artist does not state a new truth but leaves the viewer to formulate their own truth based on the material presented.

A more recent form of research-based art is modelled closely on academic research practices. In this form, the artist begins with a “a clear research question” (76) and follows it through to a tangible, visual conclusion often presented as video, film, and documents and/or photographs. Bishop cites the collaborative group, Forensic Architecture, as an example. Forensic Architecture investigates real-world situations of injustice such as colonial and contemporary acts of genocide, police killings, and public disasters like the Grenfell Building fire in London. Using satellite imagery, mapping, personal testimony, video evidence, and internet archives, they dig into situations and “uncover counter-evidence to the established narrative, often reframing who or what is culpable.”(81) Their evidence is laid out in the museum exhibition and the viewer can follow the threads of the forensic (or forensis as they call it) research method.

Research-based art today may follow any one of these tracks. In each case, like the examples above, the aim of the work appears to be two-fold: to uncover or reveal a hidden “truth” and to offer, through the presentation of the artwork, “new ways of knowing” this truth.8

The work of Kapwani Kiwanga, Tania Candiani, and Mel O’Callaghan provide a few recent examples. Each of the artists, through their research and production of art objects, strive to unearth some new truth and educate the viewer.

For her exhibition, Trinket, at the Venice Biennale (2024), Kiwanga researched how glass seed beads originated on Venice’s Murano Island in the fifteenth century. The beads were the primary feature of Kiwanga's installation and their brilliant presence was meant to remind the viewer of how the beads, typically viewed as cheap trinkets, were used in the same global trade that brought precious metals, sugar, tobacco, and slaves to Europe and the Americas. Unlike most of the examples cited above, Kiwanga’s installation did not include any documentation of her research. Instead, the viewer had to read the exhibition essay and didactic panel to be fully apprised of the historical facts about the seed beads and the other materials in the exhibition. The narrative of the texts were presented as matters of facts and the viewer was left to reflect on the "truth" about seed beads based on their reading of the text and their experience of the installation. In this way, Kiwanga's work, according to the exhibition curator, Gaetane Verna, aimed at “revealing and addressing alternative and often silenced, marginalized socio-political narratives that are part of our shared histories.”9

A similar reliance on didactic texts was part of Mel O’Callaghan exhibition, Mel O’Callaghan: Pulse of the Planet at the Esker Foundation in Calgary in 2023. O’Callaghan worked with “oceanographers, physicists, microbial ecologists, psychologists, and musicologists, among others” to record the sounds of the Earth. For her exhibition, she used painting, video, sound, and dance performances to give form to the “pulse” of the earth. Again, no actual research material was presented in the exhibition. The didactic panel at the entrance to the gallery informed the viewer about the extent of O’Callaghan’s research. According to the text, the viewer, through the experience of the work, was introduced to “different ways of knowing” and led to “consider the notion, championed in many of the planet’s knowledge systems, that the Earth, too, is a living organism.” Here art is used to highlight this “notion,” one that has not been “silenced” as in Kiwanga’s work, but that O’Callaghan suggests has not yet been heard.10

Tania Candiana, like Kiwanga, often works on site-specific projects. In Lifeblood, a commission completed during a residency at the Blaffer Museum in Houston, Texas in 2023, Candiani conducted an archival and ethnographical study of Houston’s river and bayous drawing on stories from the community, photographic documentation, historical archives, and sounds. The resulting exhibition was centred on a twenty-minute video (Echoing Landscapes) that metaphorically traced the history of the river from paleolithic times to the present-day Houston. The exhibition also included a full-size canoe, photographs, and other objects that served as artistic responses to Candiani's original research. Like Kiwanga and O’Callaghan, her work did not include archival material from her research. Instead, the viewer was expected to follow the narrative created by the different pieces that “draw attention to the things that go unnoticed.”11 As the exhibition brochure text described it;

The exhibition Lifeblood speaks to the existential importance of water to this city and region, as well as the blood and violence it has spurred and seen spilled, from colonization and slavery to industrialization and contamination.12

According to this, Candiani’s research and art had peeled away an earlier narrative that had not acknowledged the deeper and darker history of the river, Houston, and its people.

In all three of these examples, the artists begin by acting as social scientists (anthropologists, ethnographers, sonographers, and so on). They research a topic and inspired by their findings, they paint, sculpt, and make videos and installations. The word “research,” used in this context, suggests that, like scientists, these artists base their final production on a reasoned evaluation of objective evidence, evidence that then supports the proposition of a new truth revealed in the exhibition.

In a world where science and scientific methods are highly prized, the valorization of this type of research has an interesting effect on how we see and understand art. First, it distances the artwork and the artist from the mystical, spiritual, and religious roots of visual art and situates artmaking alongside the sciences. The term research also proposes an educational role for art, suggesting that art, like science, can provide the viewer with a new knowledge about the physical and social nature of the world. Finally, the term research suggests that art does something, that it is more than just a frivolous pastime or entertainment. It has a purpose; to reveal new truths and to educate.

By giving value to research, the world of contemporary art transforms the artist from mystical shaman or entertaining jester to a serious and wise scientist who is intent upon investigating and sharing new truths about the world. In turn, by exhibiting and valorizing research-based art, the museum or gallery is transformed from a place of idle entertainment and aesthetic delectation to a site of experimentation, learning, and truthful discoveries.

Making & Meaning

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