Research-Imagination
credit points: 1
Hila Cohen Schneiderman
Hila Cohen Schneiderman is an Israeli curator. She was awarded the Curators Prize by the Ministry of Culture in 2021. Since 2018, she has served as the chief curator of the Museums of Bat Yam. From 2012 to 2016, she worked as a curator at the Petach Tikva Museum of Art and at the "City Artist" project for artist residencies in municipal departments. Cohen Schneiderman specializes in projects based on artistic and site-specific research.
How does artistic research begin, and what distinguishes it from historical, scientific, or journalistic inquiry? What role does imagination play in it, what is the relationship between image and imagination, and how do we become bodies of knowledge?
The workshop will address “research-imagination” as a space where facts, documents, and testimonies converge with intuition, speculation, and poetic thinking. We will examine how artists employ research not merely to collect data or ground an argument, but to formulate questions, unveil hidden connections, propose new perspectives, and imagine possible realities.
Throughout the workshop, we will explore research-based artistic projects and examine the relationships they forge between source materials and artistic form. These case studies will allow us to think of research as a material, political, spatial, and collective practice, and to look at the ways it transforms into an exhibition, an action, an image, or a narrative.
The workshop will focus on conceptualizing the participants’ personal practices. We will use constellations as a tool for thinking and making: a way to map materials, questions, affinities, sources, and contradictions without rushing to organize them into a linear trajectory. We will examine the tension between poetics and practice, alongside the concept of testimony—not solely as conveying facts, but as embodying them; as a stance, a presence, and a relation to what is seen, spoken, or preserved.
Between sessions, participants will develop individual research processes. This will include formulating a research question, gathering a body of information and materials, and exploring the artistic forms the research may assume. The workshop will conclude with personal presentations of the evolving research projects.
