Doctoral Studies – Royal Institute of Art

The Royal Institute of Art conducts post-graduate education in collaboration with the faculty at Malmö Art Academy, Lund University, which holds the right of degree conferral. The Royal Institute of Art currently has five doctoral students. These candidates work towards a PhD in Fine Arts, which results from a thesis documenting an artistic research project (180 credits).

The doctoral student works under the guidance of a main tutor, who is a professor at the Royal Institute of Art, as well as an external co-supervisor. Twice a year, the doctoral student, together with their tutor, draws up an individual study plan in which their course of study is mapped and documented. The program contains both compulsory and elective courses (2 x 30 credits), sub-tutorials and a final dissertation.

The post-graduate program is regarded as a four-year term of employment at the Royal Institute of Art. The appointment includes work of up to 20 percent (of full-time) for the school, including teaching on mainly the five-year program in fine art. Teaching time is added to the duration of the employment contract.

Upscaling, Training, Commoning

Ana Džokić

2017
Ana Džokić (ramverk STEALTH-unlimited)
Upscaling, Training, Commoning

The doctoral study is a collaboration between the Royal Institute of Art and Lund University. (2016)

Zero Magic: Shifting the Valuation Convention

Simon Goldin

2016
Simon Goldin (ramverk Goldin+Senneby)
Zero Magic: Shifting the Valuation Convention

Forskarutbildningen var ett samarbete mellan Kungl. Konsthögskolan och Lunds universitet. (2016)

The Tidal Zone

Kajsa Dahlberg

My research project comes out of a need to think about film and image-making practices from a present position that holds a future with no guarantees, one of political distress and climate catastrophe. My point of entry is that we need to rethink our (human) position in this world and to ask: what alternatives do we have to (still prevailing understandings of) film and photography as inexorably linked to ideas of progress and modernisation, to linear temporality and spatial separation – to inauspicious understandings of technology as the mere extension of human perception?

My work is informed by queer life practices – its theories, and affinities, and I draw from new-materialist and post-humanist discourse in order to think about what role visual media play in the historical need to separate the human and the environmental. The aim of the project is to consider images’ potential for drawing together, rather than divide, human and more-than-human realms. I wish to engage in the convergences of material worlds and images by thinking through the historical connections between seaweed and chemical photography, suggesting endosymbiotic theory and non-linear storytelling as possible models for filmmaking, as well speculating on what the world had looked like if the history of film had followed the dramaturgy of Jean Epstein’s film “Le Tempestaire”.

The (inter)Tidal Zone is a real location and the habitat to a multitude of organisms. The home of seaweeds. It is a place that is neither land nor sea but constitutes a zone with its own specific relationships and living conditions. It’s where the cosmological worlds meet. In its refusal to be either or, it forms a (non-binary) temporal figuration between presence and absence, solid and liquid, dictated by the motions of spiral and circular time. This is the chemical rockpool (the darkroom) that photography grew out of.

The doctoral study is a collaboration between the Royal Institute of Art and Lund University. (2016)

Engaging for a Revolutionary Future

Oscar Lara

At a time of apparently unwanted but inevitable globalisation, the appetite for producing artistic projects questioning capital models, condemning postcolonial relationships or supporting mistreated minorities is enormous. But why are we really doing this? How is social practice impacting the human groups to whom we so broadly profess to help? And who really benefits from these exchanges?

Engaging for a Revolutionary Future investigates existing strategies within social practice, analysing the outcomes for understanding its real significance on the societies that it touches. From there on, the project will propose new ways of artistic production that could reach structural change without having to commit to the time-consuming processes that strategic models have followed, but still go further than just generating dialogues.

The doctoral study is a collaboration between the Royal Institute of Art and Lund University. (2016)

The Utopian Image – Absolute and Incomplete. The Conditions of a Utopian Function in Art and Artist-Film

Emanuel Almborg

2021
Emanuel Almborg
Towards A Pedagogy of the Utopian Image

The doctoral study was a collaboration with the Royal Institute of Art and Lund University. (2014)

Mind of We

Melanie Gilligan

2022
Melanie Gilligan
Treating the Abstract of Capital Concretely: Films Against Capitalism

The doctoral study was a collaboration with Stockholm University of the Arts/Lund University (2014)

Society is a Workshop

Olivia Plender

What happens when we collapse boundaries between the artist and audience, reconfiguring the relationship so that spectators become collaborators and an exhibition or performance event can be considered as a form of research?

Society is a Workshop draws on methodologies developed by several 20th century historical models within the fields of visual art, theatre and education, which emphasised ‘creativity’ and ‘playfulness’ as tools for emancipating individuals from apparently ‘in-authentic’ social relations produced by hierarchical institutional structures.

The aim of the project is to find new participatory forms, which stand in a critical relation to the formal and informal institutional structures of the contemporary knowledge economy.

The doctoral study is a collaboration between the Royal Institute of Art and the Swedish Artistic Research School/Lund University. (2012)