Updated September 2021 to replace Agnieska Gratza with Sepideh Karami.

Promotor: Wendy Morris (SA, BE)

Wendy Morris is a visual artist, a professor in contemporary arts at the University of Leuven, teacher and researcher at LUCA School of Arts, Brussels and founder of the research constellation Deep Histories Fragile Memories.

She engages with moving images, diaries, letters, drawings and sound works. Her work explores fictional, documentary and autobiographical genres and is concerned with colonial migrations, religious dissent and archeological traces.

Morris completed her doctorate in the arts in 2013 at LUCA School of Arts and the University of Leuven with three animated films and a book of 52 letters. She has shown her work internationally on exhibitions and festivals that include Jeu de Paume, Clermont-Ferrand, Dok-Leipzig and Annecy. In 2016 she had a solo exhibition, Off by Heart and Out of Breath, at Argos Centre for Arts and Media in Brussels. The year after she had a solo exhibition at Mu.ZEE in Ostend, titled: This, of course, is a work of the imagination, in collaboration with GoneWest and VAF.

Morris is currently working on reconstructing the plant knowledge of a 17th century South African midwife, but her intermedial practice involves so much more than that. Visit www.nothingofimportanceoccured.org for context, www.midwif.deephistoriesfragilememories.com and our dhfm research blog for collaborations, knowledge exchanges, events and updates.

Travelogue of the Wandering Womb, her Fantastic Encounters and Curious Utterings (2019). Courtesy Wendy Morris. Vocals and composition: Mariske Broeckmeyer. Notes for the Wandering Womb: Wendy Morris. Installation view Alias, Netwerk, Aalst.

Co-promotor: Jan Verpooten (BE)

Jan Verpooten did a double PhD in philosophy (KU Leuven) and biology (University of Antwerp). He’s interested in the evolution of artlike behavior in humans and animals, and presently a researcher and manager (coordination H2020 EU-project Pop-Machina) in BEE – Behavioral Engeneering at the KU Leuven. See more here.

“The Art Observation Post – AOP is a fibre board box in which an observer can take place to collect data on art event typical human behavior. My father, Gert Verpooten, designed and constructed it on the basis of my general instructions. Essentially, it had to be watertight and transportable, as I was going to use it for observations during the Kunstvlaai, an outdoor art fair in Amsterdam. “

Advisor: Theun Karelse (NL)

Theun Karelse studied fine-arts at the Sandberg Institute in Amsterdam before joining FoAM, a transdisciplinary laboratory at the interstices of art, science, nature and everyday life. His interests and experimental practice explore edges between art, environment, technology and archaeology. Lately he has been creating research programs that consist of fieldwork as a means of critical reflection. For this diverse teams are established to address specific topics in specific locations by in-situ prototyping, experimentation and direct perception. Visit his website here, and find more here.

Intro video to the research program ‘Random Forests’, looking at environmental machine learning.

Advisor: Sepideh Karami (UK)

Sepideh Karami is an architect, writer, researcher and teacher, holding a PhD in Architecture, Critical Studies, from KTH School of Architecture. She developed her thesis Interruption: Writing a Dissident Architecture, through writing practices and critical fiction understood as political practices of making architectural spaces. Having been committed to teaching, practice and research in various contexts, she is currently a Simpson postdoctoral fellow at Edinburgh School of Architecture, working on Decolonizing Infrastructures.

Visit her website ‘Troubled Sites‘ here.

Image © Sepideh Karami, 2019.