“To have a world is always the result of Art” – Hans Blumenberg
“Our task is not to supersede the body but to embrace it, to learn how it allows us to have meaning, and to nurture it as the locus of our world. We need an aesthetics of embodied meaning.” – Mark Johnson
The research line KOSMOS wants to explore the relationship between art object and world(view). Works of art and artefacts always originate within a broader worldview, within a specific 'cosmos' of meaningful relationships. Traditional cultural-historical research therefore reads a work of art as a quintessential reflection of its time; the characteristics and contradictions of an era are embedded in the internal logic of the work of art.
At the same time, however, the work of art always contains an unruly wealth of experience that cannot be reduced to the ideas of a specific era. After all, the artistic creation process always functions as a kind of scale model, a 'Sinnbild' (or 'symbol') of our relationship to the world: it trains us, by way of analogy, in rearranging the ideas and experiences that make up our cosmos. KOSMOS aims to combine interdisciplinary theoretical reflection with artistic experimentation in the field of materials, images and words, in order to not only analyse this paradoxical relationship between worldview and artistic practices, but even more so to activate its vital, innovating power.
Researchers:
Dr. Nadia Sels
Prof. Dr. Bert Willems
Sebastian Gonzalez De Gortari
Marieke Pauwels
Lodewijk Heylen
Patricia Domingues