CEAA - Centro de Estudos Arnaldo Araújo

Research Groups

Art and Critical Studies

The Art and Critical Studies Research Group, created in 2013, conducts investigation on contemporary art practices, with special focus on visual arts and in its intersections with other epistemological fields.

The multidisciplinary scope of the research is our guiding principle, in the same way as its time horizon is subtracted to chronological categories and conventions.

To optimize dialogue between researchers, critics, curators, artists and structures in the art field, to promote theoretical-critical production, applied research and exhibition practice are amongst the objectives to be given privilege.

Principal Investigator: Eduarda Neves

MAIN RESEARCH AXES FOR 2025-2029:

The work plan of the Art and Critical Studies Group is structured around three main areas:

1 – Europe and the Mediterranean

2 – Art, Curatorship, Criticism, Politics

3 – Displays, media and contexts

Each of the proposed areas focuses on the relationship between research and contemporary art practices, with special analysis developed in the scope of the visual arts, photography and film.

1. Thinking the Mediterranean: Territory, Art, Hospitality (2025-2027)
Research Project | PI: Eduarda Neves; Co-PI: João Oliveira Duarte

In recent decades, the notion of Europe has been the subject of questioning and, throughout the 20th century, it has lost its privileged place within the scope of a project that sought to encompass humanity as a whole. Given this questioning and this loss, what critical framework can be drawn today to understand the various disseminations that have transformed Europe into a problematic concept? What is the possibility of a heterotopic becoming for Europe? However, it is not only in the field of philosophical and political thought that the concept of Europe has been questioned, since it has also been the subject of complex debates in the field of art. We will therefore start from the problematization that Achille Bonito Oliva carried out in Eurasia. Geographic Cross-Overs in Art, in the context of Manifesta 7 (2008), considering the fictional, nomadic and borderless place created by Joseph Beuys. It is within the scope of this heterotopic becoming of Europe that we propose the development of a project that will explore the territory bathed by the Mediterranean. We do not intend to legitimize any identity or a return to Mediterranean Studies, but to rethink the open spaces that are the seas and the “archipelagic” dimension (Cacciari, 1997), the intersection of distance and proximity, of openness and closure, of connection to the Other, which is are inscribed in the Mediterranean. In this sense, we will take the period between 2008, the date of Achille Bonito Oliva's exhibition, and the present day as a chronological benchmark. Resorting to case studies that configure art programmes presented in Mediterranean European countries, we are interested in questioning and problematizing, among other aspects, in the field of visual arts, the operativity of a possible Art of and in the Mediterranean, within the general framework of contemporary artistic practice and global art (Belting, 2013); what Europe(s), what Mediterranean(s), would we find in these works? Is it possible to identify some kind of singularity or, on the contrary, is there an irreducible multiplicity of Europes and Mediterraneans? What geophilosophy – in the sense of Deleuze and Guattari or Cacciari – can be thought of, based on multiplicity and the connection to the “other cape” (Derrida, 1991). Thus, we will develop a programme that articulates the research results with an exhibition that will discuss the notions of Southern Europe, Art of the Mediterranean and cosmophilosophy. Integrated within the scope of the curatorship research, the exhibition will approach artists from the geographical areas considered in the project.

2. Art and Curatorship (2026-2029)
International projects – Curatorship Research | PI: Eduarda Neves

Conclusion of the international project SINS AND CAPITAL, or a certain mist for empty spaces - Printed book and in open access: + info- https://sinsandcapitals.pt/

Based on the research developed in the project Thinking the Mediterranean: Territory, Art, Hospitality, the curatorial project time, the cave, the profet will be developed. This project includes national and international artists and spaces.

3. Displays, media and contexts (2025-27)
PI: Juan Luís Toboso

From a multidisciplinary approach, we seek to question contemporary processes of artistic creation, criticism and art theory, in the formation of new territories in the production of knowledge within the scope of the experience of the “common”. Collectivities and cosmologies that articulate the past with the future based on exercises of radical imagination in the present that tremble, vibrate and echo in the crossed domains of art, politics, technology, historical narrative and fiction.