The FEINART ITN PhD programme is an ambitious attempt to map and assess the practices of the new small-scale, independent institutions and agencies involved in the production and reception of socially engaged art (art, which is involved in collaborative forms of social interaction that do not involve the primary production of objects), so as to support new forms of artistic work and curating, and as such change the priorities of funding for socially engaged practice and the independent art institution sector across the EU. Between March 2020, and March 2024, the programme trained 11 Early-Stage Researchers (ESRs) in the field of socially engaged art across the subject areas, art and political philosophy, curating/art administration, and art theory/practice, as the basis for building the relevant ESR skills to engage with the critical and funding challenges of this new artistic and cultural landscape.
The 11 ESRs were spread across four academic Beneficiaries (University of Wolverhampton [PI], University of Iceland, University of Edinburgh, Zeppelin University, Germany) and 7 non-academic Partner Organizations (POs) Tensta Konstall, Sweden; BAK, Netherlands; State of Concept, Greece; W-Est, Italy; Tranzit.ro Romania; Teatr Scena Prezentacje (Biennale Warsawa), Poland; and Icelandic Academy of the Arts, Reykjavik. The beneficiaries all have a long-standing critical commitment to socially engaged art; the POs represent an exemplary cross section of small-scale and larger independent spaces – projects spaces, cultural centres, art labs/research hubs –that are working at the cutting edge of social engaged art, and as such were able to provide support and the necessary resources for the ESRs to pursue non-academic research in the area of participatory, community, and praxis-based art activity.
As a result, FEINART has fulfilled, three substantive objectives:
1) the highlighting of the importance of socially engaged art in maintaining art’s critical relationship to public values in civil society in Europe, as a defence of a ‘new enlightenment’ project for art against all the current attacks by conservative forces on such practices.
2) the assessment and defence of the importance of independent spaces in the realization of these values.
3) the analysis of the economic conditions/constraints on these spaces and forms of practice, across national and regional territories, as the basis for supporting and sustaining socially engaged practice in the future.
