April 21, 2027 ·Academy of Performing Arts in Bratislava ·Events

18th SAR International Conference on Artistic Research - Beyond the Familiar

21–23 April 2027
Academy of Performing Arts in Bratislava
Bratislava, Slovakia

The 2027 conference will be hosted by the Academy of Performing Arts in Bratislava (VŠMU), one of the oldest and most highly accredited institutions for theatre, film, music and dance in Central Europe. Founded in 1949, VŠMU brings together three faculties across a densely networked artistic ecosystem in Slovakia and the wider region. Bratislava as a capital offers a particular vantage point on the questions this conference raises. Its location and history place it at a particular intersection of Central European cultural trajectories, while its compact cultural environment connects educational institutions, artistic organisations and independent creative practices. This context provides a distinctive setting for considering how artistic practices and forms of research move across cultural, social and institutional boundaries. VŠMU has been engaged in artistic research for more than two decades, making it an established part of the university’s artistic and academic practice.

The Society for Artistic Research (SAR) is a member-led international, non-profit association that fosters the development and dissemination of artistic research as a distinct form of knowledge production. SAR maintains the Research Catalogue (RC), an international database and publishing platform for artistic research, and publishes the peer-reviewed Journal for Artistic Research (JAR). Since 2010, SAR has convened an annual International Conference on Artistic Research, hosted each year by a different member institution.

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Conference Theme: Beyond the Familiar

The Familiar as Ground

When we talk about the familiar, we begin with "we", and the ground already moves. Who is the "we" that claims a shared familiar? The familiar is produced, learned, constructed and maintained through upbringing, education and environment, and equally through the deliberate work of making the previously unfamiliar one's own. On a personal level, the familiar is also the ground of our everyday experience: the habits, surroundings, memories and sensibilities through which the world becomes recognisable and meaningful and through which the seemingly ordinary acquires its aesthetic significance. As such, it remains under negotiation, certain elements holding fast while others dissolve, down to the point where even the self proves only partly familiar terrain.

Familiar in flux

This negotiation has rarely been as exposed as it is today. Truths circulate in the plural – alternative, mutually exclusive – while contexts overlay one another, globally networked and permanently present. Borders dissolve for some and harden for others. What counts as familiar is also shaped by social and political forces: by the narratives through which communities define themselves, by the histories and forms of knowledge they recognise as their own, and by those they leave at the margins. As exclusionary and nationalist tendencies gain ground in many places, cultural life is increasingly marked by tensions over its autonomy, public role and the conditions in which artistic work can take place. To ask about the familiar under such conditions is anything but nostalgic: it is to ask how orientation, belonging and shared understanding remain possible at all. In a region whose history has been marked by borders drawn, erased and redrawn, and by belongings repeatedly renegotiated, these questions acquire a particular resonance.

Artistic research at the threshold

Artistic research is well placed to pursue them. It begins from the limits of individual experience, where what is familiar to one person may remain unfamiliar to another. As a practice, it enacts the negotiation it studies: it appropriates, tests, unlearns, estranges. Its knowledge, embodied, material, intuitive and affective, operates at the threshold where the familiar and the unfamiliar trade places. Yet artistic research also grows familiar to itself: its languages, institutions and communities provide continuity, but can harden into self-reference, including the vocabularies that come to feel self-evident within the field.

The conference therefore poses a double question: how to interrogate the familiar as a social, personal and cultural condition, shaped by the experiences, histories and perspectives through which we understand the world, and how to interrogate the familiarities through which artistic practice understands itself, even where this means unlearning the learned. Where the unfamiliar has itself become the everyday, practices at home in it may be what carries understanding forward. Understood this way, the conference opens a space of encounter between artistic traditions, cultural worlds and ways of knowing, each willing to have its horizons altered by the others.

Conference formats

The conference brings together peer-reviewed artistic research alongside critical and reflective contributions on artistic research and its wider contexts. A diversity of formats is welcome, including project and poster presentations, performances, workshops, roundtable discussions, and experimental formats and other practice-based forms of presenting and sharing research.

Participants are encouraged to consider how the form of presentation might relate to the character of their work. Contributions may combine different formats or propose forms that do not fit conventional conference structures.