Cultural Program - CONVIVIAL CULTURES | XI Lisbon Summer School for the Study of Culture - Nithya Iyer, Jad Khairallah, and Zohar Iancu

ALTERNATIVE KNOWLEDGE IN THE MAKING: AN EXPERIMENTAL DIALOGUE BETWEEN ACADEMIC RESEARCH AND ARTISTIC INVESTIGATION

Abstract

In the early days of 2020, the artist and interdisciplinary researcher Nithya Iyer invited PhD researchers Jad Khairallah and Zohar Iancu to forge a collaborative experimental research project. Two weeks after starting their shared work Portugal went into lockdown, but the research process continued. This film explores the year-long creative journey that accompanied this project, which brought academic research into dialogue with artistic investigation and phenomenological practices. Exploring reflexive, critical, academic, and creative research methodologies, the film wishes to promote a brave discussion regarding the possibilities and challenges of creative academic research methodologies within current cultural and political settings. The project stems from a questioning of formal research practices: How can we reimagine research processes to include knowledges that lie outside traditional modalities and institutional framings? How can we share these alternate forms of research processes and outcomes? In November of the same year, only one week before the second lockdown, the three researchers presented an exhibition at the Hangar Centre for Artistic Investigation, Lisbon. Engaging in interdisciplinary and experimental scholarship that blurred the margin between art and academia, Khairallah, Iancu, and Iyer explore the possibilities for alternate models of knowledge-making to be integrated into traditional forms of research-doing.

Biographies

Nithya Iyer (Melbourne Institute of Experiential and Creative Art Therapy) is an interdisciplinary artist and researcher. She holds a Bachelor of Arts (Politics & International Relations) and Bachelor of Commerce (Finance) from Monash University, Melbourne, and was trained for 12 years at the Chandrabhanu Bharatalaya Academy of Indian Dance. In 2020 she completed her Masters in Therapeutic Arts Practice from the Melbourne Institute of Creative Art Therapy. Her practice dialogues between written, embodied and visual inquiries that engage experimental modes of meaning-making in investigating alterity, intersubjectivity and decoloniality. Having presented in Australia, India and Portugal, Iyer’s work attempts to disrupt traditional parameters of inquiry, aesthetics and performance using generative modalities of arts practice as means of both research and form.

Jad Khairallah is a PhD researcher at UCP - Catholic University of Portugal in Culture Studies. He holds a Master of Arts in Design from Notre Dame University - Lebanon. Khairallah’s work focuses on the relationship between shock and culture, in the case of Lebanon. His research tackles the shocking power that the non-normative imposes onto already established cultural concepts, particularly in terms of the queer body and the communicative practices of shock tactics prevalent in media, culture and the arts. Through an interdisciplinary model, Khairallah investigates the visual perception behind the screen, the relation it holds to its surroundings and the impact visual image has on identity.

Zohar Iancu is a PhD researcher at UCP - Catholic University of Portugal in Culture Studies. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology and Sociology from The Academic College of Tel Aviv-Yaffo and a Master of Arts in Culture Studies, Performance and Creativity from UCP. Additionally, she holds a diploma of Research and Documentary Screenplay from the Open University of Israel. Zohar is currently working on the theme of symbolic boundaries and the way they act to shape and influence the cultural, political, mental and physical environment of Israeli society. She finds much interest in Performative Research,  Feminist Theory, Liminality and Visual Culture.