States of the Art – SOTA’25 to take place on 3 and 4 July

The second edition of States of the Art (SOTA’25), this year titled Where is it (Going)?, is just around the corner. The event will take place on 3 and 4 July in the Sala de Provas Públicas at UC’s Colégio das Artes.

The Doctoral Programme in Contemporary Art at Colégio das Artes (CAUC) already has a significant body of work addressing the challenges of Art Based Research (ABR). Since 2012, 64 PhD theses have been completed at CAUC, exploring a wide range of topics and realities, and reflecting the epistemological complexity that defines the ABR model today. In 2023, the programme’s coordinators decided to undertake a qualitative assessment of this output and to give greater academic visibility to the scientific and artistic work developed by alumni since completing their PhDs.

This led to the creation of States of the Art – Meetings on Artistic Research. The first edition, SOTA’23 (20 June 2023), focused on the research carried out by alumni during and after their PhDs in Contemporary Art.

Building on that momentum, an open call was launched for alumni of all Portuguese doctoral programmes in the arts and for PhD holders working in the field of ABR. There was a great deal of interest in the call: following peer review, 22 papers were selected, offering diverse and thought-provoking approaches to practice-based research. These contributions explore the transformative impact of artistic practice on researchers working in various artistic, authorial, and curatorial fields, as well as the pedagogical and epistemological dimensions of ABR.