Research fellows 2011
Each year our fellowship programme enables artists and researchers to develop their work.
In 2011 our visiting fellows included Allan Antliff, Jeremy Howard, Paul Becker, Gülru Çakmak, Francesco Pedraglio, Robert Slifkin, Daniel Zec and Pil and Galia Kollectiv.
Allan Antliff
University of Victoria
Senior Research Fellowship
2011
From Vorticism to Dada
Allan Antliff will be developing his theories on anarchism’s central role in the formulation and reception of early twentieth-century modernism by examining the activities of Dadaists in New York between 1915 and 1923, part of a publication in progress, Reconfiguring New York Dada.
Antliff will spend his fellowship specifically researching an argument for an American variation of Vorticism, independent of but influenced by the British-based movement.
Jeremy Howard
University of St Andrews
Senior Research Fellowship
2011
Vladimir Markov: The Painter Who Changed Sculpture
Jeremy Howard’s research is part of a wider collaborative project exploring the ideas of Vladimir Markov (1877-1914), an artist whose research into sculptural principles led him to undertake, and publish, groundbreaking research into the sculpture of Easter Island, North Asian peoples and Africa.
The ultimate intention of this project is to create an exhibition and monograph/catalogue dedicated to Markov’s provocative approach to art.
Paul Becker
Research Fellowship
2011
The Life of Anton Lesseman
Paul Becker’s fellowship research will lead to a written fabrication of the life of an imaginary artist, a contemporary of Henry Moore, as a method of examining accepted histories in an original way, refiguring those histories and perhaps offering a correlative, an antithetical or parallax view on a familiar subject: in this case the life and work of Henry Moore himself.
Gülru Çakmak
Western Michigan University
Research Fellowship
2011
Jean-Léon Gérôme: The Innovative Years (1851-1859)
Gülru Çakmak will expand upon her dissertation, which focuses on the work of the nineteenth-century French painter and sculptor Jean-Léon Gérôme (1824-1904), by giving an account of the artist’s transition from painting to mixed-media and polychromatic sculpture in the late 1870s.
Çakmak takes the artist’s work as a case study to explore the controversial emergence of polychromatic and mixed-media sculpture in French art in the second half of the nineteenth century.
Francesco Pedraglio
Research Fellowship
2011
Writing as a medium for the production of and reflection on the idea of abstract objects
Francesco Pedraglio employs written words as non-representational tools to trigger a visual result aiming to ‘corner’ the nature of a carefully chosen series of objects – redefining language and the written word as active tools to freely imagine and produce abstract sculptures.
Pedraglio will develop a series of written works, starting from an abstract reading of selected objects, which will apply different strategies to research the abstract potentiality of these same objects, subsequently translating these writings in live lectures and public events.
Robert Slifkin
New York University
Research Fellowship
2011
Incidental Cenotaphs: The renewal of Monumentalism in Postwar Sculpture (and Beyond)
As part of a larger book project, Robert Slifkin will examine Henry Moore’s sculpture Nuclear Energy and situate it alongside contemporaneous work addressing the same subject.
Drawing upon the theoretical writings of Paul Virilio, it is Slifkin’s hypothesis that the logic of nuclear weapons may provide a powerful means to historicize the widespread interest in an embodied or phenomenological understanding of postwar sculpture, as well as post-humanist approaches to cultural production.
Daniel Zec
University of Zagreb
Research Fellowship
2011
The Life and Work of Oscar Nemon (1906-1985)
Daniel Zec investigates to what extent Oskar Nemon ‘belongs’ to Croatian art history, and how much to English culture – within which Nemon spent the greater part of his life and completed the majority of his artistic work.
Zec’s ongoing research focuses particularly on Nemon’s lost work and portrait sculptures. Planned outcomes are a book, an exhibition and an exhibition catalogue.
“Thanks to the opportunity to stay in Leeds and delve into the Institute’s archive, I earned my doctorate four years ago, focusing on the life and work of Oscar Nemon.”
Daniel Zec, 2024
Zec is currently working on a book about Oscar Nemon. Find out more about his work in this interview with Alice Hiller:
oscarnemon.org.uk/daniel-zec-and-oscar-nemon-an-encounter-across-two-centuries
Pil and Galia Kollectiv
Goldsmiths College / University of Reading
Research Fellowship
2011
The role of faith in sustaining the fiction of capital
Pil and Galia Kollectiv will explore the notion of capitalism as a faith system founded on the abstract concept of money, considering the relationship between decorative sculpture and post-religious iconography. In this context, they are especially interested in Oscar Nemon’s proposal to construct a Temple of Universal Ethics. They will be working towards realising a project as a series of ritual objects pertaining to a cult of finance.
