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Mick Wilson

Assistant Head of Department

HDK-Valand - Academy of Art and Design
Mail
mick.wilson@akademinvaland.gu.se
Visiting address
Kristinelundsgatan 6-8
Göteborg
Postal address
Box 131
40530 Göteborg

Director of Studies

HDK-Valand - Academy of Art and Design
Mail
mick.wilson@akademinvaland.gu.se
Visiting address
Kristinelundsgatan 6-8
Göteborg
Postal address
Box 131
40530 Göteborg

Professor

The Crafts and Fine Art Unit
Mail
mick.wilson@akademinvaland.gu.se
Visiting address
Kristinelundsgatan 6-8
41137 Göteborg
Postal address
Box 131
40530 Göteborg

About Mick Wilson

Mick Wilson is an artist, educator and researcher based in Gothenburg and Dublin. He is currently Professor of Art, Assistant Head of Department at HDK-Valand, University of Gothenburg, and PI for the Centre for Art and the Political Imaginary.

Background

Trained as both an artist and historian of art and design–with graduate degrees in art & design history; information technology and education; and visual culture–he is a research professor at University of Gothenburg, appointed on both academic and artistic grounds (according to the Swedish University protocol.) Having three decades of experience in higher arts education, research, development and leadership, he has worked in a wide variety of roles and institutions, including as: former Director of Valand Academy, Gothenburg (2012-2018); Fellow at BAK, basis voor aktuele kunst, Utrecht, the Netherlands (2018/2019); Editor-in-chief PARSE Journal for Artistic Research (2015-2017); Dean of the Graduate School of Creative Arts & Media, Ireland (2007-2012); Chair of the SHARE network of 40 higher arts education institutions across 30-plus countries (2010-2014); and Head of Research, National College of Art & Design, Ireland (2005-2007).

Current research

The exhibition and the curatorial:

I have a long-standing interest in ideas of the curatorial and the exhibition as a site and agent of research. Together with colleagues in the EARN Curatorial Studies Workshop, I am currently working on two essays for publication later this year with the working titles: 'The curatorial is to curating as the political is to politics?' and 'Discursivility: Some polite talking points on curatorial turn taking'. Previous work in this strand includes editorial projects:

Research Education:

I have worked on a series of essays, book chapters, workshops, conferences and research seminars over the last 20 years that focus on aspects of research education and the challenges of introducing research education into higher arts education. Adopting a broadly anti-exceptionalist approach, and seeking to avoid positing a definitive or fundamental opposition between the artistic and the academic, this work has tried to lay out a specific practice of research education that seeks to re-negotiate the special pleading of the sector.

  • "'F*ck you and your footnotes': On some tropes in the rhetorical situation of supervision' in M. Borgen et al. (eds.) (2024) Challenging Institutionalization, Sternberg / MIT Press.

  • "La Mise-en-Abîme: Placing Academic Writing in Scare Quotes”, in Bernd Herzogenrath (ed.) (2022) New Perspectives on Academic Writing: The Thing That Wouldn’t Die, Bloomsbury;

  • "White Mythologies & Epistemic Refusals" in R.Mateus-Berr & R.Jochum (eds.) (2020) Teaching Artistic Research, De Gruyter;

  • "Engaging Performative Contradiction: Introducing the Rhetorics of Practice and Method to Artist Researchers" in P. Sormani et al. (eds.) (2018) Practicing Art/Science: Experiments in an Emerging Field, Routledge.

  • "Take one step forward, two steps back…" in J. Kaila et al. (eds.) (2017) Futures of Artistic Research, Uniarts Helsinki, FI.

  • "Between Apparatus and Ethos: On Building a Research Pedagogy in the Arts" in James Elkins (ed.) (2014) Artists with PhDs: On the New Doctoral Degree in Studio Art, (2nd Ed.), New Academia Publishing.

  • with S. van Ruiten (eds.) (2013) SHARE Handbook for Artistic Research Education, ELIA

  • "Four Theses Attempting to Revise the Terms of a Debate" in James Elkins (ed.) (2009) Artists with PhDs: On the New Doctoral Degree in Studio Art, (1st Ed.) New Academia Publishing.

Political Imaginaries:

Current research conducted through the Centre for Art and the Political Imaginary seeks to specify the affordances and limitations of the construct "political imaginary" with particular focus on the question of how this may be constructed as an operational space for practice-based inquiries. An area that is becoming increasingly important for me here is that of social sphere imaginaries or 'field' distinctions (the uneasy division of social worlds into contrastive zones such as public/private or living/dead or free/unfree or institutional/non-institutional; the construction of relatively autonomous fields such as 'the social' 'the economy' 'culture' 'law' 'technology' and 'the aesthetic'; and the contrastive temporal orderings of contemporary/non-contemporary-pasts or futures). Other areas of interest include questions of violence and friendship within the broad tradition of liberalism. My specific interest is how these different imaginaries may be operational spaces for artistic practices while also being constitutive of those practices. One ongoing, and as yet unresolved strand within this work, is with the positioning of relations between the living and the dead, specifically with the variety of forms of political community with the dead, currently using the figure of the 'body count' as a device to track these in a series of workshops.

Some recent work in this strand includes the editorial projects:

and essays and book chapters such as:

  • "Publicness as Problematic" in Art and the Public Sphere, 13.2 (online 2026)

  • "Body Counts, Balancing Acts and the Performativity of Statements" Collective Study in Times of Emergency, (2023/4) L’Internationale Online.

  • "Imagining Elsewise" in R. Jochum, J. M. Burton, and J. Watson (eds.) (2023) Turning Points: Responsive Pedagogies in Studio Art Education, Teachers College Press Columbia University.

  • "The Crowd of the Dead" in (2022) Glossary of Common Knowledge Vol. II,

  • "To Live the Coming Death", M. Hlavajova & W. Maas (eds.) (2019) Propositions for Non-Fascist Living, MIT Press.

  • "What Is to Be Done?", S.H. Madoff (ed.) (2019) What about Activism? Sternberg Press.

  • "The Social as Always Already the Political", in Giorgiana Zachia et al., (eds.) (2018) Public Enquiries: PARK LEK and the Social Turn in Scandinavian Contexts, BDP, UK.

  • "Institution and Political Community with the Dead" in P. O’Neill et al. (eds.) (2017) How Institutions Think, MIT Press.

  • "Dead Public: An unfinished enquiry", in C. Gheorghe (ed.) (2014) Vector-artistic research in context, Iasi, Romania.

Rhetoric and knowledge conflict:

Since my doctoral work on knowledge conflict and the institutional form(s) of university, I have had a concern with the rhetorical dynamics of knowledge conflict and a broad interest in the use of rhetorical analysis as a research tool. Recently this has focussed on the study of "figures" and specifically on the figure of the archive.

Current and recently concluded projects include:

Current courses based on this work include:

Current doctoral supervisions include:

  • 'The Contested Doctorate' , Emiliano Battista, VUB and HDK-Valand GU (2025-)

  • 'Caravan of Peace: Geopolitics of Exhibition in the Post-Cold War Continuum' Vladislav Shapovalov, NABA and HDK-Valand GU (2024-)

  • 'Pedagogies of Care and the Curatorial' Andris Brinksman NABA and HDK-Valand GU (2024-)

  • 'From the critique of the institution to institutional transformations' Giulia Menegale, external co-supervisor, Scuola IMT Alti Studi Lucca (2022-)

  • 'Self-initiated institutions: The case of artists-run educational platforms' Ginevre Ludovici, external co-supervisor, Scuola IMT Alti Studi Lucca (2022-)

  • 'Curatorial Practices in Latvia: Approaches and Debates' Antra Priede, external co-supervisor, Latvian Art Academy (2022-)

  • 'Pan-African Feminist Ecological Creative Imaginaries' Nkule Mabaso, HDK-Valand GU (2021-)

recently concluded (for full list see CV.)

Recent and current workshops and conferences:

as part of research on the body-count as a device to explore imaginaries of relations between the living and the dead:

as part of research on the question of exhibition and curatorial practices:

  • 'In Different Places: Imagining the Biennial Form' symposium on the future biennale frameworks of three distinct traditions': Havanna, Istnanbul and Gothenburg. Co-organised by European Artist Research Network (EARN), Gothenberg International Biennial for Contemporary Art (GIBCA), HKU Utrecht, and HDK-Valand research education. Speakers include: Margarita Gonzalez Lorente, Ioana Leca, Bige Örer, and Henk Slager. (8 Jun 2022)

  • 'O My Friends, There Is No Friend' three week intensive with guest researchers and speakers including: Simon Critchley, Celine Condorelli, Yuk Hui, Walter Mignolo, Jota Mombaca, Sara Pierce, Elizabeth Povinelli, Helena Reckitt, Sybil Schwarzenbach, Shuddha Sengupta, and Claire Tancons co-convened with Prof. Steven Henry Madoff of SVA New York (28 Jun -16 July 2021)

  • 'The Political Condition of the Young Cultural Proletariat' with colleagues from Iași and Gothenburg, and guest researchers and speakers including: Raluca Voinea (Bucharest), Rena Rädle & Vladan Jeremić (Belgrade), Vladimir Us (Kishinev), and Vasyl Cherepanyn (Kyiv) together with Prof. Cătălin Gheorghe, Vector Studio,”George Enescu” National University of the Arts in Iași. (22-24 Jun 2021)

  • 'handfuls thrown into air and scattered over earth' curatorial workshop as part of Farewell to Research: Bucharest Biennale 9 (2020)

as part of ongoing work in respect of the expanded terms of contemporary art practices: