Daphne Plessner

United Kingdom (residence)
en

 Daphne Plessner is a practicing artist who writes and produces visual and text based artwork and public interventions. Her current project is an online publishing platform called “The Citizen Artist” (www.citizenartist.org.uk). It has two functions: it documents collaborative and interventionist art projects that creatively use investigative journalistic strategies to examine the notion of citizenship through a series of interweaving topics such as 'Protest', 'What is a University?', 'Assembly'. The site also archives journal articles, critical writing and information on activist-artists and artists who use media (print publishing and journalism, broadcast and new media) as central to their practice. She has won a number of research grants for projects and has exhibited her artwork in galleries and institutions in Europe over the past 20 years. She is also an Associate Professor at the Emily Carr University of Art & Design in Vancouver, Canada and formerly Senior Lecturer and Course Director of the BA Book Arts & Design programme at London College of Communication, University of the Arts London, UK. She holds a BA (Hons) Philosophy, Birkbeck College, University of London and is currently working on a MPhil/PhD in Politics at Goldsmith's College. Previously, she studied Fine Art at a number of institutions, including the Emily Carr College of Art and the University of British Columbia (Art History) before taking up study at the Akademie der Bildenden Kunste, Munich, Germany under the artist Robin Page, one of the early members of the Fluxus movement.

 

 

research

research expositions

  • What is a University? (2014) author(s): Daphne Plessner published in: Journal for Artistic Research
    The popular perception of the University today involves notions of hierarchies of knowledge distribution and centres of excellence. The University is also regarded as a space where the values of social equality and mobility allegedly are reproduced, carrying the traces of sentiments such as those in which education is seen as a social good, a preparation for public life and civic responsibility. However, despite this general conception, students may look to a University for material, that is, career advantages, lecturers believe that universities are for critical inquiry and self-development (at least in Europe and America), and managers see it as a business enterprise and replicate the economic strategies of neo-liberalism. None of these conceptions sit very well together. In fact, they conflict sharply. The pressing question then is, What is a University? This project investigates and responds to this problematic question by looking more carefully at how people imagine the idea of a University. What exactly are the assumptions of say, a group of research students? How do different universities instigate and enforce the boundaries of membership and participation? And exactly what kind of education is on offer when universities operate as a 'service' industry with a managerial rationale borrowed from the business models of corporate capitalism? These questions weave through a series of collaborative and interventionist art projects, some of which are still under development and others have yet to be realised. The point is not to arrive at an answer, but to capture the experience of the University in transition and to problematise its conditions.
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