LENKA VESELÁ (* 1980) is a PhD student and assistant professor at the Department of Theory and History of Art, Faculty of Fine Arts ( FFA), Brno University of Technology. She graduated in painting at the FFA BUT and completed a year of studies with honours at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts, London.

Her work combines research on "synthetic bodies" (bodies manipulated by technology and responding to technologically transformed environments) with an interest in "synthetic knowledge" at the intersection of art, activism and feminist technoscience. She is the initiator of Synthetic Becoming, an art-research project bringing together researchers in the arts and humanities and social sciences who are concerned with the effects of hormonally active chemicals on human bodies and more-than-human environments. The outcome of the joint project is a collective monograph, published in co-edition by FFA BUT and the Berlin publishing house K-Verlag, and an exhibition of the same name in the FFA Gallery, curated by Lenka Veselá. Lenka Veselá's own artistic-research intervention presented in this project consisted in the creation of a speculative tool for monitoring affective symptoms induced by endocrine disruptors. The resulting brochure is a challenge to individualised understandings of responsibility for one's own health and is also a means for a collective research practice that recognises the need for a political solution.

Lenka Veselá also focuses on artistic research theoretically, for example in her article "Artistic Research as Academic Borderlands" for the Journal for Artistic Research, or in her article "Artistic Doctorates as a Means of Sustainable Artistic Research Practice" for ArteActa. Her other recent publications include "Getting Angry with Endocrine-Disrupting Chemicals" for Matter: Journal of New Materialist Research and "The Chemical Anthropocene" for FlashArt. At FFA, she co-teaches the course Research through Art and runs the Feminist Seminar. She is a lecturer, organizer and feminist thinker promoting inclusive forms of transdisciplinary knowledge production.

I guess it was actually at the Faculty of Fine Arts when I started my PhD studies. In the first year there was a course by Lenka Klodová called Research through Art. That was my first introduction to art research.

I think it was rather that it was the first time I came across art research as a concept. But somehow I guess it inspired me, or helped me to name the work I wanted to pursue during my PhD studies.

For me it's a bit of a strategic term, it's a term that doesn't have a general definition, so different people interpret it in different ways, which is interesting for me. I think that PhD students at FFA project into it both their own desires, what they would like to do, and also some demands on themselves, in terms of self-discipline, because they think that the concept is asking something of them. I myself treat the term quite loosely, and I take advantage of the fact that it doesn't have a robust, authoritative definition, so I can treat it in a way that suits me. Doing work that I enjoy or that I think is meaningful, and using the term to say 'this is artistic research'.

Towards the end of the first year or in its second half. I came back to FFA after quite a long time and in the meantime it had become a completely different institution, so I was actually getting to know it. After the first year, I even changed the topic of my dissertation because it was only after, say, half a year that I found out what you can do within you PhD studies. Based on that, I decided to change the topic and then the course where we were introduced to art research came into it a little bit. Maybe at that time we weren't so much dealing with the concept of artistic research, but more with the concept of the artistic doctorate, what its content was and how we could use that platform.  

Well, I think they certainly have. Now I don't identify myself as an artist so much, and I'm rather more comfortable with the term researcher. Actually, it's somehow related to how I applied for the PhD in the first place. I only had practical education, from FFA as well as from my studies abroad, and for my PhD studies I applied to the Department of Theories. During my first year I went on various internships with theorists, a kind of crash course in theory, and then I got more into the research aspects. In my practice, I'm thinking more about some aesthetic strategies within research rather than art production. My research is still very much, as they say, "embodied, embedded", that is, embedded in the body, material and sensory experience, I need to touch something a lot, to be in contact with some material. I collect various visual material, create an archive, and make recordings, which I then use in my research in various ways. But it's not that I'm creating something that I can call an artistic work. 

Half and half. The fact that Lenka Klodová invited me to teach her course has also helped me to educate myself a lot in the field of artistic research. And because the definition of artistic research isn't fixed, I confess that I pretty much tailor it to what I want to do, or even to what I want to teach. There's maybe some activism in there, or just feminism and an effort to democratize the concept of research and science.

I'm sure it is. Both in how I discuss artistic research with students and in how I use the term myself. Very specifically: we're now publishing a book with a collective of authors. Most of them are male and female artists, but we called it a collective monograph to give it that type of scholarly outcome. It was part of a pragmatic strategy. When you ask for support for a professional monograph, you get more money than if you say it's going to be an artbook. And that's something that I also disagree with. An artbook is not a catalogue, it's just a different way of articulating an argument and working with concepts. I don't think it's less than scholarly research. But at the same time, I've already laid my cards on the table in that application and said that part of it will be rethinking what research is and how it can be presented, how the results can be presented.

Well, the tangible result is that we got the grant for it. So we were able to do it with a collective that has grown over time. In the end, the decision to do the "research" and present it in a "scholarly monograph" was very much reflected in the debate we had with one another: that it was quite important for us to assert that authority and to say that what we were doing was not just some creative experiment, but an important contribution to knowledge in the field we were dealing with. That it's a contribution that is serious.

The book has a broader scope and is grounded in the discourse of feminist materialism, queer ecologies, new materialism and posthumanism. It deals not only with pharmaceutical synthetic hormones, but also with chemicals present in the environment that we absorb involuntarily, and how they affect our bodies, but also our feelings or thoughts. The original idea was that this would be evenly represented in the book, but there's more of an emphasis on environmental chemicals there in the end. My path in the PhD studies was that I started with pharmaceutical interventions and gradually my interest shifted to the environment and chemicals in the environment. At the same time, the non-binarity of how those substances act in different contexts is important to me. We are trying to overcome the normative distinction of chemicals and their effects into those that are good and desirable and those that are harmful, and focus more on the difference between voluntary experimentation and involuntary exposure.

I think that even the connection between the two areas, which are not connected in science, is important. There is a separate study of endocrine disruptors and a separate study of pharmaceutical synthetic hormones, which are developed deliberately, and there is virtually no intersection between the two. And then of course there's the difference that our research is very personal - for all the artists involved, and there are anthropologists and ethnographers and an evolutionary biologist. There's always a strong personal reason why we're researching that particular area. I also think it's important that activism comes into it a lot, and also bringing in people from outside who are neither part of the art world nor part of the scientific world, for example, one self-help group which one of the anthropologists works with. Or a local community is involved in one of those parts. Some people work in community organized labs. It's a conscious bringing of other knowledge into the field of academic research, even if it is "just" academic arts research. From the perspective of the humanities, let alone the natural sciences, artistic research is somewhere on the fringe, but it still counts as academic research somehow. So it's also a way of democratizing knowledge and contradicting the gatekeeping of what science is and what a scholarly monograph published by a university should look like.

We do have that ambition, but, realistically, I think the most important thing is that it makes sense to us and to people who are related to us in some way. For the needs of our community, we are looking for an alternative vision of what our body is. What does it mean to be polluted by something? What is toxicity? There is a much greater emphasis on relationality and being aware of how we are connected to each other and to our environment. In contrast to the scientific and medical discourse where everything is terribly individual and where even those exposures to chemicals are taken as something individualized, we are looking for different starting points, structural ones. We relate to toxicity through the concept of care, but also through imagining what our body is and what it can be.

What helped me a lot, and this brings us to the collectivity of this research, is that even though I initially started with my own body, I gradually found people to talk to about the topic. It was very important to build up at least a small circle of these people. Tereza Stöckelová from the Institute of Sociology sent me a call to a conference in Oslo that I wouldn't have known about otherwise, because she knew what I was doing, what I was interested in, and at the conference I had an opportunity to meet similar researchers. Our group wouldn't have formed if we hadn't met at that conference which was very specialized. That's where our group really crystallized. Then we met at two more conferences and we started meeting and organizing ourselves informally. By then there was a pandemic, so it was online. At that time I was the only artist among them, the others being people from social sciences and humanities, but they were close to art people through various collaborations. We thought we would like to do something together, but we wanted to do it differently. We talked about books that we liked and that inspired us, and then out of that came a collaboration with a publisher that makes the type of books that appealed to us. Then I applied for a publishing grant, and that's how it all started.

I try to educate myself in the field of artistic research, but I also relate to theory, which is not so much a part of artistic research now, but I want it to be. That's why some of my publications are in the field of art research, whereby I'm trying to create a field for myself, but maybe also for other people, a field where I can pursue my vision. I'm creating a kind of shield for myself, fortifying the framework within which I want to work.

I would say it's research. And I actually hesitate to use the word artistic, it's more of an aesthetic intention, in the original Greek meaning of the word - aisthetikos - as sensory perception. It's not that kind of objective, dispassionate approach, but I'm always connected to a material, to a particular sensory experience. For example, my individual project is about emotions - making chemicals visible through disturbed emotions as a strategy that can make us more sensitive to the presence of chemicals in the environment, and as a way of being able to feel those substances and to imagine cohabitation with them.

It pushes the boundaries of knowledge in that it makes room for knowledge that was not considered scientific at all before. The things I do here at FFA are encouraged and welcomed. But those of us who are doing, say, multimodal research that involves some aesthetic strategies or collaborations, but they are doing it at traditional universities, within the humanities or social sciences, have to think much more about how they articulate those things in order to get away with it. For example, here at FFA, more and more people are using the concept of autotheory, thinking that it's a perfectly relevant form of theory. The fact that it is situated and grounded in their subjectivity does not diminish its relevance, quite the opposite. They don't make a claim to general truth, of course, but there is a claim in the sense that their experience matters and says something important. So the fact that the research is grounded in specific terms is no reason why others should not engage with it. Autotheory in particular is often embedded in very specific positions at the margins of society, and just by being a view from the margins, it also says a lot about the centre and the system as a whole. It is often from the margins that one can see things that are not visible from the centre. Also, the aspect of intervention is very much there, rather than neutral reflection, to convince others of the importance of one's vision of the world, perhaps through artistic means.

Anyway, I think that the concept of artistic research has a lot of emancipatory potential. Due to the fact that it already has the character of an academic discipline, it can loosen the category and confront the scientific way of working and to point out where it can be problematic, for example, where there may be some legacy of colonial ways of thinking about the world.

I don't present myself as an artist, but I always say that I am an art-based researcher, that is, I am a researcher rooted in art. And I start my presentation by positioning my work. For example, one of my starting points and driving forces motivating my work is that I suffer from migraines, and I will admit to that as well. I think it's important to mention this when I talk about emotions and their disruption. In some ways I may be more akin to design or extended design or speculative design than I am to free art. Specifically, my work is about how emotions can be an index of environmental pollution, because one of the effects of endocrine disruptors is that they disrupt the brain and desensitize us. For this I have produced a booklet that looks like a medical manual, and is actually derived from an existing manual that is used to monitor emotional symptoms caused by fluctuations of physiological hormones, where it is assumed that all symptoms are due to physiological hormones, and no consideration is given to the intervention of any other hormonal substances. So I used the same symptoms, but I added the speculative question that it's not just physiological hormones, but that it's the interaction of physiological and endocrine disruptors, and if someone is using synthetic hormones as well, then that whole group of diverse hormonal molecules are involved in the resulting condition. Another important thing is that in medical discourse these things are terribly individualized, so the manuals and the various apps are for self-monitoring. My tool, by its aesthetics, also evokes that it is self-monitoring in order to make an individual diagnosis and based on that an individual solution in the form of prevention or medical intervention. But then it shows that there is no truly effective individual solution to the problem of chemical exposures, that the solution must be collective, political. One cannot individually protect oneself against chemicals present in the environment. Moreover, the focus on individual prevention and protection then reduces the willingness to talk together about some collective, structural solution. 

As I teach a course on artistic research, I attend PhD colloquia where I see the full spectrum of what our students are doing. So I very loosely conflate art research and the content of artistic doctorate. I really think of it as saying that artistic research is what doctoral students do as part of their PhD studies, and by doing that, it becomes artistic research. But it seemed to me a little that even though the research is supposed to be artistic, in the colloquia for the first and second year those who were more artistic were at a bit of a disadvantage. Because I've done an analysis of PhD questionnaires, I know that about one third of PhD students are not people who have studied at art faculties, but come either from art history, or even more often from some humanities or even technical disciplines with some overlap of architecture, and they are theoretically better equipped and have the advantage of a greater awareness of scientific methodologies. Those who are more artistic are still finding their ways and methods. They are building their terrain, entering it, letting it work on them, and only then are they looking for questions and forming networks of relationships. This is how artistic research differs from scientific research, in that it has nothing fixed in advance, that we often look at our topics by trial and error and create methods as we go along. This is close to ethnographic methods, where the researcher is educated in the field but also wants to go into the field without preconceptions, let it affect her, and only then formulate research questions that are really important and that she cannot know before she enters the field.

It was a combination of things. After my master's degree studies, I studied for one more year at Saint Martins in London. And I enjoyed it immensely. I had a great tutor. The study was theoretically much more robust than at FFA where there was hardly any theory. But then came the disillusionment of not knowing how to relate it to my artistic practice. So I completely disconnected from it. I had kids and I wondered whether or not I would ever go back. I was thinking about switching to theory, but at the same time I had no formal training in it. I was also thinking about working for a NGO. I was thinking a lot about what to do next. And then I did some research on what a doctorate in art was, so I applied and it was successful. But it wasn't until I was doing my studies that I worked out what artistic research was and how to do it in a meaningful way. I don't think applicants and applicants for studies today have that luxury anymore. The competition is getting more fierce every year, the demands on students' preparedness are increasing, and the way they have their projects thought out and set up is improving.

Surely. I didn't read anything at all during my entire studies at FFA - or I read some, but I didn't connect it with artistic work at all, these were two different lines. Then I read a lot more at Saint Martins, everyone there was so well-read, so I was catching up. And then when I had kids, at first I was still trying to do some art, but it turned out not to work. My daughter was a baby who didn't eat or sleep, so the opportunity to do something just wasn't there. But I started to read a lot more, it was much easier to take a book and read for a while when the kids were asleep. And I felt like immersing myself in theory even more.

Definitely research and developing my idea of what artistic research is. I'm also very much into teaching. Interacting with people and giving them my experience, opening something new for them. I felt a lot of things intuitively in the beginning, so I know that if someone helps you to name those intuitively felt things, it makes your job a lot easier. Or we name it in a group discussion, and then the person is much more confident and self-assured, and can develop their project in a better and more conscious way.

I think that since the emergence of conceptual art or performance art, it has become increasingly important to think of art not as a means to create an autonomous artifact, but as a means of communication. To talk about something, even if by different means than, say, writing an article about something. Which I think is the case here at FFA not only at the doctoral studies level, but also at the master's degree and the bachelor's degree studies level. Students concentrate more on their topic, on the process or on the practice - what they do, what they want to say - and less on the result. In the end, and this is the problem of the artistic practice, these people are not creating works that will sell but that will be some way of communication. It's not something that produces things that will then be sold and that they will make a living from, but rather it's some kind of service to others or an educational program. So then the question is how to fund such things. It requires a whole different way of thinking about artistic work and how it should be valued and from what sources. I think the great strength of artistic research is paradoxically that we have no original methods or a set of methods that are ours and that we can learn and then rigorously apply. And that the methods that we adopt are not self-evident to us, so we question how we can actually use them. There's some shyness about whether we're using them well, but there's also some productive amateurism, or even the audacity that we don't want to use them in exactly the right way, but need to adapt them for ourselves.
I often come across this because the people I'm in contact with are anthropologists and ethnographers, and that made me want to do something like this, but at the same time I felt that this was something I probably couldn't do. For me, it was a completely different context to which I was looking for a way, there was a terrible reluctance at the beginning. It's only now at the very end of my studies that I've started to do something that is close to ethnography. Because my research is about interconnectedness that transcends individual experience, I chose a group workshop format where I and others looked for intersections of what we perceive as similar in terms of chemical exposures and emotional experience, what experience we share. This is something I would like to develop more in the future, trying different ways of collective conversation and exploration, based on the principle of sharing experience that is concrete and situated, but also often collectively shared. That's what I find interesting about artistic research, that there is room for such experimentation.