Hugarflug annual conference on artistic research
11. - 12. September 2025
Iceland University of the Arts
This research draws upon the experience of three art school lecturers who together work as Common Culture. All have witnessed the transformation of the art school from a relatively free educational space for creative exploration and experimentation into a highly structured provision, centred on a commercial transaction between the student-client and institution.
In response, Common Culture have developed a series of humorous narratives, set within a fictional art school. These are turned into the visual form of a comic, with AI generated imagery.
The paper will be presented both as a formal presentation, and as a performative delivery of an ‘Emergency Meeting’ featured in the comic, with the presenter adopting the role of the dean of school.
A series of short videos, Rumours, will be presented in available spaces around the university. These decontextualised moments, isolated from the larger narrative, are akin to the overheard conversation snatched in university corridors.
Ian Brown
Professor of Fine Art, University of Staffordshire, UK.
The artist group, Common Culture, is David Campbell, Mark Durden and Ian Brown. Common Culture explores how contemporary social identity is constructed through the rituals of consumption within popular culture and investigate how venerated and vernacular cultural forms are unequivocally bound up with issues of taste, class and notions of national identity.
They have exhibited extensively in the UK and internationally, including solo exhibitions in Athens, Berlin, Belfast, Birmingham, Cardiff, Derry, Derby, Lisbon, London, Manchester, Miami, New York, Nottingham and Porto. Major group exhibitions include: The Laughable Enigma of Ordinary Life, Arquipélago, Centro de Artes Contemporâneas in São Miguel, the Azores, Portugal; Double Act: Art & Comedy, Bluecoat, Liverpool & MAC, Belfast; Manifesta 8, Murcia, Spain; The Bienal Cerveira, Portugal; Grin & Bear It – Cruel Humour in Art and Life, The Lewis Glucksman Gallery, Cork; The 6th Shanghai Biennale; Shopping – A Century of Art and Consumer Culture, Tate Liverpool.