Following the 2022 call for grants for centre of excellence, the Swedish Research Council has decided to fund 15 research environments. The Royal Institute of Art is one of them.
For the Royal Institute of Art, the approved application means that a centre of excellence for art and political performance will be established in collaboration with the Department of HDK-Valand at the University of Gothenburg – the first of its kind in Sweden. The project initiator is Professor Natasha marie Llorens.
The aim, according to the Swedish Research Council, is to support the highest level of artistic research in Swedish postgraduate education and in postgraduate education in the visual arts.
Sanne Kofod Olsen, Vice-Chancellor of the Royal Institute of Art, received the news with joy and gratitude.
– In recent years, the Royal Institute of Art has worked intensively and purposefully to build up its research environment in artistic research. With previous support from the Swedish Research Council, the university has launched several distinguished research projects. With this extraordinary grant for the establishment of a centre of excellence for art and political performance – in collaboration with a well-established research environment at the department HDK-Valand – we are strengthening our research and thus we can continue to work on the development of our research environment and research-based teaching.
A total of 124 applications were assessed by an international panel, and the Swedish Research Council describes the competition as very tough.
– The panel, consisting of experts in this type of centre formation, was very impressed by the quality of the project proposals. A large proportion of the applications were of an exceptionally high standard,” says Mattias Marklund, who led the design of the grant, on the Swedish Research Council’s website.
The Swedish Research Council announces that each research environment will receive SEK 4-6 million per year for five years, “with the possibility of an additional five years of funding after evaluation”. The plan, it says, is for the funds to go to “long-term programme activities where researchers from different disciplines gather around a theme or issue”.