Nedan följer en textversion av det tal som Axel Andersson, vicerektor för forskning vid Kungl. Konsthögskolan, höll den 6 november 2025 under invigningen (Rundgång) av den upprustade Kasern III. Talet hölls på engelska.
At the Royal Institute of Art, specialised knowledge about art and architecture has for almost 300 years been passed from what used to be known as master and disciple, and now teacher and student. One experienced practitioner has taught one with less experience. This seemingly simple generational transfer of knowledge has been at the core of this institutional organism – both as part of the Royal Academy of Fine Art on Fredsgatan and KKH as an independent publically funded higher education institution since 1978. And it will continue to be so in these newly refurbished premises on Skeppsholmen where we have been located since the mid-1990s.
We have at the Royal Institute of Art also pursued knowledge about and through the practice of the arts in a wider sense, alongside the generational transfer. A knowledge that has been in a direct dialogue with the world outside of these and our previous walls. This has also always been part of what we do. We might now for the sake of simplicity call it research. But for most of our history the inquiry into art and architecture through artistic means was not officially understood as something else than what practitioners always did. As we have entered an academic system that has become increasingly streamlined, part of a natural way of working here has morphed into research as a category of higher education. A couple of decades ago the new concepts of artistic development and artistic research became part of the framework structuring and supporting research overall in Sweden. What this means in reality is on the one hand that the higher education system finally catches up with more aspects of the work of art academies, and on the other hand that there is a marriage taking place between the knowledge through the fine arts and other academic forms of knowledge.
The Royal Institute of Art has always been at the forefront of an inquiry through art and architecture, also in these last decades. There are certainly examples to back up this claim. Just to mention a few from relatively recent history when artistic research was being discussed and coming into place: the pioneering work artistically exploring the new information technology in projects like the Collegium for Art and New Media in the early noughties, involving Senior Lecturer Åsa Andersson Broms who is still with us to Senior Lecturer Emma Kihl’s, also still here among us, project on the A4 paper format in the beginning of the last decade. All the way to the project Tell the field that it wants to be a meadow by Kultivator on Öland that begun just last year and where agriculture and art meet. So, from New Media to media formats to fields that want to be meadows. We have done it all. Not to mention the seven completed practice-based PhDs in Visual Art who have passed through this building during 2010-2025 and helped to further define the field. In 2024 we were by the Swedish Research Council together with HDK-Valand, Gothenburg University, awarded the first ever centre of excellence in artistic research. And the Centre for Art and the Political Imaginary came into existence in competition with all the other academic disciplines applying at the same time – it was, importantly, not a specific measure toward artistic research. We competed on the same playing field as all the rest of the higher education institutions in Sweden.
In an early anthology on artistic research at KKH from 2002, previous KKH Professor in Art Theory and History of Ideas, who recently passed away, Peter Cornell writes: “We have during a long time, and not without travails and doubt, discussed different avenues. We have tried to think not of what is expected of us, but what we want ourselves.”[1] It is time to say that the previous generation succeeded, and now it is up to us to continue this work.