This research project will be devoted to an interdisciplinary master seminar year with students from the Department of Art History, Musicology and Theatre Sciences and the Department of Architecture & Urban Planning of Ghent University. In the first semester of the academic year 2026/2027 (October–December 2026), the students will pursue archival and textual research on Polke’s 1986 Athanor and explore the enriching implications of the artist’s remarkable installation. What makes Polke’s Athanor so pertinent 40 years later, again, or better still? We will stimulate the students to develop a multidisciplinary research approach and to expand the spectrum of their critical findings into an evocative framework anno 2026/2027. The very discipline of painting (incl. Polke’s idiosyncratic techniques in relation to aspects of chemistry and mineralogy), architecture, geopolitics, (counter-)institutionalization, (counter-)canonization will be analysed in relation to each other.
Polke’s Alchemical Spaces
Polke’s Alchemical Spaces. A Radical Pedagogical Project in the Form of a Research Seminar
The starting point of this research project will be the analytical dismantling of the pictorial, material, political and architectural sub-elements of Polke’s site-specific installation Athanor. This project will be distilled into three interdependent phases, each of which will constitute the ‘polyphonic laboratory’ that this project aims to institute: a prismatic place for transformation that is itself constantly in transformation. The seminar will serve as a place where experiment and reflection, micro and macro vision, life and work can overlap. The priority will be the topical approach to Polke’s multiple working methods as a substantive but also organizational blueprint for 1) an artist’s book and temporary studiolo, 2) a research seminar and 3) an exhibition.
Collaborating with the Anna Polke Foundation will be a beautiful opportunity to touch on new exciting elements within an equally stimulating artistic and scholarly field. By taking a mature and metaphorical key work from Sigmar Polke’s oeuvre as a starting point for a broad research, it would be considered urgent to take the necessary risk: the justification that the parameters that determine the focus of the subject — in this case the elaborately ‘alchemical’ approach in the ultimate phase of Polke’s oeuvre — can also become the very conditions of the focused research.
Yves Coussement, 2025
Polke’s Alchemical Spaces. A Radical Pedagogical Project in the Form of a Research Seminar
Seminar, led by Yves Coussement, October 2026–May 2027, Universiteit Gent