RESEARCH & COLLABORATION

WATA Institute also serves as a platform for research collaborations across borders.

Interdisciplinary in art practices

Interdisciplinarity – is the study of two or more disciplines alongside a critical engagement with subjects in the wider world, that aims to communicate connections through thinking and practice. Artists arrived at it by moving beyond medium-specific categories, then by treating art itself as a form of research, with the artwork as the site of inquiry and not an illustration of findings gathered elsewhere. Method defines the practice more than medium does: the artist’s sustained engagement with a field outside their training and the effect this has on the form of the work.

Interdisciplinarity is not the calm of an easy security; it begins effectively (as opposed to the mere expression of a pious wish) when the solidarity of the old disciplines breaks down … in the interests of a new object and a new language neither of which has a place in the field of the sciences that were to be brought peacefully together, this unease in classification being precisely the point from which it is possible to diagnose a certain mutation. (Barthes 1977: 155)