Ways of Practicing: Imaginaries

Ways of Practicing: Imaginaries, a two-day symposium organised by doctoral candidates of the Binational Artistic PhD Program at the University of the Arts Bremen, taking place on 26 and 27 August 2026 in Bremen and online.

This symposium addresses imaginaries as a field of artistic research. It builds on the doctoral course "Researching Imaginaries" hosted by our cooperation partner, the University of Gothenburg, HDK-Valand – Academy of Art and Design, in Spring 2025. 

Imaginaries, in this context, are understood as a mode of reality-building: shared frameworks of meaning that shape our sense of what is possible. Rather than a private mental faculty, they are approached as a performative field, collectively inhabited and continuously negotiated through practice. This symposium centres on the speculative – "what if" – as a way of working with these frameworks. Artistic practice is approached as a site of inquiry and labour, where such structures are produced, tested, and transformed. In this sense, “practicing” becomes a way to reveal and reshape the structures, opening space to rehearse alternative ways of inhabiting reality.