AVU Doctoral Symposium 2025

We know more than we can tell

Date: 4 December 2025
Location: AVU Veletržní (Veletržní 826/61, Praha 7)

Moving through the layers of everyday realities requires an ability to perceive and understand different languages. Making sense of where we are is a continuous act of translation, in which meanings emerge and fade depending on who translates, why, for whom. Language is a shifting field of relations: to understand what language is, we must also ask where it flows and with whom it shares space.Within artistic research, a dynamic tension often unfolds between verbal and aesthetic language. Words can help bridge the space between artistic practice and reflection – making the research process present, contextualized, and comprehensible to others. Yet words can also become fog machines, obscuring and dispersing meanings until everything, including ourselves, gets lost in translation.

This year’s AVU Doctoral Symposium explores language as a malleable terrain – a space where diverse forms of knowing emerge from the tensions between intuition and rationality, intention and serendipity, signal and noise. In resonance with Polanyi’s insight that “We know more than we can tell”*, we seek to examine how to capture the ineffable, see through the fog, and express that which resists naming.What meanings reside in the interstices of seemingly disparate linguistic forms and modes – such as artistic and scientific, verbal and embodied, visual and multisensory, human and more-than-human?*Polanyi, Michael (1967) The tacit dimension. Garden City. NY Doubleday.

This year’s symposium will feature a six-hour program of performances, lectures, sound walks, workshops, and a short film. Presenting their work will be: Julie Černá, Marie Čtveráčková, Catherine Dormor, Berta Doubková, Cristina Maldonado, Hana Chmelíková & Lucie Nováčková.The AVU Doctoral Symposium is co-organised annually by the Department of Doctoral Research and doctoral students. This year’s program is curated by Markéta Dolejšová, Johana Novotná, Lucie Nováčková & Hana Chmelíková. Catering is prepared my Marika Krčmářová (AVU – Painting 3 studio).

Programme

16:00 Opening & welcome by symposium curators

16:15 Berta Doubková: I’ll Make a Hole So I Can Stick Out of It

17:00 Marie Čtveráčková: Depths of Listening and the Waves Between Notions

18:30 Catherine Dormor: Stitching Text, Writing Textiles – a Methodology of Making and Thinking

19:45 Julie Černá: The Stone of Destiny

20:15 Hana Chmelíková & Lucie Nováčková: Objects of Language

21:00 Cristina Maldonado: The Stranger Gets a Gift

The 2025 symposium happens in conjunction with “A Space in a Place It Is Not” - A 12-hour (Performative) Reflection on Artistic Research organised by the AVU Department of Artistic Research LARGE (Laboratory for Artistic Research and Graduate Education), on 5th of December 2025, 12pm to 12am, at AVU Veletržní.You are more-than-welcome to join the program on both days (entry is free).