Research Groups
Research Groups at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague are collaborative spaces dedicated to artistic and theoretical inquiry across a range of thematic areas.
Employees
Mgr. Markéta Dolejšová, Ph.D.
Head of the Multispecies Ecologies & Practices group
marketa.dolejsova@avu.czdoc. PhDr. Pavlína Morganová, Ph.D.
Head of the AVU — Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow group
pavlina.morganova@avu.czMgr. et Mgr. Darina Alster, Ph.D.
Head of the Fluid Identities, Liquid Bodies group
darina.alster@avu.czprof. MgA. Adam Pokorný, Ph.D.
Head of the Material in Context: Artworks Conservation group
adam.pokorny@avu.cz+420 233 015 318Mgr. Art. Anetta Mona Chişa, Ph.D.
Vice-Rector for Internationalization and Research
a.monachisa@avu.czAll groups are initiated by AVU researchers themselves and shaped around topics and concerns they consider meaningful. While the programme primarily supports doctoral research, all groups are open to AVU faculty, students, and external collaborators.
Interdisciplinarity is central to the Research Groups programme. The groups connect perspectives from the arts and humanities, as well as from the social and natural sciences, often extending beyond AVU to include partners from local and international institutions.
Aims
The Research Groups aim to create an environment where researchers can work together systematically and over the long term—sharing methods, exchanging feedback, and developing thematic lines of inquiry that might otherwise remain dispersed across AVU studios and departments. By fostering these research communities, AVU strengthens its research capacity and increases its visibility in national and international contexts.
Structure
The Research Groups programme is developed and coordinated by AVU’s Doctoral Research Department under the oversight of the Vice-Rectorate for Internationalisation and Research. The Department provides conceptual and administrative support, while the AVU Research Board conducts annual reviews of the programme and ensures its alignment with AVU’s research strategy and institutional priorities in ethics, sustainability, and inclusion.Each Research Group is led by an active AVU researcher (faculty), often in collaboration with external experts.Membership in the groups is open at two levels: Core members, who participate regularly (typically PhD candidates and faculty), and Affiliated members, who join occasionally or contribute to selected projects (such as MA students, alumni, external collaborators).
AVU Research Groups
The group is led by: Mgr. Markéta Dolejšová, Ph.D. (AVU), together with MgA. Tamara Spalajković (FaVu VUT)International research advisor: Prof. Danielle Wilde, Ph.D. (Umeå University & University of Southern Denmark)
Current members: Lucia Bergamaschi, Kristína Jamrichová, Iwona Janicka, Susanne Kass, Denisa Langrová, Martin Lasinger, Vojtěch Liebel, Michal Mitro, Alžběta Petrův, David Přílučík, Rute Putramentaite, Catherine Radosa, Barbara Rakovská, Róbert Repka, Eva Švejdarová, Polina Valerijivna Šyškina, Chewie
Focus: Interactions and relations among species — animals, plants, fungi, microorganisms, humans — shape our cultures, histories, economies, politics, and even our bodies. These entanglements situate human existence within a dense web of multispecies interdependencies, rather than outside them.Over the past decade, multispecies research has emerged across disciplines to explore these interconnections by foregrounding the agency, subjectivity, and significance of other-than-human beings in co-constituting social and ecological systems. Moving beyond traditional anthropocentric focus, multispecies scholarship challenges the nature-culture divide, inviting us to ask what it means to live, think, and create with others rather than about them.The research group Multispecies Ecologies & Practices welcomes researchers from art, design, architecture, social and natural sciences, and other fields into a shared, practice-based exploration of multispecies ecologies and the diverse relations and tensions that shape them. Drawing on posthumanist and relational ontologies, the group engages with multispecies issues through a range of “co–” practices: co-creation of research situations and artifacts, organisation of research events such as exhibitions, symposia, workshops, and field trips, as well as more down-to-earth and convivial forms of group dialogue and exchange.Working both intuitively and analytically, sensorially and verbally, spontaneously and systematically, and always interdisciplinarily, the group experiments with artistic and research practices that open new perspectives on living and learning across species.
Our inquiries (especially, though not exclusively) focus on:
Multispecies agencies and relations
Ethics and aesthetics of multispecies coexistence (across landscapes, bodies, contexts)
Temporalities and rhythms of multispecies cohabitation
Decolonial perspectives and traditional ecological knowledge
Multisensory and embodied ways of knowing
Ferality and feral ecosystems
Eco-social resilience as a multispecies concern
Methods of multispecies inquiry
Group's focus at a glance (pdf)
Partners & companions:
The group is led by: John Hill, Ph.D. (AVU), together with international research advisor Assoc. Prof. Enrique Encinas, Ph.D. (Oslo School of Architecture and Design)
Current members: Paula Gogola, Štěpán Kleník, Palo Fabuš, Barbora Tauerová, Susanne Kass, Filip Verda
Focus: Emergent properties arise from complex systems. Qualities and ideas that are not present in any of the individual parts are generated in their interaction. Because of this, new things can emerge from old things that are used together in new ways. Emergent technologies are those that appear, often unexpectedly and unpredictably, when different things are put together. Tools for one purpose or practices from one field can produce something new when they are misused or misapplied. Artistic research of and with technologies allows for the kind of knowledge generation that goal-oriented research can struggle with. Artistic thinking can also put pressures on assumptions embedded in technologies, revealing their limitations and blind spots.While generative artificial intelligence makes certain questions about human knowledge, creativity and autonomy very visible, these are questions that have been addressed by theoretical and artistic practices for a long time.
It also makes apparent the importance of contextual, embodied and situated practices and knowledge. The world is not its representation, however accurately or granularly it is modelled, something artists have known for a very long time.New technologies, however, continue to have huge impacts on art and artists. New ways of sensing the world, from the smallest to the largest scale, new ways of manipulating information and testing ideas, new ways of visualising and materialising, all open up new ways for artists to think and make. Often this requires collaboration between artists and researchers in other fields, something that needs careful communication long-term commitments from both sides, as researchers can be working in very different frameworks and on very different scales.AVU’s emergent technologies research group promotes and facilitates all of these types of work with technology: artistic experimentation with old and new technology; critical reflection on technology and its application in the world through artistic practice; the application or artistic theory and thinking to questions raised by technology; and interdisciplinary collaboration on the development and deployment of new technologies.
Areas of specific interest include:
the potentials of generative artificial intelligence within artistic practice
the creative use of GPUs for modelling and visualisation
the ecological impacts and applications of technologies
emergent and self-organising properties within technical systems
digital and playable spaces and narratives
Partners & connections:
The group is led by: MA Irina Gheorghe, Ph.D.International research advisors: MA Ben Woodard, Ph.D. (affiliated fellow at the Institute for Cultural Inquiry Berlin) and MA Ștefan Tiron
Current members: Vít Bohal, Anetta Mona Chișa, Lamija Čehajić, Hana Chmelíková, Tereza Justína Vaneková, Vojtěch Liebl, Alison Sperling
Focus:The research group explores the idea of an alien language, starting from the history of attempted extraterrestrial communication and expanding it into a wider understanding of what a foreign linguistic system might be, from abstract languages in visual art to undeciphered or invented languages in human society or the use of signals in the natural world.The alien is a hypothetical figure: one which is not impossible, but whose existence is uncertain. Taking shape at the intersection of scientific research, philosophical perspectives and the imagination of popular culture, it is a being whose existence and form can only be presumed but of which there is no empirical evidence. As such, it imposes on scientific fields researching it, from astrobiology or astrophysics to astrolinguistics a methodology which goes beyond the empiric scientific method, leading to results which might have a lot of common ground with artistic practices and formats.A universal cosmic language might equally draw on results of scientific research and the visual vocabularies of geometric abstraction or concrete poetry. Through readings, performative workshops, artistic explorations, as well as individual and collective writing projects, the group will dive into the aesthetic and conceptual contradictions of hypothetical language systems, both in a terrestrial and extraterrestrial context.
The group is led by: prof. MgA. Milena Dopitová, together with MgA. Lenka Tyrpeklová
Current group members: Lukáš Dirga, Fedir Kis, Zuzana Šklíbová, Daniela Voráčková
Focus:Art in the Space of Control is an artistic research platform focused on examining the conditions of creative practice and collective relations within environments of restricted freedom. Through participatory art practices, it investigates how art operates inside regulated institutions and what forms of thinking and action can emerge there.The group's research understands art as a method, not as a therapeutic tool. It works with the experience of unfreedom across sensory, material, and collective registers. The methodology is built on three elements: sustained collaboration in closed groups of participants, co-facilitation, and the public presentation of outputs as part of the research process rather than its endpoint.The platform connects art with fields such as penitentiary sociology, pedagogy, and social work, creating a space for crosspollination of different perspectives. Outputs take the form of exhibitions, performances, installations, and methodological tools.Art in the Space of Control operates at the intersection of artistic research, socially engaged practice, and institutional critique. It develops approaches that emerge from direct experience and fieldwork.
The group is led by:Prof. MgA. Adam Pokorný, Ph.D., together with: Prof. PhDr. Michaela Ottová, Ph.D. and doc. Ing. Mgr. Štěpánka Kučková, Ph.D.
Focus:
contexts of restored artefact
Material research of artworks
The group focuses on the comprehensive study, protection, and restoration of artworks, with an emphasis on their material and technological foundations. Restoration is understood here as an interdisciplinary field that connects artistic skills, deep knowledge of historical techniques, and scientific approaches to the analysis of original materials. This also includes a developed understanding the broader contexts of the artefact’s creation (formal, semantic, functional, etc.) and tracing the cultural-historical reasons for its transformations over time.Specific Areas of Interest Include:
Art-historical research examining the form and meaning of the artefact
Archival research and interpretation of historical contexts of the work’s origins and subsequent history
Cultural-historical research into the function of the artefact
Preparation of cross-sections and stratigraphic identification of paint layers
Identification of inorganic pigments (XRF, SEM-EDX, FTIR)
Protein-based binders in cultural heritage objects (MALDI-TOF MS, LC-MS/MS)
Distinguishing whole-egg and egg-yolk binders
Natural organic dyes and pigments in artworks (FTIR, MALDI-TOF MS)
Ageing processes and the influence of inorganic components on organic compounds in artworks (LC-MS/MS)
Partner Institutions and Collaborators:
Olomouc Museum of Art
National Gallery Prague
National Heritage Institute
Charles University
University of Chemistry and Technology in Prague
Gallery of West Bohemia in Pilsen
Doerner Institute, Munich, Germany
Opificio delle Pietre Dure, Florence
The group is led by:Mgr. et MgA. Darina Alster, Ph.D.
Current members: MgA. Viktor Takáč, Ph.D., MgA. Martin Kámen, Mgr. Tomáš Samek, MgA. Nik Timková, MgA. Kateřina Olivová Ph.D., Luiza Prado Ph.D., MgA. Erika Velická, PXS aka Peter Susan Šagát Ph.D., MA Peter Bill
Focus: We are exploring the liquid boundaries of contemporary humanity, gender fluidity, and different perspectives on reality. Performance is a key medium for capturing some key principles on which our society operates. By understanding these principles, communicating and sharing their meaning, we learn about the inner identity of humans and the course of their worlds.Contemporary art together with intersectional and speculative feminism create utopias and visions for a new society. Post-humanism meets ancient mystical systems. Care, interbeing, healing, emotions, identity, sexuality, rituality, and ecology are examples of topics that move the currents of contemporary art.Performance is a way of enabling one to transcend personal and political taboos. We are interested in examining the functionality of society constructs as language, thinking or relationships and crossing the boundaries of one's own ego and ideas about the world. We are searching for a sense of our contemporary life in a physical-psycho-spiritual context. We don't believe in hegemony of common sense. Answers for our research lie in the subconsciousness of society. Contemporary art is a great terrain for this kind of lived research.
Key words:Performance, Post-performance, Post-human, Collective body, Embodiment, Imagination, Fluidity, Video-object, Expanded cinema, Rituality, Queerness, Spirituality, Fiction, Identity, Temporarily autonomous zone, String figures, Living web of care, Continuum, Body positivity, Memory, Poetry, Ecology of emotions, Archetypes, Transformation of mind, Timelessness, Ritual, Post-structural meta body, Ferality, Hope, Survival, Resilience, Visions of the past and memories of the future.We are mainly artists. Our research is practical. We are researching through methods such as autotheory and research-through-experience. Our theories are sometimes written in rhymes, like poetry. We love to talk about body and emotions, we like to talk about art-science fiction and the expansion of the media and their extension of archaic ones (oracles and spirituality).
Partners & connections:
The group is led by:doc. PhDr. Pavlína Morganová, Ph.D.
Current members: MgA. David Böhm, Vojtěška Dubcová, Pavel Geryk, Bc. Marie Havlínová, Mária Jančová, Mgr. Lujza Bederka Kotočová, Mgr. Zuzana Krišková, Branislava Kuburović, PhD., Xenie Poldaufová, Mgr. Dagmar Svatošová, Mgr. Martin Škabraha, Ph.D.
Focus: The aim of the group AVU — Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow is to expand the scope of the project The Academy of Fine Arts in Prague 1799–1999: Art Education and Canon. This project, prepared by the Research Centre of the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague (VVP AVU) in collaboration with the Institute of Art History of the Czech Academy of Sciences, received funding from the Czech Science Foundation (GAČR) for the period 2026–2028. Its main output will be a scholarly publication interpreting the transformations of art education at AVU from 1799 to 1999, in relation to changing societal understandings of art’s function, expectations, and ideas of quality. The project brings together leading experts on specific historical periods from AVU, the Faculty of Arts of Charles University, UMPRUM, and the Czech Academy of Sciences.Within the framework defined by the project, the research team will address the development of education in painting, sculpture, but also in architecture, printmaking, and restoration. It will also focus on the history and transformation of AVU exhibitions, gender aspects of study, international students, the Czech–German and Czech–Slovak contexts, among others. As a secondary output, the project will produce a complete catalogue of AVU students from the Academy’s founding to the present, as well as a detailed chronology of its institutional history.
The mission of the Research Group is to broaden the project’s scope, extend it to new topics, and link its primarily art-historical focus with other dimensions of life at AVU. The group will create a space for discussion on how this fundamental research can be developed creatively and made relevant for the contemporary AVU and its alumni.The group is open to all students and faculty interested in the history of our institution. It reaches out both to members of the Department of Theory and History of Art (KTDU) and theoretical PhD candidates, as well as to studio environments where artistic practice emerges — the very practices that the project will reflect upon from a historical perspective.The participation of practicing artists in the research group is considered highly valuable. Within its framework, new exploratory projects may arise, examining various aspects of the Academy’s functioning in the past and present. These may take the form of artistic research, theoretical essays on specific topics, web projects, podcasts, exhibitions, maps, or presentations of archival materials.We consider it important that the research undertaken by VVP AVU expands to include previously overlooked themes, intersects with various layers of the school, enriches them mutually, and strengthens the connection with our alumni community.
Partners & connections:
Launch
The Research Groups programme was officially launched on 15 December 2025 at Research Groups: Forming Fields, a public event held at AVU Veletržní. The event introduced the overall programme, the seven research groups established to date, and practical guidance on how to join an existing group or initiate a new one.A presentation summarising these practical details is avalable here.
How to join a group?
Please contact the lead of the group you would like to join (contact details are listed below). In your email, briefly explain why the group interests you, how it relates to your own artistic and research practice, and what you would like to collaborate on within the group.
How to start a group?
AVU researchers (faculty) are welcome to propose new thematic research groups. If you wish to start a new group, please send an email to odv@avu.cz with the following details: your group’s title; a short annotation outlining its thematic focus; planned research activities; and the names of the group lead, potential co-leads, international research advisors, and other members.