Cecilie Ullerup Schmidt

How is sociality shaped and negotiated in the arts - the way we organize ourselves, split or stay together? In the frame of the research centre Art as Forum I am examining how social, temporal and economic conditions both politicize artistic work and shape forms of living. From a feminist perspective I analyse interdependencies in the dynamic relation between production and reception of art. Conditions of domestic work, affective and reproductive labor are taken into account, both in our historical present and in a diachronous perspective. 

Within cultural analysis my ‘objects of study’ are the historical practices of artists' collectives in the 1930s, 1970s, and after 2011: how they organize and distribute shared time, visibility, affects, and economy.  

I am particularly interested in how access to art institutions and artistic education is shaped through gendered, racializing and classist infrastructures of the art world and its haunting aesthetic concepts such as of the free artist, originality and quality.

Since 2022, I am PI of the research project Communities of Separatism. Affects in and around separatist collectives of racialised artists and cultural workers (with postdoc Anna Meera Gaonkar), which is looking at the relation between self-organization in the cultural sector and diversity work in cultural policy.