Alessandra Ferrini

Alessandra Ferrini

Artist, Researcher, Educator, University of the Arts London, Corby, UK

Museums as Catalysts of Practice-based Research

Academic research in the arts and humanities, as well as public funding for arts and culture, are constantly threatened by governmental budget cuts and the neoliberal administration of universities and museums, and they are even more endangered by the current global rise of authoritarianism. Yet, practice-based PhD programs are steadily growing in the Global North. These programs equip artists with a methodology that often clashes with the workings of the art system and market. Nevertheless, the artist-researcher is a constant fixture of art institutions’ programming. Sustaining a research-based practice can be extremely difficult, especially since the requirements placed on art and research by different institutional frameworks can be conflicting and counterintuitive for the development of long-term practice-based research. Thus, can we rethink the role of the museum in ways that can be conducive to long-term practice-based research? Can museums become the sites for sustaining politically positioned practices that require a serious and ethical engagement with research? Additionally, as we are living in a time of endless economic and environmental crisis, live-streamed genocides, and the rise of repressive and racist politics, to what role should the art museum aspire? Can it overcome the logics of production, display, and commerce? Or can it, instead, fully commit to its role of knowledge producer, relinquishing its focus on production and its interconnectedness with the art market in favor of research?

Biography:

Alessandra Ferrini is an Italian-born, UK-based artist, researcher, and educator. Her work is rooted in lens-based media, anticolonial practices, memory and critical whiteness studies, as well as historiographical and archival methodologies. She explores the enduring legacies of Italian colonialism and Fascism, with a specific interest in the past and present network of relations between Italy, the Mediterranean region, and the African continent.

Ferrini has exhibited, spoken, performed, and published internationally. Her work Gaddafi in Rome: Anatomy of a Friendship was featured in Foreigners Everywhere, curated by Adriano Pedrosa for the 60th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia (2024) and it premiered at the International Film Festival Rotterdam IFFR 2025. Ferrini is the recipient of the Maxxi Bvlgari Prize 2022 and the 2017 Experimental Pitch Award at the London Film Festival. Her latest solo show, I Saw a Dark Cloud Rise, was commissioned by Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo (Turin, 2025). Ferrini’s first monograph, Like Swarming Maggots: Confronting the Archive of Coloniality across Italy and Libya, was published by Archive Books in 2024 thanks to an Italian Council grant. She holds a practice-based PhD from the University of the Arts London, supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council.