I started with the University of Hertfordshire as a Research Fellow in the School of Creative Arts on 1st November so I'm taking this early opportunity to introduce myself and my research interests.
My name is Alana Jelinek and I am a practicing artist. I also write about art, specifically the role and value of art, from the point of view of an artist. My first book, called This is Not Art: Activism and Other Not Art (IB Tauris 2013), revisited my PhD thesis on 'Art as a Democratic Act' in the light of later experience working with activist group, Platform London, and my post-doc with the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Cambridge. I was with the Museum from 2009-2017.
My first post-doc role at the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Cambridge, was as AHRC Research Fellow in the Creative Arts. I worked on a 5 year project called 'The Collector's Desire', investigating the relationship between collections, collectors, the collected, where the collected is both people and things. My second 5-year postdoc at Cambridge was as senior researcher on a ERC-funded project, 'Pacific Presences', which investigated Oceanic art in European Museum, or in other words, the artefacts collected and amassed in Europe as a result of colonial contact.
My current postdoc is also a 5 year post. This time the focus is on my writing, not my artwork. For more about my previous work, please see my website. My current post will start with a focus on writing my next monograph, The Discipline of Art. I use the word discipline in spite - and because - of its Foucauldian overtones. I have a long-standing interest in the question of knowledge, and I am specifically interested in the type of knowledge that art, visual art, produces. I might try to tackle that question in my next book... in addition to questions of inter- and multi-disciplinary working, ethics, and the definition of art.
In the meantime, if you're interested, please visit soundcloud to hear my final artwork-as-podcasts for the Pacific Presences project (European Research Council funded 2013-2018).
