ArtLab shapes current debates to advance art disciplines and their understanding, while contributing to conversations on protecting the environment, where communities feel safe and healthy. We advocate for society’s better future, and are committed to bringing together local and international communities in a fast-paced world.
Art practices, with their histories and evolving conceptualisations, are fundamental to humanity because they are a primary way we express, record, and understand our complex world. From the earliest cave paintings to contemporary practices, art has always reflected and shaped human experience, culture, and society.
In the current landscape of social, political and economic crises, art, which can be understood as an emotional and intellectual form of inquiry, is well placed to challenge perceptions, and to question, critique, support, and heal.
At ArtLab, we value free experimentation through making, thinking and contextualisation in order to support creativity while advancing subject specificity in a wide range of art approaches including histories of art, fine art, performance, painting, sculpture, technology oriented and mediatised practices, situated and participatory practices, and photography.
We do so while activating conversations on some of the most pressing issues of our time. The lab supports exchange, discussion and cross discipline collaboration, locally and internationally in, including decolonisation and intercultural dialogues; gender studies and feminist care aesthetics; memorisation processes; deep ecology, planetary heath and sustainability; migration studies, place attachment and forced detachment; emotional wellbeing and creative health; and the role of technology in the everyday.
The lab welcomes PhDs, and mentors early career researchers in collaborative projects and through talks series, knowledge exchange and engagement events and exhibitions, and facilitates collaborations with a wider context of practitioners, including through the Fine Art Research Unit (FARU) and Wellbeing, Care Aesthetics and Art Research and Education Unit (We CARE) platforms. We also support initiatives such as the Venice Biennale for MA students and PhD candidates.
Dr Veronique Chance is a Senior Lecturer in Fine Art. Chance’s research through artistic practice investigates how running as a performance and mediated practice brings new insights to a sense of embodiment, place, and representation. This is aligned to the reframing and understanding of running as a creative practice and the ways in which this serves to challenge established understandings, perceptions, and assumptions around running as a sport.
Distance running tests the limits of the body through physical effort, difficulty and endurance, which are key concepts in performance art. Its particularity brings new insights to these and to how we understand fundamental aspects of the human body, its limitations and how we care for the body. The uses of mobile phones as a means of communication, mediation and dissemination in the work, acknowledges the historical role of liveness and documentation in performance art.
Projects include London to Cambridge Run (reprise) (2025), an eight-day live-steamed running performance and multimedia installation in Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger at the Stephen Lawrence Gallery, Stockwell Street, Greenwich; Thames Run: Source to Sea (2022) a multimedia exhibition and installation for the Totally Thames Festival at gallery@oxo, London; and Thames Run Source to Sea (2021), a live artwork for Associated Programme in partnership with the Estuary Festival.
Dr Elena Cologni is an Associate Professor of Contemporary Art and Critical Practice. Cologni’s art practice research adopts dialogic and spatialised strategies addressing our precarious relation with place. Cologni’s Caring-With (2020) participatory approach, adopted in many projects including The Body of/at Work (Venice Biennale 2021), has advanced the understanding of sculptural dialogic and situated practices, within the international feminist care aesthetic debate she leads.
This is at the core of the project Towards a Feminist Care Aesthetics funded by the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles (2023/ongoing), as well as the Quality Research and Innovation Fund (Impact), Faculty of Arts, Humanities Education and Social Sciences, ARU (2024 and 2025). Among the relevant outputs are the exhibition From the Home to the Planet. A dialogue between Elena Cologni and Mother Art Collective and accompanying symposium (2025) at the MLAC Museo Laboratorio Arte Contemporanea, Sapienza Università di Roma, also in collaboration with the University of Central Los Angeles Mathias Botanical Gardens.
Rosanna Greaves is Senior Lecturer in Fine Art. Greaves’ art practice is multidisciplinary, working with sound, text, sculpture, and moving image; often working in a site-specific context. Her broader research interests include environmentalism, notions of activism and value, language and the voice, and documentary methodologies.
Recent projects include investigations into landscapes which reveal the effects of climate change and raising water levels, specifically islands and fenlands. Working with oral histories, folk traditions and imaginative re-enactment to represent forms of embodiment of the land. Find out more about Rosanna's work.
Dr Kerstin Hacker is a Senior Lecturer and a leading researcher in decolonial photographic practice. Hacker’s work centres on collaborative methodologies to challenge (neo)colonial visual narratives and promote visual self-governance. She co-founded Bakashimika International Photography Festival and is developing a strategic vision for a Southern African Photography Research Entity. She held fellowships at Cambridge Visual Culture (Cambridge University) and the Affect and Colonialism Lab (Freie Universität Berlin).
Her current project, Forty Buckets, in collaboration with Zambian painter Geoffrey Phiri, explores the human impact of informal manganese mining on the Mulunda community. Combining photography, painting, and community-led engagement, the project contributes to broader conversations on decolonial methodologies, cross-cultural dialogue, and the responsibilities of artists working across global divides.
Dr Hacker’s work contributes to ARU’s strategic research priorities by advancing creative methodologies, fostering international partnerships, and addressing global challenges. Hacker is the author of ‘Us in Relation to the Universe: Collaborative North-South Photographic Practice Research’ in Photography and Culture, volume 15: Radical Pedagogy and the Photographic Image (2022).
Dr Nina Lübbren is an Associate Professor History of Art. Lübbren is the author of Narrative Painting in Nineteenth-Century Europe (reviewed as displaying ‘great intellectual authority’) and Rural Artists’ Colonies in Europe, 1870-1910 (a Spectator Book of the Year) as well as essays, journal articles and edited books.
Lübbren’s current research focuses on women sculptors in Germany, 1910-1933. She has just completed two book manuscripts on that topic, deploying an eclectic analytical toolbox of feminist criticism, queer, post-colonial and reception theory, close visual reading and archival research. The books’ methodological approach is informed by feminist political theorist Cynthia Enloe’s question, “Where are the women?” This question not only leads to unexpected discoveries, but also interrogates the very construction of canons.
Benet Spencer is a Senior Lecturer in Fine Art. Spencer’s research examines the intersections between painting, computer design, science, and technology, engaging with both historical and contemporary frameworks within the art–technology discourse. It explores how technological mediation reshapes visual language and representation in painting, positioning the medium within broader debates on digital culture and speculative aesthetics.
Recent work comprises a series of oil paintings depicting imaginary landscapes and architectural forms that investigate notions of time, place, and constructed reality. Originating from computer-generated collages, these compositions function as digital blueprints for painted visions of idealised environments. Benet’s research extends into curatorial projects, including international touring exhibitions, catalogues, and symposia.
These outputs have examined, including the relationship between painting, drawing, and architecture (Phase I, 2016–20); the dialogue between contemporary painting and collage (Collision Drive, 2019); and the convergences of art, science, and science fiction (The New Accelerator, 2023). Ultimately, these outputs situate painting as a site for reimagining the relationship between materiality, image-making, and technological experience.
Image credit: From the Home to the Planet. Trajectories of migrations (Elena Cologni and Mother Art Collective, 2025), in collaboration with UCLA Mathias Botanical Garden (US) and MLAC Museum, Sapienza Università’ di Roma (IT), funded by Getty Research Institute (LA, US).