BIOGRAPHY

 

Artist Elena Cologni lives and works in Cambridge, UK.

Education

Cologni gained a BA in Fine Art from Accademia di Belle Arti Brera in Milan, an MA in Sculpture from Bretton Hall College,  Leeds University and a PhD (2004) in Fine Art and Philosophy from University of the Arts London, Central Saint Martins College (CSM).

Elena Cologni Studio Projects

Her work combines her academic research and artistic studio and site/communities/discourse responsive practice in a ‘research as art practice as research’ approach. In her projects she often collaborates with academics and professionals from other disciplines with open formats. These result in workshops, drawings,  sculptures,  video and text. In her work she has been interested in sharing experiences of the unstable nature of perception and memorisation of place through time (eg. the Mnemonic Present,  Un-Folding series of video live installations 2005-2006 was developed as part of my post-doctoral project at CSM supported by Arts and Humanities Research Council). Since 2006, her work became distinctively situated and participatory  interrogating on the nature of memory, the archive, remoteness, heritage, personal histories, the city. She won the Creative Lab residency at the Centre for Contemporary art Glasgow, and presented Re-Moved at Glasgow international 08 Biennale, CCA Glasgow, 2008,  centered around notions of memory as archival and removal in trying to enhance the audience’s and her own experience of who we are in any given moment.  For this using video pre-recorded and archival material in the ‘presentness’ of the event, underlined the everyday condition of constantly engaging with (and processing)  re-presentation of immediate or remote past,  to make sense of the present.  This is the present of the exchange with others (the dialogic), which remains a core element in her practice (eg. residency at Yorkshire Sculpture Park in 2009, Arts Councils of England, Geomemos,  on measuring land through time,  with drawings and small sculptures).

Her ongoing umbrella project ROCKFLUID (2011/13-2014/15) is the outcome of a residency at the University of Cambridge, through investigative public workshops (1 and 2), with Prof Lisa Saksida at the Faculty of Experimental Psychology (awarded with two Grant of the Arts,  Arts Council of England, and Escalator Visual Art Retreat at Wysing Arts Centre,  Escalator live art, Colchester Arts Centre).  Adopting an interdisciplinary and dialogic approach, this includes works such as the participatory live installation Spa(e)cious (Wysing Art Centre, Galleria Artra Milan,  MK gallery Milton Keynes,  Philosophy and performance group,  performance Studies international and Kingston University Art Research Unit, Bergamo Scienza); ‘views form above’ (Institute of Astronomy,  Cambridge); L’elastico (Ruskin Gallery,  MK Gallery,  2012); the public art/sculptural interactive installations: Navigation Diagrams (MK Gallery), U’ Verruzze’ and Balancing (as part of Radio Materiality, curators Vessel, Bari, Athens Biennale 2013, and solo show at Doppelgaenger Gallery Bari, Italy, 2014), and lived dialectics: movement and rest (Q2, MuseumsQuartier Vienna, Austria, 2016).  All of the above share the interest in investigating how the delicate relationship between memory, presentness and place impact on the construction of our identity. A residency at the Gropius designed Impington Village College (Cambridgeshire, 2015/16) led to defining a growing interest in our physical/psychological relation with the built environment, and to develop the exhibition A Modernity which forgets including precious documents from the archives and the site responsive Gropius’ Offcuts. The most recent project Seeds of Attachment (2016/18, Awards for the Arts, Arts Council of England) was exhibited at New Hall Art Collection at Edward Murray College of the University of Cambridge. The show …And Encounter  (2017/18) was accompanied by the roundtable NOMADIC AND DIALOGIC: ART AND ECOFEMINISM chaired by Curator Eliza Gluckman, with Feminist geographer Susan Buckingham and  environmentalist Jenny Bavidge, and an artist talk and small exhibition at the Freud Museum in London. She was artist fellow for the 250th anniversary of Homerton College (University of Cambridge), where she collaborated with the 250 Archive working group  on the project CARE: from periphery to centre  resulting in a permanent sculptural commission. The project Practices of Care, on Finding the Cur(V)e was awarded an Artist International Development Fund – British Council /Arts Council (2018/19), an A-N bursary and an Arts Council Emergency Fund. This will be presented at the Italian Pavilion, Venice Biennale of Architecture (2021), and through an exhibition curated by Gabi Scardi at Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa (2021) Venice, among others.

Academia

Research- Cologni is Associate Professor of Contemporary Art Practice and Critical Theory, and Research Lead  at the Cambridge School of Art, Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences (Anglia Ruskin University, UK). Cologni was previously Post Doctorate Research Fellow at CSM (2004/06 funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council),  Research Fellow at York Saint John’s University (2007/09), and Associate of the Creativities in Intercultural Arts Network (University of Cambridge) (2013/2016), addressing: documentation of ephemeral art as the work, participatory/dialogic approach, feminist critique of relational approaches, care ethics and art, in(ter)disciplinarity (details in the research section).

Pedagogy – She is PhD coordinator at the Cambridge School of Art, devising a program on creative practice methodologies and training.  She was Lecturer in the MA Performance Practices  at the HOME OF PERFORMANCE PRACTICES (ArtEZ, University of the Arts, NL, 2020), and was previously Lecturer in Fine Art in the Public Realm BA program at Lincoln University (2016/17), Associate Lecturer in the Art Creativity Education and Culture MPhil course at the University of Cambridge (2010/2015), and  Associate Lecturer at Central Saint Martins College of Art ad Design, University of the Arts London. Her expertise in Fine Art and Performance include: research as art practice methodologies, performance art practices (artist-audience dynamics, mediatisation, documentation), sculpture in the expanded field, site-specific/discourse-specific approaches (artist/artwork-audience dynamic), dialogic and participatory art (littoral art, interdisciplinarity, shared authorship, trust), ecofeminism in art, art in the public sphere (public space, place making, place activation and activism, new genre public art).

Awards

  • Getty Institute (LA) Research Grant 2023
  • Develop Your Artistic Practice — Arts Council England, 2022 (in collaboration with Universita’ di Pisa, Anglia Ruskin University and Heliopolis 21 Architects)
  • Harald Szeeman prize — IKT- International Association of Curators of Contemporary Art, 2021 (in collaboration with curator Gabi Scardi)
  • Emergency grants — Arts Council England, 2020 (in collaboration with Wysing Art Centre)
  • The Shape of the Public’s Health – first prize – ROYAL SOCIETY FOR PUBLIC HEALTH in collaboration with the ROYAL SOCIETY OF SCULPTORS 2019
  • Artist International Development Fund — British Council and Arts Council England, 2018
  • A-N Artist Bursaries 2018
  • Research Allocation Fund — University of Lincoln, 2016 (InDialogue, Nottingham Contemporary)
  • Grants for the Arts — Arts Council England, 2016 (New Hall Collection, University of Cambridge)
  • Artist in Residence — Frei_Raum Q21, MuseumsQuartier, Vienna, 2016
  • Grants for the Arts — Arts Council England, 2014
  • UNESCO/European Funding — IArts Residency, 2015
  • Grants for the Arts — Arts Council England, 2011 (rockfluid)
  • Grants for the Arts — Arts Council England, 2009 (Yorkshire Sculpture Park)
  • Research Funding — York Saint Johns University, 2007 (Cluster for Research as Practice)
  • Creative Lab Residency — Centre for Contemporary Art, Glasgow, 2006
  • Award for the Creative and Performing Arts — Arts and Humanities Research Council, 2004 (Central Saint Martins College, University of the Arts London)
  • Research Scholarship — University of the Arts, London, 1999

Professional Affiliations

Editorial

Education Activities and Consultancy

Educational activities are regularly provided in collaboration with Art Galleries and Museums, for example with: for the Circuit project (funded by Tate and the Paul Hamlyn Foundation, at Wysing Arts Centre and Kettles Yard, Cambridge) and Sainsbury Centre for the Visual Arts, Norwich, among others.
Cologni also collaborated with the NHS Foundation Trust (Peterborough and Cambridge) to devise a pilot project of creative interventions in schools

 

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