Homing In, Sharing Knowledge:

Confirmed availability: August 2025
Note: orders including pre-orders will be posted once the final copy is delivered from print.

The 13 book and catalogue essays, conversations, emails and occasional texts collected here sample a decade or more of work by noted art historian and critical theorist John C. Welchman, Distinguished Professor at the University of California—in studio visits, lectures, workshops and other collaborations—with HISK (Higher Institute for Fine Arts Advanced Studies & Practice-based Research in Visual Arts) until its summary defunding in 2022. They pay tribute to the creative vitality, powerful, research-driven investigations, and engaged critical thinking of the rich material and conceptual activities of HISK laureates in a full spectrum of media and genres during the last decade or so.

The texts offer amplified meditations on the possibilities—but also defaults and limits—of the studio visit and on how this scene of encounter sets engagements with work that are dialogical and critically robust; respectful but also challenging; full of seeing into and through; and tactically combustible, in the sense of sparking future allusions. In his preface Welchman reflects candidly on his time at HISK, but also on the stakes and consequences of the signal forms of knowledge co-production generated though work-mediated conversation—with its revelations and risks, silences and aporia, seasoned by occasional unexpected, unpredictable, even uncanny, insight.

The book is a thinking out loud; but everything it delineates and suggests derives from what was seen and then animated in the complex mutuality of shared encounters.

Included artists are Femmy Otten, Chloé Op de Beeck, Lisa Wilkens, Ariane Loze, buren, Vesna Faassen & Lukas Verdijk, Adja Yunkers and Indrikis Gelzis, Katya Ev, Sofia Caesar, Nikolay Karabinovych, Helen Anna Flanagan, Nelleke Cloosterman and Danielle Kaganov.