Research Days 2026: Play
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Research Days 2026: Play
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Research Days 2026: Play
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Research Days 2026: Play
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Research Days 2026: Play
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Research Days 2026: Play
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Research Days 2026: Play
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Research Days 2026: Play
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RESEARCH DAYS 2026
PLAY
18, 19 & 20 March
Bijloke Ghent
What if play no longer happens on the margins, but sets research itself in motion? With Play as its central theme, KASK & Conservatorium announces the first edition of the Research Days: a threeday festival for researchers, artists, students and visitors to explore playfulness in thought and action – through performances, lectures, panel discussions, exhibitions, workshops and interventions.
PLAYFULNESS AS A RADICAL GESTURE
Playing is a fundamental way to engage with the world. How we play both reflects and shapes our ways of being and knowing. Playing also introduces instability and imagination, placing us in a fluid, indeterminate field of experience. In artistic research, playfulness can function as a mindset and as a research method. Here, playing becomes a critical tool for exploring ideas, testing assumptions, and generating knowledge. When researchers and artists fully embrace play, they tap into its disruptive potential, using uncertainty and improvisation to challenge norms. Yet play is never neutral. It is situated, embodied, and negotiated: shaped by movement, territory, materials, social structures, media, and the technologies through which it unfolds. When does art or research in the arts become a playful proposition? Who is allowed to play, and who is excluded? And how might playfulness be understood as an attitude that opens up possibilities and moves beyond normative constraints?
The programme of the Research Days is structured around four thematic categories. These form the underlying structure of the festival and reflect the lines of thought used by the programmers. At the same time, they can serve as a possible guide through the programme without imposing a fixed route.
Each category brings together different practices, perspectives and forms of research and culminates in a round-table discussion in which insights, questions and tensions are explicitly shared.
Play as method and mindset
Exploring playfulness as a research strategy and artistic tool, these events question how artists use play to think, test and discover. Here, play is a generator of alternative realities, encompassing speculation, storytelling, myth, role-play and future thinking.
Embodiment, sensation & physical play
How does play operate at the level of the body? These events look at which kinds of knowledge are produced through physical play. Embodied practices are explored to teach us ways of imagining otherwise.
Access, power & exclusion
Who is allowed to play, and maybe more importantly, who is not? Some materials or technologies invite play, while others resist it. The events in this category look at who controls the conditions of play, and how play is distributed unequally across society.
Collectivity, participation & social play
When play is used to create forms of togetherness, which communities emerge? In these events, play is approached as an experimental material practice in which humans, non-humans, and their environments participate.
With Research Days, KASK & Conservatorium is launching a new annual festival dedicated to artistic research. We see it as an open moment of exchange between researchers, students and staff within our school and in dialogue with research communities from other institutions.
All activities are free of charge. When booking, you can indicate whether you will be attending the opening lecture and reception on Wednesday 18 March. You can simply walk in for most activities, except where it is explicitly stated that additional booking is required. These are workshops in which you actively participate or activities with limited capacity. During the event, you can check in the Zwarte Zaal to see if any places have become available if an activity is marked as full.
festival, it also serves as a shared meeting space for exchange and conversation. There will always be someone there to talk to.
required.
A shared space for artistic research
Artistic research at KASK & Conservatorium is organised into five research clusters. These clusters bring together artists, designers and theorists from diverse disciplines around a specific research field that connects them through their research or artistic practice. Within a research cluster, there is space for experimentation, the exchange of expertise, interdisciplinary approaches, and the organisation of study days, symposia, presentations, publications and master seminars.
Once a year, the clusters jointly organise the Research Days. This festival creates a moment of encounter that builds bridges – between clusters, between researchers and students, and towards the wider research community beyond the school. In this way, the Research Days are explicitly situated within the everyday practice of artistic research, while also serving as an invitation to exchange beyond institutional boundaries.

























