Svetlana is a cultural practitioner, creative researcher, curator, and organiser.

In her capacity as Founding Director of Arts Cabinet – a research-led arts organisation based in London, exploring connections between art and research, Svetlana Sequeira Costa has been working with the Faculty of Social Science and Public Policy (SSPP) for the last three years, delivering innovative projects that bring artists from around the world and researchers from King’s College to explore complex social issues – Justice, Migration, Wildfire, Indigenous Knowledge (upcoming) - and produce collaborative, experimental research which has been published and presented to the public.

 

Svetlana is undertaking a practice-led PhD at the Slade/UCL. Her research question is “Artistic Research as radical potentiality: a critical examination of modes and formats in artistic research.” In addition to the interests mentioned above, this PhD will provide a rich resource of formats, models and methods derived from artistic practices that may be applied in other disciplines beyond art.

 

Svetlana was born in Tehran, daughter of concert pianists. She has worked in the field of art and culture for over 25 years with major artists, foundations, institutions – public and private - around the world. She lived in Iran, France, the USA and Portugal before moving to the UK in 2005. She is fluent in several languages. In 2016, she founded the organisation Arts Cabinet as a curatorial and editorial project to examine the intersection between art and other disciplines as spaces for experimentation, curiosity and creative inquiry.

At a time when artists are progressively expanding the boundaries of art and increasingly engaging with societal issues, Arts Cabinet sees itself as a base from which to test the potential of artistic research to produce new meanings and ways of understanding the world we live in.

 

Research interests:

• Exploration of formats, models, and methods at the intersection of artistic research and the social sciences
• Publishing and documenting possible forms of knowledge emerging from research processes at the interface between various disciplines
• Artistic research as potential tool to reframe complex issues and promote different forms of understanding.