The Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB), in partnership with the Institute for Multidisciplinary Research in Art (ICMA) at the George Enescu National University of Arts, Iași (UNAGE Iași), is pleased to announce a public lecture by Cristian Nae, Professor of Aesthetics and Contemporary Art History at UNAGE Iași. Entitled What Is Artistic Research? A Transversal Approach, the lecture will take place on 3 December 2025, from 3.00 pm to 4.00 pm, at the Faculty of Letters, Translation and Communication, Université Libre de Bruxelles. The event is open to students, academic staff and the wider public, and the lecture will be delivered in French.

The lecture analyses the idea that contemporary art has become a syncretic field of expression for all art forms, characterised by a distinctive mode of research. While art has always relied on science to create images, it has more recently become a partner, a companion to science, employing specific methodologies, proposing forms of experiential knowledge, and raising questions about fundamental notions concerning the role of images in the validation of knowledge. Drawing on the idea of transversality proposed by Félix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze, the lecture argues that contemporary art complements, intensifies, and questions the disciplinary fields of the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities, moving continuously between them.

Cristian Nae is Professor of Aesthetics and Contemporary Art History at the George Enescu National University of Arts, Iași (UNAGE Iași), Romania, where he also directs the Institute for Multidisciplinary Research in Art (ICMA).

He was a Fulbright Visiting Scholar at the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 2023. He has received grants and research fellowships from ERSTE Foundation, CNCS-UEFISCDI (the Romanian National Council for Research), the CAA-Getty International Program, the Getty Foundation, and New Europe College – Institute for Advanced Study, Bucharest. He was a senior advisor to the project Periodization in Art History and Its Enigmas. How to Approach Them in Central and Eastern Europe, supported by the Getty Foundation as part of its Connecting Art Histories initiative (2019–2022). He has given lectures as a visiting professor at Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne University (2018) and the University of St Andrews (2023).

His recent studies have been published in journals such as Third Text and ARTMargins (print edition, MIT Press), as well as in volumes such as Curating Socialism (forthcoming, University of Toronto Press, 2026), Globalizing the Avant-Garde (De Gruyter/Brill, 2025), Plural and Multiple Geographies of Modern and Contemporary Art in East-Central Europe (Routledge, 2024), State Construction and Art in East Central Europe, 1918–2018 (Routledge, 2022), Art History in a Global Context: Methods, Themes and Approaches (Wiley-Blackwell, 2020), Realisms of the Avant-Garde (De Gruyter, 2020), and Performance Art in the Second Public Sphere: Event-based Art in Late Socialist Europe (Routledge, 2018).

He co-edited Contemporary Romanian Art 2010–2020 (Hatje Cantz, 2020) and curated the Romanian Pavilion at the 58th Venice Biennale.

The lecture is organised as part of a partnership between Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB), the George Enescu National University of Arts, Iași (UNAGE Iași), and the Alexandru Philippide Institute of Romanian Philology.