Adam Nasser Benmakhlouf

Each month, we offer the spotlight to one of our researchers to exhibit their research projects in more detail. 

The Featured Researcher for June 2025 is Adam Nasser Benmakhlouf (they/them). Benmakhlouf is working towards a Collaborative Doctoral Award, fully funded by SGSAH, in Contemporary Art Practice and Theory, and Interdisciplinary Writing. The title of their thesis is: 

Attempts To Locate the Body Are Continuing: a practice-based experimental enquiry moving towards a hybrid creative-critical register and syntax capable of being utilised in service of forming writerly responses to artist workshopping activity, recognising this form of output as an integral artistic practice, medium and output of undercommoning within contemporary art institutions.

Below, Benmakhlouf gives a brief synopsis of their doctorate, presents an excerpt of their writing entitled ‘stretch’, and answers some questions about their research, their experience of working on their PhD, and the lessons they’ve learned as a doctoral candidate.

HEIs: University of Dundee, Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design

Supervisors: Professor Maria Fusco, Dr Johanna Linsley, Director of Dundee Contemporary Arts Beth Bate. 

In my practice-based PhD research, I’m producing writerly responses to workshopping, framing this kind of activity as an essential artistic practice, as well as an integral, underappreciated output of art institutions, and in many instances at the core of grassroots organisations and other more provisional and/or anarchically composed contexts. How can adaptation in critical approach, undergirded by writerly experimentation with format, syntax, register allow for the emergence, development, understanding and resourcing of activity otherwise tacked onto a “main programme” of static exhibitions, given pat regard as nice, good, or—often in cynical tones—fundable? The workshop as an artwork is recognised as such only through a careful relocating of my body into the fibre of writing itself. No longer audience, but attendee, participant, coconstituting. 

 The decision to site myself as a writer within workshopping comes in part from my working life devoted to the expansiveness of this specific learning dynamic, but also crucially in response to Fred Moten and Stefano Harney’s The Undercommons (2013). The undercommons is not given a fixed definition by Moten and Harney, but it can be understood as the space of socially transformative possibility that exists within seemingly predictable or regulated environments, e.g. the workplace. [i] As another example,  they look to the university “deregistered students in a closed-down and beery student bar, where the seminar on burrowing and borrowing takes place.” [ii] More generally, they describe, “a common experiment launched from any kitchen, any back porch, any basement, any hall, any park bench, any improvised party, every night.” [iii] An undercommon philosophy looks to the invisible and shadowy places as the sites of social transformation, rather than looking towards the authoritative and official processes and changemakers; ‘the new way of being together and thinking together’ emerges from the undercommons.  Amongst these, teaching,iv working, [v] and improvisation [vi] are mentioned as suggested contexts. During the interview included in The Undercommons, Moten speaks with (seemingly a little exasperated) about being asked by people how to enter the undercommons. One of the specific answers he gives is “being in a kind of workshop”. [vii] The workshops I consider in my PhD are not scoured for corroborating details to be matched with phrases and propositions of The Undercommons. Still, the animating intention to locate myself within this specific setting extends from a desire to follow up on the poetics of The Undercommons with a kind of pressing sense of specificity to stay in the room, and engage in close first-person observation of the body in an undercommons. 

Practice first as a principle determines the direction, shape and success of my research. In keeping with this ethic, I present here an excerpt from a longer work titled fix it in pose. In this work, I speak in exact detail about a dance workshop led by the international movement artist, teacher and creative director, Dorine Mugisha. The sessions take place within a diversity of spaces, including contemporary art organisations, formal educational settings, and dance studios. 

Footnotes

i) Moten and Harney, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study. New York: Autonomedia/Minor Compositions, 2013. 143.
ii) Ibid, 39.
iii) Ibid, 74.
iv) Ibid, 27.
v) Ibid, 110, 143.
vi) Ibid, 110.
vii) Ibid.