Dr Katarina Rankovic
Dr Katarina Rankovic
- Lecturer in Fine Art
- Professional Title
- Doctor
- Job Title
- Lecturer in Fine Art
- School or Academic Area
- School of Fine Art
- School or Academic Area Supervised for
- School of Fine Art
- k.rankovic@gsa.ac.uk
- Professional Address
- The Glasgow School of Art, Stow Building | 43 Shamrock Street, Glasgow G4 9LD.
- Country
- United Kingdom
Biography
Katarina Ranković (b. 1994) is an artist working across performance, video and text to ask questions about selfhood and agency in the age of artificial intelligence.
Her practice-led PhD (Goldsmiths, 2022) explored the fluidity and variability of selfhood through a video performance series called 'The One Woman Empathy Circus'. Following in the tradition of artists who masquerade as others, often informed by popular culture and mass media, Ranković assumes different personas for camera by pursuing a state of deep empathy with the others that she temporarily inhabits.
Derived from her own everyday habit of code switching, the performance practice challenges the apparent singularity of the self, problematising essentialist intuitions and offering a pathway into thinking about the conditions for AI consciousness and agency in human beings, fictional characters, and other kinds of agents.
Research Interests
artificial intelligence, performance, social media, popular culture, memetics, cultural memory, character, frame switching, agency, fictional character, personal diversity, social diversity, contextual person, distributed person, selfhood, identity, social agent, evolution, subject formation, authenticity, fiction, emergence, post-structuralism
Grants
2026
Title: "Aria and the Curtain"
Description: Developmental grant towards the production of a demo track for a new opera.
Role: Project Lead (Librettist & Composer)
Funder: Sound and Music Essentials Fund
2024
Title: "Aria: A Theatrical Séance for Choir and Audience"
Description: Research and development grant towards a new piece of musical theatre for choir.
Role: Project Co-lead (Librettist), with Dr Steve Potter (Guildhall School of Music and Drama, composer)
Funder: Guildhall School of Music and Drama
2022
Title: "Diagramming the Self: Deriving Lay Theories of Self Through Drawings"
Description: Field research on lay theories of self produced through crowd-sourced drawings.
Role: Principal investigator
Funder: Goldsmiths College, University of London
Title: "Scripting for Agency:
Description: Departmental bursary towards practice-led PhD project, 3 years.
Role: Principal investigator
Funder: Goldsmiths College, University of London
2021
Title: "The Writing for Practice Forum"
Description: An annual grant (2019–2021) towards a peer-led training opportunity, organised for artists who use writing in their practice.
Role: Project co-lead, with Dr Kate Pickering, Rowena Harris and Dr Julia Calver
Funder: The Consortium for the Humanities and the Arts South-east England (CHASE)
2017
Title: "Art to Artillery"
Description: Short film commission
Role: Project co-lead, with Thomas Cardew
Funder: NOWNESS, Louis Vuitton Moët Hennessy and Central Saint Martins
PGR Supervision Interests
Performance, video, mimesis, popular culture, memes, artificial intelligence, subjectivity, online culture, social media, metafiction, drawing, memetics, cultural memory, code switching, authenticity, evolutionary theory, emergence, computational ontology, Victorian literature, feminism(s), visual cultures, postmodern literature, post-structuralism
Current PGR Students
Sitian Zeng, "Painting as an Approach to Explore Immanent Subjectivity in the Digital Age"
Teaching
Dr Katarina Ranković is a Lecturer in Fine Art and the Year 3 Lead for the Painting and Printmaking programme in the School of Fine Art. She also supervises practice-based doctoral projects.
Latest Additions
- Reading, Christina and Rankovic, Katarina (2024) Real and Imagined Explorations of Self: A Conversation with Katarina Ranković. In: Conversations on Creative Process, Methods, Research and Practice: Feminist Approaches to Nurturing the Creative Self. Routledge, Oxon and New York, pp. 36-47. ISBN 9781032259994
- Rankovic, Katarina (2023) When Pigment Masquerades as Light.
- Rankovic, Katarina (2023) The Surface and the Scar.
- Rankovic, Katarina (2021) The Shape of a Thinking Thing. In: PhD Programme, Art Department Goldsmiths, University of London. PhD Programme, Art Department Goldsmiths, University of London, London, pp. 19-20. ISBN 9781527295087
- Rankovic, Katarina (2018) A Story About a Drawing. JAWS (Journal of Arts Writing by Students), 4 (1). pp. 85-92. ISSN ISSN 2055-2823
- Rankovic, Katarina (2017) Becoming a Line: Examining Distributed Subjectivity through Lines found in Drawing, Theatrics and Novel Writing. Curating the Contemporary.
- Rankovic, Katarina (2017) Stunt Man. Confluence, 3. ISSN 2515-1215
- Rankovic, Katarina (2016) Unborn Lovers: Scripting for Agency. Curating the Contemporary.
- Rankovic, Katarina (2015) An Empathetic Affair: The Embodied Practice of Hedwig Houben. Curating the Contemporary.
- Rankovic, Katarina (2012) The Railway Rocket Dog. HESA Inprint, 17.
