Professor Ross Birrell is a Senior Researcher at GSA. His interdisciplinary creative practice research is predominantly situated in the field of site-specific/contextual art and moving-image/audio installation, and explores inter-relationships between music, poetry, politics, and place.

Projects combine theoretical and practical modes of inquiry and question the extent to which musical forms and methods (eg. fugue, counterpoint, polyphony, improvisation) might offer models for understanding (and innovative methods of approaching) intercultural collaboration, co-creation and co-existence across a range of socio-political contexts: violent political antagonism (Israel and Palestine; Syrian Civil War); interspecies solidarity in the Anthropocene; online communities of audio-visual practice during the Covid-19 global pandemic.

Research questions and methods are framed and informed by (but not limited to) methodologies and critical debates in the fields of Critical Theory, continental philosophy, phenomenology, eco-criticism. In this way, research projects interweave theory and practice, politics and poetics, art and philosophy.

Research projects often involve collaboration and co-production with divergent communities (eg. refugee classical musicians, equestrian long riders).

Birrell works both solo and in collaboration with David Harding developing projects which embrace a range of media including film, sculpture, installation, music, text, events and publications. Exhibitions include Charged! MoCA, Virginia Beach (2019/20); Triptych, Trinity Apse, Edinburgh Arts Festival (2018); The Transit of Hermes, CCA, Glasgow International (2018); documenta 14 (2017); Where Language Ends, Talbot Rice Gallery (2015); The Beginnings of that Freedome, Westminster Hall (2015); The Independent, MAXXI, Rome (2015); Winter Line, Kunsthalle Basel (2014); Counterpoint (Generation: 25 Years of Contemporary Art in Scotland), Talbot Rice Gallery (2014); Duet, Rothko Chapel (2013); Olinka, Museo Tamayo, Mexico City (2012); You Like This Garden?, Portikus, Frankfurt (2011); !Patria o Libertad!, Cobra Museum of Modern Art (2010); Strange Comfort, Swiss Institute in Rome/Kunsthalle Basel (2010); TIMECODE, DCA, Dundee (2009); Romantic Conceptualism, Kunsthalle Nurnberg/BAWAG Foundation, Vienna (2007); QUAUHNAHUAC, Kunsthalle Basel (2006); Homo Ludens: Works from the Envoy Series, 1998-2005, FriesMuseum (2005); Utopia Station, Sindelfingen (2003); Envoy, BuroFriedrich, Berlin; Ellen de Bruijne Projects (2003); Between the Lines, Apex Art, New York (2003); 4th Gwangju Biennale (2002). Publications include You Like this Garden?... (Portikus, 2014), An Envoy Reader (LemonMelon 2014); The Parasite (Studio 14, 2018).

Birrell has supervised a number of PhDs to completion for GSA and SGSAH including at Edinburgh College of Art and University of Stirling. He has mentored PhDs by published work at Cumbria Institute of the Arts/University of Lancaster and GSA and has acted as Internal and External Examiner on PhDs.

Birrell is interested in supervising doctoral research in the fields of interdisciplinary contextual art practice; site-specific art; critical inquiry in the fields of aesthetic theory, political theory and philosophy.

Birrell was founding editor of the open access e-journal, Art & Research: A Journal of Ideas, Contexts and Methods (ISSN: 1752 6388), member of the AHRC Peer Review College and a peer reviewer for PEEK, Austrian Science Fund.