Starting from the Middle: Institutional-Humans with Ohad Ben Shimon

A Centre for Arts and Learning Stories of Change Event.

As part of the Centre for Arts and Learning Stories of Change Series (2025-26) Ohad Ben Shimon will be discussing 'starting from the middle' as an approach to cultural and social change.

Starting from the middle is not only a methodological approach but an ethical responsibility attuned to caring for the world “from the middle” of a set of relations and resisting clear separations. It involves an “ethico-onto-epistem-ological” (Geerts 2016) relational bond of a kind. On an institutional level, starting from the middle means engaging with institutions and the communities they affect and are affected by from within, attuning to their rhythms, practices, and relational dynamics.

In a gesture of what Ethan Kleinberg (2024) calls “temporal-anarchy,” Ohad Ben Shimon attunes to embodiment across different temporalities, and knowledge-intensive situations. In his presentation, he will specifically attend to how bodies are affectively and materially oriented toward their institutional-human life in advance of, during, and after being artist-residents within the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten (State Academy of Fine Arts), an international art residency in Amsterdam, where Ohad was a guest resident for nine months in 2022.

Drawing on studio-based practice during that time, and a series of interviews conducted with fifteen Rijksakademie alumni, Ohad Ben Shimon will articulate embodiment, not as something that “starts” once one enters an academic or cultural institution, but as something that is already in motion before admission, arrival, or inhabitation. Inspired by Maggie McLure’s (2010, 2013a, 2013b) notion of “glowing data”, Ohad is developing a 'non-method' in which embodiment appears as a contingent, relational, and emergent phenomenon, articulated in practice through situated accounts and experiences.

Ohad Ben Shimon is an artist, researcher and educator with a background in art, cognitive sciences, psychology, philosophy, cultural analysis, art, interdisciplinarity and international business education.

He is currently a PhD candidate in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Utrecht University, where his research focuses on embodiment in knowledge-intensive institutions. His work is funded by the Dutch Research Council (NWO) Doctoral Grant for Educators. Alongside his doctoral research, he is a Senior Lecturer in Critical Thinking and a Researcher in Change Management at The Hague University of Applied Sciences and a Researcher in the Plasticity Consortium at the Centre for Unusual Collaborations (CUCo). He has also been a Guest Resident at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam.

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