Ethnographic Research-Grounded
Alfredo Jaar — Investigates sites of political trauma through prolonged field research (Rwanda, Chile, Skoghall). His work is built on direct testimony, archival study, and community engagement before any aesthetic decisions are made.
Allan Sekula — A foundational figure whose photographic essays (Fish Story, Dead Letter Office) emerged from sustained documentary fieldwork within specific labour and maritime economies.
Zoe Leonard — Works through close, extended observation of communities, trades, and landscapes, particularly marginalised urban economies.
Hito Steyerl — Combines essayistic research with ethnographic attention to image circulation, migrant labour, and digital culture.
Ursula Biemann — Her video essays emerge from fieldwork across extractive industries, border zones, and ecological sites.
Phenomenologically Oriented
Ana Mendieta — Her Silueta series is grounded in a deeply embodied, phenomenological relationship between body, earth, and cultural memory.
Richard Serra — His sculptural practice is explicitly rooted in Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of embodied perception and spatial experience.
Olafur Eliasson — Draws directly on phenomenological philosophy to frame viewer experience of light, atmosphere, and perception.
James Turrell — Works with pure perceptual experience — light and space as primary material — in a strongly phenomenological vein.
Wolfgang Laib — A meditative, phenomenologically charged practice concerned with presence, time, and natural material.
Working Across Both
Trinh T. Minh-ha — Her films and writing explicitly interrogate the ethnographic gaze itself, while remaining attentive to phenomenological questions of voice, body, and representation.
Multiplicity (collective) — Produce spatially and socially researched projects that blend rigorous field investigation with experiential installation.
Forensic Architecture — Combine architectural phenomenology of space with investigative research methodologies drawn from social science and legal inquiry.
Jeremy Deller — Long-term social research underpins projects like The Battle of Orgreave, which involved deep archival and community ethnography.
Paul Pfeiffer — Examines spectacle and the body through careful attention to media rituals and collective phenomenal experience.