Artistic Research Week 2018, programme texts
Session 5: Jeremiah Day - The “ominous silence that answers us whenever we dare to ask, not “What are we fighting against” but “What are we fighting for?”
In Jeremiah Day’s project “The chair remains empty / But the place is set,” Hannah Arendt’s affirmative argument for council democracy is taken up as a narrative and conceptual lens to consider recent events like the Gezi Park demonstration and the withered tradition of townhall democracy in New England. While Arendt is best known for her description of “the banality of evil,” what is less discussed is her late work concretely arguing for the principal of councils as the basis for a renewal of public life and a “new concept of the state.” Day will introduce this particular approach to Arendt’s work, drawn from his work with Fred Dewey, show material from his performances and photography, and wrestle with that “silence” mentioned in the Arendt quote above.
Session 5: Jorge Manilla - Fragments are not only small parts, the artist as researcher
How can a visual artist build new interpretations of a body from fragments and how can he submit information about this very personal research process to the public?
What is the role of the body in social and individual contexts? In my research project the physical and mental relationship with the body is the starting point. Religion, rituals, faith, death, disease and healing have been a guiding theme in my work for years. According to Aristotle, mind and body are two different elements , elements that are not complete but incomplete. Both together form a complete something, a human being. But even if this ‘complete something’ exists , there is a kind of duality. For this lecture I will analyze some of my most personal and relevant work. I try to understand what the body is and what the boundaries are between the aesthetic and the emotional. I do not pretend to give answers or to confirm existing ideas. I want to share a clear impression of what for me as an artist physical body is, what a psychological body is, what is visible and what is intimate?
Session 5: Michiel Jansen
Michiel Jansen will show his collaboration with the Greek PhD artist Eleni Kamma in which art and theatre practices tend to become one. As starting point for the trans disciplinary course called Time will tell Kamma brought in her expertise on parrhesia and the parade. Then the course was developed round the question s of how can we create opportunities to act, think, to move and experience and how to understand possibilities when they are manifested in an actual presentation.
Session 5: Film screenings
Dora García - “Segunda vez”, 2018, 90 min.
Screening of work-in-progress version of Segunda vez. Film release Spring/Summer 2018. Read more about the project at segundavezsegundavez.com.
Felix Gmelin - “We wish you welcome to an active, inspiring and participatory day!”, 2017, one channel video, 30 min.
We are being evaluated, but who is evaluating who, and on what terms? Today universities are obliged to be transparent and comparable by the “Bologna Process”, which is great for student mobility. But who is evaluating who and on what terms? What are the qualifications of the evaluators? Why do market oriented managerial reforms loose track on educating individuals who can relate to societal questions? This project has the ambition to evaluate the evaluators.
The educational reforms following the “Bologna Accords” have sought legitimation through intensive evaluation methods. This evaluation process has opened up for strong political influence over higher education by various governmental agencies. How do we as educators in the humanities and the arts deal with this?
For trying out how managerial methods work within the humanities in practice I hired Mr. Rhaman K.J. Wagner, who works within the German Bad-Homburg-based department of the Kaizen Institute — a world wide enterprise mainly helping industries to improve efficiency — and presented him to six students from the Carl von Ossietzky University in Oldenburg, Germany.
Staging this was a way for me to understand a true story I was told by an artist friend of mine, Markus Degerman, who experienced exactly the same scenario at the Tromsø Art Academy in Norway.
The ambiguity in how the students react to this Kaizen lean management education performed by coach Mr. Wagner, and how he approaches them, to me, is the content of this event and video. And on a symbolic level: lean management method Kaizen, developed by the car manufacturer Toyota meets 1935 Nobel Peace Price winner Carl von Ossietzky within his own context. What does this mean? How would the idealist Carl von Ossietzky have reacted to these lean management strategies?
Session 6: Book launch - Jan Pettersson: Printmaking in the Expanded field
Please join Professor Jan Pettersson, Head of Print and Drawing, for an informal discussion around the publication Printmaking in the Expanded field. The discussion will be moderated by Professor Theodor Barth together with Christina Lindeberg who is the Editor of the Swedish magazine Grafik Nytt published by Grafiska Sällskapet in Stockholm.
The radical changes within the field of printmaking the last 20 years has totally changed the approach towards the media. Printmaking is now an art form that consists of sculpture, performance, clothes, installation, the commercial aspect, cyberspace, artist books, multiples, ready-mades, newspapers etc. The result is a cross pollination which in its turn points to the total reflection of todays contemporary art.
The aim with this publication is to emphasize / bring forward / implement and discuss the situation of printmaking today, from its tradition, the theoretical aspects, the historical, and what is and can happen, globally, in the future. It is an examination of the expanded field, within the media (including the book).
The Publication, Printmaking in the Expanded Field, discusses the following six topics, listed below:
- Dissemination of knowledge
- Visual delight and collapsing strategies
- Contemporary Constituencies of print
- Print in public space
- The expanded field
- Leaving an imprint