Registration for symposium and workshops is required by 28. 3. 2014!
To register, please contact Roswitha Gabriel (roswitha.gabriel@sbg.ac.at)
Limited Workshop attendance!
Conference venue: Salzburg College, Bergstraße 12, ground floor, 5020 Salzburg
There is no conference or workshop fee.
Conference organization:
Program area Contemporary Arts & Cultural Production
Focus Wissenschaft & Kunst
University of Salzburg in cooperation with Mozarteum University
Bergstraße 12 / 1st floor / 5020 Salzburg / Tel: 0662 8044 2383
www.w-k.sbg.ac.at/conart
Concept and organization:
Elke Zobl (elke.zobl@sbg.ac.at), Laila Huber (laila.huber@sbg.ac.at)
Administration: Roswitha Gabriel (roswitha.gabriel@sbg.ac.at)
Programme
Symposium:
April 4th, 2014: 9 a.m. – 12 noon
9-9:15 a.m. Welcome
9:15-10 a.m. Presentation Annette Krauss, artist: In Search of the Missing Lessons (Auf der Suche nach den fehlenden Stunden)
10 – 10:30 a.m. Break
10:30 – 11:30 a.m. Presentation Janna Graham, Centre for Possible Studies/Ultra-red and Nicolas Vass, artist, University of Leicester: What We Didn’t Learn at Art School: The Politics of Solidarity
11:30 a.m. – 1 p.m. Lunch break
Workshops:
April 4th, 2014: 1-5 p.m.
April 5th, 2014: 9 a.m.-5 p.m. (with public presentations from 4-5 p.m.)
Content
Following the series of events in autumn 2013, in this symposium we will discuss the ways that artistic interventions can create open and shared collaborative learning spaces for empowerment and agency in informal contexts, and in exchange and solidarity with social movements. Focus will be on critical practices at the various intersections of the arts and education exploring new settings for research and action aiming at social transformation. Artistic projects will be presented and discussed, and ideas will be developed and presented as interventions in public space.
The following questions will be explored: What types of strategies for artistic intervention have artists and cultural workers employed at the intersection of the fields of education, research, and pedagogy? How are such projects positioned in relation to activism, cultural resistance, social movements, and education? How do artists and cultural workers initiate, develop, and realize projects with, and in solidarity with various communities in an attempt to initiate critical practices through artistic interventions? Hhow do they do that in relation to educational processes? What does knowledge production look like in such projects? And what makes this a critical practice?
One aspect of the conference concerns artistic interventions in relation to (un)learning processes and hierarchical knowledge systems. Annette Krauss will present various long-term collaborative practices that she has (co-)initiated, such as Read-in / ASK! / Read the Masks. Tradition is Not Given / School of Temporalities. Krauss will present aspects of these works in relation to hidden and alternative curricula in schools and domestic spaces and will discuss the potential of (un)learning with regard to collaboration, our bodies, and social practices we are involved in.
Focusing on her project Hidden Curriculum (since 2007), Krauss will provide insights into various performative situations that have been explored by pupils in different stages of the project in their respective schools. These performative situations engage with invisible, unplanned, and unexpressed forms of knowledge and learning in schools. It is an attempt to think together with pupils about the location and the institution „school,“ its value system and the routines taking place. In the workshop, we will use these elaborations as a starting point to think about a possible Hidden Curriculum in academic studies and at university: What do we learn, what do we not learn, and why?
The second aspect of the conference will deal with the idea of interventions and community engagement in relation to the question of artist solidarity. Janna Graham and Nicolas Vass will present projects realized during the UK movements against cuts to Education in London using examples from their work with Precarious Workers Brigade, UK Uncut, Ultra-red, and the Centre for Possible Studies. Questions of solidarity will be raised in relation to forms of „artistic placement,“ i.e., of artists being placed or placing themselves in particular social realms, and they will discuss examples of what the differences might be between diverse approaches. Questions arise such as: How can artistic interventions support movements and issues in progress-by developing creative interventions, helping to frame questions, thinking about futures beyond immediate concerns? How do we put our creative skills to work in the context of community organizing and mobilization? What questions does this raise, i.e., about authorship, artistic autonomy, distribution of resources, etc.? What politics are associated with doing this work using resources from mainstream cultural institutions and academia? Does engaging in acts of solidarity necessitate a certain artistic unlearning and departure from the art world as we know it? To engage in solidarity work, what skills do we require that are atypical of those we tend to learn in art school? What skills are important for us to retain?
Workshops
Workshop I: Crazy Little Thing Called Love: The Ethics of Solidarity
Janna Graham/Centre for Possible Studies and Nicolas Vass/artist
April 4th, 2014: 1-5 p.m.
April 5th, 2014: 9 a.m.-5 p.m.
Location: Salzburg College
Activism and intervention are often thought to be what we do „out there.“ How do we begin from the problematics of our own conditions of desire, oppression, collectivity, and individuation and, from there, link to others? Drawing from their own experiences working as artists to developing consciousness raising activities and public interventions during the anti-cuts movements in the UK, in relation to issues of exploitation of cultural workers and counter recent migrant policing in London, Vass and Graham will invite the group to make a zine style publication, mapping current conditions that effect workshop attendees and respond publicly. Starting with the experiences of the group on day one, we will develop a series of gestures related to our own conditions of exploitation, isolation, and the possibilities for learning otherwise. These will be turned into graphics. On day two we will create a graphic publication and a „distribution action“ in public space.
Janna Graham
Originally trained in geography, Janna Graham has developed radical research and pedagogical projects in and outside of the arts for many years. Graham is a member of the international sound and political art collective Ultra-red, works with the Precarious Workers Brigade in London, and is currently Projects Curator at the Serpentine Gallery. There, she and others have created the Centre for Possible Studies, a research space and artistic residency in which artists and local people create „studies of the possible“ that expose and respond to social inequities in the Edgware Road neighborhood of London.
http://centreforpossiblestudies.wordpress.com/about/
http://serpentinegalleries.org/about/projects
http://www.serpentinegalleries.org/exhibitions-events/edgware-road
http://www.serpentinegalleries.org/exhibitions-events/ultra-reds-reassembly
http://www.newleftproject.org/index.php/site/article_comments/organising_free_labour
Nicolas Vass
Nicolas Vass works with a number of London-based collectives in response to injustices in education, arts and culture as well as UK migration policy. As an artist he has developed Re-constructing Hasil, a performance based on the work and music of the depression era one-man band Hasil Adkins. With this project, he looks at issues of contemporary artistic and cultural labor, austerity, and performativity. He is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Leicester, where he is doing research on micro-politics and value production in the contemporary art industry.
http://precariousworkersbrigade.tumblr.com/Toolbox
http://precariousworkersbrigade.tumblr.com/antiraidscampaign
http://thedictionaryofreceivedideas.wordpress.com/zoe-charaktinou/
Workshop II: Praktiken des (Ent-)Übens
Annette Krauss, artist
April 4th, 2014: 1-5 p.m.
April 5th, 2014: 9 a.m.-5 p.m. (with public presentations from 4-5 p.m.)
Schwerpunkt Wissenschaft & Kunst, Bibliothek, 1.Stock
Im Workshop nehmen wir die Ausführungen zum Projekt „Hidden Curriculum“ zum Anlass, um über ein mögliches Hidden Curriculum im Studium und an der Universität nach zu denken. Was lernen wir, was lernen wir nicht und warum? Welche Rolle spielen unsere Körper in unseren wohl erprobten Seminar-Sitzungen, Vorlesungen und Situationen wie diesem Workshop? Ausgehend von performativen Annäherungen der Körperlichkeit in verschiedenen Bildungsprozessen, erarbeiten wir ein kontextspezifisches Vokabular von ‚Zusammenarbeit‘. Was wird in diesen Situationen ‚geübt‘, was wird nicht ‚geübt‘ and warum? Aufbauend auf diesen Untersuchungen, widmet sich der zweite Teil des Workshops der Annäherung an Beispielen kollektiven Ent-übens.
Ziel des Workshops ist es dann, in Gruppen jeweils eigene Vorstellungen und Praktiken des kollektiven Ent-übens zu entwickeln. Diese möglichen ‘test-sites for unlearning‘ beziehen sich hier auf die eigenen spezifischen Situationen im Studium mit ihren sozio-politischen Verschränkungen in die Gesellschaft hinein.
Annette Krauss
Annette Krauss (based in Utrecht/NL) works as an artist. In her conceptual-based practice she addresses the intersection of art, politics, and everyday life. Her work revolves around informal knowledge and (institutionalized) normalization processes that shape our bodies, the way we use objects, engage in social practices, and how these influence the way we know and act in the world. Her artistic work emerges through the intersection of different media, such as performance, film, historical and everyday research, pedagogy, and texts. Krauss explores the possibilities of participatory practices, self-organization, and investigations into institutional structures in order to work/think through how we perceive the world around us, what we sense, and what we don’t see.