DAI-week 10

Trip to New York from May 3-17, 2013 

May 10 / Sotheby's / Yona Backer & Third Streaming / MOMA & Whitney Museum

May 9  Printed Matter / lecture Liselot van der Heijden, the High Line/ visiting Marisa Jahn in her studio / attending evening openings: McKee Gallery & New Museum

ROAMING ACADEMY GOES NYC / May 8 / El Museo del Barrio & chief curator Chus Martínez / apexart & it's director Steven Rand

 May 7 / Tania Bruguera & Arte Util / Tom Finkelpearl & Queens Museum of Art

 May 6 / EELATION: bringing baby glass eels to Bronx River with Natalie Jeremijenko & Dutch drinks with Robert Kloos

May....  from Museum El Barrio to High Line and all places in between / meeting with Chus Martinez, Nato Thompson, Tom Miller, Sal Randolph, Jeff Raven, Marisa Jahn, Josh MacFee, Gregory Sholette and numerous others

DAI-week 9

All day seminar with Tone Nielsen

Wednesday, June 26, 2013 10-13 and 14-17:30

Projects of Decolonization, Practices of Solidarity: Kuratorisk Aktion and the Trampoline House Activist curator Tone Olaf Nielsen is the co-founder of two of the most widely discussed projects to emerge from the Danish art scene in recent years. In 2005, she formed the transnational feminist curatorial collective, Kuratorisk Aktion, with feminist curator Frederikke Hansen, with an aim to take curatorial action against the injustices and inequalities produced and sustained by the order of global capitalism; a collective that has received international recognition for its curatorial investigations into the aftermath of colonialism's race and gender-thinking in our globalized present. In 2010, Tone co-established, in collaboration with artists Morten Goll and Joachim Hamou and a large network of asylum seekers and migration justice activists, the Trampoline House: a user-driven refugee justice community center located in Copenhagen, where refugees and other residents of Denmark meet, share experiences, and work together for a just and humane refugee and asylum policy. The center operates as a non-profit, self-organized platform for social interaction, knowledge exchange, and solidarity building across boundaries of privilege, exclusion, and inequality, and offers a series of services and activities intended partly to inform the Danish population about the conditions for refugees living in the Danish asylum centers or underground, and partly to provide refugees and asylum seekers in Denmark with a platform from which to better their situation. In different ways, both projects have contributed to establishing a genuine 'systemkritik' in Denmark, offering platforms for anti-racist, anti-sexist, anti-colonial, and anti-capitalist critique and action. During her visit, Tone will give a detailed account of both projects and discuss with the students the numerous practices, actions, and ideas informing the methodologies behind them.

June 26: 10 am–1 pm: PowerPoint presentations of Kuratorisk Aktion and the Trampoline House

2–6 pm: Discussions of the 2 x assigned readings: 1) "Curatorial Collectives and Feminist Politics in 21st-century Europe: An Interview with Kuratorisk Aktion," in Angela Dimitrakaki & Lara Perry (eds.), Politics in a Glass Case: Exhibiting Feminist and Women's Art, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2013 (forthcoming in June). This longer version is available at http://arts.brighton.ac.uk/research/irn/resources 2) Giorgio Agamben, "What Is a Camp?" (1994), in Agamben, Means Without End: Notes on Politics, Minneapolis & London: University of Minnesota Press, 2000.

DAI-week 8

Workshop Form Follows Finance with Anthony Iles of Mute. Wednesday, May 29, 2013

This one day seminar will explore connections between art and processes of financialisation. This will be an attempt to survey recent theoretical efforts to pose a relation between art and economy at the level of material form and practices which experiment with late capitalist modes of work and economy. The seminar will look beyond the incursions of money into the institutional artworld and examine more directly the correlations and antinomies between art work and capitalist work at a moment in which they increasingly appear to dissolve into each other.

relation to this text: Make Whichever You Find Work, by Anthony Iles & Marina Vishmidt available here: http://www.variant.org.uk/issue41.html

DAI-week 7

Workshop with Brett Bloom of Temporary Services Wednesday, April 24, 2013

10-13 and 14-17:30 Deep Listening Every aspect of our lives—from how we sense our surroundings to how we make art or group ourselves in daily situations—has been minutely orchestrated by the ever encroaching demands of the dominant culture, of neoliberal capitalism. To investigate this claim (whether you agree with it or not), and your relation to it, we will do different kinds of listening sessions together and engage in conversations that help us understand what is meant and what is at stake, and the degree to which our lives are guided by concerns that may not be our own. We will discuss ways of articulating forms of social organization that do not feed into the production of the knowledge economy. We will look for ways of building exits and new realities and the role that art has in helping us in our search.

Readings:

1) "Introduction" and "Ways of Listening," by Pauline Oliveros, Deep Listening: A Composer's Sound Practice, iUniverse Books, 2005

2) "Philosophy on the way to ecology," by David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous, Vintage, 1996

 ONE: Deep Listening Session 1 Pauline Oliveros is a tremendous force whether she is performing, thinking, or just listening. She developed the practice of Deep Listening (see reading for more information and description). We will use her process to investigate our capacities for perceiving and for thinking about the limits we accept in the built environment.
TWO: Collective analysis of art-working We will use methods of resource mapping—developed by permaculturalists in the 1970s—to visualize the labor, resource, social and other costs of producing art works.
THREE: Deep Listening Session 2 We will do another deep listening session tuned to understanding human groupings and radically opening up our capacities to hear and empathize with others.
FOUR: Collective analysis of human groupings Language has a tremendous role is shaping our perceptions of how we group ourselves and make various social configurations. We will investigate our use of language versus the richness of language we have at hand and what this can tell us about ideology and contemporary society. Listening sessions 2 & 4 are based on ones we have developed in Temporary Services over the past decade. 

Evening lecture Wednesday, April 24, 2013 at 19:00

Tonight we welcome Brett Bloom from Copenhagen, where he is based and currently teaching at Jutland Academy in Aarhus. Brett Bloom is an artist, writer, educator and publisher. Over the past twenty years he has been documenting, protesting in, writing and publishing books about the shared spaces of several cities. Bloom will present the work he has done with Temporary Services, an artists collective (with Marc Fischer, Salem Colin-Julin) that started as an experimental exhibition space in a working class neighborhood of Chicago. Their name directly reflects the desire to provide art as a service to others and is a way for them to pay attention to the social context in which art is produced and received. The group documents informal modifications citizens make to alter their city spaces to a variety of ends. Temporary Services also run Half Letter Press, a publishing imprint. http://www.temporaryservices.org

Bloom will also discuss Mythological Quarter, a recent collaboration with Bonnie Fortune that uses art, ecology, writing, and photography to make sense of the hyper-local conditions of the duo's neighborhood in Copenhagen. Bloom's own individual projects range from making giant sign systems that get handed over to others, to writing about the use of art by urban planners to making neoliberal city space design look like a lot of harmless fun. Bloom's most recent essay "Superkilen: Participatory Park Extreme!" (Kriitk, April 2013, Copenhagen) is an investigation of a new park in Copenhagen designed by starchitects Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG) and the art group Superflex. It looks at how narratives of democracy and participation are used to gloss over extreme influence peddling and the spatialization of neoliberal values and city planning.

DAI-week 6

Wednesday 10:00 - 17:30 workshop with Marsha Bradfield and Neil Cummings.

ART FUTURES One day, some of the futures we currently imagine won't be present. How can we encourage those we want and discourage those we don't? ART FUTURES is a workshop that continues Roaming Academy's year-long research regarding art and her economies by exploring the urgent challenge of building desirable futures for art, artists, arts institutions and the communities they constitute. By way of 'future casting,' we will catapult ourselves fifty years forward in time and try to remember how we got there. Conversations, post-it maps and timelines will track our experience as we performatively inhabit 2071. The futures we build may be wildly speculative, strangely dystopic, coolly rational and/or adamantly optimistic. We will be keenly aware of what impact pragmatic imagining can have on the futures of our art worlds.

ART FUTURES is based on a method developed by Manuela Zechner for Future Archive. A presentation of practice will launch our time travel to 2071. To nourish our future casting, Neil Cummings introduces and screens his video project, Museum Futures. Marsha Bradfield will discuss her current investigation into the modes of assembly and forms of address in collaborative, collective, cooperative and other art practices that are explicitly shared and visionary. Her work with Neil and others as part of Critical Practice Research Cluster (http://criticalpracticechelsea.org) are the mornings topic of discussion. The research elements pursued under the auspices of Critical Practice engage with the various forces that are implicated in the making of art, and the increasingly devolved experience of art made available through art institutions to their audiences. They explore new models for creative practice, and engage those models in appropriate public forums, both nationally and internationally by envisioning participation in exhibitions and the institutions of exhibition, seminar and unconferences, film, concert and other event programmes.

Furthermore, Marsha's participation in Precarious Workers Brigade (http://precariousworkersbrigade.tumblr.com) aims to exemplify artistic praxis that is catalyzing desirable futures through a combination of critical thinking and creative doing. Marsha recently completed her practice-based Ph.D. at Chelsea College of Art and Design, University of the Arts London on dialogic art that foregrounds authorship as dispersed and contingent, spread across paradigms, practices, processes and practitioners.

evening program: 19:30 Our guests will be 16 Beaver, a.k.a. AND, AND, AND who are René Gabri and Ayreen Anastas.

In the context of nuclear fallout, climate change, economic austerity, mass privatization and enclosure of the commons, increasing xenophobia, political dissent and state repression, what can art do or undo?

Ayreen Anastas and Rene Gabri are two artists living in New York, associated with various works, collaborative projects, spaces, and initiatives. Whether they do something individually, with each other, or with others, the endeavors often involve an open ended search for how a particular place, context, situation or encounter may offer a singular perspective on the world, on life, or on shared life (sometimes understood as politics).

Art, in this sense, is not a privileged or isolated site of formal inquiry or medium specificity, as much as it acts as a between space, a conjunctive space for understanding or perceiving life or things or the life of things sometimes anew, sometimes for the first time and sometimes for the last.

In their brief time in Holland, they are interested in activating discussions with different groups inquiring about the general conditions of life, and to possibly learn about different initiatives, struggles, challenges, positions and how they may be connected to broader dynamics/struggles beyond Holland and the EU.

They have over the last years been interested in rethinking essential elements of life, such as food, work, and housing along a non-capitalist and common(s) horizon.

More generally, the two are interested in going beyond their interest and this process of discussion may be seen as a step in that direction.

They are also open to share from their recent experiences in different contexts, so questions you may have can also be a good starting point.

DAI-week 5

Seminar with Jakob Jakobsen: Wednesday the 20th of February, 10-18

Arnhem Drift- Institutional bodies The one-day seminar at the Dutch Art Institute will be a 'drift' through selected institutions in Arnhem, taking in the city's psychogeography and the effects of the geographical environment on our beings. We will begin at the Dutch Art Institute with a short introduction about Jakob's past practices, after which we will walk and talk through a selection of urban institutions and city sites. These include a walk through Sonsbeek's park, a visit to the hospital, De Berg prison, the Museum of Modern Art and the Arnhem court of law. During the drift he will introduce parts of his on-going investigations into anti-institutions such as the Anti university of London, Kingsley Hall and Villa 21 in the UK, all projects that in some way take their experimental point of departure from the so-called anti-psychiatry movement. Hopefully this will develop into a greater discussion about self-organisation, self-institution and autonomy. We will be keenly aware of what impact the various institutional spaces are having on our bodies during the course of the day.

DAI-week 4

10:30-17:00 Stephen Wright

Today, in our age of e-flux and MutualArt.com, Fama has become the tautological goddess of the artworld's reputational economy and the now pervasive economy of attention upon which it is founded. "Great show. Great show. Great show." How do hedge funds like Artist Pension Trust speculate on artistic futures, their derivatives combining the infamous and the famous as complementary values in the same market, each potentially the future of the other? Has Allport and Postman's infamous definition of rumour (R=Importance x Uncertainty) become the rule-of-thumb algorithm of art's exchange value? As art, rumour and reputation become synonyms, distinguishing them only serves the persistant rumour that art is something other, something more than what it is reputed to be. Adapted to contemporary art-historical practice, this opens radically new perspectives of enquiry. Above all, by enquiring into practices beyond the scope of rumour, it inverts the perspective between fame and infamy, inviting an entirely different and perhaps double understanding of the infamous in their fleeting meeting with performative capture. What are the meanings of "infamy" within the contemporary attention economy?

DAI-week 3

In November the entire DAI-week will take place in Amsterdam at the Inexactly This / Kunstvlaai in Amsterdam.

10:30-13:00 Stedelijk Bureau Amsterdam, with a tour by Kerstin Winking. We will visit the exhibition HOLLANDAISE With: Godfried Donkor, Abdoulaye Konaté, Wendelien van Oldenborgh, Willem de Rooij, Billie Zangewa. Curator: Koyo Kouoh. Terms like Wax Hollandais, Hollandaise, Dutch Wax, wax prints or batik prints are used interchangeably, but the meaning is always the same: the exuberant and colourful textiles that we are familiar with from African countries, and in particular West Africa. It is less known that in the colonial era the Dutch and British imitated Indonesian hand-made batik to create these fabrics by means of industrial processes, and then found their most important market in Africa. Right down to this day the Dutch textile firm Vlisco is the market leader for this textile. This is how we got 'Hollandaise'.

As a part of Project '1975' SMBA invited curator Koyo Kouoh (director Raw Material Company, where DAI presented last year in Dakar) to make an exhibition on the basis of her previous exhibition concepts, in each of which she put colonial and post-colonial connections between Europe and Africa at stake. She accomplishes this through the subjects that she proposes and the artists whom she invites to reflect on them. 'Hollandaise' is one such subject. Five artists, working in Europe and Africa, have made new work especially for this exhibition. In May 2013 we will travel to New York City, visiting mainstream institutions as well as more subversive or underground artistic platforms and initiatives. Is there a future for alternative artistic production, which was perhaps once a model yet nowadays has ostensibly been takeover by the contemporary art market? Is there production outside of the market and if so, what are these economies and how can they be realized?

Wednesday 28 November / DAI Public Lecture by Olav Velthuis / The Contemporary Art Market Between Stasis and Flux / Location: Festival of Independents / Kunstvlaai 2012

In this talk Olav Velthuis will discuss three key developments in the contemporary art markets of the last decade. First of all, contemporary art has taken over the role once played by pop music as a locus around which fan cultures and celebrity worlds develop. Secondly, contemporary art has subject to financialization: it has been turned into an asset class. Speculators now see art as a safe haven in the turbulent times of financial crisis. Thirdly, a new global market architecture has emerged which channels the wealth of emerging economies to artists in Europe and the United States and vice versa. These reconfigurations have both been propelled by and have further fortified the role of art fairs and auction houses in the contemporary art world. But in spite of these reconfigurations, the contemporary art market's underlying structure has remained by and large the same.

Olav Velthuis is Associate Professor at the Department of Sociology and Anthropology of the University of Amsterdam. Before, he worked for several years as a Staff Reporter Globalization for the Dutch daily de Volkskrant. He is currently studying the emergence and development of art markets in the BRIC-countries (Brazil, Russia, India and China). Velthuis is the author of Imaginary Economics (NAi Publishers, 2005) and Talking Prices. Symbolic Meanings of Prices on the Market for Contemporary Art (Princeton University Press, 2005). Together with Maria Lind of Tensta Konsthall (Stockholm), he recently edited the book Contemporary Art and Its Commercial Markets A Report on Current Conditions and Future Scenarios (Sternberg Press, 2012). His journalistic writings on art markets have appeared in among others Artforum, the Art Newspaper and the Financial Times.

DAI-week 2

On Wednesday October 30 we go to Utrecht to visit exhibitions at BAK ( 'How much fascism?' ) and at Casco ( Aural Contract: The Whole Truth by Lawrence Abu Hamdan ). As special evening guest we welcome Nishant Shah who will present a public evening lecture.

Face to face meetings with Simon Ferdinando and Renee Ridgway.

DAI-week 1

We will begin at the Liverpool Biennial and the Mobile Art School- event that addresses what exactly is 'socially engaged art'? Introductory lecture presentation by Renée Ridgway and talk by Static's director Paul Sullivan, taking place at Static. http://www.statictrading.com/