DAI-bulletin 2010-2011 number three December 2010
This is the third issue of the monthly DAI-bulletin in the academic year 2010-2011, informing you about our program during our so- called
DAI-week.
Instead of asking its master students to be present at the institute on a daily base the DAI offers an alternative educational environment: once per month (11 times per year) students, faculty and invited guests come to the DAI for a full week and take part in an intense program (consisting of lectures, artists talks, performances, seminars, face to face conversations, projects, master classes and workshops) that lasts from early morning until late at night. During the DAI-week, a guest cook prepares the afternoon and evening meals that students, faculty and guests enjoy together. During the DAI-week students spend the night in an accomodation provided by the DAI. In between DAI-weeks all return to their daily practices as artists and researchers - scattered over the Netherlands, or abroad.
Please note that:
- biographical notes on our guests can be found on our website under 'Faculty' and ' Guests'.
- all parts of the curriculum have to be attended by ALL students unless it is mentioned otherwise.
- the evening presentations on Monday, Wednesday and Thursday are open to interested members the public.
Location of the month: Kortestraat 27, Arnhem.
PROGRAM DAI-WEEK DECEMBER 6 - 10
DAI-Cantina
Lunch will be served daily from 13:00-14:00, dinner Monday from 18:00-19:00, Wednesday to Thursday from 18:30-19:30
December 6: Monday DAI - Publication
11:00–17:00 (Reading Room )
For all 2st year students
Pressing Issues – coordinator Rebecca Sakoun
Today's Guest: Freek Lomme
Second-year students will gather for the second session of <<DAI Publications: Pressing Issues>>. In the morning, Gabriëlle Schleijpen will make an inventory of questions that the participants in this session ask themselves about the relevance of printed matter in contemporary artistic practice. At 14:00 hours the director of publishing house Onomatopee, Freek Lomme, will join the group for an informal "round table"- exchanges of questions, insights and information about the relevance of printed matter in contemporary artistic practice .
During the day, Pressing Issues Coordinator Rebecca Sakoun will have face-to-face meetings with individual students.10:30–17:30 ( Lecture Room)
For all 1st year students
Publishing Class
Framework: Binna Choi (Casco)
Support editor and coordinator: Chris Lee (Casco)
Today's guests: Wendelien van Oldenborgh & Cohabitation StrategiesWe will start the day with our monthly Journal review & editorial meeting, followed at 11:30 by a Consultation w/ Cohabitation Strategies on the design of the Publishing Class workspace. Cohabitation Strategies is a non-profit international cooperative for socio-spatial development based in Rotterdam, The Netherlands. The cooperative focuses its actions, designs and research inside the conditions of conflict and exclusion of the contemporary city. Their work is orientated around the possibilities to design and stimulate parallel economies, alternative cohabitation models and social relations in the casualties of neoliberal urbanization.
13:00: L(a)unch of first 'journal' of Publishing Class.
14.00–17.30
Workshop with Wendelien van Oldenborgh.
19:00 (Lecture Room)
For all students and for students of Werkplaats Typografie
Publishing in Practice, or Parallel Inquiry
Today's guests: Wendelien van Oldenborg, Rael Artel, Eva Fotiadi and Jaan Evart
An evening programme with Wendelien van Oldenborgh in combination with the book-launch presentations by curator Rael Artel, Eva Fotiadi (art historian), Jaan Evart (designer) and other guests on "Public Preparation," a newly published book that "negotiates issues of contemporary nationalism and ciritical art practices in Europe."
December 7: Tuesday DAI - Presentation
Starting 10:30
Face to face meetings with Rebecca Sakoun and Rael Artel
according to schedule
10:30–21:00 (Lecture Room)
Artists Talks / Lecture-performances by students
Today in no particular order: Barbara Wagner, Goncalo Sena, Nancy Tjong, Eva Olthof, Ingeborg Entrop, Yunjoo Kwak, Sander Uitdehaag, Marija Sujica, Emilio Moreno and Tzvika Gutter.
Their 20 – minute presentations will be reviewed on the spot by guest advisors Aneta Szylak and Praneet Soi. The discussion will be moderated by Gabriëlle Schleijpen.
December 8: Wednesday DAI-Thesis
Starting 10:30 (Reading Room)
Reading for Writing or How to do things with Theory
Alena Alexandrova & a group of 15 students
In this plenary session we will read and discuss texts by Rancière and Bourriaud and address issues of art and politics, politically engaged art, relational aesthetics. In the first part of the session, two students will briefly present Jacques Rancière's "Artistic Regimes and the Shortcomings of the Notion of Modernity"; "Politicized Art" In: The Politics of Aesthetics, trans. Gabriel Rockhill (London:Continuum) 2004, pp. 20-31, 60-66. Following this, two students will present Nicolas Bourriaud's text "Relational Form" In: Relational Aesthetics, trans. Simon Pleasance and Fronza Wood (Les presses du reel) 2002, pp. 11-25. At the end of the session, there will be one hour for discussion of questions related to the writing of the thesis.
Starting 10:00 (Lecture Room)
Reading for Writing or How to do things with Theor y
Doreen Mende & a group of 15 students
10:00 – 13:00 face to face meetings
At 14:00, we will start the afternoon session with a game: Each of us 'plays' to be a theorist by reading: Irit Rogoff, "What Is a Theorist?", in: BAK (eds), On Knowledge Production: A Critical Reader in Contemporary Art, Utrecht / Frankfurt 2008, pp. 142–158.
After a 15 minute break, we will start again at 15:15 with a reading of Michel Foucault's Lecture ONE: 7 January 1976, in: Mauro Bertani, Alessandro Fontana (eds.), trans. by David Macey, Michel Foucault "Society Must Be Defended" Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975-1976, pages 1–23.
In the final part of the day programme, we will discuss both texts:
What does connect them? What do they deliver for practice? Starting 19:30 (Lecture Room)
For all students
Reading for Writing or How to do things with Theory
Lecture Presentations by Doreen Mende and Alena Alexandrova
The theme of Doreen Mende's lecture will revolve around the question "What is exposed?", a question that perhaps might not be as relevant as the question "What is not possible to be exposed?". The act of exposure is charged with a set of impossibilities. Namely, the process of a research, a train of thoughts, an inner experience, a feeling of unease and an urgency to engage in a situation are rather impossible to be made manifest as an object. Neglecting these impossibilities would be to neglect the emancipatory potentialities in artistic and curatorial practice and, at the same time, would withdraw from driving dynamics of art towards politics. - The presentation is situated around a recent project: In cooperation with the International Art Academy Palestine, she was commissioned by UNESCO Office Ramallah to conceptualize a workshop on Exhibition Design and Curatorial Practice in Palestine, that took place in November 2010 in Ramallah. The case study was the Abu Jihad Museum for Prisoner Movement Affairs, which was founded by former political prisoners several years ago. Presentations by Milica Tomic, Rema Hammami, Khaled Hourani, Yazid Anani, Wilfried Kuehn, Zakaria Mohammad and Ayshe Odeh as well as the screening of a film by The Otolith Group and the reading of texts activated a research group and an arena for discussion: How can exhibiting become a site for the production of a vocabulary and of knowledge?
Alena Alexandrova will talk about Capturing Metamorphosis - an exhibition and a lecture series at the HeritageLab, Allard Pierson Museum, Amsterdam she curated with Vladimir Stissi and Martine van Kampen. The exhibition in the HeritageLab takes the central concept of metamorphosis as a means to stage a creative dialogue between contemporary and ancient art, new and old media, and practices of image making. James Beckett, Rob Johannesma, Lawrence Malstaf, Barbara Philipp and Rebecca Sakoun took the collection of the Allard Pierson Museum as a point of departure to develop new works, shown here with a selection of archeological artifacts from its own collection and those of other museums and libraries.
December 9: Thursday DAI - Autonomy
Starting 9:30
Face to Face meetings between individual DAI-students and individual guest advisors Doreen Mende, Alena Alexandrova, Simon Will & Tanja Baudoin, Phil Collins, Aneta Szylak, Florian Göttke, Renée Ridgway, Stephen Wright, Clare Butcher, Steven ten Thije and the students of the master course "Curating (Beyond) Exhibitions: Critical Curatorial Practices and Contemporary Society" (BAK and University of Utrecht).
10:30 - 14:30 (Lecture Room)
Exclusively for participants in the project
TRACES OF AUTONOMY - THE ECONOMY OF SPEECH AND VOICE IN GLOBAL ART
PROJECT curated by the VAN ABBEMUSEUM.
With Clare Butcher and Steven ten Thije
Today's session of Traces of Autonomy will begin by discussing the Latour/Katti interview more fully as the curators are very much interested in hearing and exchanging readings of these ideas with the students as a starting point for their work together.
After the session there will be space for face-to-face meetings.
http://theautonomyproject.ning.com/
19:30 – 21:00 (Lecture Room)
The evening lecture for all students
'Plausible Artworlds'
by Stephen Wright
Plausible Artworlds is a collaborative project organized by Scott Rigby, Basekamp and Stephen Wright, which, in 2010, has taken the form of a once-weekly "potluck" where the representative(s) of artists collectives or art-related groups present not their art "work" but the art-sustaining environment they have devised where art – as they understand that term – can thrive. Every Tuesday evening from 6 pm – 8 pm EST, a group of people gather in the Basekamp space in downtown Philadelphia, while dozens of others from around the world join the potluck discussion over skype. Sometimes the week's featured guest does the informal but invariably spirited presentation live in Philadelphia; but more often than not, the presenters are far from Philadelphia – often joining from time zones on the other side of the globe. Piggybacking on the sometimes capricious (but user-friendly and widely used) infrastructure of skype, Plausible Artworlds has sought over course of the year to compile a sizeable cross-section of "exhibits" – in the forensic sense of the term – attesting to the widespread existence of actual, multiple artworlds, substantively different from the mainstream variant, around the globe. The idea is to support alternative modes of artworld / lifeworld integration by bringing together, and hopefully engineering plausible reconfigurations of what is often referred to, unpluralized, as the artworld – its economy, its infrastructure, its inter-cerebral network.
December 10: Friday DAI-Project
Starting 10:00 (space to be announced)
Affect/Production
Curated by If I Can't Dance, I Don't Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution, tutored by Phil Collins and co-ordinated by Tanja Baudoin
Today's special guest: Simon Will
Friday's session consists out of a theoretical component concentrated on "affect" in the morning, and a "production" component in the afternoon.
This month, Simon Will from Gob Squad is joining our project and will help us explore potentials for collaboration through performative exercises.
Gob Squad is a group of English and German artists who have been working collectively with performance since 1994. Their work is characterised by a desire to place Romantic beauty into the mundane by inserting home made magic and small-scale spectacle into everyday life. Audiences and public are often invited to participate in these interventions. Their work can be seen as an exploration of fantasy and desire in relation to contemporary urban existence.
As well as producing work for radio, internet, galleries and theatre, the group have used offices, houses, shops, hotels and railway stations as starting points to generate images and concepts. In the last decade the use of video cameras have become central to their interventions.
In the morning, we will be reading the introduction to the book "The Affective Turn" by Patricia Ticineto Clough, in which Clough describes where the recent attention for affect stems from, and outlines the broad spectrum of research in this field. In addition, we are reading the introduction to the book "The Cultural Politics of Emotion" by Sara Ahmed, in which she writes about how emotions move between individual and collective bodies.
Starting 10:00 (space to be announced)
Negotiating Equity
Organised by Renée Ridgway and contributors to n.e.w.s (http://northeastwestsouth.net)
Today's special guest: Stephen Wright
Machina multa minax minitatur maxima muris,
seminar with Stephen Wright
How's that for a lilting verbal readymade? "Mega machines that menace walls and ramparts to the max." Cut & pasted from Roman military strategist Ennius (2nd C. BC), it happens to be one of the first instances of what would become the Latin usage of "machine". Wouldn't it make a nice epitaph for what so much politically engaged modernist and contemporary art sees itself to be doing? Breaking down semiotic walls, or better still, melting them away, circumventing them by displacing the partition lines of the sensible? But more importantly, this premodern usage of the notion of machine reveals to just what extent modernity "instrumentalized" the notion of the machine, construing it either as an alienating replacement of the human, or else a mere extension of human agency. What has become clear under post-Fordism and the rise of 2.0 attention economics is the extent to which machines are not mere objects, but subjects -- or rather to what extent subjectivities and their production are inseparable from giant machines, from networks of hybrid machinery, from the desiring machines that we are. Animism, anathema to modernity, may be making a comeback. The walls that have been broken down are those of the factories -- those icons of modern productivism -- yet if the factories are no longer visible, they have not disappeared, but have become socialized -- and their immateriality continues to produce value, desire, relationality, profit. The shadows previously cast by the walls have shifted, by which we mean that working conditions have changed dramatically, and yet we struggle to describe this shift with the conceptual vocabulary of modernity. But artists are showing a different picture -- and in this era where language stutters to articulate the change, it is interesting to see what artists have been filming behind the invisible factory walls, in the new shadows cast by the pulsing of the overcoded networks. With works by Yang Zhen Zhong; Angela Melitopoulos & Maurizio Lazaratto; Harun Farocki; Chto Delat?
14:00-17:00 'Plausibel Artworlds', Skype with Scott Rigby and Greg Scranton
http://plausibleartworlds.org/, http://basekamp.com/
Starting 10:30 (Space to be announced)
Re-reading Public Images
Project leader Florian Göttke
Today's special guest: Aneta Szylak
Aneta will talk about her curatorial work at Wyspa and especially about the project Estrangement in which she collaborates with the Iraqi artist Hiwa K.
The concept of Estrangement developed through a series of discussions and collaborative projects between Iraqi artist Hiwa K. and Polish curator Aneta Szylak is an attempt to create a form for mutual translation and collaborative work that is not restricted to one cultural format.
Estrangement seeks to capture the tension between European cultures and what was once constructed as the 'Orient', investigated from different European cultural contexts of London, Gent and Gdansk, as well as Sulaimany and Hawler in Iraqi Kurdistan. While Europe and the Western world are not homogenous in cultural terms, there has often been an insistence on its coherence when confronting the invented face of an undefined enemy. While the West appears to deny having anything culturally in common with this reinvented 'Other', Estrangement attempts to find a way to reformulate these relations, and complicate them.
http://estrangementproject.blogspot.com/
After lunch we will take a 30-minute break when DAI-student Lauren Alexander will take us on a walking tour through her section of Arnhem (as part of the assignment "Arnhem Show and Tell").