DAI-bulletin 2011-2012 number three November / December 2011

PROGRAM DAI-WEEK 28 NOVEMBER / 2 DECEMBER
Please note that bio’s of all four workshop leaders are to be found at http://www.dutchartinstitute.nl/
DAI- Cantina:
Lunch will be served daily from 13:00-14:00
Dinner Monday & Tuesday from 18:00-19:00
Wednesday & Thursday 19:00-20.00

November 28: Monday DAI – Presentation
13.00 For a kick-off of today’s two projects we will have lunch with the complete group in the DAI’s canteen. Today we welcome Jean-Luc Vilmouth and David Weber Krebs as tutors.

14.00 - 21:00 (DAI Auditorium/Project room)
two workshops dealing with the act of ‘presenting/performing your work in public’:
1. When the stage hits you…
Run by Otobong Nkanga and Jean-Luc Vilmouth. When you believe that your hunger is an equivalent to that of a hostage who has been kidnapped by a terrorist or a bank robber, without food or drink then what do you do? This state of urgency creates a platform where intricate, extreme and creative stands are taken resulting in a holdup situation. We will be interested in looking at different forms of performances that can create this state of a holdup situation. When the stage hits you and there is no way out but to face the situation in a radical and extreme way. The idea will be to push the limits of (re) presentation, how one could go beyond just the normal and accepted ways of presentation of their works and engaged the public or spectator in an unusual and unpredicted way. “Un art ne peut être une fin pour lui-même car, en lui-même, il ne rend personne meilleur” Socrate
Bio’s of Otobong and Jean-Luc to be found at http://www.dutchartinstitute.nl/

2. Presenting Performance/Performing Presentation
A six part workshop on performance art and lecture performance with David Weber-Krebs and Jan-Philipp Possmann. This workshop is aimed at artists interested in developing or sharpening their own artistic language in the live mediums performance art and lecture performance. Together we will discuss and experiment on basic parameters of the performative situation and assist each other in developing performances. An interest but not necessarily an experience in performance art or lecture performance is required of all participants.

November 29: Tuesday DAI – Thesis
Morning workshops will continue with Jean-Luc Vilmouth and David Weber-Krebbs Starting 10.00 – 13.00 for all students

13.00 – 14.00 lunch

DAI Thesis, 2011-2012
Reading for Writing or How to do things with Theory, Alena Alexandrova & Doreen Mende and their two respective groups of students

During the first year the focus is on developing research skills and a central question for the thesis, formally submitted as a thesis project. During the second year the students engage in further research and writing the thesis.
Plenary session group Alena Alexandrova:

14.30 – 17.30 PM Alena Alexandrova’s reading group will focus on the question: what does it mean to think with or through images? Georges Didi-Huberman’s writing is key with regards to the field of visual studies; he insists that the image is a site and a medium of a specifically visual knowledge that cannot be reduced to language or concepts. His latest exhibition Atlas. How to Carry the World on One’s Back? explores the atlas as a “visual form of knowledge” and a “knowledgeable form of seeing.” Sarat Maharaj discusses the hotly debated topic of the (im-) possibilities of considering visual art as a field, or even a method, of knowledge production.

The last part of the Theory Seminar will focus on introducing the thesis project in a more detail and discussing issues around research process, finding and working with research resources.

Plenary session group Doreen Mende:
14.30 – 17.30 PM ‘The ontology of performance: representation without reproduction’. Doreen Mende’s reading group November session will focus on questions about the undocumented event and its relevance for the unconscious of society. The students will read the essay "The ontology of performance: representation without reproduction" by Peggy Phelan. The text stands in relation to the artistic practice of Milica Tomić who will be our guest for the reading group as well as for the evening lecture. In this framework, Phelan's text will offer several lines of thoughts enabling to entangle theoretical propositions with urgencies of practice and concerns of gender. It is also useful here to understand 'performance' in a wider sense than a media-specific category but through its singular moment, e.g. the act and space of exposure. If there is time, we will relate Phelan's text to the notion of 'event' as a cross-point of politics and aesthetics which has been extensively unfolded by Alain Badiou in his seminal book Being and Event (1988) - (optional for further reading and research).

20.00 – 22.00 Public evening lecture
Container: photography by other means by Milica Tomić
DAI Auditorium (in the framework of How to do Theory with Things)

Tomić will talk about her ongoing project CONTAINER which has been realized recently at the Octobersalon in Belgrade through the question: How to exhibit CONTAINER that is considered to be a performative object, with us in the middle? How to exhibit CONTAINER that has been an instrument to re-construct a crime?

November 30: Wednesday DAI – Private
09:30 – 13:00 (DAI location) For all students
Face to face meetings between students and: Milica Tomić, Alena Alexandrova, Doreen Mende, Renée Ridgway, Florian Göttke, Suzanne Kriemann, Ian White, Tanja Baudoin, Emma Hedditch, Kiluanji Kia Henda and Grant Watson.

Co-ordinated by Rik Fernhout

13.00 – 14.00 lunch

15.00 – 17.00 SHIFT IN MY THINKING

The Dutch Art Institute / MFA ArtEZ in collaboration with
The MMKA (Museum for Modern Art Arnhem) and curatorial collective Suze May Sho presents a series of 6 lectures, taking place at the MMKA on the following Wednesdays; October 19, November 30, January 11, February 8, March 21, April 18.
Always from 3-5 pm
By inviting 6 eminent speakers, each with an outspoken position in the current postcolonial or decolonial debate, we will rethink past, present and future entanglements between the African continent and Europe (and beyond),through theory and art.

November 30, 2011:

Afronautas: from the ashes of the past, to the blink of the satellites.

by Kiluanji Kia Henda

After their fights for indepence many countries in the so called "Third World" had to face destructive civil wars. Murdered before they were even born, those young countries were run over by history. Up to today many have to deal with stone age conditions for living, as if time had stopped. But at the same time, for better or for worse,they are willing to belong to a modern world.

“Afronautas” came into being as a post-war movement of young Angolan artists who, in their formation were compelled to travel; or in the absence of an industrial structure were contaminated by the different foreign cultures that arrived via the ports and airports and today through the internet and satellite television. In Angola this “contamination” created a global, assimilated, cultural production, from music to visual art and a rupture with traditional standards by legitimating multiculturalism.

By creating fiction from factual stories Henda’s work draws upon a certain complicity with history. He uses art as a method to revise it. But more than trying to escape from an amnesia of the recent past, Henda looks for utopian narratives, as a way to avoid the still very present harmful heritage caused by those years of conflict.

Kiluanji Kia Henda (born 1979) is a photographer and visual artist who also works in theater. His photographs grapple with colonial history and perceptions of modernism in Angola. Recent exhibitions include: Experimental Station: Research and Artistic Phenomena, Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo (CA2M), Madrid, 2011; Other Possible Worlds, NGBK, Berlin, 2011; and 2nd Luanda Triennale, Luanda, 2010. Henda lives and works in Luanda.

This specific lecture was organised in collaboration with BAK, basis voor actuele kunst in Utrecht where on 03.12.2011 Kiluanji Kia Henda will screen films in the context of the program Cinematic Narratives from Elsewhere: Revisions of African Representation.

18.00 – 19.00 Dinner

19.15 Negotiating Equity students and faculty leave by train to Brussels. Overnight stay in SleepWell youthhostel rue du Damier.

19.30 – 21.00 Continuation face to face meetings with: Milica Tomić, Alena Alexandrova, Doreen Mende, Florian Göttke, Suzanne Kriemann, Ian White, Tanja Baudoin, Emma Hedditch, and Grant Watson.

21.00 – 22.00 ‘practice-theatre’ an informal meeting with the group. Location: Audit I en II

December 1: Thursday DAI – Project
Today students split up to participate in 3 different ongoing projects

Negotiating Equity
Negotiating Equity: Archive, Database, Research investigates curation as artistic practice, investigating experimental and conceptual art practices under physical as well as virtual conditions. Negotiating Equity draws upon theories of fairness in questioning divergent value systems and asserts that these terms of engagement imply rethinking the political, economic and social conditions of art, drawing upon a wide range of artistic and art-related practices, some off the radar, undocumented and under-theorized, others representative of art historical paradigms.
Negotiating Equity goes to Brussels to see the exhibition ‘Riffs’ by Yto Barrada at Wiels Contemporary Art Centre and to visit Constant, Association for Art and Media an interdisciplinary arts-lab based and active in Brussels since 1997.

Brussels: Starting 10:00
11.00 Wiels Contemporary Art Centre: exposition
‘Riffs’ by Yto Barrada
12.30 Constant Association for Art and Media
Access & Anonymity (with Nicholas Malevé & Seda Gürses)
15.18 Depart Brussel Midi - Roosendaal Arr.16.28
16.51 Depart Roosendaal - Arnhem Arr. 18.36

Wiels Contemporary Art Centre: exposition ‘Riffs’ by Yto Barrada. Riffs is the first survey exhibition of the work of Yto Barrada, whose photographs, films, publications, installations and sculptures engage with the peculiar situation of her hometown of Tangier, Morocco, situated on the Strait of Gibraltar, transformed into a dead end since the 1991 Schengen agreement.

Constant Association for Art and Media http://www.constantvzw.org/site/
A general overview of Constant, a non-profit association, an interdisciplinary arts-lab based and active in Brussels since 1997. Constant utilizes free software and free licenses, works with artists, activists, curators making experiments and organizing workshops, print-parties, walks and the yearly Verbindingen / Jonctions 13, now going on (December 1-4).
Constant reflects on how this free culture is produced, how it develops, and in which context it takes place.

Nicholas Malevé will first present one of his recent projects, http://academycommons.net/
The second part will focus on ‘Access’, with a closer inspection of the rapid enclosure of the internet, IP addresses and web 2.0 ideologies.

Seda Gürses lectures on ‘Anonymity’, a powerful concept and strategy that transgresses concepts like authorship, the original, and the origin, presenting itself across important elements of our lives like songs, poems, oral histories, urban legends, conspiracy theories and chain mails. http://www.constantvzw.org/site/

Practice-theatre
Starting 10:00 – 17.00 location: DAI Audit I en II 12.00-13.00: guided tour Stadsschouwburg in Arnhem
A project tutored by Ian White in collaboration with Emma Hedditch and Jimmy Robert, and curated by If I Can't Dance, I Don't Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution. Coordinated by Tanja Baudoin.
Practice-theatre is a cumulative project that seeks to explore and question, through performance, the various aspects of what the place of theatre means to us as artists and how we might want to use it in our work. Each month the project will expand and enact ideas around a different aspect of theatre - with what’s done one month mapping onto the next - to consider the positions from which we speak, how we act, and what, through different frames, speaking and action might be.

The group meeting on Thursday includes a guided tour of the Stadsschouwburg in Arnhem. The session is led by Emma Hedditch, who has composed a short text, outlining some points of focus for the students.

Re-reading Public Images
Images are part of our vocabulary that we use to communicate with. We show our position and our identity, not just as individuals but also as groups. With images we take part in the debate about our society. In this DAI project we will investigate images that take part in this public debate. We will critically read the images and trace their hidden personal, ideological and political messages.

Starting 10:00 – 17.00

Project leader Florian Göttke

Special guest: Susanne Kriemann

10:00 work presentation by Susanne Kriemann
14:00 Talking Public Images – presentations by Rui and Susan
15:00 discussing the text by Peio Aguirre Semiotic Ghosts: Science Fiction and Historicism

In her presentation Susanne Kriemann will talk about the main themes as well as the intricacies of her works ‘Ashes and broken brickwork of a logical theory’ and ‘One Time One Million’. Further, she will introduce some key questions of her new work ‘A silent crazy jungle under glass’, which deals with the archive and its inner destructive forces, the notions of storing and deleting knowledge, of saving information of the past and rewriting this
past in fictive entities and the idea of an archive as the most abstract thing imaginable to document. Here, the text by Peio Aguirre gives some context, and we will discuss the terms ‘semiotic ghosts’.
Susanne Kriemann invites the students to bring some of their work samples.

December 2 Friday DAI – Public

10.00 - 17.00 Situating Artistic Practice Today – Matter of Choice
This year the Van Abbemuseum offers a seminar to the first year DAI students, that addresses the current position of art in society. Through a series of ‘experiments’ and readings, the students are invited to develop an expanded understanding of their own practice in relation to a historical and contemporary background of art production and presentation. Special attention thereby will be given to the historical institutionalization of art in modern times in museums, galleries and a professional art history, next to a tour d’horizon of contemporary practice. A returning issue will be the effect of post-1989 globalisation on the position of art.

Van Abbemuseum Curated & tutored: Steven ten Thije and Ahmet Ögüt (location: Reading room)

The third session of Situating Artistic Practice brings the students from the more speculative, theoretical towards the first of ‘three’ assignments. Throughout the year they will think through artistic practice on three levels: material, institution, society. As Hans Belting has elucidated in the text read for last session the Western idea of a modern and autonomous art is shifting in a global world where the key concepts of ethnicity and history are changing in signification. This doesn’t mean that what used to be art, ceases to be, but more that its might produce different affects or can be used to different aims. Standing with one foot in the old world and one in the new, we will try to de- and reconstruct the artistic practice. Our first stop in this is what is our material.

At 15.30 the DAI & Situating Artistic Practice Today will team up with the ArtEZ studium Generale and open the doors for members of the public joining the:
ArtEZ Studium Generale Friends! masterclass 2 December
15.30 – 17.00 pm (Location: DAI Lecture room)

IRWIN A Slovenian art collective
In this masterclass Borut Vogelnik, one of the artists of the Slovenian art collective IRWIN and students of DAI/MFA ArtEZ, talk about how artists could create spaces, parallel to political and social structures in society. Spaces in which people are able to approach each other in new and different ways.

IRWIN The Slovenian art collective IRWIN founded in the early 80s, has responded to the collapse of Yugoslavia with a declaration of independence, forming a new, artist state: NSK State in Time. This monumental and collective artistic act is now already 20 years old and marks one of the most charged and interesting art projects in recent history. It has countered the disintegration of community life by creating new forms of relationships and communal discourse. In a social environment marked by mistrusted and anxiety IRWIN has installed a space where it is possible to encounter each again – as friends.

More information
Website NSK State in Time

Publishing Class

‘Publishing Class’ is a two year program designed for the Dutch Art Institute MFA ArTEZ by Casco – Office for Art, Design and Theory, delving into the act of publishing in critical art practice, both as a way to make things public – forming the publicness – and as a form of dissemination beyond time and space constraints. The first year of the program was facilitated by monthly guests and explored diverse aspects of publishing and its social and political urgency whilst exercising them through a collective monthly artistic journal ‘Spencer’s Island’ made by the students themselves.
The second phase of ‘Publishing Class’ shifts into individual publishing, as yet implementing different forms of collaboration. The “class” is divided into three groups to operate as small editorial cooperatives. Each group is guided by and works closely with artists, Mattin, Falke Pisano and Wendelien van Oldenborgh, respectively. Students from the Werkplaats Typografie will also collaborate, further developing the “art and design” relationship beyond any established manner. The first public lecture was on 20 Oct 2011. Two more lectures are scheduled on Thursdays: 12 January 2012 and 22 March 2012. These dates will also serve as “book launch” occasions. The class will conclude with its own launching event in July 2012 and travel to the coming NY Art Book Fair.
10.00 – 17.00 Publishing Class (location: Audit 1 en II) For the students in their second year of studies. Framework: Casco ‘Publishing Class’ is curated by Binna Choi and coordinated by Yolande van der Heide
Today’s guest supervisors: Falke Pisano and Wendelien van Oldenborgh
Mattin’s group will continue on Saturday 3 December.

December 3 Saturday

10.00 – 13.00 Situating Artistic Practice Today – Matter of Choice, exclusively for 1st year students. Steven ten Thije and Ahmed Ögüt. Location: DAI reading room

11.00 – 17.00 Publishing Class
Location: Casco in Utrecht
exclusively for students of Mattins group.
END OF PROGRAM DAI WEEK