DAI-bulletin 2009-2010 number three November 2009

This is the third issue of the monthly DAI-bulletin in the academic year 2009-2010, informing you about our program and about important dates and events. Eventual alterations can be found on our website under DAI-bulletins.

TAKE NOTICE:
- A  biographical note on faculty and 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.  

DAI-week November 9 – November 13

Instead of asking its master students to be present at the institute on a daily base the DAI offers an alternative educational environment: during one week per month (11 times per year) everyone who is involved in DAI stays in Enschede day and night and takes part in an intense program (consisting of lecture presentations, seminars, face to face conversations, projects, master classes, workshops etcetera) that lasts from early morning until late at night. During the DAI week, guest cooks prepare the afternoon and evening meals that staff, students and guests enjoy together. During the week students spend the night at one of the two DAI houses in the centre of Enschede. In between these so called DAI-weeks all return to their daily practices - scattered over the Netherlands, or abroad.

DAI-CANTINA: this weeks’ guest cook is Yutaka Hoshino.

Lunch will be served Monday from 12:00-13:00, other days from 13:00-14:00, dinner daily from 18:30-19:30.

Monday November 9: THEORY

13:00–15:30 (space to be announced)
FOR ALL 1st YEAR STUDENTS

Plenary session with thesis mentor John Heymans

Close reading of texts by Walter Benjamin and Martin Jay.

13:00–17:00 (projectroom)
FOR ALL 2nd YEAR STUDENTS

Plenary session with thesis mentor Alena Alexandrova

The topic of this plenary plenary session is Iconoclasm and Appropriation Art. We will discuss texts by Bruno Latour and Sven Lutticken. Iconoclasm and appropriation are multi-faceted practices that need existing images to attack, re-frame or manipulate. In other words, they produce new images by using old ones. These two practices are present throughout the history of art, but had either negative connotations or marginal status until they became integrated in the discourse of art and became valid strategies of producing images. Iconoclasm and appropriation are usually employed as a means of critique of large set of concepts and issues - value, authorship, gender and social issues among others. Each text will be presented by to students. At the end of the session there will be time to discuss issues related to the thesis research.

19:30 (projectroom)
For all students

79.89.09
Lecture by Payam Sharifi / Slavs and Tatars

79.89.09 is an intimate visual, oral, and written study of two key dates–1979 and 1989–to better understand our current environment in 2009. The talk consists of topics as diverse as the monobrow, Islam, and modernity. It is informative but also funny, polemical and intimate. Iranian-American writer Payam Sharifi, co-founder of the collective Slavs and Tatars, will talk from the perspective of someone growing up in Texas during the event–the Iranian revolution– considered to be the most important after the Russian Revolution of 1917. The second part of the talk will look at how doing things ‘wrong’ (via certain non positivist strategies) today is a particularly relevant approach.
http://www.slavsandtatars.com   http://www.payamsharifi.com

Tuesday November 10: PRESENTATIONS

9:00-16:00
Face to face

Meetings with Alena Alexandrova

9:30 (project room)
For all students

Plenary meeting with course director Gabriëlle Schleijpen. During this meeting, Taf Hassam will also give a short introduction to ‘Studio Palaver’, a student led initiative that aims to create further communication and dialoge between the practicing artists of the institute.

10:00–17:00 (projectroom)
For all students

Artist presentations

by DAI-students James Skunca, Charlotte Rooyackers, Catalina Nistor, Emilio Moreno, Amanda Koelman, Sevgi Ortac and Goncalo Sena.

Their 20 – minute lecture presentations will be reviewed by guest advisor Payam Sharifi and and discussed between him and course director Gabriëlle Schleijpen.

19:30 (project room)
For all students

ACADEMY EXPANDED AND EXPANDED EXHIBITING
lecture by Doreen Mende

The title of this lecture sounds very ambitious for a one-evening event. Two expansions at the same time. Academy expanded and expanded exhibiting. How can we connect these two conflicting zones of reflection on and production as well as presentation of art? Or to put in different words: while the academy is an environment, which does not request a 'finished' product, the space of exhibition depends on something to be shown to a public beyond the academy. Not necessarily in materialistic terms but in terms of a mode of manifestation that both articulates and collides diverse economies and interests.

The lecture will be based on the project Displayer, which is a roughly annual publication series of the programme Exhibition Design and Curatorial Practice at the University of Arts and Design / ZKM Karlsruhe. The editors are the participants of the seminars of the University's programme. Through this project as a part of the curriculum of the programme, Doreen Mende wants to unfold the intersection of academy and exhibiting that generate a threshold for expansion. Thus, she wants to take the intersection as a point of entry to reflect on issues of exhibiting as a violent and conflictual arena of non-linear temporalities as well as heterogeneous publics. The intersection also lifts the distinction between theory and practice by working within transdisciplinary net of action and agents. Displayer seems to take up a materialized space between academy and exhibiting. But in which way can a publication be understood as a space for exhibiting? And under which demands as well as urgencies does a publication expand the conditions of an academy?

The lecture will focus in particular on the third issue, released in the summer of 2009. The points of departure of Displayer 03 are the demands, the challenges, and the potentialities as well as the impossibilities of exhibiting space itself. Certainly in this context space is not considered a mere geometric entity but a conflictual field of relations, situations and events. Hence, the exhibition of space is strongly connected to performative acts in addition to questions about the requirements of constructions in space. Space is the fabric in which events occur, and events, in turn activate space culturally, socially, politically and geographically. More than 20 interviews, statements and essays were produced exclusively for Displayer 03.

Wednesday November 11: Public/Private PROJECTS

9:00-16:00
Face to face

Selected students meet individually with Doreen Mende or Payam Sharifi

10:30-17:30 (space to be announced)

GOODTRIPBADTRIP.reloaded
Curated by Mark Kremer with contributions by John Heymans

Guest: Francesco Bernardelli

The 1st session of this research and workshop project introduces the nature of the territory. The 1960s was an era of euphoria: borders of outer space and inner self were broken, the status and rule of all kinds of institutions was contested and changed, young people stood up for and lived the potential and liberation of the individual. The 1960s was the era of the trip. But how does this show in art ? At first glance it is not really visible. Art history/theory apparently has a blind spot that obscures the actual identity of various important and lesser known 1960s works, often grouped under the label Conceptualism, and what these works were about: expanding the mind and the senses.

It seems good to start with a somewhat loose overview of some examples of relevant works and their artists, works that get meaning when seen in the space between Conceptualism and Psychedelia. This concrete material will serve to get more familiar with the project and its proposed trajectory. It will also help to engage with questions that need to be addressed before going into a territory. What kind of theoretical challenges and practical chances does the 1960s research have in store for a curator, for a philosopher, for artists?

Presentations and conversations and a spoken column by John Heymans form the program for the day, and the artists will be given an artistic task/challenge. Our guest of the evening is curator Francesco Bernadelli.

10:30-17:30 (space to be announced)

AFFECT
Curated by If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution / co-ordinated by Tanja Baudoin and tutored by Phil Collins ( onward from January 2010 together with Hito Steyerl).

The first meeting of the If I Can't Dance's seminar will be an introduction to the theme of Affect and is taught by Phil Collins. This session is devoted to establishing sustainable relationships as a group.  

As a first exploration of the theme, we will read and discuss Michael Hardt's essay 'Affective Labor' and a fragment from Susan Sontag's book 'Regarding the Pain of Others' and look at examples in art and film. In the evening we will screen the film 'High Hopes' (1988) by Mike Leigh, a social comedy concerning culture clashes between different classes and belief systems. In an interview, Leigh states that High Hopes is "a film about the difficulty of being a socialist".

11:00-17:30 (project room)

PLATFORM FOR (UN)SOLICITED RESEARCH AND ADVICE
Curated by Manifesta

Today’s guest: Marieke van Hal
Also present co-ordinators Yoeri Meessen and Florian Göttke

On this month’s meeting, Manifesta’s guest Marieke van Hal will introduce to you the first ‘brief’ and make a presentation about the broader biennial landscape, mapping out the various kinds of biennials and other large-scale, recurring art events, their backgrounds and aims. In the afternoon we will focus on the role and position of the artist in this biennial context through group discussions and a screening of some of the discussions and lectures that took place in the recent Bergen Biennial Conference, which was co-organized by Marieke van Hal.

Title: 'The Biennial Landscape: Origins'.
Abstract: 
As a rule, contemporary art biennials have their origins embedded in political, cultural, social and economic grounds. One biennial can have more political or economical than cultural ideals than the other or vice versa, but generally all four aspects traditionally appear at the roots of each contemporary art biennial anywhere around the world. Listing some of the main objectives of the average biennial of contemporary art can be a relatively easy task. Chief recurring purposes are: to create a new platform for dialogue and exchange of artistic practices - hence stimulating the local or regional cultural infrastructure – ; to gain a better image and visibility by integrating a peripheral city or ‘remote’ region in a globalizing world and culture - herewith automatically formulating a new geography for international art - ; to foster the local / global dialogue - by internationalizing the local artistic circuit as well as the wider realm of related groups involved via the biennial – ; to articulate or boost an international art economy, stimulate cultural tourism and potentially aim for urban gentrification or renovation. These very generic aspects should be nuanced for each biennial individually, however some biennial - genesis classifications can arguably be made. The presentation 'The Biennial Landscape: Origins' elaborates on the range of motivations and origins of contemporary art biennials and is an attempt to create an analysis and categorization related to it: biennials with artistic, political or ecological origins, municipal or state biennials, and 'alternative biennials'. All categories will include and describe some examples.

19:30 (project room)
For all students except ‘Affect’participants

‘SOFT OUTBURST. Love and Ecstasy as Cinema’
with Francesco Bernadelli

A program devoted to the pleasures –physical and psychological– of a multitude of wriggling bodies liberated by the socio-political transformations of the 1960s. The ‘haptic movies’ in which all these bodies appeared, were in part a result of a wide attack on established ways of perceiving sensitivity, favoring mapping new erogenous geographies. One way to understand the films is the fact that they had much in common with the 1960s explorations in performance and dance. In less than a decade, an amazing corpus of cinematic works emerged, that saw artists engaging in various explorations of the sense of touch. Deliberately, enormous amounts of time were spent, embracing, washing, hugging, caressing, kissing…

Thursday November 12: FACE TO FACE

9:00-17:00

meetings between individual DAI-students and individual guest advisors and faculty members. This DAI-week: John Heymans, Florian Göttke, Mark Kremer, Phil Collins, Axel John Wieder, Rebecca Sakoun, Erin la Cour, Francesco Bernadelli, Branka Ćurčić.

19:30 (project room)
For all students

Lecture by Branka Ćurčić

Branka is member of new media center_kuda.org, Novi Sad, Serbia and the editor of the recent publication, Reader ID: Ideology of Design, published by AUTONOMEDIA, which she will discuss along with past projects.

In what way are design practices perceived and understood today and in what way can one follow their crucial development during the last decades of the 20th century and their connections with artistic practices and critical discourses? The issue is raised about meaning of contemporary design as one of the main proponent of creative industries which, refracted through an ideological prism of neoliberal capitalism preserve the exploiting relationship regarding creativity and the creative personae. Today, there is the question of possibility to practice design outside dominant functionalist principles and the market-dictated production and consumption, i.e., is there a possibility to conduct politization of design practices today?

Friday November 13 : PROJECTS ON THE CURATORIAL & THE EDITORIAL

10:00 (project room)

‘User’s Manual: The Grand Domestic Revolution’
curated by Binna Choi/coordinator Yolande van der Heide
Today’s Guest: Axel John Wieder

'User's Manual: The Grand Domestic Revolution’ is the title of a year long project (Oct 2009-Oct 2010) organized by Casco Office for Art Design and Theory, that deals with the evolutionary and collaborative process of “living” research in the contemporary domestic and private sphere - particularly in relation to the spatial imagining (or the built environment). It aims at re-articulating while exercising notions of the social, the public and, eventually, the commons. For this purpose, an apartment, we named the Casco house, is rented to be both a symbolic and functional base of the project. The actual use and transformation of space and multiple forms of activities in and out of the apartment intertwine with cross-disciplinary research and imaginative practices.

The project appropriates its title from the book (1980) by architect and urban historian Dolores Hayden. Departing from the late nineteenth century era in the United States, Hayden illuminates the feminist (influenced) design practice and urban planning, and articulates the momentum of socializing isolated domestic space and (domestic) labour, reorganizing neighbourhoods and cities which she names as “a grand domestic revolution”. Our project draws from this work, as yet, by questioning the actuality, necessity, and/or possibility of contemporary forms of “grand domestic revolution” also questioning the relevance of the feminist view then and its current development.

A group of DAI participants joins this year long project to form a research group that individually and collectively develops long-term research, organizes related public activities, and makes a presentation in diverse formats including a publication of a "user's manual" while intermittently and gradually inhabiting the Casco house. Every month, a seminar with guest lecturer(s) from different fields of practice and knowledge will be held to inform and inspire the participants' research and organizational methods and to share feedback with their work in progress.

Axel John Wieder introduces the exhibition 'Social Diagrams. Planning Reconsidered' that he co-curated with architect Jesko Fezer last year at Künstlerhaus Stuttgart. This exhibition presented various archive materials as well as contemporary art and architecture projects that show different design approaches into our built environment and that are much imbued with ideas of planning, participation and feedback.

10:30, Amsterdam (exact location to be announced)

NEGOTIATING EQUITY
Curated by Renée Ridgway and contributors to n.e.w.s (http://northeastwestsouth.net)

We will be meeting in a ‘secret space’ in Amsterdam at 10:30 !!!! please bring a flashlight.
Location to be announced

10:30-13:00
Brigitte van der Sande

2030: War Zone Amsterdam

2030: War Zone Amsterdam is an exercise in imagining the unimaginable: civil war in your own city in the year 2030. A cease-fire has just been announced, and a group of international artists, theatre makers, filmmakers, journalists and intellectuals go out into the city to investigate what the war has done to Amsterdam and its inhabitants. 2030: War Zone Amsterdam names no enemies, provides no answers, but fires questions at a possible future. The artists occupy public space, infiltrate exhibitions, festivals and publications, or seek cover in underground spaces.

De Volkskrant building

14:00-17:00
Simon Ferdinando

Rotten Cinema- Friday 13th

Rotten Cinema - false sun and the new dawn - no time to think, just gotta keep moving….in several contingencies (or wolves). The Sufi teacher Pir Vilayat Inayat Khan taught that 'Luciferian Light' is light that has become dislocated from the ‘divine source.’ Using a series of sub headings we will ruminate on and illustrate some of the possible means of approaching Luciferian roots and routes of cinema. Including George Bataille, George Jackson (Soledad brother) +Deleuze and Guattari on Anti Oedipus.

11:00 (space to be announced)

THE PUBLICATIONS PROJECT
Curated by Delphine Bedel

The Publications Project is a collection of artists publications issued by the DAI and designed in collaboration with the designers from Werkplaats Typografie. The 2009-10 edition is directed by artist/curator Delphine Bedel. The Publications Project is an experimental research and production platform that aims to address the specific process of artist books production, from concept and design to distribution. Designers and artists are invited to team up in couples to develop one project, in close collaboration with an author. The format of this diverse collection can varies from magazine, essays, books, and artist editions to performance artefacts. Through very diverse perspectives the artists and designers reflect on publishing as a versatile medium. The limited editions are distributed through artist's performances, bookshops and artist book fairs.

Monday November 16th

THE PUBLICATIONS PROJECT
With Delphine Bedel
10:45 at Werkplaats Typografie, Arnhem
For 2nd year students