DAI-bulletin 2007-2008 number six February 2008

This is the sixth issue of the monthly DAI-bulletin in the academic year 2007-2008, informing you about our program, about important dates and events.

Students: please keep it with you as an extension to your diary.
Alterations and additions to the program will be e-mailed to you.
PLEASE READ YOUR E-MAILS EVERY DAY.

///////// DAI Week February 2008 /////////
Instead of asking its master students to come to 'school' on a weekly base the DAI offers an alternative educational environment: during one week a month (so 11 times per year), everyone who is involved in DAI stays in Enschede day and night and takes part in a very full programme consisting of lectures, seminars, projects, excursions, workshops, and evaluations of his or her own work, which lasts from early morning until late at night. During the DAI week, cooks prepare the afternoon and evening meals that staff, students and guest lecturers from all over the world take in the cosy canteen. During the week participants in the programme spend the night at one of the two DAI houses in the centre of Enschede.

Take notice: This week ALL diners and evening lectures will take place at the Balengebouw, Schurinksweg 97, Enschede. The day programme takes place as usual (in the AKI building, Hallenweg 5 at the campus of the University of Twente).
The evening lectures are open to the public.

WEEK 8

* Yvonne Dröge Wendel is a visual artist based in Amsterdam.
A central theme within her work is her personal obsession with collecting, making and restoring ‘things’. What is the most enriching experience between object and human subject? How do people and ‘things’ relate? www.yvonnedrogewendel.nl
In her DAI public lecture she will talk about her work made for public space, about authorship and public design processes and about "Architecture of Interaction", a tool to conceptually investigate interactive projects, that she developed with a number of colleagues.

* Student presentations by:
10.30 Marina Tomic
11.15 Barbara Philipp
12.00 Renaldi Zefi
12.45 Lunch
13.30 Yen Yitzu
14.15 Seda Manavoglu
15.00 Tea break
15.15 Philip Tonda Heide


* Sophia Tabatadze (1977) is an artist from Tblisi, Georgia.
She participated in the last Venice and Istanbul biennials and is currently living in Berlin.
http://www.sophiatabatadze.blogspot.com/

* Jeremiah Day is an American artist based in Berlin. His work is on show till February 23 in Amsterdam where Ellen de Bruijne Projects presents “The Fall of the Twelve Acres Museum” an exhibition of new work. In a new slide-show installation, Day re-visits the landscape of New England through the vantage of the historic developments and recent political struggles of its native population – the Mashpee Wampanoag Indians. Interviews with Earl Mills - Chief Flying Eagle of the Wampanoags, stories of the recent political struggles of the tribe, and the music of a short-lived rock band from Cape Cod form the audio track, a counter-point to the drifting glimpses of landscapes presented in 6x6cm projected transparencies. The images weave the inter-relationship between local history and world history, fragmentary glimpses of sites of epic meaning, and those of more anonymous historical forces.

* Monument voor Newton
Students of the Faculty Technical Engineering and the Dutch Art Institute invite you for the opening of the presentation of proposals for a Monument for Sir Isaac Newton.
9 proposals of Dutch Art Institute students.
Horst Building, Twente University, Oosthorst, ground floor
19 February 16.00

For the Edward Said lecture the DAI invites scholars, writers and curators and other cultural practioners whose research and/ or practice is informed by (aspects of) postcolonial theory. The DAI invites them to talk about their research in relation to certain theoretical notions that derive from the work of postcolonial scolars and writers.

* Sandra Ponzanesi is Assistant Professor of Gender and Postcolonial Critique at Utrecht University, department of Media en Re/presentation. She has studied and worked in Italy, the UK and the US. She has published on post-colonial critique, transnational gender theories, Italian colonial history, visual culture and Third World Cinema. Among her publications are Paradoxes of Post-colonial Culture: Contemporary Women Writing of the Indian and Afro-Italian Diaspora (Albany: Suny Press, 2004) and Migrant Cartographies New Cultural and Literary Spaces in Post-colonial Europe (Lanham, MD,: Lexington Books, 2005) with Daniela Merolla.

The Gendered Logic of Empire

At the height of European empires women became the primary battleground between the culture of the colonizers and that of the colonized. Native women were stereotypically represented as desirable objects, voyeuristically gazed at and petrified in a-temporal settings without any socio-cultural specificity and dismissed as “victims” of European colonialism. These images were corroborated by the many orientalist paintings of the time and the fascination for the harem, by travel literature describing local women as exotic others, by ethnographic and historical accounts reporting the fate of interracial relationships, and mostly by the advent of photography and the circulation of postcards representing “la belle Algeriénne” or the “black Venus,” images that emphasised the erotic and passive nature of colonized women.
Postcolonial critique strenuously engages in the correction of these stereotypical and damaging representations, which continue to be proposed in today’s contemporary culture almost in unchanged fashion, especially in advertisement and popular culture. Postcolonial critique aims therefore at retrieving the perspectives, voices and positions of the other subjects of history, and at proposing a different account of global culture in which migrants, third world women and minorities in general get centre stage. These critiques are relevant to the understanding of many disputed issues in current affairs such as modernity versus religion, democracy versus fundamentalism, universal human rights versus cultural difference.

3 Transnational DAI projects.
Students choose to participate in one of them.

Upbeat to a (still untitled) collaborative project with the
* Art-eco-platform in Cappadocia
In June the DAI will conduct a research project in the small Turkish village Ibrahim Pasja, aiming at the increase of awareness about WATERMANAGEMENT.
The project will be run by Florian Göttke and is open to 6 students.
Today’s introductory readings & screenings & discussions will be moderated by Gabriëlle Schleijpen.

* Armenia Dreaming
This project is open to a maximum of 17 students.
Todays readings & screenings & discussions are moderated by Partizan Publik (Christiaan Ernsten and Joost Janmaat) & guestlecturer Sophia Tabatadze.

* Here as the Centre of the World
Final stage of a 3-year long transnational project involving artists from Beirut, Damascus, Diyarbakir, Enschede, Khartoum and Taipei. In this final stage a selected group of 10 second year students will prepare for:
- the visuals in the upcoming publication Here as the Centre of the World
- a presentation at the KUNSTVLAAI (opening May 10 in Amsterdam)
- book launches and presentations in the 6 cities taking place in September 2008
Co-ordination: Alite Thijsen, who will also moderate today's meeting.

* The Artist as an Opinion Leader (2007)
was a so-called outside DAI-project of four days of training, working, debating. The DAI offered its students Daniëlle Davidson, Yota Ioannidou, Barbara Philipp, Sasha Miljevich and Renaldi Zefi the possibility to participate in this 4-day seminar, organised by the Vrede van Utrecht together with several partners. The outcome of the selection of DAI-participants will be presented today.

* Why Video? A DAI workshop in February, March, April and May 2008 led by Hala Elkoussy.
Hala Elkoussy was born in Cairo in 1974. She started working as a freelance photographer in 1998. In 2002, she completed an MA in Image and Communication at Goldsmiths College, University of London and lectured on photography at the American University in Cairo between 2002 and 2003. In 2004, she co-founded the Contemporary Image Collective - CiC, an artist independent initiative dedicated to photography and video, based in Cairo. In 2005, she started a two-year residency at the Rijksakademie Van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam. Recently, Elkoussy has exhibited at Tate Modern, London, the Stedelijk Museum Bureau, Amsterdam, the International Centre for Photography, New York, The Centre D’Art Contemporain, Geneva and the Townhouse Gallery in Cairo.

The workshop involves 3 assignments, the satisfactory completion of which is a requirement for participation in the workshop.

Today: open discussion and video screenings surrounding the question:
“Why Video?”
Video became an accessible medium for artists since the sixties. It was a vital tool to record performances in the seventies. Now, it is more predominant than ever with every major exhibition hosting more video works in dark rooms than anything else. The question of “why video?” is more pertinent than ever. In the first session of this workshop we look at examples of recent video productions and try to establish why this medium was the best (un) suited to the concept and direction of the artist. Through an open discussion on durational aspects and the mechanics of camera work using the cases in point, we come closer to what makes a video artwork work.
The session is concluded by an introduction to pre-production issues. A technical medium requires preparation. From the original idea or concept until the shooting, steps need to be taken to ensure the desired results. What are those steps? How can the idea/concept be broken down into achieavable, measurable steps.


* Sit, Walk and Stand A DAI workshop in February, March, April and May 2008 led by Sanne van Rijn
This workshop is focusing on performance skills. The craft. How to sit, walk and stand. How to get your actions communicative. How everything you do becomes meaningful when looked at. How what you feel during a performance is rarely corresponding with what it expresses. How to combine the body with the other ingredients of your performance in a meaningful way.
We are going to look for strategies, techniques and tricks to manipulate your audience. We are going to find a mentality, an awareness to perform. We are going to be watched a lot. Even if we do not dare.

Sanne van Rijn studied classical ballet and photography. Later she attended the Interfaculty for Image and Sound at the Conservatory in The Hague. In recent years she has staged various performances, first with ZTHollandia and later with NTGent, including This Is How I Give My Cat a Pill (Zo geef ik mijn kat een pilletje), Let’s be Firm (Laten we flink zijn) and Gradually Zero (Langzaam tot nul). Sanne van Rijn devotes herself in her work to the extraordinary in the ordinary. ‘She carefully juxtaposes a minimal action with a minimal sound, with a minimal image, with a minimal movement, forcing the viewers to review and change their way of looking and listening, to review and change their perception of time and space. Under this transparent fabric lies silence.’ In 2000 Sanne van Rijn was awarded the VSCD Mime Prize and the Incentive Prize for Drama by the City of Amsterdam. Swan Lake (Zwanenmeer) was selected for Het Theaterfestival 2002. La Sylphide & James as well as Hey Presto! You’re a Bear! (Ik wil dat jij een beer wordt!) were nominated for the VSCD Mime Prize in 1999 and 2007. As a performer she worked with the British ensemble Forced Entertainment in the 24 hour performance Who Can Sing A Song to Unfrighten Me? She was also seen in Christoph Marthalers Seemanslieder and in The Damned (De val van de goden) directed by Johan Simons.


On Saturday February 23 you are kindly invited to join us in Amsterdam for:

ARMENIA DREAMING

Loggia 
a public lecture on Post Soviet Urban Imaginaries
by Georgian Artist 

SOPHIA TABATADZE

hosted by agentur
at the Volkskrantgebouw 
Wibautstraat 150 (4th floor)
Amsterdam 

drinks afterwards

*****************************

ARMENIA DREAMING
is a project by the DAI & PARTIZAN PUBLIK

for more information please contact Joost Janmaat
+ 31 20 55 35 151

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