Berlin MFA/PhD Summer Schedule 2013
Location: Hosted by Supermarkt Creative Resource Center
Brunnenstrasse 64, 13355 Berlin
1RS MFA first summer residency or new students
2RS MFA second summer residency or returning students
3RS MFA third summer residency or graduating students
MPH MPhil
FAC Faculty
OPT Optional, all else required
REP Student reps
PUB Public invited
PRE-RESIDENCY
July 15
Knoll, Cella, Bowdidge meetings at Plymouth University, UK
July 17 – 18
Thesis exhibition students arrive July 16, all others recommended arrival July 17
Wednesday – Thursday
Install 3RS (Casbarian, Bowdidge)
SESSION 1
Weekend 1: July 19 – 21
Friday
Bennett, Blount, Pope, Gonzalez, Suetzl, Russell arrive
09:00 – 12:00 Freitagsfrühstück: Supermarkt welcomes Transart, breakfast buffet PUB
09:00 – 12:00 Transart registration by appt. with Drew ALL
11:00 – 12:00 Exhibition walk through, curators only
12:00 – 18:00 Curator MFA thesis critiques: Ece Pazarbasi, Kate Martin 3RS
14:00 – 18:00 Berlin Gallery Tour (Menze) OPT
18:00 – 19:00 Reception with curators 3RS
19:00 – 20:00 Pope and Bennett review exhibition
Saturday
Orientation
Cox arrive
3RS + returning MPH day off but return for reception
09:00 – 11:00 Plymouth registration > (Blount, Henmi) 1RS
09:00 – 10:00 Collegium meeting REP (S2)
10:00 – 11:00 APM meeting > REP Knoll, Cella, Bowdidge, Bennett (S2)
11:00 – 11:30 Photo IDs (Blount, Henmi) 1RS 1MPH
11:30 – 12:30 Meeting with external (Pope) 2RS
12:30 – 14:00 Academic Resources with Russell 1RS 1MPH
12:30 – 13:30 Discussion with (Bowdidge, Knoll, Cella) 2RS
14:30 – 15:30 Information Skills seminar with Russell MPH
16:00 – 18:00 Seminar faculty orientation (Knoll, Cella) (S2)
16:00 – 18:00 Orientation + QA (Henmi, REP, Bowdidge, Casbarian) 1RS
16:00 – 18:00 Orientation, process, procedures > Bennett MPH (S2)
18:00 – 19:00 Welcome reception OPT
Sunday
Blount, Russell depart, Subramaniam arrives
No computer work during presentations please.
Individual meetings with Russell > by sign up
MPH Supervisor meetings
o9:00 – 10:30 Cox, Bennett, Knowles (S2)
10:30 – 12:00 Evans, Bowdidge, Book (S2)
12:00 – 13:30 NN NN (S2)
13:30 – 15:00 NN NN (S2)
MFA Thesis exhibition presentations
09:00 – 10:30 3RS students 1-3 present (15 min set-up/present + 15 Q+A) Casbarian/Gonzalez/Bowdidge ALL MFA PUB
10:30 – 11:00 Break MFA
11:00 – 12:30 3RS students 4-6 present (15 min set-up/present + 15 Q+A) Casbarian/Gonzalez/Cox ALL MFA PUB
12:30 – 13:00 Break MFA
13:00 – 14:30 3RS students 7-9 present (15 min set-up/present + 15 Q+A) Subramaniam/Suetzl/Cox ALL MFA PUB
14:30 – 15:00 Break MFA
15:00 – 16:00 3RS students 10-11 present (15 min set-up/present + 15 Q+A) Subramaniam/Suetzl/Bowdidge ALL MFA PUB
16:00 – 17:00 Meeting with external (Pope) 3RS
16:00 – 17:00 All faculty MFA thesis assessment meeting (Cella, Knoll)
17:00 – 20:00 MPH students present: 15 min set-up/present + 15 Q+A, Knowles (RDC 1) presents 30 OPT
20:00 – 22:00 Vernissage OPT PUB
Week 1: July 22-26
Seminars
Pope departs Monday, Estevez, Cooks, Koebel arrive Friday
1RS 2RS 3RS Monday – Friday
Subramaniam, Gonzalez, Suetzl, Knoll, Bowdidge, Cox
Student individual meetings with advisors and directors by appt.
09:30 – 10:00 Media check
10:00 – 11:30 Suetzl, “Sharing”
10:00 – 11:30 Knoll, “TBA” 1RS
11:00 – 11:30 Media check
11:30 – 13:00 Gonzalez, ”The Personal is Political”
11:30 – 13:00 Subramaniam: “Natives and Invasives”
13:00 – 14:00 Meeting (Samples) Pope, Bennett, Bowdidge (Monday)
13:00 – 16:00 Research time, individual meetings
16:00 – 17:30 Gonzalez, “The Personal is Political” continues
16:00 – 17:30 Subramaniam, “Natives and Invasives” continues
17:30 – 19:00 All faculty, “TBA” 1RS continues
17:30 – 19:00 Suetzl, “Sharing” continues
19:00 – 20:00 Friday only: “Seminar results” + reception (each class gives a 15 min. presentation consecutively)
MPH Monday – Friday (S2):
Cox, Bennett, Gonzalez, Bowdidge
Monday: 10-12 Introduction to Research Degrees + Research Ethics, Bennett (incoming MPH)
Tuesday: 10-13 Research Proposal, Cox
Wednesday: 10-13 Artistic Research, Cox
Thursday: 12:30-3:30 Investigative Contexts, Gonzalez
Friday: 10-13 The Artefact, Bowdidge
Tuesday
17:30 – 19:30 Two minute presentations ALL
Friday
17:00 – 19:00 Workshop faculty orientation, review student blogs, proposals, diaries FAC (S2) Knoll, Cella
Estevez, Cooks, Koebel, Robinson arrives friday
SESSION 2
Weekend 2: July 27-28
Saturday
Bowdidge, Subramaniam departs
New student reps announced
09:00 – 16:00 Advisor/student meetings (20 min. each) ALL
09:00 – 13:00 De-install MFA exhibitions
13:00 – 17:00 Install Transartfest exhibition
17:00 –18:30 Faculty presentations + book launch
Pecha Kucha “Current Project” (20 slides x 20 sec. each) PUB
Cox, Subramaniam, Gonzalez, Suetzl, Casbarian, Estevez, Cooks, Koebel)
18:30 – 19:00 Q&A
19:00 – 20:00 Book signings (Estevez, Hafez, Gonzalez, Beasley, Schaer)
20:00 – 21:00 Transartfest vernissage PUB
Sunday
09:00 – 11:00 Closing meeting seminar faculty (S2) (Cella, Knoll) Faculty peer review > form
11:00 – 12:30 Gonzalez, Robinson, Danowski (S2)
12:00 – 18:00 Academic Committee Meetings by Doodle (20 min) ALL
12:00 – 20:00 Trans-what? symposium (24 papers, 2×20 min. each) PUB
Week 2: July 29-Aug 2
Workshops 1-4*
Subramaniam, Gonzalez, Suetzl, Cox, Robinson, Bennett depart Monday, Bowdidge returns Tuesday.
Monday – Friday
Student individual meetings with advisors and directors by appt.
09:30 – 10:00 Media check
10:00 – 11:30 Estevez “Within Walking Distance”
10:00 – 11:30 Koebel ”Writing Art / Artist’s Writing”
11:00 – 11:30 Media check
11:30 – 13:00 Casbarian “Considered Bodies in Place and Time”
11:30 – 13:00 Cooks “State(s) of Exile”
13:00 – 16:00 Studio time, individual meetings (student attendance required)
16:00 – 17:30 Estevez “Within Walking Distance” continues
16:00 – 17:30 Koebel ”Writing Art / Artist’s Writing” continues
17:30 – 19:00 Casbarian “Considered Bodies in Place and Time” continues
17:30 – 19:00 Cooks ”State(s) of Exile” continues
19:00 – 20:00 Friday only: “Workshop results” + reception (each class gives a 15 min. presentation consecutively)
* Returning MPH Independent study with pre-residency proposal approval
SESSION 3
Weekend 3: Aug 3-4
Saturday
Book arrives
Estevez/Koebel/Cooks + Casbarian/Book/Bowdidge review
09:00 – 10:30 2RS students x 2, 1-6 present (15 min set-up/present + 15 Q+A) ALL
10:30 – 11:00 Break
11:00 – 12:30 2RS students 7-12 present (15 min set-up/present + 15 Q+A) ALL
12:30 – 14:00 Lunch
12:30 – 14:00 Graduating student luncheon with faculty 3RS
14:00 – 15:30 2RS students 13-19 present (15 min set-up/present + 15 Q+A) ALL
16:30 – 17:30 Faculty 2RS assessment meeting FAC (Cella)
Sunday
Revised proposals due in Transart blog 1RS 2RS
Ethics Approval form (if applicable) due > form 1RS 2RS
10:00 – 14:00 Ensemble Xenon rehearsal
14:00 – 17:00 MPhil lead off site crit groups first meeting (20 min each) 1RS 2RS MPH
17:00 – 19:00 Closing meeting studio faculty (Cella, Knoll) faculty peer review > form
17:00 – 20:00 Open frame night, Supermarkt + Transartists event OPT PUB
Week 3: August 5-9
Transartfest
Book launch, Concerts, Symposium, Discussions, Exhibitions, One day seminars, One day workshops, Pecha Kuchas, Performances, Screenings, Speed Critiques, Tours, Vernissage
1RS 2RS 3RS MPH (Choose 3 events)
Day off depends on course choice
Monday, August 5
Estevez, Cooks, Casbarian, Koebel depart
08:30 – 09:00 Media check
09:00 – 10:00 Pecha Kucha 10 min. each + 10 min. Q&A ALL
10:00 – 16:00
Michael Bowdidge: “Coming Up For Air” workshop (SM)
Kate Martin: “Displacement” discussion/various locations (Field)
Merete Rostad ”Conversation Pieces: Public, art and the city” workshop (SM)
TBA “DIY” from Supermarkt
19:00 – 19:30 “Trans-ideology: Nostalgia” shortfim festival begins (curated by Ming Turner) PUB
19:45 – 21:30 ”Edge of Berlin” film screenings begins (curated by Takkides) PUB
Tuesday, August 6
08:30 – 09:00 Media check
09:00 – 10:00 Pecha Kucha 10 min. each + 20 min. Q&A ALL
10:00 – 16:00
Alanna Lockward: “Afropean Film” (Screening room)
Jennifer Hope Davy + Julia Holzl: “Ways of Ending” seminar
Lynn Book, “Voice and Its Objects” (SM)
Jean-Ulrick Desert, “Art and the Echo Chamber” Discussion (S2)
18:00 – 19:00 Dafna Naphtali + Hans Tammen” performance PUB
19:00 – 19:30 “Trans-ideology: Nostalgia” shortfim festival continues (curated by Ming Turner) PUB
19:45 – 21:30 ”Edge of Berlin” film screenings continues (curated by Takkides) PUB
Wednesday, August 7
Wong, Ling arrive
08:30 – 09:00 Media check
09:00 – 10:00 Pecha Kucha 10 min. each + 20 min. Q&A ALL
10:00 – 16:00
Astrid Menze: “Collective Stop Motion” workshop/on location (Field)
Dafna Naphtali, “Interactive Sound: Techniques and Practice” (SM)
Noam Toran: “Object as Protagonist” workshop (SM)
TBA: “DIY” from Supermarkt
18:00 – 19:00 Lynn Book excerpts from”Escapes” performance PUB
19:00 – 19:30 “Trans-ideology: Nostalgia” shortfim festival continues (curated by Ming Turner) PUB
19:45 – 21:30 ”Edge of Berlin” film screenings continues (curated by Takkides) PUB
Thursday, August 8
Book departs, advisor proposal approval forms due
Student makes required proposal changes by Aug. 12
08:00 – 09:00 Media check
09:00 – 10:00 Pecha Kucha 10 min. each + 20 min. Q&A ALL
10:00 – 16:00
Virgil Wong: “Brains + Bodies: Future and Past” workshop/Berlin Medical Historical Museum (Field)
Yuen Fong Ling: “Delete/copy/paste” workshop/life drawing (SM)
Stephan Takkides: “The Edge of Berlin” (Field)
TBA: “DIY” from Supermarkt
15:00 – 18:00 Ensemble Xenon set-up
18:00 – 19:30 Ensemble Xenon: “NN” concert PUB
19:00 – 19:30 “Trans-ideology: Nostalgia” short fim festival continues (curated by Ming Turner) PUB
19:45 – 21:30 ”Edge of Berlin” film screenings continues (curated by Takkides) PUB
19:30 – 21:30 Alumni dinner?
Friday, August 9
Wong, Ling, Rostad, Takkides depart
10:00 – 11:00 Collegium meeting REP
11:30 – 17:30 Peer speed crits (two 20 min. each) ALL
19:00 – 19:30 “Trans-ideology: Nostalgia” shortfim festival ends (curated by Ming Turner) PUB
19:45 – 21:30 ”Edge of Berlin” film screenings ends (curated by Takkides) PUB
End of Transartfest
CONCLUSION
Weekend 4: August 10
Saturday
09:00 – 10:00 Evaluations due ALL
09:00 – 17:00 Proposal and residency sign offs + final advisor/committee meetings by appt.
18:00 – 20:00 3RS ceremony, reception SM and group dinner in Biergarten OPT
August 11
All depart
SUMMER COURSE BIOS + DESCRIPTIONS
Myron Beasley
Bio:
Dr. Myron M. Beasley teaches courses ranging from Cultural Politics, Introduction to American Cultural Studies to Food, Performance and Community. As the 2010/11 Recipient of the Whiting Foundation Fellowship he was able to complete his ethnographic work on gender, economic development, and foodways of Haiti. He was also the recipient of the 2010 Andy Warhol Artist Writers Grant for his recent research about living artists in the Africa Diaspora. Myron’s recent critical ethnographic work explores “Women who cook on the streets of Jacmel Haiti” and Haitian underground food economies. His work has led him to fieldwork in the Morocco, Brazil and Haiti which have appeared in several academic journals including Text and Performance Quarterly, Performance Research and Food and Foodways. He is also an international curator at the Ghetto Biennale in Port-au-Prince, Haiti and his installations have also appeared internationally, particularly his “Ritual, Sacred Spaces, and the Body: Men of African Descent and the Performance of Sexuality” at Performance International-PSi 6 and his short film work on food and ritual in Brazil at the UMAMI Food and Art Festival. He has been awarded, both nationally and internationally, for his outstanding teaching
Seminar: “Performance, Narrative & the Body: Death, Eroticism, and Art” is a special topics course that examine the dynamic and complex relationships among human communication, narrative, and cultural performance of the body. Scholars in the areas of communication, folklore, anthropology, sociology, and theatre, recognize that human speech and behavior are capable of producing powerful aesthetic experiences with significant rhetorical consequences in a given cultural context. This seminar examines the politics of the body through the broadly inter/transdisciplinary frame of the narrative and performance. This course devoted to understanding the specific ways theories of the body and cultural practices operate in everyday life and social formations. Theme of this seminar this summer is death, eroticism and performance.
Info: http://myronbeasley.com/
Jean Marie Casbarian
Bio: Jean Marie Casbarian is an interdisciplinary artist who incorporates photography, film, video, sound and performance into her artworks. She received her MFA from Milton Avery School of Art at Bard College in New York and along with exhibiting her works throughout the United States, Europe, Central America and Asia, she has received a number of awards and residencies including a nomination for the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, The LaNapoule Foundation Grant in LaNapoule, France, The Chicago Artist’s Assistance Grant and an Associateship with the Rocky Mountain Women’s Institute. Currently, Jean Marie holds an appointment as Artist and Research Associate at Five Colleges, Inc., in Amherst, Massachusetts. As an educator, Jean Marie has been a faculty member and advisor with Transart Institute since 2007. She also teaches with both the ICP-Bard MFA program and the General Studies Program at the International Center of Photography in New York City and has taught in the film and photography programs at Hampshire College, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the City Colleges of Chicago. Jean Marie lives and works in New York City.
Workshop: ”Considered Bodies in Place and Time” This summer workshop will address the intimate relationship that our body, mind and psyche carries through the embodied memories of the spaces we have encountered and continue to move through. Throughout the week we will explore the effects that urban spaces and architectures, gardens, public and private space, virtual space, and reconstructed remembered space have on our physical bodies, emotions and behaviors. We will question the power of sound, smell, and touch and the subsequent triggers to memory that ultimately connect us to our present experience. Using Yi Fu Tuan’s Space and Place as a guide, exercises in walking, mapping, listening, and performative gestures will inspire works that may include audio tours, narrative sketches, public interventions and video documentation.
Info: http://www.jeanmariecasbarian.com/
Andrew Cooks
Bio:
Andrew Cooks was born in Sydney and is a painter. He is completing his PhD with Monash University in Melbourne. His research uses the pleasure garden as a model, together with pattern and decoration, to investigate paradoxes of pictorial representations of space. Andrew’s work has been exhibited in Australia, Asia, Europe and the United States, and he has been teaching in a variety of academic institutions and community settings in Australia and the United States since 1982. He currently teaches at the School of Visual Arts in New York City and at Dutchess Community College in upstate New York.
Workshop: ”State(s) of Exile” …”the other important joke, for me, is one that’s usually attributed to Groucho Marx; but, I think it appears originally in Freud’s Wit and Its Relation to the Unconscious, and it goes like this – I’m paraphrasing—um, ‘I would never want to belong to any club that would have someone like me for a member.’” Woody Allen in Annie Hall
This self-deprecating and amusing quip, like much humour is, of course, a potent commentary on human experience. After questioning various manifestations of exile, we will use experience, texts and documentary evidence to chart what exile might be. We will question individual and collective understanding by considering what exile means now. Using texts to focus on specific ideas relating to exile, we will examine how different states of exile can be created and dismantled.
Have you ever been or felt ‘in exile’? Perhaps it is as simple as being an outsider, or being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Who is an alien? Is exile a physical or psychological state; based just in notions of location? How does exile feature in our recognitions of diaspora? Concepts of identity, tribal instinct or simply ‘belonging’ affect our understanding of states of exile and different situations can make us more or less aware of it. For example, architecture, music, mapping, language, political energies and discourse, sanity, tribal identity, individual/collective antagonisms etc. all effect where we find ourselves in the world. Memory and memorials, too, relate not just to conditions of exile, but specifically to ideas of what is worth remembering, valorising and historicising.
Language is a consistent tool used to exile—not just obvious ‘foreign’ language, but language employed directly as an agent of inclusion/exclusion—think here of professional jargon, opaque scholarship or euphemism (especially recent military and economic examples).
Finally, in this twenty-first century, amidst so much displacement—human and natural—and amidst the discourses of globalism, is exile simply old fashioned, an outdated concept?
Readers will include (but are not limited to) excerpts from: Rainer Maria Rilke’s Fortschrift; Saul Leiter’s urban photographs; Ian Hamilton Finlay’s garden Little Sparta and John Dixon Hunt’s Nature Again; Bruce Chatwin’s The Songlines; Allen S Weiss’s Mirrors of Infinity; Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran; Emile Zola’s The Belly of Paris; Rebecca Solnit’s A Field-guide to Getting Lost; Giuliana Bruno’s Atlas of Emotion; John Berger’s The Shape of a Pocket; Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried; Judith Thurman’s Hide and Seek; Robert Hughes’ The Culture of Complaint.
Info: http://www.andrew-cooks.com/
Nicolas Estevez
Bio:
NICOLÁS DUMIT ESTÉVEZ treads an elusive path that manifests itself performatively or through experiences where the quotidian and art overlap. He has exhibited and performed extensively in the U.S. as well as internationally at venues such as Madrid Abierto/ARCO, The IX Havana Biennial, PERFORMA 05 and 07, IDENSITAT, Prague Quadrennial, The Pontevedra Biennial, The Queens Museum of Art, MoMA, Printed Matter, P.S. 122, Hemispheric Institute of Performance Art and Politics, Princeton University, Rutgers University, The Institute for Art, Religion, and Social Justice at Union Theological Seminary, The MacDowell Colony, Provisions Library, El Museo del Barrio, The Center for Book Arts, Longwood Art Gallery/BCA, The Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, Franklin Furnace, and Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, among others. During the past seven years Estévez has received mentorship in art in everyday life from Linda Mary Montano, a historic figure in the performance art field. Montano and Estévez have also collaborated on several performances. Residencies attended include P.S. 1/MoMA, Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony. He has received grants from Art Matters, Lambent Foundation, National Association of Latino Arts and Culture, Printed Matters and Puffin Foundation. Estévez Holds an MFA from Tyler School of Art, Temple University, Philadelphia, PA; and an MA from Union Theological Seminary in the City of New York. Publications include, Pleased to Meet You, Life as Material for Art and Vice Versa (editor) and For Art’s Sake. Born in Santiago de los Treinta Caballeros, Dominican Republic, he lives and works in the Bronx.
Workshop: In this one-week seminar the entire city of Berlin is given preeminence in order to serve as the encyclopedic tool for a series of theoretical discussions and practical exercises in strolling, journeying, parading, pilgrimages, processions and the like. Each day participants take to the streets to put in motion individual or group actions dealing with, but not restricted to, the topic of walking as well as their condition as bipeds: from window shopping to strolling through managed nature (e.g. parks). Participants comb block after block for the purpose of becoming familiar with what may be to some an uncharted land. In the classroom, the group engages in discussions triggered by presentations on the works of artists/scholars and by the students’ daily experiences as pedestrians. These indoor activities are combined with crawling, tiptoeing and walking in spiked pumps. Seminar presentations include trips to sites of disasters, some of which have resulted from the hand of terrorism. Also to be addressed by the class is tourism, and pilgrimage-like movements of people, such as that of Caribbean balseros and yoleros on an exodus to the promised land of capitalism, the United Sates.
Note:
In Within Walking Distance: The Art of Treading Paths, as in all of the seminars I teach, I make space for the works and voices of historically overlooked artists and writers to expand on, interrogate and/or interpolate the privileged and hegemonic discourses that still dominate society in general.
Info:
Laura Gonzalez
Bio: Laura Gonzalez is an artist and writer. Her recent practice encompasses film, performance, dance, photography and text, and her work has been exhibited and published in the UK, Europe and the US. She has spoken at numerous conferences and events, including the Museum for the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York, the Medical Museum in Copenhagen, College Arts Association and the Association for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society. When she is not following Freud, Lacan and Marx’s footsteps with her camera, she lectures and supervises postgraduate students at various institutions around the world. Her doctoral project, completed in 2010, investigated the practice of seduction. She is currently immersed in an interdisciplinary project exploring knowledge and the body of the hysteric. She edited a collection of essays titled ‘Madness, Women and the Power of Art’ (2013) to which she contributed a chapter—although it is really a work— written with the artist Eleanor Bowen.
Seminar ”The Personal is Political”
With the title statement (taken from Carol Hanisch’s seminal paper published in Notes from the Second Year: Women’s Liberation in 1970) as a starting point, this course explores how personal characteristics can become political statements in artistic practice. This workshop would enable the student to find strategies to shift between the subjective and the general, exploring issues such as race, gender, sexual orientation, class, age, or religious belief. Questions around ethics and political activism will be examined, as well as more general campaigning, economic and guerrilla actions. Artists to be explored include Guillermo Gomez-Peña, Guerrilla Girls, Sharon Kivland, Jeremy Deller, Marina Abramovic, Regina José Galindo, Santiago Sierra, Felix Gonzalez Torres, Mona Hatoum, Jo Spence, Hayley Newman. As well as the title essay, I will propose texts by David Harvey, Luce Irigaray, Guillermo Gomez-Peña, and Jo Spence.
Info: http://www.lauragonzalez.co.uk
Caroline Koebel
Bio
: Caroline Koebel is an Austin-based filmmaker and writer, with recent retrospectives at Festival Cine//B (Santiago, Chile) and Directors Lounge (Berlin, Germany). Current research focuses on the relationship individuals have to the greater reality of contemporary global experience and the means by which information is disseminated, gathered and assimilated in the Web 2.0 age. Flicker On Of, a three-part series presented at Scope Art Fair (USA), Edinburgh International Film Festival (Scotland), European Media Art Festival (Germany), and LOOP Barcelona (Spain), applies the idiom of experimental film and artist’s video to big-budget movies in order to ponder global warming, the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, and the Haditha Massacre in an alternate essay format. Viewing Blind, her series-in-progress supported by the Texas Filmmakers’ Production Fund and the Kodak Award, extends this trajectory combining different technologies and clashing aesthetics with journalism by redefining the debate about the US drone program in the Middle East. She has published in Jump Cut, Brooklyn Rail, Afterimage, Art Papers, and Wide Angle, and co-authored the acclaimed stencil graffiti book Schablone Berlin. She holds a BA in Film Studies from UC Berkeley and an MFA in Visual Arts from UC San Diego, and is on faculty at Transart Institute (New York-Berlin).
Workshop: “Writing Art / Artist’s Writing” We will do a range of writing exercises and experiments in this workshop aimed to familiarize participants with writing about art and culture as well as writing as a form and/or extension of one’s own art praxis. We will write within the space of the workshop and also in situ around the city of Berlin, both outdoors and in exhibition venues. We will consider artworks and writings by such figures and groups as The Atlas Group/Walid Ra’ad, Martha Rosler, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Robert Smithson, Gary Indiana, Critical Art Ensemble, Johanna Drucker, Group Material, Miranda July, Bernadette Corporation, and many others. We will share results of our experiments with one another and an expanded audience both in person and on the Web.
Info: http://carolinekoebel.com/
Radhika Subramaniam
Bio
: Radhika Subramaniam is a curator, editor and writer based in New York. She is presently the Director/Chief Curator of the Sheila C. Johnson Design Center at Parsons The New School for Design where she is also assistant professor of Art and Design History and Theory. Her recent projects include Abecedarium for Our Times (Apexart, 2008), Rods and Cones: Seeing from the Back of One’s Head (Guest curated for the South Asian Women’s Creative Collective, 2008) and a major two-year international initiative Cities, Art and Recovery (LMCC, 2005-2006) focused on the work of art and culture in the aftermath of catastrophe. Subramaniam was also the founding and Executive Editor of an interdisciplinary art journal, Connect:art.politics.theory.practice, published by Arts International. “With a curatorial practice that is both cross disciplinary and dialogic, Radhika has a demonstrated commitment to public pedagogy, critical urbanism, and questions of political and social justice,” said Parsons Dean Joel Towers. International cultural exchange, cross-disciplinary encounters, South Asian urban modernity and issues of cultural translation define Subramaniam’s professional practice.
Seminar: “Natives and Invasives” explores the politics of place through the ecological metaphors of the native and the invasive. Even as the world is believed to be increasingly mobile and transnational, there is a growing investment in the local, whether tied to people or the environment. Locavore was the Oxford University Press’ 2007 word of the year. Terroir, the je ne sais quoi of place infuses wine, and various appellations of origin are hotly protected by international agreements. The Asian longhorned beetle, probably hitching a ride on packing crates from China, wreaks havoc on North America’s hardwoods. The so-called First Fleet, which sailed to Australia with many evicted from Britain, who proceeded to settle there, pushing aside the so-called Aboriginal peoples, also brought along a few rabbits. The bunnies became so numerous, they were soon considered invasive pests who in turn had to be deliberately infected with the myxoma virus in order to control the population. Contradictory rhetorics compete in defining place as well as ideas of belonging, natural, and alien. Through writers such as Mabey on weeds, Lippard on the lure of the local, Baldwin on the Native Son, Raffles on vermin, Canetti on contamination, we will examine the slippages between usages, and their implications on such often used terms such as community, mobility, migration, host, alien, us, them, others, and diversity.
Info: http://www.transart.org/faculty-guests-2012/radhika-subramaniam/
Wolfgang Sützl
Bio
: Wolfgang Sützl is a transdisciplinary researcher, writer and educator chiefly concerned with a critique of violence and understanding the conditions in which such a critique is possible. His Ph.D. is in Philosophy from the Universitat Jaume I de Castellón, Spain where he wrote on “Emancipation or Violence. Aesthetic Pacifism in Gianni Vattimo”. He is Chief Researcher of World-Information.Org a project of Public Netbase / Institut fuer Neue Kulturtechnologien, Lecturer in Peace Studies at the MA Program in Peace Studies at the University of Innsbruck, Universitat Jaume I (Spanien) und Universidad Autónoma del Estado de Mexcio, Mexiko, a Faculty member of the UN University for Peace; MA Program in Media, Conflict and Peace Studies, Lecturer in political science at the Department of Political Science, University of Vienna, and Lecturer in philosophy at the Department of Philosophy, University of Innsbruck.
Seminar “Sharing” has a congenial and promising flavor: the hope that through the act of sharing we actually gain something that is more significant than the sacrifice of exclusivity travels with us from childhood admonishments to share our toys, to current calls share our work or its fruit. The rise of digital networks has brought sharing into sharp profile as we are experiencing the emergence of what network sociologist Manuel Castells has called a “culture of sharing rather than the sharing of culture”. Accordingly, sharing has become a term in widespread use, and sharing practices emerge in the most diverse of contexts: We share information and knowledge, online time and bandwidth, artifacts and copyrights, cars and bicycles, problems and pleasure. At the same time, ancient practices of sharing are being rediscovered: the sharing of vital natural resources in commons goes back many centuries and is being researched with a view to creating models of cultural economics that are more sustainable than capitalism and less authoritarian than the classical socialist model. Against this general background, the seminar will offer a place to – enquire into what actually happens when we think we share, discussing sharing in terms of its commonalities and differences to the more dominant concepts of ‘exchange’ and the ‘gift’, as well as its liberal and radical interpretations – investigate sharing in terms of subjectivities (who shares, who do we become by sharing or by being shared), processes and structures (the actions and technologies of sharing), and materialities (the resources shared, or created by sharing) – identify and describe ways in which artistic practice contributes to defining and interpreting sharing, and what the emerging culture of sharing means for the work of artists: for their subjectivities as artists, for their work, and for artistic communities and their transits in society.
Info http://www.activistmedia.at, http://www.wolfgangsuetzl.net
TRANSARTFEST BIOS +DESCRIPTIONS
Lynn Book
Bio
Lynn Book’s 25 year history of transmedia, interdisciplinary practice engages bodies as becoming, bodies being with. Her hybrid projects include full scale performance media works, concerts in contemporary music and club settings, exhibitional stagings, recordings and public actions that draw from performance art, movement, the theatrical, visual art, language, sound and new music. Content and form merge in Book’s works which are part delirium and part meditation. Book’s work has received citations, fellowships, and awards from among others, the National Endowment for the Arts, Illinois Arts Council, Franklin Furnace, and Mary Duke Biddle Foundation. ‘RE:garding Next’, a collaborative culture project investigating utopian desire, premiered at the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art in North Carolina, 2007 and was subsequently performed at Roulette in New York City, Pittsburgh and Vienna. The New York Foundation for the Arts has supported several projects with Book as writer, composer, director, and producer including the The Dice Project: a CD of adventurous women composers and accompanying series of live concert and media events at Thundergulch, EAR Studios at RPI, and The Kitchen in New York. Book’s current projects include ‘FROTH’, a collaboration with an opera company and an early music orchestra in New York City, a video artist and a composer in Vienna, that collides with an 18th century French Baroque opera and received a preview at Symphony Space, May 2010. She is a featured artist at Art Stays, an international festival of contemporary art in Slovenia in 2010, where she will produce ‘SongSpot’, a new site specific performance and installation project. Lynn Book has taught at the Kitchen Summer Institute, Sarah Lawrence College, Barnard, and the School of the Art Institute, among others.
Workshop “Voice and Its Objects: From Utterance To Archive” Participants would be expected to engage in a voice laboratory and to perform their voices across the thresholds of personal limits and media platforms including writing and texting explorations that would result in a range of creative avenues.
Info www.lynnbook.com
Michael Bowdidge
Bio: Michael Bowdidge is an artist who works with found objects, images and sound. He received his undergraduate degree in Fine Art from Middlesex Polytechnic in 1989, and completed his doctoral research at the University of Edinburgh in 2012. His project took the form of a practice-based investigation into the relationship between the later philosophy of Wittgenstein (specifically the Philosophical Investigations) and assemblage sculpture. This research was fueled by the same curiosity about the possibilties of object-based sculptural practice which has also driven 20 years of creative production in this medium, resulting in a substantial number of exhibitions both within the United Kingdom and internationally. The notion of the sculptural as a distinctive set of qualities and criteria (after Koed) also informs his work. Michael works in a variety of educational contexts, which include academic and community settings. All of these activities enrich his teaching practice, and by extension, his creative output – as, for him, these two areas of endeavour are fundamentally intertwined.
Workshop ”Coming Up For Air” In our practice there are times when we fall into negativity and procrastination – we all know the old saying ‘one day, some day, never’. In response to these perennial issues, this one day workshop aims to uncover just what is possible in a single day and to provide a space for sharing our strategies for dealing with our blockages and stumbling points.
As the day progresses we’ll be looking more specifically at the individual creative problems that each of us has faced, and collaborating on finding ways over and through these barriers. There’ll also be a practical element to the workshop, in which we’ll try putting some of these suggestions into practice. We’ll also be looking at how other artists have managed these issues and discussing various helpful frameworks for thinking practice, such as the ideas of Donald Schön and Alice and David Kolb.
Info: http://www.re-title.com/artists/michael-bowdidge.asp
Geoff Cox
Bio: Geoff Cox is Associate Professor in the Dept. of Aesthetics and Communication, and Participatory IT Research Centre, Aarhus University (DK). He is also an occasional artist, Adjunct faculty Transart Institute (DE/US), Associate Curator of Online Projects, Arnolfini, Bristol (UK), and part of the self-institution Museum of Ordure. His research interests lie in the areas of contemporary art and performance, software studies, network culture and a reappraisal of the concept of publicness. He is an editor for the DATA Browser book series (published by Autonomedia), and co-edited Economising Culture (2004), Engineering Culture (2005), Creating Insecurity (2009) and is working on Disrupting Business (for 2013). His latest book is Speaking Code: coding as aesthetic and political expression (MIT Press 2012).
Symposium: Trans-what/how/why?
across and beyond (artistic) research
bi-annual transart-fest symposium
Featuring Julia Mortiz as keynote speaker
The prefix “trans” – such as transaction, transcription, transdisciplinarity, transgression, translation, translocation, transmission, and so on – has become commonplace to point to some of the problems of universal concepts and ongoing boundary disputes between epistemes. Transart institute positions itself in such a name-space where art practice, knowledge production, and research processes operate in the tensions between, across, through, and beyond establishing paradigms. Hito Steyerl talks about artistic research speaking several languages at once – and as “an act of translation”. But how do we further translate “trans” to account for the apparent normalisation of its application? Trans-what/how/why (and for whom)? As part of a process of developing a research community and network, Transart Institute is organising the first symposia in a series of bi-annual events. For the first of these, we wish to be reflexive, and invite researchers, artist-researchers, artists, and others, to explore some of these acts of translation.
Proposed topics might include:
* Artistic research, and alternative models of knowledge production.
* Histories of attempts to rethink organizational and institutional structures of knowledge production.
* How technological paradigms redefine possibilities.
* Examples of non-traditional methods, use of non-textual language, speculations, and actions.
Conference chairs: Geoff Cox
Review panel: TBA
Jennifer Hope Davy
Bio: Jennifer Hope Davy was born and raised primarily in New Jersey. She has studied and worked in europe, new york, seattle, san francisco, texas and is now currently based in berlin. Davy received her fine arts degree from the san francisco art institute, her masters in art history and criticism from the university of texas and more recently completed her phd at the european graduate school (egs), where she is currently a post-doctoral fellow, focusing on contemporary art theory and practice. Forthcoming is the book staging aporetic potential, in addition to art and writing, davy has functioned as a curator, editor, producer and professor of art and media studies.
Seminar: “Ways of Ending”After Finitude (Meillassoux) and After the Future (Bifo)—in these times of crisis everything seems to have come to yet another end: the end of art, the end of philosophy, the end of history, the end of capitalism, of the world as such. And it is precisely here, at “the end of the world as we know it,” and we cannot know it, where we have to think the end. And how to think such end How to think the end, think in and at the end? How to say the end as end, how to end an end, how to end the end that is not, but that has yet to come, always? Such end, always ending, is [not] to be seen as an end in itself. Every crisis, every krisis, is a turning point. For the crisis we are facing today (and we are always already facing a crisis) designates nothing but this: a decisive turn, a turning, or rather, a re-turn to signification. If this is such an opportunity for a “re-turn to signification”, then how to signify (represent/present) as such? How to approach these ways of ending without making this end an end in itself? How to mobilize such impasse without passage, the “ultimate” aporia? Engaging philosophical excerpts of thinkers such as Derrida and Nancy with the art practices of artists Bernadette Corporation and Bruce High Quality Foundation, this seminar will explore apparatuses of mobility in theory and practice. Within this engagement, the students will develop ways of staging the “the end in crisis.”
Info: http://www.jhd.name
Jean-Ulrick Desert
Bio: Jean-Ulrick Désert is a conceptual and visual-artist. He received his degrees at Cooper Union and Columbia University (New York) and has lectured or been a critic at Princeton, Yale, Columbia, Humboldt University and l’école supérieur des beaux arts. Désert’s artworks vary in forms such as billboards, actions, paintings, site-specific sculptures, video and objects and emerge from a tradition of conceptual-work engaged with social/cultural practices, Well known for his “Negerhosen2000”, his provocative “Burqa Project” and his poetic “Goddess Projects” he has said his practice may be characterized as visualizing “conspicuous invisibility”. He has exhibited widely at such venues as The Brooklyn Museum, Cité Internationale des Arts, Contemporary Arts Museum Houston,The NGBK in galleries and public venues in Munich, Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Ghent, Brussels. He is the recipient of awards, public commissions, private philanthropy, including Lower Manhattan Cultural Council , Villa Waldberta-Munich, Kulturstiftung der Länder (Germany) and Cité des Arts (France). Désert established his Berlin studio in 2002.
Discussion: TBA
Info: www.JeanUlrickDesert.com
Julia Holzl
Bio
: Julia Hölzl is the Maurice Blanchot Fellow at the European Graduate School, where she also received her PhD. Currently completing a second doctorate at the Centre for Modern Thought (Aberdeen), Julia has studied and taught a variety of disciplines in the humanities and social sciences at universities in Austria, Spain, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and Thailand, where she has been a Visiting Professor at Ramkhamhaeng University (Bangkok) since 2009.
Seminar: “Ways of Ending”After Finitude (Meillassoux) and After the Future (Bifo)—in these times of crisis everything seems to have come to yet another end: the end of art, the end of philosophy, the end of history, the end of capitalism, of the world as such. And it is precisely here, at “the end of the world as we know it,” and we cannot know it, where we have to think the end. And how to think such end? How to think the end, think in and at the end? How to say the end as end, how to end an end, how to end the end that is not, but that has yet to come, always? Such end, always ending, is [not] to be seen as an end in itself. Every crisis, every krisis, is a turning point. For the crisis we are facing today (and we are always already facing a crisis) designates nothing but this: a decisive turn, a turning, or rather, a re-turn to signification. If this is such an opportunity for a “re-turn to signification”, then how to signify (represent/present) as such? How to approach these ways of ending without making this end an end in itself? How to mobilize such impasse without passage, the “ultimate” aporia? Engaging philosophical excerpts of thinkers such as Derrida and Nancy with the art practices of artists Bernadette Corporation and Bruce High Quality Foundation, this seminar will explore apparatuses of mobility in theory and practice. Within this engagement, the students will develop ways of staging the “the end in crisis.”
Info: http://aberdeen.academia.edu/juliaholzl
Ensemble Xenon
Bio Ensemble Xenon, formed in Berlin in December 2009, is a composer-performer ensemble straddeling the fence between free and noted music. Central to their work are the compositions and concepts of the members of the ensemble as well as free improvisation, sometimes including other genres like dance, installation or video. The ensemble also performs a repertoire of new music of composers that relates to the its working style.
Concert The concert will consist of various performances with the participation of an 8 piece band. Some instuments include saxophone, trombone, violin, double bass.
Info: http://www.ensemble-xenon.de/
Alanna Lockward
Bio: Alanna Lockward is an author and curator based in Berlin. She is the founding director of Art Labour Archives (1996, Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic) an exceptional platform that has spiraled around the amalgamation of theory, political activism and aesthetics. She has been awarded by the Danish Arts Council, the Nordic Council of Ministers and Allianz Kulturstiftung, among others. Her production BE.BOP 2012. BLACK EUROPE BODY POLITICS was presented with overwhelming success at Ballahaus Naunynstrasse. Her book “Apremio. Apuntes sobre el pensamiento y la creación contemporánea desde el Caribe” (Pressure. Notes on Thought and Contemporary Creation from the Caribbean”) was published in 2006 by Cendeac, in Spain. Between 2002-2008 her unprecedented curated exhibition “Pares & Nones (Evens and Odds). Contemporary Photography from Haiti and the Dominican Republic” was presented in the Caribbean, the African continent, the US and Europe. Lockward has lectured on critical race theory, Black feminism and decolonial aesthetics at the Humboldt University, Goldsmiths University of London, University of Warwick, Roosevelt Academy, Transart Institute and Dutch Art Institute and is associated scholar of the Young Scholars Network Black Diaspora and Germany. She graduated at UAM-Xochimilco, Mexico City, as communication scientist and received her M.A. in Art in Context at the University of the Arts Berlin. She is currently writing a dissertation on the oral history of the AME (African Methodist Episcopal Church) in the Caribbean and Namibia at the Department of American Studies at Humboldt University Berlin.
Seminar: ”Afropean Film” a collective-based educational program aimed at contributing to the dissemination of the decolonial aesthetics theoretical model from an Afropean perspective.
Info: http://artlabourarchives.wordpress.com, http://afropeanfilmseminars.wordpress.com/
Yuen Fong Ling
Bio: Yuen Fong Ling (b.1972 Salford, England) is an independent artist and curator living in Manchester, United Kingdom. Graduated from Glasgow School of Art’s MFA programme in 2007 (including exchange programme with Hunter College New York, Autumn/Winter 2006). Now embarking on his Fine Art PhD by practice at University of Lincoln whilst a Senior Lecturer at Sheffield Hallam University. Ling’s research entitled “A Body of Relations: Reconfiguring the Life Class” examines his art practice through the ‘curatorial’ and ‘educational’ turn of the artist adopting and adapting the traditions, conventions and roles of artist, model and tutor in the contemporary life class.
Workshop “Delete/Copy/Paste”… a re-configuring of the conventional life drawing class from the live human form. Using a traditional method of drawing practice in which student’s copy the tutor’s own work or that of other revered artists, the performance-workshop begins to re-work this method of observation and transcription. The resulting reconfigured life class uses live mark making as the conduit to question authorship, ownership and originality of the hand-drawing by switching roles, hierarchies and the nature of production between the artist, model and tutor.
Info: http://yuenfongling.blogspot.de/
Kate Martin
Bio: Kate Martin is an Australian freelance curator and arts educator based in Berlin. She holds a Bachelor of Contemporary Art and a Masters of Cultural Heritage both from Melbourne’s Deakin University. She has nearly ten years’ experience working in both Melbourne and Edinburgh as a freelance curator organising a variety of projects, exhibitions, events, research work and conducting collection cataloguing, and has been working in arts education for the last three years. She has worked on various arts projects for organisations such as Macmillan Cancer Support (Edinburgh), Visual Artist and Galleries Association Scotland, The Gallery of Modern Art (Glasgow), Benalla Art Gallery (Victoria, Australia) and Fortyfivedownstairs (Melbourne). Kate was Education Assistant at The Fruitmarket Gallery in Edinburgh from 2009-10 and worked as an educator for the National Galleries of Scotland and Strathclyde University from 2011-2012. Her curatorial practice Contemporary Art Exchange constitutes internationally focused projects, exhibitions and events, generally with a focus on emerging or young artists. CAE provides a platform in which to explore the concept of “exchange” – of thoughts and ideas; the exchange of experiences or skills; and physical exchange such as travel and how this operates within a contemporary art context. Kate’s research interests include nationalism, cultural identity, globalisation, contemporary art biennials, and the intersection between the arts and psychology, disability and community. Kate is currently working on ‘Common Ground’ an international collaboration with two blind photographers from Edinburgh and Berlin.
Discussion Group “[Dis]placement” Aim: The aim of the Discussion Group is to further develop participants’ skills in self-reflective critical thinking and to think about the process of “[dis]placement” and how it could be a rich source of inspiration for a creative practice. The Discussion Group will use the participants’ Transart Institute residency in Berlin as a case-study in progress by encouraging participants to explore the relationship they each have with their immediate physical environment and explore expectations, presumptions and definitions of cultural identity. The discussion group will provide an opportunity for students to use the here and now – their temporary placement in the globalised, international, historically and culturally rich city of Berlin (or even their ongoing daily life in Berlin if they reside here) – and to examine the physical fabric of the city and their place within it, the relationship the city has with the rest of the world, and furthermore, what their [dis]placement in the city of Berlin means for the development of their future careers. | Method: Takes an auto-biographical approach as the starting point, introduction of myself as curator/arts educator/foreigner and my prior relocation from Melbourne to Edinburgh, then from Edinburgh to Berlin. I invite participants to share their own experiences of travel and relocating and take on the role of “agent provocateur” or “guide” to participants to help them reflect critically on what these experiences mean for their own creativity. Starting at Supermarkt, participants will embark on a walking tour through Berlin stopping at various selected locations along the way for focussed discussions. We will also use the very locations we will venture to as a source of inspiration for discussion. | Content: Physical displacement – how does it affect your work/thinking? Relationship between the body and physical space? What are the limits/borders of the city and of ourselves? What is belonging and how do you know when you belong somewhere? Berlin is notoriously a cultural melting pot, not without political and social issues: what of the exchange that takes place between people from different cultures within the city, in particular the creative people who come here? How do you perceive the city before or after you arrive? What do we presume about its cultural identity? And on our own cultural identity: what do we take with us? What do we leave behind? How do we look at ourselves in other countries? How do you navigate the cultural landscape when you have recently relocated? What of the process of travelling/moving: is it ok to fail? To start from scratch? To reinvent your own identity? Can you transfer your skills and knowledge when working/creating in another country? Will your message, your language translate? Can you transform yourself?
Info: http://contemporaryartexchange.org
Astrid Menze
Bio:
Astrid Menze, born in Frankfurt/Main Germany, studied Audiovisual Media at the Gerrit Rietvield Academie in Amsterdam and San Francisco Art Institute where she received her diploma in 1999, her MFA in New Media from the Transart Institute in August 2010. She lives and works as a freelance editor and video artist in Berlin. Her work is shown and awarded nationally and internationally as group and individual projects. She is currently teaching editing and visualization at Academy for International Education in Bonn, LMU Los Angeles, A&M Texas University and film history and media theory at DEKRA Akademie Berlin.
Workshop ”Collective Stop Motion”
”Collective Multi-Perspective Stop-Motion Animation” In this one-day workshop, the students are using a big space (like a gym from a school, a storage place from the city department of traffick, still needs to be to be determined) and every desired object in it to animate in time and space. Every participant is responsible for a certain amount of manageable objects to move and animate and photograph. Ideally we have as many cameras as participants and capture the collaborative movement of items and/or people in this space. The concept of cooperations within clusters or complete independency of each object and speed can be determined in situ, depending on the theme chosen according to the space and objects. The result is a complete group project where independency and cooperation can function in coordination with with random surprises. All single frames will finally show the result after being edited into a filmclip.
Info: www.astridmenze.de/
Julia Moritz
Bio: Art historian and curator Julia Moritz has been the Head of “Maybe Education and Public Programs of dOCUMENTA (13)” until very recently. The department pursued new methods in art education and reassessed the successful public programs of past documenta exhibitions. Before she was the curator of University of Lüneburg, where she was responsible both for the exhibition and events program of the university’s art space, Kunstraum, and also taught seminars in the cultural studies teaching program. In the course of her postgraduate studies in Vienna, New York and Bilbao she wrote a doctoral thesis on issues relating to institutional conditions in contemporary art. She previously worked for major exhibitions such as Manifesta 7 in Trentino/Alto Adige (2008) and the German Pavilion at the 52th Biennale di Venezia (2007). Independently curated projects include the group show “Critical Complicity” (with Lisa Mazza) in Vienna, Ljubljana and Bolzano (2010). The volume “Question of the Day”, (2007), jointly edited with Nicolaus Schafhausen and published by Sternberg Press gives insight into Moritz’ ongoing dialogical inquiry into the formats used for art production and reception.
Symposium: Entitled, “Trans-what?”The prefix ‘trans-’ points to some of the problems of universal concepts and ongoing boundary disputes between epistemes. It modifies the meaning of what it is attached to: transaction, transcription, transgression, translocation, transmission, translation, transdisciplinarity, to name only a few of the many examples in contemporary culture. Transart Institute positions itself in these alternative name-spaces where art practice, knowledge production, and research processes operate in the tensions between, across, through, and beyond establishing paradigms. Rather than prefixing meaning, Hito Steyerl talks about artistic research speaking several languages at once – and as “an act of translation”. But if this is the case, the symposium asks how do we further translate ‘trans’ to account for the apparent normalisation of its application?
Info: http://www3.documenta.de/participants/participants/julia-moritz/
Dafna Naphtali
Bio: Dafna Naphtali is a singer/instrumentalist/electronic-musician from an eclectic musical background (jazz, classical, rock and near-eastern music). Since the mid-90′s she composes/performs experimental, interactive elctro-acoustic music using her custom MAX?MSP programming for live sound processing of voice and other instruments, and also interprets the work of Cage, Stockhausen and contemporary composers.
Workshop: “Interactive Sound: Techniques and Practice” The course would focus on various ways interactive sound is and has been used in performance, sound installations and other interactive public exhibitions and interventions. Discussion, examples of artist works and projects will be given that investigate live audio processing of sound, music and voice through triggering of audio cues, loop pieces, score following; multi-channel interactive sound works and live performance. Students will learn about the basics of psychoacoustics, and new stratetgies for listening, thinking about (and creating with) audio, and create their own works as a final project. Course includes hands on training in Max/MSP or PD. Emphasis on experiencing work currently being created in Berlin. Because of my background as a performer/composer in this field, i can give a unique focus and perspective on incorporating live sound processing, the human voice, and musical structure into interactive audio projects that the students will create. Student projects will be completed in Max/MSP or PD (my main teaching tool for many years), and the course will also provide practical information about sound equipment and hardware issues that must be addressed when putting together a sound work.
Info: http://www.dafna.info
Ece Pazarbasi
Bio
: Ece Pazarbaşı is a curator, advisor and educator living in Istanbul and Berlin. Since 2007, Pazarbaşı has been curating public space projects and Audio Tours in the urban and rural domains. She had the privilege being part of Institute for Spatial Experiments with Olafur Eliasson. Recently she worked as Istanbul Coordinator for New Museum New York’s Ideas City: Istanbul project. She has curated The Silent Shape of Things-Sophia Pompery exhibition at ARTER Istanbul (2012), Turkish Art New and Superb (2012) and Zwölf im Zwölften (2011) exhibitions in TANAS – Berlin together with René Block. She was the co-founder and the co-director of CUMA Contemporary Utopia Management (2008-2012) where she was the originator, curator and director of its artistic projects. Between 2001-2003 she acted as assistant director at Project-Istanbul Museum of Contemporary Art and between 2002-09 she was the executive assistant to director of the Platform Garanti Contemporary Art Center where she has been assigned on several different freelance projects. She was the assistant curator of the 52nd Venice Biennial Turkish Pavilion (2007), director of the on-going education and festival programme Meeting Point since 2007, project manager of “Orhan Pamuk: Museum of Innocence” for Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt (2007-08) and Contemporary Art Exhibitions Director at Pera Museum (2005-2006). In 2009 and 2010 she worked as Consultant and Program Specialist of Visual Arts for Turkey at the Strategic Planning and Development Department for Abu Dhabi Authority for Culture and Heritage, UAE.
Info: www.c-amp.org
Merete Rostad
Bio: Merete’s current work has developed out of a rigorous drawing practice in both her academic and professional life in Norway, England and Germany. As a result, she now uses industrial materials to sculpt metaphors within urban contexts. She will continue to explore the potential of spatial and temporal constructs as a catalyst for engaging with history, identity and memory. Røstad has earned a Master Fine Arts at the Bauhaus Universität Weimar, Germany in Public Arts and New Artistic Strategies and a Bachelor degree in Fine Arts at the Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts (LIPA), Liverpool, UK.
Workshop: “Conversation Pieces: Public, art and the city” The workshop focuses on the production of art projects in public places. Students will be engaged in the execution of site-specific interventions, examining how to become comfortable with the complexity of working in public space. It dialogues with the applied, means-to-ends relation between knowledge and action that is evoked by the term ‘public art’ and the artificial opposition between theory and practice, it implies. The methodology draws on the vocabularies of urbanism, architecture, science, aesthetics, and philosophy in order to develop spatial practices into an open form of critical inquiry.
Info: http://mereterostad.blogspot.com/
Stephan Takkides
Bio: Stephan Takkides is an English-Cypriot artist, currently living in Berlin, Germany. His work is concerned with place and landscape and includes different media, such as web-based projects, computer games, photography and video. He studied New Media at Chelsea College in London and graduated in 2012 from the MFA program with the Transart Institute. His work has been shown in the UK and Berlin.
Workshop/Tour: “The Edge of Berlin” This one-day workshop will be a tour of places on Berlin’s outer borders. It will take in two areas: one at the southern edge of the city and one just beyond the city limits to the north. In the morning, we will meet in Gropiusstadt, an area of modernist high-rise in the south of the city (former West Berlin), and briefly leave the city to the flat pastures immediately adjacent. We will then travel around the city on the Ringbahn (Berlin’s orbital railway) and head north to see the former sewage fields around the village of Hobrechtsfelde. The context of the tour will be the geographical terms: “edgelands”, “Zwischenstadt” and “Umland”. By the end of the day, I hope participants will have a different perspective on the city of Berlin and, perhaps, a new way of looking at places elsewhere. Along the tour, I will encourage people to share their knowledge of similarly marginal spaces, as well as their own perceptions of Berlin and its environs. Aspects of Berlin’s rural-urban fringe will be familiar, but others are quite specific to the city. From our diverse backgrounds, we should be able to make some interesting comparisons and observations, which may influence how we view our environments and approach our art practices.
Info: http://vokzal.info/
Hans Tammen
Bio: Hans Tammen creates sounds that have been described as an alien world of bizarre textures and a journey through the land of unending sonic operations. He produces rapid-fire juxtapositions of radically contrastive and fascinating noises, with micropolyphonic timbres and textures, aggressive sonic eruptions, but also quiet pulses and barely audible sounds – through means of his “Endangered Guitar” and interactive software programming, by working with the room itself, and, as a critic observed, with his “…fingers stuck in a high voltage outlet”. Signal To Noise called his works “…a killer tour de force of post-everything guitar damage”, All Music Guide recommended him: “…clearly one of the best experimental guitarists to come forward during the 1990s.”
Info: http://tammen.org/
Noam Toran
Bio: Noam Toran’s work involves the creation of intricate narratives developed as a means to reflect upon the interrelations of cinema, history, design and memory. The works are most often exhibited as sculptures, films and installations. The works attempt to evoke memories and sensations related to cinema and cinema watching, and to examine the implications of how fictions influence the collective consciousness, be it as collective myth or memory forming. This is realised through an original way of deconstructing and reconfiguring cinema’s codes, conventions and structures, and repositioning them in the gallery space. The works often exist in archival or schematic forms developed through a unifying thematic narrative. What results are installations comprised of objects, films and texts which provide the viewer with a space for speculation and interpretation. The work is exhibited, screened and published internationally, and is part of the NY MoMA, FRAC Ile-de-France, and Israel Museum collections.
Workshop ”The Object as Protagonist” is an investigation into the historical understanding and future potential of ‘things’ as narrative or philosophical protagonists (and agitators) in art, literature and cinema. Specifically, it is not just spaces and objects that are of interest, but the complex relations and narrative potentials that develop within those spaces or around (and because of) those objects. Viewing spaces and objects in this way complicates their usual status as settings or props, gives them a completely different mode of attention, and allows them to take on a new kind of force. Additionally, by isolating, foregrounding or displacing narrative objects in a gallery or museum setting, new meanings and new storytelling methods can be proposed. Students will be introduced to a wide range of historical and contemporary practitioners who employ objects or environments within narrative structures in unique ways. A combination of lectures, screenings and discussions will provide the traction for a workshop in which students will develop narrative-based proposals in the medium and on the subject matter of their choosing. Writers, artists and filmmakers examined will include Jorge Luis Borges, Franz Kafka, David Cronenberg, Don Coscarelli, Italo Calvino, Agnieszka Kurant, Robert Aldrich, Giorgio Agamben, Jean Baudrillard, Tibor Fischer, Tom McCarthy, Nicholson Baker, Christoph Buchel, Rebecca Horn, Harun Farocki, Panamarenko, Pierre Huyghe, Mac Adams, Roland Barthes and Reyner Banham.
Info http://www.noamtoran.com
Ming Turner
Bio: Ming Turner received her PhD in Art History and Theory at Loughborough University in the UK, and is currently a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Research Center for Humanities and Social Sciences of National Chiao Tung University, Taiwan. She lectured taught Critical and Contextual Studies at De Montfort University in the UK, and was a visiting faculty member at Transart Institute based in New York. Her curatorial projects include An Inconvenient Truth: New Environmental Art in Cijin (2012-13) staged in Taiwan, Beautiful Life: Memory and Nostalgia (2011-12), an international touring project held at three venues in the UK and Taiwan; 0&1: Cyberspace and the Myth of Gender (2010), staged in Chongqing, China; Simply Screen: Inbetweeners of Asia (2009), held in Berlin and London. She has delivered research papers at many international conferences, and published widely in several international journals and publications, including n.paradoxa (2010 and 2012), Women’s Studies in the West (Beijing: People’s University Press), Gender and Women’s Leadership (London: Sage, 2010) and The International Journal of the Arts in Society (2009). She is currently curating a show for the Museum of Contemporary Art, Taipei, to be open in November 2013.
Info: http://www.beautifullifeexhibition.com/index.html
Virgil Wong
Bio
Virgil’s electronic works, installations, films, paintings, drawings, and prints have been exhibited in galleries and museums around the world, including the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Taipei, and Deitch Projects in New York City. He produced and co-directed Murmur, a medical dreamscape film that premiered at the 2002 Sundance Film Festival. In the previous year, he received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) for an art and medicine exhibition called Corporeal Landscape. Virgil is currently Vice President of Interactive Media at Element 115, a company that builds technology-based solutions for hospitals throughout the country. Previously, over 15 years, he founded and led the in-house Web and Multimedia division for Weill Cornell Medical College and NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital. Virgil also teaches photography, film, and interactive media as an adjunct Assistant Professor in The New School’s Masters in Media Studies Program. In 2011, Virgil cofounded Medical Avatar, a company that uses personalized 3-D anatomical bodies to visualize health information in the past, present, and future. Virgil is currently doing research at Columbia University on time travel simulations of patients’ bodies to motivate disease prevention.
Workshop: “Brains + Bodies: Future and Past” The Berlin Museum of Medical History at the Charité (BMM) provides a compelling journey through health and medicine over the past 300 years. The museum reveals an ever-changing view of the human body from the inside out both clinically and culturally. Artists such as Suzanne Anker, Joyce Cutler-Shaw, Laura Ferguson, and Mark Kessell have studied similar anatomical sources to create transformative work that influences how we look at ourselves, our bodies, and the world around us. This workshop will draw from BMM’s collection to likewise inspire artists in visualizing the past and imagining the future.
Info: http://www.virgilwong.com
