Programme

 poster 4 A3-1

 

SUNDAY, AUGUST 26

2-8 pm arrival snacks
6 pm tour of the Nida Art Colony
7 pm intro to the course programme and participants
8 pm welcome dinner

 

MONDAY, AUGUST 27

9 am breakfast
10 am intro to the course by Vytautas Michelkevičius
10:30 am self introductions by tutors (Mika Elo, Lolita Jablonskienė, Teemu Leinonen, Joanne Morra)
11 am  Henk Slager Curatorial Thinking

This presentation departs from the assumption that the current ontological impasse – the continued repetition of the academic question “what is artistic research?” – could be overcome by portraying artistic research as a non-disciplined space where an assemblage of creative practices, artistic thinking processes, and curatorial strategies continually produce new sets of relationships contributing, in an idiosyncratic way, to the articulation of crucial issues. Put differently, artistic research should be characterized by the uninterrupted interaction and articulation of three inseparable and intrinsically interconnected lines: the line of creative practice, the line of artistic thinking, and the line of curatorial strategies.

In that frame the perspective of the curatorial line that stands for generating experimental spaces for the public and performative modes of reflection and presentation, contextualizing connections between objects, images, discourses, locations, histories and especially futures. In particular this last aspect, re-thinking of and speculating about the future, has triggered many research-based artists today to revise the curatorial strategy of the archival display. However, the ‘exposition of research’ should not be reduced to static models or preformed categories, as this is completely contrary to the intrinsic and inseperable intertwinement of these three dynamic lines. In this perspective curatorial strategy must stand for a dynamic, continuously traversing spaces of creativity in which the presentation of rhizomatic processes and transformative forms of thinking directed to urgent issues are instigated time and again.

12 am post presentation discussion
1 pm lunch
2 pm presentations by doctoral candidates*
7 pm guided tour of Nida Art Colony exhibition (Per)forming Scapes by the curator Vytautas Michelkevičius
8 pm dinner
10 pm sauna

 

TUESDAY, AUGUST 28

9 am breakfast
10 am Dorita Hannah Performance Design: Mediating a Critical Spatial Practice

"Elin Diamond memorably referred to performance as “a risky and dangerous negotiation between a doing […] and a thing done:”* a reference to both action and artefact that is also inherent to ‘design’, which is both verb and noun. Design performativity is therefore central to this presentation that articulates and develops notions of a Critical Spatial Practice as applied to my own interdisciplinary artistic research, operating across and between architecture, performance and the visual arts. This involves an understanding of J. L Austin’s theory on How to Do Things with Words in order to reveal that spaces and things have their own performative utterances; enacting rather than describing. The creative work I will present and discuss as ‘performance design’ focuses on a highly mediated contemporary condition and is formulated to challenge and reveal our prescribed conceptions of how vulnerable bodies and sites interact and inform each other. Understanding this allows events and their intervening dramaturgies to reveal the hegemonic within the status quo through a critical performance of research. This will be discussed with specific reference to an iterative project, occurring between 2016-2017, which addresses issues of detained bodies. It follows how the enactment of a landscape scenography (Maria Island Performance+Design Workshop) is translated into a gallery installation (Tasmanian Arts Festival) and then incorporated within a performative exhibition (Chile Architecture Biennial)."

* Elin Diamond, Performance and Cultural Politics (London: New York: Routledge Press, 1996), 5.

11 am post-presentation discussion
12 am presentation by a doctoral candidate
1 pm lunch
2 pm individual consultations
6 pm presentations by doctoral candidates
8 pm dinner

 

WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 29

9 am breakfast
10 am presentations by doctoral candidates
12 am individual consultations
1 pm lunch
2 pm presentations by doctoral candidates
5 pm individual consultations
6 pm open studios of NAC residents: Heidi Axelsen & Hugo Moline, Gabi Schillig
8 pm dinner cooked by participants

 

THURSDAY, AUGUST 30

9 am breakfast
10 am Michael Schwab The Exposition of Practice as Research

Arguably everybody concerned with artistic research will have encountered the question of what it is, which often comes paired with a challenge to its status as art or its validity as research. Rather than accepting such an impossible position between a rock and a hard place, over the last few years, practitioners have started to question whether ‘art’ as pitched against ‘knowledge’ is still a relevant concept and whether knowledge void of aesthetic experiences is worth having. As a consequence, the value of artistic research may be seen to lie in specific engagements between art and knowledge, in which neither is taken for granted to provide the guide against which a project is judged. Rather, definitions of art or knowledge are seen to emerge from a research project in specific ways. However, projects are never accessible as such; we only have their articulations to go by. Hence, a new concern has arisen regarding the mode and quality of such articulations, for which we, at the Journal for Artistic Research (JAR), coined the term ‘expositions.’ The lecture will explain the use of ‘expositions’ in the journal, engage with wider definitions of term and speculate how things may continue to develop.

11 am post-presentation discussion
12 am presentation by a doctoral candidate
1 pm lunch
2 pm workshop and long table Modes of Exposing Doctoral Research in Art and Design led by Joanne Morra

Looking at contemporary instances in which artists, designers and PhD students have exposed their research through exhibitions, publications, diagrams, mind-maps, workshops, or in formal and informal institutional assessments, this session aims to open up a space in which Nida Doctoral students have the opportunity of making plans towards a forthcoming exposition of your PhD research, or looking back on an instance from the past that you would like to reappraise.

4 pm individual consultations
6 pm presentations by doctoral candidates
8 pm dinner
10 pm sauna 

 

FRIDAY, AUGUST 31

9 am breakfast
10 am Mika Elo Ex-

The presentation is dedicated to different aspects of the very gesture of exposing. How does exposing relate to other processes that involve an outward gesture, such as explaining, explicating and exhibiting? What kind of inner space do these outward gestures imply? How does an exposition negotiate its framing conditions? The presenter will touch upon this seemingly abstract and philosophically complex issue through a series of concrete examples.

11 am post-presentation discussion
12 am individual consultations
1 pm lunch
2 pm presentations by doctoral candidates
5 pm individual consultations
8 pm dinner

 

SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 1

9 am breakfast
10 am wrap up (results, findings, unanswered questions)
1 pm lunch
2 pm individual consultations
8 pm farewell dinner

 

SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 2

9 am breakfast & departure

 

* 20 min presentation + 20 min Q&A