On Not Knowing -
How Artists Teach
Conference / Excursion
8.6.-11.6.23
Glasgow School of Art

Some students of the class visited the conference On Not Knowing: How Artists Teach at The Glasgow School of Art convened in partnership with Uniarts Helsinki’s Academy of Fine Art. Susan Philipsz was invited as the keynote speaker. The On Not Knowing: How Artists Teach conference shared and explored the various approaches, methods and understandings of artists who teach in the field of higher education and beyond. 

"The not knowing is crucial to art, is what permits art to be made. Without the scanning process engendered by not knowing, without the possibility of having the mind move in unanticipated directions, there would be no invention." (Donald Barthelme, Not-Knowing, 1997)

Lecture & Film Screening
Hörsaal, HfBK Dresden
7.6.23
3pm Lecture
5pm Screening*

Workshop
Studio Class Philipsz, HfBK Dresden
5.–6.4.23

Irina Gheorghe works primarily with performance, in combination with installation, collage, photography or video, to address the tensions inherent in the attempts to speak about things inaccessible to observation, from extraterrestrial life to hypothetical planets. Her work explores techniques of deviation as a way of estranging the everyday, abstraction as a language for interstellar communication and the absurd as the possible mood of engaging with a world beyond perception.

Irina also works as part of the artist duo The Bureau of Melodramatic Research, co-founded in 2009 together with Alina Popa (1982-2019) to investigate how passions shape contemporary society. Irina also performs with the Psychedelic Choir. 

Recent solo exhibitions include Things Which Are Not Here, of Which We Cannot Say at Ivan Gallery Bucharest (2022), Methods for the Study of What Is Not There at Künstlerhaus Bremen (2021), Betraying the Senses, or How to Speak of What Is Not There at Project Arts Centre Dublin (2022) and All the Things Which Are Not Here at Swimming Pool Sofia (2019). Recent Bureau solo shows include Heartbeat Detection Systems at Suprainfinit Gallery and The Internal Fire at Goethe-Institut (both Bucharest, 2022). Selected group shows include Grazer Kunstverein, Salonul de Proiecte Bucharest, National Museum of Contemporary Art Bucharest, CCA Derry, Glasgow International, TRAFO Budapest, Pratt Manhattan Gallery New York, Times Museum Guangzhou, HOME Manchester, etc.

Lecture
Studio Class Philipsz, HfBK Dresden
18.1.23

Sandra Teitge is a curator, programmer, and sporadic performer born in East Berlin in the 1980s. She is the Head of Public Program and Curator at CCA Berlin – Center for Contemporary Arts. Teitge organizes exhibitions and programs at the intersection of contemporary art, architecture and design, often in urban and commercial spaces. Her recent curatorial projects include an investigation into gossip in Berlin’s urban space, the nGbK project Art in the Underground; a podcast for the ifa gallery Berlin, the exhibition and the associated program Wild Frictions. The Politics and Poetics of Interruption at CAC Cincinnati and Kunstraum Kreuzberg/Berlin; New Nature Vitrines, a film program for shop windows in Berlin, Montreal and New York; and Quarantine Choir, a series of audio performances.

In 2018/19 Teitge was director of the Goethe Pop Up Minneapolis Goethe in the Skyways; in 2014, she founded the residency program FD13 in Saint Paul, MN/U.S., which now runs independently of her. Teitge studied art and visual history (MA) at the Humboldt University and the Berlin University of the Arts, as well as Media Studies and French (BA) at the University of Sussex in Brighton, UK, and at the Nouvelle Sorbonne in Paris, France.

Live Performance
Studio Class Philipsz, HfBK Dresden
14.12.22

‚A SYMPHONY OF HORROR‘ is a live performance to mark the centenary of the classic movie ‚Nosferatu – Eine Symphonie des Grauens‘ by F.W. Murnau (1922)

In collaboration with Susan Philipsz and composer Ari Benjamin Meyers, students of the Susan Philipsz class have developed a collective performance in which individual performances and artistic works are embedded.

Excursion
Gallery tour, Berlin
16.11.22

Workshop
Studio Class Philipsz, HfBK Dresden
Okt/Nov/Dec '22

Talk & Round Table Discussion
Aktsaal, HfBK Dresden
19.10.22

Video

Exhibition
Manifesta 14,
Pristina, Kosovo
22.7.–30.10.22

The interconnection of sounds across time and space has been the inspiration for several works by Susan Phillipsz, among them the collective project Radio International, whose project comprises a series of radio-transmitted sound works.

The modular K67 kiosk was designed by Slovenian architect Saša J. Mächtig. It was marketed from the late 1960s onwards as “the right point of meeting”. Its popularity extends across eastern and central Europe all the way to New York, where it is part of the collection of the Museum of Modern Art.

Inscribed in cultural memory, the once ubiquitous model has become a rare sight on the streets of Prishtina. To halt the tide of dereliction and disappearance, Ilir Dalipi has restored and repurposed one of the last remaining kiosks in town. Influenced by tactical urbanism, which proposes swift and small-scale solutions to larger problems, the architect and urbanist seeks to inspire others to follow his example.

During Manifesta 14 Prishtina, the K67 will host Radio International, an intervention by sound artist Susan Philipsz in collaboration with a collective of students from Kosovo and abroad. Later on, Dalipi intends for the kiosk to become a museum for other everyday design objects, similarly rescued from oblivion.

Press

Talk
Center for Narrative Practice,
Pristina, Kosovo
23.7.22

Prof. Susan Philipsz and students from the University of Fine Arts (HfBK) Dresden in collaboration with students from the Faculty of Philosophy at Universiteti i Prishtinës spoke about their project Radio International developed for Manifesta 14 at the Center for Narrative Practice in Pristina. Radio International is a series of radio transmitted sound works broadcast from the 9th floor of the Grand Hotel Prishtina to a restored Saša J. Mächtig K67 kiosk on Zahir Pajaziti Square in the center of Prishtina.

Video

Lecture
Aktsaal HfBK, Dresden
12.5.22

Biennales and biennales. 

Among the three hundred biennials in the world, there are biennales and biennales. Those second ones ‒ such as Autostrada Biennale in Kosovo ‒ are more valuable to look at and work with from a critical, curatorial perspective. These have been called Biennales of Resistance by the political scientist Oliver Marchart and many have originated in the Global South such as the early Havana Biennial 1978, the Gwangju Biennale after the democratic uprising in South Korea in 1980, the short-lived Johannesburg Biennale after the end of apartheid in 1994, or the Istanbul Biennale after the 1980 military intervention in Turkey. Some of their aims were to de-westernize the art canon, decenter cartographies, shake legitimized institutional art, or create counter-hegemonic models. Starting with Kosovo but also making a detour to Venice we will also speak about how the language of contemporary art can be a form of resilience and recovery.

Joanna Warsza, is an interdependent curator, editor and educator. Currently a co-curator of the Polish pavilion at the 59. Venice Biennale, with the work of Polish-Romani artist Malgorzata Mirga-Tas. She is also co-curator, with Ovul O. Durmusoglu of the 3rd and 4th Autostrada Biennale in Kosovo (2021, 2023) and a program director of CuratorLab at Konstfack University in Stockholm. 

Lecture + Film Screening
Hörsaal HfBK, Dresden
9.12.21

Tom McCarthy's passionate interest in early radio and film have coincided with our programmes 'Radio International' and 'The Cinematic' and prompted us to invite Tom to speak to the students here in Dresden.

Tom McCarthy was born in 1969 and grew up in London. He has published numerous stories, essays and articles on literature, philosophy and art. Two of his novels have been shortlisted for the prestigious Booker Prize. His most recent work The Making of Incarnation (2021) was launched in Kunst Werke in Berlin recently. His first Booker Prize shortlisted novel 'C' (2010) is an exploration of early radio, call-signs and crackle. He describes the main protagonist "flying around in a WW1 plane dosed up on morphine sending radio messages with lines of Hölderlin crackling through his head to the rhythm of machine guns..." McCarthy's debut novel Remainder (2005) was the source for the artist and filmmaker Omar Fast, culminating in Fast's first feature length film also titled Remainder (2015). His ongoing project the International Necronautical Society is a semi-fictitious avant-garde network that surfaces through publications and live events. In 2003 they broke into the BBC website and inserted propaganda into its source-code. The following year, they set up a broadcasting unit at the Institute of Contemporary Art in London from which more than forty ‘agents’ generated non-stop poem-codes which were transmitted over FM radio in London and by internet to collaborating radio stations around the world.

Tom McCarthy will discuss his practice as a writer, his interest in art, film and radio and in particular the relationship between his radio project at the ICA and Jean Cocteau's film Orpheus (1950) and afterwards in the format of The Cinematic talk series we will enjoy a screening of Orpheus in the Hörsaal in Güntzstraße.

Exhibition + Workshop
Senatsaal HfBK, Dresden
28.–29.10.21

Radio International is a series of radio transmitted sound works that explore the medium of radio and respond to the particular acoustics of the Senatsaal.

Guglielmo Marconi, the pioneer of radio, suggested that sounds once generated never die, they fade but they continue to reverberate as sound waves across the universe. I found this to be an extremely evocative idea and has been the inspiration for the class project Radio International.

At the start of this years winter semester we began by delving into the world of analogue radio. We explored various radio archives and studied works by artists that were designed for transmission, culminating in a radio workshop in the Senatsaal of the HfBK Brühlsche Terrasse. Each student has engaged in their own way with the material to produce a unique sound work that has been designed for transmission. While most transmission art is made to be experienced at home or from a private location we set out to produce transmissions that would be experienced as sound installations in the Senatsaal.

Working with the particular architecture and acoustics of the Senatsaal the sound works resonate with their environment to create an immersive transmission experience.

Exhibition
Brühlsche Terrasse HfBK, Dresden
24.–25.07.21

The Sixth Sense was an exhibition of students work that took place throughout the public areas of the Brühlsche Terrace. The projects were comprised of interventions in the courtyard, the entrance passageways, the stairwells and many other oblique but interesting spaces.

The impulse of the exhibition was to move beyond the designated gallery spaces of the Brühlsche Terrace and to explore the architecture, character and potential of other spaces throughout the building. Each of these places have been chosen by the students for a particular reason and encouraged the visitor to experience the place in a new way. Rooms became eerie, the acoustics were activated and drew your attention to the architecture, or the context was almost entirely obliterated in order to draw the eye inwards.

The title The Sixth Sense refers to those experiences that cannot be attributed to any one of the five senses. The Sixth Sense exhibition aimed to explore the extra sensory power of contemporary art.

Lecture + Film Screening
Aktsaal HfBK, Dresden
20.1.21

Pauline Curnier Jardin is an artist and filmmaker who lives and works in Amsterdam and Berlin. In 2015/16 she completed a residency at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten, Amsterdam. In 2017 her installation Grotta Profunda Appronfundita was display at the 57th Venice Biennale and she presented a screening of her film works at the Tate Modern in London. Also in 2017 she was nominated for the Prix Fondation d’Entreprise Ricard and won the Dutch NN Group Art Award. In 2019 Pauline Curnier Jardin won the prestigious Preis der Nationalgalerie and her solo exhibition will be held at the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin this spring. Other solo and group exhibitions include Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, Performa 15, New York, The Cartier Foundation, Paris, The Migros Museum of Contemporary Art, Zurich, MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, Massachusetts, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, Palais de Tokyo, Paris, Musée d’Art Moderne, Paris and ZKM Museum of Contemporary Art, Karlsruhe.

Pauline will present Ted Kotcheff’s 1971 film Wake in Fright.

Lecture + Film Screening
Aktsaal HfBK, Dresden
6.1.21

Luke Fowler is an artist, filmmaker and musician based in Glasgow. He studied at the Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art in Dundee. His work explores the limits and conventions of biographical and documentary film-making and often takes the form of a film portrait of an individual or movement that lies beyond the mainstream. As well as portraits of musicians and composers he has also made films and installations that deal with the nature of sound and of listening. His work has been said to echo the British Free Cinema movement of the 1950’s.

Luke received the inaugural Derek Jarman Award in 2008 and was shortlisted for the Turner Prize in 2012. He has had solo exhibitions in the Serpentine in London. Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas, Lismore Castle Ireland, Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen, Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane and Kunsthalle Zürich. Solo screening and group exhibition at MOMA in New York and group exhibitions at Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt and the Secession in Vienna. In 2000 he established Shadazz, an art music label based in Glasgow. Luke is represented by the Modern Institute in Glasgow, Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne, Taka Ishii Gallery, Tokyo.

Luke Fowler will present British director Margaret Tait’s 1992 film Blue Black Permanent.

Lecture + Film Screening
Aktsaal HfBK, Dresden
16.12.20

Film is a medium and the cinema is a space and if there is an artist who really explores cinema as a space; a real space that also has a relationship to public space then it is Clemens von Wedemeyer.

Clemens von Wedemeyer was born in 1974 in Göttingen, Germany and currently lives and works in Berlin. The artist and filmmaker studied photography and media at the Fachhochschule Bielefeld and the Academy of Fine Arts Leipzig where he now holds a professorship with the title Expanded Cinema, which is very interesting for our programme.

Wedemeyer has participated in many of the same large exhibitions such as the 4th Berlin Biennale (2006), Skulptur Projekte Münster (2007), the 16th Biennale of Sydney (2008) and dOCUMENTA (13) (2012). He had solo shows at MoMA PS1, New York, Frankfurter Kunstverein, the Barbican Art Centre, London, MCA Chicago, and the Hamburger Kunsthalle. 

Clemens von Wedemeyer will present the 1999 film by Canadian director David Cronenberg ‘EXistenZ’

Lecture + Film Screening
Aktsaal HfBK, Dresden
2.12.20

Anri Sala's immersive and cinematic works are constructed through multiple relationships between music and sound, architecture and film, interleaving qualities of different media to produce works in which one medium takes on the qualities of another.

Anri Sala was born in 1974 in Tirana, Albania. He lives and works in Berlin, Germany. Anri was educated at the National Academy of Arts, Tirana; at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs in Paris; and undertook studies in Film Directing, Le Fresnoy, Studio national des arts contemporains, Tourcoing. Anri Sala is a recipient of the Vincent Award (2014), the Mario Merz Prize (2014), the 10th Benesse Prize (2013). He won the Absolut Art Award in 2011, and the Young Artist Prize at the Venice Biennale (2001)

Sound and acoustics are very important in Anri Sala's film works. In an early piece 'Naturalmystic (Tomahawk #2)' from 2002 an actor from Belgrade sits in a darkened recording studio, vocally simulating the sound of missiles falling from above. Sound and space are explored in works 'The Present Moment' at Haus des Kunst where the tones of an Arnold Schonberg composition travel through the space. His ability to direct an image with a sound is evident in 'Take Over' at Esther Schipper where the musical progression directs the focus pull of the film. The sound is an active element in the construction of the film.  There is also a mobile cinematic quality to the experience walking through 'As You Go' at the Castello di Rivoli, Turin, Italy in 2019 where individual works are arranged into an ensemble with films doubled on multiple screens arranged in a round.

As part of his contribution to The Cinematic film club Anri Sala will introduce the film 'Out of the Present', 1995 by Andreï Ujicā

Lecture + Film Screening
Aktsaal HfBK, Dresden
19.11.20

Rosa Barba is a German-Italian artist and filmmaker who was born in Agrigento, Sicily in 1972 and is now based in Berlin. Barba is known for working with the medium of film and its materiality to create cinematic film installations, sculptures and publications, which explore the ambiguous nature of landscape, time and memory. Because of the experiential nature of her installations and their rootedness in the cinematic experience she is an especially important artist for us to have here in Dresden. 

Rosa Barba studied at the The Academy of Media Arts in Cologne and at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam. She has undertaken residencies at IASPIS in Stockholm, the Chinati Foundation in Marfa and Artpace in San Antonio, Texas. She currently hold a Professorship in Fine Arts at the Hochschule für Künste Bremen. Barba has participated in the 52nd and 53rd and 56th Venice Biennale. She has had solo exhibitions in Pirelli Hangar Bicocca in Milan, the Malmö Konsthall in Sweden, The Albertinium in Dresden, the Reina Sofía in Madrid, Tate Modern in London and the MIT List Visual Arts Centre in Massachusetts

Since 2004 Barba has been publishing a series of printed editions, titled Printed Cinema, in conjunction with her film installations. These documents can include research material, essays and unused filmic fragments to explore the themes of each project. The materiality and temporality of film and the spatial configurations of the exhibition, the cinematic experience of the viewer can be dismantled and expressed in a parallel medium.

As part of her contribution to The Cinematic film club Rosa Barba will introduce the film Daughters of the Dust, 1991 produced and directed by Julie Dash.

Lecture + Film Screening
Aktsaal HfBK, Dresden
4.11.20

Tamar Guimarães was born in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, in 1967. She received a BA in Fine Arts from Goldsmiths College, London in 2002 and an MFA from Art Academy Malmö, Sweden in 2007. She also has an MA in art theory awarded in 2009 by the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen. She participated in the Whitney Independent Study Program, New York, as a Studio Fellow from 2007–08.

Guimarães’s body of work in video, sound, and installation uses found and manufactured elements to question dominant histories of modernism. She manipulates appropriated imagery with an intensity that mimics sociological method and questions the staging of history, revisiting neglected figures and events in order to elucidate current social and political issues. She’s also involved in the organization of small, intimate gatherings, collective readings, small-scale public talks and film screenings, invested on the possibilities of creating transient micro-communities and minor public events.

She has exhibited her work at the 55th and again in the 56th Venice Biennale, the 31st São Paulo Biennale, The Guggenheim in New York, LACMA in Los Angeles, the South London Gallery, London, the Palais de Tokyo in Paris and the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, in Berlin as well as the Fundación Jumex Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico City and the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow. Her work can currently be seen at The Renaissance Society in Chicago as part of the exhibition Nine Lives.

After her talk there will be a screening of Patrick Keiller's film "London", 1994.

Lecture + Film Screening
Aktsaal HfBK, Dresden
21.10.20

Declan Clarke was born in Dublin in 1974. He studied at the National College of Art and Design, Dublin, and Chelsea College of Arts, London. He works predominately in the medium of film. In 2002 he was awarded the PS1 MoMA International Residency Program in New York and in 2012 he was short listed to represent Ireland at the Venice Biennale 2013. His work explores political themes and their representation in film and television

For his exhibition, ‘Loneliness in West Germany’, at the Goethe-Institut in Dublin, he examined the activities and legacy of the Movement June 2nd, an anarchist group closely associated with the Red Army Faction, founded in Berlin in 1971.

His film ‘Group Portrait with Explosives’, 2014 connects the early history of Czechoslovakian tractor production with his own family history in rural South Armagh, it’s notorious IRA Brigade, and the invention of the plastic explosive Semtex in the former Czechoslovakia.

He is an unabashed connoisseur of eastern European film culture. From Russian anti-war films to new wave of Romanian cinema. Today he will talk to you about his own work and he will introduce the movie he has chosen The Saragossa Manuscript (1965) by Wojciech Jerzy Has

Lecture + Film Screening
Aktsaal HfBK, Dresden
7.10.20

‘The Cinematic; Film and Memory in Contemporary Art’ was a series of talks that explored immersive experiences in art, sound and film. We set out to explore the influence feature films have on contemporary art and to see how film can be used as a medium to explore memory and the passage of time. We wanted to look at the cinematic as both an architectural and communal space where darkness, immersion and projection were key features and as a psychological state of mind that allowed us to explore memory and imagination. While we were discussing the cinematic it was important to emphasize that, film is a medium and the cinema is a space. And it was this space that guided our thinking throughout this semester.

James Richards was born in Cardiff and studied Fine Art at Chelsea School of Art and Design, London but now lives and works in Berlin. In 2012 he received the Derek Jarman Award and in 2014/15 the ars viva award. In 2013 James was a guest of the Berlin artist program / DAAD. In 2014 he was nominated for the Turner Prize and in 2017 he represented Wales at the 57th Venice Biennale. Richards works with moving image, installation and sound. He works by mixing disparate material compiled from feature films, YouTube clips, his own footage and other moving imagery sourced online. Richard's video collages refuse conventional patterns of narritive or linearity and rely on the emotional pull of the suggestive power that unfolds in the combination of images, music and language. 

James Richards will introduce his own work and afterwards the movie he has chosen Todd Haynes’ Safe (1995)

Lecture
Aktsaal HfBK, Dresden
7.10.20

Ariane Beyn grew up in Hamburg and studied art history in Munich and Berlin. From 2006 2007 she was guest curator at the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts in San Francisco. In 2008 she was the artistic Director of the first Berlin art fair ABC (art berlin contemporary). From 2008 until 2018 Beyn was head of the visual arts department at the DAAD and directror of the daadgalerie in Berlin. Since the DAAD she has returned to her role as an independent curator and has just opened her most recent exhibition Readings From Below at the Times Art Centre in Berlin during the Berlin Art Week.

The main reason we have invited Ariane Beyn to the school is because in 2012 the daad galerie in Berlin hosted the "Agency for Unrealized Projects" (AUP) a project by e flux and The Serpentine Gallery in London. The "Agency for Unrealized Projects" grew out of the publication "Unrealised Projects 107 Unbuilt Roads" by Hans Ulrich Obrist and Guy Tortosa which was the model for our previous semester.

Ariane will talk to you about her work and then to look at some of your projects.