Master’s program application deadline: March 15, 2018
The Australian poet Romaine Moreton writes, “I wish now I had learned better the tongue of the streets.” Imagine if studying art were to learn the tongue of the streets, of the world. You should forget that you graduate and instead concentrate on the immense quality of time imparted to you to find your own tongue.
It is difficult to describe in a few words what characterizes our program, but I would say it is an uncommon speculative interest in linking art and artists with some of the crucial questions of our future social development: What is nature? How is gender possible? What does it all have to do with art, with experience? Does it relate in any way to technology? These questions are at the core of our seminars and events, which bring together our team of teachers and a very large range of international artists and experts from a variety of disciplines. The main goal is to support your practice—the many hours you spend in your studio—by engaging you in debates and presentations that unfold in different languages and forms of production and presentation. Mentoring constitutes the character of the program, which includes not only assistance from our technical team in workshops, but also the thoughtfulness of a very attentive group of artists towards your concerns and doubts and trials.
To study art is to find the elements that define your practice, and at the same time to understand the world in which this practice takes place. Take the notion of “climate change,” for example: the media and the sociopolitical discourses continuously use “climate change” as if the effect of human action on Earth could be equivalent to “cultural change,” some sort of transformation presented as a package, as a kind of denial, a reaction to the radical trauma of our new reality. To understand the potential of art and artists to help our societies adjust to and comprehend emotionally and cognitively the many realities that constitute “today” and influence the times to come is at the core of the Institute’s two-year program. Together with different foundations and partnerships we develop summer schools, residencies, and projects that add to the seminars and enhance each individual practice in a context of mutual exchange.
The Institute only accepts twenty students per year. The program possesses a warm and immediate quality that allows each student to discuss their choices and develop constant conversation with artists and professionals about their work, their views, their problems. The facilities on campus are outstanding, and include several large workshops open to students at all times to experiment with all media and materials, as well as smaller digital and woodworking ateliers that can be used more casually. The program is not divided by media, but instead stresses your media interest while, at the same time, encouraging you to discover other areas that may help you to evolve further. We also have a modest but beautiful exhibition space, der TANK, where new commissions are produced and presented, and which students can request to exhibit their own work.
The context of the Campus of the Arts where the Institute is located is also interesting: from the Broadcast and Performance studios, video editing rooms, and media library centrally located at the tower of the Academy, to the vicinity with the House of Electronic Arts (HeK) and Atelier Mondial (a residency and studio program) and the cultural broadcast station Radio X, it all reinforces the Institute as a site for art production. And the same can be said about Basel, a city with a large number of artist-run spaces and art institutions centered around contemporary art, and with a unique way of activating public space, the political, and the social. But we are also attentive to the problems of different art communities and contexts that are less privileged, to the radical decrease of possibilities and economic aid for artists, and to the hope of being a voice that declares the incredible importance of caring for culture.
More information about the master’s program, the admission procedure and the Art Institute available on www.institut-kunst.ch/master.
Contact: T +41 61 228 40 77 / info.kunst.hgk [at] fhnw.ch
