Call for applications: Work.Master—Contemporary Artistic Practices

Work.Master, HEAD – Geneva’s Master’s programme devoted to contemporary artistic practices, is a network that all of us—students, guest artists, professors—are working on expanding because we feel called to invent multiple and complex strategies and create relevant visions with regard to art in the world of tomorrow. We believe our programme to be an important incubator for emergent strategies.

Personalities such as Marie Angeletti, Mathieu Copeland, Fabrice Gygi, Anthea Hamilton, Tobias Madison, Paulina Olowska, Mai-Thu Perret, Lili Reynaud-Dewar, and Michael Stevenson, to name just a few, have initiated very diverse ventures. Each of these real-world projects on a 1:1 scale has been primarily shaped by the work of the students as well as by these artists’ specific modes of production and ways of conceptualising ideas—by their spirit and their wit.

Work.Master takes the risk of proposing a heterogeneous program with open perspectives on exchange and sharing, embracing a variety of unpredictable results. Rather than offering a formatted curriculum, Work.Master seeks to adapt to the inclinations of each personality it hosts, to the inventiveness of each methodology it helps build, and to the non-orthodox, emancipated propositions of its students. For it is Work.Master’s ambition to help students develop highly personal and singular—if not eccentric—conceptions of what it means to produce art today.

Laboratory-like situations are created to help craft steady relationships between guests or faculty members and students, that is, not just temporary encounters but relationships that will last for the duration of the two-year programme and beyond. The idea is to be able to wander and ponder, take walks and trips, extend conversations beyond their reasonable length, produce books, exhibitions, and other forms of creative expression in formats liable to challenge the conditions in which art is produced and received, get involved in Geneva’s art scene and project one’s work both locally and internationally.

We consider theory to be a multi-voice form of practice—a participatory field, open not only to art theory and art history but interconnecting art with poetry, live arts, sound, and film and questioning social and political issues or cultural narratives.

The seminars are led by renowned theoreticians and historians such as Tiphanie Blanc, Fulvia Carnevale, Yann Chateigné, Catherine Chevalier, Jill Gasparina, Christophe Kihm, Genveviève Loup, Raimundas Malašauskas, Valérie Mavridorakis and David Zerbib. They enrich and embody an educational philosophy that aims to place the students’ practices at the centre of the curriculum and shape the bilingual program according to these practices.

In addition to promoting discursive formats and connections, Work.Master also conceives its pedagogical role as that of a producer, in collaboration with major institutions, independent spaces and selected individuals. Past and recent projects include, among others: Pavilionesque, a theatre and magazine project with Paulina Olowska; Oracles, a book on artist’s calling cards with Pierre Leguillon and Barbara Fedier; Beyond the Land of Minimal Possession, a short movie with Lili Reynaud Dewar in Marfa and San Antonio, Texas; Science fiction institutionnelle, with Jill Gasparina at Le Confort Moderne in Poitiers; Provisoire et Définitif with Dan Solbach at LiveInYourHead in Geneva; LapTopRadio with Laurent Schmid at the Bar Project in Barcelona; Temenos (Revisited) with Andreas Dobler at LiveInYourHead in Geneva; a chat bot project for the Nuit Blanche in Paris with Charlotte Laubard; performances and a video essay Radical Chic Academy with Verena Dengler; and the conception and realisation of an exhibition on an archive and a collection with Tiphanie Blanc at the CNEAI in Paris. Una Szeeman and Bodhan Stehlik, Isabelle Cornaro, Angela Marzullo, Aurélie Petrel and others are also developing projects in common.

For more information, please visit HEAD – Geneva’s website and Work.Master’s blog.