Call for applications: Artists’ Program 2019–20

The Artists’ Program is a space for artists, critics, and curators interested in participating in an intense experience of formation, discussion, and production in a university context. For a year and a half, the 25 selected participants will take part in a series of workshops, seminars, lectures, and visits by local and international professors. They will be furnished with a shared studio to gather and work on group and individual projects. Participants in the Program must commit to attending classes three afternoons a week and to engaging in collaborative work.

The eleventh edition of the program, to be held in 2019, opens a new cycle. The Art Department’s new director, Carlos Huffmann, will bring changes to the Program’s academic and organizational structure.

First, the call for applications will be launched earlier than usual, in the month of November, and the selection announced in December 2018. The aim of this change is to give selected applicants—especially those from other states in Argentina and international students—more time to organize their affairs.

Second, the academic proposal will revolve around the specific intensity a work of art produces. This implies a focus on the unique material of the artwork and on how it is conceptualized and articulated in the physical and social space.

The program will be structured around the annual group critique coordinated by Valentina Liernur. The Critique is a space for in-depth discussion of the proposals of the participating curators, critics, and artists.

During the first part of the year, Carlos Huffmann will teach the Extraña Materia seminar. It will examine the intersection between material/visual language and discursive/verbal language. The tension between them as the engine that produces the artistic experience will be examined in assigned readings, hands-on exercises with simple materials, and visits to exhibitions.

Throughout the year, a series of technical/authored workshops will be offered to participants in the Program and to a limited number of individuals from the general public. The workshops will focus on a specific technique, or aspect of a technique, related to artistic practice, such as painting, archival research, autobiographical narrative, performance, and others. They explore how an artwork’s material characteristics and conditions of production act on its discourse. Alejandro Tantanian, Guillermo Ueno and Alan Courtis, Max Gomez Canle, and Karina Peisajovich will direct these workshops.

During the second part of the year, three elective theoretical seminars, taught by Nancy Rojas, Graciela Speranza, and Santiago García Navarro, will be offered to Program participants and the general public.

Over the course of the year, a series of tutorial sessions will be held with Diego Bianchi. In them, interested participants can converse about their work and other topics related to artistic practice.

The selected critics and curators will participate in the Program alongside the artists, fostering an ecosystem of material and discursive production that includes all of the primary players in contemporary art, an indisputably collective phenomena. Javier Villa will be the supervising tutor for the group of critics and curators, organizing a series of hands-on exercises and excursions. The curators and critics will also participate in an intensive curatorial seminar given by Peruvian curator-in-residence Miguel Lopéz, who lives in Costa Rica.

Critics and curators in the program as well as members of the general public can participate in a series of Curatorial Units with classes on the history of exhibitions, theoretical debates, a legal seminar, and other pertinent topics.

The eleventh edition of the Artists’ Program will take place from March to December, 2019, and from March to June, 2020. The final semester will focus on working with a tutor on the Final Project to be carried out in June 2020.

The selection committee is composed of Valentina Liernur, Nancy Rojas, Marcelo Pombo, and Carlos Huffmann.

For further information or to dowload the application form see our website or contact us at arte [​at​] utdt.edu.