Academy. Learning from Art
September 15 – November 26, 2006
Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst
Antwerpen, Belgium Opening:
September 14, 2006, 9 p.m. in Antwerp
Academy. Learning from the Museum
September 16 November 26, 2006
Van Abbemuseum
in Eindhoven, Netherlands
Opening:
September 15, 2006, 7 p.m. in Eindhoven
Symposium: Learning and Teaching
September 14, 2006, 2 6 p.m.
MuHKA Media Antwerp:
Mary Kelly, Dieter Lesage, Irit Rogoff et al.
September 15, 2006, 3 7 p.m.
Van Abbemuseum Eindhoven:
Rosi Braidotti, Sarat Maharaj,
Jan Verwoert et al.
Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst Antwerpen
Leuvenstraat 32
2000 Antwerp, Belgium
Phone: 32 32 60 99 99
Fax: 32 32 16 24 86
info@muhka.be
www.muhka.be
Van Abbemuseum
Bilderdijklaan 10
5611 NH Eindhoven, The Netherlands
Phone: 31 40 238 1000
Fax: 31 40 246 0680
info@vanabbemuseum.nl
www.vanabbemuseum.nl
Academy is an initiative of Siemens Arts Program in cooperation with the Department of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths College in London, Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst Antwerpen, and Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven.
Curators Bart de Baere and Dieter Roelstrate (Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst Antwerpen), Charles Esche and Kerstin Niemann (Van Abbemuseum Eindhoven), Irit Rogoff (Goldsmiths College), and Angelika Nollert (Siemens Arts Program)
Academy. Learning from Art
How do we expand our notions of teaching and learning beyond the frames assigned by formal education? With this question the focus shifts from art academies as institutions per se, to perceiving them as extended aspirational drives. With that it is possible to distinguish between teaching geared to a clear output and teaching that focuses on possibilities for an enabling interaction between subjectivities and social organisms. The aim is to understand the core concepts by which this type of learning occurs: exchange, reflection, speculation, and fallibility.
The Antwerp exhibition presents artists projects that envisage mediation between artistic practices, which are conceptualised as modes of learning how to engage with the world. The projects foreground is the communicative quality of artistic gestures which act out the possibilities of academy as learning, analysing, and communicating.
Additionally, this project wishes to speculate on the possible emergence of the concept of the civic in order to open up a much broader sphere of self-organisation among cultural impulses and phenomena. Our understanding of the civic presents it as the location of a politics of singularity. The civic can become a forum in which numerous initiatives, both individual and collective, may come together beyond the representation of identity-based group interests.
The exhibition hopes to engage with artists as persons with a civic attitude, with an interest in a pedagogy of action, with artists as both involved persons and agents of involvement.
Artists Uli Aigner; Herman Asselberghs, Dieter Lesage & Ina Wudtke; Dockx & Mast; Jimmie Durham; Gelitin; Johanna Kandl; Mary Kelly; Modulator; Paulina Olowska & Lucy McKenzie; Lia Perjovschi; Pistoletto; Raqs Media Collective; Apolonija Sustersic; Joëlle Tuerlinckx; et al.
Academy. Learning from the Museum
The Van Abbemuseum project is regarded as an ongoing process. It aims to ask what it may be possible to learn from the museum beyond what the museum sets up to offer. By producing an alternative set of principles for teaching and learning, and by viewing the museum as a cumulative archive of experiences and dynamics that expand beyond the notion of a collection of objects. While traditionally the museum sets up an idealized notion of what or how one should learn, “Learning from the Museum” wishes to address several questions. These include: What does the museum make possible beyond itself? How can the museum become a series of exchanges and responses, and how can it move beyond acting as a vehicle of established values?
Groups of activists, theorists, artists, students, archivists, librarians, and philosophers have been invited to the museum to help answer these questions. They will work with the collection, archives and other resources, including the staff. Instead of studying the museum, the conditions are being set up for the museum to produce some new models of knowledge and to engage visitors in new ways of thinking about the experience of coming into the museum. Academy is therefore a pilot project for further investigations of the new possibilities for education and knowledge exchange that the Van Abbemuseum will develop in the future. Academy. Learning from the Museum also serves as a part of a long-term program funded by the Mondriaan Foundation.
Contributors Irit Rogoff & Deepa Naik; Anselm Franke, John Palmesino & Eyal Weizman; Jan Gerber, Susanna Lang, Sebastian Luetgert & Florian Schneider; Liam Gillick & Edgar Schmitz; Janna Graham, Valeria Graziano & Susan Kelly; Jean-Paul Martinon & Rob Stone; Mårten Spångberg & Bojana Cvejic;, et al.
Publication The publication on the series Academy will appear in September 2006.
Further information and Press contact:
Siemens Arts Program
Annika Schoemann
Phone: 49 / 89 / 6 36 33 50 8
annika.schoemann@siemens.com
