Image: Design by Ida Elisabeth Jensen
OPEN CALL: The Artistic & Curatorial Thing
28 – 31 August
Deadline 15 July 2018
SixtyEight Art Institute is welcoming artists, art writers, curators, and art organisers to join us for our annual free intensive summer programme. Using the concept of a ‘thing’, an old Nordic concept for a meeting place, an assembly of the community, or what can be defined as the precursor of the modern term ‘parliament’, SixtyEight Art Institute is inviting you to join us for a series of workshops, evening talks, and conversations, led by some of the most interesting artistic and intellectual profiles in the Nordic region. The programme is modelled as a series of workshops and lectures, which will focus on the various dimensions behind exhibition-making and artistic and curatorial research methodologies.
Thematic frame: Art Production in the New Creative Economy
This year’s summer school will operate under the thematic framework of ‘Art Production in the New Creative Economy’ as a way to open up questions and debates about new challenges in independent artistic and curatorial practices. The aim of the programme is to reflect on how artistic and curatorial methodologies continue to be collaborative, co-creative, critical, and experimental within the ever-expanding parameters of cultural production. The workshops, talks, and conversations will revolve around fundamental questions about production in the field of contemporary art, such as the production of knowledge, of space, of histories, and of artistic and curatorial discourses. If exhibition-making and other means of making art public are increasingly perceived, used, and disseminated as a kind of social capital – a resource in the creative economy – how do artists, writers, and curators create or maintain independent and critical discourses in an expanding cultural sphere, which increasingly seeks to promote and develop spectacle, performativity, or entertainment?
How can artistic and curatorial practice both reduce the effects of neoliberal cultural policies and at the same time secure and actively produce independent artistic production? Does artistic and curatorial practice conform to expectations from our current system of galleries, art markets and government grants or can it actively change them? How can artistic development persuasively balance the importance of artists’ practices, artworks, and critical ideas in times when these often take second place to mediation, value creation, and social capital? Can art practitioners and curators find new positions and critical methodologies in the current neoliberal political climate and a general popular celebration of contemporary art, the artist, and the curator? SixtyEight Art Institutes invites artists, art writers, curators, cultural producers, speakers, and theorist to collectively reflect upon how to create a future for independent artistic and curatorial research and knowledge production.
The Artistic & Curatorial Thing consists of two strands: closed workshops for ten selected participants and an evening programme of lectures that are open to the general public. The workshops are designed exclusively for participants to strengthen their understanding of curatorial mechanisms and research positions via a combined practical and theoretical approach. The workshops are closed and intimate sessions that seek to ask, at a fundamental level, how independent artistic and curatorial practice sustain, develop, and strengthen within the current challenges and change in the sphere of art production. The evening lectures are open to the public and examine the thematic frame through subquestions and themes presented as public talks, conversations and Q&A.
SixtyEight Art Institute invites artists, art writers, art historians, curators, cultural producers, and students to apply. The full programme will be announced at www.sixtyeight.dk. Last year’s speakers and workshop leaders included curator, writer, and researcher Simon Sheikh, professor Sarat Maharaj, editor of The Nordic Journal of Aesthetics and associate professor at Aarhus University Jacob Lund, curator at Savvy Contemporary Antonia Alampi, curator at BAK – Utrecht Matteo Lucchetti, writer at Kunstkritikk Maria Bordorff, and artist and organiser of Copenhagen Free University and now Hospital Prison Archive Jacob Jacobsen, among others.
To apply for full participation, including both workshops and evening lectures, please send the following to info@nullsixtyeight.dk, att: The Artistic and Curatorial Thing:
– A written statement about why you would benefit from participating in the programme (max 2000 characters, excluding spaces).
– Your CV (including nationality, age, and contact information)
DEADLINE: 15 July 2018.
The learning programme is dedicated to Nordic based candidates and funded by Nordic Culture Point. SixtyEight Art Institute cannot cover travel cost or accommodation, but provides a free learning programme for selected participants.
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SixtyEight Art Institute is an artistic/curatorial research organization that aims to uncover, develop, and further exchanges between artists and curators and their creative labour. The Artistic & Curatorial Thing is SixtyEight Art Institute’s new educational arm, which aims to organize and develop public learning formats within the local context of Copenhagen. The program is kindly supported by Nordic Culture Point. SixtyEight Art Institute’s exhibition program kindly supported by Billedkunstudvalg Københavns Kommune, The Danish Arts Foundation and Bikuben Foundation.