Collabarts.org

Collabarts.org was established in December 2005 as a resource and platform for artists, theorists and art students setting out to offer a source of information, dissemination and discussion about collaborative art practice. The site hosts a number of commissioned essays and interviews including some important published and as yet unpublished essays on collaboration that have been generously contributed to the site by their writers. There are also a large number of links to relevant articles and artists’ websites. In addition the timeline for collaborative art practice sets out to place artistic collaboration in a historical perspective in relation to cultural and political events.

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Radical Education Collective

In 2006, a project known as Radical Education was initiated. The basic idea was to find ways of “translating” radical pedagogy into the sphere of artistic production, with education being conceived not merely as a model but also as a field of political participation. The aim of Radical Education, then, was to create a unique “progressive” micro-political space within the gallery ifself, a kind of critical antipodes to both the conservative and neoliberal tendencies that predominate in the art system. Right from the start, Radical Education was understood in the sense of “heterogeneous spaces”, in which art would be but one field of activity among others. For this reason, the project was all the more critical toward art’s extended domains, e.g. socially engaged art, relational art and participatory art – forms of art-making that often include in their projects, in an uncritical way, transversal practices, practices of self-organization and practices in which it is not clear where art ends and politics begins; as a result, such practices become normalized. Radical Education, then, aimed not only at interpretations of various forms of art/activism, but in fact at “the production of space”, basing itself on the principles of transversality, which is not some predetermined form but is rather constituted through events, different kinds of alliances, crossings and collective organizing.

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Experimental pedagogy and art practice in Mexico

By Sofía Olascoaga
Published February 1, 2010

This DISPATCH addresses the case of a growing scene at the intersection of education, pedagogy and art in Mexico.

At this particular time there seems to be a collective, urgent demand for alternative strategies that provide new relationships of knowledge production and spaces for dialogue and encounter.

In recent years, artist-led, self-organized, institutional and private educational initiatives in the contemporary art scene have opened up an active debate on the intersections of education and art. A number of artist-instigated educational projects have emerged, many of which are independently staged, while others are institutionally framed, and some privately funded.

Within the contemporary art circuit, through many differences regarding perspectives, positions and objectives, universities, museums, and independent spaces in Mexico openly address questions and activate speculation on the relationship between education and art. As yet, there is no consensus on the concepts (and specific uses) of education and pedagogy, but proposals from artists and scholars test various ideas and approaches. Keep Reading…

MALMÖ FREE UNIVERSITY For WOMEN

Malmoe Free University for Women, MFK, is an ongoing participatory art project and a feminist organization for knowledge production. We aim to raise and discuss contemporary political issues by bringing together experience and knowledge from various fields. Through experimental, radical pedagogical methods we hope to bridge theory and practice and challenge dominating norms and power structures. Our work has taken the form of readinggoups, workshops, lectures and screenings. MFK was started in 2006 with Malmoe but is now mobile. It’s run by artists Lisa Nyberg, Johanna Gustavsson and more or less temporary collaborators from various backgrounds.

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The Community Museum Project

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A museum needs not be an intimidating and elitist institution. The Community Museum Project believes that a museum can be a means to represent everyday living and values. Through the collection and interpretation of artifacts and visual evidence, indigenous creativity, visual culture and public culture can be explored.
The Community Museum Project focuses not on establishing conventional “musum” hardware but carrying out flexible exhibition and public programs, often within specific community settings.

Through this process the Community Museum Project aims to nurture a platform to articulate personal experiences and under-represented histories. It can also be an occasion to facilitate the participation of the public and cross-disciplinary collaboration. To us, the word “Community”has three connotations: subject matter, settings and creative public interface.
Community Museum Project was founded in 2002 in Hong Kong by Howard Chan (art curator), Siu King-chung (design educator), Tse Pak-chai and Phoebe Wong (cultural researchers).

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Mike Kelley “Educational Complex”

“To be a teacher is my greatest work of art.”
Joseph Beuys

Anthony Vidler on Mike Kelley’s Educational Complex
(Mike Kelley, Phaidon Press, 1999)

On the surface, Mike Kelley’s recent ‘architectural models’ evoking his memory of the spaces in which he lived and worked since childhood in the project Educational Complex (1995), signal a natural extension of this long tradition of mutual spatial influence between art and architecture. As artworks they seem to comment on the realm of architecture, even taking on the shape of architectural projects, produced and presented in the form of meticulously drawn and measured models. They might even be seen as dealing directly with architectural issues, seemingly concerned, for example, with the nature of housing or of institutions. This is, of course, hardly a new phenomenon in the contemporary art world; Minimalism, installation art, performance art, Land Art, have all engaged spatial concerns both metaphorically and literally. Kelley’s recent work might then be construed as a simple continuation and elaboration of these preoccupations, expecially as Kelley himself, from the 1980s on, was an active performance artist, and distributed many of his installations within highly elaborated spatial settings.

But the peculiar quality that marks these new works as different, both in characteristic and kind from earlier ’sculptural’ projects is that, in a self-conscious way, they claim, and take on the status of architecture. Which is not to say that they have fully realized themselves as works of architecture; indeed, they stop short precisely in that momentary ambiguity between the possible and the impossible, retain their critical status and their place in art…keep reading

The Department of Artists’ Theories and Art in Practice

(Leiden University Academy of Creative and Performing Arts and the Royal Academy of Arts (KABK) in The Hague)
The objective of the research group is to conduct research on the interaction between theory and practice in the artistic process, and the ‘how’ and ‘what’ of artistic research. The research group is composed of visual artists and theorists from various disciplines. Some teach at the Royal Academy of Art (KABK) and some are external specialists. The research group is open to all Academy staff who want to conduct research in this field. Contributions from external experts serve to stimulate reflection and to bolster cooperation with those working in the field. More Info

Uqbar Foundation

A Brief Account of Two Artist-Run Spaces

By Michele Faguet – There is a contradiction implicit in the idea of the alternative or artist-run space as a phenomenon specific to developed countries or contexts in which a highly organized, sophisticated cultural infrastructure is clearly not lacking. One might argue that the very modus operandi of this kind of space—rejection or critique of both the institutional structure and the art market with their respective (often overlapping) processes of legitimation, a spontaneous manner of operating based on immediate material conditions along with a desire to adapt to (and make the most of) limited resources, and perhaps most importantly the mapping out of a self-defined position or space of marginality (in the positive sense of the term)—would find its natural habitat in a “marginal” context characterized by the presence of dysfunctional institutions and the absence of a real art market. In other words, what is an alternative way of working in one context might be a necessary manner of operating in another. Yet, the history of alternative spaces in Latin America is a very short one and difficult to research because it is a history that is fragmented, largely undocumented, and too often forgotten as many of these initiatives have fallen victim to a selective amnesia resulting from territorial alliances and interests typical to cultural contexts in which there are so few opportunities. This text treats two specific cases from the 1990s: La Panadería, an artist-run space in Mexico that is often looked to as the model for alternative spaces in Latin America, and Galería Chilena, a lesser known artist-run, nomadic, commercial gallery that moved around Santiago over the course of several years, organizing exhibitions in borrowed spaces. Read More

Fillip Magazine

Journal for Artistic Research

The planned Journal for Artistic Research (JAR) is an international, online, Open Access and double blind peer-reviewed journal for the identification, publication and dissemination of artistic research and its methodology. The journal’s most innovative feature is the Research Catalogue (RC), which is a searchable, documentary database of artistic research work and its exposition. The RC is an inclusive, open-ended, bottom-up research tool that supports the journal’s academic contributions.

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Cultural Negotiations (Transductores)

Cultural Negotiations: Conferences videos up now.

During the 2, 3, 4 of December the international seminar “Cultural Negotiations. Articulations of collective pedagogies and spatial politics” took place at Granada organized by UNIAarteypensamiento. In the section “archivo de recursos” (resources centre) you can watch the uploaded videos of the evening sessions.

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