Context-Responsive Art Practice
Slicing Lab - a temporal journey through space.
“A cut and a slice is there any question when a cut and a slice are just the same.
A cut and a slice has no particular exchange it has such a strange exception to all that which is different.
A cut and an occasion, a slice and a substitute a single hurry and a circumstance that shows that, all this is so reasonable when everything is clear.”
—Gertrude Stein, What Happened: A Play (1922)
The space is a metaphysical arena of continually intermittent appearances and disappearances. Anselm Kiefer has said that no empty place is really empty: everywhere is filled up, “almost claustrophobically” with all the traces of the past. The past is always there in the present. I am proposing to work with these traces or “ghosts” as raw material.
Understanding the world in a sculptural way is for me to constantly undo what comes as a frozen stable construct. In this workshop, we will be training the eye and senses to see beyond the surface. By undoing and delayering what surrounds us by a clean an informed incision. Introducing a material and conceptual approach to the problem of site. We will move across historical figures and disciplines that also consider the fabric of space-time as material to work with. While doing so slicing clinically through the material presence of the past.
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About Leyla Cardenas:
Cardenas received her BFA from Los Andes University in Bogotá, Colombia and her MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). She was recently part of the Cuenca Biennial in Ecuador (2018). Her work Excisión was part of the show Home, so different, so appealing at the Museum of the Los Angeles County (LACMA) as part of the Getty’s Pacific Standard Time project: LA / LA and in the Museum of Fine Arts of Houston (MFAH) (2017). In addition, her work has been shown at Palais de Tokyo, Paris, Galería Max Estrella, Madrid, Casas Riegner Gallery-Bogotá, Q21Museums Quarti-er-Wien,Museo de Arte de Zapopán-México, CAM-Raleigh, Institute of Contemporary Art-San Jose (SJICA), Galería Josée Bienvenu-NY, Museo de Arte Moderno-Medellín, Maison de l ́Amérique Latine-Paris, Apexart-New York, and Banco de la República Bogotá, among others.
Seminar led by
Köken Ergun
This seminar will navigate through Ergun's filmmaking practice, unearthing representations of communities that are not known to a greater public and the importance of ritual in such groups. Ergun’s preoccupations are based on forms of contemporary rituals and celebrations, religious or secular, through events such as national holidays, beauty contests, world fairs, and the Olympics. The seminar is addressed to artists and filmmakers inclined toward the importance and role of archives, engagement in artistic research, and collaboration with ethnographers, historians, and sociologists to constitute the current political situations.
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Binibining Promised Land (2010)
Full movie: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MijYOzVr05Q
About Koken Ergun:
Ergun studied acting at the Istanbul University and completed his postgraduate diploma degree in Ancient Greek Literature at King’s College London, followed by an MA degree on Art History at the Bilgi University.
After working with American theatre director Robert Wilson, Ergun became more involved with video and film. His multi-channel video installations have been exhibited internationally at institutions including Palais de Tokyo, Stedelijk Museum Bureau Amsterdam, KIASMA, Digital ArtLab Tel Aviv, Casino Luxembourg, Protocinema, Wilhelm Hack Museum, SALT and Kunsthalle Winterthur. His film works have received several awards at film festivals including the “Tiger Award for Short Film” at the 2007 Rotterdam Film Festival and the “Special Mention Prize” at the 2013 Berlinale. His works are included in public collections such as the Centre Pompidou, the Greek National Museum of Contemporary Art and Kadist Foundation.
Seminar led by
Raqs Media Collective
Memory and Magma: Documents in Eruption
The Philippine Archipelago is one of the most active sites of volcanic activity. In this workshop, Raqs will take the metaphor of volcanic activity to talk about what happens when art practice enters the domain of memory and reflection.
Memory and magma work subterraneously; one never knows what will trigger their sudden appearance. Raqs Media Collective's work with documents leads them to discover volatile memories, and to ask what a document is or can be. Sometimes these documents are photographs, at other times they are letters, diary entries, or personal effects. But artistic work with the document can expand its definition to include any object or trace that indexes a reality, affect, thought or sensation. Even the barely legible humming of a song in the voice of a prisoner of war can become a document pointing to a hesitation about the artificial binaries of defeat and victory.
History and memory, like unstable tectonic plates, collide. Sometimes these collisions cause eruptions. These eruptions may be memories of difficult circumstances and of living within and with unstable social and cultural conditions, or they may simply index the volatile fluctuations that mark everyday life. How can one undertake a seismological investigation of memory? How can one look into the caldera of the volcano of our time and still keep one's feet on the ground?
Raqs Media Collective's workshop will examine these questions with a view to making artists, curators and all those interested in contemporary art take the temperature of our explosive time.
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About Raqs Media Collective:
Raqs Media Collective (Monica Narula, Jeebesh Bagchi & Shuddhabrata Sengupta) follows its self-declared imperative of “kinetic contemplation” to produce a trajectory that is restless in its forms and methods, yet concise with the infra procedures that it invents. The collective makes contemporary art, edits books, curates exhibitions, and stages situations. It has collaborated with architects, computer programmers, writers, curators, and theatre directors, and has made films. It co-founded Sarai—the inter-disciplinary and incubatory space at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi—in 2001, where it initiated processes that have left deep impact on contemporary culture in India.