Seminar led by Anselm Franke

SEMINAR DAY 1
Friday, January 31
10AM- 2PM

SEMINAR DAY 2
Saturday, February 1
10AM-2PM

PUBLIC LECTURE
Saturday, February 1
5PM-7PM
(free and open to the public)

@ BAP Outpost
2316 Chino Roces Ave., Ext.
The Alley at Karrivin Plaza
Makati

Resource text:

Curatorial Delirium

Undercutting Divisions

SEMINAR:

Does modern/contemporary art have a cosmology? Or is the “modern” in modernism defined by its negative and alienated relation to cosmological functions? Using the exhibitions “Mimetism” (2008) and “Animism” (2010-14) as a backdrop, the seminar will focus on the relation of modern and contemporary art to other forms collective expression, to the imaginative faculties, to poeisis and the metabolisms of life-work. The seminar seeks to critically engage with the genealogy of modern/contemporary art by looking at practices and domains that in the  process of modernization have been marked as pre- or non-modern. We will trace the process by which crafts, folklore, ritual and myth where secluded from the process in which modern art emerged as a discipline, and as a value-form. We will discuss the social isolation of art in relation to the problem that cosmology has become in modern and capitalist societies. The seminar then seeks to discuss the political use of the topoi of cosmological regeneration in times of both indigenous self-assertion and resurgent fascist myths. 

Open to all levels and backgrounds. Applicants with curatorial practice or art history and museum studies are strongly encouraged to apply. Apply for the seminar at bit.ly/frankebap

RSVP for the talk at bit.ly/franketalk

BAP TALK: Undercutting Divisions

Exhibitions are threshold spaces, where meaning is inscribed and simultaneously unsettled. Together with numerous collaborators, Anselm Franke has developed long-term research projects, where the liminality of the exhibition as a medium becomes a programmatic tool to investigate and challenge the “modern” role and institutional place of art. In this lecture, he will begin with the European Biennale Manifesta, whose 2008 edition was in parts devoted to tracing a “colonial history of the the soul”, in reference to the Council of Trent in the mid 16th century, where the Catholic Church devised the counter-reformation and its colonial policy. He will speak of various discursive and disciplinary practices that revolve around setting apart interiority and exteriority, which develops into a foundational nexus of a colonial history of the soul and subsequently informs conceptions of the human subject, the psyche and the science of communication and media. Against the backdrop of more recent exhibitions such as “Neolithic Childhood. Art in a False Present ca. 1930”, Anselm Franke will use historical references to the horizon of a “primordial mediality” that emerged at the nexus modernist "primitivism” and the foundational crisis in the sciences in the early 20th, in order to undercut the disciplinary divisions that have come to set apart the domains of anthropology, psychology, media theory and art. 

Anselm Franke’s ESKWELA programme is supported by Goethe-Institut Philippinen.