Exhausted Academies

Workshop Schedule
10am - 1pm, August 25, 26, 27, 28

Our current ‘neo-liberal’ society presents itself as an achievement-oriented world characterized by an abundance of positivity that is expressed in ubiquitous over-production, over-performance, and over-communication. In response to that, New modes of concentration and academy formats will be discussed and explored through screenings of contemporary artists during the workshop.

Day 1. Start: publication Agonistic Academies
Day 2. Exploring the Concept of Exhaustion
Day 3. Screening and discussing of for the academy discussion topical and relevant Art works/Projects
Day 4. Concluding workshop: (Starting from the observation of Nietzsche) Contemplative Attention

Exhausted Academies Screening
In Henk Slager's workshop Exhausted Academies, six works dealing with Art Education and Art Academy were presented and discussed. These works were shown in the context of fatigue and overabundance, art education within the academy and art education outside the institutional boundaries. Each work was discussed in connection to one another as a basis for the discussion on art education in Korea and alternative modes of education that requires contemplative attention and concentration.

Extended Screening: Daily from 10-13 at Nam-Seoul Living Arts Museum

Isabella Gresser, Fatique Society, 2015. 

Collaboration with philosopher Byung Chul Han. 60 minutes
Philosospher Byung Chul Han presents the current, globalized world as a fatigue society characterized by shallow form of attention that emerges from overproduction, overperformance and overcommunication. He stresses that retraining intense and contemplative attention is urgently needed through the experience of ‘in-between time.

Hito Steyerl, How Not to Be Seen, 2013. 15 minutes
Hito Steyerl focuses on the consequence of such societal conditions mentioned in Fatigue Society for image production: high speed, image circulation, and the ongoing urge for transparency and visibility. She asks adequate strategies of art(education) for this strong focus on visibility which implies valuable issues - such as verticalistic perspectives.

Tiong Ang, As the Academy Turns, 2013. 25 minutes 
Tiong Ang brings together two diverging poles; one is autonomous artistic research and production as outcomes of art education and the other is art academy “remodeled” as a product of the entertainment industry serving a mainstream, neo-liberal, consumerist audience.

Ane Hjort Guttu, Time Passes, 2015. 45 minutes
Fine art student Damla starts a performative art project that consists in begging on the street alongside the Rom? woman Bianca. Soon the graduation project turns into a political and existential crisis for the student, who must handle criticism from her classmates, teacher as well as from Bianca.

Rene Francisco, 4th Pragmatics, 2012-2014. 5 minutes
Rene Francisco’s Pedagogia Pragmatica workshops take place outside the art academy on unexpected locations in Havana’s urban landscape such as a deserted home or a posh swimming pool. The workshops deal with artistic group processes, the awareness of a community of action, reinterpreting the relations between doing, seeing and saying.

Inci Eviner, Co-action Device, 2012-2014. 54 minutes
Inci Eviner proposes a performative way of working together translating a clearly defined, institutional space in an experimental working-stage ignoring didactic and declarative parameters. Thus a collaborative practice emerges, hovering in the interstitial space of artistic research and artistic production, causing it to extract from the hierarchic and descriptive restrictions of a coercing, curricular structure.