Fellowship Program for Art and Theory 2017/18

 

Dear Friends of Künstlerhaus Büchsenhausen,

 

A new fellowship year starts in Künstlerhaus Büchsenhausen at the beginning of October. In 2017/18, the Fellowship Program for Art and Theory focuses on works that deal with loss of rationality and censorship as signifiers of our age, with strategies of escape from the visibility regime of contemporary societies, and with the libidinous economy of desire in capitalism. The fellows, Marianna Christofides, Belit Sağ, Julie Sas and Jan Sieber, have been invited – following a two-stage application process, in which more than 250 artists and theorists took part – to work on their respective projects in Künstlerhaus Büchsenhausen by a jury of experts comprising Dominique Hurth (artist, former Büchsenhausen fellow), Gregor Neuerer (artist, member of the advisory board at Künstlerhaus Büchsenhausen) and Andrei Siclodi (curator, director of Künstlerhaus Büchsenhausen). In the context of the Start Up Lectures 2017/18 on 6 October 2017, as well as in the exhibition The Natures of Things: Contingency – Resilience – Invisibility – Desire, which opens at the same time as the Start Up Lectures, the fellows will present their work and their projects for the coming months. Here is a brief preview:

 

In her film essays and filmic installations, Marianna Christofides focuses on the juxtaposition of geological with socio-historical narratives, and the (mis)use of the notion of nature as a justifying argument towards contingent cultural facts. During the fellowship at Büchsenhausen Christofides will attempt to create an “anthology of moments of closure” tracing the “wandering” manifestations of uncertainty, given the fact, that everything around us is stripped of reason and gradually slips out of our grasp.

Belit Sağ will explore ‘censorship’ as a current state of affairs. Starting from her own experience with censorship in Turkey, Sağ will invite a number of women artists from this country who have also experienced censorship personally, to participate in a productive experience exchange. The project attempts to investigate the ways in which individual and emotional experience of censorship can be shared, the different tactics emplyed by visual artists as responses to repressive regimes, the kinds of subjectivities censorship creates, and to research these subjectivities through affects.

In her practice Julie Sas combines installations, writing, performance and collaborative projects, in which she organizes spaces and situations around plays on meanings, norms and identities that demonstrate a tension with certain linguistic or social data. In Büchsenhausen Sas will be preoccupied with open forms of anonymity, invisibility or retreats, which overlap different strategies, ways of living and acting, and modes of enunciation.

Jan Sieber lives as philosopher and art theorist in Berlin. The emphases of his research lie in Aesthetics, Psychoanalysis, Critical Theory, Cultural Theory, and contemporary French Philosophy. In his work project for Büchsenhausen, Sieber is interested in how the libidinous economy of desire in capitalism, as well as questions of subjectivity and identity, are echoed, reflected and criticized in contemporary art. How can art stage or promote subjectivation without merely repeating or working towards the production of capitalist subjectivity? How can art be understood as criticism of the capitalist economy of desire?

 

As every year, the artistic and theoretical research, as well as the development and production processes will be accompanied by a diverse program of public events suggested by the fellows and realized in close cooperation with them. For example, in the context of the Innsbruck Premierentage, within the exhibition The Natures of Things, the film Days in Between by Marianna Christofides will be screened on 11 November, followed by a discussion with the artist. A further screening and discussion evening with Christofides will follow on 23 January 2018. As a follow-up to the project Image Diplomacy by Vladislav Shapovalov (Fellow 2016—17), on 21 November 2017 we will be showing his homonymous film, produced in cooperation with the V-A-C Foundation, Moscow. The focus of this work lies with specific historical aspects of the construct of the political-imaginary through exhibition strategies and the medium of photography during the 20th century: on the one hand, Soviet photo exhibitions and films that represent Soviet modernity and were intended to convey a positive, controlled image of the USSR and life in the Soviet Union during the Cold War; on the other hand, Edward Steichen’s photo exhibition The Family of Man, also instrumentalized politically by the USA after 1955, which was elevated to the status of World Cultural Heritage by UNESCO in 2003 and can be viewed as a permanent exhibition in Luxembourg today.

Further fellows’ events are being prepared and will be realized as from March 2018.

 

Künstlerhaus Büchsenhausen also enters into distinguished cooperation with other institutions in the region in the context of our Fellowship Program. In the coming year, on 30 January, cultural theorist and artist Belinda Kazeem-Kaminski – in cooperation with the working group Global Learning from Südwind Tirol – will be giving a lecture about her project, Naming what once could not be named, which received the Theodor Körner Prize in 2016. This photographic research project aims to investigate childhood memories of “women of color” who grew up in German-speaking countries, looking at the way they are interwoven with experiences of exclusion, and to visualize this knowledge.

After successful cooperation with the Tyrolean Museum of Folk Art in the context of the exhibition project The Uncomfortable Science by Gareth Kennedy in 2015/16, in 2017/18 Künstlerhaus Büchsenhausen will be realizing another cooperation fellowship. Together with ar/ge kunst Bozen (Bolzano), the Künstlerhaus has invited architect and designer Matilde Cassani to develop a project about the border-cultural region around the Brenner Pass. Essentially, she will be exploring the cultural region that has developed at each side of the border between Northern and Southern Tyrol over the last decades. The project aims for a better understanding of the respective circumstances of life beyond consumerist oriented (keyword: Outlet Shopping Center) and border-military (keyword: migration flow) paradigma. There will also be reflection on the concept of the “border” as such, and on the question of how a “border” can develop into a working method.

More, up-to-date details on content and dates etc. can be found here on this website over the coming months. We hope that your experience of the Fellowship Program at Künstlerhaus Büchsenhausen will prove both exciting and informative!

 

Best regards,
Andrei Siclodi
Program Director