Academic Calendar

Croquis.

The Estonian Academy of Arts will hold an Open Day for all interested prospective students and others on March 24th, 2016. All lectures are open for visitors as well as there will be exhibits, information hours in departments and other activities. All are welcome! More information will be available soon.

On Thursday, December 17th 6PM we are pleased to host curator and professor of Academy of Visual Arts Leipzig Beatrice von Bismarck who will hold an open lecture „Valorisation Machines or The Exhibition as (Re-)Staging: “When Attitudes Become Form – Bern 1969/ Venice 2013”, Venice Biennial 2013“. The lecture will take place at the main hall of Estonian Academy of Sciences, Kohtu 6.

Exhibitions are in general performative. They bring their exhibits on stage by making them public. Furthermore they involve them in a process of meaning production through embedding them into new constellations. Over the course of processes of shifts and transpositions, additions and commentaries they create different relations between the exhibits and other objects on show as well as display devices, sites and spaces, people and discourses. Exhibitions are thus always temporally defined and this through the temporary structure of their exhibits as much as through their own rhythms, processes and duration.
With the exhibition “When Attitudes Become Form” (Bern, 1969) process and ephemerality have been inscribed not only into the history of art but also into the rather younger history of exhibitions. While a number of other curatorial initiatives around the late 1960s and early 1970s offered similarly oriented contributions to the discourse, the Swiss show and its curator Harald Szeemann acquired a particularly outstanding, almost legendary reputation. The re-staging of this show in 2013 in Venice at the Prada Foundation under the title of “When Attitudes Become Form -Bern 1969/ Venice 2013” implied a de-contextualisation and a resulting shift of meaning not only in aesthetic terms. Hand in hand with the alterations of the temporal and material conditions of the exhibits went a number of re-valorisations and capitalizations, which affected the artistic works, but also the participating artists, the curators and the exhibition itself. The Venice exhibition can thus be treated as a paradigm not only with regards to the theatrical nature of exhibiting but also to the meaning and value production of its performative capacities.

Beatrice von Bismarck (Leipzig/ Berlin), professor at the Academy of Visual Arts Leipzig for Art History, Visual Culture and Cultures of the Curatorial. 1989 – 1993 Städel Museum, Frankfurt/Main curator 20th Century art. 1993 – 1999 Lüneburg University, co-founder and -director of the project-space „Kunstraum der Universität Lüneburg“. 2000 co-founder of the project-space „/D/O/C/K-Projektbereich“. 2009 initiator of the MA-program “Cultures of the Curatorial“. Research areas: The curatorial; effects of neo-liberalism and globalization on the cultural field; postmodern concepts of the „artist“.
Currently on research leave for a book on “The Curatorial” financed by the “Opus magnum”-program of the VWStiftung.

Publications include: – Games Fights Collaborations. Art and Cultural Studies in the 90s, Ostfildern-Ruit 1996. (ed. with Diethelm Stoller, Ulf Wuggenig); – Interarchive. Archival Practices and Sites in the Contemporary Art Field, Cologne 2002. (ed. with Hans-Peter Feldmann, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Diethelm Stoller, Ulf Wuggenig); – Grenzbespielungen. Visuelle Politik in der Übergangszone (Performing the Border. Visual Politics in Zones of Transgression), (ed.), Cologne 2005; – Globalisierung/Hierarchisierung. Kulturelle Dominanzen in Kunst und Kunstgeschichte (Globalization/ Hierarchization. Cultural Dominances in Art and Art History), Marburg 2005 (ed. with Irene Below); – beyond education. Kunst, Ausbildung, Arbeit und Ökonomie, (beyond education. Art, Education, Work and Economy), Frankfurt a. M. 2005 (ed. with Alexander Koch); – Nach Bourdieu: Visualität, Kunst, Politik (After Bourdieu. Visuality, Art, Politics), Vienna 2008 (ed. with Therese Kaufmann, Ulf Wuggenig); – Auftritt als Künstler (Performance as Artist), Cologne 2010; – Cultures of the Curatorial (ed. With Jörn Schaffaf and Thomas Weski), Berlin 2012; – Timing – On the Temporal Dimension of Exhibiting (ed. with Rike Frank, Benjamin Meyer-Krahmer, Jörn Schafaff, and Thomas Weski), Berlin 2014; – Hospitality – Hosting Relations in Exhibitions, (ed. with Benjamin Meyer-Krahmer), Berlin (about to come out in January 2016).

The public lecture will be preceded by a reading group of prof von Bismarck’s earlier texts, to be taking place on Wednesday, December 9th at 4PM at the Centre for Contemporary Art Estonia, please register rebeka@cca.ee.
Beatrice von Bismarck will also be holding a seminar at the Institute of Art History on December 18th, 10 AM, room 104. For participation please email ingrid.ruudi@artun.ee

Piibe Piirma’s PhD dissertation is an art-based research, that is focusing on her artistic experience by collaborating different Science labs in Estonia and explores hybrid art and theories of interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary art forms, bioart and citizen science.

Piirma’s dissertation is mainly based on her personal new media art practice and curatorial work (2012–2015). Her theoretical study deals with a variety of hybrid art forms, art&science collaborations of Estonian and internationally known artists, and inter- and transdisciplinary studies of in general. Piibe Piirma’s art-based research consists the analyses of her solo exhibitions “Hybrid Practices”, “Hybrid Practice – from General to Specific” and curatorial work of the international exhibition “Rhizope” and related conference “Art and Science – Hybrid Art and Interdisciplinary Research” (EAA 2014).

The objective of Piibe Piirma’s dissertation is to utilise theoretical and practical approaches to seek answers to questions pertaining to co-functioning of different disciplines (art and science). The term is used in this dissertation for artwork in which the two of them, art and science, meet is “hybrid art”. Although new and exciting directions far exceed the established genre definitions and evaluation criteria permit, she holds that the phrase “hybrid art” is the best characterisation of artwork that transcends the boundaries of different and at ostensibly incompatible disciplines. How science impacts art or vice versa becomes clearer through practical examples of art and collective initiatives, which are described in the various chapters and sections of this dissertation.

The defense event will be in English. 



Please find the PhD thesis from the Academic Library of EAA (Estonia pst 7, III floor) and HERE: https://drive.google.com/a/artun.ee/file/d/0B5zWAWhayOJUSHQ0aEsza0JCdWc/view

Additional info: www.piibepiirma.com

On Thursday, November 12th at 6PM, internationally renowned art theorist and professor of Oslo Art Academy Jan Verwoert will hold a public lecture Whipped Cream for the Walking Dead at the hall of the Estonian Academy of Sciences, 6 Kohtu St.

The material world each day gives us more stuff to buy and fear, while at night our faces at night are bathed in the glow of LED-screens as we look for true life on the net. Did the war stop in the ’50s? Or did the pills just get better in taking the edge off? What to do when everywhere we go, online or IRL, we still can’t help but bring our body?

One way to deal with the situation, it would seem, is to turn life into a shimmer as sublimely dull as that on your screen. Call it the bliss of Zombies who no longer feel that they don’t feel, because they have lost their metabolism and can eat what they want and never put on a gram of weight. Who could fail to be convinced by the deep drowsiness in Lana del Rey’s voice when she sings that all she wanted to do was get high by the beach?

Yet what if the soul keeps kicking and yearning for some food and hurls us back in among a world of things, people, promises and online horoscopes? What if we confronted the question Bifo Berardi raised, asking: “Where shall we take our round bodies?”

Jan Verwoert is a writer, a contributing editor of frieze magazine, a professor for theory at the Oslo Academy of the Arts and teaches at the Piet Zwart Institute Rotterdam. He is the author of Bas Jan Ader: In Search of the Miraculous (MIT Press/Afterall Books 2006), Tell Me What You Want What You Really Really Want (Sternberg Press/Piet Zwart Institute 2010), and, with Michael Stevenson, Animal Spirits — Fables in the Parlance of Our Time (JRP, Zurich 2013) and Cookie! (Sternberg Press/Piet Zwart Inst. 2014).

Estonian Academy of Arts, Institute of Art History in co-operation with the Centre for Contemporary Art Estonia are organizing a public lecture series concentrated on the questions of contemporary curatorship, criticism and theory. All lectures will be preceded by reading groups analyzing the previuos texts of the visiting lecturer at the office of Centre for Contemporary Art Estonia, Vabaduse väljak 6. The reading groups are free and open for all. The writing of Jan Verwoert will be discussed this Friday, November 6th at 2PM, please e-mail rebeka@cca.ee for registration.