Category: Faculty of Art and Culture

You are cordially invited to a public lecture by Nora Sternfeld, Professor for Curating and Mediating Art at the Aalto University on Tuesday, February 21 at 18.30 at The institute of Art History and Visual Culture (Suur-Kloostri 11, Tallinn)

“Some Thoughts About Learning Together. Strategies of Art Education as Critical Practices of Knowledge Production”

How can we learn something that doesn’t exist yet? On the one hand this sounds paradoxical. But isn’t it on the other hand exactly what radical education is all about? Learning as a political and emancipatory practice has always been understood as a process towards another possibility: as a way to understand the social relations in order to change them; to understand them as they might only be understandable in another world. And maybe by doing so this one might change… As this process of self-transformation is a collective practice we can only learn it together. Following this thoughts the lecture will look at some examples of trafo.K – an office for art, education and critical knowledge production based in Vienna. We will discuss strategies for in-between spaces and contact zones that lay the ground for learning together.

Nora Sternfeld is Professor for Curating and Mediating Art at the Aalto University in Helsinki and co-director of /ecm — Master Program in Exhibition Theory and Practice at the University of Applied Arts Vienna. She is co-founder of trafo. K, office for art education and critical knowledge production and part of freethought, platform for research, education, and production based in London. In this context she is was one of the artistic directors of the Bergen Assembly 2016.

In cooperation with CuMMA – Studies in Curating, Managing and Mediating Art at Aalto University (https://cummastudies.wordpress.com).

September 21 – October 2, 2016
Application Deadline: September 12, 2016

Tallinn, Estonia
www.ecadc.ee

This fall the Estonian Contemporary Art Development Center (ECADC) is presenting the third edition of its Gallerist Master Course in Tallinn, Estonia, offering training for both practicing and emerging gallerists.

The course is designed to introduce students to the dynamics of the art world infrastructure. Classes will discuss the various segments of today’s global art market (Alessia Zorloni, IULM); artist representation and the day-to-day operations of a commercial gallery (Sol Pochat, HILO Gallery); art journalism and writing for social media (Andrew M. Goldstein, Artspace, Phaidon); as well as more recent developments in exhibition-making and curating (Fatos Üstek, independent curator, fig2).

This eight-day intensive course will accept MA students with a demonstrated interest and/or experience in contemporary art as well as practicing gallerists, arts and culture managers, and artists. The entire course will be conducted in English.

September 21 – 22
Sol Pochat
Case Study of HILO Gallery

Established in 2015, HILO Galeria is an emerging gallery in Buenos Aires, Argentina, with a special focus on site- and context-specific artistic and curatorial practices. The seminar will take the form of a case study on how to develop a sustainable gallery model representing emerging artists.

September 23 – 24
Alessia Zorloni
Introduction to the International Art Market

The art market, like most major business sectors in the 21st century, operates in a global environment and is complex, dynamic, and often seemingly irrational. This seminar will give students an understanding of the various segments of today’s ever-evolving international art market.

September 29 – 30
Fatos Üstek
Introduction to Contemporary Curatorial Practices

The seminar will address curatorial positions and the significant role they play in today’s arts ecology. Visiting a plethora of voices that are shaping the practice of contemporary curating, it will concentrate on different modalities and sensitivities that a curator employs in order to engage with art, and, more significantly, to make art public.

October 1 – 2
Andrew Goldstein
How to Write About Art (and Actually Get People to Read It)

Beginning with the polemicists and publications of the postwar era and going through the rise of the October magazine style to today’s proliferation of TMZ-like art sites, the seminar will take the form of a discussion on how art writing has dramatically changed over the past 70-odd years.

For the full course schedule and to download the application form, please visit our website: http://www.ecadc.ee/call-for-applications-gallerist-master-course-2016/

Location: Estonian Academy of Arts, Institute of Art History

Tuition: Full program €500 / Single module €125
Participants will be responsible for their round-trip transport to and from Tallinn, accommodations, and living expenses during their stay.

Estonian Contemporary Art Development Center

The Estonian Contemporary Art Development Center (ECADC) is a nonprofit foundation focused both on fostering international exposure for artists from Estonia and on developing the contemporary art scene in Estonia. Functioning as an umbrella organization for Estonian partner institutions, the center is creating strategic international partnerships in the field of contemporary art. ECADC is supported by Enterprise Estonia from the European Regional Development Fund and its team members are based in New York and Tallinn, Estonia.

Acknowledgements

The Gallerist Master Course has been made possible with generous help from Enterprise Estonia through grants endowed by the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF), and the Ministry of Culture, Estonia.

For further information on the Gallerist Master Course 2016 please contact info@ecadc.ee

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.

Estonian Academy of Arts, Institute of Art History is delighted to present a public lecture of Prof Kenneth Frampton (Columbia University, New York) on Wednesday, October 14th 6PM at the Museum of Estonian Architecture.

Kenneth Frampton is an architect and architectural historian whose Modern Architecture. A Critical History from 1980, currently available in its fourth, significantly updated edition, has become one of the most canonical accounts of 20th century architecture. With remarkably broad scope, Kenneth Frampton introduced to the Western-centered discourse of modern architecture developments by the Russian avant-garde, Alvar Aalto and Scandinavian modernism, experimentations in colonial contexts as well as contemporary developments on the global scale. Besides architecture history, Prof Frampton has been a prolific commentator on architecture of our own age. Having moved from Great Britain to the United States in 1965, Kenneth Frampton started teaching firstly in Princeton University and from 1972 onwards in Columbia, forming the most innovative circle of architectural theorists of the time together with Peter Eisenman, Manfredo Tafuri, Rem Koolhaas, Diana Agrest ja Anthony Vidler. The magazine Oppositions, established at Columbia in 1973, became the leading platform for innovative architectural thought, aiming at introducing critical theory to the discussions on architectural practice and culture in the wider sense. Frampton’s own positions have been informed by Hannah Arendt’s social critique as well as Martin Heidegger’s conceptions of locality, thus he has always emphasized the social responsibility of architectural production as well as the specificities of context, aiming to resist the tendency to view buildings as representations or commodity. The 1983 essay Towards a Critical Regionalism: Six points for an architecture of resistance, pleading for a critical locality as a countermeasure against global homogenization and scenographic architecture, retains its relevance even today. These principles continue to inform Prof Frampton’s recent publications including monographic volumes on Alvaro Siza (2000), Le Corbusier (2001), Tadao Ando (2003), and five North American architects (2012).

The open lectures of the Institute of Art History are supported by the Estonian Cultural Endowment.
Professor Kenneth Frampton’s public lecture is organized in co-operation with Aalto University Helsinki.

Photo: Jeff Barnett-Winsby, 2007