GETTING TO KNOW ONE ANOTHER
teacher- Liisa Roberts
An intensive two and a half day workshop in which we will look at each participating artist’s practice and its ties to a greater context and community. Student artists will have the opportunity to gain a broad perspective of their own work by studying their own influences and the ties of their ifluences to those of others. They will also be able to play with projecting their work into a context outside of the studio and gallery. In the spirit of the investigations of FORUMAK Leto, this workshop actively participates in the mapping, understanding and building of a community.
Before starting the workshop:
Student artists will be asked to gather materials representing or describing influences on their works. They should collect at least one example of an influence from art, literature, music, their urban environment, their national heritage, their community and their personal lives. Each artist will be allotted a space in the FORUMAK gallery space where they will be able to hang their materials in an exhibition format. The "exhibitions" should be hung in such a way that they do not require additional verbal explanations, but can be interpreted by the viewer using whatever elements the artist has provided in the exhibition.
On the first day of the workshop, 18.6:
We as a group will enter the exhibition and spend time looking at it, understanding it and discussing it. Each artist will pick two or three elements from the exhibition which do not belong to their chosen sphere of influence, but which they find interesting and would like to discuss. They will share their views on these elements with the group. We will trace connections between artists and will be able to perceive a shared community of ideas and practices.
Overnight participants will be asked to answer the following two questions in writing: What do you believe your work currently influences? What would you hope your work to have the potential to influence?
On the second day of the workshop 19.6:
These texts will be read outloud and discussed. At the end of the discussion a pot-luck hat of possible scenarios in which an artist can work, will be handed around, each participant will pick a scenario blindly. These scenarios may include: a suburban television station running out of funding that focuses mainly on local news; a plot of land in between two buildings in an urban enviroment with an overgrown wildflower graden in it; a dance theatre that invites an artist-in-residence; a school which buses students in from two diverse communities that wants to hire an exceptional contemporary artist to teach...
Each participnannt will have an hour to think of a work of their own within that context. The work could be a writing, a performance, a building idea, a video clip.
In the afternoon we will look at the work of artists such as Dan Graham, Christine Hill, Simryn Gill, Gordon Matta Clarke, Tellervo Kalleinen & Oliver Kochta-Kalleinen, among others, as well as at each participating artist's own work.
