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Course of Art – curatorial project investigating contemporary art education.
Course of Art is a nonprofit educational initiative based on experimental studies and practices aimed at exploring the principles of contemporary art.
The Course of Art defines its objectives as testing the new forms of art education, growing out of collaboration and interdependence between theory and practice; studying the essence of contemporary art as a phenomenon and practice through education; developing the contemporary art terminology.
The Course of Art is an experimental laboratory, where examination of theory by practice, as well as practice by theory is the core principle. Not wanting to borrow art techniques and strategies developed by anyone, the Course of Art has been created and exists as an attempt to understand what it means to be an artist. On the one hand, the goal of the Course of Art is to pay attention to the intellectual and institutional issues of the contemporary art in Ukraine at the time when Soviet-grown structures and institutions are collapsing and the local contemporary art system is yet to be formed, as well as define cultural policy relevant to current social realities. On the other hand, the Course of Art aims to develop critical, complex thinking, and form contemporary art discourse.
Simultaneous rethinking of historical artistic experience and inspection of a present-day local cultural situation provide the basis of educational practices and methods within the Course. By referring and repeating various artistic methods, approaches, tools and forms of polycontextual work we re-actualize relevant instruments to create an image of culture in which we are situated.
Curators: Kateryna Badianova and Lada Nakonechna.
You can reach us at contemporaryartcourse@gmail.com
Activity of the Course of Art :
Course of Art exists from 2012.
In 2013 and 2014, the half-year training programs for artists and public presentations were realized (at the National Museum of Taras Shevchenko, Kyiv; the House of Artists, Kyiv; the Closer artistic space, Kyiv).
In 2014, the Course of Art group took part in the “Mobile communication platform” at the invitation of the School of Rose (School of engaged art) in St. Petersburg.
In 2015, the three-month curatorial project on problematics of the notion of ‘border’ was held.
Course of Art is also the initiator of the After Text Discourse Group (http://aftertext.wordpress.com)
On November 15-20, 2015 — organization and participation in the workshop “Communication and Responsibility. Reflection of Crisis in Ukraine in dialogic perspective” in partnership with the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD)
Statement of the Course of Art represented on the exhibition
UNDISCIPLINARY LEARNING >>
Remapping The Aesthetics of Resistance
22 Sep 2016 - 19 Nov 2016
DISTRICT Kunst- und Kulturförderung, Berlin
Curated by Janine Halka, Suza Husse, Julia Lazarus
In 2017 we run an artistic independent research performative program "Academy. Foundation" at the National Academy of Art and Architecture and artists studios Shoshenko 33.
Captivation. Statement
The critical gaze requires us to make room for contemplation, which allows us to actualize ourselves in a particular situation, and to actualize the specificity of the space we have cleared.
Through artistic and educational practices, which enable us to establish "cultural situations," we reach a state of consciousness in which dissociation and captivated attention can coexist.
We cannot represent the present without making reference to the past, the dubious and the unattainable. The critical gaze is forcibly retrospective.
This act of referencing is made possible by repetition of what has already happened, of the past, in which a choice was, at one time, made.
There is no need to invent something new out of nothing. Everything is all around us; we are simply playing out the same script again and again. We do not want to submit blindly to a homogeneous, anonymous and ahistorical totality. We resort to radicalized contextualization. Without this starting point, any act of distinction becomes impossible, absurd. If we mechanically reproduce something, accepting it uncritically as an absolute given, then we voluntarily abstain from deliberating on it.
Intentional repetition (re)actualizes a situation and brings it within the reach of our gaze.
The act of returning is always a return to a time where something happened and a thought occurred which must be thought through again. At the same time, it is an act of returning the gaze to ourselves. We repeat, conscious that we are gazing from the viewpoint of the present moment — a moment that still needs to be clarified.
Attention to the conditions in which we find ourselves, to how our bodies are positioned, what is near them and what is between them in a specific space at a specific time presents cultural situations. When we establish or manifest cultural situations, we have the experience of being captivated in the present, despite the fact that we were always already captivated. In this space, in which we are located and which created us, we make room for the gaze. We captivate that room forcibly and temporarily. The act of captivation is contemporaneous with that of making room. It is through this manifested image of culture that we are capable of seeing ourselves. It is in this way that we imagine, clarify and establish those spaces between bodies, those places with their stories and their hidden opportunities, places containing the potential for (re)establishment.
2016
Captivation. Statement based on methods, ideas and educational practices developed by Lada Nakonechna and Kateryna Badianova as curators of the Course of Art (an educational program by Method Fund) within three years.
Captivation. Statement presents a vision of actual/possible roles of art education, as conceived by the curators. Particular attention is given to the concepts of captivation, repetition, contextualization (the idea of "contextual art" by Ukrainian artist Miroslav Kulchitsky), cultural situation (a strategy by Slovak artist Julius Koller), etc.
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