Post mfa-workshops Archives

Everything you want was already here 2022

August 2022
In August 2022, we return to our investigation of site-responsive art practice in rural settings by hosting the Master level KUNO course, Rural Contextual Practice: Everything you want was already here offered jointly by the the Academy of Fine Arts in Helsinki, Konstfack University College of Arts Crafts and Design in Stockholm and the Vilnius Academy of Fine Arts.

For more information: https://www.kunonetwork.org/ongoing-past-intensive-courses/2022/8/9/everything-you-want-was-already-here-a-kuno-intensive-course-focused-on-rural-contextual-practice

Everything you want was already here is a two-week intensive, site-responsive course that takes place in Rejmyre. Participants explore issues central to making site-responsive art in rural contexts and create an artwork in response to the site of the course. Group exercises, collective meals, study visits in the area, shared and individual work time as well as evening presentations of participants’ past work are core components of the course. The workshop is funded under the Nordplus/KUNO framework.

The selected group of 15 participants are from: The Academy of Fine Arts, Helsinki Vilnius Academy of Arts Konstfack University College of Arts, Crafts and Design Trondheim Academy of Fine Art
Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts

Represented departments include: Site & Situation/Time and Space Arts Photography & Media Art Printmaking Painting Fine Arts Craft Spatial Design

Nationalities represented include: Finnish, Lithuanian, Swedish, Russian, Norwegian, Danish, U.S., Portuguese, Turkish, South African, South Korean

FACILITATORS

Daniel Peltz

Professor of Site and Situation Specific Practice, Department of Time and Space Arts

Academy of Fine Arts, Helsinki, Finland

https://www.uniarts.fi/en/units/academy-of-fine-arts/

Dr. assoc. prof. Vytautas Michelkevičius

Head of Photography, Animation and Media Art Department and Head of Doctoral Programme in Fine Art, Vilnius Academy of Arts, Lithuania

https://www.vda.lt/en/

Vitalij Cerviakov, PhD, artist

Doctoral Programme in Fine Art, Vilnius Academy of Arts, Lithuania

Sissi Westerberg

Senior Lecturer, Smycke & Corpus: Ädellab, Department of Craft

Konstfack University College of Arts Crafts and Design, Stockholm, Sweden

https://www.konstfack.se/en/

David Larsson, visual artist

Stockholm, Sweden
Excerpt from the course description: This transdisciplinary course explores contextually responsive art practice with a specific focus on the rural. The dominance of the urban in artistic discourses and the marginalization of the rural, as an often invisible space of industrial production and resource extraction, combine to form a strong argument for focusing our attention, within the space of master-level art and craft education, on developing our conceptions of the rural and rural publics and our capacity to make complex works within and about rural contexts.

Our chosen theme, Everything you want was already here, is an opportunity to explore conceptions of abundance and lack in our respective approaches to art, craft and making. Rural spaces have historically attracted artists seeking a respite, or a near total escape, from the implicitly urban art worlds. All of the participants in this space are currently enrolled in art academies in different large cities of Europe. These urban areas, and the academies themselves, are places of abundance in many ways, in terms of the resources and opportunities they present. Those of us who inhabit these urban institutional art spaces also come to recognize that, in all this seeming abundance, there is also a great deal of lack (over regulated time and space, disconnection from the natural world/the source of the materials we consume and the people who produce them). Rural areas in turn present different forms of abundance and lack, real and imagined (‘open’ space, decreased regulation, different conceptions of time, social disconnection etc.).

The course is an opportunity for students pursuing master’s degrees in fine and craft arts as well as media art, to meet and engage in a site-responsive exploration around these issues, through their own existing practices.

Rural Resistance

August 2017
Vår 2017-workshop, Rural Resistance, försöker tänka förhållandet mellan dessa två termer: motstånd och landsbygd. Samtidigt som uppmaningen till motstånd skallar som svar på auktoritära, nationalistiska rörelser runt om i världen, vänder vi oss till att studera och kanske utveckla motståndsstrategier som är inneboende i vår konstnärliga praxis. Samtidigt överväger vi vilka motståndsstrategier som finns inom landsbygdssammanhang, och drivkraften mot en existens på landsbygden.
Workshopen var öppen för utövare från både bildkonst och konsthantverk, med syfte att skapa en mötesplats mellan dessa två områden. Workshopen omfattade en kombination av individuella- och samarbetsövningar, presentationer, genomgångar och kollektivt boende.

Deltaggarna hade nyligen tagit examen från Kungliga Konstakademin, Sverige, Konstfack, Sverige, the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, Bergen Academy of the Arts, Norge, the Icelandic Academy of the Arts, the Academy of Fine Arts [KUVA], Finland, Vilnius Academy of the Arts, Litauen, the Art Academy of Latvia och the Estonian Academy of the Arts.

clearcut

Workshopen syftar till att använda det fysiska och konceptuella utrymmen som regelbundet skapas i vår region genom kalhyggen och skogsbrukspraxis. Denna typ av avverkning är en grundläggande metod för vad som kallas “Den svenska skogsbruksmodellen”. Man kan hävda att detta är en av Sveriges största ideologiska, miljömässiga exporter.

Vad kan det betyda att göra en “clear cut”, som samtida konstnär? Vad kan vi skära av oss från och till? Vad finns i viljan och fantasin av en “fullkomlig avskärning”, ett avtäckande, förberedandet inför något nytt som ska komma. Deltagarna uppmanades att utforska dessa och andra frågor som de tog med sig till platsen.

Deltaggarna hade nyligen tagit examen från utbildningar inom konsthantverk och bildkonst från Kungliga Konstakademin, Sverige, Konstfack, Sverige, the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, Bergen Academy of the Arts, Norge, the Icelandic Academy of the Arts, the Academy of Fine Arts [KUVA], Finland, Vilnius Academy of the Arts, Litauen, the Art Academy of Latvia och the Estonian Academy of the Arts.

Everything you want was already here 2014

August 2014
In 2014, Rejmyre Art LAB’s Nordic/Baltic Studio for Continued Engagement gathered a group of recently graduated MFA students from across the Nordic and Baltic Art academies for a 10-day intensive workshop Everything you want was already here: an exploration of site-dependent making. Together we investigated the constitution of rural places such as our site, as places often characterized as abundant in certain resources and lacking in others. We coupled this investigation with a parallel consideration of how a focus on abundance and lack might be used to reflect on this transitional moment for the participants (all recent graduates of Nordic and Baltic MFA programs) from the academy to constructing one’s own contexts for making and learning.
“Everything you want was already here” är en workshop som riktar sig till unga professionella utövare inom konst- och formområdet från de nordiska och baltiska länderna – en plattform för de som vill bygga nätverk och fortsätta att engagera sig i diskussion, utbyte och kritiskt tänkande kring sitt arbete efter att de avslutat sin högskoleutbildning. Deltagarna blir en del i Rejmyre Art LABs nyetablerade nätverk ”Nordic Network for Continued Engagement” som syftar till att skapa utbyte och samarbeten mellan unga utövare från de nordiska och baltiska länderna.

Under tio dagar samlades gruppen i Rejmyre för en intensiv workshop under ledning av amerikanska konstnären Daniel Peltz (multidisciplinär konstnär och professor på Rhode Island School of Design). Studion bestod av samarbetsövningar och diskussioner, eget arbete, presentationer och kritik. Focus ligger på att diskutera deltagarnas konstnärskap utifrån de olika konstinriktningar och kulturella perspektiv som representeras i gruppen. Då gruppen är sammansatt från olika discipliner och länder har deltagarna möjlighet att expandera sitt tänkande utifrån nya perspektiv. En del av tiden ägnas också till diskussion kring teoretiska texter från de olika länderna som deltagarna få i uppgift att läsa och presenterar för gruppen. Vi diskuterar även socio-politiska frågor kring demokrati, samhällsansvar, revolution och konstnärens roll i samhället. Förutom det övergripande upplägget så uppmanas deltagarna att använda studion som en demokratisk plattform där de själva är med och formar strukturen och innehållet. I samband med workshopen pågår även ett månadslångt artist i residency med internationella konstnärer från övriga världen, vilket skapar möjlighet för ytterligare utbyte med mer etablerade kollegor.

Infinite Gestures

Our 2012 workshop focused on the theme of Infinite Gestures, an exploration of the aesthetics of duration and repetition. The workshop consisted of a combination of work presentations, peer and professional critique and dialogue through making.

This year’s theme for the Post-MFA workshop and seminar has been, will be, was “Infinite Gestures”. We attempt to treat our themes lightly, thematic explorations are tricky in their potential to narrow or even bludgeon. We attempt to treat them as a seed for a plant of unknown origin, to give them just enough, just the amount of attention they need to tell us what they are or might be. We each instill them with our own meaning, make and unmake meaning of them, and this seminar is a part of furthering this process.

For me this theme grew out of a response to the Occupy Movement that swept across the U.S. and the world last fall. I was drawn to many things within the movement as a citizen, the struggle for greater economic justice and the modeling of direct democratic process amongst them. As an artist, I was inspired by the form of the movement, its aesthetic character if you will [the aesthetic character of the movement]. What made the occupations so easy to ridicule in the minds of detractors and skeptics was exactly what made it beautiful to me. Its refusal to become singular, to accept any singular self-image, even as it grew to the epic proportions of a worldwide movement. Like a child that refuses to differentiate, residing just a moment longer in the infinite primordial state of belonging. Occupying was an action that could mean things to many people. To me this instance on an amorphous plurality was its complicated beauty. It showed off this beauty in its durational structure, which was infinite. They/we were occupying, this space was occupied for an indeterminate time, for the infinite now. The appreciation of the beauty of this movement made me want to explore its aesthetic character further, to bring together a group of artists, crafts people, designers, thinkers, and writers to expand on this infinite gesture. I also saw a reflection of our organization in the theme. One of the participants from this year’s workshop said yesterday in our discussion “Artists displace matter, being an artist in Remyre is matter out of place.” Rejmyre Art LAB, is now in its fourth year of occupying Rejmyre, matter rapturously out of place.

Daniel Peltz introducing Infinite Gestures at the seminar that accompanied the workshop [Rejmyre Art LAB research leader

This post-MFA workshop was open to practitioners from both visual art and craft educations from a select group of Nordic and Baltic art schools. Activities of our post-MFA workshops include a combination of individual and collaborative exercises, work presentations, peer critique and living together in community.

Participants had recently completed their MFA degree at The Royal Institute of Art, Sweden, Konstfack, Sweden, the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, Denmark, Bergen Academy of the Arts, Norway, the Icelandic Academy of the Arts, Iceland, the Academy of Fine Arts [KUVA], Finland, Vilnius Academy of the Arts, Lithuania, the Art Academy of Latvia and the Estonian Academy of the Arts. Participants were selected by nomination from our network of professorial colleagues and through an open call.

Place as Matter

The Place as Matter workshop is held in conjunction with the pioneering Rejmyre Matters international artist residency, which has brought a diverse group of established artists and designers to the Östergötland region over the past two years to engage Rejmyre as a site of practice. The workshop brings together an interdisciplinary group of students and newly graduated practitioners for an 8-day, intensive engagement of notions of place. Participants are guided through an exploration of varied potential meanings of “place” and “matter.” They explore one or several of these through the lens of their own particular field and personal interests.
The workshop includes individual and collaborative projects, thematic slide lectures by the instructors, presentations by invited artists, designers and academics, study trips, brief blowing times in the hot shop, individual and group critiques as well as an optional morning yoga session, an evening theoretical discussion group and swimming in the nearby lake. The workshop re-actived several of the old mill buildings adjacent to the active glassworks Reijmyre Glasbruk.

Place as Matter is open to a wide range of approaches and scales of exploration; from socially-engaged practices to independent art/craft making. The focus is placed on investigation and discovery of new ideas and approaches to materials and site, rather than product-based outcomes. All participants do a work-in-progress presentation at the culmination of the workshop in the form of an exhibition/dialog that is open to the local community and invited guests.

Artists/Instructors-in-Residence Daniel Peltz – media art/installation [US] Jocelyne Prince – glass/performance [CA/US] Sissi Westerberg – jewelry/sculpture [SE]

Deltaggarna hade nyligen tagit examen från utbildningar inom konsthantverk och bildkonst från Konstfack, Sverige, Bornholm Glass academy, the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, Rhode Island School of Design , USA and Bergen Academy of the Arts

Category: Post mfa-workshops