Welcome to join us at PUBLICS for a day long public event and discussion panel on Wednesday 13th March 10-4pm. To register for the event please see the link below.
Rather than attempting to create an all-encompassing survey, the Archive of Art School Dissent aims to map particular genealogies consequent to a focused range of questions initiated through a series of live public events. The plan is to bring the discussion to a number of global locations to consider how trans-geographical entanglements between education, geo-economic circumstances, cultural conditions, and communities have led to dissent in art schools, how alterity has been articulated and how consequences have fed back into predominant or alternate systems of artists pedagogy. This event is the first in the series and responses or provocations from attendees are welcome. Please join us!
Hosts: Chris Evans, Academy of Fine Arts Researcher and Magnus Quaife, Academy of Fine Arts Professor in Artists Pedagogies
Invited panel: David Munoz Alcántara, Sezgin Boynik, Gavin Butt, Luis Guerra, Pauliina Pesonen, Elina Merenmies, Paul O’Neill, H Ouramo, Delphine Paul & Corin Sworn.
Please register for the event via link here.
BIOS
Hosts
Chris Evans is a researcher at the University of the Arts Helsinki, an educator at De Ateliers, Amsterdam and an artist, editor and musician. His work has been featured in numerous exhibitions worldwide including solo exhibitions at Parasite, Hong Kong; Praxis, Berlin; Project Arts, Dublin; Stedelijk Bureau, Amsterdam; Studio Voltaire, London, and The British School in Rome. He has also exhibited in a number of international art biennials: Athens Biennial 1; 4th International Architecture Biennale, Rotterdam; Taipei Biennial 10; Berlin Biennial 8 and the 8th Liverpool Biennial. A monograph, Goofy Audit, was published by Sternberg Press and his work has been featured in several compendiums on sculpture including Contemporary Sculpture—Artists’s Writings and Interviews (Hatje Cantz, 2020) and Vitamin 3-D: New Perspectives in Sculpture and Installation (Phaidon). Evans has edited and illustrated anthologies of writing including: Job Interviews (Parasite, Hong Kong, 2019) and Magnetic Promenade (Studio Voltaire, 2006) and, under the name Sudden Wealth, collaboratively records music. Sudden Wealth with Roy Claire Potter was published by Slimvolume in 2022. From 2017 to 2023 Chris Evans served two consecutive terms as a trustee of Liverpool Biennial, and is a member of De Ateliers Advisory Board.
The Archive of Art School Dissent is central to Chris Evans’s research at the University of the Arts Helsinki, through his interest in rethinking our working epistemologies and questioning how to transform the institutional mechanisms that support artists’ practices.
Magnus Quaife is the Professor of Artists Pedagogy at the Academy of Fine Art, University of the Arts, Helsinki. He is an artist, educator, and researcher. Quaife is a founding director of the organisation Teaching Painting, on the steering committee of the International Network of Foundation Educators (INFE), and a founder of the Artist/Pedagogy/Research specialist interest group of the Society of Artistic Research. He worked at Manchester School of Art for over 15 years and has been visiting lecturer/professor at institutions including the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Art, Glasgow School of Art, and the Academy of Fine Art Munich. His artistic practice has been described as that of a conceptual artist interested in paint and as being connected through an approach that is akin to an archaeology of the modern and contemporary.
Panel
Sezgin Boynik is a writer, editor, and publisher who lives and works between Finland and Kosovo. He is the co-founder of Pykë-Presje in Prizren and founder of Rab-Rab Press—an independent platform based in Helsinki which annually publishes Rab-Rab, a journal for political and formal inquiries in art. Sezgin Boynik has written extensively on such topics as the subversive resistance movements in Yugoslavia in the 1960s and 1970s and co-authored Counter-constructivist Model (La Fontaine Stories for Immigrants) paper-film in nine acts (2012, together with Minna Henriksson), the critical reader Contemporary Art and Nationalism with Minna Henriksson, and History of Punk and Underground Resources in Turkey 1978–1999 with Tolga Güldalli. He has also edited “Coiled Verbal Spring: Devices of Lenin’s Language” (Rab-Rab Press, Helsinki, 2018), “Sickle of Syntax and Hammer of Tautology: Visual Poetry in Yugoslavia” (OEI, Stockholm, 2021), and “Socialist Dawn: Yugoslav Communist Party’s Turkish Newspaper from 1920” (TUSTAV, Social History Publications, Istanbul, 2023). Sezgin Boynik has participated in many conferences including Punk Kongress, Kassel; Serious Pop, Vienna; and has contributed to many journals and publications on political movements.
Gavin Butt is Professor of Fine Art at Northumbria University, Newcastle. He writes and makes creative research about visual art, popular music, queer culture and performance. His most recent book is No Machos or Pop Stars: When the Leeds Art Experiment Went Punk (Duke 2022), accompanied by a compilation LP The Art School Dance Goes On: Leeds Post-Punk 1977-1984 (Caroline True Records 2023). He is also the author of Between You and Me: Queer Disclosures in the New York Art World 1948-1963 (Duke 2005) and co-editor of Post-Punk Then and Now (Repeater 2016). He is currently working on new research exploring the histories and cultures of art education across UK nations and regions.
Luis Guerra is a visual artist and philosopher. He is a University Researcher at the Research Institute of the University of the Arts Helsinki, where he develops research on Gestural Philosophy. Guerra is a former Fellow Artist-Researcher in the Art & Theory program, Künstlerhaus Büchsenhausen, Innsbruck, Austria 2022-2023 and has also been a Kone Foundation Fellow 2020 and Resident Fellow 2021 at the Academy of Fine Arts, Uniarts Helsinki, Finland, Saastamoinen Foundation. His work has been exhibited at the Kunstpavillon, Innsbruck, Austria; Fabra i Coats Centre d’Art Contemporani, Barcelona; Württembergischer Kunstverein Stuttgart, Germany; Museo de la Solidaridad, Chile, among others. His last publication is Wandering Echoes, a handbook of operative losses, Errant Bodies Press, Berlin, 2022.
Elina Merenmies studied painting at Saint-Luc School of Art in Brussels, monumental painting at Prague Academy of Fine Arts and is a graduate of the Academy of Fine Arts, Helsinki. Elina has an extensive career as a visual arts teacher, specialising in painting tuition at the Academy of Fine Arts, Helsinki (2000—2012) and was appointed Rector of the Free Art School in 2020. Elina’s practice has included community art (Block radio programme, Paris), painting and music and has collaborated with artists from various disciplines using experimental working processes.
Dr. Paul O’Neill is an Irish curator, artist, writer, and educator. Paul is the Artistic Director of PUBLICS, since September 2017. PUBLICS is a curatorial agency, contemporary art commissioner and event space with a dedicated library and reading room in Helsinki. Between 2013-17, he was Director of the Graduate Program at the Center for Curatorial Studies (CCS), Bard College, New York. He is author of the critically acclaimed book The Culture of Curating and the Curating of Culture(s), (Cambridge, MASS., The MIT Press, 2012), which has been translated into many languages. Paul has also co-curated over seventy exhibitions and is author and editor of numerous agenda-setting anthologies on curating. Most recent being Not Going it Alone: Collective Curatorial Curating (Apex Art, New York, 2023).
Paul is widely regarded as one of the foremost research-oriented curators, educators and scholar of curatorial practice, public art, and exhibition histories, and most recently has published three artist’ books as author, co-editor; Maryam Jafri: Independence Days (2022), Kathrin Bohm: Art on the Scale of Life (2023), and Dave McKenzie Banners and Letters (2023). Paul is currently working on two new publications of his curatorial texts called CURIOUS and CURED planned for publication later this year.
H Ouramo is the rector of Art School Maa, a private educational institution on Suomenlinna. Focusing on critical discourse around art education and spaces for sharing artistic thinking, H is interested in creating alternative pedagogies that centre knowledge exchange and transparent power relations. H is also an artist and performer whose practice explores the boundaries of sites and bodies through the situated economies of labour, gender and language.
Delphine Paul is the director of School of Fine Arts in Nîmes, south of France. She has worked in several art schools (National school of Photography in Arles & ENSA Paris-Cergy in France) and for the French Ministry of Culture, as a visual art officer (DRAC Bourgogne-Franche-Comté, France). She has also taught at the University Paris 8, given various lectures in art schools and universities (art history, contemporary art, the ecosystem of art, art education) and has regularly taken part in juries and commissions in the arts. During her studies of Art History (Master, University of Bordeaux Montaigne) and Cultural Policies (University of Paris Dauphine), her research fields were focused on African contemporary art and the artistic and economic values of art. Her current PhD in art history at the University of Tours & Paris 1 is focused on figures and representations of the artist-teacher since the 1970s.
Pauliina Pesonen is a visual artist and PhD researcher focusing on artists’ pedagogy of the Nordic Art School/Pohjoismainen taidekoulu/Nordiska konstskolan (Kokkola 1984-2018) with support from the Finnish Cultural Foundation. She curates the annual contemporary arts event, Ars Weikkola, in the village where she lives and works: an event which emphasises artist renumeration, unusual locations and new audiences.
David Muñoz-Alcántara’s work intersects art, architecture, philosophy, and research. They focus on producing and reproducing revolutionary poetics of art grounded in liberation struggles and eco-social dignity, learning-with insurgent indigenous communalism in defence of life. They seek to forward the understanding of art as class-struggle in the imagination and aesthetic praxis grounded in peoples’ liberation merged in socio-ecological collective constructions of autonomy. They combine art, social sciences, history, and philosophy bringing forward strategies of experimental pedagogies, study, and translation as processes of transformative politics. David Muñoz-Alcántara is an award-winning Doctor of Arts from Aalto University and an Architect from UNAM-México; post-doctoral researcher at Helsinki University Social Sciences Faculty (2023-2025); a research fellow at BAK-Basis voor Actuele Kunst (2019-2020); and a visiting researcher at Goldsmiths University of London (2016-2017). They are co-convener of the internationalist research constellation Red Forest (2020-YTD); co-curator of the German Pavilion at the 23rd Milano Triennale (2022); curator for the International Biennial-Residency VeiculoSUR (2019-2021); member of Another Roadmap for Art and Education Network (2012-YTD); contributor of Rab-Rab Press (2014-YTD); and co-founded the Nomad Agency/Archive of Emergent Studies (2011-YTD).
Corin Sworn is an artist working with performance, video, distributed narrative, digital collage and installation whose work is shown at art institutions and film festivals worldwide. Solo exhibitions in institutions include Inverleith House, Edinburgh; The Common Guild, Glasgow; Neuer Aachener Kunstverein, Aachen; Chisenhale Gallery. London; Whitechapel Gallery, London; Art Now, Tate Britain, London; Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver. Sworn was one of three artists representing Scotland at the 55th Venice Biennale in 2013, participated in You Imagine What You Desire, 19th Biennale of Sydney and the 2022 Edinburgh Arts Festival. Corin was awarded the Leverhulme Prize in 2016, Max Mara Art Prize for Women in 2014 and shortlisted for the Margaret Tait award in 2018.