[artinfo] Academy. Learning from Art

[e-Flux]

Academy. Learning from Art
September 15 – November 26, 2006
Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst, Antwerpen, Belgium
Opening: September 14, 2006, 9 p.m. in Antwerp

Academy. Learning from the Museum
September 16 – November 26, 2006
Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, Netherlands
Opening: September 15, 2006, 7 p.m. in Eindhoven

Symposium: Learning and Teaching
September 14, 2006, 2 – 6 p.m.
MuHKA Media Antwerp:
Mary Kelly, Dieter Lesage, Irit Rogoff et al.

September 15, 2006, 3 – 7 p.m. Van Abbemuseum Eindhoven:
Rosi Braidotti, Sarat Maharaj,
Jan Verwoert et al.

“Academy” is an initiative of Siemens Arts 
Program in cooperation with the Department of 
Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths College in London, 
Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst Antwerpen, and Van 
Abbemuseum in Eindhoven.

Curators Bart de Baere and Dieter Roelstrate 
(Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst Antwerpen), Charles 
Esche and Kerstin Niemann (Van Abbemuseum 
Eindhoven), Irit Rogoff (Goldsmiths College), and 
Angelika Nollert (Siemens Arts Program)

Academy. Learning from Art
How do we expand our notions of teaching and 
learning beyond the frames assigned by formal 
education? With this question the focus shifts 
from art academies as institutions per se, to 
perceiving them as extended aspirational drives. 
With that it is possible to distinguish between 
teaching geared to a clear output and teaching 
that focuses on possibilities for an enabling 
interaction between subjectivities and social 
organisms. The aim is to understand the core 
concepts by which this type of learning occurs: 
exchange, reflection, speculation, and 
fallibility.
The Antwerp exhibition presents artists’ projects 
that envisage mediation between artistic 
practices, which are conceptualised as modes of 
learning how to engage with the world. The 
project’s foreground is the communicative quality 
of artistic gestures which act out the 
possibilities of “academy” as learning, 
analysing, and communicating.

Additionally, this project wishes to speculate on 
the possible emergence of the concept of “the 
civic” in order to open up a much broader sphere 
of “self-organisation” among cultural impulses 
and phenomena. Our understanding of the civic 
presents it as the location of a politics of 
singularity. The civic can become a forum in 
which numerous initiatives, both individual and 
collective, may come together beyond the 
representation of identity-based group interests.

The exhibition hopes to engage with artists as 
persons with a civic attitude, with an interest 
in a pedagogy of action, with artists as both 
involved persons and agents of involvement.

Artists Uli Aigner; Herman Asselberghs, Dieter 
Lesage & Ina Wudtke; Dockx & Mast; Jimmie Durham; 
Gelitin; Johanna Kandl; Mary Kelly; Modulator; 
Paulina Olowska & Lucy McKenzie; Lia Perjovschi; 
Pistoletto; Raqs Media Collective; Apolonija 
Sustersic; Joëlle Tuerlinckx; et al.

Academy. Learning from the Museum
The Van Abbemuseum project is regarded as an 
ongoing process. It aims to ask what it may be 
possible to learn from the museum beyond what the 
museum sets up to offer. By producing an 
alternative set of principles for teaching and 
learning, and by viewing the museum as a 
cumulative archive of experiences and dynamics 
that expand beyond the notion of a collection of 
objects. While traditionally the museum sets up 
an idealized notion of what or how one should 
learn, "Learning from the Museum" wishes to 
address several questions. These include: What 
does the museum make possible beyond itself? How 
can the museum become a series of exchanges and 
responses, and how can it move beyond acting as a 
vehicle of established values?

Groups of activists, theorists, artists, 
students, archivists, librarians, and 
philosophers have been invited to the museum to 
help answer these questions. They will work with 
the collection, archives and other resources, 
including the staff. Instead of studying the 
museum, the conditions are being set up for the 
museum to produce some new models of knowledge 
and to engage visitors in new ways of thinking 
about the experience of coming into the museum. 
‘Academy’ is therefore a pilot project for 
further investigations of the new possibilities 
for education and knowledge exchange that the Van 
Abbemuseum will develop in the future. “Academy. 
Learning from the Museum” also serves as a part 
of a long-term program funded by the Mondriaan 
Foundation.

Contributors Irit Rogoff & Deepa Naik; Anselm 
Franke, John Palmesino & Eyal Weizman; Jan 
Gerber, Susanna Lang, Sebastian Luetgert & 
Florian Schneider; Liam Gillick & Edgar Schmitz; 
Janna Graham, Valeria Graziano & Susan Kelly; 
Jean-Paul Martinon & Rob Stone; Mårten Spångberg 
& Bojana Cvejic;, et al.


Publication The publication on the series 
“Academy” will appear in September 2006.


Further information and Press contact:
Siemens Arts Program
Annika Schoemann
Phone: +49 / 89 / 6 36 33 50 8
annika.schoemann at siemens.com
<
http://www.siemensartsprogram.com> http://www.siemensartsprogram.com


Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst Antwerpen
Leuvenstraat 32
2000 Antwerp, Belgium
Phone: +32 32 60 99 99
Fax: +32 32 16 24 86
info at muhka.be
<
http://www.muhka.be> http://www.muhka.be

Van Abbemuseum
Bilderdijklaan 10
5611 NH Eindhoven, The Netherlands
Phone: +31 40 238 1000
Fax:	 +31 40 246 0680
info at vanabbemuseum.nl
<
http://www.vanabbemuseum.nl> http://www.vanabbemuseum.nl