28 Nov 2011

Correspondences and Interventions

Correspondences and Interventions
November 21 - December 2, 2011
Kingston University - London, UK
Exhibition opening December 2 - see website for details and locations

Correspondences and Interventions is a three year project initiated by the Hungarian University of Fine Arts (Budapest), Kingston University (London), Krakow Fine Arts Academy and the Stuttgart State Academy of Art and Design. The title refers both to specific places and/or types of activity. Correspondences are the intersections and transfer points in the Paris Metro. But, they refer also to the book In The Metro by the French anthropologist Marc Augé. For Augé, a correspondence, with its tunnels and walkways and escalators linking one metro line with another, is a place of transition where people move between different realities: from private to public, from home to office, from cinema to pub etc.. In conjunction with the spatiality and changing rhythms of the correspondence, an intervention can be an act, concept or object which interrupts or disturbs or reconfigures the normal flow of everyday routines. Thus, in either instance the project locates itself within sites and spatialities that lie within the horizons of daily experiences.

Correspondences and Interventions brings together forty students and twelve teachers from different disciplines in a project designed to maximise the use of its multi-disciplinary components over a fourteen day period. The project seeks to address some of the issues which are at the forefront of current discourses relating to an arts education, for example: what is an 'interdisciplinary' or �intermedia’ programme? What media and skills should it include? Furthermore, besides the museum or gallery, how do we investigate and work within virtual territories as well as public spaces as sites of exhibition and discourse? Working across this range of issues, the programme’s objective is to assist students in creating artistic practices that can both reconfigure exhibition environments as well as enable interactions where the spectator can discover, as Pipiotti Rist suggests, one’s �presence’. Thus, the project becomes a form of research that extends the boundaries of the institutional environment into territories that can invigorate dialogues between artist and spectator.
 
The acquired forms of knowledge, variety of experiences and skills students bring with them to university energizes Correspondences and Interventions. Additionally, while the mixing of disciplines occurs in many art schools, it is a practice not always widely accepted or fully understood; yet, this crossing of departmental borders, the overlapping and mixing of media and art forms, reflects the life-world of today’s art and visual media student. And, while there are a number of examples of an interdisciplinary or intermedia curriculum, the area of study is still sufficiently new to benefit from the framework at the core of Correspondences and Interventions. Probing the manner in which these disciplines and media overlap, their meshing, has facilitated the development of the project.  Yet, the objective is not simply to utilise these different means of expression but to better understand and explore  the creative possibilities of a multidisciplinary programme.

The project is an Erasmus Intensive Programme supported by a grant from Tempus.

Teachers participating in the project include: Bogdan Achimescu, Malgosia Butterwick, Artur Tajber (The Jan Matejko Academy of Fine Arts, Department of Intermedia - Kraków); Dr Maria Mencia, Dr Frank Millward, Fleeta Chew Siegel (Kingston University); Szabolcs KissPál,  Allan Siegel, Ã?gnes ElÅ‘d (Hungarian University of Fine Arts, Intermedia Department); and, Marion Butsch, Justyna Koeke, Oliver Wetterauer (State Academy of Art and Design - Stuttgart)