21 Nov 2016

Residency opportunity at CPVA (London) and SYB (Netherlands)

King's College London's Centre for Philosophy and Visual Art (CPVA), in partnership with Kunsthuis SYB (the Netherlands), is inviting artists to apply for their first ever joint residency programme. This two-stage residency is an exciting opportunity for artists with an existing interest or curiosity in philosophy to be included in university life and develop their research, after which they will be awarded time in Kunsthuis SYB to develop (a) new piece(s) of work.

Applicants working in any discipline or media are invited write a proposal in response to a topic discussed one of two lecture series (see below for details). The resulting works (finished or in progress) will be shown at presentations at the end of the artists' stay at Kunsthuis SYB, and later in the year at a presentation at King's College.

At King's College, the selected artists will be provided with a temporary student pass (giving them access to all of King's facilities for the Spring term; 16-1-17 to 28-4-17). They will be expected to attend the lecture series they applied to, and will have the possibility of discussing their work with both the lecturer and the programme curator. King's does not offer living or working space (except for standard library work spaces), so applicants must be able to provide the necessary facilities themselves. The CPVA offers a fee of £700, and up to a further £500 in expenses. In addition, King's will host a presentation of the artists' works at the end of 2017.

At Kunsthuis SYB (which is situated in the north of the Netherlands), the two artists are invited for a six week residency (18-9-17 to 30-10-17). This includes 24-hour access to a furnished apartment and studio space, organizational guidance, artistic feedback, publicity, and a presentation at SYB. During your residency in SYB you will be connected to an artist or curator from SYB's programming committee for artistic feedback, and to a writer/art critic from SYB's writers programme who will write about your project. In addition, SYB will offer a budget of €1000 for living expenses and materials.

Applicants must be UK or EU citizens. They may work in any discipline, and applicants from any point in their career are welcome to apply. Applicants can download an appplication form from the CPVA website. Applications will consist of the completed form, a CV, and max. 5 images (of max. 2MB each). Please email completed applications to philosophyandvisualarts@gmail.com, quoting 'application Hamilton' or 'application Callanan' in the subject line.

Deadline for applications is midnight on the 1 December 2016. A final selection will be made by the 12 December 2016.

We very much look forward to receiving your application! Please feel free to contact us via email with any queries.


You can apply for the following modules:

Christopher Hamilton on The Search for Meaning
Through lectures and seminars Christopher Hamilton will explore with students some of the ways in which philosophers and others have struggled to make sense of the human condition. They will investigate ways in which both philosophical and literary texts approach this issue and what their distinctive contributions to this are. They will be encouraged to develop an open-ended, exploratory style of thought in which answers arrived at are less important than grasping the difficulty of formulating the most helpful kinds of questions in the present context. They will, however, of course, be expected to engage with texts in a rigorous manner, reading closely and carefully, exploring the ways in which different kinds of texts make different demands on readers. Key questions include: How can we make sense of life in the light of the 'death of God' or the barbarities of the twentieth century? How do violence and justice relate to the struggle to make sense of life? How do modern, bourgeois individuals make sense of their lives? Is the only real answer to the need for meaning one of resolute scepticism? The texts used in this module are: Tolstoy, A Confession; Kleist, Michael Kohlhaas; Primo Levi, If This is a Man and The Drowned and the Saved; Virginia Woolf, The Waves; and Montaigne, 'On Experience'.

John Callanan on Kant's Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals
John Callanan will be lecturing on Kant's foundational text on ethics, the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals.Questions addressed include: is it possible to define what a 'morally good' action really is? Can someone ever really know whether they have acted for truly moral reasons? Is morality itself a mere invention of human beings? Kant's answers to these questions involve fascinating and complex theories of the nature of moral value, of how the human being is valuable in itself, how human beings can be understood as belonging to 'two worlds', how moral reality can in fact be 'constructed', and finally how some questions regarding human nature and morality actually go beyond the very limits of knowledge itself.