Application deadline: April 7, 2017
Geneva School of Art and Design (HEAD)
Visual Arts Department
Boulevard James-Fazy 15
1201 – Genève
Switzerland
At Work.Master, HEAD – Genève’s Master’s program devoted to contemporary artistic practices, we all come together because we feel the necessity to create multiple and complex, but relevant visions on what art and the world could be. We esteem it to be an important incubator for emergent strategies.
This year, we have initiated projects and classes with artists such as Marie Angeletti, Stuart Bailey, Mathieu Copeland, Verena Dengler, Fabrice Gygi, Tobias Madison, Paulina Olowska, Mai-Thu Perret, Lili Reynaud-Dewar, Laurent Schmid, and Dan Solbach, to name just a few. Each of these real world projects at 1:1 scale has been primarily shaped by the work of the students themselves, as well as by these artists’ specific modes of production and ways of conceptualizing ideas—by their spirit and their wit.
Work.Master takes the risk of proposing a heterogeneous program. Rather than offering a formatted curriculum, Work.Master seeks to adapt it to the sensibility of each personality it gathers, to the inventiveness of each methodology it helps building, and to the non-orthodox, emancipated propositions of its students. For it is Work.Master’s ambition to help them developing highly personal and singular—if not eccentric—conceptions of what it means to produce art today.
Laboratory-like situations are created to help crafting steady relationships between guests or faculty members and students, not just temporary encounters but relationships that will last during the course of their two-years program and further. The idea is to be able to wander and ponder, to take walks and trips, to extend conversations beyond their reasonable length, to produce books, exhibitions, and many other formats apt to challenge the conditions of reception and production of art, to get involved with Genève’s art scene and to project one’s work both locally and internationally.
In the same spirit, seminars are led by renowned theoreticians and historians such as Lars Bang Larsen, Yann Chateigné, Catherine Chevalier, Jill Gasparina, Christophe Kihm, Genveviève Loup, Charlotte Laubard and David Zerbib. They enrich and complete an educational philosophy that aims to place the students’ practices at the centre of the curriculum and to shape the bilingual program according to these practices.
Besides promoting discursive formats and relays, Work.Master also conceives its pedagogical role as one of a producer, in collaboration with major institutions, independent spaces and selected individuals. Past and recent projects include, among several others: Codex with Pierre Leguillon at CCA Wattis, San Francisco; Territories of Assembly with Markus Miessen at Art Sonje Center, Seoul; Off the Stove with Vittorio Brodmann at LiveInYourHead, Genève; houhouHaHa with Marie-Antoinette Chiarenza at CAAP, Genève; Performance Proletarians with Lili Reynaud-Dewar and Benjamin Valenza at Le Magasin, Grenoble; Radical Enlightenment with Lars Bang Larsen at Adelaide Festival; Room Mate Education with Tobias Kaspar at Studio Roma at Istituto Svizzero di Roma; The Exhibition of a Film by Mathieu Copeland at the Biennial of Moving Images, Genève, Centre Pompidou, Paris and Tate Modern, London; Poetics of Relation with Uriel Orlow and Bettina Malcomess at the WITS School of Art in Johannesburg; Orgon Lunch by LapTopRadio at MA*GA museum in Gallarate, the Swiss Institute of Milan and Kunstmuseum Luzern; If Boa Vista by Armando Andrade Tudela at LiveInYourHead, Geneva; Small Modest Bad Blood Opera by Lili Reynaud-Dewar at the last Venice Biennial; Dan Solbach at project 1049 in Gstaad, and recently a series of performances and a video essay Radical Chic with Verena Dengler, Communità Olivetti with Donatella Bernardi at Swiss Institute in Milan or a diving into art scenes of Los Angeles with Tobias Madison and friends. Una Szeeman and Bodhan Stehlik, Isabelle Cornaro, Andreas Dobler, Jill Gasparina and others are developing common projects as well, Charlotte Laubard and also Tiphanie Blanc are each working on the conception of exhibitions in Paris with a group of students.
For more information, please visit HEAD – Genève website and Work.Master’s blog.
