May 9–13, 2015
Application deadline: January 10, 2015
Bari, Italy
www.vesselartproject.org/international-curatorial-retreat-2015
Vessel and MADA (Monash Art Design and Architecture) are pleased to announce the 2015 International Curatorial Retreat, which will take place May 9–13 in and around Bari, Italy.
After three editions of Vessel’s self-organized International Curatorial Workshop, they will collaborate with the Curatorial Practice Program at MADA in Melbourne, Australia, in 2015 to host a new event: the International Curatorial Retreat.
The retreat gathers together a small number of curators selected by open call, Curatorial PhD candidates from MADA, a group of invited tutors, and Vessel and MADA staff. The four-day short course takes as its subject curatorial writing, and will be comprised of workshops, seminars, and presentations led by arts professionals engaged in the theory and practice of writing. For many of us, writing is an active negotiation of issues of translation and knowledge production. The retreat will explore the process of writing, particularly within the framework of what we are calling, with Portuguese sociologist Boaventura de Sousa Santos ‘epistemologies of the South.’ The event is designed to be a short course, but also a space for retreat. It takes place in Puglia, itself a very special environment, and will encourage conviviality, hospitality and speculative thinking.
The tutors include Latitudes, an independent curatorial office initiated in 2005 by Max Andrews and Mariana Cánepa Luna, that works in an international context from and in Barcelona, Spain; Tara McDowell, Associate Professor and Director of Curatorial Practice at MADA; Alexandra Ross, Post-doctoral Fellow, Centre for Curating the Archive at Michaelis Art School, University of Cape Town; and Tirdad Zolghadr, a curator and writer currently affiliated with Al Quds, Bard College and the International Academy of Art in Ramallah. Additional tutors to be confirmed.
Participation in the International Curatorial Retreat requires a payment of 350 euro. This fee covers room and board; the workshop itself is offered free of charge. Successful applicants are responsible for return travel to Puglia. Applicants of all nationalities are encouraged to apply, and no certificate of study or academic degree is required. The course will be delivered in English.
Additional information about the structure and objectives of the International Curatorial Retreat, as well as instructions for applying, may be found here. The deadline is January 10, 2015, and applicants will be notified of the results in early February 2015.
Vessel is a platform for the development of a critical discourse related to cultural, social, economic and political processes taking place in the South of Italy and in the Euro-Mediterranean area. Vessel is interested in exploring socially engaged practices in relation to their context of emergence, to their geographies and psycho-geographies, to their imbrication into fixed political ideologies; Vessel investigates how social imagination could be enhanced and how its concrete products could articulate strategies of critical resistance against the current dominant representation.
Launched in March 2014, the Curatorial Practice Program at MADA plans to develop as an international centre for curatorial models that reflect critically on how we engage with our cultures, our cities, and our world. It fosters curatorial projects that test the limits of arts institutions. It supports advanced scholarly work on exhibitions and their histories, conditions of art’s public appearance, and the politics of display. The program nurtures spaces of retreat to allow forms of research other than those that normally occur within the framework of educational institutions.
Monash University Art Design & Architecture
900 Dandenong Rd
Caulfield East, Victoria 3145 Australia
T +61 3 9903 1837
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