The Practitioners Program

L’Internationale Online and PARSE, the two research and publishing platforms placed at HDK-Valand (Gothenburg, Sweden) with a common aim of expanding the field of art production and publishing, are launching The Practitioners Program. By bringing together L’Internationale Online and PARSE, we seek to trigger synergies between different strands of research, methods and vocabularies in publishing. 

The Practitioners Program brings an individual artist or art collective to the research context of HDK-Valand through its associated platforms L’Internationale Online and PARSE. The aim of the program is to invite an artist to produce a body of work in relation to the current research frameworks and to follow their creative and research process.  

The program gives the artist(s) the opportunity to pursue research and/or realize a specific project while drawing on L’Internationale Online and PARSE’s resources. During the course of the program, the artist(s) will create a project that engages with the institution’s research community and will be expected to make one public presentation. The artist may work with an exhibition, performance, screening, or installation which will be made available on the L’Internationale Online and PARSE platforms. Furthermore, the artist will be invited to present the work to one of the major partnering art institutions of the confederation L’Internationale. Contact with other disciplines at HDK-Valand is encouraged. Where possible, new relationships with scholars, researchers and institutes connected to LIO and PARSE are formed.

The Practitioners Program will support the relationship between art and research by providing artists of any discipline with the space and time to work on a nascent project, offering access to the intellectual and archival resources of PARSE, L’Internationale Online, HDK-Valand and the museums part of L’Internationale confederation.

We are thrilled to invite Aykan Safoğlu to pilot the program in the fall of 2020. Aykan Safoğlu was born in Istanbul and graduated from the Art in Context MA program at Universität der Künste, Berlin. He received his MFA in Photography from the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College, NY. His works cultivate relationships and even friendship among cultural, geographical, linguistic, and temporal boundaries. Through his work in multiple media including film, photography, and performance, Safoğlu conducts open-ended investigations into cultural identity, creativity, and kinship.

In addition to his latest solo exhibitions weekend at The Pill, Istanbul (2020); ziyaret/visit at Kevin Space, Vienna (2019) and Off-White Tulips at Ystads Konstmuseum (2016), he has recently participated in such group exhibitions as: The Crack Begins Within, 11th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art (2020) Imagined Communities, 21st Contemporary Art Biennial Sesc_Videobrasil (2019); Klassensprachen, Kunsthalle Düsseldorf (2018); ğ – soft g – queer forms migrate, Schwules Museum* Berlin (2017); Father Figures are Hard to Find, nGbK Berlin (2016); Home Works 7, Ashkal Alwan (Beirut, 2015); Sight and Sounds: Turkey, Jewish Museum (New York, 2014). In 2018, Safoğlu was a fine arts fellow at Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart. He was an artist-in-residence at Istanbul’s Tarabya Cultural Academy in 2019, at Beirut’s Ashkal Alwan in 2016, as well as at Rijkakademie van beeldende kunsten’s SAHA Studio in Amsterdam during 2014-2015. Recipient of the Grand Prize of the City of Oberhausen at the 59th International Short Film Festival Oberhausen (2013), Safoğlu was invited to participate in the public programs of the 15th Istanbul Biennial (2017) and the March Meeting 2017 at the Sharjah Art Foundation.

Safoğlu is currently a PhD-candidate at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. Aykan Safoğlu will present the outcomes of his research and developmental work in a series of unfoldings: in January and April 2021 as part of L’Internationale Online’s e-pub ”Class and Re-Distribution”, in February 2021 as part of PARSE’s publication on the format of the exhibition and in September 2021 in an exhibition at SALT, Istanbul.
 
About L’Internationale
L’Internationale confederation gathers seven major European art institutions: Moderna galerija (MG+MSUM, Ljubljana, Slovenia); Museo Reina Sofía (Madrid, Spain); MACBA Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (Spain); Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst Antwerpen (M HKA, Antwerp, Belgium); Muzeum Sztuki Nowoczesnej w Warszawie (Warsaw, Poland), SALT (Istanbul and Ankara, Turkey) and Van Abbemuseum (VAM, Eindhoven, Netherlands), which team up with HDK-Valand Academy (Gothenburg, Sweden) and the National College of Art and Design (NCAD, Dublin, Ireland). The confederation and its partners are working now within the frame of the project Our Many Europes, co-funded by the Creative Europe programme of the European Union, featuring over 40 public activities including exhibitions, workshops and research.