Photo: Aleks Slota
TRANSART 2020 MFA SUMMER INTENSIVE
Transart’s 2020 MFA summer intensive will require us to re-think what shared space means. Rather than a traditional residency format we will think this intensive as a collective research studio. Over the course of the two week intensive, the Transart 2020 cohort will participate in workshops, movement sessions & one-on-one curator conversations while also running a public symposium on the theme of Sympoiesis. The symposium will include talks, conversations, a video program, a reading room and daily prompts for practice.
INTENSIVE PROGRAM
PRE-INTENSIVE
FRIDAY JUNE 5TH
9am - 1pm - Global Intersections – New Practices in the Artist Presentation with Jean Marie Casbarian
(Group Session)
JULY 10TH & 11TH - Individual meetings with Jean Marie Casbarian
SESSION ONE - AUGUST 3 - 8
(This program uses NYC time)
Monday August 3
8am - Welcome & opening meeting
8:30am - 1pm - Global Intersections group session with JM & guest reviewer
Tuesday August 4
8am - Movement session with Kate Hilliard
9:30am - 12:30pm - Workshop AR in art, archive and activism
WEDNESDAY AUGUST 5
8am - deadline to submit final materials for website. (SQ will post and send links to all dialogue participants
8am - Movement session with Kate Hilliard
9:30am - Dialogue planning & rehearsal session
12:00 - Sympoiesis opens with talk by Tinashe Mushakavanhu
THURSDAY AUGUST 6
8am - Movement session with Kate Hilliard
9:45am - Dialogue planning & rehearsal session
11:30am - Invisibility Lab with Gabrielle Senza
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FRIDAY AUGUST 7
8am - Movement session with Kate Hilliard
10:00am - Symposium: Screening + Q&A
11:00am - Sympoiesis session: ANTIMUNDO with Oscar Santillán
SATURDAY AUGUST 8
9am - 12pm - Workshop Utopia Amiss with Sayed Sattar Hasan
SESSION TWO - AUGUST 10 - 15
MONDAY AUGUST 10
8am - 1pm - The Translocal Neighbourhood Workshop with Michael Bowdidge
TUESDAY AUGUST 11
8am - 1pm - The Translocal Neighbourhood Workshop with Michael Bowdidge
Curator conversations with Miguel López (Kyambi & Lopez)
WEDNESDAY AUGUST 12
Symposium Sessions
8am - Fluid Presence
with Sheila Lynch & Gabrielle Senza with Susanne Martin
9am - Correspondence
with Rudi Cossovich, Sarah Jane Eaton, Susanne Martin & Michael Bowdidge
10am - Voice / Release / Metonymy
with Syowia Kyambi, Peter Lopez, Nathalie Anguezomo & Lorenzo Sandoval
11am - Symposium keynote conversation
with Elvira Dyangani Ose and the Transart MFA class of 2020
THURSDAY AUGUST 13
8am - 1pm - The Translocal Neighbourhood Workshop with Michael Bowdidge
FRIDAY AUGUST 14
8am - Symposium session: *** with Fayen D’Evie
9:30am - External Examiner meeting
10:30am - APM meeting (Lopez, Anya, Chris)
11am - Programme Committee meeting (Susie, Michael, Chris, Anya)
11am - 2pm - Symposium session - Unambitious Stripper workshop with Isabel Lewis
SATURDAY AUGUST 15
9am - 10:45am - Closing meeting / celebration
11am - A notso Short Fest curated by Jean Marie Casbarian
See the full symposium program here
3-DAY WORKSHOP (OVER 2 MONTHS)
GLOBAL INTERSECTIONS – NEW PRACTICES IN THE ARTIST PRESENTATION
WITH JEAN MARIE CASBARIAN
Through group and one-on-one conversations, this workshop will aim to develop the skills needed to document and disseminate your final portfolio for thesis, dialogue, and symposia. We will discuss the many ways in which to navigate virtual platforms as a positive avenue for developing strong professional relationships while building a foundation for artistic expression and presentation.
Jean Marie Casbarian (b. Aberdeen, MD) is an interdisciplinary artist who works across photography, video, sound, writing and performance. She holds an MFA from Milton Avery School of Art at Bard College, New York (2000) and a BFA from the University of Colorado at Denver (1987). Her artistic practice lies in her interests around the reinterpretation of memory, personal fictions, migratory space and the essence of time. Along with exhibiting her works throughout the United States, Europe, Central America and Asia, Casbarian has received a number of awards and artist residencies including the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation nomination, The LaNapoule Foundation Grant in LaNapoule, France, the Chicago Artist's Assistance Project Grant, an Associateship with The Rocky Mountain Women's Institute and has been a Research Associate with Five Colleges, Inc (Amherst, MA).
3-DAY WORKSHOP
THE TRANSLOCAL NEIGHBOURHOOD WITH MICHAEL BOWDIDGE
As an institution we have constantly sought to understand and occupy spaces of liminality and in-betweenness, always responding to what we find and where we are in a spirit of optimism and openness. Given the enormous changes that the events of the last few months have brought, it now seems both urgent and necessary that we bring our creativity to bear upon one of the biggest questions that we now face as a species: How can we be together when we are apart?
We do not confront this conundrum alone – thankfully there are artists and theorists who paved our way along this difficult path, whose thoughts and actions we can now experiment with and re-evaluate with a view to shining some light upon the darkness.
The key idea here is the notion of translocality, which can be understood “as an expression of “simultaneous situatedness across different locales” and “connectedness to a variety of other locales” (Brickell and Datta, 2011: 4), no matter the proximity” (Knowles, 2016: 4). We will explore this notion in discussions and collaborative creative exercises over the course of several days, in order to survey, map and understand our translocal neighbourhood.
Artists and theorists whose work we will examine include: Rachelle Viader Knowles, Jorge Luis Borges, Grant Kester, Katherine Brickell and Ayona Datta, Arjun Appandurai, Ewa Wojtowicz, Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz, Guy Debord, and Suzanne Lacy and Linda Pruess. This is a field that has been extensively theorised, but the implications of these theories have been explored in practice less often than might be supposed. This workshop attempts to re-address this imbalance in in an urgent and timely manner.
Michael Bowdidge (PhD) is an artist who works with found objects, images and sound. He received his undergraduate degree in Fine Art from Middlesex Polytechnic in 1989, and completed his doctoral research at the University of Edinburgh in 2012. Michael works in a variety of educational contexts, which include academic and community settings. All of these activities enrich his teaching practice, and by extension, his creative output – as, for him, these two areas of endeavour are fundamentally intertwined.
1-DAY WORKSHOP
AR through Art, archive and Activism with Luke Garwood
“Augmented Reality is a new Form of Art, but it is Anti-Art. It is Primitive, which amplifies its Viral Potency. It is Bad Painting challenging the definition of Good Painting. It shows up in the Wrong Places. It Takes the Stage without permission. It is Relational Conceptual Art that Self-Actualizes.”
–Manifest.AR
This demo/workshop provides participants with an overview of augmented reality (AR) as a technology, and platform, to anchor digital content to the physical world. The recent push in AR’s capabilities, along with its dissemination and ease of development, has made AR a powerful medium available for makers to create works that re-contextualize, capture, and disrupt physical spaces, objects, and bodies. Over the course of the workshop we will look at examples of this in action, discuss its effectiveness and applications to existing creative practices, as well as build our own AR project. No previous programming or 3D modelling experience needed, but we will utilize the Unity game engine for development, as well as photogrammetry to create digital models for content.
Luke Garwood is a hybrid media artist, dancer, and choreographer based in Toronto, Canada. Garwood has over a decade of experience as a collaborator with many of Toronto’s foremost dance makers. He has received 6 Dora Mavor Moore nominations – including an award in 2017 for best ensemble – and a national Faust award in Germany in 2015. In parallel with his dance career, Garwood pursues a passion for programming and technology. He attained a BDes in Digital Futures from OCAD U, where he received the Dr. Eugene A. Poggetto and Dorothy Hoover awards. For three years, Garwood was a member of the Public Visualization Lab where his duties included motion capture recording, 3D modelling and animation, augmented reality app development, and machine learning research. As a creator, Garwood draws from his performance background to create hybrid media pieces that have an element that either thematically or literally addresses the body in digital space. His recent works include Ephemeral, an augmented reality dance piece, Wounded Woods, a photography and AR installation created with Jeremy Mimnagh for Citadel + Compagnie and Canada’s 150, and In Shift, a participatory VR and motion capture installation featured at the Metro Toronto Convention Center and the 2019 dance: made in Canada/fait au Canada festival.
1-DAY WORKSHOP
Unambitious stripper with Isabel Lewis
Departing from feminist sociologist Roslyn Wallach Bologh's notion of "erotic sociability" as a form of interhuman sociality and an alternative to relational modes of competition, conflict, and coercion, this workshop will focus on the tuning and heightening of the senses in order to facilitate a state of hyper-presence that will be the aid towards generative and affective forms of being and dancing together, with and for one another. The figure of an unambitious stripper serves as a guide to connecting with our inner worlds in order to become more radically receptive to our outer worlds. "Unambitiousness" is central to this investigation. The outward-oriented gaze that typically reaches out to address and arrest the viewer is turned in on the self in this scenario. Within each of our immediate kinespheres, looking at the surfaces of our own skin, sending the gaze further inward through the epidermis and into our fleshy insides a dance will emerge that, firstly given to oneself, can be offered to the other. This workshop uses guided imaginative exercises combined with playful physicality to approach and reconnect with the human and nonhuman presences we share space with. In this workshop dance is a doing and undoing of oneself in relation to the other. We will move along a continuum of becoming an object of interest and desire and being drawn out as an interested and desiring subject.
We will talk about risk, support, safety, freedom, entanglement, surprises, multiplicity, complexity, the future...We will at times alternately watch and perform for one another. We will be generous and kind to ourselves and one another.
Isabel Lewis lives and works in Berlin. Trained in literary criticism, dance, and philosophy, Lewis’ work ranges from lecture-performances and workshops to listening sessions and parties with a focus on exploring alternative forms of sociality. Her work has been presented at Tate Modern, London (2017); Ming Contemporary Art Museum, Shanghai (2016 – 2017); Dia Foundation, New York (2016); Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2016); Göteborg International Biennial for Contemporary Art, Sweden (2015) and Tanz Im August, Berlin (2015) among others.
1-DAY WORKSHOP
UTOPIA AMISS WITH SAYED SATTAR HASAN
Join Sayed Sattar Hasan as he discusses the notion of utopia and considers the value of utopian thought in artistic practice.
The workshop will be presented online within Oslo City Hall, Norway, which is home to the Nobel Peace Prize Ceremony. The session will commence with a walk and tour of the mid 20th Century murals that decorate the vast ceremonial halls, which depict scenes of Norwegian social history and utopian visions, with a key focus on Wili Middelfarts mural, Det Gror (It Grows). These grand backdrops are part of Hasan’s everyday scenery as he undertakes a two-year studio residency within the building. For Hasan the location reveals how depictions of Utopia lose relevance over time, while also provoking the question, ‘What should utopia look like today?’