THE SWERVE is an interdisciplinary Time Based Media Lab for the unpredictable. It is also a platform for performance, the moving image, sound, experimentation and socialization, embracing spontaneous situated encounters. This semester THE SWERVE welcomes Merle Radtke, since 2018 curator and director of Kunsthalle Münster. Together with her, we will look at the institution as a place for gathering and examine what it means to create a space for encounters, whereby knowing is reconceived as an embodied practice, one that is intimate and firmly rooted in emotional and reciprocal presence.

By looking at examples of encounters in and around exhibitions, we will think about how our shared communal condition can be playfully rechoreographed to offer new perspectives and nurture the ability to resonate while facing an increasing societal division and polarisation. We will have a look at the policiy of programming, which includes examining various strategies to build (temporary) relationships. We will look at the exhibition as a stage, as a social situation, that offers space for vulnerability, imagination and dreams, as a space that allows its visitors to immerse themselves in other forms of knowledge—simply by moving through the exhibition within time and space.

Together, we would like to look at different experiences in and around institutions. That’s why all participants are invited to share experiences of encounters they memorize, encounters with an artwork, a film, a sound, with an exhibiton space, the foyer of a museum, encounters with visitors or employees. It might be an observation of a specific sitution or a feeling, even if it might seem allegedly unspectacular. By bringing together the position of being a visitor and/or a creator, we will examine how predictable and unpredictable encounters might be and what might influence them.

At the second meeting at the Kunsthalle Münster, we will examine the aspect of hosting and questions of reformatting a space, as well as different formats of time based media. What does the exhibition space might be besides a place for the presentation of artworks? How does the spatial organization might influence an experience, an encounter? What does it mean to spend the night at an institution, what might it offer besides an exhibiton? The sleepover can be seen as an experiment to get another perspective on the institution beyond its regular perception, for the hosts and the guests. A stay from sunrise to sunset might offer new insights.

During the excursion to Münster, there is also the chance to visit parts of the collection of artworks in the public space, that derives from former editions of Skulptur Projekte. In Münster the art in the public space has marked the appearance of the city, which has itself become the subject matter of artistic concern. It negotiates a transformation in artistic practice in the course of the 20th century, geared toward a redefinition of the relationship between art and the public. 

More info will follow soon!

max 15 Teilnehmer*innen

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