Head: Univ. Prof. Bouchra
Khalili
Operating across the Institute of Arts and Society, the newly developed department
of Artistic Strategies offers teaching of theory and practice, situating at its core questions of artistic methods in
relation to social dynamics and global challenges.
The purpose of the teaching is not to teach a comprehensive
and final definition of Artistic Strategies, but rather to focus on artists’ work and methods in order to investigate how
artists define innovative approaches to respond to and reflect on the complex contexts in which artworks are produced
and shown.
Rather than a programmatic conception of art and its making, courses and seminars invite the
students to investigate the dynamics at stake in the development, the production, and the implementation of artistic strategies:
artistic eco-systems, historical, cultural, intellectual, social and political contexts.
Such investigations
rely on an interdisciplinary and transversal approach articulating a wide range of art practices, media, and fields of knowledge.
The teaching of Artistic Strategies focuses on how artists with their work and methods provide innovative tools to envision
potential new forms of social relations and communities, subjectivities, knowledge production and dissemination, and
new forms of perceptions and comprehension of the challenges of our time.
Labs of Artistic Strategies and
workshops welcome students from all departments to develop a project from the first stage to completion. The purpose
of the course of those labs is to allow students to develop their own artistic strategies based on the specifics of
their projects rather than on a doctrine or formula. Collegiality and interdisciplinarity are key to the labs. The students
develop their individual projects in dialogue with a group, allowing them to collectively contribute to each other's projects.
Exploring the challenges of our time and investigating how artists develop strategies to reflect them, involves articulating
the global and the local, opening the doors of the university to other contexts. This articulation is developed via a strong
commitment to international collaborations, engaging with artists, cultural practitioners and educators through
workshops, site visits, symposiums, exhibitions, and publications.
For the next two years, the department
aims to explore questions of representation and self representation of excluded groups and interrelations of artistic practices
and strategies of visibility in public spaces (public spaces is to be understood from a wide perspective, from the physical
public space to public debate).
This exploration includes invitations extended to guests to interact with the students,
and to contribute to workshops and public programs such as lectures, performances, and panels, among other forms of
implementations and collaborations.
