SEMINAR SERIES // RESIDENT GOOD, RESIDENT EVIL, RESIDENT CONFUSION?
DEVELOPING CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES ON THE GREAT CONTEMPORARY ART RESIDENCY COMPLEX
Seminar 4: The Going Away Artists on Safari
In this seminar, Rachel will begin to sketch a map of the deeper histories that might inform the practice of some international artist’s residencies. She will test the proposition that certain aspects of residency thinking are subtly embedded in Western-centric ideas that arose in the later nineteenth century, and that were themselves informed by eighteenth century practices of privileged cultural tourism.
She will ask if this accusation is justified, and if yes, invite discussion about what do we do about it. As a possible framework for thinking about possible ideas and solutions, she will explore ongoing discussions about international biennials: cultural loci where the tensions and possibilities of melding the local and the global have received particular attention.
As always, the session will include plenty of scope for group members’ ideas, opinions and arguments.
This seminar series is part of PRAKSIS’s fourteenth residency Now that’s what I call an artist’s residency!. It sets out to anatomise the diverse range of phenomena that come under the title, “artist’s residency”. It proposes that, by asking questions about artist’s residencies, we can expose and probe many of the foundational questions, problems and contradictions that both bedevil and enable present-day artmaking.
We will almost certainly not arrive at definitive answers to the issues we encounter. However, by placing the theories and practices of artists’ residencies on the bigger, global contemporary art map, we can potentially make more informed decisions about where we wish to place ourselves, and our own practices, on that map – and devise strategies for getting there.
This seminar series is designed to be of interest to anyone presently working in, or thinking critically about, the institutions of contemporary art. Everyone is welcome and free discussion is warmly invited.
