SEMINAR SERIES // RESIDENT GOOD, RESIDENT EVIL, RESIDENT CONFUSION?

DEVELOPING CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES ON THE GREAT CONTEMPORARY ART RESIDENCY COMPLEX

Seminar 6: Wherever I lay my hat, that’s my studio!

Do residencies rely on, or reinforce, a hegemonic kind of “portable art practice”? Where do they leave the kind of practice that relies strongly on local infrastructure? (Here, infrastructure could be material – for example, studio space and specific pysical tools and media; or social and psychological – for example, intimate knowledge of particular communities, or emotional attachments to people, places and things.) In this meeting, we will investigate the positive and negative pressures generated when artists are asked to load their practices into a suitcase and take them on the road.

There will be extensive scope in this session for participants to inventory the importance of ‘home’ in their practices, and review their feelings about dependence on, or independence from, the ‘non-portable’ in their work. PRAKSIS co-ordinator Nicholas Jones will be invited to review issues encountered and solutions found within previous PRAKSIS residencies: for example, Monumental-Temporal, a month-long project culminating in an exhibition of physically huge, but entirely temporary, mixed-media sculptures.

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.