ART 330 Intuition: Mixed Media Art Studio & Curatorial Practice Business, Liberal Arts & Social Sciences Program Summer 2017 June 9-Week 2 Course - Prague

Contemporary art is a unique field of practice, where artistic and curatorial approaches meet with cross-disciplinary topics and forms of engagement. It strives not only to picture or comment on, but also to question and attempt to transform the modalities of the world we live in, dealing with psychological, sociological, political, economical and other issues. This course is a practical studio course, which aims to reveal (some of) the complexities of contemporary art approaches through studio work and a curatorial assistance in installing a final exhibition of the works produces. It therefore also explores the similarities and boundaries between the work of a curator and an artist. The students will be able to explore various artistic techniques from traditional media, such as painting and sculpture to new media, such as video or performance. They will also learn some basics on how to prepare and install an exhibition, including not only the practical side of distributing artworks into a given space, but especially the conceptual reasoning behind such work. The selected theme for both the studio workshop and curatorial workshop is 'movement'. This will give us enough space to explore each student's take on the possible explanations of the theme, as well as a secure a unifying ground for our joint work on the final exhibition. The course will lead to an exhibition opening in the studio space at MeetFactory, which will be open to friends & public on the final day.

The course is led by an established visual artist, Jana Babincová, who graduated from the Fine Arts Academy in Brno in 2006 and has shown her work a number or galleries, museums and art centers in the Czech Republic and internationally since. Jana is trained as a painter, however her recent work also involves large-scale installations, performances, videos and intermedia work (www.janababincova.info). Karina Kottová has been a lecturer at the AAU since 2010. After four years of working as a chief-curator in MeetFactory, she was in 2015 appointed the director of the Jindrich Chalupecky Society, which among other projects organizes the most prestigious Czech award for artists, the Jindrich Chalupecký Award. She also continues her independent curatorial practice (www.cjch.cz, https://www.works.io/karina-kottova)

This course will meet at the contemporary art center MeetFactory, in Smichov, Prague 5, one of Prague's most vibrant spaces for contemporary art, hosting three galleries, a theatre, music hall and 15 artistic studios. The students will therefore also have daily access to the artistic life at MeetFactory.