CLASS BONVICINI

Prof.in: Monica Bonvicini

Guest Prof.in 2017/2018: Suza Husse

Universität der Künste

Raum 91, 92, 95a

Hardenbergstraße 33, 10623 Berlin

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About

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Monica Bonvicini is pleased to take over the tutorship of the sculpture class in Universität der Künste Berlin (UdK), previously directed by Tony Cragg and other renowned artists. Bonvicini, who has been leading study programmes and teaching in various schools, the most recently in Akademie der bildenden Künste Wien, envisions the UdK sculpture class a perpetual exchange between the enrolled students and artists, architects and professionals from other fields. As such, she has launched first interdisciplinary collaborations that gave the base to the study programme in 2017/18, and which will be developed during Bonvicini’s years in the University.
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The class begins with an examination of the crossroad between Minimalism and Conceptual Art, two movements that keep resonating in many research-based art practices today. Considering the discursive legacy of these movements and Rosalind Krauss’ theoretical work, the sculpture as the study subject is understood in an expanded field, and thus takes different medium forms, including multimedia and language. A special attention is paid to context, site, and material and immaterial architectures, in which art is produced, presented and distributed. Finally, critical, feminist, queer and political art practices constitute a big part of Bonvicini’s class curriculum.

Students are encouraged to research and practice the methods of interdisciplinary research, especially with a focus on social and political issues. Seminars and other teaching undertakings delve into the topics of contemporary conditions of economy, society, and politics, construction and production of identity and subject, sexuality, gender and gender roles, disobedience and resistance. The overall programme aims to stimulate critical thinking and build up critically-informed positioning to arts and to artistic practice. Throughout the time in the class, the students will be encouraged to develop collaborations with their colleagues and with members of other faculties of UdK.
 

Academic Year Winter 2017 - Summer 2018: Sister Stones and the Blocks of Anger + N*A*I*L*S 

in collaboration with Suza Husse

In the academic semester of 2017/18, Bonvicini invited Suza Husse to share the teaching with her. Students were invited to take part in the research projects Sister Stones and the Blocks of Anger and N*A*I*L*S, which both sought to examine migrational diaspora politics within bio-political and capitalist critique. The outcome of this collaboration was presented during the final exhibition of the academic year – Rundgang, taking the format of an appropriated nail salon. Visitors were given the possibility to receive a manicure while seated in a discursive display-space, showing and discussing economic and cultural conditions of this metier.
 

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Academic Year Winter 2018 - Summer 2019: From One to Many,

in collaboration with the Architecture-Class of Florian Riegler (UdK Berlin)

For the 2018/19 academic semester Bonvicini initiated a collaboration with the master program of Professor Florian Riegler (Professor Entwerfen und Baukonstruktion, Institut für Architektur und Städtebau) at the Universität der Künste Berlin (UdK) in order to work on a re-make of the studio 95A with the title "Studio Architecture - from one to many".
The programme starts with Mike Kelley’s Educational Complex, an installation that the artist conceived in 1995. Assembling the miniatures of different buildings, in which Kelley received his education over the years, the work becomes a model of a fictional architectural complex as a psychological embodiment of Kelley’s campus. School as an architectural genre is a type of disciplinary architecture. The class seeks to interrogate: What does this mean to artists and art students? How does a studio space participate in defining a subject, and what subjects have been outcomes of studio practice? And what kind of usage of physical studio spaces might reconfigure, highjack or creatively repurpose the current (neoliberal) studies, in favour of the studying ones?

The course will invite students to address physical and ideological edifices of learning, education, academia, the university in which they find themselves and the curriculum which they chose through a number of different viewpoints. Propositions for novel schooling will be imagined in multiple reading sessions, meetings, workshops, experiments and outside-visits. The students will actively and materially engage with the study matter while refurbishing their own studio space according to their needs and ideas, which will constitute the major study project of the academic year.

Additionally Monica Bonvicini was the substitute professor for the class of Professor Manfred Pernice in winter semester 2018/19.