The Master's Program

T H E M A S T E R’ S P RO GR A M

A RT I NSTITUTE F H N W, A C A D E M Y O F A R T A N D D E S I G N A R T I N S T I T U T E / F R E I L A G E R - P L A T Z 1 C H - 4 0 2 3 B A S E L w w w. f h n w. c h / h g k / i k u w w w. i n s t i t u t - k u n s t . c h

Institut Kunst: the Master’s Program The Time of Study Time spent in the Master’s program at the Institute is divided into three spheres: — Personal (comprising time spent in the studio).

— Collective (spent in seminars and symposiums).

— Mentoring (time spent in tutor / student dialogue and plenary sessions).

During the two years of Master’s study, students are encouraged to find the affinities between these various spheres so as to better understand what makes art relevant now. Each sphere of study is crucial in learning to define one’s individual artistic language, to locate critically one’s practice within contemporary art and society at large, as well as to express successfully concerns of method, research, form and content to peers and mentors.

Studio Time and Workshops: We see studio time as the sphere in which intensive interaction with the work can occur via concentration and experimentation. This time is balanced by exchanges with other students and further defined by the workshops and many other opportunities offered by the Institute to explore technical and formal questions. Reflecting the recent redesign of our campus, we have reorganized the workshops to allow students more room to experiment with unaccustomed methods while still finding support for their questions and needs.

The Master’s curriculum as well as the structure of the campus itself emphasizes the positioning of studio time within this larger landscape of technical possibilities. The studio spaces offered by the Institute to Master’s students without their own are situated alongside those of the Bachelor students, encouraging a close coexistence between the two groups and facilitating moments of interaction. Here you can expand your practice in ways impossible in any other study context.

Expressing and Exposing the Work: We consider Mentoring to be a fundamental tool for Master’s students to engage with the other artists in the program and their work. The Mentoring process consists both of dialogues with a tutor of your choice as well as regular, group presentations during which students present work to their peers and act as critically involved audience members. The care with which these sessions are prepared and the broad experience of the teachers and guest artists participating in

Breathing, Thinking, Showing By enrolling in our Master’s program, artists must face the questions that define contemporary practice. How can the artist deal successfully with the ever-increasing flow of theory and information without being estranged from the artistic practice itself? How can the artist deal with the anxiety of never being able to wholly comprehend all the unknowns influencing an artistic practice? Productively formulating these concerns, at both a personal and collective level, is at the heart of our curriculum. To see your own practice and its relations within a broader context, to perceive which of these relations are relevant to your practice, and to understand one’s potential to communicate with our time, its challenges and social forms – all of this is included in the artistic practice itself and, therefore, our curriculum. The program invites many different active practitioners to address these concerns with you.

Our seminars and symposia are involved most often with these three inquiries: — How can we understand the many different forms of intelligence that art brings into play?

— How does the positioning of works in exhibition and public contexts affect and inform the perception and practice of art?

— How does art activate levels of consciousness and perception that are not included in traditional understandings of the rational?

Trans-humanism, Singularity, and Gender Only recently have people begun to consider the intelligence of materials and the ways in which they sense the world and report to us about it through our touch and other senses of perception.

Such considerations, which allow that inanimate life can possess strange forms of wisdom, also reflect a change in the way people encounter technology. Artificial intelligence, for instance, can be seen as a singular dialogue with machines using programming

Vernissage Mx. World. On the Million Genders of the Real / Es Welt. Eine Wirklichkeit mit tausend Geschlechtern. Kunsthalle Basel, 8. November 2015. Foto: Nici Jost.

them facilitate the students’ task of forming a language with which to address works and the contexts in which they are created. The Institute’s compact size, with only 40 Master’s students enrolled at a time, allows for close interactions among not only the members of the Master’s program, but also between the entire faculty, student body, and visiting artists and lecturers.

INNOCENCE: A SYMPOSIUM. Presentation by Diego Blas “Extrapolations and cosmology”, October 2015. Photo: Christian Knörr.

languages that surpass traditional notions of the tool. Art knows this now and always has. It is art that can be used to explore the innumerable new relationships still possible that can be constructed with the real. Moreover, it is art that has signaled that the complex relationship people have established with objects – technological or otherwise – has transformed our relationship with nature. “Gender” is the better word for this transformation than “ecology” for, if the latter names the science of conservation and suggests a certain superiority of the human over the natural, then the former names the necessity to reverse roles, reinterpret functions, and use our senses differently.

We will invite guests, artists and scientists to help us investigate how these new positions influence the production of art and the merging of technology, gender, and nature. Art production as well as exhibition production are absorbing this new thinking, expanding the borders of traditional divisions of media, questioning classical notions of form, and facilitating the use of spaces beyond the white cube, like the forest, the body, or media itself.

Production, Display, Reflection Though the history of art is built largely upon analyses of individual works, another writing of this history could involve an analysis of how these particular works altered in and were altered by exhibitions. Discourse on contemporary art is mainly furthered through exhibitions, which operate not only as spaces of presentation and display, but also as instruments with which to both formulate ideas about artistic production and transform its reception. The exhibition makes it possible for works to establish relationships with other works, the viewer and, moreover, with notions of what art is or might be. The exhibition is neither pure discourse nor mere context; it is perception and knowledge in action. The exhibition is a perceptive device in and of itself, a machine for seeing that is also an act of learning.

From this perspective, it is possible and necessary to reread the history of contemporary art on the basis of its devices for presentation; the course joins in recent attempts to consolidate an understanding of the exhibition as a cultural object and to trace its genealogy – an undertaking that involves the history of art and art criticism, as well as architecture (exhibitions are, after all, public spaces), the psychology of perception and, of course, the voices of curators and artists.

Our Master’s program reflects on these issues through work discussions and seminars in which some of the most emblematic exhibitions are investigated. Study of these exhibition models demonstrates that the ideology of the white cube – a

supposedly neutral exhibition space, the seat of pure visuality as theorized by Brian O’Doherty – is largely an incomplete project, and that the history of paradigms for the exhibition of modern art could also be seen as the history of the transgression of the white cube, a transgression that has altered forever our readings of power relations, gender invention, the perception of public space, art and the economy, as well as art and social displays.

Modernization is generally understood as the constant expansion of communication and the process of progressive secularization that disperses all states of loneliness and self-isolation. Modernization is seen as the emergence of a new society of total inclusion that rules out all forms of exclusivity.

Modernity and its aftermath fosters, on the one hand, a compulsion for total communication and total collective contemporaneity, while, on the other, the constant generation of new projects that repeatedly end in the reconquest of radical isolation. Interestingly enough, art and artists participate in these two impulses. On many occasions during the Master’s program, we will reflect on exactly this need to devise languages and functions that defy this “society of total inclusion” by exploring methods developed to enhance our consciousness, by engaging in forms of (self–) isolation that may positively affect the art practice, and by connecting questions of the intelligence, the importance of display and exposure, and the self.

Every work of art is above all the declaration of a new, other future that promises to come about once the project has been executed. In order to induce such a new future, however, the artist must first take a period of leave or absence for oneself, during which the project can transfer its agent into a parallel state of heterogeneous time. This other time frame, in turn, is undocked from time as experienced by society: it is de-synchronized.

This is the time we want to explore.

These are not the only questions that can be seen reflected in our master’s program curriculum, but they do act as guidelines, as bridges connecting debate with practice. Our intent is to situate the personal work – the articulation of an artistic language, the redefinition of technical skills and formal concerns – within the production of an environment where students can sense their taking part in a thinking that is still taking form. Art is a speculative practice that includes and relates all sorts of materials and ideas.

The crucial aspect of our Master’s program is to make students aware of their relevance to how art is made today and position them as active participants in this practice of seeing the new.

TREE (Abies Alba) by Johannes Willi at Der TANK. Photo: Christian Knörr.

Consciousness, or Ways of Feeling the Future

S T U D I E N AU F B AU M A ST ER OF A RT S I N F I N E A RTS

Die Module 1 bis 3 gelten durchgehend für die Studienzeit vom 1. bis zum 3. Semester. Das 4. Semester ist reserviert für die Master Thesis (Modul 4).

Modul 1: Künstlerisches Studium und Reflexion Im Modul 1 «Künstlerisches Studium und Reflexion» planen die Studierenden selbstständig und in Absprache mit den Mentorinnen und Mentoren die Schwerpunkte ihrer künstlerischen Arbeit.

Diese individuelle künstlerische Entwicklung wird ergänzt durch den Diskurs in den Plenumsveranstaltungen, in Projekten und Exkursionen. Modul 1 läuft durchgehend vom 1. bis 3. Semester und gibt 15 ETCS. Modul 2: Kunst im Kontext Das Modul «Kunst im Kontext» umfasst Angebote in Kunst und Medientheorie (Seminare, Vorlesungen, Lektüre-Kurse, Vorträge, wissenschaftliches Arbeiten). Die Veranstaltungen sind mit unserem Master-Partner MA CAP in Bern koordiniert und beinhalten auch Angebote der Universität Basel sowie weiterer Institutionen. Im Zentrum des Moduls steht der Kunstdiskurs, ergänzt durch Vertiefungsangebote in den Bereichen der Theorie, Forschung und der künstlerischen Praxis. Modul 1 läuft ebenfalls durchgehend vom 1. bis 3. Semester und gibt 9 ETCS. Modul 3: Theorie und Praxis, CH-Plattform Das Modul 3 «Theorie und Praxis» beinhaltet Angebote der Master of Fine Arts Plattform Schweiz in den Bereichen Theorie, Technologie und Kontext. Die Angebote werden schweizweit in einem Pool ausgeschrieben. Die Plattform fördert den Austausch unter den Studierenden aus den Master-of-Fine-ArtsProgrammen der Schweiz. Zudem findet einmal pro Semester für alle Studierenden ein Master-Symposium in der Schweiz statt.

Das Modul gibt 6 ECTS und läuft vom 1. bis 3. Semester.

Modul 4: Master Thesis Ausgehend von den bisherigen Studienerfahrungen konzentriert sich das vierte Semester auf die Konzeption und Erarbeitung einer eigenständigen Master Thesis mit öffentlicher Präsentation (30 ECTS).