Course syllabus
Individual Project Work 1— More-Than-Human Realms and Art (VSIND1)
During the summer of 2023, the international course Individual Project Work 1, will attend to socially engaged arts practices with a specific focus on questions of the more-than-human realm. The course will support students to develop projects (either as individuals or in partnership with other students enrolled on the course). The research-led and collaborative framework is realised in partnership with colleagues from The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Art. The course is based on online presentations, seminars, and supervision in combination with on-site/ hybrid intensive workshops. This year the teaching team comprises: Åsa Sonjasdotter, Ewa Einhorn, Katarina Stenbeck, and Tintin Wulia. The course is based on online presentations, seminars, and supervision in combination with on-site/ hybrid intensive workshops. This year the teaching team comprises: Åsa Sonjasdotter, Ewa Einhorn, Katarina Stenbeck, and Tintin Wulia.
The course is free to EU nationals, delivered in English, and bearing 15 ECTS. The course is rooted in live research currently underway in our academy and within our wider networks of affiliation.
Online and IRL
The course has "meet up" IRL aspects in: (i) Gothenburg, Sweden (June 5, with June 7 and 12 as further IRL options); (ii) Copenhagen, Denmark (June 19); (iii) Gothenburg, Sweden (August 17-18).
The 2023 course is delivered with particular focus on:
(i) more-than-human; relationality and temporality away from modern-colonial categories of ”culture” and “nature”, "art" and "science", “theory” and “practice”
(ii) entanglements, toxicity, and contamination; on nurturing relations in capitalist ruins
(iii) politics, poetry and speculation: tradition as in "trade" and "exchange"; peasant relationality as method
More about the course content:
The course attempts to open for a wide range of practices engaging in socially engaged arts practice in regards of more-than-human realms and art. The on-site/hybrid sessions are the following: Speculative gardening at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Art in Copenhagen; a workshop by The Krabstadt Education Center with Ewa Einhorn at the Valand Academy, Gothenburg; as well as the workshop Aesthetic Objects and Things-in-common in Social Practice conducted by Dr Tintin Wulia at Valand Academy, Gothenburg.
A key issue considered is the variety of ways in which a separation and distinction between ”culture” and “nature”, "art" and "science", “theory” and “practice” has been historically produced and reproduced within the modern-colonial matrix. The presumption of the "and" that bridges between the two terms, also marks a separation which it is necessary to interrogate. Early in the course there is a basic consideration of the different ways in which the domain of the enquiry is constructed that will be unpacked through practice-based, material engagement in combination with talks, readings and conversations.
Acknowledging the complex field of theoretical, critical and activist positions that operate in the interaction/conjunction of practices of more-than-human realms and art, the course takes a partial survey approach, and does not claim to be comprehensive, but does seek to achieve breadth. The course interrogates the different claims for art's political agency and political saliency, rather than accepting these at face value.
The course is structured in three phases; intensive introduction to the course theme as well as all on-site/hybrid gatherings and tutorials take place in June in order to prepare students for collaborative and individual elaboration of projects during July. The students’ projects are presented, further elaborated and assessed in August.
The course is closely informed by the research activities of Hdk-Valand and the work of the platforms: https://parsejournal.com/
and specifically https://parsejournal.com/environment/
Examinable format
As the examinable format to conclude your project, you are expected to present a visual essay of maximum 5 minutes. The essay can be the artistic outcome, a documentation of the artistic project, or similar. We are asking that you develop a visual essay using between 50 and 100 images (as a guideline), alternatively moving images. The sequence of images-and-texts should not take longer than 5 minutes to view.
Course team bios:
Åsa Sonjasdotter is an artist, researcher, writer, and organiser engaging in processes of rehabilitation and re-narration of livelihood relations. Through cultivation of outlawed crops and close readings of related archival matter, lost knowledge and imagination is brought into re-existence. Sonjasdotter is a doctoral researcher in artistic practice at HDK-Valand, the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. Her recent film Cultivating Abundance – Away from Monoculture, is made in dialogue with the seed association Allkorn (Common Grains) and breeder of peasant seeds Hans Larsson. Sonjasdotter’s work is presented and exhibited in numerous international contexts. For more information: asasonjasdotter.info.
Katarina Stenbeck is a curator and art historian teaching at the Royal Danish Art Academy. She holds a phd from the University of Copenhagen and the Art Academy with the project Forms of Entanglement, Care and World-Making in the Anthropocene. Stenbeck is currently working on questions of sustainability and how to build practices in dialogue with eco-feminist thinking and indigenous knowledges.
Dr Tintin Wulia is a Senior Researcher at the University of Gothenburg, and a transnationally practicing artist who has been examining the borders for more than two decades. Wulia had published in over 200 peer-reviewed exhibitions/publications, including in a Routledge publication (2022), major exhibitions like the Chicago Architecture Biennale (2021), and a solo pavilion at 57th Venice Biennale (2017). Her works are part of prominent public collections worldwide, including the Van Abbemuseum. She was a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellow (2019) and an interdepartmental Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Gothenburg’s Centre on Global Migration (2018-20). Currently she is Principal Investigator of the Swedish Research Council-funded Protocols of Killings: 1965, Distance, and the Ethics of Future Warfare (2021-23) and the European Research Council-funded Things for Politics' Sake: Aesthetic Objects and Social Change/THINGSTIGATE (2023-28). Her upcoming twinned/telematic solo show in Baik Art Jakarta and Melbourne’s RMIT Gallery will open in December 2023.
Ewa Einhorn is a visual artist and filmmaker working with animation, satirical drawing and documentary formats. She teaches at the BFA program at HDK-Valand, University of Gothenburg, Sweden. She is currently conducting a research project about the intersection of games and animation with the support of the Swedish Research Council. Her most recent project, the Krabstadt Education Center (KEC), explores the tension between real and imagined settings where education takes place and the challenges arising from enrolling more than human students. Together with Jeuno JE Kim and Karolin Meunier she guest edited an issue of PARSE journal devoted to KEC’s conflation of online vs offline spaces. The Krabstadt universe has been presented at Jakarta Biennale (2021), Busan Biennale (2020) and Oslo Kunstforening (2023).
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