At Vilnius Academy of Arts
October 18 - 19, 2012
KUNO Coordinators and Network meeting
October 19-20, 2012
KUNO Teachers Seminar
IMAGINATION AT WORK
17.00-18.00 Teachers seminar kick off:
Keynote speaker: Brandon LaBelle “Did you hear something?”
19.00 Dinner
Restaurant KITCHEN
Saturday, October 20:
10.00 – 10.30 Coffee and registration
10.30 – 11.30 Keynote speaker: Ann Lislegaard:
Paraspace and Out of Sync Monologues: four animations, a sound piece and an earthwork
11.30 – 12.30 Keynote speaker: Miriam Bäckström
12.30 – 13.30 Lunch
13.30 – 16.00 Group discussions
16.00 – 17.00 Film screening and introduction by Deimantas Narkevicius:
‘Restricted Sensation’ (45 min., 2011)
17.00 – 18.00 Plenum/ending of the seminar
19.00 Dinner
Restaruant La BOHEME
Sunday, October 21:
Morning: Sightseeing programme in Vilnius (organised upon registration on Friday)
Theme: Imagination at Work
For almost a decade attention within certain areas of contemporary art and its institutions has been on the notion of utopia. The question essentially has been this: are we, with the methods offered by contemporary art, able to envision another and more ideal world, if only to nurture the dream that we can change the one we live in, while at the same time acknowledging that this other world does not exist and even will be forever out of reach? And does utopian thinking today differ from earlier forms of the modern utopia? When do utopias become dystopic?
While utopias are often related to a wish for political alternatives, to other ways of building societies and to other ways of being together, i.e. of forming communities, our faculty of imagination opens up even broader scopes of potential otherness. There is a sense in which the utopias and utopian thinking are conditioned by imagination, by the very fact that we are capable of imagining more than what we perceive. In other words: we produce images, some utopic, some intimate, some scientific, some oneiric, most of them based on bodily experience and all of them having some kind of effect upon us and upon the way we interact with the world and with each other in the most pragmatic everyday life. Visual arts deal with images. It is imagination consciously and critically at work.
Since the romantic era art has commonly been associated with the work of imagination. While this still holds true of contemporary art, the notions and understandings of the concept as well as its function within the arts have undergone significant changes during the last centuries. The KUNO teacher’s seminar 2012 in Vilnius aims at discussing contemporary approaches, both practical and theoretical, to imagination and, as always, to how imagination is at stake in today’s teaching practices. Particular points of interests in this context could be: imagination and the everyday; imagination, dream and fantasy; imagining the real; imagination and the body; space and imagination; imagining the self as other, imagining sounds… The list could continue.
Visual artists Brandon Labelle, Mariam Bäckström and Ann Lislegaard have been invited to give talks at the seminar.
The steering group looks foreward to welcoming as many faculty members from the KUNO academies as possible.
