The Program of the UMPRUM Visiting Artist Studio in the 2024/2025 Fall Semester

The UMPRUM Visiting Artist for the 2024/2025 fall semester is Anna Witt

Program title and syllabus:

Survival of the softest. Performative Strategies.

 In this class, we will explore performative strategies, that reflect on alternative social imaginaries as a response to the conditions of contemporary culture in a critically engaged way. Mutual aid, grassroots theory, radical imagination and care will serve us as a starting point, to reflect on alternative narrations and micro-utopias in prevailing systems of capitalist societies.

We will approach research as a body based experience and as a way to engage with specific contexts; aiming to open dialogs and exchange among each other and extended audiences. There will be space for experimental praxis and collective decision-making processes.

We will look at the spectrum of performance, as a time-based medium and how to address different presentation formats and ways of engagement with the public.

In this class, we will particularly pay attention to the sensitive topic of power dynamics within social structures and within artistic production processes in particular.

 

Illustration photo credits: Routine Exercise. Collaborative project and performance in public space, 2022, Foto: Joanna Pianka

 

The structure of the program:

The visiting artist will give a theoretical and practical course.

The program is structured in several intense in-person sessions with the visiting artist and several online meetings with her and her guests. Regular meetings of the group will be held in person weekly throughout the term.

Applications: 
The program is part of the Fine Arts Department of UMPRUM and is primarily reserved to its students but offers limited numbers of places to the students of other departments of UMPRUM. Students of the bachelor, master and PhD programs can apply.

All students apart from the students of the first year of Bachelor Program and the students currently graduating from Bachelor and Master Program are encouraged to enroll. The Visiting Artist Program is open to students of Fine Arts Department and all other UMPRUM departments in limited numbers.

To apply, students must have completed their previous semester and enrolled in the next semester. For applications please contact the UMPRUM Study department.

For more information please contact the program’s Czech pedagogue Sláva Sobotovičová, ssobot@vsup.cz, 737 620 381

 

In the past UMPRUM has hosted courses of the following visiting artists:

spring 2023/24 Setareh Shahbazi: Eyes, Come Back! Solidarity in Art. 

fall 2023/2024 Jana Ndiaye Berankova and guests: East-South. Transnational Exchanges Between Eastern Europe and Global South.

spring 2022/2023 Özlem Altin: Draw a map to get lost. Listening in.

fall 2022/2023 Marwa Arsanios: Building a structure. Strategies of self-organizing. 

spring 2021/2022 Viktor Timofeev: Process Soup. Artist’s Derailing and Return Points. 

fall 2021/2022 Matt Mullican: Details from an Imaginary Universe

spring 2020/2021 Maja Smrekar: Dialogues with Different Kinds of Interlocutors

fall 2020/2021 Sam Lewitt: Scales

spring 2019/2020 Tyler Coburn: Counterfactuals

fall 2019/2020 Justin Fitzpatrick: Critical Aspects of Painting

spring 2018/2019 Nina Beier: Cultural Meanings of Material and Objects

fall 2018/2019 David Maljković: Crossovers of Installation

spring 2017/2018 Marie de Brugerolle: The Legacy of Performance