THE PROGRAM OF THE UMPRUM VISITING ARTIST STUDIO IN THE 2024/2025 SPRING SEMESTER

 

The UMPRUM Visiting Artist for the 2024/2025 spring semester is Basim Magdy

 

Program Title and Syllabus:

 

PLAYING MUSICAL CHAIRS IN A.LOCKED ROOM. A multi-disciplinary approach to creating art

 

How do we navigate the boundaries between different artistic media, and what can we learn from multi-disciplinary artists and the way they communicate their ideas? This program will explore the dynamic interplay between concept and medium, offering participants an understanding of the technical aspects of various media, choosing the right medium for an idea, expanding the medium’s potential and moving fluidly between diverse creative approaches.

Drawing on Basim Magdy’s practice of blending film, photography, sculpture, text, and painting, we will investigate how crossovers between mediums can help us express our political, personal and creative concerns with more freedom. Through group and individual discussions, we will analyze works by artists who work across traditional medium boundaries, such as filmmakers who embrace photography or painters who work with film.

The program aims to encourage participants to experiment with technical and conceptual frameworks while challenging preconceived notions of medium specificity, to find new ways of creating meaning. Our collective questions, curiosity and desire to tackle recurring obstacles in artistic practices will be the backbone for creating progress in this class.

 

 

About the artist:

Basim Magdy is an artist and filmmaker. He works with painting, photography, film, text, sculpture and installation in their expanded forms. He creates poetic narratives about the layers of absurdity in daily occurrences. In Magdy’s work, future, present and past seem to play musical chairs while locked up in a room. Humor is sometimes one of the ways out.

His work appeared recently in solo exhibitions at Frac Bretagne, Rennes; KM21 Museum for Contemporary Art, The Hague;  Röda Sten Konsthall, Gothenburg; M HKA, Museum of Contemporary Art, Antwerp; CAPC Museum of Contemporary Art, Bordeaux; MCA Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; MAXXI National Museum of the 21st Century Arts, Rome; Jeu de Paume, Paris and in group shows at The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Castello di Rivoli, Torino, New Museum Triennial, New York; Henie Onstad Museum, Oslo; KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin; Taipei Biennial; MEDIACITY Seoul Biennial; 13th Istanbul Biennial; Sharjah Biennial 11 and La Triennale, Palais de Tokyo among others. 

He was shortlisted for the Future Generation Art Prize, Kiev (2012) and won the Abraaj Art Prize, Dubai and the New:Vision Award, CPH:DOX Film Festival, Copenhagen (2014) and the Experimental Award at the Curtas Vila do Conde – International Film Festival, Portugal (2015). He was selected Deutsche Bank Artist of the Year (2016). His films were screened at Tate Modern, Locarno Film Festival, New York Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam, ICA London among many others.

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@umprum.cz, 737 620 381

Deadline for applications: Jan 31st, 2025

 

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

fall 2024/25 Anna Witt: The Survival of The Softest. Dynamics of non-competitiveness.

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