THE UMPRUM VISITING ARTIST IN SPRING 2022/23 IS ÖZLEM ALTIN

Özlem Altın (she/her) explores the body at rest and the inanimate in action in her paintings, collages, photographs, and artist books. To create her work, Altın digs through a photographic collection she has assembled over the years, combining found images with her own photographs into a dense constellation of amalgams. By finding connections between layers of photomontage and ink, the artist prompts viewers to create narratives by “acknowledging what is happening in between the images.” Some emotionally resonant images—the mask, the mermaid, the heron—are symbols that she frequently returns to; they embody something part human and part animal, or a state of in-betweenness, and are recurrent in her work. Her flowing yet complex nets of images contribute to elaborate a narrative, at times mythological, on the bodily existence.

Özlem Altın was part of the 59th Venice Biennale The Milk of dreams curated by Cecilia Alemani. 
Her most recent exhibitions include Kunstverein Braunschweig; Tongues of Time in Villa Romana, Florence (2021); Companion Pieces, MoMA, NY (2020); The 16th Istanbul Biennial (2019); The 10th Berlin Biennial (2018) and more.

Altın received a Master of Fine Art in 2006 following the postgraduate studies at the Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam, The Netherlands (2004-2006). Altın was a guest-professor for photography in HGB Leipzig in 2020-2021, and currently lives and works in Berlin, Germany.

For the recording of Özlem Altın’s lecture for UMPRUM (from December 2022) contact Sláva Sobotovičová at slavka.sobotovicova@umprum.cz

Program title and syllabus:

Draw a map to get lost

We will be aiming for deepening individual practices as well as researching possibilities of a collective creation. We will be exploring notions of landscapes, in the sense of a topography of relating to the world, to each other, as well as listening within. We will examine boundaries of inside and outside, the individual and the group and specifically concepts of vulnerability, porosity, resilience and multiplicity. As a means, storytelling forms a foundation of an attempt towards weaving networks of care and building community. We will discuss textures of elasticity with regards to body and time, and through embodied practices look at the analogy between the body and earth.

[The title of the program refers to a piece by Yoko Ono.]

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:

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