Hunting & collecting Lotte Arnt / Sammy Baloji, Salzburg International Summer Academy of Fine Arts

Séminaire

22juil201903août2019

Media
All media

Location
Hohensalzburg Fortress

Teaching language
English (teachers also speak French, German, Swahili, Lingala and Spanish)

What to bring
Your personal working material (whatever that comprises)

Requirements
An interest and curiosity to work in the Salzburg environment

Maximum number of participants
20

Participation fee
€ 700.– (€ 540.–)

This two weeks’ course at the Salzburg Summer Academy is for everybody interested in postcolonial theory and practice. It addresses artists, curators, art historians, anthropologists, postcolonial theorists, students, and general public alike.
Participants will actively research traces in the postcolonial present; a special interest will be in landscape as bearer of history, and museum collections. The work can include a broad variety of media, such as photography, sound, installation, writing, painting, sculpture but can also take the shape of an exhibition concept, an essay, a thesis.

In past years, Sammy Baloji has repeatedly interrogated museum collections for their slumbering histories. By examining the objects in their materiality and their trajectories, seemingly well-known artifacts unfold complex life stories, leading to sometimes vast entanglements, connecting the local and the global, art and economy, historical violence and the claim for justice. What is the role that artistic practice can play in unfolding these stories? In how far can the properties of specific materials lead to unravel their connections with other matter, agents, and procedures? Taking our work on the exhibition (2015, Mu.ZEE, Ostende (BE), and book Hunting & Collecting (2016) as a starting point and a methodology, we would like to accompany participants in their specific research.

Sammy Baloji, born in 1978, was raised in Lubumbashi (CD), a centre of colonial, post-colonial and contemporary entanglements related to resources. Colliding reality and representation, his photography and multimedia installations expose tensions between past and present. He mines the archive, traces social history in architecture and landscape, and probes the body as a site of memory and witness to operations of power. He is co-founder of the Picha Encounters Biennale in Lubumbashi.

Solo exhibitions
2018 A blueprint for toads and snakes, Framer Framed, Amsterdam. 2016–18 Sammy Baloji & Filip De Boeck – Urban Now: City Life in Congo, WIELS, Contemporary Art Center, Brussels; Open Society Foundation, New York, NY (US); The Power Plant, Toronto (CA); Galerias Municipais/EGEAC, Lisbon. 2014 Hunting and Collecting: Sammy Baloji, Mu.Zee, Ostend (BE).

Group exhibitions
2018 Congo Stars, Kunsthaus Graz, Graz (AT). 2017 documenta 14, Athens & Kassel (DE). 2016 11th Shanghai Biennale, Shanghai (CN). 2015/16 La vie moderne, 13th Biennale de Lyon, Lyon (FR). 2015–17 Senses of time: video and film-based works of Africa, Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, Washington D.C.; LACMA, Los Angeles (CA). 2015 All the world’s futures, 56th Biennale di Venezia, Venice (IT).

Writer and curator Lotte Arndt (Paris) accompanies the work of artists who critically interrogate the postcolonial present and the blind spots of modernity, and co-organizes cultural programmes, screenings and discussions. She co-curated Candice Lin: A Hard White Body (2017, with Lucas Morin at Bétonsalon, Paris, and 2018 at Portikus, Frankfurt/Main, with Philippe Pirotte); Tampered Emotions. Lust for Dust, Triangle France ( June 2018); One Sentence Exhibition, Kadist (August 2018); and worked on the research programme The Vacation of the Museum. Decolonize Ethnographic Collections with Cinema (2016–2018). Her PhD is dedicated to postcolonial negotiations in Paris-based cultural magazines related to Africa (2013). She is a member of the artists’ and writers’ group Ruser l’image and the research group Global Art Prospective (INHA Paris), and publishes on artistic strategies that aim to subvert Eurocentric narratives and institutions.

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