Time: Tuesday March 10, 2015 at 7.30 pm
Location: Piet Zwart Institute, Karel Doormanhof 45 Rotterdam
Admission: free
A talk by Franciska Zólyom, Director of GfZK – Museum of Contemporary Art Leipzig. Zólyom is currently hosted by the international visitors program of the Mondrian Fund in the Netherlands.
Artistic and scientific research on creativity, education and productivity takes place in a tension-filled area as regards both policy-making and economic exploitation. Against the backdrop of current educational reforms in Hungary and of challenges in cultural education in Germany the talk presents “Creativity Exercises”, a project developed by tranzit.hu Budapest and the Museum of Contemporary Art Leipzig.
“Creativity Exercises” is a study of how people learn, what they know and how it influences their personality, their behaviour and their position in society, observed from various different perspectives. With a focus on Eastern Europe the exhibition, workshops and lectures discuss the inquiring quality of creativity, which is at the same time subversive and constructive. (The title of the project is borrowed from a drawing course held by the artists Miklós Erdély and Dóra Maurer between the years of 1975 and 1977 in Budapest. For a short time, independently of state art schools, the education of amateurs presented the opportunity to put collective and process-oriented work to the test and to eliminate thought barriers.)
The talk elaborates on artistic projects, both historical and contemporary, that experiment with alternative forms of teaching and learning as performative art. In analogy with questions and concepts associated with educational and social sciences, these artistic projects investigate equitable forms of learning and knowledge exchange and in exploring the interplay of individual expression and collective action. They challenge a wider view of learning, along with the social, economic and institutional conditionalities that accompany them and aim to foster the empowerment potential of knowledge, as well as to tackle mechanisms of monopolisation and exclusion in the educational system.
Franciska Zólyom was born in Budapest. She studied art history in Cologne and Paris and worked as a curator at the Ludwig Museum of Contemporary Art in Budapest (1997-99). After an internship at the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin (2001 and 2003/04) she became the director of the Institute of Contemporary Art – Dunaújváros, Hungary (2006-09). There she worked together with international artists on site- and context-related projects, initiating and fostering artistic research on local history and on the spatialisation of ideologies. Since 2012 she is the director of GfZK – Museum of Contemporary Art Leipzig where she presented the work by Andreas Fogarasi, LITTLE WARSAW, Dainius Liskevicius and intitated collaborations with Céline Condorelli, James Langdon, Urs Lehni, myvillages.org and Slavs&Tatars, among others.
Image Credit: Rainer Ganahl, ‘Teaching a Five Year Old a Chinese Song from the Great Cultural Revolution,’ 2013, Sequence 02. hacStill 001-007, Courtesy Rainer Ganahl