Seminar on Artist Residency

With Toril Johannessen, Dieter Lesage (Belgium) and plan b (Sophia New og Daniel Belasco Rogers, UK). Moderator: Erlend Hammer

Seminar on Artist Residency in conjunction with the launch of The Norwegian Art Yearbook 2010. One of our main themes in the Art Yearbook 2010 is the internationalization of the art scene. An important, yet fairly little discussed issue, is the global increase of different Artist Residency-programmes during the last 10 to 15 years, and how this has influenced the contemporary art production.

The Artist residency-prorammes deals with accommodating artist’s travels and ideally become established internationally, while the organizers also want something in return, in the form of exhibitions or network. In addition to looking at the potential conflict between these two intentions, we wish to discuss how the dissemination of Artist Residencies influence artists’ way of working and today’s art production.

“If the background for a residency programme is formulated clearly and early on by those who host it, the residency is all the more likely to be successful.” Artist and curator Karolin Tampere, from her conversation about Residency-programmes in Norwegian Art Yearbook 2010.

“In today’s global capitalism, there is only one kind of desire worthy of support, and that is the desire for maximum absence.” Writer and critic Dieter Lesage on the demands on artists of minimum presence during residencies in Norwegian Art Yearbook 2010.

Dieter Lesage is a philosopher and writer. He has been a visiting professor at the Piet Zwart Institute of the Willem De Kooning Academie in Rotterdam (2003-2005) and at the Institut für Kulturtheorie of the Leuphana Universität Lüneburg (2007). He is a professor and research coordinator at the Department of Audiovisual and Performing Arts (Rits) at the Erasmus University College Brussels.

He is a member of the Editorial Board at Afterall and member of the International Advisory Board of Art & Research – A Journal of Ideas, Contexts and Methods. He is a co-editor, with Kathrin Busch, of A Portrait of the Artist as a Researcher: The Academy and the Bologna Process (Antwerp: MuHKA, 2007). With German artist Ina Wudtke, he curated the exhibitions A Portrait of the Artist as a Researcher (Freiraum/quartier21, Vienna, 2007) and A Portrait of the Artist as a Researcher 2.0 (Beursschouwburg, Brussels, 2008) and recently published the book Black Sound White Cube (Vienna: Loecker Verlag, 2010). Since 2006, Dieter Lesage lives in Berlin.