For
the exhibition “A Poem Is Being Written”
June 12 to 29, 2024
To mark the end of the semester,
the Gallery of the University of Applied Arts Vienna is planning “A Poem Is Being Written,” an exhibition featuring the university’s
students alongside other artists.
Submissions will be considered from students of all disciplines, at any stage
of their studies. The gallery is especially interested in works that critically engage with the structures of the University
of Applied Arts as a place of learning and as place with spoken and unspoken laws; works that, in short, exhibit diverse forms
of self-reflection on working at, with, and against the university.
All formats and media are welcome. Curators
Anke Dyes and Anette Freudenberger will select works from the applications submitted.
Please send a portfolio of
no more than 5 pages and include views, stills, or sketches alongside a brief explanation (a maximum of 1 page) of the proposal.
Applications are to be submitted to
anette.freudenberger@uni-ak.ac.at.
(maximum 2MB)
A Poem Is Being Written
The exhibition inquires into the foundational conditions
and the promises that govern an education based on aesthetic inclinations and abilities within the field of art and design.
Picking up the baton from the recent show at Heiligenkreuzerhof, which focused on creative schools and eminent teachers, this
exhibition will ask what is actually taught to students of art or design—and how consciously that teaching is done. How do
students deal with the conventions, vocabulary, and unspoken rules they are being exposed to for the first time? What conflicts
result when a person’s projections about their own work as an artist, architect, or designer encounter an educational system?
And how can conflicts like these be made productive? Is it possible to identify moments of friction—moments where practice
leaves the framework of the institution? Or where it re-uses such frameworks, thus reflecting at the same time upon their
nature? Might this process even be understood as the origin of artistic research?
These investigations will be
guided by a text from Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. In “A Poem Is Being Written“ (from Tendencies, 1993), the literary scholar and
key thinker from the field of queer studies engages with poems she wrote during childhood, which she takes as the starting
point of an investigation into the origins of fantasy and an exploration of the idea of an artist’s (supposedly still unspoiled,
unformed, natural, genius-driven) early work. She here also implicitly poses questions on the rules and constraints that enter
the frame during the development of an individual’s artistic language.
Even in its title, the text keys into one
of the most well-known texts from psychoanalysis—Sigmund Freud’s “A Child Is Being Beaten,” which, based on a fictional scene
of what was then sadly still a common method of nurturing and raising children, sets out an internal structural arrangement
of wishes, notions, and desires. Sedgwick turns the scene around: it's not about what happens to the child, but that a poem
happens. Such a creative act is not an undisguised, intrinsic self-expression, nor is it the outcome—or goal—of the nurturing
of a child. The writing of poems is, rather, a moment of empowerment: a reappropriation of one’s own experiences, the conditions
which gave rise to them, and the affects that resulted from them, translated now into the child’s own identification and discovery
of form.
The exhibition will seek out moments in which students take institutions and their laws and translate
them into forms and formats of their own. These will be accompanied by a (small) selection of established artists, who will
go beyond the study phase to reflect on “early work,” appropriation, and fantasy as a highly charged set of interrelationships.
