Courses and workshops descriptions

WEEK 1 – Monday July 05 to Thursday July 08
Basis of Reality – 8 hour workshop with Yoshua Okon
This workshop explore different strategies in representation that question conventional notions of reality. Departing from the idea that our understanding of reality is very limited and full of clichés, the workshop discuss different artworks which, by blurring the conventional lines between reality and fiction, allow us to re-consider and propose more nuanced and complex versions of what constitutes reality for us.

Tactics and Strategies of Appropriation in Contemporary Art – 12 hour seminar with Nate Harrison

This four-part seminar introduce the art of appropriation in the U.S. since the rise of “postmodernism” in the 1970s through to the present. The class use primary theoretical and legal texts to interrogate the criticality and political efficacy of appropriation given its position within a “culture industry” and its antagonism towards regimes of intellectual property. Comparisons to other non-U.S. (or even non-Western) historical contexts are encouraged.

Individual critics: Carla Herrera-Prats

Visit to: kurimanzutto gallery

WEEK 2 – Monday July 12 to Thursday July 15
Children and Revolution – 12 hour workshop with Larissa Harris
Larissa Harris will use the class as a pretense to explore hands-on ideas and projects past and future along the theme of “children and revolution,” including toy theater plays, international childrens’ book traditions, and the oeuvres of Alighiero e Boetti and Fischli and Weiss.

Special session: Larissa Harris in conversation with Pedro Reyes

Studio visit: Gonzalo Ortega

Individual critics: Edgar Orlaneita

Visit to: Museo Rufino Tamayo, Museo de Arte Moderno

WEEK 3 – Monday July 19 to Thursday July 22
Mexico City’s Art Scene – 12 hour seminar with Carla Herrera-Prats
Since the early ‘ 90s, Mexican artists have occupied an increasingly prominent role in the international art scene. This course allows participants to engage some of the key figures who have helped shape it over the last two decades. Visits to artists’ studios, museums, and galleries are scheduled. Participants regroup after guided visits to share their opinions. This semester visits will include: Magalí Arriola, Chief Curator, Museo Tamayo; Jorge Reynoso, Chief Curator Academic Program, MUAC, Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo; Enrique Jezik, artist.

Studio visit:

Individual critics: John Menick, Yoshua Okón, Larissa Harris

Visit to: Teotihuacan, OMR gallery

WEEK 4 – Monday July 26 to Thursday July 29
Off side Mexico City, a site specific workshop, 8 hour workshop by Eduardo Abaroa
The course will include four sessions. The workshop takes place in four different surprise non-academic places around Mexico City. Each session will be a group reflection and discussion on the concepts of site-specificity and the possibilities of art to comment on specific cultural, political, social and geographical situations.
- Mercado de Sonora
- Hotel de México
- Juzgados
- Bandera de San Jerónimo

CoBrANyM e – 12 hour workshop with Sarina Basta and Rita Ackerman
CoBrA was an active group of people around Copenhagen, Brussels and Amsterdam generally considered to have lasted from 1949 to 1951. Members of the group focused their activities around themes such as freedom of form, and spontaneity versus automatism. CoBrANyMe is a fourth days encounter that proposes a new form of interaction among participants. Based on readings, and the analysis of works by Karel Appel and Asger Jorn and their respective strategies, careers, and aesthetic programs, the group will be invited to produce a phantom collaboration with CoBrA. CoBrANyMe will be examining cultural appropriation and disappropriation, the formation of a collective groups, de-skilling, the erasure of authorship, ground/figure relationships and films where collective action both generates energy and possible failure within cultural representation post-1968, with a particular focus on the genre of cinéma vérité. This week aims at giving participants tools in analyzing artists’
strategies of the 20th century, identifying ideological positions and re-applying them to other contexts. A bare-bone of film and lectures are provided as departure points. In between these moments participant’s reactions and associations are key in defining the turns of the conversations and any possible production. These encounters can lead to individual work from each participant, or a short collective experience. Some sessions of these encounters will be recorded.

Studio visit: John Menick, Rita Ackerman

Individual critics: Eduardo Abaroa

Visit to: Jumex Collection, Sala de Arte Público Siqueiros

WEEK 5 – Monday August 02 to Thursday August 05
Theory and Criticism – 12 hour Workshop with Mariana Botey
Art criticism has the function to produce a system, or method through which to think the field of art.
Contemporary art practices are inevitably linked to the production of critical discourse and to referents of theory and forms and figures of theorization. Working a distance that allows us to grasp art beyond notions such as representation or, as language and communication, the workshop will approach the relation between theory and art criticism trying to understand these forms of discourse as a supplement to contemporary art interventions— that is, analyzing them as specific and particular forms of social practice. Against the grain of a formalist reading or a historicist explanation of art, the idea of the course is to experiment with a materialist critique: by articulating the contradictions between institutional practices and the theories by which they explain and justify themselves and each other. Throughout the course we will work through examples from the canon of modernist theory and from criticism discussing contemporary artists, while at the same time looking for a comparative model and working these ideas within the specific localization of Mexico City.

Special session: M ariana Botey will be in conversation with Cuauhtémoc Medina

Studio visit: Yoshua Okon, Gonzalo Ortega, Carla Herrera-Prats

Individual critics: Jennifer Teets, Vicente Razo, Mariana Botey

Visit to: Museo de arte Carrillo Gil, MUAC

WEEK 6 – Monday August 09 – Thursday August 12th
The Origins of M odernism: A Brief I ntroduction to the M exican and Latin American Vanguards of the
20th century – 8 hour seminar/workshop with Vicente Razo
This workshop will be an experimental introduction to the avant-garde movements conceived in Mexico and Latin America through the 20th century. The course will provide students a new perspective and access to a history often overlooked in western academia of the ways in which modernity has been constructed and designed. Through the reading of primary texts, manifestos, poems, instructions and insults that generated the local avant-garde, the student will be introduced to the dynamics of creation and crisis proper to Mexico and Latin America.

How a writing dipped in diverse Liquors may be read * – 12 hour workshop with Jennifer Teets
* from John Baptist Porta – “Natural Magick” – thanks to Asli Cavusoglu.

This workshop looks to the writing process (fiction and non-fiction) as an incubator for the art event and exhibition. In particular, it looks to writing and the use of the site to bring about relevance to the exhibition itself, which is in effect, created for and by the artists. In this sense, it negotiates an exchange of formats between event and exhibition. How does this differ from ordinary and conventional procedures of exhibition making? What role does the site have in the making of the work and the exhibition? Where does the artist fit or come into the process in the context of the writer and vice versa? A case by case study will be conducted drawing from contemporary writers and artists such as philosopher Aaron Schuster (Belgium), curator/writer Francis Mckee (UK), sci-fi writer Mark von Schlegell (USA/Germany), artists Mark Aerial Waller and Gilles Round (UK), cultural critic/novelist Norman Klein (USA), curator/writer Raimundas Malasauskas (Lithuania/France), writer Maria Fusco (UK), and more. The seminar initiates with the activation of an event around the use of a site, the writing process, and the involvement with a local writer.