pupparatjik - workshop with Ute Meta Bauer and Magne Furuholmen

pupparatjik is a reference to the latin word “pupa” meaning “doll and girl”, but also means “an insect in its inactive immature form - a cocoon stage - between larva and adult”. pupparatjik as well refers to the artist-collective apparatjik. The project’s website was launched on 09.09.09 www.apparatjik.com
In this two-day workshop Ute Meta Bauer and Magne Furuholmen will create with the workshop participants a kind of puppet show interacting with shadow techniques and video projection.
Puppets are no innocent toys - they are figures animated and manipulated by the puppeteers. Puppets represent societal life in almost all cultures, and puppet plays with hand puppets, rod puppets, puppets on strings are to be found around the globe. The use of puppets in art works often deal with allegorical and symbolic meanings in order to play with the theatre of realities. One might just think of DADA, Surrealism or the famous Bauhaus Theatre, for example the stage plays by Oskar Schlemmer or the hand puppets created by Paul Klee.
Furthermore the workshop reflects upon scale & collage and puppets & video projections – both address the question of re-presentation.
Within the two days the students will have the chance to learn about or experiment different methods due to working collaboratively and in group constellations like members of bands do. In this regard it is of interest to think of “generosity” as an underlying principle – to share ones own artistic ideas with a group of people, and to reflect the impact that a collective working process has for ones individual work approach and artistic attitude.
The pupparatjik workshop will make use of the wood workshop, print workshop and the photo / video studio.
Everybody is welcome! Please sign up!

* Due to practical reason we might have to limit the number of participants.
If you are interested please sign up - online! Sign up is binding for two-day workshop participation.
You can either e-mail Assoc. Professor Regina Maria Möller:
regina.m@gmx.net
or sign up at
http://www.kit.ntnu.no/en/calendar-date/2010-W3
Closing Date is January 14th

ABOUT THE GUEST PROFESSORS:

Ute Meta Bauer
is an Associate Professor and the Founding Director of the Program in Art, Culture and Technology (ACT) at MIT’s School of Architecture and Planning, Cambridge/USA where she served as Director of the MIT Visual Arts Program from 2005 -2009. The focus of her current research and practice is on theatricality as feminist strategy and the development of a mobile ACT lab. Bauer is the Artistic Director (AD) of apparatjik.
Bauer studied art and stage design at the HfbK Hamburg/Germany, where she was a member of the artist formation “Stille Helden e.V.” and the performance group “Paris ruft”. From 1996 to 2006, she held an appointment at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna as a Professor of Theory and Practice of Contemporary Art. For more than two decades Bauer has worked as a curator of exhibitions and presentations on contemporary art, film, video and sound, with a focus on trans-disciplinary formats. She was a Co-curator of Documenta11 (2001-2002) in the team of Okwui Enwezor, has been the Artistic Director of the 3rd berlin biennial for contemporary art (2004) and in 2005 curated the Mobile_Transborder Archive for InSite05, Tijuana (MEX)/San Diego (USA). Furthermore Bauer has been the Founding Director of the Office For Contemporary Art Norway (OCA) and was the editor of numerous publications in the field of contemporary art, including: “What’s left…What remains? SITAC VI” (Mexico City 2009), “Education, Information, Entertainment. New Approaches in Higher Artistic Education” (Vienna, 2001); META 1 - 4 (Stuttgart, 1992-94); case (Barcelona, 2001; Porto, 2002) and Verksted # 1- 6 (Oslo, 2003-2006). Bauer is an advisor for a number of cultural institutions such as the MIT List Visual Arts Center/ USA, the CCAA in Kabul/Afghanistan and is a member of the Scientific Advisory Boards of the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation, Germany and the LABoral Center for the Arts and Industrial Creation in Gijon, Spain. See http://visualarts.mit.edu/people/faculty/faculty_bauer.html

Magne Furuholmen
is a well known artist and musician. He is a member of the internationally famous Norwegian band a-ha, and also a founding member of the new artist-collective apparatjik (www.apparatjik.com). Magne works in different creative fields and his work is exhibited internationally on a regular basis. Recently, a new series of prints titled “Alpha Beta” was shown at the gallery Paul Stolper in London (www.paulstolper.com). Magne has participated in many group shows, and previously hosted graphic workshops in Shanghai, China back in 1996, and alongside colleagues Olav Christopher Jenssen, Mette Tronvoll, and Per Kleiva, in Hanoi, Vietnam in 2004.
One art work that is worth pointing out with regards to the pupparatjik workshop is “Mange Furuholmen discussing Leonard Rickard” – the project was made for a group exhibition at Sørlandets Kunstmuseum during “The Punkt Festival for Contemporary Art and Music” in 2007. The installation showed approx.150 different puppet versions of Magne F, created by fans and arranged around a painting by Rickard titled “Tired Model-airplane Builder” (1985). The puppets were accompanied by a quadraphonic recording of multiple Magne Furuholmen voices discussing art with himself, art in general and in particular the Leonard Rickard painting. See www.magnef.org