This section provides information in relation to a series of international courses, hosted by HDK-Valand that explore questions of art, politics and the imaginary. These courses are by distance and blended education (online with additional opportunities to meet face-to-face) free to EU nationals, delivered in English, and bearing 15 ECTS. Each course is rooted in live research currently underway at HDK-Valand academy of art and design at the University of Gothenburg and realised within wider networks of affiliation.
The first course is a bachelor level, free-standing course entitled Introduction to Contemporary Arts and Politics (15ECTS) (Code: VFSPOL). This is a summer course that has been based on a combination of online presentations and seminars between early June and late August. The course was first delivered in 2016 and the course team currently comprises Nkule Mabaso and Thiago de Paula Souza as the course leaders and Mick Wilson as examiner, with guest speakers from the new Centre for Art and The Political Imaginary (CAPIm). This international course, delivered in English, introduces key political themes in relation to contemporary art practices, theories and institutions. It is informed by ongoing research and operates as a summer-long collaborative process of enquiry. For more see Introduction Course – Art & Politics. We will publish a schedule for the Summer 2024 iteration of the course here on 1 March 2024.
The second course is a master’s level, free-standing course entitled On Friendship and the Political Imaginary (15ECTS) (Code: FKAKPO). This course was originally developed in 2021 through the collaboration between Prof. Steven Henry Madoff (SVA New York) and Prof. Mick Wilson (Hdk-Valand, Gothenburg.) (See more on the 3 week intensive in summer 2021 at the heart of the original collaboration.) Building upon the success of the 2021 course, a second iteration of the course was made in Summer 2022. The third iteration of the course was delivered in Autumn 2023, and linked to the fifth PARSE biennial research conference from 15–17 November, 2023 Powers of Love: Enchantment to Disaffection.
The fourth iteration of the course, will be delivered in Autumn 2024, and is an associated initiative of the new Centre for Art and the Political Imaginary (CAPIm). The Centre is committed to interdisciplinary practice and research in the meeting between contemporary art and the future of politics. Based at two institutions of higher education in art: HDK-Valand, University of Gothenburg and Kungl. Konsthögskolan, Stockholm, the Centre’s aim is to facilitate connections between research and education through an engagement with experimental approaches. It is the first Swedish Centre of Excellence in the field of Artistic Research. The Centre is co-chaired by Prof. Mick Wilson and Prof. Natasha Marie Llorens, who together with Prof. Jyoti Mistry and Dr. Axel Andersson form its steering committee.
Each year the course takes the form of a collective reading and research process that operates as a focused inquiry into friendship – and what is termed ‘the figure’ of the friend – as a question across politics, philosophy, art and curatorial practices. However, ‘the friend’ seems not to be simply a figure to be described, nor a concept to be defined and then applied, but rather a constellation of practices to be lived, ways of being in the world, and indeed for some, the very way of worlding in itself.
There is also a specifically ‘liberal’ figure of the friend (involving values of the authentic, the private, the elective and the individualist). The construction of this ‘liberal’ figure of the friend is often haunted by, or worried at the possible contamination of friendship by other terms: by blood (kinship, obligation), by utility (as means to an end, as a mode of publicity, evacuated of content by the instrumental de-humanizing of ‘mass’ society), and by formality (external performance, rule governed, boundaried). One research task of this course then is to ask: What might be obscured, occluded or evacuated in the ‘liberal’ figure of the friend? What are the different ‘otherwise’ figures of the friend? How are these to be differentiated? What is at stake in these differences? For more see On Friendship and the Political Imaginary. We will publish a schedule for the Autumn 2024 iteration of the course here on 1 April 2024.
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