about
OPEN UP ACADEMY (2024–27) is a four year collaboration process between HDK-Valand and the participants in the former OPEN UP (2019–23) EU-funded project.
OPEN UP ACADEMY is a space for the self-organisation of artists, film-makers and other creative practitioners who support each other to develop their different practices, create new opportunities, and collaboratively learn together about contemporary art.
New members are welcome, please write to: Open Up open.up@hdk-valand.gu.se or just come along and meet us at one of our regular Saturday afternoon meetings.
The OPEN UP ACADEMY will operate through four working sub-groups focussing on key activities: 1. Film-makers’ Cooperative; 2. Exhibition as Community; 3. Publishing as Relation; and 4. Contemporary Diasporic Art Studies.
1. The Film-makers’ Cooperative is a framework for sharing film-making resources and skills, providing access to a shared infrastructure of production and post-production, as well as a cooperative approach to film-making.
2. Exhibition as Community will work on the basis of collective self-organisation of exhibition opportunities. It approaches exhibition-making as a process of building communities of practice and inventing forms of social relation.
3. Publishing as Relation will continue the work of the OPEN UP Sampler, by providing a framework for developing new publication projects by participants, with a particular emphasis on the way publishing as a process can produce new forms of relation and different modes of becoming public.
4. Contemporary Diasporic Art Studies is a monthly gathering of those interested to develop a shared knowledge of the breadth and possibility of contemporary art within various diasporic formations. The process begins with an exploration of the recent high profile international achievement and visibility of many Kurdish film-makers, and the new visions for life-in-common being produced among artists, architects, writers and thinkers within the Palestinian diaspora. For diasporic communities, we ask what is artmaking in the face of dehumanisation and radical exclusion from agency in the public sphere? What is art’s possibility in the teeth of surpassing violences that self-announce as righteous, even as they viciously imprison, starve, torment, mutilate and destroy children and non-combatants? What is art’s possibility when words such as “humanity”, “feeling” and “expression” turn to dust in any mouth that now would dare to utter them?
upcoming meetings
- Saturday 23 March 14:00 @ The Glasshouse
- Saturday 13 April 14:00@ The Glasshouse
- Saturday 27 April 14:00 @ The Glasshouse
- Saturday 11 May 14:00 @ The Glasshouse
- Saturday 18 May 14:00 @ The Glasshouse
- Saturday 25 May 14:00 @ The Glasshouse
- Saturday 15 June 14:00 @ The Glasshouse
The materials shared in previous meetings are available here: Materials shared during the Saturday OUA meetings
a research project?
OPEN UP ACADEMY is a research project that is being built out of an educational process. The participants in this process are invited to become co-researchers in considering two key questions:
- how can artists build their own support systems in partnership with public institutions?
- what does collaboration across class, colour, nationality, and other lines of division make possible?
about the previous project
For the previous project OPEN UP (2019-2023) you can visit the following resources:
exhibition.school 