Learning from Art

Series of exhibitions and projects

Academy is an international series of exhibitions and projects initiated by Siemens Arts Program and realized in cooperation with the Kunstverein in Hamburg, the Department of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths College in London, the Museum of Modern Art Antwerp, and the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven.
Academy wishes to prompt reflections on the potential of the academy within society. It places itself amid the speculative tensions resulting from the questions of what one needs to know and what one can aspire to bring forth.
Academy should be approached as a space that generates vital principles and activities, which can be taken and continued as a mode of lifelong learning.

Academy. Teaching and Learning Art

In spring 2005, the Kunstverein in Hamburg reflected on the situation of students and teachers at art schools in the exhibition entitled "Academy. Teaching and Learning Art". This exhibition - together with its in part processual artworks and the accompanying lecture series - referred directly to the original meaning of "academy as a forum for exchanging ideas and for open, informal gatherings, and examined the issue of institutionalized art education and communication. In September 2006, the series will be continued at the Museum of Modern Art Antwerp and at the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven. These two contemporaneous approaches are devoted to two different aspects of the same subject - albeit aspects that mutually determine and complement one another, and which are closely linked with the institution of the museum and its educational potential.

Museum of Modern Art Antwerp

How do we expand our notions of teaching and learning beyond the frames assigned by formal education? With this question the focus shifts from art academies as institutions per se, to perceiving them as extended aspirational drives. With that it is possible to distinguish between teaching geared to a clear output and teaching that focuses on possibilities for an enabling interaction between subjects and social organisms. The aim is to understand the core concepts by which this type of learning occurs: exchange, reflection, speculation, and fallibility. The project's foreground is the communicative quality of artistic gestures, which act out the possibilities of academy as learning, analyzing, and communicating. Additionally, this project wishes to speculate on the possible emergence of the concept of the civic in order to open up a much broader sphere of self-organization among cultural impulses and phenomena.

International artists and artists' groups

Invited to Antwerp are international artists and artists' groups whose works enter into the process of imparting and learning the material they present as a constitutional element of the pieces themselves. Some of the participants have been invited to transform the exhibition spaces in the Museum of Modern Art Antwerp into places of discussion, discovery, and understanding. To this end, their works aim to create ideal situations for receiving art that enable people to learn from it. Other artists will be involved in projects that respond to the exhibition's theme and describe its context.