The lynx’s tail is scratching the love pan. Posthumous creature is silent. Just follow its gestures, plant the words in your mouth, shallow all big theories, salivate your food, learn how to chew. Your sweat is a memory. Your production is cursed. Nothing is broken, except linearity. Unruly parts are not b-r-o-k-e-n. Tiny parts are broken, but no more comparisons. No bodyguards, just bodies defending dirty words, engine fluids, and water.
Sofia Bempeza
Keine Bildung und Kunst ohne Streben nach sozialer Gerechtigkeit.
Annette Krauss
Diesem Erbe sehe ich mich verpflichtet.
The KKP program is based on artistic practices and principles of art education that serve as opportunities for experiencing differences within teaching and learning processes. On the one hand, it focuses on the development of artistic/educational work, and on the other hand, it focuses on reflecting on the socio-political conditions in which artistic/educational projects take place, how they are produced and located. In this way, students are prepared as cultural practitioners to interpret images, texts, and practices of contemporary societies from the context of artistic practice with regard to changing subject formations, migration, climate change, ecosystems, digitization, and changes in the labor market and education system, to act within them and actively shape them.
The curriculum includes various seminars and artistic positions that understand the fields of art, art education, and digital/visual cultures as critical thinking and action as well as experimental practice. The KKP team consists of approximately 20 artists under the direction of Univ. Prof. Sofia Bempeza and Univ. Prof. Annette Krauss. Teachers and students develop their own practice with a focus on artistic-educational, visual, and performative approaches that enable a critical and engaged engagement with, among other things, knowledge and image production. We design the teaching of art and communicative practice as an incomplete process in which knowledge and artistic practices are tested performatively, affectively, and collaboratively. This involves not only unlearning (our) patterns of thinking, acting, and perceiving in social, economic, and geopolitical contexts, but also helping to shape caring social processes. We continue to work on this artistically, situated, and polyphonically.
⋇ Polyphony ⋒ Situatedness ⌔ ⍦ ⌔ Affect ⊱ Ecology ⋯ Collectivity ⚕︎ ⍜ Metaskills
We build on practical knowledge and the continuity of the field of study as developed over many years by Barbara Putz-Plecko together with the KKP team, with a particular focus on transdisciplinary work in the field of artistic and educational training. Visiting artists and cultural practitioners also regularly contribute new ideas with regard to current art practices and visual cultures. Guest professors over the last fifteen years have included: Danica Dakić, Werner Feiersinger, Imogen Stidworthy, Michael Kienzer, Simon Wachsmuth, Carola Dertnig, Anette Baldauf, Wendelien van Oldenborgh, Helmut Draxler, Lindsay Seers, Robert Del Tredici, Pierre Hébert, Prinzgau Podgorschek, Willem Oorebeck, Simonetta Ferfoglia (gangart), Zou Bin, Basak Senova, Ebru Kurbak, Chico Mac Murtrie, Aboubakar Fofana, and Isin Önol.
Graduates of the department work as teachers, artists, and (art) mediators in formal and informal educational settings: as art teachers in secondary schools and in tertiary education, in art and cultural mediation—for example, in art and cultural spaces, museums, galleries—and they develop new working practices at the intersections of art and culture, science, education, and society. Additional guest semesters at international universities and student participation in interdisciplinary, transdisciplinary, and transcultural projects offered by the department open up a broad and diverse range of experiences and opportunities from many different perspectives.
Ongoing research projects being conducted at the department include:
SPACEX – Spatial Practices in Art & ArChitecture for Empathetic EXchange
Project lead: Barbara Holub
(EU Horizon H2020-MSCA-RISE-2019, project nr. 872561)
Shaken Grounds: Seismography of Precarious Presences
Project lead: Mariella Greil and Lucie Strecker (PEEK AR 780),
Angewandte Performance Lab
Completed research projects carried out at the department:
- Choreo-ethische Assemblages: Erzählungen bloßer Körper
Project lead: Mariella Greil-Möbius
Austrian Science Fund (FWF): V 733 Richter-Programm (incl. Richter-PEEK)
- A Research of Doing
Project lead: Assoc. Prof. Dr. Basak Senova und Dr. Johan Thom
OeAD Africa-UniNet und BMBWF: P017_South Africa/ A Research of Doing/ University of Applied Arts Vienna, University of Pretoria
- Passenger Diaries
INTRA Projekt 2020: Mariella Greil
- „Sounding Research“
INTRA Projekt 2020: Ricarda Denzer
- The Octopus Programme
Programmleitung: Basak Senova
- The Entanglement between Gesture, Media, and Politics
Arts & Science in Motion (Volkswagen-Stiftung): Florian Bettel, Konrad Strutz
(at the Braunschweig University of Art with Irina Kaldrack)
The Department of Art and Communication Practices is part of the
Institute of Studies in Art and Art Education