Drawing (MA)

Extended Drawing Diaspora Art Practice

Teacher: Christine Meisner

Assistant Teacher: Dareen Abbas

Class

Based on the artistic practice of drawing, this class expands the drawing space to media such as video, photography, canvas, text, music, sound, and installation. Drawing is understood in the sense of bringing something to the surface, as an attitude of approaching reality through the gesture of cautious but perseverant tracing. The visible and the hidden, the conscious and the unconscious, the experienced and the observed are captured as graphism, cartography, excavation, diagram, document or record in order to be transferred into an expanded space of thought. This drawing process can stand on its own or form the content and structure for other media that are combined with or built upon it. The class addresses primarily students who are interested in this extension or who already have an artistic practice with other media and formats.

The critical examination of history and the present, of individual biographies and social processes as well as the questioning of political systems and their implementations are conceived here as a fundamental approach to art production. In challenging global knowledge systems and cultural techniques, daily life, and pop cultural phenomena, students situate themselves within a research-based art practice. In this class, we are exchanging on a multi-layered artistic practice: How can the complex interplay of experience and experiment, of discourse and research be directed into an artistic form? What does it mean to exhibit “research”? In the course of the two-year master’s program we will investigate the relation between research, art practices, and installing the work as a form of interacting with the viewers.

Focus Diaspora Art Practice

Within the different individual artistic approaches in the class, the exploration of diasporic experience is a focal point in the work of many students. In this context the term "diaspora" is not only applied to collective histories of experience – such as the Jewish or African Diaspora – but rather is also understood in a perspective of globalization and migration independent of a specific group. Individual and family biographies are placed in relation to historical and contemporary political, social, and economic regimes. Therefore, it is a matter of broadening the concept of diaspora to include a concern with transcultural, multicollective, and transmigrant movements.

Diasporic art practice has become an art discipline in its own right in the course of the global history of movement, migration, colonization, displacement, flight and exile. It is not only a subject, a discourse within art, it is ultimately part of culture formation itself: notions, forms, languages, sounds and rights emerge from the practice of fusion of different influences. In this regard, the concept of diaspora is read both as an articulation for self-empowerment and as a creative process beyond specific political agendas. It represents daily experiences between origin and home, place and space, departure and arrival, heritage and intertwining, roots and paths traveled. But it also demands the right to move, the right to stay, the right to travel, the right to domiciliate, the right to work – the right to self-realization. It questions the regimes of marginalization and inclusion, the pressures of assimilation and loyalty, the traces of the past and the void of memory politics.

This focus within the class is solely dedicated to artistic practice and the development of artistic projects. It builds on the large global art production of artists who have engaged with the notion of diaspora in the past and present in a variety of methods, forms, and media. Discursively, we will navigate within a referential system that includes Diaspora Aesthetics, global Colonial History, Postcolonial Studies, Decolonial Theory, Holocaust Studies, Commemorative Politics, Theories of Memory and Historicization, Transatlantic Routes of Flux and Reflux, Everyday Culture, Vernacular Culture, Popular Culture, Popular Music, and Sound Art Studies.