Monday, August 4, 2008

Institute Overview

This summer institute is designed to explore the relationship between belief and action, looking closely at the ways in which human beings negotiate, hold, & balance contradiction. Through the use of text & image we will call attention to the inadequacies, failures, disappointments, and outrages of the present political, historical, social moment, exposing beliefs, systems, structures, and questions that rattle our sense of private and political (in)securities. We will also investigate the power of text & image to galvanize change, identifying the methods and practices of contemporary artists/activists to provoke dialogue and exchange around the most potent questions of our time. Our curriculum draws particularly upon the work of contemporary artist Jenny Holzer, whose collaborations with poets and writers offers new insight into the power of text as image to convey and hold contradiction in a complex world. This is a call for tenderness and absurdity, rawness and intersubjectivity as a political stance.

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