Particles / Exam / Tides
With EXAMEN 2023 the Kunsthochschule bids farewell to 70 students who are celebrating their graduation in the documenta Halle. As with Schrödinger’s cat, the graduates’ potential is still unknown, any kind of future is possible at the same time. Studying at this institution is not conceived as vocational training, but as having the space to acquire and develop artistic and/or design skills. What the graduates will do with these skills is yet to be seen, but the possibilities are wide open.
The graduate exhibition has something ambivalent about it. As fixed as the annual date might be in the city’s cultural calendar, the exhibition also runs counter to everyday life at the Hochschule. Like the ebb and flow of the tide, EXAMEN marks a cycle with unforeseen dimensions. For the graduates it marks the symbolic end of their studies and a metamorphosis. There is a similarity to particles in quantum physics, simultaneously behaving as particles and as waves whose potential is still unexplored.
This diversity in artistic and design practices exhibited during EXAMEN 2023, and also the character of the transitional moment from students to graduates, raise the fundamental questions of what curating means and what the curatorial method is. Curators might seek out rules or patterns, but what they turn up instead is resistance to being read as a homogenous mass. The formal and aesthetic difference is what constitutes the program.
In order to make the difference to the actual relationship between the works shown, the exhibition examines how different design and artistic strategies are used to achieve personal goals and ideas. The works are grouped in five clusters, within which the graduates pursue similar or related visions of the future. This contrast of larger formal differences is meant to underscore the diversity of skills and disciplines that are developed by the students at the Kunsthochschule Kassel.
The exhibition is based on the conviction that art and design have much more to offer than simply a solution to aesthetic or practical problems. Both disciplines are an integral part of social, economic, and ecological transformation, and therefore studying at the Kunsthochschule is not vocational training, but provides students with the opportunity and capability to position themselves in our society using the means of art and design.
Visitors to the exhibition are therefore also presented with the bandwidth as well as the depth with which art and design can influence private, social, economic, and ecological life. Instead of a pedagogy of what good art or good design should be, the exhibition focuses on the differences between the strategies that the graduates use to achieve their goals. It not only conveys future possibilities, but also how the artistic and design practices of the former students are already influencing everyday life in the city of Kassel and beyond.
The program of additional events will be published here.
The exhibition EXAMEN has been made possible for the last ten years by the generous support and sponsorship of the cdw Stiftung.
Link:
EXAMEN 2023 exhibition catalog (PDF download)
Curator of EXAMEN 2023:
Mateo Chacón Pino
Dates:
December 13–17
Opening and presentation of awards:
December 13, 6:00 p.m.
Opening hours:
Th, Fr, Sa: 10 a.m. – 8 p.m. / Su: 12 p.m. – 8 p.m.
Location:
documenta-Halle
Du-Ry-Straße 1
34117 Kassel, Deutschland
PROGRAM
Dec 14–16, 11 a.m., meeting point: main entrance, documenta-Halle
Dec 17, 12 noon, meeting point: main entrance, documenta-Halle
"Tour with impulses"
Dec 14–17, 5 p.m., meeting point: main entrance, documenta-Halle
"Tour with impulses"
Joint walk through the exhibition, accompanied by a graduate and students of the Kunsthochschule Kassel. There will be an exchange about selected works with the respective artists.
(max. 20 people, without registration)
Dec 14, 2 to 5 p.m., location: Netz-Werk, documenta-Halle
"GRADUATION - AND NOW? Prototyping for the Zentrum für Kreativwirtschaft (ZfKW)"
Public workshop for university graduates with Britta Wagemann, founding member of RAAMWERK and part of the ZfKW initiative group.
In an intensive workshop, an optimal professionalization environment for graduates who will work in the cultural and creative industries in the future will be developed together. The spatial and content requirements will be determined and prototypes for the Zentrum für Kreativwirtschaft (ZfKW) in Kassel will be designed and then presented.
Registration or questions to:
workshops.examen23[at]gmail.com (max. 24 people)
Dec 14, 6 to 8 p.m., location: documenta-Halle
Panel discussion: Inflation compensation
This panel discussion is dedicated to the effects of economic pressure on artists, designers and creators and their solutions in this regard.
Guests: Geert Lovink, Vienne Chan
Moderation: Max Grünberg
Dec 15, 2 to 3 p.m., location: Netz-Werk, documenta-Halle
"Explore degree programs with KHK alumni"
Open Q&A session on choosing a course of study/career orientation. Pupils with an interest in art, creation and design can approach graduates of the Kunsthochschule Kassel over a cup of tea to ask questions about artistic studies. The alumni talk about their anticipation of their first exhibition, their encounters with documenta artists, fun in workspaces and studios, the struggles and doubts in their own work, discoveries in the basement and their eternal love of canteen fries. Without registration.
Dec 15, 4 to 5 p.m., location: Netz-Werk, documenta-Halle
"Prototyping Future - Design of a Center for Creative Industries (ZfKW)"
What must the ZfKW in Kassel be able to do? The graduates will present their prototypes and open the discussion. All creative professionals and interested parties are invited. Public presentation, without registration.
Dec 16, 3 to 5 p.m., location: documenta-Halle
Panel discussion: The human habitat
This panel discussion focuses on the question of how artists, designers and creators realize their ideas of an ideal living space for humanity. The focus is on how they contribute to increasing the well-being and quality of life of society by designing innovative living environments.
Guests: Gabriela Aquije Zegarra, Leoni Fischer
Moderation: Katharina Mludek, Viktoria Heinrich
Dec 17, 4 to 6 p.m., location: Netz-Werk, documenta-Halle
"Movement research workshop - movement meets art"
Public workshop with Sophie Sengle, freelance dance artist.
In this workshop, participants will engage with the exhibition on a physical level and explore their individual physical relationship to objects from the exhibition through improvisation. The workshop begins with a joint warm-up and sensitization of the senses.
Registration or questions to:
workshops.examen23[at]gmail.com (max. 20 people)