Master Classes

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BOTANICAL INTIMACIES
Master Class with Benny Nemer
November 13-17, 2023

Whether staring into a flower, smelling its perfume, touching the textures of mosses and barks, tasting berries, seaweed, mushrooms and saffron, watching the bowing dance of reeds and rushes in the wind or listening to the song of rustling leaves, botanical life offers us infinite sensations and affects upon which the human experience is dependent. For many of us, our attraction to, and engagement with flowers, plants, and trees is more elemental than intellectual, our intimacies with botanical life are central to the ways we live, think, and create. We turn to flowers to mediate human relations, to observe and understand the cycle of life, for inspiration on how to adorn ourselves, how to flirt, how to dance and how to wither and die. We see the true natures of our genders and sexualities in the polyform stamens and petals of flowers, a reflection of our kinship formations in the cruisy, meandering growth patterns of ivy and bougainvillea, of elm branches and gypsophila.

This Master Class will consider the ways as artists we can work with the botanical world as material and collaborators. We will create individual and collective artworks with and alongside botanical material, tuning into the vegetal world and seeking ways to invite them in collaboration. We will go on observational and foraging walks to Ghent’s Botanical Gardens, Citadel Park, and other green spaces in the city.

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LISTENING AND HOSPITALITY
Master Class and Exchange with ERG Brussels
January 29 - February 2, 2024

This Master Class is designed as a creative exchange with Master students from ERG, Brussels. ERG is a space for artistic, plastic and graphic practices that enter theoretical and formal risk zones; a space for research and pedagogies that are defined and redefined collectively. This spirit of collective defining and redefining will shape this Master Class: students from ERG will travel to Ghent to workshop and co-imagine artistic practices of hospitality, collaboration, and the politics of sharing space with students from KASK's Master Vrije Kunsten.

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SLOW READING CLUB
Master Class with Slow Reading Club
February 5-9, 2023

Slow Reading Club considers reading not as a passive process of ingesting information, but as an active and generative site of contact/friction between text and reader, reader and reader, text and text. Moving the activity of reading out of the silent, seated reader and into the room, the voice, the body, the screen, the page.

This Master Class aims to occupy the thresholds between collective reading, writing, editing, and publishing. The workshop will focus on “artist writings” - that is, writings by artists in which strategies and concerns learned from the artist’s material practices are applied to written language. What permissions can we take as readers and what kind of writers do we then become? The workshop strums the mantra that one does not need to be a writer in order to write.

Together, students will enact and develop protocols for reading extant texts. These protocols will seek to interrupt or intensify elements of collective reading as an embodied practice, a fully body practice. This repertoire of protocols will then be repurposed as writing tools and used to generate a corpus of text-substance to be then collectively edited into a text. Finally, we will think through “publishing” (making public) and dissemination to ask how this text might iterate its (public) form.

Practically, we will be working between screen and page, simple body practices and softwares for shared editing. We want to work collaboratively, finding ways to produce material that is unprecious and open to shared ownership and co-contamination. The workshop is not interested in “good” writing, but rather material writing, bodily writing, generative writing, generous reading.

6 students from Master Vrije Kunsten who will be joined by 6 students from Graphic Design

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HIC . EST . TUUM . HORA HIER . IS . UW . UUR
A Master Class with artist Katja Mater
March 18-22 2024

His watch pushes the White Rabbit around, who in turn pushes Alice around. We check the time every day all day long — But what do we experience as a NOW, as an absolute present, what does being ‘in the moment’ mean, and how long does such ‘a moment’ last in a hasty world where speed has become a status symbol?

Brussels-based artist Katja Mater is interested in revealing a different or alternative (experience of) reality through capturing the areas where optical media hardly behave like the human eye, by mediating between time, space, perception and our understanding of them, while recording events that simultaneously can and cannot be – holding midway between information and interpretation.

Mater is a visual artist, editor, organizer and educator who studied at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy and subsequently at the postdoctoral institute de Ateliers in Amsterdam, with a practice that focuses on the parameters of photography and film as non-transparent media. By creating hybrids between photography, film, drawing, performance and installation Mater documents something that is often positioned beyond our human ability to see. Next to a solo practice as a visual artist Katja is involved in different collaborative projects as editor of Girls Like Us Magazine since 2014 and as one of the founding members of Mothers & Daughters, a Lesbian* and Trans* Bar.

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