Center for Contemporary Arts CSU

You are kindly invited to attend a three-day workshop with curators Maximilian Lehner and Tia Čiček. The event is aimed at students and young professionals from various cultural and creative fields with aspirations and/or experience in curating contemporary art. Based on the interests of the participants, we will select texts and use them for our discussion and reflection on current conditions and methods of work within cultural production.

The workshop Work, Curator, Work! is an experiment in thinking and talking about how to deal with wanting to create projects in the best possible way without idealising the means or ways to get there. When discussing exhibition concepts in art, we often forget that their realisation involves finances and the division of labour. While the curatorial discourse incorporates these questions and launches curatorial ideas into a field of ideals we urge to fulfil, our conversations could be expanded to talking about the influence of networks, physical or mental health, co-working etc. Work, Curator, Work! could be a chance to add some footnotes to important discourses, to discover them, and to think about how we can work with them instead of experiencing them as a burden in how we make exhibitions. The workshop will consist of an introductory session (day 1), followed by a close reading of two or more texts (appx. 1 text per day, 2 days), which will be selected during the introductory stage of the workshop, thus taking into account the wishes and interests of all participants. Departing from these texts, we will discuss exhibitions, modes of working together, artworks, and concrete utopias of how we want the art world to be. The workshop is intended as a non-hierarchical structure for exchange of ideas, interests, concerns, and knowledge.

APPLICATION

The event is free of charge and will be held in English. Please apply by September 30, 2023, at maja.hodoscek@celje.si, with the subject line Workshop WCW.

Please attach a short CV or summary of your interests and/or experience (in English). If you have any questions about the workshop, please write to maja.hodoscek@celje.si.

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Tia Čiček holds an MA in Art History from the Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana. For the last few years, they worked as a curator and producer of contemporary art in various spaces such as the Centre for Urban Culture Kino Šiška (Ljubljana) and DobraVaga (Ljubljana), and have been the artistic director of the Škuc Gallery (Ljubljana) since January 2020. From July 2022, they have been co-leading the World of Art School for Curatorial Practices and Critical Writing at SCCA-Ljubljana, Slovenia. In 2018, they attended the course at the International Summer Academy of Fine Arts in Salzburg, led by Ruth Noack and Grace Samboh, titled Thinking With Works of Art, and finished the two-year curatorial programme at the World of Art School for Curatorial Practices and Critical Writing. Their main interests lie in work theory and ethics of care, through which they try to rethink conventional exhibition-making and contemporary art production. They are a part of the curatorial conversation platform bad curating inc.

Maximilian Lehner is an associate curator for exhibitions and public program of the International Summer Academy of Fine Arts Salzburg, and co-founder of The Real Office (RO) in Stuttgart, an agency for concepts, funding, and project management in the independent art scene. From 2016 to 2022, Maximilian was a research and teaching assistant at the Institute of Contemporary Arts and Media at KU Linz. They studied art theory and philosophy in Paris, Stuttgart, and Linz where they currently pursue their doctoral studies. Maximilian participated in curatorial courses by Ruth Noack and Grace Samboh at the Salzburg Summer Academy, and by Joanna Warsza at ECCA, Cluj/Art Encounters Foundation, Timisoara, and are a part of the CuratorLab program 2023 at Konstfack, Stockholm (co-curating Autostrada Biennale, Kosovo). They develop projects with RO in Stuttgart and Salzburg, and have curated exhibitions for art spaces such as the Salzburger Kunstverein, ElectroPutere (Craiova/Bucharest), Škuc Gallery (Ljubljana), Fünfzigzwanzig (Salzburg), BLOK (Zagreb), sehsaal (Vienna), and aqb (Budapest). Their writing was published in art magazines such as BLOK, Kajet, Revista Arta, ETC. magazine, and Artforum. They are a part of the artist collective Funduk and the curatorial conversation platform bad curating inc.