Learning with M

Abstract

Going to the Limits of Your Longing, Research as Another Name for Care, the spring 2021 Master symposium at Art Institute HGK FHNW, in Basel, will be devoted to ideas and forms of artistic research that center art as a practice in service of the social. With this symposium we will revisit certain moments in our recent history and present of researching, producing, and exhibiting art in the name of such beliefs, namely social justice. To that end, this gathering will be dedicated to the memory of Marion von Osten, the artist, curator, researcher, writer, and teacher whose curatorial, theoretical, and altogether empathic approaches to the medium of exhibition-making revolved around artistic research devoted to the collective.

In von Osten’s memory, and under her exemplary influence, we will examine the moments when exhibitions became filled with archives, with documents of testimonies and documentaries of testifying moving images. Institutions suddenly saw the need to create collective collections—like the Former West curatorial research project, for example. It was the beginning of a transformation that, since then, has undergone many turns and many faces, but that remains at the core of understanding art as a practice that serves the social and all the forms of justice (and its opposite) that enumerate it.