Please join the St Andrews Centre for Contemporary Art for this talk and group discussion with Dr Magdalena Holdar, Senior Lecturer of Art History and Curatorial Studies at the Department of Culture and Aesthetics, Stockholm University. Holdar is also Head of Curating, Director of the Curatorial MA Programme, and Director of Studies in Art History, Friday 22 November, 2-4pm, Arts Seminar Room 4, The Arts Building, University of St Andrews.
In higher education, the classroom is too often a place where teachers present information that students are expected to digest. Moreover, art historical teaching tends to privilege images of works, and texts about them, assuming that the students can do the translation of powerpoint slide to a work’s real-life materiality. While exploring other methods of teaching, building on material and time, I have found that objects empower, and that exploring them without a text-image detour supports independence and creativity. Treating the classroom more as a studio, and seeing the teacher as a curator of the students’ knowledge-building processes, then supports a situation where teaching and learning turns into research for everyone involved.
Spending many years developing and teaching an MA programme for curatorial studies at Stockholm University has meant incorporating my research of Fluxus into my classroom teaching. Developing research while also having fulltime teaching duties thus meant that the classroom needed to be the site for that research, which for practical reasons could not take place elsewhere. But what began as a necessity, soon turned into an advantage: through the students’ interaction with Fluxus art and instructions, I have come to understand the pedagogical aspects of Fluxus practice—as art and as creative methodology.
Arts Seminar Room 4 is an accessible room, which can be accessed via a lift.
All welcome.
