A new art school? Statements by 30 artists, writers and architects.

Over the past two decades, Berlin’s growth into an international art metropolis has brought many people to the city. A number of these imports teach art – seemingly in all other cities but Berlin. The city’s two schools providing full-scale arts education – the Universität der Künste (UdK) and the Hochschule Berlin Weissensee – were established long before 1989.

Since 2006, if not before, discussions about the UdK’s organizational and administrative politics have flared up – generated, for one, by the stepping down of Stan Douglas and Daniel Richter as professors, a development the UdK attempted to atone for by appointing prominent professors such as Olafur Eliasson (whose assignment though ends March 2014). Weissensee has seen an outflow of professors with international profiles to teaching posts in other cities – Karin Sander has taught in Zurich since 2007, Katharina Grosse in Düsseldorf since 2010 – and the school has gone the way of appointing guest professors and lecturers.

Reputations, ratings and capacities for reform aside, the question still presents itself whether Berlin, given its manifold art scene, is in need of new models and directions for its art education. In 2006–7, the one-year temporary project unitednationsplaza underscorred the city’s desire for an informal art school mediating its larger, international art discourse.

Does the current situation suffice? If not, what form would a new institute ideally take? frieze d/e asked Monica BONVICINI, Helmut DRAXLER, Tom HOLERT and Robert KUDIELKA for extended responses to these questions. A set of additional artists and theorists also contributed shorter statements.

Finally, six artists and architects – Roger BUNDSCHUH, Eva GRUBINGER, Sabine HORNIG, Michelle HOWARD, KUEHN MALVEZZI, and Studio MIESSEN – were asked to submit concrete drafts for the design and structure of a new art academy.

And much more…

Editors: Matthew Slotover, Amanda Sharp
Language: German / English
Pages: 158

Price: €8.50
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Komuna Fundamento. Kuehn Malvezzi. Mousse Publishing.

Esperanto’s failure to become a commonly spoken language is a fact, just as modern architecture has not become part of the mainstream: there are other kinds of lingua franca today. Like Esperanto, architecture intended to constitute a common ground appears instead to be sectarian in the midst of contemporary pluralism. Responding to David Chipperfield’s call for an exhibition of Common Ground at the 13th Venice Biennale of Architecture, Kuehn Malvezzi built two interventions using grey stack-bond brickwork, at the entrance and in the Sala Chini of the Palazzo delle Esposizioni, the central pavilion at the Giardini. The Berlin-based practice created two thresholds, two specific spaces that encourage people to meet and linger, to sit down and watch. Komuna Fundamento embraces the relationship between the architectural object and its physical construction.

Including contributions by Candida Höfer and Armin Linke – two artists who approach architecture from opposite directions, while both working in and with space – architecture is considered by Kuehn Malvezzi as part of a curatorial action in space that is neither foreground nor background, but a transformative medium of the in-between. Very much like the installation, the book follows the logic of translation, putting contrasting imagery from various other places into a relationship.

Pages: 208
Language: Esperanto / English

D 33€

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Kuehn Malvezzi – Index. Mousse Publishing.

The presentation of Kuehn Malvezzi’s new monograph, titled KUEHN MALVEZZI – INDEX is strikingly straightforward: the projects created by the Berlin-based architects over the last decade are exclusively narrated through images, with the sole textual presence consisting of selected reprints of previously published theoretical treatises and interviews. Nothing was added to the volume that would interfere with the narratives, evoked here by the juxtaposed visual sequence of public, private and exhibition spaces. All references are listed on the cover jacket, which also acts as the index.

D 28 €

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