Lecture Series on Arts, Cultures, Policies & Educational Practices #6

From September 2021 to February 2022, CAMP notes on education is running a series of lectures on Arts, Cultures, Policies, and Educational Practices. In nine online sessions, internationally renowned experts at the interface of Arts, Cultural Policy and Education will present their concepts and approaches. They will be talking about their research within their particular contexts. Through dialogue and knowledge-sharing, participants will have an opportunity to reflect on their own concepts, methods and practical experiences in the context of the upcoming documenta fifteen.

The curatorial approach of the artists’ collective ruangrupa is to locate art in people’s everyday lives and, with documenta fifteen, create a place for shared knowledge production. In line with this concept, the lecture series and its speakers will ask questions about the free and institutionalised spheres of arts and education. CAMP notes on education initiates a dialogue on the social and political factors that influence the emergence of artistic practice.

The series is organized in collaboration with the University of Hildesheim and the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich. The lectures will be moderated by students and held in English due to the presence of international speakers.

CAMP notes on education

CAMP notes on education is a glocal* network of teachers and learners in the fields of arts, arts history, aesthetics, cultural policy and arts education. CAMP uses the practice of lumbung as an opportunity to place the question of contemporary Arts Education in networked and global contexts. For example, what role does it play in relation to artistic and curatorial actors? How does it position itself in the current cultural policy discourse?

The contemporary practice of Arts Education needs new responses to translocal teaching and learning contexts. documenta fifteen should provide a framework for instigating structural change in these areas. lumbung allows CAMP participants to learn about new parameters for horizontal decision-making processes and resource allocation. In the coming weeks and months, CAMP will be working with a growing number of cooperation partners and networks to translate these values, rituals and organizational principles. It will be questioning the foundations and practices of Arts Mediation and looking for ways to learn in and from collectives.

With this focus, CAMP notes on education is constantly growing and opening up spaces for collective and project-based learning.

*glocal = global-local

Thursday, January 20, 2022:

Lecture: Listening to Performances of Difference: Negotiating Multiplicity with Dialogic Empathy

Speaker: Charlene Rajendra

The presentation will draw from the experience of five established Singapore theatre practitioners, Alvin Tan, Alfian Sa’at, Haresh Sharma, Kok Heng Leun and Ong Keng Sen, whose artistic works negotiate issues of cultural diversity and create spaces for audiences to encounter alternative perspectives that reconfigure normative notions of ‘us’ and ‘them’. Attending to questions of inter-cultural conflict and the struggle to deal with prejudice, their collaborative and experimental approaches to theatre provide potent examples of inclusive and critical options for rethinking cultural identity.

Charlene Rajendran is a theatre educator, dramaturg and practitioner who is currently Assistant Professor at the National Institute of Education at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. She is Co-Director of the Asian Dramaturgs’ Network (ADN) and Lead Editor of the ADN Re/View. Her research interests include issues of identity in multicultural contexts, dramaturgy, play-based pedagogy and arts leadership.

Lecture: Sounding out Matters of the Nation through Visual Arts Education: Pedagogical Cues from Singapore Contemporary Artists

Speaker: Chee-Hoo Lum

This presentation offers critical perspectives of young Singapore contemporary artists in the articulation of their relationship with the nation state through their creative works and processes. The ambiguous and self-censoring ways with which artists articulate their opinions and speak about their works point to the layered and oftentimes subversive ways with which narratives of difference are weaved into the artistic outcomes as they negotiate and comment on state mechanisms. Pedagogical implications drawn from the works of these contemporary artists are suggested for working with primary and secondary school students within the visual art classroom to encourage a more critical approach towards sounding out matters of the nation.

Chee-Hoo Lum is associate professor of music education with the Visual and Performing Academic Group at the National Institute of Education (NIE) at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. He is the coordinator of the NIE Centre for Arts Research in Education (CARE), an initiative of the UNESCO UNITWIN programme ‘Arts Education Research for Cultural Diversity and Sustainable Development’. Chee-Hoo’s research interests include issues towards identity, cultural diversity and multiculturalism, technology and globalization in music education; children’s musical cultures; creativity and improvisation; and elementary music methods.

More information about the event can be found here.

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