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Education: Alternatives and the Academy
Speakers: Emily Floyd and Gridthiya Gaweewong
This program is part of ACCA’s 2021 Lecture Series, Experimental Institutionalism: Contemporary Art and Curatorial Ecologies, which delves into the artistic, curatorial, organisational and institutional models in which artists, curators and producers reflect and shape the role of contemporary art practice.
This series has been developed in response to the significant impacts on practice, movement, cultural production, display and community gathering in 2020, and reflects a desire to strengthen and retain international connections in the face of radical limitations on travel, movement and collaboration.
Engaging local and international experts, this series touches on the changing roles of artists, curators, writers, funders, educators and institutions, as they intersect with wider global economic, technological, environmental and political contexts.
Loose Objects and Situated Knowledge
Lecture by Emily Floyd
Emily Floyd’s practice activates spatial and material strategies of child-centred learning, exploring possibilities and limitations for navigating the casualised realm of Contemporary Art’s critical classroom. Emily will discuss the concept of Loose Objects, an institutional experimentalism used in Montessori classrooms, referring to objects that can be moved around and manipulated by children as they play and explore. Like utopian artworks, Loose Objects play the role of itinerant, post-human educators; freely circulating across institutional frameworks. Yet, what happens when these haptic distractions can no longer deflect from the flaking paint on the kindergarten walls?
Emily Floyd works in sculpture and public installation. She explores the history of play, employing it as a frame for investigations into public philosophy, socially engaged design, typography and the legacies of modernism. Drawing parallels between educational models and contemporary art, Floyd’s works generate spaces for engagement and interaction. The artist has completed a number of large scale public commissions, including works for the 56th Venice Biennale, Heide Museum of Modern Art and Australia Square, Sydney. Floyd’s work is in the permanent collections including: Museum of Contemporary Art Australia; National Gallery of Victoria; Art Gallery of New South Wales; Monash University Collection, Melbourne; National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; GOMA Queensland; Victoria and Albert Museum, London; and The British Museum, London. Emily Floyd is Senior Lecturer in the Fine Art Program at Monash Art Design and Architecture. She is a fellow of the Australia Council of the Arts and a Sydney Myer Fellow.
What’s missing with the Art School in Thailand (and beyond)?
Lecture by Gridthiya Gaweewong
Gridthiya Gaweewong founded arts organisation Project 304 in 1996, and is currently Artistic Director of the Jim Thompson Art Center, Bangkok. Her curatorial projects have addressed issues of social transformation confronting artists from Thailand and beyond since the Cold War. Gaweewong has organized exhibitions and events including Underconstruction, Tokyo (2000 – 2002), Politics of Fun at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin (2005), the Bangkok Experimental Film Festival (1997–2007) (co-founded with Apichatpong Weerasethakul), Saigon Open City in Saigon, Vietnam (2006-07) (with Rirkrit Tiravanija) and Unreal Asia, Oberhausen International Short Film Festival (2010). Gaweewong is on the curatorial team for the 2018, 12th Gwangju Biennale, Imagined Borders. She is also the head curator of ICI’s traveling exhibition Apichatpong Weerasethakul: The Serenity in Madness.