Olga Chernysheva / Anna Jermolaewa

The topic of the course is “Artist’s Territory”. It will deal not with style, but rather with occupying some invented or discovered territory. In the current art scene, a work of art cannot be apprehended at first glance, since every work is an integral part of an “artistic landscape”. The important thing is the extent to which that landscape is detailed and convincing. Literary comparisons might include invented or constructed places such as Dostoevsky’s St. Petersburg, or Kafka’s fictional but still recognisable city.

Participants will work on their own artistic landscape. This may be entirely fictional, or it may contain details taken from reality. It will have a number of different, interconnected themes. Every new tonality, every new nuance will be intelligible and come alive only in the context of the existing body of work. The smallest change, however trivial or coincidental, may completely alter the whole perception and interpretation.

As a starting-point, we might take sketches made in the town, or perhaps visual comments on some spaceoriented text. Our media may be drawing, painting, sculpture, video, photography, or even poetry or readymades. In any case, intuition will drive us towards our subject, with empathy as our guiding principle and our primary resource.

Assistant: Ekaterina Shapiro-Obermair