Speakers include: Amerigo Restucci, Medardo Chiapponi, Chiara Vecchiarelli, Angela Vettese, Mara Ambrozic, Sarat Maharaj, Hito Steyerl, Henk Slager, Mary Jane Jacob, Lev Kreft, Ute Meta Bauer, Carol Becker, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Marco de Michelis, Paolo Legrenzi, Paolo Garbolino, Hong John Lin, Simon Njami, Cornelia Lauf, Giulio Alessandri, Suzana Milevska, Gertrud Sandqvist, Jan Kaila, Mick Wilson, John Aiken, Franco “Bifo” Berardi, Jan Cools, and Baton Sinister

Download schedule as .pdf here

Download Italian text schedule as .pdf here
Download press release here

The year 2011 marks the 10th anniversary of the Faculty of Arts & Design at Iuav University of Venice, which offers the only public Undergraduate & Graduate Programme in Visual and Performing Arts in Italy.

On this occasion, under the directorship of Angela Vettese (who has run the graduate programme since it was founded), the International Symposium Art as a Thinking Process: Visual Forms of Knowledge Production will be held. The symposium will be curated by Mara Ambrozic, and will feature the presentation of Visual Arts at Iuav, Venice 2001-2011 – What an Art School Should Be?, a publication edited by Chiara Vecchiarelli with Angela Vettese.

Held on Sunday 5th and Monday 6th June 2011 in the Aula Magna in Tolentini, the main Iuav University venue, the meeting will aim to investigate the role of art in the context of knowledge production. Within the two-day symposium a series of papers will be presented by a number of prominent thinkers — be them theoreticians, curators, scientists, writers or artists — variously involved in both the teaching of art and the reflection on the relationship, overlapping and intertwining between art and thought.

The goal of the symposium is to discuss the logic and methods involved in this specific yet open form of knowledge production and dissemination from which arises the idea that art is to be conceived as lying within the thinking process itself. Art as a Thinking Process: Visual Forms of Knowledge Production follows the increasing interest in art schools, the prominence gained by their joint exhibition places, the evidence of art practices and, accordingly, the diffusion of an extensive literature discussing art schools as a resource and potential alternative to the merely commercial dynamics that are presently shaping the system of contemporary art. The meeting will also address the current crisis and shifts in the practices of knowledge production within the general educational sphere.

The symposium proceedings will be published shortly afterwards.
The two-day symposium will be open to the public.
Please register by 1st June 2011 with sending an email to thinksart@gmail.com

This event is organised by Università Iuav di Venezia, the Faculty of Arts and Design Graduate Programme in Visual and Performing arts in collaboration with EARN. 5-6 June 2011 at the Aula Magna, Tolentini, Santa Croce 191, Venezia.