Felix Gmelin at Summer School as School 2018
July 26, 2018, 19:00
Venue: Boxing Club

Summer School as School
July 16 – August 2, 2018

Stacion – Center for Contemporary Art Prishtina is pleased to announce the presentation “We wish you welcome to an active, inspiring and participatory day!” by Felix Gmelin, part of Summer School as School 2018 Public Program.

“We wish you welcome to an active, inspiring and participatory day!”
(On the current state of education within the humanities)

We are being evaluated, but who is evaluating who, and on what terms? Today universities are obliged to be transparent and comparable by the “Bologna Process”, which is great for student mobility. But who is evaluating who and on what terms? What are the qualifications of the evaluators? Why do market oriented managerial reforms loose track on educating individuals who can relate to societal questions? This project has the ambition to evaluate the evaluators.

The educational reforms following the “Bologna Accords” have sought legitimation through intensive evaluation methods. This evaluation process has opened up for strong political influence over higher education by various governmental agencies. How do we as educators in the humanities and the arts deal with this?
For trying out how managerial methods work within the humanities in practice I hired Mr. Rhaman K.J. Wagner, who works within the German Bad-Homburg-based department of the Kaizen Institute — a world wide enterprise mainly helping industries to improve efficiency — and presented him to six students from the Carl von Ossietzky University in Oldenburg, Germany.

Staging this was a way for me to understand a true story I was told by an artist friend of mine, Markus Degerman, who experienced exactly the same scenario at the Tromsø Art Academy in Norway. The ambiguity in how the students react to this Kaizen lean management education performed by coach Mr. Wagner, and how he approaches them, to me, is the content of this event and video.

“We wish you welcome to an active, inspiring and participatory day!” was commissioned by by Edit Molnár, Lívia Páldi and Marcel Schwierin for the exhibition “The Fevered Specters of Art” at the
Edith-Russ-Haus in Oldenburg. It was broadcasted KOHA vision – KTV, curated by Stacion - Center for Contemporary Art Prishtina in 2017, and will also appear in a book around the exhibition at the
Edith-Russ-Haus, edited by Nataša Ilić and published by Sternberg
Press 2018.

Felix Gmelin lives and works in Oslo. He studied at the Royal Institute of Art/ Kungl Konsthögskolan in Stockholm (1983-1988) and currently serves as Professor of Contemporary Art at the Oslo National Academy of the Arts and teaches at the International Academy of Art in Palestine. In 2010 Gmelin was awarded the Carnegie Art Award ”for a work that is an almost archaeological exploration of the social and political ramifications of the tactility and expressiveness of painting. A key topic in early performance art, Gmelin returns to this field of action in a complex work that reconsiders the painterly “touch” by passing through the media of film, painting and printed stills.”
Gmelin’s solo shows include PORTIKUS, Frankfurt a.M; Malmö Konstmuseum; Gasworks, London; Galerie Nordenhake, Stockholm; Milliken Gallery, Stockholm; Annet Gelink Gallery, Amsterdam; Vilma Gold, London; and maccarone inc., New York. He has also had solo presentations at Premier | Art | Basel and the Frieze Art Fair. Group shows include the 50th Venice Biennale curated by Francesco Bonami and Daniel Birnbaum; the 52nd Venice Biennale curated by Robert Storr; the berlin biennial 4 curated by Maurizio Cattelan, Massimiliano Gioni and Ali Subotnick; and the October Salon 2006 in Belgrade curated by Barbara Heinrich and René Block.