MAKING USE. LIFE IN POSTARTISTIC TIMES IS AN EXHIBITION AND PUBLIC PROGRAM FEATURING MORE THAN ONE HUNDRED PARTICIPANTS

Jesper Alvaer

Jesper Alvaer

The work placement Stretching imagination, photo by Monika Orpik

In the spirit of the Artist Placement Group, the curatorial team of Making Use have engaged artists in the organizational processes of shaping this project. These arrangements are not considered new commissions, but rather as subtle modifications of models of work conducted on a regular basis by artistic institutions. Jesper Alvaer, a Norwegian artist and a researcher at Academy of Arts, Oslo, is cooperating with the educational department of the museum by inviting educators, mediators, guides, and volunteers into a creative partnership which will last for the duration of the exhibition. Together, they experiment with modalities crucial for organizing processes of mediation in artistic institutions: between volunteer and artist, artist and artwork, artwork and exhibition, exhibition and research, research and institution, institution and policy, policy and language, language and form of employment. His open-ended workshop suspends conventions, thus transforming the institutional processes in the spirit of postartistic times, testing in practice the plausibility of museum 3.0. In order to cross professional divisions and stimulate the creative capacities of participants, Alvaer applies a so-called “low skill, high sensibility” approach, alternating between doing and reflection, between artistic competence and other human capacities. He makes use of methods originating in various disciplines, cross-pollinating with such fields as critical management, participatory art, social work, and cognitive psychology.

 

The report presented in exhibition consists of the work placement Stretching Imagination, produced in cooperation with the Education Department of the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw and realized within the framework of the doctoral research program at KHiO (Oslo National Academy of the Arts).