Teaching period: 13th –17th October 2025
Location: Oslo National Academy of the Arts, Norway
Teacher(s): Dora Garcia
ECTS: 3
Number of available places for KUNO students: 2
Level: BA & MA
Application deadline: 19th September 2025
How to apply: lease apply via this form online: https://nettskjema.no/a/542792
Course description:
What do we mean when we say that art is for everyone? can truly everyone access art? what does it mean to own an artwork, is ownership really something only for the elite? Art for the many or art for the few?
As art producers, Who do we have in mind when we make art?
As art producers and art consumers, Who benefits from art? Who decides and contextualises the art that we see?
keywords: art practice, public, public sphere, access to art, right to art
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Art is for everybody but only the elite knows it is a workshop/course made in collaboration with Athens School of Fine Art, the University of Bologna and KHiO Oslo, using the formats of group discussion and collective practice to develop new forms of political imaginations and of new forms of presence of art in the public sphere.
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Art is for everybody: the concept "commons" is defined as the cultural and natural resources accessible to all members of a society (everybody), including natural materials such as air, water, and a habitable Earth. But commons are as well worlds in movement, communities that create forms of life in common that are continuously transformed. Under conditions of art/commons, the making and circulation of (art)objects are aimed at concretising, making visible and surrendering agency to the expanded, multimodal and abstract relational network in which human value resides. The commons counter capitalist forms of production and value, but they are not outside capitalism, rather, they have carved zones of self-organisation and autonomy within them. The commons are a socialist and postcolonial space where knowledge, gestures and social relations go towards the reproduction of the commons.
But only the elite knows it: we will discuss together how art acquires value, monetary value and symbolic/influential value, and who determines this value and according to which factors. We will discuss how art is exhibited (made accessible) and for whom; how society is educated in relation to art - is art a necessity for everyone or just an amusement/luxury for the few? and we will discuss what is the role of artists in all that, and who has the right to call themselves an artist.
Practical/ theoretical
The workshop is mainly addressed to practice, but based on discussion and debate.
Bibliography (new items will be added)
Poetry is not Luxury, by Audre Lorde :https://sites.rutgers.edu/teaching-against-erasure/wp-content/uploads/sites/893/2022/11/Teaching_Black_The_Craft_of_Teaching_on_Black_Life..._-_Poetry_Is_Not_a_Luxury_Audre_Lorde.pdfLinks to an external site.
Hope and Fears for Art, William Morris: https://www.marxists.org/archive/morris/works/1882/hopes/chapters/chapter1.htmLinks to an external site.
Open Call for the Communist Museum of Palestine : https://en.bergenassembly.no/Open-Call-from-the-Communist-Museum-of-PalestineLinks to an external site.
'The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility , Walter Benjamin: https://monoskop.org/images/6/6d/Benjamin_Walter_1936_2008_The_Work_of_Art_in_the_Age_of_Its_Technological_Reproducibility_Second_Version.pdfLinks to an external site.
Financial Support by KUNO:
Travel support between countries: 330 € (except 660 € to/from Iceland)
Subsistence per week: 250 € per week.
General KUNO Eligibility Rules:
- only BA and MA full-degree students from the KUNO network schools can participate;
-exchange students from other institutions, which do not belong to the KUNO network, studying at one of the KUNO network schools, CANNOT participate;
- full-degree students from the KUNO network schools, currently on exchange at another institution, CANNOT participate (neither with nor without the KUNO grant).
In case of any questions please contact Hanna Gjelten Hattrem hannhatt@khio.no
