Teaching period: 21/10/2025 – 31/10/2025
Location: Academy of Fine Arts, Uniarts Helsinki
Teacher(s): Slavs & Tatars collective, Kasia Korczak and Payam Sharif
ECTS: 1-4 (based on participation in teaching and execution of the course tasks)
Number of available places for KUNO students: 6
Level: BA /MA
Requirements: Basics of screen printing is a desirable skill, alternative printing method, e.g. Riso printing is also possible on a basis of independent practice.
Those interested in books and various printed ephemera, Eurasia, performance, philology, tea, translation, crafts, and poetry are welcome to apply.
Application deadline: September 24th, 2025
How to apply: Please fill out the online form including a motivation letter:
https://link.webropolsurveys.com/S/7B5B92781BAEADC3
Course description
The course—part seminar, part workshop—will take place during an intensive two-week period in October 2025. We will explore material and conceptual approaches to reading as an act of hospitality, including translation and transliteration, with an emphasis on genres of religious texts, poetry and historical scholarship.
For much of its history, reading has been a collective and performative act. For millennia, texts have been recited, delivered to crowds, and experienced as a social body. Only in recent centuries have we become accustomed to understanding reading as a private, individual, and silent act.
In our age of rampant disinformation and increasingly fragmented, molecular attention, the course "Radical Reading" proposes to reexamine the potential of reading—in a broader sense—to create spaces for social cohesion. How does hospitality function as a discursive but also affective practice? How can the analytical and intimate act of contemporary reading be translated into a phenomenological and public act?
Learning material:
Hamja Ahsan, Shy Radicals: The Antisystemic Politics of the Militant Introvert
Dib, El Janaby, El Juridy, Hadi, Lariby, Younis, Manifesto of the Arab Surrealist Movement (1975)
Graham, Beyond the Written Word: Oral aspects of Scripture in the History of Religion
Henri Lefevre, The Production of Space
Saba Mahmood, “Religious Reason and Secular Affect: An Incommensurable Divide?”
Siah Armajani: Walk this Line, ed Victoria Sung and Claire Davies, Walker Art Center, 2018.
Rima Vesely-Flad, Black Buddhists and the Black Radical Tradition, NYU Press: 2022.
Viktor Shklovsky, Turksib
Karen Brodine, Woman Sitting at the Machine Thinking
MMS, The Natural Enemies of Books: A Messy History of Women in Printing
Reza Negarastani, Cyclonopedia
David Melnick, Men in Aïda (Translations of the Iliad)
Mots d’Heure Grousse Reims (Nursery Rhymes Homophonically Translated into French)
Financial Support by KUNO:
Travel support between countries: 330 € (except 660 € to/from Iceland)
Subsistence: 250 € -1st week (5-7 days).
Eligibility:
- 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).
Further information on the course content: annu.vertanen@uniarts.fi
Further information on applying and practical matters: kuva.international@uniarts.fi
