Workshop6. - 8. Juni 2011
Candice Breitz Künstlerin, Berlin
Questions for a Stranger
The workshop brings together students from the Angewandte Wien and the HBK Braunschweig to collaborate in an interdisciplinary workshop titled Questions for a Stranger. In recent years, contemporary art and filmmaking have increasingly been regarded as fields in which questions regarding the formation and narration of the self can be posed in complex ways. Perhaps as a consequence of the increasingly sophisticated manner in which artists take on questions around subjectivity (often taking recourse to analytical tools developed by anthropologists, ethnologists, sociologists and other social scientists, but without being bound by the clinical expectations of such discursive fields or restricted by simplistic notions of truth), artists have in recent years become particularly interested in the format of the interview as a means of connecting to and attempting to identify with or build a meaningful dialogue with those who are the subjects of their work. Questions for a Stranger will include discussion around how 'the interview' has conventionally been used by documentary makers, sociologists and journalists; and will consider the power relationships that are inherent to certain styles of interviewing.It will culminate in a layered group project to be developed out of a series of interviews by the participating students, who will be asked to bring fresh critical thinking to the practice of interviewing, and to find new ways of exploring the interview as a tool in their creative practice as artists/filmmakers. Students will be encouraged to develop unexpected and experimental approaches to the interview process during the two-day workshop.