ART EDUCATION IN THE MIDDLE - EAST
OCTAVIAN ESANU
AUB BYBLOS ART GALLERY, 2022
CURATED BY Miha Vipotnik and Melissa Ghazale
OCTAVIAN ESANU
AUB BYBLOS ART GALLERY, 2022
CURATED BY Miha Vipotnik and Melissa Ghazale
PLATEAU I
CURATORS: MELISSA GHAZALE & MIHA VIPOTNIK The project commenced in November 25, 2021 with a platform dedicated to art and film education at the Holy Spirit University of Kaslik (USEK)—a private Catholic university in Mount Lebanon Governorate established in 1938 by the Lebanese Maronite Order. The project revolves around the pedagogical activities of Miha Vipotnik (b. 1954), a pioneer Slovenian video artist who joined the Department of Film and Television in 2002 (renamed since 2017 into the Department of Communication). In ex-Yugoslavia Vipotnik has been credited with being one of the first artists who worked in the medium of video art during the 1970s, a process that in Slovenia has been largely synchronous with the rise of video art in the West. Working for two decades at USEK, Vipotnik has trained several generations of Lebanese film and video makers, many of whom have pursued successful artistic careers. At USEK Vipotnik teaches film, video and interdisciplinary exhibition-making and has been acting as mediator and facilitator of numerous cultural exchanges between Lebanon and Slovenia. He has involved his students in several extra curriculum exhibitions, such as In-Medias Res, Vertical Collisions, and EYE’N. In these and many other projects, exhibitions and workshops Vipotnik has played multiple roles: from managing and securing European Union funding, which allowed his students to produce new artworks and collaborate with established artists in Lebanon and Slovenia, to teaching them how to make individual and group exhibitions. For this project, which revolves around USEK and its engagement with pedagogies of art, film and video, Vipotnik is collaborating with one of his former students Melissa Ghazale (b. 1992). For the first chapter of Art Education in the Middle East project this Slovenian-Lebanese duo are co-curating an exhibition inside AUB Byblos Bank Art Galleries by putting on display documentation, video-works, maquettes, and relics from various workshops organized by Vipotnik during his teaching career in Lebanon. The duo will also hold a presentation in late November 2021, and a workshop in video art in the spring of 2022. The USEK plateau offers an overview of Vipotnik’s educational method and processes, as well as a reflection and familiarization of AUB Art Galleries audience with the methods of art education practiced at USEK. The Kaslik University (USEK) chapter, which is an open work or evolving organism or art installation that changes periodically, will then introduce other or the next participants to the project. |
PLATEAU II
CURATORS: KAJA KRANER, LUCIJA SMODIŠ, MELISSA GHAZALE & MIHA VIPOTNIK WITH THE PARTICIPATION OF: SASHA BECHARA, RONY GHANIME, ROMY-CHRIST STEPHAN, JOSEPH AOUN, ELENA FEGHALI, YASMIN A KOBEISSI. “Image, digitalization and transmediality: Emile Hannouche's collection at USEK Department of Communication (Plateau 2)" continues with Miha Vipotnik's pedagogical and other activities at the Department of Communication at the Holy Spirit University of Kaslik (USEK). The project is informed by Vipotnik's approach to art education that he carries out at USEK as well as in his extra-curriculum exhibitions that are often collaborations between Lebanese and Slovene artists and curators. The approach reflects Vipotnik's thinking about the image, technology, media, and the document, which is overall characteristic of his transterdisciplinary and intermedia artistic practice. The starting point of the present exhibition is Emile Hannouche's art collection. Vipotnik sees Hannouche's collection in terms of a starting point for future development and extension of the Department of Communication into a contemporary interdisciplinary and transmedia education art department at USEK. The exhibition builds on a series of projects developed between USEK (Kaslik, Lebanon) and Pekarna Magdalenske mreže (Maribor, Slovenia). The multi-media exhibition does not approach Hannouche's collection from a scholarly art-historical point of view. Rather, we start with the possible ways of integrating Hannouche's collection into the existing (film/video) format of art education at USEK. The processes include digitalization (making the inventory of the collection) and using artworks from the collection to participate in various cultural projects in Lebanon and abroad. By setting this exhibition with Vipotnik's students, we were, therefore, interested not only in the educational potential but how a particular art media and its characteristic language develops in parallel with concurrent technological media. How the artistic and curatorial research of an art heritage unravels complex intertwinement of artmaking, politics, and economy, or how a particular artwork has a life of its own – especially when living outside the conserving and sterile environment of an art institution. |