Plug In Institute of Contemporary Art is honoured to announce two exciting opportunities for our 2018 Summer Institute post-graduate research program. Both sessions are invested in alternative frameworks and sites for curatorial and exhibition research and practice; with corollary interests in labour, including systems of value and exchange.

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Summer Institute Session I • DIS: “Thumbs that Type and Swipe: The DIS Edutainment Network”

DIS Collective

A guide for this brave new world that might help us understand how to be and how to live, love, and work in our bodies in this techno-capitalist context. – Marco Roso

For Session I of our Summer Institute research program, Plug In Institute of Contemporary Art is pleased to present DIS. Over the duration of the Institute Marco Roso and collaborators will facilitate “Thumbs That Type and Swipe: The DIS Edutainment Network”. The session will be grounded in discussions that centre on media and the visual arts; offering directed, one-on-one conversations with Roso and guests, as well as group activities that privilege participants and their ongoing work.

The seminar circles around a series of exhibitions organized by DIS and framed by dis.art, a new streaming edutainment platform. Through direct engagement with the artists of dis.art, the session will contemplate a series of linked concerns, including: the nature of belonging in a rootless-seeming, networked world; the changing relationship to the ways one owns, lends or gives time through occupations, bodies, or other forms of value-creation. Some of the topics DIS will covered will be: Money: what is it?; information consumption; the future of citizenship; reparations; love and humor.

Participants will engage in a series of exercises and activities in response to the themes of the Institute. These will range in form and approach, and may include the production of short videos, bike rides, city walks, screenings and guest lectures. Participants will be encouraged to produce individual work generated through our collective thinking and peer-to-peer engagement. The workshop is open to visual artists of all kinds as well as writers, critics and scholars.

DIS is a New York based collective best known for DIS Magazine (2010-2017), and curating the 9th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art (2016). DIS has become an umbrella for a number of networked and collaborative platforms – all of which reimagine one format or another.

Today DIS is focused on dis.art. While remaining true to the novel approaches to critical inquiry that defined life as a magazine, DIS is now focused on redefining entertainment and education through the new streaming platform on dis.art.

DIS enlists writers, filmmakers, and artists to offer new forms of genre-bending edutainment that help cut through the atomization and polarization that defines the noisy, disjointed mediasphere. In the last century, public television programming meant that quality information, education and artistic formats could go hand in hand.

Summer Institute Session II • BUSH gallery “Site/ation”

Feasting on the Land, BUSH gallery, 2015. Photographer: Aaron Leon.

For Session II of our Summer Institute, post-graduate research program, Plug In Institute of Contemporary Art is excited to partner with BUSH gallery. Over three weeks, from August 6-24, Tania Willard, Peter Morin and Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill will lead Site/ation, pushing a radical approach to curating and art making, born from active engagements and lived experiences on the land, land marking, contemporary art, the reserve, and the gallery. Using Indigenous methodologies to build a transformational space, that is open to everyone, BUSH seeks to de-centre the gallery, and the city as epicentres of contemporary art.

BUSH gallery Project Statement:

BUSH gallery acknowledges the Indigenous Nations that have ancestral ties to the Treaty 1 Territory and the Métis Nation homeland. As uninvited guests,* we strive to connect what we are doing as Indigenous artists with valuing and circulating within local Indigenous economies and communities, while also creating space for conceptual, experimental and performative land-based Indigenous led contemporary art. By practicing reciprocity and value-based systems of Indigenous knowledges, centred by our specific cultural backgrounds, we make galleries of thought, colour, land, sky, text and interrelationality.

The 2018 summer intensive with Plug In ICA enacts ideas of site/ation. How are we influenced, challenged, changed and politically tied to the lands in our communities and in our orbits. Participants will camp on the land together, read relevant texts, go for walks on the land, dream new relationships, and will research and learn by making and doing.

Using art as strategy to guide resources and value Indigenous led spaces that acknowledge the land as the first gallery, as our gallery as BUSH gallery we will come together to laugh, to make, to eat and to conjure ideas and dreams that will feed the ancestors.

Artists, curators and writers from all backgrounds are encouraged to apply, but preference will go to QBIPOC (Queer, Black, Indigenous, People of Color) applicants. Deadline is March 10, 2018, 6pm Central Standard Time.

BUSH gallery functions as a space that allows for dialogue, experimental practice and community engaged work that contributes to an understanding of how gallery systems and art might be transfigured, translated and transformed by Indigenous customs, aesthetics, performance and land use systems. BUSH gallery is a trans-conceptual galleryspace. Trans-conceptual repositions ideas born within Indigenous and western epistemological conditions. The trans-conceptual space requires your body to be in a constant state of flux. Never settling like the flow of water in a river. One of the goals of BUSH gallery is to articulate Indigenous creative land practices, which are born out of a lived connection to the land.

Plug In ICA extends our heartfelt gratitude to our generous donors, valued members, and dedicated volunteers. You make a difference.

We sincerely thank the RBC Foundation for the direct support of our Summer Institutes.

We gratefully acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Manitoba Arts Council and Winnipeg Arts Council. We thank the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts for their support of our 2016 and 2017 program.

Plug In ICA relies on community support to remain free and accessible to all, and enable us to continue to present excellent programs. Please consider becoming a member of Plug In ICA and a donor at https://plugin.org/support or by contacting Angela Forget: angela@plugin.org