ARTH 354 Studies in Interdisciplinarity in the Visual Arts

• Instructor: Dr. Maya Oppenheimer

Artists create archives, work with and in spite of them, and develop gestures that take positions on what archives do in history and culture. This course will focus on gestures made by artists in various disciplines to bridge relationships with archives and their stories. Each class will centre a particular verb (re-enacting, collecting, complicating, mapping, inventing, etc) as a theme to consider mediums from painting to performance art, experimental writing to sound installations and film. Assignments will involve researching archival art practices locally and internationally, visiting collections, and imagining potential gestures that help students take a position in relationship to historical, ephemeral, and imagined archives.