Education from Below is a two-year collaborative programme organised between the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten, Amsterdam, MACBA, Barcelona and WHW, Zagreb.
Education from Below explores art as a place for dialogue, collective learning and imagination. Education doesn't belong only in institutions, but it can be horizontal and come from below, from communities.
The project recognises that art practices can dislocate the usual hierarchies of what should or should not be learned and traditional divisions between theory and practice, and that knowledge does not have to be based on accumulation, but rather on sharing and mutual learning.
The partners will explore new models of art practice based on collective learning and will generate a network of institutions and professionals for sharing methodologies.
Education from Below links three independent programmes for artists, Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten, PEI at MACBA, and WHW Akademija that each provide important opportunities for artistic development outside of formal education systems. The project will be realised over the course of autumn 2019 – autumn 2021 through seminars, study groups, artist residencies, exhibitions, series of lectures, an international conference, a collective reader and a common web platform, involving many artists, thinkers and educators.
As a part of the programme of the second edition of WHW Akademija, from February 17–28th 2020 Banu Cennetoğlu is conducting a two-week intensive for the programme participants. Within a series of public events Evenings with WHW Akademija, she will give a public lecture on Thursday, February 27th at 7pm.
“The attempt to talk on behalf of someone else comes with a burden. In general, one will never know if you are doing something good, or if you are taking advantage, or if you are really talking about yourself when you are talking about them. These are blurry borders. How to not fully occupy the agency or space of someone who is silenced? When one says I love the silence, the silence is already disrupted. On the other hand, in the middle of atrocities, staying silent is a form of complicity.”
Banu Cennetoğlu’s work incorporates methods of mapping, collecting and archiving as well as information distribution and consumption in order to question and challenge the politics of memory. Her most recent work 'Yes. But. We had a golden heart.', is a moving image work 127 hours long. It presents the artist’s professional and personal visual archive from June 10, 2006 to March 21, 2018. The documented time period starts with the beginning of Cennetoğlu’s engagement with UNITED for Intercultural Action’s list. The list, which has been compiled and updated by UNITED each year since 1993, traces information relating to the deaths of more than 36,000 people who have lost their lives within or on the borders of Europe because of state policies. Since 2006, in collaboration with art workers and institutions, Cennetoğlu has facilitated updated versions of the document using public spaces such as billboards, transport networks, and newspapers.
Banu Cennetoğlu lives and works in Istanbul. Solo exhibitions include: K21 Ständehaus, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf (2019); Sculpture Center, New York (2019); Chisenhale Gallery, London (2018); Bonner Kunstverein, Bonn (2015); Salonul de proiecte, Bucharest (2013); Kunsthalle Basel, Basel (2011). Selected group exhibitions include: Actually, the Dead Are Not Dead, Bergen Assembly 2019; Beautiful world, where are you?, Liverpool Biennale (2018); documenta 14, Athens and Kassel (2017); The Restless Earth, Fondazione Nicola Trussardi, Milan (2017); 10th Gwangju Biennale (2014); Manifesta 8, Murcia (2010); 53rd Venice Biennale/Pavilion of Turkey (2009); 5th and 3rd Berlin Biennale (2008/2004); 1st Athens Biennale (2007) and 10th Istanbul Biennial (2007). In 2006 she initiated BAS, a project space in Istanbul focusing on collection and production of artists’ books and printed matter. In 2016 she was a guest at the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Programme.