Master Students in Fine Art Raise Major Social Issues
For two years, the graduating students of HDK-Valand’s Master of Fine Art programme have been pursuing a deeper understanding of everything from the artist’s role in society to how artistic research can be conducted. We met three of them in conjunction with the group exhibition "Speculative Gatherings".
It’s mid-May on the calendar, but the temperature in Gothenburg today is like the middle of summer. In a large open space in the city’s old slaughterhouse district, the graduating students of HDK-Valand’s Master of Fine Art programme are showing a selection of the work they’ve been making – artworks, workshops and artist talks that in different ways aim to stretch the boundaries of what a conventional gallery space is and what the role of an artist might be.
One of the students is David Spraggs. He now lives in Gothenburg, but was born in Great Britain and prior to this was educated at Goldsmiths in London. When he applied to HDK-Valand, he had already been working for several years, primarily with sound and video art, but had begun to tire of treating the viewer as a passive observer. “There’s nothing inherently wrong with that,” he says, “but I just wasn’t happy working that way anymore. I no longer wanted the audience to just look at and talk about my art – I wanted them to participate.”
For the Speculative Gatherings exhibition, David is showing a piece called Summoning. It’s based on a participatory performance he developed for Skogen cultural center. He describes it as a kind of role play intended to call forth non-human entities. “Mysticism and magic have always interested me,” he says. “When we perform a ritual in a playful way in order to conjure up something beyond the human, even if we’re just pretending, it raises questions like ‘How do we relate to one another?’ and ‘Can we relate to the world in a different way?’”
David thinks a lot about how as an artist he can contribute to society, especially in a time when one crisis follows another – climate, economy, war and pandemics. “The reason I applied here was that HDK-Valand emphasises the role of the artist in society,” he says. “The individualistic perspective does not interest me. It’s all about what we can do together.” Showing his work in the exhibition context of Speculative Gatherings was therefore a challenge. “I presented a sound art piece at the opening,” he explains, “but what I’m showing here is the documentation. What’s important is the experience the participants shared during my performance.”
Raghad Resres is another artist whose creativity extends beyond the ordinary exhibition format. Her work is based on research, and the piece Hidden Dimension is rooted in her own experiences of living and growing up in a Palestinian refugee camp in Jordan. Her focus is on the architecture of the camps and how it influences and limits the women who live there. Raghad explains that the camps were established to provide refugee housing for the Palestinians who were forced to relocate by the Israeli occupation during the 1948 Nakba, or catastrophe, and many have been living there for generations as a result of the colonisation by Israeli settlers.
“The buildings reflect the powerful feeling of community and solidarity that exists among the residents of the camps,” says Raghad. “But they are so densely populated that they pose challenges for women, since the crowding erases the boundary between public and private spaces.”
At the opening Raghad gave a performance in which she symbolically sewed the audience into the space of the artwork and stitched her own feet with red thread. She has also created pictures in which she uses visual means to try to invoke the feeling of motion sickness in the observer. She calls the method “disruptive gestures”. “I believe that anyone who lives long enough in a system can no longer really see it,” she says. “You need action to disrupt that.”
She already studied literature at the Hashemite University in Jordan, and over the years she has worked at the borders of performance, participatory theatre and conceptual art. Her studies in Gothenburg were made possible by support from various funders and scholarships, including the Axel Adler Scholarship, which pays the cost of tuition for students from outside of Europe to study at the University of Gothenburg.
A number of Raghad’s expectations for the master’s programme have been fulfilled. “I wanted to deepen my knowledge and I wanted to identify my role as an artist in the public realm,” she says, “and that’s were I’ve gotten.” More than anything, she has adopted a theoretical framework. She now connects her artistic practice with decolonial practices, intersectionality and feminism. She also sees her art as inescapably political. “In the beginning, I didn’t identify myself as political at all,” she says. “But now I can no longer talk about my art without talking about the colonial legacy.”
Dominika Kemilä’s journey has been almost the opposite. She already had a foundation of theory when she entered the programme. She knew she wanted to base her work on research, and she was already engaged in artistic investigations. In fact, this is Dominika’s second master’s degree from HDK-Valand. “I did both the undergraduate and graduate programmes in textile art and finished in 2017,” she recalls. “But as an undergraduate I was increasingly drawn to fine art, and from early on I was interested in doing research. That’s why I wanted to get another master’s degree.”
The question was what she would do next with her artistic practice. In her installation Enemy of the People, we find part of the answer. Here Dominika mixes simple materials such a tarpaulin with custom-designed chairs and photographs. Through headphones, we hear the sounds of various readings she has given at different locations in Europe. The text she reads is documentation about the executed Karelians.
“What I’m studying is the archives of the Soviet security police and the potential for these documents to function as a memorial,” she says. “Previously I worked with themes such as deportations in the Soviet Union and how people have worked to recover from that trauma over time. When I discovered my own Karelian surname among the list of those who had been executed and buried in a mass grave in St. Petersburg, I wanted to know more.”
But how could Dominika, who was accustomed to making site-specific work, move forward with this Karelian subject matter when she couldn’t travel into Russia? Her solution was to approach places in a tangential way. She recorded the wind from the Norwegian side of the Barents Sea and visited the prison cells of the Soviet Security and Intelligence Services in Estonia. But most important are her readings of archival materials in locations near the Russian border in Norway and Finland. “Reading these people’s names in places that are related to the mass murder becomes a way to bring them back into reality,” explains Dominika.
She says that in the course of the programme, more than anything she has learned to clearly delineate her work and to conduct research through artistic practice. “The programme has pushed me to seek out new contexts and make use of artistic processes in the public realm much more methodically than before.”
Like David and Raghad, Dominika sees the role of the artist as an opportunity to connect with topical issues on both a societal and a personal level. “As I see it, when you work with artistic research, it’s precisely this boundary-defying dialogue that’s the foremost strength.”
Text: Camilla Adolfsson
More information on the participating former students
- Raghad Resres: raghadresres.com
- Dominika Kemilä: dominikakemila.com
- David Spraggs: davidspraggs.co.uk
On Speculative Gatherings
In May 2024 the graduating students in MFA Fine Art programme created creative hub at Slakthuset in Gothenburg: Speculative Gatherings .
Speculative Gatherings offered a dynamic series of art works, hosted talks, dinners, performances, readings and screenings, based on 14 independent artistic projects.
The student group aimed to explore: “What worlds are possible? What stories do we want to tell? In a society focused on the individual, how do we create ways of gathering? Speculating asks us to think about how things are and how they could be. When we gather we make worlds, share ideas, use tools, and tell stories.”
Speculative Gatherings took place on May 10-18, 2024, at Slakthuset in Gothenburg.
