Art Writing Workshop at KLA ART ‘24 I 13th - 15th August 2024

The ARAK Collection invites art writers and cultural analysts to apply to a three-day art writing workshop at KLA ART ‘24 in Kampala, which will run from Tuesday, 13August until Thursday, 15 August 2024. Themed ‘Keeping Company’ and organised in collaboration with 32° East, it takes seriously Arundhati Roy’s observation that ‘Today’s world of specialization is bizarre. Specialists and experts end up severing the links between things, isolating them, actually creating barriers that prevent ordinary people from understanding what’s happening to them.’ Similarly, Susan Sontag once wrote that ‘Interpretation takes the sensory experience of the work of art for granted and proceeds from there,’ to the point where art appears ‘in need of defence.’

For a long time, art writing has been intent on trying to package a plurality of practices into a readily consumable, easy to digest form. Instead of trying to ‘situate,’ ‘link’ or ‘tie’ the work of artists to one or other conceptual broad strokes, this workshop foregrounds how arts writing might keep company with art and live alongside it, rather than trying to re–present it. After Sontag, it is premised on the understanding that ‘What is important now is to recover our senses,’ and that the task of the art writer today ‘is not to find the maximum amount of content in a work of art, much less to squeeze more content out of the work than is already there,’ but rather, ‘to cut back content so that we can see the thing at all.’

The workshop will be facilitated by art writer and critic, Dominic Muwanguzi and writer, editor and curator, Sven Christian within the context of the KLA ART festival, drawing on the sights, smells, and sounds of the city as a catalyst for understanding the place of art writing within the larger nexus of life.

Application process and deadline:

Interested participants who reside in Uganda are invited to submit a 500-word art writing sample to workshop@arakcollection.com by Saturday, 6th July, 2024 11:59PM (EAT).

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