Independent Study Program

Rogaland Kunstsenter (RKS) is an independent regional art centre located in Stavanger, on the west-coast of Norway. The art centre was founded in 1978 by the local arts and crafts communities. Today, RKS is a member of the nationwide network of Kunstsenters in Norway and serves as a resource centre for the artists, the municipality and the county when it comes to contemporary art and its challenges. RKS develops and carries out art projects in public and private spaces, operates professional development programs, and protects the artistic freedom of expression.

For the last three years, RKS has been experimenting with alternative forms of school and learning through three different programs: The Wilson Exercises (2014), The Legend (2015), and How Many Cures Can a Curator Cure (2016) with support from Arts Council Norway.

The professional development program and educational focus at RKS is responding to the local situation and the lack of experimental forms of education based on collective, community and self-organised practices, and a lack of conventional education for artists, art historians and other arts professionals.

With the Independent Study program, RKS acts as a complement to the local educational programs for art by adding an experimental dimension and an opportunity to program with a degree of risk-taking where we challenge the existing structures of education.

In the long run, the ISP aims to strengthen the professional environment in the region of Rogaland with an influx of artists, guests and faculty of the ISP, and methods to provide the local audience with a greater diversity of cultural offerings.

Thinking about the potential of alternative study programs to support artists with an interest in intellectual and social exchanges between other artists, local art community and broader public, we came to realisation that the best way to do it is to combine an artistic residency with the summer school format.

Our Independent Study Program is inspired by already established programs offered by for instance the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and Maumaus in Lisbon, but also the numerous alternative forms of education highlighted at the Alternative Art School Fair in Brooklyn in 2016, where Rogaland Kunstsenter was featured with its summer school program from 2014 — 2016.

Central to our approach is bringing together people who represent different conceptual and practical approaches in the field of contemporary art in a space of artistic learning that is experimental, versatile and collaborative. Instead of having a goal oriented education, our program is based in the intrinsic pleasure of information sharing among participants and faculty.

With an open ended practice, parameters can remain emergent. In other words, learning about what each participants goals and parameters is one of the main concerns of the ISP. In that sense, we trust the participants to create a learning environment.

Participants will have four weeks to develop their individual artistic research whilst taking part in a community of interdependent learning with other participates, the local artistic community, and our faculty members: critic and editor Kristina Ketola Bore, performance artist Marthe Ramm Fortun, designer João Doria, and philosopher Philipp Kleinmichel, and select guest speakers, such as Prem Krishnamurty and Elise By Olsen.