‘TENDER INSTITUTE’
international conference by a.pass
After finishing the artistic research post-graduate program at a.pass, 8 participants open up their researches in a performative and multi-layered setting.
Sharing their insights into questions that are on the table for contemporary artists every day: what is the notion of work? How to deal with intuition today? What is the performative power of the object? How can the city be the witness of time?
8 cases open up as many different strategies, diverse invitations to engage and experience artistic research from 8 wholly different perspectives.
During a residency period of 3 weeks, a space is constructed that invites you into all these different cases, constructing crossing points and welcoming the visitors into the research trajectories.
At the same time, a.pass organizes the conference 'The Tender Institute': an active meeting around the notion of the 'institute' in artistic practices today.
In the last ten years, more and more artist initiatives have been re-thinking the institute once again as a point of address: a place where people share their concerns and interests, where you can find topical information and engage with it, where knowledge is archived and opened up to public interest and scrutiny. Compared to the more established Institutes these initiatives seem less concerned with classical knowledge conservation than with a dynamic reformulation of knowledge processed in situ. Opening up the monolithic space of recognition and representation into a heterotopic space of engaged interest.
In these two days, a.pass invites speakers, artists, and administrators to construct new imaginations of what the institute today might look like: how to think of an institute with flexible walls, how to administer an organic institute that grows out of the interests of the people working in it? What is the place of this kind of institute in today's society? In other words: how can an institute still stay an institute when it is embracing its 'tenderness': when it recognizes its dependency on the interest of its users? The risk to become obsolete in the whirlwind of heterotopic interests? The challenge to re-invent its administration to shift from a politics of categorization to one of attention and engagement?