Shanghai 2008, Henk Slager is curator of Shanghai Biënnale 2008

A conversation with Henk Slager, lector MaHKU

Artist and context
There’s a growing urge for artists to reflect on their work and to create their own context. Art has to master its domain and to deliver its own production of knowledge.
Bart van Rosmalen: ,,In a changing society a concert for piano and flute is simply not enough.”
Still, a lot of artists don’t use their creativity and their qualities as an artist in the presentation of their work. A power point presentation simply doesn’t fit anymore, we have to look for different forms. This is the artist aim in a changing society.
MaHKU trains a new generation of artists to reflect on their own work and to create context: how would you exhibit your own work? MaHKU encourages artists to go beyond their own discipline and seek for other forms of presentation. The Consortium, a Utrecht collaboration of MaHKU, Casco, Expodium, Central Museum and University Museum, provides the possibility to exchange ideas and practices about exhibiting.

Creating new forms
Professional conversations often follow traditional forms. People meet and talk within the lines of the symposium habits, the roles are fixed. Discussion and outcome are predictable.
MaHKU is interested in finding different forms of symposia, new types of conversation about art.
Organizing an expert meeting beforehand and presenting and discussing the outcome gives already a more interesting input to the symposium. But the conversation about art has to change radically and this demands for new forms. It’s the artist turn.

MaHKU
MaHKU is the working title for the master programmes of the Utrecht Graduate School of Visual Art and Design.
MaHKU meets the need of exploring the “why” of creating art. The focus is on critical reflection. Key notions such as research, communication, and crossovers are at the core of the programme. Students are trained to create a flexible research attitude, where they are able to cross boundaries from their specific design discipline or medium to other professional and theoretical fields while dynamizing their own professional domain.