The Oceans Academy of Arts: ‘University’
Özlem Altın, Matthew Lutz-Kinoy, Ola Vasiljeva and Marianne Vierø
Vleeshal Zusterstraat
13 September 2015 – 13 December 2015

University brings together works by members of Oceans Academy of Arts including Özlem Altın, Matthew Lutz-Kinoy, Ola Vasiljeva and Marianne Vierø.

The exhibition plays with the notion of experimental pedagogical systems that historically emerged as critiques of society’s dominant ideological institutions. Such schools proposed forms of self organised learning and developed alternative courses that resisted conventional academic structures, while encouraging the unrestricted development of thought.

Founded in 2008 by Vasiljeva, OAOA operates as a similar experimental platform within contemporary art. The semi-fictional institution presents itself as real, while simultaneously performing its own illusion. Within this framework the exhibition space, the artwork and the artist appear as reflections of the same body.

For OAOA the idea of unlearning becomes central. Reason, form, function and chronology gradually lose their authority; while nonsense, fragmentation and forgetfulness are allowed to guide the structure of knowledge.

The show runs parallel to and in dialogue with Ola Vasiljeva’s solo exhibition at Vleeshal Markt.