International Studio – Martin Newth

The International Studio is available to:
-    3rd, 4th and 5th-year students of the Faculty of Art,
-    Second-cycle students of the Faculty of Design.
If you are interested, please prepare a portfolio (max 4 A4 pages, pdf): a short description of your artistic interests/concepts and a few photographs of your works.

The International Studio is part of the project titled “Development programme for the Academy of Fine Arts in Katowice,” co-financed by the EU in the framework of the European Social Fund (Operational Programme Knowledge Education Development). The participants will be asked to fill in additional documents required in the project and to accept the terms and conditions of the rules of participation.

Information meeting: Friday 25 January, 11:00, cinema in 50 Raciborska building.

The course will examine modes by which artists use or misuse both old and new technologies. Participants will be asked to explore the possibility of bringing together traditional and new processes. This could include: the analogue and the digital; the still and the moving; the hands-on and mediated; or the material and immaterial. Participants will develop ideas and approaches they have already been working on to ask what it means to build an experimental practice. The course will focus on generating a body of independent work which will be exhibited in a group exhibition. Through exhibiting the work, participants will explore how the process by which a work is made might become part of the way it is understood.  The workshop will interrogate the nature of the encounter with a work of art now - bringing together the historical with the contemporary and exploring the relationship between the viewer and process.

Martin Newth will be working with participants over the course of the semester, visiting ASP Katowice on four occasions. Participants will be asked to share their interests and approaches with others. Through engaging in ongoing dialogue and critique, participants will challenge and support each other to take creative risks and expose existing practices to new ways of thinking.

About Martin Newth

Martin Newth’s photographic, video and sculptural installations explore and emphasise the processes and apparatus of production. He employs numerous processes including very long exposures and purpose-built camera obscuras to make experimental works that explore the material nature of photography, tracing the historical roots of the photographic process as well as raising questions about the aesthetics of the medium in the 21st century.  In contrast to the majority of photographs, which invite the viewer to read pictures from a screen or page, Newth’s work slows down the process of reading images and offers an engagement with the material nature of the photograph and the performance of its production. The relationship between technology and control is a central concern in his practice. Martin Newth purposefully avoids the control promised by technological advancement, instead embracing the potential for chance and accident, providing traces of the works’ production. Newth’s works sets up a tension between old and new. It has its roots in early, experimental modes of photography but, instead of being nostalgic for the loss of analogue, it deploys an engagement with the way photographic images are made to explore the conditions that inform how we experience images and objects now.

Martin Newth, who is based in London, where he is Programme Director of Fine Art at Chelsea College of Arts, has exhibited his work in solo and group exhibitions in the UK and abroad. Recent solo exhibitions include: Rezension – Skulptur, Objekt, Apparat at the MEWO Kunsthalle, Germany; Re-view at Photofusion, London; Material Matters at the Gerald Moore Gallery, London; Sentinel (South) at The Gallery, The Arts University College Bournemouth; Ausblick at Axel Lapp Projects, Berlin and Slow Burn at Focal Point Gallery, Southend. Group exhibitions include: In Place of Architecture at the Bonington Gallery, Nottingham; Troubled Waters at The Kuandu Museum of Fine Arts, Taipei;  Andmoreagain at the Open Eye Gallery, Liverpool; and Menschen und Orte at The Kunstverein Konstanz, Germany.