The project has started in September 2014 and is run by Vera Hofmann , Berlin and Amsterdam based artist.
Public moments:
2016/06: All I wanna do is sit in the sun for a while @ Graduation Show of Sandberg Institute, Amsterdam, NL
2016/06: Discocactus @ Salto TV, Amsterdam
2016/05: Because we can swim in the immense @ 'Untitled (Two Takes on Crisis, De Appel Arts Center, Amsterdam, NL
2016/02: editorial Time Capsule @ print and online magazine 'Rosegarden', DE
2016/01: exhibition SevenEightElevenInfinity @ Sandberg Institute, Amsterdam, NL
2016/01: solo performance I start where you end @ workshop 'Do yourself a favour' with Ivo Dimchev, Sandberg Institute, Amsterdam, NL
2015-16: screenings The Shepherdess @ Royal Academy of Art Galeries, The Hague; Sandberg Institute Open Day, NL
2015-16: screenings Aux Origines de la Cure @ 'The One Minute Healing Tool', curated by Shana Moulton, ikonoTV, Intersections at ArtRotterdam (NL); 1646, The Hague (NL); Bonnefantenmuseum, Maastricht (NL); deBuren, Brussels (BE); Dortmunder U (DE); Drents Museum/CBK Drenthe, Assen (NL); East China Normal University, Shanghai (CN); Lloyd Hotel & Cultural Embassy, Amsterdam (NL); Museum de Fundatie, Zwolle (NL); Museum Hilversum (NL); Museum De Pont, Tilburg (NL); SCHUNCK*, Heerlen (NL); WOW, Amsterdam (NL)
2015/11: lecture The Nutritionist @ exhibition 'Cure Café, De Punt, Amsterdam, NL
2015/07: Meditation For Schäuble @ Syntagma Square, Athens, GR
2015/05: lecture Useless Artist Disease @ 'Design For Babylon', Side Room, Amsterdam, NL
2015/01: MC AU & Useless Artist Disease @ 'Ouch', Stichting Kunstenaarsverblijf Het Vijfde Seizoen, ISBN, 978-90-822437-1-0
2014/12: exhibition MC AU & Useless Artist Disease @ artist in residence Het Vijfde Seizoen at the psychiatric institution Willem Arntsz Hoeve, Den Dolder, NL
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About this website (long version):
This website contains part of my practise-based research during the two year long MA in Fine Arts studies at the Sandberg Institute Amsterdam. I was investigating how to tackle the field of health politics, illness, self-optimization, pain and care through an artistic lens.
By being a member of a multidisciplinary group of students in a one-time ‘temporary’ course program called ‘Cure Master ’ I got introduced to various, yet similar thinking visiting artists, designers and lecturing guests from the field. The workshops and theoretical input circulated around six topics: pain/ache, environment, nutrition, death/loss, body and belief.
My approach was that of a journey through and around the topics, a crusade against and for my own beliefs.
I was looking for answers if and how I could combine therapeutic methods that I examined for years with contemporary art making, believing that in this practise could lie a usefulness for me as an artist to contribute to this urgent topic which manifests itself in the political, social and private sphere.
I haven’t found the answer yet and stay critical.
Acceptance of incurability.
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About Vera Hofmann (long version):
Vera Hofmann is an innocent child, a displaced teenager, a Triple A advertising account manager, a satisfactory commission photographer, a long-time mourner, an underground techno DJ, a global native, a digital immigrant, a disobedient activist, a patient client, a hypercritic, a wounded healer, a cover polar bear, a useless artist and a dedicated lover who received a highly-acclaimed trauma from the Cure Master program at Sandberg Institute Amsterdam.
Currently her engagement circumambulates alternative methods of healing, digging up ancient therapies, queering contemporary ones, appropriating, remixing and reformulating them into empowering DIY attempts. She is on a quest to achieve a higher sensibility for social and political conditions, interpersonal and intrapersonal connections, becoming fearless but soft and permeable as a whole.
The choice of media and platforms is versatile, her interest is even more multi, the amount of output is that of a self-exploiting no collar addict.
Her favorite practice for interpersonal connections is that of receiving a carte blanche, from an institution, company, project, group, individual, for then sensibly re-appropriating space, inviting friends and strangers into it, sharing the master key, allowing the unfolding of self- and group empowerment. By holding vulnerable tipping points and enduring discomfort, negotiating how to operate, she maps a territory of privilege and precarity, body and mind, inner and outer, curator and artist, expertism and autonomy, individual and collective, patient and healer, intimacy and detachment, trying to find a third way of navigating between the binaries.
In the last two years she held intimate artist-to-artist overnight sessions in the Botanic Garden VU Amsterdam where the two artists for example stole the extinct cactae collection and took them on a tour across town (video, photo series, animated gifs) or in another night she guided her guest through a healing trip on a psychoactive plant from the garden (40 min. video documentary); she invited the spectator into an empty bathtub to get cured from the Useless Artist Disease she invented and initiated the Anonymous Useless Artist group sessions (videos, text, audio, photo); created online-mixtapes with patients of the psychiatric institution in Den Dolder (website); held group meditations in Greece to connect to the enemy, the German Finance Minister (documented action), and gave the visitors of De Appel Arts Centre their entrance money back from her own artist fee and handed them over the keys to every door of the institution (documented action).
The intrapersonal strand of her work is taken up whenever ‘proper functioning’ is interrupted by personal pain, be it the death of a family member or a break up of her relationship or simply the need to express resistance and critique towards a setting or a condition. Believing that showing and sharing vulnerability and malfunction is one of the core lacks in society and a ∞ key ∞ to healing, she dares to lay open her own wounds. She produced a series of attempts to overcome her recent heartbreak (hacked heart rate measuring device and DJ set, calendar, photography, text, ritual, video, objects) and wrote her thesis in the form of a personal narrative about coping with the cancer diagnosis and death of her mother and her own subsequent journey into the world of healing.
Her astrologic birth constellation says that she is in the phase of transitioning from an individual to a collective form of being which could be another, extraterrestrial, explanation for her choices of expression.
self guinea
Holistic VOID resistance procedures
YANG LOOKING ART WITH YIN CONTENT
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