Classes Fine Arts

The students’ artistic work, their preoccupation with and engagement with painting are the focus. Weekly plenaries provide continuous space to jointly find and develop a linguistic form for the work. Accompanying excursions, exhibition and studio visits are organised to give the students insights into different artistic contexts. Joint exhibition projects and guest visits are an equally important part of the teaching. The plenary is held bilingually, with both German and English used as languages of communication. 

In addition, individual discussions are available by arrangement to address students’ specific needs and development goals. Guests are welcome to register by email to attend the lectures.

Shaping and designing also involves thought processes. That is why talking, discussing, asking, and investigating are an important part of our classroom activities. 

In addition to working in and around the studio, we go on smaller and larger excursions, cook together, read texts together and ask ourselves how the world works and what works in it as art and what doesn’t. We look around (sometimes locally) for the sources of our actions and creating and try to understand them. Where does material come from? What is a work of art and what is it part of? What are the often subtle differences between a thing, an object, a commodity and a work of art? By what natural and unnatural processes are they formed? We, being humans, too, are part of the forces that shape this planet, right? But is this human-made earth a natural or unnatural phenomenon? Nature, literature, migration, the environment are some of the topics we discuss and question in class. We research, try out, move, think and listen. We do. 

In class we mostly speak German and English.

Questions about the class are answered by:

I am excited to collaborate with Freie Klasse and share my transdisciplinary approach to creative processes. With a focus on expanded sculpture and performance, we will explore how small shifts in perception and intention can build a cohesive body of work. I offer tools for transforming embodied experiences and research, to generate material and conceptual frames using techniques like translation, scoring, sculpting, and muscular/sonic bonding—giving form to intention and intention to form.

The approach of Freie Klasse is not defined by a singular discipline, but open to redefinition, fostering the interconnection of artistic practices. As a semi-autonomous and self-organised space, we thrive on collaboration and adaptability.

Weekly meetings - held in English - provide space for dialogue, feedback, and exchange, evolving to meet the changing needs of individuals and the group. The structure of the weekly plenum enables collaborative decision-making and shared institutional responsibility between the professorship and the class. These Plenaries emphasise reciprocity and critical engagement, challenging traditional pedagogies to develop approaches tailored to the class’s intentions.

With a revolving professorship introducing new perspectives every one to two years, the class grows by integrating the experience and embodied knowledge of each individual. Freie Klasse supports students’ artistic development while encouraging the sharing of work and participation in collective projects.

For further inquiries:
Emma Waltraud Howes: ehowes@hfk-bremen.de
Freie Klasse: freieklasse@hfk-bremen.de

Specifically includes the investigation of space and the body, in its physical and media expression, taking artistic and social issues into account.

The teaching in the drawing/painting class consists of group events (plenary) and individual discussions. We discuss individual works, processes and ideas and deal with the contents of art. This is enriched by excursions, exhibition visits, project work, collaborations, guests and thematic workshops.

In the class for time-based art, we meet weekly and try to understand art, media and images together by talking about power structures, politics, aesthetics, as well as coexistence and survival in art. We work with digital media and their analogue variants: photography, film, video, 3D techniques, performance and installation, as well as staging in digital and analogue spaces. There are also many students in the class who work with drawing and painting, thereby underlining the interdisciplinary approach of the class. Interdisciplinarity is highly encouraged; the main interest lies in how and what we look at, not necessarily with what. We discuss, listen and look at things together, ask questions, plan, eat, sometimes get bored and practise learning with and from criticism. We usually speak German and English in the plenary sessions.

The class office is partly used as an exhibition space, where each week a participant from the class sets up an installation. An integral part of the plenary session is the in-depth discussion of the installation with the class. The outcomes of this format, called ‘ADHOC’, are also posted by the class on Instagram and can be viewed on site after the plenary session. Each semester, in addition to the plenary session, a course on theory or practice is offered, in which, for example, specific positions are discussed or analogue and digital film editing and recording techniques are taught. Furthermore, we regularly go on excursions to film festivals or exhibitions.

Additional information: Participation in the plenary session and workshops is open to all HfK students, subject to capacity. Students who would like to join the plenary sessions should first register for an individual interview by email.

(@klasse_rudelius) • Instagram photos and videos

With the aim to critically reflect space as a time-based and location-based category, Temporary Spaces Class addresses historical, political, social, technological, and aesthetic aspects of our built environments and their material structures.

Beyond disciplinary conventions and boundaries, the class explores practices that include various media and experimentation with space, at different scales, from urban interventions to video, installation, performance, sound, and text. The works are research-based and engage with topics and methods ranging from site-specific approaches to historical finds, from feminist manifestos to queer theories, from critiques of modernism and standardisation to socialist architectural utopias and urgent urban questions, such as the housing crisis.

Temporary Spaces Class organises participatory feedback sessions that include collective readings and discussions. In regular gatherings, related to their particular ideas and practices, participants come together to discuss processes and approaches, work with other class members and guests and develop their own (or collective) projects and reflexive aesthetic experiences.

Collective gatherings are in English.

Previously, the class has collaborated with and exhibited at institutions such as GAK Bremen, Pera Museum Istanbul, Großer Wasserspeicher Berlin, Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, documenta fifteen, Sinop Biennial, Breminale Bremen, Weserburg Museum Bremen, Top e.V. Berlin, theater.prekariat Stuttgart, Schwankhalle Bremen, Theater Bremen, Württembergischer Kunstverein, etc.

Instagram: @temporary_spaces

In the class for Intermedia Photography, we explore visual narratives and the rapidly changing medium of the image in its diverse languages and forms of application. We reflect on the relatively young field of artistic photography and related visual media not only within their historical contexts but also by challenging their limits in terms of content, form, and technique.

In doing so, we continually shift our perspectives and readjust our depth of field by examining visual hierarchies and their range, reach, and impact. Through playing with focus, light, and shadow, we try to bring underrepresented narratives to light. Within these processes, we explore new applications, materials, and forms of presentation, and seek to understand algorithms and artificial intelligence in order to navigate newly conceived analog and virtual contexts and realities and, when necessary, actively shape or distort them. Together, we reflect on the relationship between form and content—and the process that connects the two.

We contemplate how knowledge can be shared, how it emerges collectively, and how it can sometimes be unlearned and relearned.

Through conversations and generous exchange, we create possibilities for confident and artistically curious communication, as well as the active conception and creation of appropriate spaces for different needs (intimate, semi-public, public, institutional, underground, analog, digital, fictional, etc.)

Collaborative approaches and a strong commitment to self-organisation are very welcome.

We have moved into the new building and the summer semester will be the first time together with the students and lecturers of Integrated Design. We will establish the workplaces and routines in the new studio and develop joint exhibitions with the official opening ceremony of the new building and the University Days. We also want to plan an excursion. The ‘Reallabor Kunst am Bau’ (real-world art in architecture laboratory) will continue and the realisations will begin this semester. Ellen Blumenstein, Ruth Lübke and I will oversee the artistic projects. The development of the accompanying publication is supervised by Andrea Rauschenbusch and Gregor Schreiter in a separate course. Planning for the project on artistic perspectives on mobility, in cooperation with Heritage Space Hanoi, is being finalised and is scheduled to begin in September 2023. The draft monument for the abused and murdered children in the orphanage is in place and will be approved by the authorities.

Individual discussions
Each student should at least make one appointment. Please do prepare those individual meetings! Send me pictures and videos or maybe texts on work you wish to discuss a day prior to the meeting. Of course, you may also send over sketches or description of your projects.

Plenary
The plenary is the forum to present you work and for discussion on the arts. Do plan at least one such presentation per semester