Collaborative (Un-)Learning

The project Collaborative (Un-)Learning aims to facilitate access to art and cultural institutions for young people and young adults through a project- and exhibition-based programme focusing on artistic mediation and collaboration. By collaborating with artists, curators, activists and other representatives of the arts and cultural sector, it aims to establish networks for young people within the institution and support them in building sustainable relationships both inside and outside the institution. The project aims to create spaces for exchange, (un-)learning and artistic collaboration between young people and diverse protagonists from the art and cultural scene. The aim is not only to provide institutional and artistic access but also to challenge, deconstruct and reinterpret traditional ideas and methods of linear educational and mediation work.

School co-operations are an integral part of the project:
The idea is to accompany art lessons in schools and to take this participation – or possibility for intervention – as an opportunity to introduce artists’ positions, social discourses and artistic practices that are usually missing or underrepresented in scholarly art education.

The programme is being developed under the artistic direction of Havîn Al-Sîndy, visual artist and art professor, amongst others, in dialogue with the participants and in cooperation with the Katharina-Henoth Gesamtschule in Cologne-Vingst, supervised by art teacher Tinani Van Niekerk.

Project management & curatorial work:
Paloma Nana

Former project coordination & artistic mediation:
Ana Manhey Ahrens

Havîn Al-Sîndy (she/her) lives and works in Germany and Kurdistan. She studied at the Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste Stuttgart and at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf.  In parallel, she studied biology and chemistry at the University of Duisburg-Essen. She currently teaches at the University of Fine Arts in Braunschweig. She is concerned with artistic and scientific processes of making things visible, finding languages for what is difficult to say, as well as the ambivalences in the production of visibility itself. Her working method is processual and mostly collaborative. Again and again, a dialogue takes place across generations – an interest in and engagement with one another. The figure of the mother plays a special role here, as in the works Uda, or the installation Lehmhaus. Personal as well as collective memories and their reconstruction, localization and de-localization are themes that she presents performatively and installatively in order to involve viewers in the spatial dimension of her sculptures and to encourage them to interact with the works. This creates spaces of encounters which carry invitations to unlearn supposedly self-evident things. Boundaries between past and present, perception and expectation, inside and outside become porous. This also applies to her interest in the sphere of nature as a formative entity, which is supposedly separate from man, and which comes from the natural sciences. Al-Sîndy buries paper and lets it vegetate, she draws in the forest with the forms of tree roots and lets herself in. She is an arts professor and has lectured in Kassel, Münster and at the University of Maryland as well as in Brunswig.

Tinani Van Niekerk (she/her), who grew up in South Africa, studied art at the Academy Maastricht (Netherlands) after completing a Fine Arts diploma at Vaal University, which she began with the support of a scholarship from the Vaal Triangle Technikon and completed with funding from the Academy Maastricht. At the University of Bonn, she deepened her knowledge of art history, musicology and English literature. During her studies, she already taught art at Gesamtschule Gummersbach and passed her state examination in 2013. Since 2016 she has been teaching art, music as well as performance and design at Katharina-Henoth-Gesamtschule in Cologne, where she has been coordinating artistic projects in collaboration with partners such as the WDR ensemble Musikfabrik, the SK Kultur Foundation and the Temporary Gallery since 2017. She is particularly interested in creativity as an intercultural and interdiverse medium.

Funding and support:
The project is sponsored by RheinEnergieStiftung Kultur and Stadtsparkasse Köln/Bonn (Hier mit Herz)