Transculturality
The Transcultural Academy is an important format for bringing forth different historical-cultural inscriptions in the collections from a contemporary perspective and as a process. This also involves the development of models for a canon-sensitive overcoming of Eurocentric patterns of knowledge. It develops ways in which different viewing contexts create a diverse history of knowledge in the collections. It also deepens research into diasporic relationships with the aim of differentiating them in colonial or unjust contexts.
Through workshops, dialogues, collection tours and exhibitions, transdisciplinary processes are made visible in collaboration with students from different contexts. The aim is to make the interweaving of academic, artistic and curatorial practice accessible to a museum audience with different perspectives, voices and positions. Designed as a multi-year project, the Transcultural Academy is dedicated to an open core question each year with the involvement of international artists, interdisciplinary researchers, employees of the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden (SKD) and the museum public, taking into account the results of the previous academy years. In changing formats, the canon-critical examination of the SKD's holdings will be placed at the Japanisches Palais using methods of transdisciplinary exchange.
Eurocentrically dominated knowledge contexts of the collections are questioned and decentred within the structure of the world. A practice of the "ethics of relationships" (Felwine Sarr/Bénédicte Savoy) will be developed for the museum in the 21st century. In the context of the SKD, the Transcultural Academy sees itself as an active forum for different publics in order to be able to meet the multiple challenges and demands on the museum in times of permanent, international exchange of news and global networking as a learning process. This is not about final answers, but about recognising the uncategorisable, the non-narrative and the ambivalent as complexes of knowledge.
Key methodological and pedagogical approaches of the Transcultural Academy:
(a) cross-institutional: the collaboration between the SKD museum complex, the Technische Universität Dresden, the Hochschule für Bildende Künste Dresden and the public as a unique combination of different cultural and educational institutional contexts;
(b) para-institutional: the inclusion of concretely situated experiences as equivalent knowledge of people outside historically validated institutions; (c) transdisziplinär: eine aktive Verschränkung der Diskurse mit dem Fokus auf praxisbasierte Prozesse im aktiven Dialog mit theoretischen Modellen unterschiedlicher Kontexte;
(d) processual: joint learning as a social process in various learning and public formats;
(e) Collection-based: in close dialogue with the collections from the outset;
(f) artistic research: artistic and curatorial thinking to create experimental spaces.
This spectrum of approaches reflects the educational transformation of museums and art and cultural institutions into places of participatory and radical educational formats due to the practical and social relevance of these institutions.
