Castles Made of Glass
Castles Made of Glass

Workshop with Jan Vormann

The workshop consists of 2 sessions from remote (21, 28 September 2020) and 4 onsite meetings (1–4 October 2020).

  • The online meetings are open to all, upon registration.
  • The onsite meetings are open to 15 participants of 16-25 years of age who commit, by enrolling, to participate in every meeting.
  • Meetings are held in English.

the Workshop

There are more solutions than problems in the world. Indeed, Jan Vormann believes that for every problem there exists at least one possible solution. So the question is always how to overcome difficult situations in the most pleasant, elegant, and effective way. Nowadays, we are well connected with the rest of the world through many different forms of media and therefore we are flooded with new problems arising seemingly by the minute. Traditional solutions have to be adapted constantly to ever-changing paradigms, new solutions have to be found at a steady pace to keep up with the contemporary challenges, and the public discourse needs to be reevaluated and renegotiated on almost a daily basis.

The workshop will review the means of communication in public spaces, specifically through glass as a material. We will explore all the properties of glass, its beauty, either shattered or unscathed, and its ability to allow for transparency or to obstruct the view. We will discuss problems that can be made out both locally and globally, and, if possible, tackle them by melting, blowing, glueing, and smashing glass.

the artist

Founding member of the T10 Studios in Berlin, Jan Vormann is an artist, researcher and lecturer. He studied Visual Arts at Kunsthochschule Berlin-Weißensee, Germany, as well as Monumental Arts at the Stieglitz Academy of Fine Arts in St. Petersburg, Russia. He has lectured New Media / Interaction Design (IXD) at the New Media / IXD Department, BTK University, Berlin, has led numerous workshops and given talks at institutions such as the Parsons School of Design, Paris, the ARCAM Amsterdam Institute for Architecture, and the Kunsthochschule Burg Giebichenstein, Halle.

In addition to interventions in public spaces around the world, Vormann has presented his work at international exhibitions, including the Venice Biennale of Visual Arts (2011) and Architecture (2018), Ars Electronica in Linz (2010), the Nuits Blanches in Paris (2014), and the Humboldt Forum/ Altes Museum, Berlin (2009). His projects have been featured in global media outlets, such as Le Monde, The New York Times Mag, Deutsche Welle, and Financial Times Deutschland.

the project

This workshop is part of the project Overcoming. Art Practices for the New Normal, organized by the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, with the participation of Swatch Art Peace Hotel. The project asks young artists to challenge their own practice by creating workshops which should become virtuous activators of community processes, and catalysts of actions to re-appropriate spaces and to redefine social paradigms.
Find out more

  • Free / Registration required
  • Online