21 November 2013 - 18 January 2014

The gallery's latest exhibition examines the ideas, processes, workshops and legacies of three radical educational models in 1960s Japan, the USA and Denmark. Comprised of three installations, each relating to one of these school’s programmes, Anti-Academy explores life at Bigakko, Tokyo, The Intermedia Programme at the University of Iowa, and Ex-School, Copenhagen.

The exhibition reveals workshop materials and teaching methods developed in the late 1960s and early 1970s at Bigakko by Hi Red Center artists Akasegawa Genpei, Nakamura Hiroshi, and Matsuzawa Yutaka; video, slide shows and photographic materials relating to workshops delivered at The Intermedia Programme, Iowa, by Vito Acconci, Mary Beth Edelson, Elaine Summers and others; and documents and examples of early 1960s/1970s collective and individual works by Ex-School artists Poul Gernes, Per Kirkeby, Bjørn Norgaard, John Davidsen, Peter Louis-Jensen and Henning Christiansen.

The exhibition also showcases artefacts loaned from these archives: films, photographs, journals, objects, paintings, teaching notes, instructions, correspondence between the institutions and artists, publicity materials and posters etc.

Anti-Academy is a comprehensive interpretation of how these three academies situated themselves on the peripheries of the art world, existing in opposition to the mainstream, and responding to the political and social climate, location and cultural context of the day. A new publication will be on sale to accompany the exhibition, comprehensively illustrated and with a range of essays exploring the themes and contexts of the show.

More information can be found on the Anti-Academy website.

Image Credit

Poul Gernes, 1967. Circle and dot paintings displayed on barn door for photographing. Photograph by Troels Andersen.