Jan Verwoert

Jan Verwoert is a critic and writer on contemporary art and cultural theory, based in Berlin. His writing has appeared in different journals, anthologies and monographs. He teaches at the Piet Zwart Institute Rotterdam, Oslo National Academy of the Arts. He is the author of Bas Jan Ader: In Search of the Miraculous, MIT Press/Afterall Books 2006, Tell Me What You Want What You Really Really Want, Sternberg Press, Berlin/Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam 2010, with Michael Stevenson, Animal Spirits — Fables in the Parlance of Our Time, Christoph Keller Editions, JRP, Zurich 2013, Cookie! Sternberg Press, Berlin/Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam 2014. He edited No New Kind of Duck — Would I Know how to Say what I Do?, Diaphanes & UdK Graduate School, Zurich-Berlin 2016, with Daniel Pies: What if It Won’t Stop Here?, Archive Books & UdK Graduate School, Berlin 2018, with Polys Peslikas: Umm Kulthum Faints on Stage, Sternberg Press, Berlin and Cyprus Ministry of Education and Culture 2020, and with Walter Verwoert: Wo soll das Lachen übernachten? Where shall laughter spend the night?, Mount Analogue, Stockholm & Slim Volume, London & Badischer Kunstverein, Karlsruhe, 2024.

LEARNING METAPHORS OF OUTSIDE ENCOUNTERS

We used to think we were in education. Now we know we are in real estate. Learning environments are converted into property holdings governed on digital platforms. Earn a degree in art? Lease studio space from a school. Learn to turn your art into processable data: “my project, methodology, research agenda” — upload and forget! Do we remember learning? When research meant: “We’re out in the field. See you later.” When a school was but a counter to invite encounters with outside entities: when a poet, a Jinn, and a Hoopoe walk into a bar, and the bar tender resumes the seminar; when embodied knowledge enters a closed cybernetic system and causes a reverse data breach; when animated metaphors of learning transport souls across epistemological borders, out into boundlessly shared mnemonic space …