The artists book Unsettling Educational Modernism is published by adocs, Hamburg in cooperation with Camera Austria. The book is published on the occasion of the exhibition Education Shock Learning, Politics and Architecture in the 1960s and 1970s, 2021, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin

The iconic architecture of the brutalist modernist megastructure of Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada built by architect Arthur Erickson in the 1960s is the site of the artistic research project into the history of this “radical campus” and its built environment by Vancouver and Vienna based artists Sabine Bitter and Helmut Weber. The collaborative research group, “Guests and Hosts”, formed by Bitter & Weber and Métis scholar June Scudeler including Métis scholar and student Treena Chambers, Kanien’kehá:ka Mohawk student Toni-Leah Yake, as well as Rachel Warwick and Hannah Campbell, has challenged the narrative of the radical campus, so called because it was informed by experimental concepts of learning and teaching. Using the spaces of a settler colonial institution, the project shifts perspectives by unsettling and challenging western- based concepts of pedagogy and knowledge. Combining archival photographic material, architectural photographs by the artists, and interventions into the institutional spaces by Guests and Hosts, the project performs the claim for places rather than spaces for Indigenous ways of knowing and learning.

Texts: Treena Chambers, June Scudeler with Sabine Bitter and Helmut Weber.

Unsettling Educational Modernism is also the second volume of Sabine Bitter und Helmut Weber’s series of case studies of universities built in the 1950s–1970s. The first artists’ book about the Johann Wolfgang Goethe-University Frankfurt, Bildungsmoderne entzaubern, was just published in February 2021. Forthcoming are artists’ books about the University of Lethbridge, Alberta, Canada, and the Workers University in Zagreb, Croatia. As artists’ books, they are less conceived as final outcome or a framed product of knowledge, and more as form and format of artistic research picturing moments of investigations into universities as spaces of knowledge: How universities were shaped by policies and politics of learning and teaching during the formative period of modernization and how to reactivate and rethink their legacy and meaning for today.

Look at the sildeshow here