BY MILENA BURZYWODA

Some years ago, after graduating from the Academy of Art Berlin (today ‚UdK Berlin‘), I had the opportunity to teach first year art students at this same academy as a guest lecturer. The quality of discourse with those students, developed and pushed over time, was characterised by an intensity and intellectual hunger and rigour, which, in my experience, is close to non-existent within the contemporary art world. In this situation I also discovered that my love and passion for art -which I had believed to be singular and unparalleled- was in fact equalled by my love for teaching. I am thus very excited about the launch and potential of the ArtistUndergroundAcademy.

As a self-declared ‚artist underground‘, fiercely suspicious and critical of the mechanisms of the contemporary art world / art market, and thus working strictly outside of it, this self-imposed isolation has guaranteed my freedom, yet has also produced its own powerful limitations and challenges.

The context which the contemporary art world provides neither meets with the requirements of my own work, nor does it provide a context for the kind of discourse about the situation of art on the whole which I believe is urgently needed.

I see the existential need to invent and produce the context that is missing.

​Artistunderground is driven by the Utopia that this seed-like movement has the potential to initiate real change and can impact on the situation on the whole. At the same time our outlook is focussed on the small scale – even to only find a small handful of people to work with in order to push and develop our questions regarding art in the 21st century in a radical manner I would regard as a huge achievement.

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