We are pleased to once again welcome young people to take part in our international educational program Mobilizing Citizenship (MC).

After a break due to the pandemic, we are now ready to embark on an exciting week. From June 27 to July 1, a group of young people will work with artists Lex Brown, Delali Ayivor and Ingela Ihrman. The spring semester is curated by cultural worker Lee Heinemann. This is an opportunity for young people to work closely with international artists and find relevant ways to activate strategies from contemporary art in their everyday lives.

MC is a comprehensive and international educational project where world-renowned artists and designers are invited to work with a small group of young people at Kunsthall Stavanger.

The overall focus of MC is to investigate how young people can use tools and methods from contemporary art to express themselves and be heard in today's society.

Heinemann has chosen the theme of DRAMA for the week. Together we will embrace DRAMA as the theatrical and everything extra, over, and too much. As artists who deploy costumes, characters, choreography, etc. to make their work, each artist will share dramatic techniques from their practice with the group and support participants in using these tools to articulate their own interests and perspectives.

Sign ups are now open for youth aged 12-16. Please click here to sign up. We work together every day through the week from 10am – 3 pm. Participation is free but sign ups are binding.

For more information about the week or to sign up a youth, please contact: marisa@kunsthallstavanger.no

About the curator and the artists:

Lee Heinemann (b. 1993, Kansas City, USA) is an artist, organizer, and founder of Get Your Life!—a collaborative, youth-centered video production company that puts practicing artists to work producing projects written, designed, and directed by middle school students at Baltimore, MD community center 901 Arts. Lee worked as the Education Director of Baltimore nomadic museum The Contemporary, which produced Get Your Life! in 2016 and 2017. Get Your Life! was in residence in the Baltimore Museum of Art with an exhibition, publication, and a series of public programs from 2018-2019. Lee served as manager of Covid-19 emergency relief fund Artist Relief and is the current Initiatives Manager at United States Artists.

Delali Ayivor (New York, USA / Accra, Ghana) is a Ghanaian-American writer crafting poetry for Black women and those who hope to love them. She is a 2011 U.S. Presidential Scholar in the Arts and member of the second class of Kehinde Wiley’s Black Rock Senegal residency. A 2020 Tin House Summer Workshop Scholar, Delali has been artist-in-residence in 2018 at Atlantic Center for the Arts with Tracie Morris and at the STONELEAF Retreat in Kingston, NY. Her work has been published most recently online by The Rumpus and CovenBerlin. She currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

Lex Brown (New York, USA) is an artist who uses poetry and science-fiction to create an index for our psychological experiences as organic beings in a rapidly technologized world. Through humorous characters and expansive fictional worlds, her work opens up a place for spiritual examination. In performance, music, video, sculpture, drawing, poetry, and narrative, Brown explores existential themes such as environment, technology, commerce and connection. Throughout her work is the reassertion that an organic intelligence is far more powerful than an artificial one. Brown has performed and exhibited work at the New Museum, the High Line, the International Center of Photography, Recess, and The Kitchen, REDCAT Theater, The Hammer Museum, The Baltimore Museum of Art and at the Munch Museum in Oslo, Norway. She was a 2021 recipient of the prestigious USA Fellowship.Brown holds degrees from Yale University (MFA) and Princeton University (BA). She is the author of My Wet Hot Drone Summer (published by Badlands Unlimited), a sci-fi erotic novella that takes on surveillance and social justice. Consciousness (published by GenderFail) a limited edition survey of Brown's work, is available from GenderFail. Containing documentation from 46 different videos axnd performances, as well as 33 original song lyrics performed in artist-run spaces, museums, music venues, and galleries it has been acquired by the collections of the Met, MoMA, Whitney, and SFMoMA museums amongst other notable collections.Brown teaches as Lecturer at Princeton University. She is the host of the podcast 1-800-POWERS available on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. Brown is represented by Deli Gallery in Tribeca, NYC. Her work is viewable online.

Ingela Ihrman (b 1985, Kalmar, Sweden) lives and works in Malmö. Her work is sparked by the strong emotions of everyday life and a desire to understand, question or express certain aspects of being alive, social and human. It is particularly the pleasures and pain that come with co-existence, autonomy, loneliness and longing for belonging that intrigues her. Her practice includes sculpture, performance, video and writing as well as collaborations within the fields of science, theater and dance. She graduated from Konstfack, Stockholm 2012.

Also present throughout the MC summer school are several youth workers.