The project Mach dich (nicht) verrückt! [(Don’t) Drive yourself crazy!] took place as a cooperation between OeAD – Agency for Education and Internationalisation, Basis.Kultur.Wien – GO.FOR.CULTURE and Kunsthalle Wien and was carried out as part of the series K3-PROJEKTE. Cultural education with apprentices between December 2021 and June 2022. Twenty students from the Viennese vocational school Handel@Administration took part.
A related series of workshops was developed by Kunsthalle Wien’s education team in cooperation with the comic artist Viktoria Strehn, who also conceptualized and conducted the workshops, together with art educators Wolfgang Brunner and Michael Simku.
Starting from the exhibition Do Nothing, Feel Everything, which was on view at Kunsthalle Wien Karlsplatz from November 2021 until April 2022, we looked at madness as an issue and also tried to talk about forms of consciousness, systems of thought, and ways of producing meaning.
Based on the artistic positions of the exhibition, the focus of our education project was on the question of how far madness could also be understood as a form of knowledge or how it is possible for us to make our inner exposures productive. The apprentices were instructed to draw avatars who then appeared in comics and told their story(ies). This also enabled the students to distance themselves from overly personal statements. All the stories were collected in the publication Mach dich (nicht) verrückt! [(Don’t) Drive yourself crazy!]. The project of the same name was conceived as a workshop series and consisted of three three-hour-long workshops and an exhibition visit. It concluded with a presentation of the publication at Kunsthalle Wien Karlsplatz.
The publication Mach dich (nicht) verrückt! [(Don’t) Drive yourself crazy!] is available at Kunsthalle Wien or can be downloaded here.