Institution

The Winter School Middle East is a localized, small-scale hub, which regularly performs cultural and educational activities in collaboration with local NGOs, schools, and individuals, and -– through its new, long-term presence – houses a critical platform for exchange. Being launched as an idea in 2007, the Winter School Middle East was set up as a roaming, mobile institution that has undertaken a series of workshops, seminars, mini-schools and conferences since its inception in January 2008: ‘“Learning from Dubai’” (2008, Dubai), dealing with the Labour Housing issue, and ‘Spaces and Scales of Knowledge’ (2009, Dubai), dealing with the question of institution building, both in collaboration with the Architectural Association (London), The Third Line gallery (Dubai), and the American University of Sharjah. In 2010, the Winter School is moving to Kuwait for a longer-term involvement and local engagement regarding the setting up of a platform for critical exchange.

Combining the Winter School’’s workshop methodology with local initiatives, this intensive workshop-based programme was and continues to be run as a design- and discourse-led curriculum that combines conceptual and spatial research in the process of radical criticism and the rigorous production of ideas. Students and staff work in teams of up to ten in which they develop individual and group projects. These projects will be tested against the criticism of the group, but also against the knowledge and expertise of local protagonists. Each tutor-led unit investigates different aspects of the (emerging) spatial realities of the Gulf region, with a strong local and site(location)-specific focus.

Instead of presenting a set of self-referential objects, it addressed excessive urban development, pollution, unilateral politics, and the misuse, abuse and exhaustion of natural resources. It seems that, here, artistic and spatial practices manage and assume responsibility regarding that what politics is often incapable of: outright critique.