20 & 21 October 2025 - Academy of Fine Arts, Antwerp
Conference across two evenings with Simon Asencio, Feiko Beckers, Annaïk Lou Pitteloud, and Luka Savić, organized by Yuki Okumura in collaboration with the Educational Master of Visual Arts.
(Image: A consequence of Chance Meeting of Strange Objects on a Classroom Table, conceived by Yuki Okumura and performed by the participants of the workshop Some More Chances: Re-Playing Surrealist Games and Beyond (24 October 2024), co-organized with Inge Henneman. Photo by Wannes Cré)
In this conference, PhD researcher Yuki Okumura brings together four artists currently or recently in teaching positions at various art academies across Europe–namely in Bern, Ghent, Ljubljana, and Marseille—each exploring, on the basis of their own artistic work, how the conceptual and/or performative can help students develop their practices.
Since September 2022, Okumura has been leading the inter-studio elective course Performance for third-year bachelor’s and master’s students at Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp. Its curriculum is based on his belief that conceiving and performing self-instructed simple actions—in the legacy of conceptual art, experimental music, and postmodern dance—can open up one’s working process to unexpected interrelations with both self and world.
While developing this course through trial and error, Okumura has become curious about how other artists with whom he feels an affinity construct and conduct their pedagogical practices, which led him to organise this event to exchange methods, reflections, and visions.
Programme
Day 1: Monday 20 October: Performative, Pedagogical
- 18:00–18:10 Introduction by Yuki Okumura
- 18:10–18:40 Presentation by Feiko Beckers
- 18:40–19:10 Presentation by Simon Asencio
- 19:10–20:00 Discussion among Beckers, Asencio, and Okumura, including the audience
Day 2: Tuesday 21 October: Conceptual, Pedagogical
- 18:00–18:10 Introduction by Yuki Okumura
- 18:10–18:40 Presentation by Annaïk Lou Pitteloud
- 18:40–19:10 Presentation by Luka Savić
- 19:10–20:00 Discussion among Pitteloud, Savić, and Okumura, including the audience
Practical
- 20 & 21 October 2025 - 18:00
- Location: Lange Zaal, ground floor Academy, Mutsaardstraat 31, 2000 Antwerpen
- Free entrance, no registration needed.
This conference is part of Art x Research x City - ARIA's month for Research in the Arts, and research festival ARTICULATE 2025
Yuki Okumura
Yuki Okumura (*1978, Aomori, Japan) is an artist who pursues the most genuine form of self-portraiture through the conception and performance of empty-handed, chance-oriented procedures in which the lived body interacts directly with found elements in the here and now. He is a PhD researcher and a teacher of the elective course Performance at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp.
Feiko Beckers
Feiko Beckers (*1983, Witmarsum, the Netherlands) is an artist who constructs narratives that are often interrupted unexpectedly based on failures, incompletions, accidents, and embarrassing situations in his own life through video, performance, installation, and text. He is a teacher of Performance at KASK, Ghent.
Simon Asencio
Simon Asencio (*1988, Toulouse, France) is an artist who addresses invisible choreographies through performances, publications, exhibitions, collective study situations, and co-creation projects including Galerie, an immaterial gallery he runs with Adriano Wilfert Jensen. He was a teacher of Performance and Corporeal Practices at Marseille Art Academy (2022–2024) and is a visiting faculty member of Institut Supérieur des Arts et Chorégraphies in Brussels.
Annaïk Lou Pitteloud
Annaïk Lou Pitteloud (*1980, Lausanne, Switzerland) is an artist who challenges the art world’s codes of perception, transmission, and presentation while playing with aesthetic, conceptual, and theoretical references through long-term procedures, site-specific installations, and small gestures and objects. She is the vice president of the Association Sommerakademie Paul Klee and a teacher at the Bern Academy of the Arts.
Luka Savić
Luka Savić (*1990, Ljubljana, Slovenia) is an artist who translates historical phenomena into the present to reflect upon the universal foundation of art through archival research, philosophical analysis, and conceptual reconstruction, exploring art as a production of new forms of knowledge, perception, and understanding. He is a teacher at the Academy of Visual Arts in Ljubljana.