12.12.2025 5PM
The round table and book presentation dedicated to the artistic practice and to the most recent publication of Daniel Peltz, The Schol of Shy-ing a Way.
Daniel Peltz, refuging in Rejmyre - 2017 - ongoing
enter like an unemployed elephant
which is to say
begin to wonder
what an unemployed elephant might need
upon entering
begin by building a ramp
a ramp that allows one to overcome one’s
own inclinations
begin by not knowing
not knowing whether you have entered
when you might have entered
begin by being sure you will not know
when exit has been achieved
someone will have to tell you
to point it out
or to point up
and for you to look out instead
an act of defiance that might lead you
to a moment of knowing
that you have entered
that you are inside
begin with the assumption that you were
always already inside
your task is not to enter
but to move, already from within
Daniel Peltz - 2017 -
Daniel Peltz will share his artistic practice, which involves long-term engagements with specific sites, including an ongoing 18-year engagement with a rural, glass factory town in Sweden. His presentation will also include a recently released book of field notes, The School of Shying a Way, from a collaborative research project on the aesthetics of shyness conducted as part of a Finnish/African innovation platform.
From Shying a Way:
The School of Shying a Way attempts to craft a space, and provide an ideological support, for a set of resistances: to the collective/individual binary, to the limited conscious – ness of fixed meaning, to the locating of knowledge as something and somewhere outside of the study and the student.
Daniel Peltz is an artist and international educator. Through public projects, performances and media installations, Peltz’ artworks explore complex social systems, attempting to provoke ruptures in the socio/cultural fabric through which new ways of being may emerge and be considered. To accomplish these goals, he uses a range of intervention, ethnographic and performance strategies. His projects often take the form of existing social systems to directly engage non-art audiences in the language of critical art practice.
Artifacts from Peltz’ public projects and performances have been exhibited in international solo and group exhibitions at institutions including Färgfabriken and Botkyrka Konsthall in Stockholm, the Cable Factory in Helsinki, Galleri F15 in Moss and the Norrköpings Konstmuseum. He has been a resident artist at Yaddo in the USA; Helsinki International Artist Program in Finland; International Artists Studio Program in Sweden; Artspace in Australia; Cemeti Art House in Indonesia; and Spaced in Western Australia.
From 2004-2020 Peltz served as Professor of Film and Video at the Rhode Island School of Design in the U.S. Since 2020, Peltz is Professor of Time and Space Arts with a specialization in Site and Situation Specific Art at the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts, Uniarts Helsinki. Growing out of a 2007 artistic-research Fulbright term in Sweden, Peltz co-founded the artist-run, long-term, place-based research project Rejmyre Art Lab’s Center for Peripheral Studies in the glass-factory town of Rejmyre, Sweden that continues to be at the center of his art and curatorial practice.
