The UMPRUM Visiting Artist for the 2026/2027 FALL semester is Mark Barker
THE PROGRAM OF THE UMPRUM VISITING ARTIST STUDIO IN THE 2026/2027 FALL SEMESTER
Studies
6. 5. 2026
Program Title and Syllabus:
Private Corners
I don’t know where life ends and art practice begins. Over my time at UMPRUM I’m interested to think together about how imaginative practice situates itself within everyday life, in the precarious business of building life-worlds for ourselves.
I have a multifaceted approach to making, working in a variety of mediums simultaneously, I’m excited to discuss interdisciplinary practices with you and think together about how different mediums coalesce, inform and agitate one another. With a special focus on exploring the potentials of incongruity, we will explore out of place-ness, looking at the ways (queer) artists have navigated and expressed their lives in oppressive contexts.
Alongside regular critiques, you will be encouraged to develop your own note-taking practices in a form or medium of your choice, to support ongoing curiosity and observation. In workshops we will gather to share our independent enquires and exchange our private strategies; developing supportive ways of discussing and reflecting on one another’s processes.
Artist Bio
Mark Barker is an artist living and working in Berlin. Mark studied at the Slade School of Fine Art, London. Exhibitions include: Whole Property, Shahin Zarinbal, Berlin, 2026 (s), LC Queisser, Tbilisi, 2026 (s), Condo London 2025, Roland Ross, Margate, hosted by Arcadia Missa, London, 2025 (g), Mark Barker, Alice Hattrick, Libuše Jarcovjáková, Zuzana Šrámková, Cursor Gallery, Center for Contemporary Arts, Prague, 2024-2025 (g), The Breath of a House is the Sound of Voices Within, Akademie der Kûnste, Berlin, 2024 (g), Are you more, Between Bridges, Berlin, 2024 (s), Zürich Biennale, Kunsthalle Zürich, 2023 (g), Stone Soup (with Terence McCormack), Roland Ross, Margate, 2022 (two-person), Happy Hour, Zarinbal Khoshbakht, Cologne, 2021 (s), Fly, Robin Fly, Mécènes du Sud Montpellier-Sète, Montpellier, 2021 (g). In 2022, Mark was artist in residence at the Villa Serpentara/Villa Massimo in Olevano/Rome, Italy, for which he was selected by the Akademie der Künste, Berlin.
The structure of the program:
The visiting artist will give a theoretical and practical course.
The program is structured in several intense in-person sessions with the visiting artist and several online meetings with her and her guests. Regular meetings of the group will be held in person weekly throughout the term.
Applications:
The program is part of the Fine Arts Department of UMPRUM and is primarily reserved to its students but offers limited numbers of places to the students of other departments of UMPRUM. Students of the bachelor, master and PhD programs can apply.
All students apart from the students of the first year of Bachelor Program and the students currently graduating from Bachelor and Master Program are encouraged to enroll. The Visiting Artist Program is open to students of Fine Arts Department and all other UMPRUM departments in limited numbers.
To apply, students must have completed their previous semester and enrolled in the next semester. For applications please contact the UMPRUM Study department.
For more information please contact the program’s Czech pedagogue Sláva Sobotovičová, ssobot@umprum.cz, 737 620 381
Deadline for applications: Sept 15th, 2026
UMPRUM has hosted courses of the following visiting artists in the past :
spring 2025/26: Harun Morrison: Symbiotic Inhabitation, Embedding and Grafting. Symbiotic relationships with each other's work.
fall 2025/26 Dani d'Emilia: Artistic Practices for Times of Transition. Radical Tenderness, Metabolic Intimacy, conceptual “sheddings”.
spring 2024/25 Basim Magdy: Playing Musical Chairs in a Locked Room. A multi-disciplinary approach to creating art
fall 2024/25 Anna Witt: The Survival of The Softest. Dynamics of non-competitiveness.
spring 2023/24 Setareh Shahbazi: Eyes, Come Back! Solidarity in Art.
fall 2023/2024 Jana Ndiaye Berankova and guests: East-South. Transnational Exchanges Between Eastern Europe and Global South.
spring 2022/2023 Özlem Altin: Draw a map to get lost. Listening in.
fall 2022/2023 Marwa Arsanios: Building a structure. Strategies of self-organizing.
spring 2021/2022 Viktor Timofeev: Process Soup. Artist’s Derailing and Return Points.
fall 2021/2022 Matt Mullican: Details from an Imaginary Universe
spring 2020/2021 Maja Smrekar: Dialogues with Different Kinds of Interlocutors
fall 2020/2021 Sam Lewitt: Scales
spring 2019/2020 Tyler Coburn: Counterfactuals
fall 2019/2020 Justin Fitzpatrick: Critical Aspects of Painting
spring 2018/2019 Nina Beier: Cultural Meanings of Material and Objects
fall 2018/2019 David Maljković: Crossovers of Installation
spring 2017/2018 Marie de Brugerolle: The Legacy of Performance