Transcending Realities, Overcoming Borders and Creating Structures I curatorial forum saint petersburg | 3.10 – 6.10. 2019
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curatorialforum.art
2019
Symposium program | 3/4.10
Организаторы:
I curatorial forum saint petersburg | 3.10 – 6.10. 2019
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i curatorial forum
I curatorial forum saint petersburg | 3.10 – 6.10. 2019
On October 3 to 6, 2019, Russia’s I Curatorial Forum will take place in St. Petersburg, arranged by the North-Western branch of the National Centre for Contemporary Arts (NCCA) ROSIZO in partnership with the Creative Association of Curators TOK . This event, participated by top institutional and independent curators, gallery owners, and art-managers will promote enhancement and development of cultural ties between Russian artists, culture experts and their colleagues from other countries and regions. Events during the Curatorial Forum are intended for difference audiences: professionals are invited to take part in the Symposium, artists are welcome to join the portfolio review with international curators, whereas Art Weekend and Open Studios are opened for whoever wants to attend.
The mission of the Curatorial Forum is to provide a venue for discussion, contact building and new projects initiation — including the international ones. The Forum will bring together connoisseurs and amateurs in arts, enhance visibility and accessibility of artistic studios, art venues and galleries. The project aims to support local initiatives in the field of contemporary art, to extend the audience and to engage it into various culture-related processes.
Symposium: October 3/4 Discussion venue October 5 Art Weekend: October 5/6
Symposium program | 3/4.10
Dear colleagues, it is nice to see that you are taking part in the St. Petersburg Curatorial Forum. This project, new for the North-West branch of the State Center for Contemporary Art, in a certain way refers to the concepts of NEMOSKVA project.
We are grateful to the Finnish Institute, officials of the Ministry of Culture Frame Finland, the Goethe Institute, the Centre for German and European Studies, the Polish Institute, and the Royal Netherlands Embassy for their support of the Curatorial Forum, as well as Cec Arts Link and Sam Fair, the partner of the Art Weekend. 4
We are grateful to the New Holland Island for providing a venue for the Symposium, and to the Central Exhibition Hall Manege for providing a panel discussion venue. We are grateful to “Tretiy Park” JSC for further cooperation and provision of ART BUS. We are grateful to Wynwood Hotel for comfortable accommodation of guests of the Forum. All participants of the Forum are invited to thoroughly study the program of the Symposium, the discussions and the Art Weekend, and take as much as possible from these short days. Be pragmatic and energetic!
I curatorial forum saint petersburg | 3.10 – 6.10. 2019
Our key mission is to promote contemporary art development in St. Petersburg, through creation of precedents for international curators’ engagement into collaboration with St. Petersburg-based artists and curators. We feel certain that catching a larger audience’s interest in contemporary art will favorably influence the climate of opinion in general. At the same time, we understand that vectors and formats of such collaboration should be defined together with our nearest neighbors and partners interested in dynamic development of the city.
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The Curatorial Forum as a project appeared from discussing the term of “glocal,” which is capable of describing many things in culture of today’s: on the one hand, there is a request for global communication, and on the other hand, everything local is demanded more than ever. In the focus of the Forum’s intellectual values are the topics and concepts, currently setting certain intellectual trends. On the other hand, holding such an event lets to step back and look critically over St. Petersburg’s actual experience in contemporary art.
I curatorial forum saint petersburg | 3.10 – 6.10. 2019
The Forum will have two parts, extending each other and overflowing into one another. In the first two days of the Forum, a symposium will be arranged to share new approaches to the social and political, to discuss challenging issues in the artistic language and methods, and to establish micro-models of other relations. The second part of the Forum is the Art Weekend. This format isn’t actually brand new, but for some reason, it has never taken place in St. Petersburg. Supposedly, the city finally has enough venues to make it possible. Artists and independent curators run spaces easily overmatch commercial galleries both in terms of their numbers and content. During the first-ever St. Petersburg-based Art Weekend, the visitors will be able to walk (or even ride aboard Art Bus) down 4 routes through 20+ locations in St. Petersburg that support self-guided tours, as well as art mediation. Moreover, the program includes Open Studios, a discussion venue, lectures, round-table discussions, portfolio reviews and customized tours. Thanks a million to all the team of the Curatorial Forum for support and collaboration!
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Symposium program | 3/4.10
Thursday, October 3 Friday, October 4 Symposium Program October 3/4, 2019 New Holland Island, Pavilion
11.00–11.10
11.00–11.40
Welcome note
Snejana Krasteva, Liberating Knowledge: the Changing Role of Curatorial and Museum Practice in Russia
Symposium curators: Anna Bitkina and Maria Veits (The Creative Association of Curators TOK)
11.50–12.30
Bassam El Baroni, Curating the Desert TOK (Anna Bitkina and \ Maria Veits), How to Work Together: Inventory as a Method 12.30–13.10 Ulrika Filnk, Curating Differently: Finding a way Back to Art 13.10–14.10 Lunch time
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14.10–14.50 Paul O’Neill How Institutions Think and Parahosting as a Form of Reinstituting 14.50–15.30 Mariika Semenenko, Culture Makers 15.40–16.10 Closing notes for the day, additional questions and a discussion
11.40–12.20 Joanna Sokolowska, All Earthlings Become Sisters 12.20–13.30 Lunch time 13.30–14.10 Galit Eilat, How Do We Create Conditions for Muslim Immigrants to Be Returning to Europe, Instead of Arriving There For the First Time? 14.10–14.50 Avi Feldman, The Agency for Legal Imagination (ALI): Between Visual and Legal Activism 15.00–16.30 Closing notes for the day, additional questions and a final discussion
All curatorial presentations are followed by short Q&A. Working language of the symposium is English and Russian. Synchronous interpretation will be provided.
I curatorial forum saint petersburg | 3.10 – 6.10. 2019
In partnership with the North-Western branch of National Centre for Contemporary Arts (NCCA) ROSIZO and in the framework of the I CURATORIAL FORUM
11.10–11.50
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TOK — Anna Bitkina and Maria Veits
I curatorial forum saint petersburg | 3.10 – 6.10. 2019
Curators of the symposium
Transcending Realities, Overcoming Borders and Creating Structures Growing complexity of today and unresolved pasts set up new tasks for social and political structures and concepts to form our reality(ies). There is an urgent demand for “new institutions of learning and knowing” to articulate current conditions and pave new directions for alternative political and environmental scenarios as well as identify instruments for their development. Arguing on the topic of modernity and its main features — globalism and universalism — theorist and philosopher Keti Chukhrov claims that not a single art genre could reach such a transnational unity as contemporary art. Similarly, artist Amanda Beech states, that ‘art casts itself in an equally heroic role in claiming to offer an access to the unknowable treat of the real that reason and politics cannot’. Does it mean that contemporary art with its universal coding could provide humans and non-humans with a structure that transcends the reality? Could art’s visionary principles guide us toward a sensible political horizon based on advanced societal possibilities? During the symposium «Transcending Realities, Overcoming Borders and Creating Structures» curators and thinkers are gathered to discuss their visions, experiences and dreams that deal with the emergent political and ecological challenges. Exchange between different areas of knowledge that the symposium stimulates creates an opportunity to address the potential of the curatorial to foresee and elucidate rapid upheavals and fluid ability of curators to infiltrate into different social structures. Curator and educator Bassam El Baroni proposes to look at curating as multitude of disciplines that stretches to embrace the unknown. In his research-in-progress he suggests to apply curatorial transdisciplinarity to the desert as a new geographical and conceptual territory to test ideas for a new political potentiality. Anna Bitkina and Maria Veits / TOK reflect upon the legacy and principles of their nomadic institution by unarchiving their 10-year practice and discuss possibilities of curatorial tools to go beyond pre-designed ways of doing and being. Looking at her transitioning from a traditional art institution to a public organization Ulrika Flink explores new avenues of curating that can provide her for working more closely with art and
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Symposium program | 3/4.10
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The symposium also aims at presenting and juxtaposing a variety of curatorial projects of different scales, geographies and ambitions to outline conditions for social justice in situation of global interdependency. In her talk, leading curator of Field Research program at Garage Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow Snejana Krasteva focuses on increasing responsibility of private art institutions to preserve, interpret, produce knowledge and present plurality of art historical narratives in the context of under-financing and malfunctioning of state-run archive and research institutions in Russia. Speaking about her recent curatorial projects, Joanna Sokolowska, curator at Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź, examines possibility of a museum to become a place for ecological imagination, a territory for equal gender rights and a hostess of herstories, which all that could potentially stimulate a life-affirming future. With her multilayered, transdisciplinary research-driven art project ‘Syndrome of the Present’ Galit Eilat brings into spotlight historical narratives where ‘the seeds of present conflicts were sown’. By unfolding the life tracks of two 17th century protagonists, the ‘Messiah’ Sabbatai Zevi and the philosopher Baruch Spinoza she creates a complicated texture where different intellectual traditions, scientific and historical cannons meet to create a global piсture of interconnected socio-political processes. Entering the domain of law and legislation, curator and and lawyer Avi Feldman proposes a new format of an art institution based on principles of legal activism. According to him, ‘art is a source for the reflection and the creation of legal justice, rights, and even institutions through artistic and curatorial theory and practice’.
I curatorial forum saint petersburg | 3.10 – 6.10. 2019
artists in order to rethink society and ourselves. Artistic director of curatorial agency PUBLICS in Helsinki Paul O’Neill proposes ‘parahosting’ as a progressive terrain for organisational praxis within the curatorial paradigm’ and beyond. Marika Semenenko, a community organizer with a background in political science, instigates ways for a setting up alternative culture of thinking and doing by creating new DYI alternative structures in tight and uneasy contexts of Moscow and Kyiv.
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I curatorial forum saint petersburg | 3.10 – 6.10. 2019
Bassam El Baroni Asistant professor in curating and mediating art at the School of Arts, Design and Architecture, Aalto University, Helsinki, Finland and former lecturer (2013 – 2019) at the Dutch Art Institute MA Programme, ArtEZ University of the Arts, Arnhem, the Netherlands. He was director of Alexandria Contemporary Arts Forum (ACAF) 2005 - 2012 a now closed non-profit art space in Alexandria, Egypt. He has curated or co-curated projects/ exhibitions such as Manifesta 8 (Murcia, 2010); LIAF – Lofoten International Art Festival (Lofoten Islands, Norway, 2013); Eva International - Ireland’s Biennial (Limerick, 2014); HOME WORKS 7 (Beirut, 2015).
Curating the Desert According to philosopher Anne-Françoise Schmid, to truly grasp an object of research today it is imperative that we construe it as an “Integrative Object”. This corresponds with the growing acknowledgement of the incapacity of any one discipline alone to address and understand the complex objects and problems we face. As Schmid points out, presently, disciplines are “like the dimensions of a multidimensional object: they are no longer at the centre, but are made use of in the construction of the object.” This articulates the necessity of Transdisciplinarity and sets up curating to take on a role that is fully engaged with the construction of research objects. In view of this, how are we to understand something like ‘the desert’, for example? The talk presents El Baroni’s research-in-progress on ‘desert’ as both a site/space and a concept he develops within the context of art and curating. It takes novelist Ibrahim Al-Koni’s quest to develop a philosophy that emerges from the space-time of the desert as a starting point. For Al-Koni, the novel is an intrinsically urban phenomenon even when set outside urban space. Its time and reliance on cognitive patterns and biases afforded by urban life place it squarely within an urban framework. As Meinrad Calleja notes, urban space “has a series of inescapable mappings that allow one to manoeuvre. The desert has no such possibility, except for cosmic references.” This cosmic/astronomic entwinement as well as how the desert enforces a paradigm of thinking and encountering the world that challenges empiricism points to the desert as providing the ‘Archē-Site’ from which the speculative philosophical tools of today have emerged. A curatorial project premised on the demands of this site cuts through patterns of knowledge that interface science with sorcery, truth with fiction, rationality with delirium, and life with death. The question might then be — as Calleja notes — “Do we slice out the desert from the world, or the world from the desert?” While the former is the more popular conception, the latter provides us with an orientation that can activate fresh processes of revision and invention or as Al-Koni puts it: the desert is “an instrument of insight, capable of spying out the invisible world”. Al-Koni thus makes a
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Calleja, Meinrad. (2013) The Philosophy of Desert Metaphors in Ibrahim al-Koni — The Bleeding of the Stone. East Longmeadow, MA, USA: Faraxa Publishing. Goodman, Nelson. (1978) Ways of Worldmaking. Indianapolis, IN, USA: Hackett Publishing.
claim on the desert that identifies it as a catalyst for what Nelson Goodman has called worldmaking. The talk considers how the desert has been utilized as a site for art, art festivals, memorials and "space analogues". In many of these projects, the desert is largely a non-urban 4D canvas for artworks, apparatuses of remembrance, or future scenario experiments that have not fully potentialized it as an instrument of insight. Hence, the currently contested terminology of Desertification is reclaimed as a way of reordering and recomposing the world, desert-first, and as a transdisciplinary curatorial exercise in worldmaking.
Al-Koni, Ibrahim. (2008) interview on www.swissworld.org — Why Switzerland? cited in ‘The Philosophy of Desert Metaphors in Ibrahim al-Koni’ by Meinrad Calleja.
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The Creative Association of Curators TOK
How to Work Together: Institutional Inventory as a Method
The presentation of TOK curators will pivot around their retrospective exhibition ‘How To Work Together’ that serves as a spatial setting for the symposium and marks is curatorial collective co-found- the 10th anniversary of the collective’s practice. The curaed in 2010 by Anna Bitkina and tors will take the audience on a tour around the important Maria Veits as a platform for milestones of the collective’s development that are juxtainterdisciplinary research-based posed with significant sociopolitical timeline of the events projects in the field of contemof the past ten years that have influenced modes, ethics porary art. Throughout their practice TOK curators challenge and possibilities of curating in Russia and internationally. the borders of the territory of art Being an institution without walls TOK curators will outand seek ways of how it can fos- line their strategy of landing on different social structures ter social change. Most projects and complicated political contexts that aims at proposing of the collective are multilayered alternative future scenarios, challenging social behavioral and long-term initiatives aimed models and uniting like-minded people. They will focus at generating new knowledge about the causes and conseon sustainable ways of TOK’s institutional operation and quences of changing political demonstrate possibilities of a small-scale art organization and social realities and often lie to foster social impact. The exhibition is also an invitation between historical analysis and for curatorial self-reflective exercise and historical inventhe political imaginary. TOK’s projects deal with current issues tory. In contrary to the practice of archiving, inventorying that are widely discussed both is about continuous updates and keeping items available. in Russia and internationally Presenting the body of TOK’s curatorial works in one place such as migration, public space allows to address a variety of curatorial instruments and and citizens, development of strategies and hopefully widen their possibilities of curat-
I curatorial forum saint petersburg | 3.10 – 6.10. 2019
Schmid, Anne-Françoise. (2018) The Philosophical Underpinnings of Design Theory, In Piter Vermaas and Stéphane Vial (eds.), Advancements in the Philosophy of Design, Springer.
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I curatorial forum saint petersburg | 3.10 – 6.10. 2019
education, deprivation of social resources, forming collective memory, human rights, feminism, the growing role of the media in the global society, changing political climate and many others. Curators of TOK organize educational events, international conferences and summer schools, programs that aim at the international exchange between artists, curators, designers and educators from Russia and other countries. TOK has a strong publication component and publishes books, brochures, exhibitions catalogues that are available in print and online.
ing to go beyond pre-designed ways of doing and being. Having started with an ambition to test formats of curatorial practice, over the past decade the duo turned into a nomadic curatorial institution with horizontal structure guided by the imperatives of curiosity, social responsibility, sustainability and collectivity. Most of TOK’s projects take place outside of a white cube; they are based on principles of performativity and site-specificity, which makes their outcomes unpredictable until the research and production are complete. Therefore, emerging in open city areas, schools, libraries, youth centers as well as art institutions, curatorial projects of TOK rather take place than are being shown. Technological progress and immanent mobility of many contemporary artists and curators make them exist in multiple political realities. The process of going through the time of transition helps some of them find ways around changing sociopolitical paradigms. TOK belongs to the generation that grew up during the liberal gap between communism and capitalism, and that experience alongside Soviet social and political heritage is embedded into their identity. For the past several years, while expanding their practice internationally and working outside of Russia they have developed sensitivity to radical changes happening in the global East and global West, which gets reflected in their latest projects. They are in search of nuanced language, concepts and strategies that allow to describe both the complexity of post-Soviet reality and to loosen dominance of the existing Western canon. The curators will also talk about challenges of keeping institutional history and integrity being intentionally an organization without a physical space. They will touch upon importance of systematic curatorial labor and precarious routine, institutional intellectual footprint, knowledge production anтв network building. Rethinking their practice, TOK curators are concerned about remains after an exhibition and about ‘post-representative possibilities for curatorial work’.
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Paul O’Neill
How Institutions Think and Parahosting as a form of reinstituting
How Institutions Think and mobilise ways of thinking and being in the world are issues of fundamental contempoPUBLICS (2017). PUBLICS is a cu- rary importance — and one that needs to be addressed ratorial agency and event space from multiple perspectives, and with a new sense of urin Helsinki. Between 2013-17, he gency here today and elsewhere.
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was Director of the Graduate Program at the Center for Curatorial Studies (CCS), Bard College. Paul is widely regarded as one of the foremost research-oriented curators, and leading scholar of curatorial practice, public art and exhibition histories. Paul has held numerous curatorial and research positions over the last twenty years and he has taught on many curatorial and visual arts programs in Europe and the UK. Paul has co-curated more than sixty curatorial projects across the world. His most recent anthologies, The Curatorial Conundrum: What to Study? What to Research? What to Practice? and How Institutions Think are co-edited with Lucy Steeds and Mick Wilson, published with The MIT Press, CCS Bard College and Luma Foundation, in 2016 and 2017 respectively.
PUBLICS is a curatorial agency with a dedicated library, event space and reading room in Helsinki. During the Autumn of 2018, PUBLICS began to give over its program to the work of others, and to those institutions who are in need of space to practice and to support the realisation of their projects publically. ‘Parahosting’ is an essential means of working together without boundaries, with the para being conceived of as operating away from, alongside or supplementary to, and we wish to propose ‘parahosting’ as a progressive terrain for organisational praxis that both operates within the curatorial paradigm and retains a destabilizing relationship to it via (para-) texts, sites, works and institutes. To arrive at a para concept – an understanding of something ‘other than’, ‘beside’, ‘outside’, or ‘auxiliary’, operating at a distance from the main act – is a means of re-establishing the binary between primary and secondary curatorial labor. In this sense, ‘parahosting’ is a useful term to describe transitional temporal processes of engagement with people taking precedence over exhibitions or productions as the primary end product. Taking PUBLICS’s concept of ‘parahosting’ as a background example this talk will explore why institutions of all scales are necessary as part of a codependent culture and the need to support for small to medium scale organisations must be made more apparent. In the face of such a reductive scenario, ‘parahosting’ proposes an evolving field of operations that persists in resisting the established order of things as part of the destabilizing curatorial constellation.
I curatorial forum saint petersburg | 3.10 – 6.10. 2019
Curator, artist, writer and educator. He is the Artistic Director of
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I curatorial forum saint petersburg | 3.10 – 6.10. 2019
Ulrika Flink Ulrika Flink Independent curator from Stockholm. In different years she held positions in leading Swedish and international art institutions. Her recent positions include curator at Grafikens Hus, director of Konstfrämjandet Stockholm, assistant curator and producer at Tensta Konsthall (2011-2017). Ulrika worked for Bonniers Kunsthall and was a co-founder of the Stockholm-based curatorial collective Parallellogram. In 2017 Flink was a part of the curatorial team of the 9th edition of Momentum biennial in Norway. She has worked on numerous exhibitions at Tensta Konsthall, Autograph ABP and Tate Modern. Flink has been the co-editor of Hjärnstorm journal and has written for The Right Dissonance (UK), The Lake Magazine (South Africa) and Konstperspektiv (Sweden).
Curating Differently: Finding a Way Back to Art The talk will try to identify how leaving the traditional art institution can provide new avenues for curators interested in having more time to work with art and artist. These strategies will be mapped out using two different organizations as an example. Konstfrämjandet, “People’s Movements for Art Promotion”, works towards the mission «art for everyone». How can this be achieved? What curatorial strategies must be implemented for seeing art as a way of rethinking society and ourselves? As artistic co-director at Konstfrämjandet Stockholm, Ulrika’s mission is to work together with artists, participants, and member organizations, to develop different perspectives on the time in which we live. The elasticity of the concept of art has great potential to open up an overlapping ecosystem. The norm-creative organization SETTING aims to develop a method for broader collaboration between activists and artists. In a time where more and more people are organizing themselves in fascist and undemocratic movements, a strong counter-force is needed. Working as a curator at SETTING entails developing projects that investigate how to effect change in society manifested and sustained through the role of activism and the arts in social movements, democracy development, and social sustainability. Art and activism work in different ways. Activism is an activity for challenging and changing power relations in society. The value of art, on the other hand, often lies in giving us perspectives and new ways of seeing our world. What curatorial strategies are needed to explore activism and art?
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Co-founder and curator of House of culture Delai Sam/a, an independent cultural space based in Moscow for activists, artists, researchers, designers, architects, musicians, documentary filmmakers, theatre directors and experts. It is a hub for everyone who, by their actions, is exploring, developing, changing or seeking to improve urban life. She is also a program curator of the international activist documentary film festival Delai Film. Before that, she worked on several art projects in public spaces in Moscow and Kiev aimed at involving local people into urban development processes and community building. She was researching migration in Moscow while studying at Strelka Institute for Media, Architecture and Design in Moscow. Before that, she studied political science.
Culture doers Is it possible to make a beta-version of a new system capable of transforming the Russian cultural patterns, which won’t be a utopia or an escapist attempt, but will be practically implementable? In the context of today’s Russia, establishing any kind of system that is alternative to the state one is considered to be marginalized and leads to potential conflicts with public authorities and consequent repressions. Being put into a misfit position, the anti-governmental political framework participants are incapable of formulating common values and collaborating around that, thus disuniting even further. As an experimental platform, contemporary art allows artists to take a meta-position towards established social norms and behavioral patterns and set a practical example of introducing new values that can underlain a different cultural code. The today’s context necessitates a search for new approaches and extension of vocabulary, which will be able to describe a new hybrid-type political project. “Do Culture”/ Делай культуру project initiated by Marika is an attempt to establish a horizontally integrated community and a stable economical model that support its members in implementation of their own cultural ambitions. This is a structure, living and working, which complies with specific principles: openness, transparency, flexibility, experimentality, polytonality and non-violent existence. It is a cultural space for implementing projects about the contemporary society and its organization, as well as a venue for other independent cultural initiatives. Marika Semenenko, who identifies herself as a new culture doer, will tell about “Do Culture” project and other alternative structures, looking into building a horizontally integrated community of fellow-thinkers, which she and her friends have established in Moscow and Kyiv.
Snejana Krasteva Curator at Garage Museum of Contemporary Art. From 2007 to 2009, she worked at the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing. From 2011 to 2013,
Liberating knowledge: the changing role of curatorial and museum practice in Russia In the context of largely dysfunctional, impermeable or simply under-financed academic and archival establishments in Russia historically responsible for preserving, interpreting and producing knowledge, private museums and independent institutions are forced to take up their role. Museums
I curatorial forum saint petersburg | 3.10 – 6.10. 2019
Mariika Semenenko
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I curatorial forum saint petersburg | 3.10 – 6.10. 2019
she was a curator at Art on the Underground, London, where she realized a series of public art projects. Her exhibition projects at Garage include The Coming World: Ecology as the New Politics 2030-2100 (2019); Allora & Calzadilla: Graft (2019); The Other Trans-Atlantic. Kinetic and Op Art in Eastern Europe and Latin America 1950s–1970s (2018); the first Garage Triennial of Russian Contemporary Art (2017), NSK: FROM KAPITAL TO CAPITAL (2015).
Joanna Sokolowska Curator and works at the Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź, Poland. Her interests include contemporary art that resonates with feminist practices, and the transformation of the ecological and economic imagination. Selected exhibitions: Pangea United, Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź, 2019; For Beyond that Horizon Lies Another Horizon, Edith-Russ-Haus für Medienkunst, Oldenburg, 2017; Exercises in Autonomy: Tamás Kaszás featuring Anikó Loránt (ex-artists’ collective), Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź, 2016; All Men Become Sisters, Muzeum Sztuki, 2015/16. She is author of essays and articles on politics of contemporary art and recently edited the book All Men Become Sisters copublished with Sternberg Press focusing on feminist perspectives on work, social reproduction in art since the 1970s until today.
that deal with contemporary art, i.e art that tends to cross disciplines, to test boundaries of expertise, and the singularity of established narratives, more and more find their responsibility as cultural institutions operating in Russia in liberating knowledge from belonging to one institution, to one discipline, to one culture. Such efforts are necessary for conducting a more organic, educated and active international dialogue, for the writing of a diversified and truly global art history. Snejana Krasteva, one the leading curators of the program Field Research first launched in 2013 at Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, will expand on the accumulated cautionary tales from the museum’s focus on research, grants-giving and more recently, artists studio program in order to map the changing curatorial role of both the curatorial and museum practices in the country.
All Earthlings become sisters Can a museum become a hostess of herstories and metaphors fostering life-affirming future? How can it render sensible possibilities for future modes of environment-making that hardly makes sense under toxic conditions of production? Can we work with artists and audiences on topical sociopolitical questions such as gender-based exploitation or ecological crisis and at the same time support singularity, complexity or poetic force of specific artworks? In her presentation Joanna Sokolowska attempts to answer these questions drawing on two exhibition projects - “All Men Become Sisters” and “Pangea United” in Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź. The starting point for both were metaphors of sisterhood and earthly household, respectively. “All Men Become Sisters” proposed a genealogy and manifestation of sisterhood as present in art from the late 1960s until today. It was grounded in art resonating with feminist perspectives on work, production, and social reproduction. However, the exhibition did not aim to rewrite history of feminism in art until now nor to provide a toolbox for feminist activism today. Sisterhood was conceived as an imagination machine; built on the foundations of second-wave criticism of the patriarchal exploitation of women, it proceeded to pose questions about future ecologies of work. The feminist legacy of ethics and economics of care articulated in the exhibition All Men Become Sisters took Joanna
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Galit Elat
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Interdependent curator and writer based in Amsterdam. Since 2018 she is the director of Meduza Foundation. Her projects seek to develop conditions that enable collective encounters and experiences, underpinned by a critical view towards the status quo. Deploying eclectic, site-specific projects, often in collaboration with grass root, politically active groups and individuals. In 2001, she founded the Israeli Center for Digital Art, where she served as director for ten years. In 2004, I co-founded Maarav, an online arts and culture magazine and in 2007 she founded the Mobile Archive. In addition to my curatorial activities, I’m also engages in teaching and writing extensively about art and politics. is the recipient of the Keith Haring Fellowship in Art and Activism at Bard College, 2017-18
How do we create conditions for Muslim immigrants to be returning to Europe, instead of arriving there for the first time? The weakening of the states’ democratic structure is a global phenomenon, coinciding with the remarkable resurgence of interest in religion, which has become one of the defining issues of our time. We are living in a time where religion and its wider cosmology have an inescapable hold over us, the intersection of political theology and religious politics is gaining global momentum, the nature of human sovereignty and its propensity to generate catastrophic violence is escalating. Nationalism, religion, gender, and race are manipulated by the political elite to divide society and turn people against each other. Nevertheless, conflicts also generate moments of possibilities: the destruction that leads us to face the crises also opens doors to reimagine a future where equality, dignity, wealth, justice, mobility, and education are equally shared among all of us. In order to accomplish this, we have to look back, to see what was imagined for us. It was in the early modernity, that the multitude was identified as the sovereign constituent subject and respectively, democracy was imagined as the politics of popular grounding. ‘Syndrome of the present’ is a transdisciplinary research-driven art project that originated from the necessity to examine the art’s potentiality to respond, negate or partake in the political, social, and environmental changes of the present. The project offers complex, heterodox narratives and intersectional beliefs and explores the methods and conditions to create a comparative imagination and to disseminate ‘complex thoughts’. The project’s narrative begins in the
I curatorial forum saint petersburg | 3.10 – 6.10. 2019
further to Pangea United. It was a proposition for viewers to exercise an ecological imagination, to sense emergent horizons for the Earth household of the future. The works and the performances at the exhibition aimed to searсh for ties and connections between those who have already faced the unknown. Ignoring utopian or sci-fi scenarios, “Pangea United” took a look into present possibilities and tools that humans already have, but that they have abandoned while organizing societies devoid of life-affirming prospects. In fact, the exhibition posed questions about the basic need for care in order to sustain life, as well as about interdependence and fragility of diverse bodies in the web of life.
curatorialforum.art
I curatorial forum saint petersburg | 3.10 – 6.10. 2019
17th century central Europe, in which the seeds of present conflicts were sown. This century is famous for the religious reformation that led to the sovereign state, democracy, citizenship and the constitution of (hu)man rights in response to decades of wars. It was also accompanied by outbursts of messianic and scientific developments, economic and cultural progress. The project follows two 17th century protagonists, the ‘Messiah’ Sabbatai Zevi and the philosopher Baruch Spinoza. The second abandoned Judaism, while the first converted to Islam, creating grounds for clandestine religious communities. Both protagonists represent reformation in which various religions, cultures, and heritages overlap and coalesce. They prompt discussion on intersectionality, heterodoxy, multi-religiosity, and fluid identity — all parallel to and often interwoven with the emergence of the trans-Atlantic slave trade and colonial expeditions in the so-named ‘New World’. Through such historical and archival excavations, the project sheds light on the intersection between Black/Afro-diasporic legacies and Jewish legacies. The project’s research sets up several meta-questions: What should be done when race, gender, religion, and class become a costume for national identity imaginaries? How can we respond when the state of exception becomes the norm? What is the role of an artist under a dictatorship? How does the notion of ‘public’ function under an authoritarian regime? How do we create conditions for social equality and responsibility, solidarity and empathy? How do we create conditions for Muslim immigrants to be returning to Europe, instead of arriving there for the first time?
Avi Feldman Curator and writer based in Tel Aviv, Berlin, and Dresden. He was the 2018 curator in residence at Ludlow 38, the MINI/Goethe-Institut Curatorial Residencies program, NYC. Feldman is the founder of The Agency for Legal Imagination, which is an independent organization devoted to the investigation of existing and imagined relations between legal and artistic imagination, and visual activism and legal activism.
The Agency for Legal Imagination (ALI): Between Visual and Legal Activism The Agency for Legal Imagination (ALI) is an independent organization dedicated to the investigation of the existing and imagined relations between legal and artistic imagination, as well as between visual and legal activism. Existing as an adaptable platform based on exchange and collaboration between institutions, individual practitioners, and scholars from the fields of art, law and politics, the ALI provides theoretical analysis and creative, new perceptions on justice, imagination, as well as visual and judicial activism. Through the untangling of spaces, gaps, and lacunae in which both fields of practice and knowledge intersect, the ALI sets in
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The Agency started operating in NYC following a residency, workshops and exhibition at Artport Tel Aviv (2015-2017), and an exhibition at tranzit/sk, Bratislava (2017). Feldman holds a law degree and has been a member of the Israeli Bar since 2005.
1 Shoshana Felman, “In an Era of Testimony: Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah,” Yale French Studies 1991, n79: 39.
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2 Soshana Felman, The Juridical Unconscious: Trials and Traumas in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002) 134.
Eyal Weizman, Forensic Architecture, Notes from Fields and Forums, dOCUMENTA (13): 100 Notes, 100 Thoughts #062 (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2012) 5-6. 3
4 Thomas Keenan and Eyal Weizman,“Mengele’s Skull” Cabinet (Fall 2011) 43, <http://www. cabinetmagazine.org/issues/43/ keenan_weizman.php>.
More information about the ALI’s projects can be found here: http://ludlow38.org/contributors/avi–feldman/
motion an exploration of influences and interactions between law and art. The ALI’s preliminary questions concern witnessing, violence, counter-archive, and the creation of evidence. Some of these topics relate to Shoshana Felman’s research on literature, trauma, and witnessing. Felman understands the act of bearing witness as an act of speaking the truth, whether “before a court of law or before the court of history [...] as the narrative account of the witness is at once engaged in an appeal and bound by an oath.1” According to Felman, the truth of the testimony “embraces the vulnerability, the legal fallibility, and the fragility of the human witness. It is precisely the witness’s fragility that is paradoxically called upon to testify and to bear witness.”2 In recent years, Felman’s analysis of the act of witnessing has become challenged by Eyal Weizman, who argues that the era of the witness may have reached its end, to be replaced by the forensic era.3 Weizman together with Thomas Keenan4 defined Felman’s era of the witness as beginning with the Eichmann trial in 1961 and ending with the discovery of the skull of Josef Mengele in 1985, which marks the emergence of a forensic sensitivity. In contrast to the fragile, uncertain, difficult-to-believe, and spoken testimony of the witness, testimonies and evidence should be an outcome of a forensic scientific investigation. This process, they suggest, can provide much more reliable, truthful evidence in the courtroom. Against this backdrop, the Agency for Legal Imagination’s exploration of the legal components in art and curating form an alternative path that lies between the crisis of witnessing, as studied by Felman, and the movement towards the forensic, as maintained by Weizman and Keenan. The ALI positions itself and its work as a third option: it underscores the possibility of an artwork, or an art project to hold and embody legal grounds and qualities. According to this, art is a source for the reflection and the creation of legal justice, rights, and even institutions through artistic and curatorial theory and practice. The ALI goes further to suggest that we are facing a visual turn in law. Attracting and confronting the visual and the legal, allows for mutual, reciprocal attributes as well as common imagination to arise, become manifest, and intertwined in the realm of contemporary visual art. Avi Feldman, who is the initiator of ALI, will be sharing during the curatorial symposium some of the agency’s past projects, while also outlining future ideas for a Museum of Law.
I curatorial forum saint petersburg | 3.10 – 6.10. 2019
In 2018, the Agency organized and collaborated with Tali Keren, Hinda Weiss, Jason Loebs, Forensic Architecture, NSU Tribunal, and Devin Kenny, among others.
curatorialforum.art
ART WEEKEND October 5/6
I curatorial forum saint petersburg | 3.10 – 6.10. 2019
ART WEEKEND will embrace all the contemporary art spaces in Saint Petersburg. Galleries, exhibition venues and creative spaces will arrange special events for general public. On October 5 to 6, all the venues will be open from 12.00 noon to 8 p.m. Freeof-charge tours for visitors will be arranged at 12.00 noon, 2.00 p.m., 4.00 p.m., and 6.00 p.m. Art Mediations We offer thematic walks along several routes prepared by our art mediators. Art mediators don’t give their personal judgments on artworks, but together with the audience participate in their making. Art mediators aim to support a dialogue and knowledge exchange. Number of participants is limited. Please, register for art mediation at: www.curatorialforum.art ART BUS To access the most remote venues, you can take the ART BUS on route IV, which was made possible thanks to Tretiy Park JSC and artist Maxim Ima.The Art Bus table, list of stops and
pictures are available on Instagram @curatorialforum Locations: Saint Petersburg Stieglitz State Academy of Art and Design, New Holland Island, Pavilion, Anna Nova Gallery, FFTN, Marina Gisich Gallery, MYTH Gallery, Kunsthalle Nummer Sieben, Rosa’s House of Culture, The Freud’s Dreams Museum, Sergey Kuryokhin Center for Contemporary Art, Pushkinskaya 10, Antonov Gallery, Pig Snout Gallery, Aperto Masters, Name Gallery, Wynwood design-hotel, WöD Grafik Kabinett, National Center for Contemporary Art, North-Western Branch, FotoDepartament, Book Graphics Library, DiDi Gallery, Cultural Center Gromov. Kvadrat Youth Centre, Street Art Museum, Benois Public Space 1890, Abramova Gallery Open Studios St. Petersburg artists will open their studios to the general public to show where and how art is created and to demonstrate various artistic methods to the audience. Tours will be 1.5 to 2.5 hours long. Number of participants is limited. Please, register for Open Studio tours at: www.curatorialforum.art
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ART WEEKEND Events 5 october
14:00 Tour on workshops of artists who work with metal with Anton Shulgin. Free entrance Siniy Gus’ art cluster. 12:00–13:00 Open discussion with Alisa Gosmetr factory. Kurskaya st., 28/32 Prudnikova and Pavel Prigara about NEMOSKVA 18:00–20:00 project. Workshop by Chikako Goto as a part of the exhibition 13:00–14:30 Curating for public spaces War Requiem. 872 Days in Leningrad Moderator: Jussi Koitela The participants will be Participants: Taru Tappola, introduced to the artist’s Eliisa Suvanto, Anna technique of meditative Jensen, Carol Stakenas, drawing. Together with the Susan Katz, Nailya artist they will create works Allakhverdieva, Artem for a large-scale installation Filatov at the gallery. Free entrance 15:00–16:30 Pushkinskaya 10 Art and politics. Three Ligovsky pr., 53 propositions. Moderator: Dmitry Vilensky 19:00 Participants: Olesya Presentation of the Turkina, Luisa Ziaja, Corina L. Apostol, Sonja Lau, Artem catalogue of the exhibition project Luzhyn’s Magun Protection, implemented by the joint efforts of the 16:30–18:00 Cabinet of Graphics WöD Artistic Self–Organization and the Nabokov Museum Moderator: Lizaveta in 2018. Matveeva Artists: Maria Baturina, Participants: Clarinda Mac Mikhail Zaikanov, Asya Low, Antonina Trubitsyna, Marakulina. Ann-Kathrin Rudorf, Curators: Andrey Shabanov, Katerina Sokolovskaya, Danila Sergeev. Nikita Seleznev, Irina Free entrance Aksenova, Alexander WöD Grafik Kabinett Tsikarishvili Bolshaya Morskaya Ulitsa, 4
ART WEEKEND Events 6 October 11:00 Open interviews with curators at Masters School The updates are available on the website. Registration. Masters School Italiyanskaya st., 17 14:00 Performance CUBA (Masha Sheshukova, Vasily Zhdamirov, Sergey Pashkov, Anton Poluboyarinov) Buy tickets at sdvig.space SDV/G Performative Arts Studio Grazhdanskaya st., 13-15 Meeting with curator Olesya Turkina at the Marble Palace. Olesya will talk about Ludwig’s museum and the exhibition activities of the Newest Trends Department of Russian Museum. The event is organized by Masters school Language — English Registration is required Marble Palace, State Russian Museum Millionnaya st., 5/1
I curatorial forum saint petersburg | 3.10 – 6.10. 2019
PANEL DISCUSSIONS ART WEEKEND October 5 Location: Manege Central Exhibition Hall 1 Isaakiyevskaya Square Registration is needed
19:30 Lecture Curatorial Turns From Feminist and Intersectional Perspectives Speaker: Mirjam Westen Registration. New Holland Island Admiralteysky Canal Embankment, 2
curatorialforum.art
I curatorial forum saint petersburg | 3.10 – 6.10. 2019
15:00–19:00 Open Studios Night at Pushkinskaya–10 Art Center Visitors will have the opportunity to see the workshops of permanent residents of the art center, as well as to meet with foreign artists participating in the art residence. In the center you will be able to get a map on which you can choose the workshops to visit. Free entrance Pushkinskaya 10 Ligovsky pr., 53 16:00 Performance Irrational Body (Anton Vdovichenko, Sonya Kolukanova, Timofey Lavin aka Drozh, Kamil Mustafayev, Natalia Poplevskaya) Entrance with tickets. Buy tickets at sdvig.space SDV/G Performative Arts Studio Grazhdanskaya st., 13-15 Presentation of the first editions of graphic art by Evgeny Muzalevsky. Free entrance WöD Grafik Kabinett Bolshaya Morskaya st., 45 18:00 Performance What’s Going On? (Anna Kravchenko, Valentina Lutsenko, Marina Shamova) Entrance with tickets. Buy tickets at sdvig.space SDV/G Performative Arts Studio Grazhdanskaya st., 13-15
18:00–20:00 Workshop by Chikako Goto in the framework of the exhibition War Requiem. 872 Days in Leningrad The participants will be introduced to the artist’s technique of meditative drawing. Together with the artist they will create works for a large-scale installation at the gallery. Free entrance Pushkinskaya 10 Ligovsky pr., 53 19:00 Resonance Theatre AL–KHI Performance BOM with the audience participation Entrance with free donation Berthold Centre Grazhdanskaya Ulitsa, 13-15 21
I curatorial forum saint petersburg | 3.10 â&#x20AC;&#x201C; 6.10. 2019
I curatorial forum saint petersburg | 3.10 â&#x20AC;&#x201C; 6.10. 2019
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Transcending Realities, Overcoming Borders and Creating Structures
I curatorial forum saint petersburg | 3.10 â&#x20AC;&#x201C; 6.10. 2019
Symposium program | 3/4.10
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