Art as Commitment - International conference, December 7, 2013, Ljubljana

07.12.2013
recent protests in Bucharest against Roşia Montană exploitation in Romania. The slogan on the T-shirt says: Art, life and nature, NOT cyanide and fracking. Raluca Voinea, September 2013.
recent protests in Bucharest against Roşia Montană exploitation in Romania. The slogan on the T-shirt says: Art, life and nature, NOT cyanide and fracking. Raluca Voinea, September 2013.

Location: Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova, Maistrova 3, Ljubljana
From 9.30 a.m. till 5.30 p.m.

Speakers: Keti Chukhrov (an art theorist and philosopher, Moscow), Miklavž Komelj (an art historian, poet and translator, Ljubljana), Hito Steyerl (an artist, Berlin), Ravi Sundaram (a Senior Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS), New Delhi), Raluca Voinea (an art critic and curator, Bucharest)

The conference is organized by the Igor Zabel Association for Culture and Theory in cooperation with the Moderna galerija. The conference is supported by the ERSTE Foundation.


About the conference

The aim of the conference is to reflect on the role and position of committed art today, to discuss what committed art should be today and what the difference is when we talk about art as commitment.

Today, in a time when everything indicates that the crisis – economic, financial, political, environmental and social – will only intensify, when numerous artistic, cultural, political and social forms of resistance and critical assessments are bursting out globally in a search and demand for a world beyond the neoliberal order, art and the art system are again confronted with the urge to reflect upon their role and status in these challenging conditions. This seems to be even more pressing since for more than two decades contemporary art’s development went hand in hand with the processes of globalisation that the “old first world” used to triumphantly spread the doctrine of neoliberal capitalism after 1989.

Questions which will be addressed:
- What committed art should be today and what the difference is when we talk about art as commitment?
- How can art be socially and politically viable and emancipatory and at the same time overcome pure social and political utilitarianism?
- How can art create specific values despite being trapped within political, economic and other power systems that exploit it?
- What are the possible artistic and curatorial strategies toward autonomous art and its political effects today?
- Has conceptualization of art as an autonomous field finally become a matter of history, or is it precisely in this direction that one should seek its power in the future?
- Which are the practices that we could learn from?

More about the conference.

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