LECTURE by Ekaterina Degot: When Everybody is Critical, but Nobody is a Critic

Together with SCCA-Ljubljana and the UGM – Maribor Art Gallery we cordially invite you to lectures given by Ekaterina Degot (in English) in both Ljubljana and Maribor, as part of the programme How Critical Is the Condition of Critical Writing?

Tuesday, 5 April 2016, 7 p.m., Project Room, SCCA–Ljubljana, Metelkova 6, Ljubljana

Wednesday, 6 April 2016, 6 p.m., Studio UGM, Trg Leona Štuklja 2, Maribor

Ekaterina Degot: When Everybody is Critical, but Nobody is a Critic
The recurring discussion about critical writing reminds us of a comparable discourse centered around the notion of painting. When asked, over and again, about the destiny of painting, one is tempted to reply shortly that it is dead. Obviously many artists do paint, provide for themselves by doing so, and even manage to remain historically relevant, but they avoid calling themselves painters. In a similar vein, most of us practice critical writing, sometimes on an everyday basis, but hesitate to present ourselves as professional critics. Where is critical thinking located in this entanglement of de-skilling and performativity?

Ekaterina Degot is an art writer and curator, Artistic Director at the Academy of Arts of the World, Cologne, and professor at the Rodchenko Moscow School of Photography and Multimedia. In 2014 she won the Igor Zabel Award for Culture and Theory. She co-edited Post-Post-Soviet?: Art, Politics and Society in Russia at the Turn of the Decade (Chicago University press, 2013). Her recent curatorial projects include: Report to an Academy, a Non-Academic Symposium, Performative or Otherwise, Pluriversale I, Cologne, 2014 (with David Riff); What Did the Artist Mean by That?, Moscow Museum of Modern Art, 2014 (with Yuri Albert), and Monday Begins on Saturday, First Bergen Assembly, Bergen, Norway, 2013 (with David Riff).

Organized by: Igor Zabel Association for Culture and Theory, SCCA–Ljubljana/World of Art, and the UGM – Maribor Art Gallery.
Supported by: City of Ljubljana – Department for Culture and ERSTE Foundation.