Reflections and Premises in Contemporary Art, Art Theory and Art History

Tuesday, April 9, 2013, at 7 p.m.
Škuc Gallery, Stari trg 21, Ljubljana

How to Think of Encounter as an Art Practice?
In the last twenty years many different theories have been developed that tried to come to terms with art practices in which the notion of encounter holds a central position. Artists, curators, and theoreticians, all have contributed with different concepts to the understanding of what is actually at stake in the art practices of encounter: collaboration, participation, relation, dialogue, friendship, community.

Through creating a dialogue between philosophy of ethics and contemporary art, Eric Hagoort will critically examine the notion of reciprocity which has became a dominant concept in discourses on art practices of encounter.

Creating a dialogue between philosophy of ethics and contemporary art is the guiding line of his practice as researcher, curator, art critic, lecturer, and advisor. He works at the  Academy of Art and Design St. Joost (NL).
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Monday, May 13, 2013, at 6 p.m.
Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova, Maistrova 3, Ljubljana

In her lecture, Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez will present one of the most unique spaces in France for artistic research residencies programmes – Les Laboratoires d'Aubervilliers, where she was co-director between 2010 and 2012. Based on her experiences of working in this institution and the writings of Donna Harraway, she will elaborate on the notion of situated artistic research and the "reflexive" residency programme.

Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez is an art critic and independent curator based in Paris.
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Wednesday, February 5, 2014, at 6 pm
Project space, SCCA-Ljubljana, Metelkova 6, Ljubljana

Video of the lecture

In the lecture, Suzana Milevska will address the important and complex relation between contemporary curating and theoretical discourses. She will point to the limitations that occur when theoretical concepts are used as an excuse for and to advocate the curatorial choice of models, strategies and relationships instead of using these concepts as starting points for a critical self-reflection on art and curatorial choices.

The lecture will include Milevska’s own curatorial experience – starting from her early projects, marked, as she puts it, “with the bare illustration of specific theoretical concepts, up to recent projects, where I start from different phenomena in the real world and try to interpret them with different theoretical concepts.”

Parallel to this, Milevska will also reflect upon the relation between art and activism and the recent urge from the side of curators and art institutions to intertwine themselves with current social movements in the quest for a reality beyond the neoliberal order.

The Q/A Session's point of departure will be presented case studies on the base of which we will discuss different possible ways in which theory and practice - especially in cases of intertwining art and social-political activism - can relate to and influence each other.

Suzana Milevska (Skopje) is an art historian, curator and theorist of visual art and culture. She holds a Ph.D. in Visual Cultures from Goldsmiths College in London. Her academic research and curating interests include postcolonial critique of hegemonic power in art, gender theory and feminism(s) in art practices and socially engaged and participatory projects. She has curated over 70 international exhibitions, mostly committed to searching for new curatorial formats and models of presenting critical discourses and socially and politically engaged art practices. She publishes extensively, including among others Gender Difference in the Balkans and The Renaming Machine: The Book (both in 2010). In 2012, she was awarded the Igor Zabel Award for Culture and Theory, and in 2013 she was appointed as the first Endowed Professor for Central and South Eastern European Art Histories at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna.

Thursday, March 13, 2014, at 7 pm

Video of the lecture

SCCA Project room, Metelkova 6, Ljubljana. The lecture will be held in English.
In recent spatial practices and engagement in urban transformation, debates have surrounded the putative master planning and the putative un-planning or un-planned. This opposition has been undisputedly at the heart of critical spatial practice and theory.

The title of this lecture proposes a paradox as its starting point: unplanned history. History eludes planning, it has already happened. Still, the notion of the unplanned, as the lecturer emphasizes, is not the only conduit into history. Quite on the contrary, the writing of history, as feminist and postcolonial scholarship have shown, needs care and planning.

Elke Krasny will position a different genealogy of feminist urban curating (largely unwritten) and feminist strategies for writing an urban history that otherwise will have remained untold and invisible. These two histories will be unfold in parallel as part of an ongoing exploration of critical spatial practices in urban curating and of feminist (proto-)curatorial models of conviviality and the writing of unwritten history.

Presented examples will reflect these concerns from a historical and transnational perspective. Examples given will range from late-19th century feminism to artistic, curatorial and writing practices by Dolores Hayden, Suzanne Lacy and Lucy Lippard and some of Krasny's own work as an urban curator.

Workshop
Thursday and Friday, March 13 and 14, 2014
SCCA Project room, Metelkova 6, Ljubljana

In combination with the lecture, the workshop will look at the interrelations and interdependencies between critical practices of artistic production, curatorial approaches, issues of urban epistemology and research-based strategies. The focus will be on conviviality and care and on issues of vulnerability, resistance, knowing bodies of agency/(un)known bodies of writing within urban space.

The workshop will combine the format of a read-in with an urban walk through the Tabor neighborhood, which we will develop collectively. Texts will include writings by Elke Krasny (On The Urgent Need for Contemporary Action), Judith Butler (Bodies in Alliance and the Politics of the Street) and Rosalyn Deutsche (Uneven Development: Public Art in New York City). 

Elke Krasny is a curator, cultural theorist, and writer. She is a Senior Lecturer at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, Austria. In 2014 she is City of Vienna Visiting Professor at the Vienna University of Technology. In 2013 she was Visiting Professor of Architecture and Urban Research at the Academy of Fine Arts Nuernberg. Her theoretical and curatorial work is firmly rooted in socially engaged art, architecture and spatial practices, urban epistemology, post-colonial theory, and feminist historiography.

Tuesday, April 15, 2014, at 7 pm
SCCA Project Room, Metelkova 6, Ljubljana

In the U.S. the non-profit model is sometimes viewed as hindering social change through complex structures, therefore newer and 'more rebellious' galleries often function without the NGO structure in order to be more fluid and adaptable. Parallel to that public institutions, like the Corcoran Gallery of Art and College of Art + Design are under the threat by market driven politics. McLellan has over 20 years operated in seemingly opposite structures. Deriving from her rich experiences she will draw a comparative analysis between different modes of operation in contemporary arts (profit, non-profit, public, private), illustrated by examples from her own practice and current state of art in Washington D.C.

Workshop
Wednesday, April 16 & Thursday, 17, 2014, from 3 pm till 6 pm
SCCA Project Room

Potentials of independent operation in the field of art – based on McLellan's work in States, but also on her extensive knowledge of Slovene art scene – will be the focus of our workshop. McLellan has managed to contribute both theoretical (as a professor at various art schools), but especially as initiator and organiser of important organisations and venues that contributed to the emergence of vivid Washington independent art scene. At the same time she has been several times researching Slovene (and wider ex-Yugoslav) art scene and has, since late 90’s, established a fruitful collaboration with local art scene.

Within the workshop we will compare art systems in Slovenia and USA, focus on possibilities of independent operation in the field of art, reflect on what this should mean and try to answer the questions like: How to set up own working conditions and platforms? How to adjust an appropriate structure to the acquired theoretical knowledge? How do two different yet complimentary models: NGO and ‘more rebellious galleries’ running without NGO structure in the States benefit artists and support the artistic community? What are the revenue streams used to stabilize such institutions and how does this help or hinder diverse presentations of work?

Participants will be invited to propose suitable organisational format for their work (imagine perfect institution or individual modus operandi) and then analyse and develop further the idea. Come prepared to share your ideas and sharpen your curatorial skills!

Jayme McLellan is an artist, educator, curator, writer, and gallery director. She is the founding director of Civilian Art Projects, a gallery supporting emerging and established artists located in Washington, DC. McLellan has worked in the arts since the mid-nineties curating hundreds of exhibitions and organizing events in galleries, museums, and alternative spaces in DC, Baltimore, New Orleans, Minneapolis, New York City, Miami, Canada and Europe. Prior to Civilian, McLellan co-founded and served as co-director of Transformer (2002–2006), a non-profit arts organization dedicated to serving emerging artists. In addition to running Civilian, she is adjunct faculty at the Maryland Institute College of Art where she leads classes on professional development for graduate students. She has also taught professional development, curatorial practice and art history at the Corcoran College of Art + Design, American University, and St. Mary’s College of Maryland. She is also project manager and co-curator for HARD ART DC 1979 (Akashic Books), a book and traveling exhibition about the birth of the D.C. punk movement. The HARD ART exhibition will be on view at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University from May until October 2014.

May 12, 2014, at 7 pm
SCCA Project room, Metelkova 6, Ljubljana.

Video of the lecture

The group exhibition-form has become the primary site for curatorial experimentation and, as such, represents a relatively new discursive space around artistic practice. Paul O'Neill will look back at some of his exhibitions, and describe how cumulative and expanding exhibition-forms can constitute an investigation into how the curatorial role is made manifest through cohesive and co-operative exhibition-making structures applied during all stages of the exhibition production. This talk will demonstrate how exhibitions create spatial relations between different planes of interaction for the viewer, and how multiple agencies and actors are necessary for an understanding of the curatorial as a constellation of activities that can be represented by the final exhibition-form.

Workshop
May 13–15, 2014
SCCA Project room, Metelkova 6, Ljubljana

This workshop will look at recent turns in contemporary curatorial practice. In doing so it will explore certain concepts of the discursive, the durational and the educational turns in contemporary curating.
 

The workshop will explore how different group exhibition-forms have investigated how the curatorial is made manifest, through cohesive and co-operative exhibition-making structures applied through close involvement of all those involved, where multiple actors and agencies are at work during different stages of exhibition production. It will begin by exploring how exhibitions create certain social and spatial relations for the viewer, and how the an understanding of the exhibition-as-medium, and the exhibition-as-form, and their different durational dimensions are being contested. 
 

This workshop will continue to address the on-going 'discursive turn' in contemporary curating to the more recent 'educational turn' in a way that seeks a critical reconstruction of 'the exhibition' and 'the school' in curating and discursive practices. Key terms to be explored will be the curatorial, collaboration, duration, participation, ritual, citizenship, sociality, relationality, publicness, attentiveness, and the discursive. 

Taking the two questions: ‘What is an Exhibition?’ and ‘What is a School?’ as the starting point, this workshop will aim to produce a collaborative Dictionary of Terms/Curatorial Dictionary produced by the participants that look at key concerns and interpretations of issues, concerns, questions and understanding stemming from their own practice and seeking common points of reference to draw upon and to use as a means of articulating their current aims and objectives within their practice.

Monday, 22 September 2014, at 6 pm
Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova, Ljubljana

Video of the lecture

Since at least the landmark exhibition After The Wall (Stockholm, 1999 ), each new year seems to produce a framed survey of what goes under the pseudonym “East European art” – notably, IRWIN’s best-selling East Art Map (2000-06), but also the exhibitions Les Promesses du Passe (Paris, 2010), Ostalgia (New York, 2011), The Desire for Freedom (Berlin, 2012), Report on the Construction of a Space Module (New York, 2014), to name just some. Each initiative has to stake out its position in relation to the concerns of a complex network of participants and institutional stakeholders. The same is true of projects in which unofficial late-socialist art has been put into discursive play with its experimental equivalents from around the world: Global Conceptualism (New York, 1999), Subversive Practices (Stuttgart, 2009), and more recently, the Museum of Parallel Narratives (Barcelona, 2011). Networking and collaboration are central to such projects. Moreover, such exhibitions and projects also present necessity as a virtue. They are increasingly designed to address our networked age, with its particular audience of participant-producer-consumer. I would like to argue that if the 1970s feature so prominently in the projects listed above, then this is because that was when a certain form of spectatorship was ostensibly born, and, above all, perhaps the moment when networking and collaboration were reborn, often on the quiet, after the disappointments of 1968. I examine the uses and abuses of narratives of the micro-historical isolation and marginalization of “East European art” while considering locating the historical germs of our present condition in the late-socialist period, comparing the cultural situation today with its late-socialist counterpart.

Klara Kemp-Welch is a lecturer in 20th century Modernism at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London, where she teaches East European and Latin American art history. She has an MA in Russian and East European Literature and Culture from the School of Slavonic and East European Studies in London (2002) and a PhD in the History of Art from University College London (2008). As a post-doctoral researcher, she has been awarded fellowships from the Phillip Leverhulme Trust and the Arts and Humanities Research Council, and the Igor Zabel Award for Culture and Theory working grant. She has published catalogue essays and book chapters on experimental artists such as Ion Grigorescu and KwieKulik, and her monograph Antipolitics in Central European Art. Reticence as Dissidence Under Post-Totalitarian Rule was published in 2014. Since 2009, she has been researching and working on a book project entitled Networking the Bloc: Rethinking International Relations in European Art.

Monday, 22 September 2014, at 6 pm
Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova, Ljubljana

Video of the lecture

At the beginning of the 1970s, Jarosław Kozłowski and Andrzej Kostołowski invented NET – a global network of artists who wanted to exchange their thoughts. This was the first conception of such an idea in the Eastern Bloc, and one of the first in the entire world. Ultimately, over the course of more than a dozen years, a few hundred people from both Eastern and Western Europe, the US, Latin America and Asia participated in this initiative. This lecture does not, however, aim to describe the project itself, but rather takes it as a point of departure for an analysis of the different contexts in which artworks circulate in an effort to arrive at a theoretical approach to comparative art history. I understand this concept not necessarily as in the way in which the circulation of ideas caused them to be influenced by each other, but rather how different geo-historical circumstances lay behind their (contextual) meaning, how they illuminated each other – something that was not always perceived by the public that visited NET exhibitions. We may thus be able to distinguish aspects of global culture as they were being developed at the time, aspects that are otherwise usually seen as homogeneous and West-centric, existing in a one-way relationship between the metropolis and its periphery.

Piotr Piotrowski is a professor ordinarius at the art history department at Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznan, Poland, which he chaired from 1999 to 2008, and a permanent research fellow of the Graduate School for East and South-East European Studies, Ludwig-Maximillians University, Munich and Regensburg University. He is also a former director of the National Museum in Warsaw (2009–10) and a visiting professor at Humboldt University (2011–12), Warsaw University (2011, 2012–13), the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, USA (2001) and Hebrew University in Jerusalem (2003). He was a fellow at – among others – the Center for Advanced Studies in the Visual Arts, Washington D.C. (1989–90), Columbia University (1994), the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, NJ (2000), Collegium Budapest (2005–06) and the Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, MA (2009). He is the author of a dozen books, including: Meanings of Modernism (1999, 2011), In the Shadow of Yalta. Art and the Avant-garde in Eastern Europe (2005, English 2009, Croatian 2011), Art After Politics (2007), Art and Democracy in Post-Communist Europe (2010, English 2012) and Critical Museum (2011, Serbian 2013), as well as editor, co-editor and co-author of many others. For his scholarly achievements, Piotrowski has received, among others, the Jan Dlugosz Award (2006) and the Igor Zabel Award for Culture and Theory (2010).