EVENTS — CONFERENCE#2
Exhibition as a means of analysis of contemporaneity. Ethics and politics of exhibitions
June 05-19 2020
Contemporary art nowadays is implemented through the exhibiting process. So, the exhibition is no longer considered as a number of works arranged within the space. Rather, the exhibition creates optics that shows the connection between objects and situations where the sphere of works of art tends to widen. Therefore, exhibition analysis requires an understanding of the ways the optics is created. Optics in this context can be understood closely to the Michel Foucault`s term "dispositif". The connections showed by dispositif are not limited by the exhibiting space but reveals the author`s (curator`s) positions as well as political and socio-cultural changes.
Thus, how can we make exhibitions nowadays and how can we analyze it? Firstly, we strive to examine different methods of exhibition analysis as well as to see ourselves as researchers from the outside. Secondly, it is essential to address a variety of curatorial practices and see how the optics of every exhibition is created
Program:
June 23, 2020
Round table “Position of a researcher of contemporary exhibitions: between theory and practice”
Nowadays, the position of the researcher is as dynamic as a medium of exhibition and constitutes itself in-between a subject and an event. So, how are these positions of curator and researcher transformed today? What is their role within the exhibition? The participants will discuss the personal experience of working on exhibitions as well as issues discussed in the previous presentations
June 15, 2020
Sonja Lau is an independent curator and cultural producer based in Berlin. Curating Contingency. The making of exhibitions that lend themselves to be affected
Exhibitions can generate knowledge through artworks and artistic positions, as well as through their specific congregations, set-ups, gestures, or even "rules". Even more so, if the latter are given deliberately out of hand, as a result of an alternate understanding of exhibition making, a self-imposed method, or an acknowledgment of the confines of curating.
With my lecture “Curating Contingency”, I would like to shed light on such a curatorial frame of mind, in which contingency does not disrupt the integrity of an exhibition proposal, but is on the contrary implemented within its realms, as a crucial component and significant amplification. Guided by two specific examples (“Repaintings”, 2008, curated by Sonja Lau/André Siegers, and “Tirana Patience”, 2019/20, curated by Nataša Ilić/Adam Szymczyk) “Curating Contingency” argues for a political and ethical position within the curatorial field that allows itself to be affected by unattended and contingent interferences. What can an exhibition say about itself, once the curators have run out of words? How can we make exhibitions speak, as curators, beyond the initial proposal? How to value and evaluate what happens off the curatorial vision, how to think of what happens before, during, and after an exhibition as one? To curate contingency, as I will attempt to show, is always in tangible opposition towards the immunity and sacrosanctity of our political and artistic lives. And it takes more than "mere chance" as curators, to help this process unfold
June 11, 2020
Natalia Prikhodko. Human’s relation to the world and the problem of the displaying dispositive. Case study of Sun & Sea (Marina)
The exhibition practice implies the creation of a displaying dispositive which is understood as a material configuration of the space where the artwork is presented to the public as well as a system of relations which is directly connected the latter. Since the act of displaying is related to such operations like selection, framing, extracting, and moving from the original environment to the artificial one, it is necessary to ask: how do these operations influence the formation of the spectator and his attitude to displayed object as well as to the surrounding world?
A critical interpretation of this question appears in the artwork "Sun & Sea" (Marina) shown at the Lithuanian pavilion at the Venice biennale 2019. I suggest to analyze the displaying dispositive of this artwork as a crystallization and at the same time as an overcoming of certain principles of the exhibition practice which characterize and, in many respects, determine the Western culture since the Renaissance
June 05, 2020
Nicolas Audureau (former director Saint-Fons Art Center, France). Spaces for debate
Nicolas talks about a few specific projects carried out in Saint-Fons over the last four years when I was director of LE CAP Art Centre in Saint-Fons (France). Saint-Fons is a city with a rich industrial history and geographical, social, and economic complexity, mainly due to deindustrialization, ecological risks, and migratory processes. A priori, it is not a "place of art". It is even a complex and harsh place for artists. But it is also a very stimulating place.
With a contextual methodology and assimilation of the stakes of the territory, it becomes a place where art can take place. Nicolas talks about his curatorial approach for four years in the context of Saint-Fons and evokes the projects of Christian Nyampeta Radius Station and MetaNation Embassy
Participants:
Nicolas Audureau is a curator who ran LE CAP Art Centre in Saint-Fons (France) from 2016 to 2020. He works with the notion of porosity of exhibition formats and invites exogenous artists to question social spaces. He has published catalogues and books, including ‘Colocation’ (La box, Bourges, 2009), ‘Res publica’ (cnap, Paris, 2010). Member of C-E-A associate curators (Paris, France).
Natalia Prikhodko is a researcher and art critic based in Paris. She is currently preparing a Ph.D. thesis entitled “Art as a Form of Life: Artistic Practices of the Moscow Conceptualism in the 1970-80s” at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (EHESS, Paris).
Her research interests concern particularly the social dimension of the artistic creation as well as the place it occupies in the forms of life of different cultures and historic periods
Sonja Lau is an independent curator and cultural producer based in Berlin. Her work and curatorial experiences include art institutes such as the KW Institute for Contemporary Art, or the German Hygiene-Museum (DHMD) in Dresden. From 2013 to 2014, she held a research position at the Jan Van Eyck Academy in Maastricht and is the 2015 curator-in-residence at Schloss Ringenberg, NRW, for which she collaborates with Kunsthalle Düsseldorf.
In the course of the last years, her work has increasingly tackled questions of the site- and context-specificity
Moderator:
Art historian, curator at MMOMA, researcher. In 2018 — 2019 she led the program "Forms of Artistic Life" at MMOMA. Laureate of the special prize from U-Art Foundation (Innovation Art Prize) for the exhibition "East. Deconstruction" (special project of the VI Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art)