6th International symposium CURATING EXCHANGE
The 6th International Symposium Curating Exchange | Spaces, Functions, Fictions and Other Commons | organized by press to exit project space | 10 – 21 May 2017, Museum of Contemporary Art – Skopje, GEM Club and Social center Dunja, Skopje
1st segment of the program: Function and Design of Social Spaces
Curating Exchange is an annual symposium addressing local and regional need for an insightful and qualitative exchange of experience and knowledge in theoretical and artistic research, curatorial practice and education. The sixth edition of the symposium “Spaces, Functions, Fictions and Other Commons” will be divided into two major segments.
The first segment of the program: Function and Design of Social Spaces (May 2017) welcomes Ludwig Kittinger, Ana de Almeida and Phelim McConigly artists and founders of <dienstag abend> art collective from Vienna, Austria; Mauro Gil-Fournier, architect and co-founder of SIC | VIC Studio, from Madrid, Spain; Sebastian Cichocki chief curator of the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, Poland; as well as Klelija Zivkovic, a social designer and Dorotej Neshovski, an interdisciplinary artist, both from Skopje, Macedonia.
The invited guests will contribute in a variety of discursive presentations and projects that question changing ideas about the social and cultural dimension of the ever-evolving interdisciplinary notions between art, architecture, and theory; the role and the position of the curator as a critical instigator and educator in the processes of content-negotiation; the different perceptions about the socio-political role of public space and the idea of commons; and creativity in relation to urban space where power relations are subjected to scrutiny.
The interdisciplinary approach of the project refers to the theory of Michel de Certeau emphasizing the difference between institutional-related strategies of cultural production and their power structures as elements of reality as official regulations in society. In this context, the independent sector and their intensified production of counter content addressing laws and regulations, offers an opportunity to code and map newly established boundaries and limitations within the physical and abstract notions of what we understand as public space.
The project and the invited guests represent a variety of different methodologies all of them using a variety of performative strategies and approaches to content making and production. They speak of architecture as a critical social and political value just as the need for architectural discourse that generates appropriate stories. Hence, the main questions of the projects are: How do we experience the space as a concept that is continually evolving and changing as a social and political battleground? What scientific research, in conceptual, curatorial and archivist terms, can we take in the process of establishing the identity of the modern city? and What are the ways we engage the audiences in addressing the evolving issues in public space such as functionality, productivity, and inclusivity? With these questions as main orientation, the 6th International Symposium “Curating Exchange: Spaces, functions, fictions and other commons” has an intent to merge different surveys, views, and positions on critical thinking in relation to contemporary culture and society.
The symposium is curated, organized and managed by the team of press to exit project space, art historian and curator Jovanka Popova, and artists Hristina Ivanoska and Yane Calovski.
PROGRAM
10th of May (Wednesday)
20:00 – 22:00 at Social Center “Dunja”
Meeting with Ludwig Kittinger, Ana de Almeida and Phelim McConigly (<dienstag abend> collective) and presentation by Klelija Zivkovic and Dorotej Neshovski.
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11th of May (Thursday)
12:00 – 16:00 at Social Center “Dunja”
1st Day Working session with Ludwig Kittinger, Ana de Almeida and Phelim McConigly (<dienstag abend> collective): dienstag abend No. 86
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12 of May (Friday)
12:00 – 16:00 at Social Center “Dunja”
2nd Day Working session with Ludwig Kittinger, Ana de Almeida and Phelim McConigly (<dienstag abend> collective): dienstag abend No.86
19:00 – 21:00 at GEM Club, Skopje
Public lecture with Mauro Gil-Fournier: Bubbles, Foam and Seas
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13th of May (Saturday)
12:00 – 16:00 at Social Center “Dunja”
3rd Day Working session with Ludwig Kittinger, Ana de Almeida and Phelim McConigly (<dienstag abend> collective): dienstag abend No.86
20:00 – 22:00 at Social Center “Dunja”
Public lecture by Ludwig Kittinger, Ana de Almeida and Phelim McConigly (<dienstag abend> collective): “Situational tendencies in (co)operative practices- on modes of de-regulation, agencies and their futures”
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20th of May (Saturday)
19:00 – 22:00 at MoCA Skopje
Public lecture by Sebastian Cihocki: “This is Art and Art is Many Things”
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PROGRAM CONTENT:
Meeting with Ludwig Kittinger, Ana de Almeida and Phelim McConigly (<dienstag abend> collective)
and
Prezentations by Klelija Zivkovic: “Small Victories” and Dorotej Neshovski: “Fictions and the spaces I inhabit”
Date: 10.05.2017 (Wednesday)
Place: Social center Dunja, Skopje
Time: 20:00 – 22:00 h
Ludwig Kittinger, Ana de Almeida and Phelim McConigly will introduce us with the idea of their site-specific workshop titled “dienstag abend No. 86 “and the way in which interested parties will be involved in it.
“Small Victories” by Klelija Zivkovic is a project about archiving the changes in the city of Skopje through using personal experience as an artifact. The project aims to explore the relationship of the citizens to their city and utilize their perspective as a unique document that tells a story of a history that is being replaced and re-fabricated.
Dorotej Neshovski’s presentation: “Fictions and the spaces I inhabit” gives an insight into the research interests of the artist regarding the relationship “individual-gallery-institution” and the array of potential readings into the ephemeral versus permanent, public versus institutional, virtual versus physical gallery space while creating a so-called “invisible works.”
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Working sessions with Ludwig Kittinger, Ana de Almeida and Phelim McConigly (<dienstag abend> collective): dienstag abend No.86
Date: 11.05 (Thursday), 12.05 (Friday) and 13.05 (Suturday)
Place: Social center Dunja, Skopje
Time: 12:00 -16:00 h
As described: “dienstag abend No. 86” is a workshop about situations, interventions and interferences. We want to share the myriad of processes that have come to define how <dienstag abend> takes place through different events, exhibitions and editions. For it we invite our guests to find a situation, to intervene on it and to receive back new interventions and interferences that might take place upon their own work. In our collective practice, a situation may be a way of making our surroundings intelligible to ourselves after an individual reading of the moment. Embracing misunderstandings and errors, these readings fuel ontology of feedback loops and their contingent outcomes, enabling a situational understanding of space instead of an exclusively representative one.
As a site-specific workshop conducted in the city of Skopje, we consider all spaces as a field of interest: public, commercial, emotional, institutional space, etc. The works and artistic interventions are immaterial, as well as the posterior and unpredictable interferences that will happen upon them. Documenting and sharing are rooted in the amazing processes of oral tradition and will form the material substrate left after our workshop.
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Public lecture with Mauro Gil-Fournier: “Bubbles, Foam and Seas”
Moderated by Yane Calovski
Date: 12.05.2017 (Friday)
Place: GEM Club, Skopje
Time: 19:00 – 21:00 h
As described by Mauro Gil-Fournier, an architect and co-founder of architectural studio SIC | VIC from Madrid: As a collective, we want to place a nonlinear history of dynamics that are currently occurring in many of our cities under 3 different states. Citizen bubbles, such as the appearance and disappearance of citizen organizations and the creation of networks between them. The foams or states of complexity that arise when the bubble ecosystem has been created. The seas, as a transition-articulation between established models. These dynamics are not progressive or evolutionary in a linear fashion; Occur simultaneously in the city. They form a system with strong interactions and feedbacks between the components of the system. The non-linear history that we want to have here, with its attractors and its bifurcations, create dynamics that in the present case have a key factor: their situated character. We will explain through our work and development with the city, what makes Madrid today a prototype of citizen innovation and urban transformation.
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Public lecture by Ludwig Kittinger, Ana de Almeida and Phelim McConigly (dienstag abend collective): “Situational tendencies in (co)operative practices – on modes of de-regulation, agencies and their futures”
Moderated by Yane Calovski
Date: 13.05.2017 (Saturday)
Place: Social Center “Dunja”, Skopje
Time: 20:00 – 22:00 h
After a short introduction of <dienstag abend>, the lecture is reflecting on a work realized at the European Capital of Culture Wroclaw 2016 focusing on the social impacts of political decision making on works in public space and thereby on the role of affective information.
We will introduce a partner initiative, The Atanas Petrov Foundation and its ongoing project at the Medical Museum Pleven, Bulgaria, focusing on modes of existence of that space.
The lecture will be closed by reviewing forms of the situational and its associations to site-specificity.
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Public lecture by Sebastian Cihocki: “This is Art and Art is Many Things”*
Date: 20.05.2017 (Saturday)
Place: Museum of Contemporary Art, Skopje
Time: 19:00 – 22:00 h
In the 1970s by Jerzy Ludwiński, a Polish art theoretician and critic, announced the arrival of postartistic times. He observed the transformation of art to be the result of its assumption of a completely new form; one which the critical language of his time was not able to do justice. Ludwiński claimed that post-art had an undeniably greater potential than the activities traditionally recognised as artistic. He wrote: “All previous notions relating to art are cancelled out, even that of authorship. What matters are the tensions created by the collective effort of many individuals that contributes to the making of one system, pulsating with its own life like some gigantic work of nature. Art = reality.”
Such postartistic times signal an era in which a high “coefficient of art” (as the theorist Stephen Wright has described the phenomenon, referring to Marcel Duchamp’s lecture “The Creative Act”, 1957) present in many areas of life; when an artist’s work does not always materialize in the form of an art piece; while the art itself is carried out in a 1:1 scale, instead of generating models for situations and things.
How does one measure the coefficient of art in a device which collects fog and supplies water to inhabitants of a desert in Chile? How much art is there in the collaboration of a Turkish beekeeper with a beehive during the production of psychoactive honey? But another question is really perplexing: is there more art within or outside the walls of the museum?
*The title of the lecture paraphrases the title of the exhibition “This is the Show, and the Show is Many Things” at S.M.A.K. in Ghent (1994), described as “a fun palace, a rumpus room, a discount warehouse, a museum without walls, a wasteland and a Wunder-Kabinett of the marvellous and the inconsequential”.
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BIOGRAPHIES
Mauro Gil-Fournier is an architect and co-founder of SIC | VIC Studio. His work is focused on the progress of architecture, city and territory from urban and citizen innovation. Both structures work in a radical inclusion of the multilateral and collaborative process in the architectural and urban fields. Estudio SIC has created VIC Vivero de Inciativas Ciudadanas as a platform for urban studies that investigates the ways in which relational, material and technological are linked into citizen innovation practices. Its work has been exhibited in many national and international forums such as the recent Oslo Architecture Triennale (2016), Householding Fair Bauhaus-Dessau (2015), Lisbon Architecture Triennale (2013), or Rome Public Space Biennial (2013) Also awarded in The Mies van der Rohe European Award (2007), Detail Prize 2009, Bauwelt (2009), AR Awards and FAD (2008) and others. It´s works is periodically published and it´s invited in conferences in the main forums, meetings and publications of architecture and urban studies. SIC | VIC is nowadays developing the iberoamerican mapping of citizen innovation civics.es and the resilience urban program called maresmadrid.es
Ludwig Kittinger, born in Graz, is an artist based in Vienna. In 2010 he co- founded <dienstag abend>. He is a board member of Ve.Sch art association and currently Univ.- Ass. at the department of Sculpture and Space at the University of Applied Arts Vienna.
Ana de Almeida is an artist from Lisbon, currently living and working in Vienna. She is currently a PhD candidate at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, pursuing a thesis about the production of images and its ideological implications in the 1974-1989 inter-revolutionary space between the Carnation and the Velvet Revolutions. Ana de Almeida started working with <dienstag abend> in 2012 and joined the collective in 2015.
Phelim McConigly is born in Ireland, 1978, and lives and works in Vienna since 2006. He is PHD candidate at Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. He is founder of the Atanas Petrov Foundation, and an artist with a curatorial practice in site specificity, including Appendix (2015) and Parallax (2016), involving multiple actors and agents at the medical museum, University Hospital “Georgi Stranski” in Pleven, Bulgaria – projects instigating artistic difference and research methods which involve the creation of institution as parasite, site for recuperation, in relation to the social role of art and agency in new institutions. He is a member of <dienstag abend> since 2015, a collective with curatorial tendencies which considers situations composed by its actors, the local environment and/or the collective mechanisms that are triggered in each of our project editions. Phelim has been a student of Daniel Richter / Extended Pictorial Space since 2010. With many year of experience in software tools development and an interest in data, through methods such as game theory, evolutionary algorithms, simulated annealing, and their use in arts-based practice, Phelim uses this knowledge to broaden a material basis from canvas to public sculpture with digital possibilities
<dienstag abend> is a collective and same-named programme based in Vienna, founded in 2009 at Kunstraum Ve.Sch by Ludwig Kittinger and Fernando Mesquita which became an itinerant collective joined by Ana de Almeida, Sophie Thun, Dorota Walentynowicz and Feidhlim McConigly. We consider <dienstag abend> to be a situation composed by its acteurs, the local environment and/or the collective mechanisms that are triggered in each of our project editions. <dienstag abend> deals with questions of curating and (new) forms of display, our collaborative projects are reflections about the very process of intervening in a space. What are the inherent effects upon a specific place in the urban landscape while faced with an artistic intervention and which are the implicit power relations within an intervention that happen outside the place’s own dynamics? These and other questions are materialized in project specific curatorial processes and artistic practices. Our nomadic projects feed themselves from the specificities of a myriad of spaces and display the roulette of dynamics inherent to working at/with what is public, private, associative, commercial, non-commercial, institutional, hype, forgotten, structured, wild (…). <dienstag abend> situates events that are driven by the idea of heterarchy, it is always collaborative, interdisciplinary and site-specific.
Klelija Zivkovic is social designer that was born and raised in Skopje, Macedonia. She holds a Master’s degree in Social design from the University of Applied Arts Vienna. Her work focuses mainly on Skopje and exploring various aspects of living and using the city.
Dorotej Neshovski is a multidisciplinary artist whose interests range from participatory actions, methodologies of mappings and resonances, extra-institutional actions, research practices and children’s education. Since 2012 he is one of the founding members of Art Group SEE with whom he has realized a number of projects. Neshovski is a graduate of the Department of sculpture at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Skopje (2012). His forthcoming artist book “Art is not want you want” will be published by Priaveteprint from Skopje in 2017. Lives and works in Skopje.
Sebastian Cichocki is a curator, writer, and art critic. He is chief curator of the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw and curator of the Sculpture Park in the Warsaw district of Bródno. In the years 2005 to 2008 he was program director of the Contemporary Art Centre in Bytom. Cichocki’s main focus is the postartistic and 1:1 scale practices, conceptual reflection in art, land art, thing theory and the book as a form of exhibition. He has curated a number of solo and group exhibitions including Monika Sosnowska’s presentation in the Polish Pavilion at the 52nd, and Yael Bartana at the 54th Venice Biennale. He has produced a number of experimental exhibitions in the form of books, librettos, as well as residency programs and staged lectures. Cichocki lives and works in Warsaw.
Organized by:
press to exit project space (Skopje)
Jovanka Popova, art historian and curator
Yane Calovski, artist and co-founder
Hristina Ivanoska, artist and co-founder
press to exit project space was established in 2004 by artists Yane Calovski and Hristina Ivanoska as a special program-based artist initiative for research and production in the field of visual arts and curatorial practices. The three main programs of activities are: Visiting Curatorial Initiative, New Project Productions, and Lectures, Publications and Exhibitions which are exploring ways of generating ideas, projects and collaborations with artists and curators form Macedonia, Europe and beyond. From November 2010, press to exit project space continues functioning as a non-governmental organization with the same focus of interest.
In partnership with:
Social Center “Dunja”, Skopje
GEM Club, Skopje
Museum of Contemporary Art – Skopje
Supported by:
Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Macedonia
Österreichischen Botschaft Skopje
Embassy of the Kingdom of Spain in Skopje
Embassy of Poland, Skopje
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