This year’s Curatorial School features a series of discussions and workshops by distinguished artists, curators and writers that propose different perspectives on collaborative practices regarding history, politics and poetics of collaborations and collectivity while also testing methods of immediate connection through the mechanism of collaborative writing.
Тhese sessions with the invited guests and tutors complement the ongoing reading and discussion sessions on theory and practice around collaborations. More about our school’s methodology you can find here.
The contributions below are mainly open to school participants. Nevertheless, in case you are interested in some of the contributions please get in touch with us and we’ll try to support your participation upon availability.
Curatorial School’s public program you can find here.
On the final days the school participants will be also sharing visions and projects on collaborations. More information here, you are welcome to join.
ANTI-INSTITUTIONAL AND
COLLECTIVE SOLIDARITY AFTER 1989
with Luchezar Boyadjiev
Saturday, 16 November, 16-19 h, workshop
Starting from texts by Zdenka Badinovac and Viktor Misiano, we will extensively discuss terms as “institutionalization of friendship”, “confidential community” and “post-confidential community” that are key to the understanding of concepts of anti-institutional and collective solidarity as well as to the raise of anti-establishment groups and collectives perceived as replacements of official structures in Europe after 1989, such as Chto Delat?, IRWIN, WHW as well as the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in Sofia.
Luchezar Boyadjiev lives and works in Sofia. His work is about personal interpretation of social processes, about the interaction between private and public, about urban visuality and the world of today split between utopia and dystopia. His media is installation, photography, drawing, objects, text, video, and performative lectures. Luchezar is Founding Member of ICA-Sofia. Selected exhibitions: “Dystopian Cozy”, Sariev Contemporary, Plovdiv (2018); “Luchezar Boyadjiev. Sic transit media mundi /the present is too short and rather tight/”, Sofia City Art Gallery, Sofia (retro) (2018); “Places of Wisdom”, ICA-Gallery, Sofia (in partnership with Open Arts-Plovdiv, 2016); “Not a Library Artist either”, SALT, Istanbul (2013); “Artist in the Storage” from “The Other Eye” series, City Art Gallery, Sofia (2010); and the group shows in 2016-17 “Economize”, Ludwig Museum, Budapest, as well as “Symptoms of Society”, Guangdong Museum of Art (Guangzhou) and Zhejiang Art Museum (Zhejiang Sheng), China; in 2016 “Cold Wind from the Balkans”, PERA Museum, Istanbul; “Upside Down: Hosting the Critique”, MCA, Belgrade, and “Low-budget Utopias”, Moderna Galerija, Ljubljana; in 2015 “Inside Out”, City Gallery, Ljubljana; “The Grammar of Freedom”, GARAGE Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow, and “Art for Change 1985-2015”, City Art Gallery, Sofia; in 2014 “Disconsent”, CCA “Ancient Bath”, Plovdiv; in 2013 “Economics in Art”, MOCAK, Cracow; in 2012 “The Best of Times, the Worst of Times”, 1st Biennial, Kiev, and “The Eye Never Sees itself”, 2nd Biennial, Yekaterinburg; and in 2011 “The Global Contemporary”, ZKM, Karlsruhe.
CIRCUS, MIRROR, LANDSCAPE.
THE POLITICS OF ARTISTIC COLLABORATIONS
with Dessislava Dimova
Monday, 18 November, 13-16 h, workshop
The workshop will focus on discussing different models of collaborations and their varying implications for the status of the “work of art”. We will examine texts that could serve as effective basis for theorizing collective (art)work today and will address the dangers and the responses to the politisation of artistic collaboration in the European context, with the case study of Circus of Truth project at Bozar, Brussels, 2019.
Dessislava Dimova is an art historian and curator based in Brussels and Sofia. She holds an MA in Art History from the National Academy of Fine Arts, Sofia and in Philosophy from the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy, Middlesex, London. She is completing her PhD on the influence of the discourses on the “global” and “local” on the Eastern European art scenes post 1989, in the Academy of Sciences, Sofia. She is currently conducting research on Bulgarian modern and contemporary art for the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, and is participating in the Confrontations: Sessions in East European Art History Research Project, UCL, London (2019-2020). Between 2017 and 2019 she curated the collaborative project Circus of Truth at Bozar, Brussels. Her other projects include the conversation series Politics without Poetics, NICC, Brussels (2014-2015); Objects moving minds in space, Focus Bulgaria, viennacontemporary (2015) and the walking lectures The Wrong Side of History, Zapaden Park Festival, Sofia (2014). Dessislava Dimova was co-curator of The Tree of Life. A Genealogy of Contemporary Bulgarian Art, One Night Stand Gallery, Sofia (2018), The Dark Side of the Night, 10th anniversary program of the Museum Nights in Plovdiv, Bulgaria (2014) and Thank You for Your Understanding – 2. International Antakya Biennial, Turkey (2010).
HOW WE GET FREE
with Barby Asante
Thursday, 21 November, 13-16 h, discussion
How We Get Free is a title taken from Keeanga-Yamatha Taylor’s book that reflects on the impact of the work of The Combahee River Collective, a group of black feminists, who put out a much quoted statement which is often said to be the foundational document of intersectional feminism. Drawing on this statement and her interest in Decolonial methodologies Barby will explore understandings of liberation and decoloniality in artistic and curatorial practice. She will touch on knowledge production, institutional interventions, memory work, ideas of revolution and emergent strategy and how these idea are explored by artists and institutions.
Barby Asante is a London based artist, curator and educator who’s work explores place and identity through creating situations and spaces for dialogue, collective thinking, ritual and reenactment. Using archival material in the broadest sense, she is interested in breaking down the language of archive, not to insert or present alternatives to dominant narratives but to interrupt, interrogate and explore the effects and possibilities of the unheard and the missing. Asante’s recent projects include; The South London Black Archive (Peckham Platform/ Tate Modern) a collecting project mapping black music and memories in South London, through an invitation to audiences and local people to create that archive together. Baldwin’s Nigger RELOADED (Iniva, Nottingham Contemporary, Framer Framed/ Art Rotterdam) with the London based collective sorryyoufeeluncomfortable, using Horace Ove’s 1968 film Baldwin’s Nigger as a start for a contemporary reading of Baldwin’s provocation, through a reflective re-enactment ritual of transcribing, rewriting and re-staging the original event.
A NARRATION IN COMMON
with Barbora Kleinhamplová
Monday, 22 November, 11-14h, workshop
Cuddle Party first occurred in New York on February 29, 2004 and soon became a phenomenon not only in New York, but also around many large Western cities. Some of the cuddle party therapists are describing the character of this method as a direct response to extreme individualism in contemporary neoliberal society and the lack of contact within it. The workshop will invite the school participants to a subjective experience of an improvisational Cuddle Party. The main focus will be on observation and tracking of their own thoughts and feelings, and a subsequent discussion and analysis of the limits of therapeutic discourse in relation to the so called „anxious society“. We will critically assess whether therapeutic discourse can be a legitimate form of dealing with current (political and social) crises. By participating in this workshop, the attendants agree to follow the Cuddle Party setup. Cuddle party is a strictly non-sexual event.
Barbora Kleinhamplová is an artist living and working in Prague. Kleinhamplová’s work is rooted in the relationship of human existence and the contemporary politics and economy of institutions. She comments on different layers of society, using associations and metaphors. For recent past, it has been her overarching aim to pose questions as: What is a society? How it works, what are its constitutive elements? What are its illnesses, its emotions, its future or a situation of an individual in the middle of it? Recently she has been taking advantage of a strategy what we might call constructed or staged situation where the script is often derived from an existing format of group interaction (therapy, coaching session etc.). Performative dimension of some of her projects try to accent the symbolic role of the body politics in the economic and power system. Kleinhamplová’s work has been exhibited widely in the Czech Republic as well as internationally – including SAVVY Contemporary, KIBLA Portal, Paul Ramsay Galleries, Triennial of Contemporary Art U3, Gwangju Biennale, New Museum, Astrup Farnley Museet, Jakarta Biennale.
A NARRATION IN COMMON
with Lorenzo Sandoval
Monday, 25 November, 13-16h, workshop
The workshop will introduce some of the projects of Lorenzo Sandoval related to the production of space as an editable site of narration, and the possibilities it brings for negotiating stories though objects, words and writing beyond writing. The workshop will introduce the projects “Office Party”, “A Soft Tragedy”, “The Institute for Endotic Research” and “Shadow Writing (Fábrica Colectiva)” in order to approach few different strategies of storytelling in common. As a practical output, an exercise based on the use of constraints will be proposed, inspired by the French group Oulipo.
Lorenzo Sandoval (born in Madrid, lives in Berlin) works as an artist and curator. He holds a B.F.A and has Masters in Photography, Art and Technology from the Universitat Politècnica de València. He received several curatorial prizes. Since 2015, he runs The Institute for Endotic Research that he opened as a venue in Berlin in 2018. He presented the exhibition Shadow Writing (Lace/Variations) at Lehman + Silva Gallery in Porto and Nottingham Contemporary and participated in Canine Wisdom for the Barking Dog at Dak’art Biennale 2018. He is part of Miracle Workers Collective representing Finland in the Venice Biennale 2019 and is part of Part of the Labyrinth, Göteborg Biennal 2019. He is preparing a project on collectivizations and the textile industry for IVAM Alcoi part of The Achievement Society.
