Open seminar
Unexpected Encounters: Points of Intersection
Methodologies of research and interpretation of the practices of “historical
conceptualism”
SATURDAY, 27 November 2010
12.00 – 15.00 & 16.30 – 18.45
Galerija Miroslav Kraljevic, Subiceva 29, Zagreb
Concept and organization: BLOK (Local basis for the refreshment of culture) &
DeLVe – Institute for Duration, Location and Variables, within the micropolitics
programme
Programme:
12.00 – 12.30 Branka Stipancic & Vlado Martek, guided lecture at the Poetry in
Action exhibition
The curator Branka Stipancic selected from the vast oeuvre of Vlado Martek those
works that more directly refer to the figure of poet and poetry, the writer and the
book. The exhibition features poem-objects, artist’s books, poetic agitations, poetryactions and slogans along with drawings, geographical maps, through which Vlado
Martek’s poetry unfolds.
12.45 – 13.30 Edit András: Genius at the Price of Her Death
Through a close reading of the sculpture Beauty of Hungary 1985 made by Hungarian
artist Gyula Pauer, its making process and its reception, Edit András deconstructs the
modernist myth of male genius, the precondition of which is the death of a woman.
András analyses this myth by relating the story of the Hungarian 1985 beauty queen
who committed suicide with the topos found all over in Eastern Europe, in which a
devoted wife of a medieval mason had to be sacrificed and buried alive into the wall,
in order for her husband to build a castle. The analysis refers back to fairytales and
those archetypical works at the turn of century that could be classified into different
groups, from deathbed scenes, (dead) bodies on display, the dead beloved as a muse,
Ophilism and „necromancy” via lust murder scenes in German expressionism until
the very recent Hollywood movie „Perfume”.
Edit András is an art historian and art critic, holding a PhD from Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest.
Since 1987 she has been working at the Research Institute for Art History of the Hungarian Academy
of Sciences, Budapest, recently as a senior research fellow. Her main interest concerns modern and
contemporary Russian, Eastern and Central European art, gender issues, public art, conceptual art and
art theory in the time of transition in the post-socialist countries. She has published numerous essays in
different languages on issues of contemporary art and theory as well as she has participated in different
international conferences. She continouosly teach at different Hungarian Universities. She gave courses
at Tallin Art Academy and Brastislava Art Academy. Her recent book entitled Cultural Cross
Dressing. Art in the Ruins of Socialism, Argumentum, Budapest, 2009 (in Hungarian). She is editor of
the anthology Transitland. Video art from the Central and Eastern Europe 1989-2009, Ludwig
Museum, Budapest, 2009. In 2008 she got the art criticism award of the Hungarian section of AICA.
She lives and works in Budapest and in Long Island, USA.
13.30 – 14.15 Aleksandra Jach: Pitch-In Culture – Phenomenon, group or
strategy? Artistic practice and the discourse of community in Lodz, Poland in the
early 1980s?
Aleksandra Jach will focus on the discourse of community in artistic practice that
emerged without institutional support in the beginning of 1980s, and was manifested
through articles, books, artzines, manifestos, interviews as phenomenon called PitchIn Culture – an informal group of artists and amateurs set up in the middle of Martial
State in Poland (1981). Their private, situational and ephemeral activity brings
forward a methodological problem: how to describe a dynamic artistic process in the
context of aesthetic, political, and economical differences inside the group. The
presentation will include films, photographs and artzines which will help to discuss
the notion of „being with” during communist times.
Aleksandra Jach is an art historian, PhD student at Jagiellonian University in Kraków. She is working
on dissertation about the notion of collectivity in the last decades of Polish art. She curated: „Body in
the Library” (Design gallery, Wrocław, 2010), „Controlled image” (RCA, London, 2009), „Ain't no
sorry”(Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw, 2008). Aleksandra Jach has contributed widely to magazines
(„Obieg”, „Ha!art”, „Czas kultury”, „Res Publica”) and to other publications as „Textiles. Young
Polish Culture Dictionary” (2007), „Report about independent art institutions in Poland 1989-2009”
(2011).
14.15 – 15.00 DeLVe (Ivana Bago & Antonia Majača): Removed from the Crowd.
Proposals for Delayed Audience
Removed from the Crowd is a curatorial/art-historical project started in 2008 with a
research and contextualization of the artistic and exhibition practices of the 1960s and
1970s in Croatia. The research wasn't focused on the analysis of artistic works
themselves, but rather on the forms of artistic associations and collaborative work, in
opposition to the ideologically set definitions of the collective; the relation between
institutions and self-organized artistic initiatives, as well as the impact of several
curatorial and exhibition projects on the transformation and empowerment of the
artistic practice. The title Removed from the Crowd (taken from the title of a piece by
Mladen Stilinović) is a signifier not only of the differentiation of the “associated
individuals” as against the social collectivity but also a signifier of the actual
methodology, resulting from the researched material and based on a 'weak' structure
of associated fragments and cuts, evading a linear historical narrative. The
continuation of the project will focus on practices in the period of historical
conceptualism which evolved in nature and other non-conventional spaces, looking at
how they can be used to redefine the concept of public space and action, and subvert
the imperative of audience.
Ivana Bago & Antonia Majača are art historians and curators, based in Zagreb, Croatia, where they
are engaged in curating the program of g-mk | galerija miroslav kraljević (directed by Antonia Majača)
and running a research-oriented organization DeLVe – Institute for Duration, Location adn Variables.
The have curated several exhibitions and projects together (inluding Where Everything is Yet to
Happen / SpaPort Bienial 2009/10 (Banja Luka, 2009/2010, And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside
Out (Kunsthalle Exnergasse, Vienna, 2009.), Removed from the Crowd (Fragment 1 within the project
Political practices of (post)-Yugoslav art, Prelom collective, Belgrade) and Fragment II at Škuc
Gallery, Ljubljana, 2009, Stalking With Stories – The Pioneers of the Immemorable at Apexart, New
York, 2007; The Salon of Revolution, HDLU, Zagreb, 2008), edited the No. 83 Issue of the Život
umjetnosti/Life of Art magazine and conceived several informal education programmes, including the
seminar on the historization of self-organized artist initiatives and curatorial and exhibition practices in
Croatia within the Curatorial platform project, Student Centre, Zagreb (2008/2009).
16.30 – 17.15 Mara Traumane: Artistic Collaborations: happenings of Andris
Grīnbergs (1970s) and actions by NSRD (1980s)
Mara Traumane will present her research on happenings and performances in Latvia
in the 1970's and 1980's, made during the preparation of the exhibition "And Others.
Movements, Explorations, Artists in Latvia 1960 - 1984" which is currently on view
at Riga Art Space. She will approach the problematics that local material on
performance art is presenting to a curator and researcher, and explore how local
contexts of art history could be approached from a comparative perspective. This
involves evaluating the focus of the current knowledge on art in the Eastern Europe.
Mara Traumane is a researcher, art critic and curator working in Berlin and Riga. Her main research
focus is post-WWII art and culture in Eastern Europe and media art. She is writing her PhD titled
"Interdisciplinary art collectives in Riga and Moscow in the 1970's and 1980's" at the Humboldt
University, Berlin. She is editing anthology of the Latvian artists group Workshop for the Restoration
of Unfelt Feelings (NSRD). In summer 2008 Mara conducted the Latvian research for Gender Check.
Femininity and Masculinity in the Art of Eastern Europe. In 2009 together with Bojana Pejić, Büro
Trafo.K and ERSTE Foundation she co-organized Symposium READING GENDER. Art, Power and
Politics of Representation in Eastern Europe (MUMOK Vienna, November 2009). In November 2010
she is co-curating exhibition And Others: Movements, Explorations and Artists1960 - 1984, which is
focusing on the unofficial and experimental art practices in Latvia in the post-WWII period. Her
chapters within the show include happening and performance art sections.
17.15 – 18.00 Lissette Olivares: Colectivo de Acciones de Arte (CADA) & Las
Yeguas del Apocalipsis (the Mares of the Apocalypse). Conceptual practices in
Chile in the 1970s and 1980s
Lisette Olivares will provide a close reading of the changing role of artistic agency specifically thinking through latin american conceptual practices from Chile and
Argentina in the 70s and 80s. Some artists that will be discussed include: Colectivo de
Acciones de Arte (CADA), Las Yeguas del Apocalipsis, (the Mares of the
Apocalypse) amongst others. Attention to how each collective intervenes into public
space under authoritarian rule and their transgressions of the authoritarian state will
be considered.
Lissette Olivares, an Assistant Professor and Faculty Fellow at NYU’s Gallatin School of
Individualized Study, pursues interdisciplinary approaches to knowledge production. As an artist,
theorist, curator, and storyteller, her work emphasizes feminist epistemologies and draws from a
diverse range of methodological approaches in critical theory, performance theory, cultural studies,
visual studies, postcolonial studies and posthumanities. She is especially interested in the
interrelationship between aesthetics and politics and in analyzing the role of cultural resistance under
periods of political repression. A doctoral candidate in the History of Consciousness Department at the
University of California, Santa Cruz, she is finishing her dissertation, Repertoires of Literary
Resistance, which explores how literary performances during the 80s decade in Chile provided a
symbolic space for the articulation of diverse democratic imaginaries. Lissette is also an alumna of the
Whitney Museum’s Independent Study Program and an independent curator and critic specializing in
contemporary art with an emphasis in performance and transmedia. She has curated numerous
individual and collective exhibitions, including Chile’s first Performance Biennial in 2006, Grotesques
in Toronto’s A Space Gallery, and recently Writing Resistance in Crisis in Collaboration at UCSC
Library. In 2009 she co-founded the Museum and Curatorial Studies faculty research group, which is
dedicated to exploring the poetics and politics of display practices.
18.00 – 18.45 Nives Sertić: O MM (On MM Centre), presentation of the artistic
research project
On MM Centre is a multidisciplinary artistic project dealing with the historical
context of the Multimedia centre, part of the Student centre, in Zagreb, in relation to
its current 'image' in the public. MM Centre was one of the key places of media art
from the end of the 1970s onwards, and especially during the 1980s, in Zagreb and
Croatia, but its history and activities are little known and discussed. The form of
artistic project here implicates questioning the matter from the point of historical and
recent context of the archive in relation to the public and posing key questions with
regards to the social responsibility within the relation of cultural heritage – individual
– community. Rethinking this context happens on several levels: from the artistic
research and the process of work on the project to the collaborations with art
historians, coservation specialists, people who worked at the Centre, as well as
communication and opening the process towards the public.
Nives Sertić is a multimedia artist. She graduated at the Department for New Media, Academy of Fine
Arts, Zagreb, 2009. Since 2005 she has presented her work at many venues and has collaborated with
numerous theatre, performance and visual artists. Since 2007 to 2009 she was the coordinator of the
interdisciplinary project Academy as Laboratory, Academy of Fine Arts, Zagreb. Currently she is
working on the research project about the MMC Centre in Zagreb and, together with Iva Čepanec, is
responsible for Antibiotik, the program for young visual artists at AKC Medika. She lives and works in
Zagreb.