Session 05: States and Markets

Session 05: States and Markets. With: Tania Bruguera, Matei Bejenaru, Gregory Sholette, Corinn Gerber, Pauline J. Yao. Tania Bruguera (Cuba/USA).
Bruguera is a political and interdisciplinary artist from Havana, Cuba. Her work has been included at Documenta XI and in several biennales such as Venice, Johannesburg, Sao Paolo, Shanghai, Havana, and Site Santa Fe. She has shown in numerous museums including the New Museum of Contemporary Art (New York) and the Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago).She has lectured extensively and internationally. She is the founder / director of Arte de Conducta, the first performance studies program in Latin America, hosted by Instituto Superior de Arte in Havana and is faculty at the University of Chicago. Her most recent project, Immigrant Movement International, presented by Creative Time and the Queens Museum of Art, is a long-term art project in the form of an artist initiated socio-political movement. Bruguera will spend a year operating a flexible community space in the multinational and transnational neighbourhood of Corona, Queens, which will serve as the movement’s headquarters.Matei Bejenaru (Romania)
.Matei Bejenaru is an artist and founder of Periferic Biennial in Iași, Romania. Established in 1997 as a performance festival, Periferic transformed into an international artist-run contemporary art biennial for discussions on the historical, socio-political, and cultural contexts of the city. With a group of artists and philosophers from Iași, Bejenaru founded the Vector Association in 2001, a contemporary art institution that supported the local emerging art scene to become locally and internationally visible. Matei Bejenaru is also member of the editorial staff of the magzine "Vector – art and culture in context".As an artist, Matei Bejenaru examines the way globalization affects postcommunist life. His work has been exhibited at many venues worldwide including the second edition of the Tirana Biennial, Thyssen-Bornemisza Contemporary Art (Vienna), Tate Modern London – Level 2 Gallery (2007), Taipei Biennial (2008), and the Western Front Vancouver (2011), among others. Gregory Sholette (USA)
Gregory Sholette is a New York-based artist, writer, and founding member of the artists’ collectives Political Art Documentation/Distribution (PAD/D: 1980-1988), and REPOhistory (1989-2000). His publications include Dark Matter: Art and Politics in an Age of Enterprise Culture (Pluto Press, 2011); Collectivism After Modernism: The Art of Social Imagination after 1945 (with Blake Stimson for University of Minnesota, 2007); and The Interventionists: A Users Manual for the Creative Disruption of Everyday Life (with Nato Thompson for MassMoCA/MIT Press, 2004, 2006, 2008), as well as a special issue of the journal Third Text co-edited with theorist Gene Ray on the theme “Whither Tactical Media.” Sholette’s recent exhibitions include Imaginary Archive (for the Tulca Festival in Galway, Ireland 2011, and for Enjoy Public Art Gallery in Wellington, New Zealand 2010); a contribution to Temporary Services Market Place for Creative Time’s Living as Form (2011); a two-person exhibition at the Santa Fe Art Institute in New Mexico (2011), and the installation Mole Light: God is Truth, Light his Shadow for Plato’s Cave, Brooklyn, New York (2010). Sholette is an Assistant Professor of Sculpture at Queens College: City University of New York (CUNY) and teaches an annual seminar in theory and social practice for the CCC post-graduate research program at Geneva University of Art and Design. Corinn Gerber (Canada)
Gerber is currently the Executive Director of Art Metropole, an artist-run centre founded in 1974 in Toronto by the artists´ collective General Idea. Art Metropole fosters dynamic structures of artist-initiated publishing in any media, especially those formats pre-disposed to the sharing and circulation of ideas. Gerber has co-founded Passenger Books, publishing between Berlin, Istanbul, Montréal and Zürich (among others) since 2005. Recent publications include; "Before the Curtain, Avant le rideau" (2011) and "Danna Vajda, New Directions in Curatorial Practices" (2008). Passenger Books launched the publication "A Play to be Played Indoors or Out: This Book is a Classroom" during the conference.Pauline J. Yao (China) 
Yao is an independent curator and scholar based in Beijing and Hong Kong. She is currently co-director of Osage Art and Ideas (Hong Kong). Previously, Yao co-founded, with Rania Ho and Wang Wei, Arrow Factory, an independently-run alternative space in Beijing that has exhibited works by Patty Chang (New York), Lin Yilin (Guangzhou/Beijing), Dan Perjovschi (Bucharest), Koki Tanaka (Tokyo/Los Angeles) and Wang Gongxin (Beijing). Yao was co-curator of the Shenzhen Hong Kong Bi-City Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism in 2009 and the 2007 recipient of the inaugural CCAA Art Critic Award. Yao has subsequently published In Production Mode: Contemporary Art in China. She also sits on the editorial boards of Yishu Art Journal and Contemporary Art and Investment Magazine.