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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.

Author: Bruguera, Tania, Author: Bejenaru, Matei, Author: Sholette, Gregory, Author: Gerber, Corinn, Author: Yao, Pauline J., Contributor: Josh Olson, Contributor: Darren Heroux, Contributor: Ron Tran

Date created: 2012-10-13

Keynote Debate 1: Is There Space for Art Outside of the Market and the State?

Keynote Debate 1: Is there space for art outside of the market and the state?Video documentation with: Jaleh Mansoor, Deirdre Logue, Matei Bejenaru, Dirk Fleischmann, Gregory Sholette, Payam Sharifi (Slavs and Tatars) (USA). Deirdre Logue and Allyson Mitchell (Canada) .Deirdre Logue and Allyson Mitchell are artists and co-founders of FAG Feminist Art Gallery. Operating out of Logue and Mitchell's converted garage in Toronto, FAG’s mission is to grow sustainable feminist art, a mandate reinforced by their inaugural exhibition featuring the work of queer artist Elisha Lim. Their alternative funding system resists the reliance on government or corporate cash, favouring instead a network of feminist community contributors. FAG’s micro-funding program DAG has supported a variety of art projects, among them, Les Blues, a group dedicated to increasing the visibility and histories of queer people of colour and Colour Me Dragg. Recent media exhibitions include the presentation of art porn hybrid Community Action Center by AL Steiner and AK Burns and a focus on the UK based Cinenova collection as animated by local activists and artists. Logue is currently the Development Director at Vtape and Mitchell works as Assistant Professor in the School of Women’s Studies at York University. Both have prolific international art practices. Jaleh Mansoor (Canada/USA) Mansoor is an Assistant Professor at the University of British Columbia. Having worked on materialist abstraction in the context of Marshall Plan Italy, she is interested in complicating the discourse on abstraction, totality, universality, labour, and mere life in contemporaneity. Her areas of teaching and research include modernism, critical theory, historiography, and critical curatorial studies. She works as a critic for Artforum and is a frequent contributor to October, Texte Zur Kunst, and, more recently, The Journal of Aesthetics and Protest. Mansoor wishes to occupy and dilate the relationship (and tension) between activism and scholarship. She has written many catalog essays, including on Blinky Palermo and Agnes Martin. She has also produced monographic studies on, among others, Piero Manzoni, Ed Ruscha, and Mona Hatoum. She co-edited Communities of Sense: Rethinking Aesthetics and Politics (2010). Her current work addresses formal and procedural violence in the work of Alberto Burri, Lucio Fontana, and Piero Manzoni and another on Mere Life in the work of Santiago Sierra. 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. Dirk Fleischmann (Germany) .Fleischmann is an artist based in Frankfurt and Seoul, where he is currently teaching at Cheongju University. His work has been presented in international exhibitions and institutions. Fleischmann has received numerous distinctions and honours, including awards from the Hessische Kulturstiftung and the Stiftung Kunstfonds grant. In 2009, Fleischmann received the Arts & Ecology Residency at ZKM Island in Second Life; a special project by Centre for Art and Media, Karlsruhe (ZKM) and the Royal Society Of The Arts, London (RSA). As a visual artist, he has been creating a business conglomerate since 1997 in which his art inhabits economic forms and becomes embedded into given capitalist structures. His art projects intend to and do create financial profit, which he has continuously re-invested into future projects. Payam Sharifi, Slavs and Tatars (USA). Slavs and Tatars is a faction of polemics and intimacies devoted to an area east of the former Berlin Wall and west of the Great Wall of China known as Eurasia. The collective’s work spans several media, disciplines, and a broad spectrum of cultural registers (high and low). Slavs and Tatars has published "Kidnapping Mountains" (Book Works, 2009), "Love Me, Love Me Not: Changed Names" (onestar press, 2010), and "Molla Nasreddin: the magazine that would’ve, could’ve, should’ve" (JRP Ringier, 2011). Their work has been exhibited at Salt, Istanbul, Tate Modern, the 10th Sharjah, 8th Mercosul, and 3rd Thessaloniki Biennials. After devoting the past five years primarily to two cycles of work, namely, a celebration of complexity in the Caucasus (Kidnapping Mountains, Molla Nasreddin, Hymns of No Resistance) and the unlikely heritage between Poland and Iran (Friendship of Nations: Polish Shi’ite Showbiz, 79.89.09, A Monobrow Manifesto), Slavs and Tatars have begun work on their third cycle, The Faculty of Substitution, on mystical protest and the revolutionary role of the sacred and syncretic. The new cycle of work includes contributions to group exhibitions as well as solo engagements.

Author: Mansoor, Jaleh, Author: Logue, Deirdre , Author: Bejenaru, Matei, Author: Fleischmann, Dirk, Author: Sholette, Gregory, Author: Sharifi, Payam, Contributor: Josh Olson, Contributor: Darren Heroux, Contributor: Ron Tran

Date created: 2012-10-12

Session 4: Intimate Institutions

Session 04: Intimate Institutions with Skeena Reece, Chumpon Apisuk, Chantawipa Apisuk, Scott Rogers, Justin Patterson, Deirdre Logue, Allyson Mitchell and Jakob Jakobsen. Skeena Reece (Canada)Skeena Reece, Tsimshian/Gitksan and Cree, is a multi-disciplinary artist whose work includes performance art, spoken word, ‘sacred clowning’, writing, singing, and video art. She often uses humour and satire along with direct engagement of her body to address difficult subjects relating to race, class, leadership, political landscapes, culture, and love. She has exhibited locally and internationally in solo and group shows at Modern Fuel (Kingston) 17th Biennale of Sydney, Nuit Blanche (Toronto) (2009), LIVE Biennale (Vancouver), the Museum of Anthropology at UBC (Vancouver), and the National Museum of the American Indian (Washington, DC). Reece is based on Vancouver Island, on the west coast of Canada. Chumpon & Chantawipa Apisuk (Thailand)Chumpon Apisuk is a founder of Concrete House, an art and community space and the only performance art venue in Thailand. He is also founder and director of Asiatopia, an International Performance Art Festival in Thailand. In 2004, he was nominated as coordinator of Silabha, a cultural program of the 15th International AIDS Conference in Bangkok and is known for his activism in HIV/AIDS, Human Rights, and democracy issues.Chantawipa Apisuk is the founder of the Empower Foundation, an organization that advocates for the rights of sex workers in Thailand, and the collaborative projects and initiatives created by the couple blur the boundaries between art, performance, and activism. Jakob Jakobsen (Denmark) Jakobsen is an artist, organizer, and activist. Along with Henriette Heise he is co-founder of the Copenhagen Free University (CFU), which opened in May 2001 in their apartment. Jakobsen is also a co-founder of the artist run TV-station tvtv and has participated in exhibitions and projects all over the world. In 2011, Trauma 1–11: Stories about the Copenhagen Free University and the Surrounding Society in the Last Ten Years (an exhibition at the Museet fur Samtidskunst in Roskilde, Denmark) explored CFU’s six years of collective learning and the mechanisms of political control increasingly encroaching upon educational systems. The Free University was an artist-run institution dedicated to the production of critical consciousness and poetic language from 2001 to 2007. Deirdre Logue and Allyson Mitchell (Canada) .Deirdre Logue and Allyson Mitchell are artists and co-founders of FAG Feminist Art Gallery. Operating out of Logue and Mitchell's converted garage in Toronto, FAG’s mission is to grow sustainable feminist art, a mandate reinforced by their inaugural exhibition featuring the work of queer artist Elisha Lim. Their alternative funding system resists the reliance on government or corporate cash, favouring instead a network of feminist community contributors. FAG’s micro-funding program DAG has supported a variety of art projects, among them, Les Blues, a group dedicated to increasing the visibility and histories of queer people of colour and Colour Me Dragg. Recent media exhibitions include the presentation of art porn hybrid Community Action Center by AL Steiner and AK Burns and a focus on the UK based Cinenova collection as animated by local activists and artists. Logue is currently the Development Director at Vtape and Mitchell works as Assistant Professor in the School of Women’s Studies at York University. Both have prolific international art practices. Scott Rogers and Justin Patterson (Canada)Rogers and Patterson are artists active in the Arbour Lake Sghool (ALS) founded in 2003 in Calgary. A stage for the creation and display of artistic and critical projects that explore and engage its suburban setting, ALS is run by a loose association of artists, athletes, musicians, trades-people, and students including Rogers and Patterson, Andrew and John Frosst, Wayne Garrett, Ben Jacques, and Stacey Watson. Activities of ALS “excite, entertain, and often serve as comic interludes in the not-so-secret game of suburban one-upmanship.” Rogers is currently studying at the Staedelschule (Frankfurt) and is an MFA candidate at the Glasgow School of Art. He has exhibited nationally and internationally including at The Soap Factory (Minneapolis), the Art Gallery of Alberta (Edmonton), the Southern Alberta Art Gallery (Lethbridge), the Liverpool John Moores University Gallery (Liverpool), and the National Glass Centre (Sunderland). Patterson is a Vancouver-based artist. He received his BFA from the University of Calgary and is active in the art and music scenes of Calgary and Vancouver. He has exhibited his work through the Arbour Lake Sghool including at Toronto Free Gallery, The Art Gallery of Peel, The Art Gallery of Calgary, and The Red Deer Museum and Art Gallery. 

Author: Reece, Skeena, Author: Apisuk, Chumpon, Author: Apisuk, Chantawipa, Author: Rogers, Scott, Author: Patterson, Justin, Author: Logue, Deirdre, Author: Mitchell, Allyson, Author: Jakobsen, Jakob, Contributor: Josh Olson, Contributor: Darren Heroux, Contributor: Ron Tran

Date created: 2012-10-12

Session 3: Intimate Institutions

Session 3: Intimate Institutions video documentation. With: Mounira al Solh, Candice Hopkins, Isabelle Pauwels, Laiwan Candice Hopkins (Canada) Hopkins is the Elizabeth Simonfay Curatorial Resident, Indigenous Art, at the National Gallery of Canada and is the former director and curator of the exhibitions program at the Western Front in Vancouver. Her recent curatorial projects include Close Encounters: The Next 500 Years (2011), a multi-venue exhibition in Winnipeg co-curated with Steve Loft, Jenny Western, and Lee-Ann Martin; Recipes for an Encounter (2010), co-curated with Berin Golonu for Dorsky Gallery (New York), and Restaging the Encounter, 2011 edition of Nuit Blanche (Toronto). Hopkins has an MA from the Center for Curatorial Studies and Art in Contemporary Culture at Bard College. Her writing has appeared in texts published by MIT Press, BlackDog Publishing, Revolver, New York University, Fillip, Banff Centre Press, and National Museum of the American Indian, among others. Hopkins has lectured at venues including the Witte de With, Tate Modern, Dakar Biennale, Tate Britain, University of British Columbia, and University of Victoria. Isabelle Pauwels (Canada) Isabelle Pauwels is a Vancouver-based artist working in video, performance, and installation often engaging in themes of alienation, secrecy, and scandal. Pauwels’ work explores how narrative structures shape our emotional and moral experience. Her interests include hybrid cultural forms, prosumer production, the early history of television and film, and narratives of colonial-era exploration. She has exhibited locally and internationally in solo and group shows at the Contemporary Art Gallery (Vancouver), Henry Art Gallery (Seattle), Power Plant (Toronto), Signal (Malmo), and Witte de With (Rotterdam). In 2007, she won the VIVA award. She is represented by Catriona Jeffries Gallery (Vancouver). Laiwan (Canada)Laiwan is an artist, writer, and educator recognized for her interdisciplinary practice based in poetics, improvisation, and philosophy. Born in Zimbabwe of Chinese parents, she immigrated to Canada in 1977 to leave the war in Rhodesia. She initiated the OR Gallery (1983) and the First Vancouver Lesbian Film Festival (1988). Recipient of the Vancouver Queer Media Artist Award (2008) and of numerous arts awards over the years, Laiwan exhibits in group and solo shows, curates projects in Canada, the US, and Zimbabwe, publishes in a variety of anthologies and journals. Her cross-disciplinary projects investigate epistemology, technology and viral mobility such as with the interactive website “Call Numbers: The Library Recordings,” and similar projects that explore the performativity of texts to build communal musicality, poetics, and lyricism.She also premiered her performative rock band “LaiwanKwanKage” (2011) with collaborators Vanessa Kwan and Eileen Kage to explore improvisation and somatic intelligence. Her work was featured in the Vancouver Art Gallery’s exhibitions How Soon Is Now: Contemporary Art From Here (2009), Everything, Everyday (2010), and in c.1983 (2012) at Presentation House Gallery. She teaches in the MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts Program at Goddard College in Washington State, USA, and is current Chair of the Board of Directors at grunt gallery.

Author: al Solh, Mounira, Author: Hopkins, Candace, Author: Pauwels, Isabelle, Author: Laiwan, Contributor: Josh Olson, Contributor: Darren Heroux, Contributor: Ron Tran

Date created: 2012-10-12

Session 2: Institutional Time: Facts and Fictions

Session 2: Institutional Time: Facts and Fictions video documentation. With: Eva Weinmayr, Marie-Josée Jean, Walter Benjamin, Slavs and Tatars Eva Weinmayr (Germany)Weinmayr is a London-based artist known for work on Art in Ruins, the now defunct London-based art collective whose practice formed around iconoclastic efforts targeting the politics and economics of the art world. By enacting a reconstructed history of Art in Ruins through the use of non-actors and informal, improvised staging, Weinmayr has created occasions for the re-consideration of presumably forgotten or neglected events and ensembles. Weinmayr’s selected recent exhibitions include projects at MOT International (London), the 5th Berlin Biennale, Yama (Istanbul), Contemporary Art Museum St Louis, Kunstverein Wolfsburg, Revolver Showroom (Frankfurt), and Kunstraum Munich. Invested in the behaviour of written and spoken language, Weinmayr’s work addresses systems for immediate communication and ranges from interactive readings and performances to publications and films as well as gallery based installations and activities. She has published several artists’ books and is the co-director of AND Publishing, a platform that explores print on demand technologies and publishes conceptually driven artists’ books. Together with Andrea Francke she is running The Piracy Project as part of AND Publishing’s programme. Marie-Josée Jean (Canada)Marie-Josée Jean presented a new work entitled The Unmaking of Art on behalf of “Walter Benjamin,” an anonymous artist from the former Yugoslavia known for projects such as Mondrian ’63-‘96 (1987), a 25 minute video featuring a Walter Benjamin impostor lecturing on the value of Mondrian copies in English with Serbo-Croatian subtitles. Previous iterations of The Unmaking of Art include a performance in Chinese at the Guangdong Times Museum (Guangzhou) and in English at the Arnolfini (Bristol). "Walter Benjamin"Walter Benjamin was an important philosopher and art theoretician best known for his work Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1935). Many years after his tragic death (1940) he reappeared in public with the lecture Mondrian ’63 -‘96 organized 1986 by the Marxist Center in Ljubljana. The same lecture was filmed in English in 1987 and broadcasted on the Belgrade television. Since then he has has given interviews and published several articles on museums and art history. In September 2011 “Walter Benjamin” appeared in public with the lecture The Unmaking of Art held in Chinese at the Times Museum in Guangzhou. The same lecture, this time in English, was presented at the Arnolfini in Bristol. Payam Sharifi, Slavs and Tatars (USA) Slavs and Tatars is a faction of polemics and intimacies devoted to an area east of the former Berlin Wall and west of the Great Wall of China known as Eurasia. The collective’s work spans several media, disciplines, and a broad spectrum of cultural registers (high and low). Slavs and Tatars has published Kidnapping Mountains (Book Works, 2009), Love Me, Love Me Not: Changed Names (onestar press, 2010), and Molla Nasreddin: the magazine that would’ve, could’ve, should’ve (JRP Ringier, 2011). Their work has been exhibited at Salt, Istanbul, Tate Modern, the 10th Sharjah, 8th Mercosul, and 3rd Thessaloniki Biennials. After devoting the past five years primarily to two cycles of work, namely, a celebration of complexity in the Caucasus (Kidnapping Mountains, Molla Nasreddin, Hymns of No Resistance) and the unlikely heritage between Poland and Iran (Friendship of Nations: Polish Shi’ite Showbiz, 79.89.09, A Monobrow Manifesto), Slavs and Tatars have begun work on their third cycle, The Faculty of Substitution, on mystical protest and the revolutionary role of the sacred and syncretic. The new cycle of work includes contributions to group exhibitions — Reverse Joy at the GfZK, Leipzig, PrayWay at the New Museum Triennial, and Régions d’Être at the Asia Pacific Triennial–as well as solo engagements with Not Moscow Not Mecca at the Secession, Vienna, Khhhhhhh at Moravia Gallery, Brno , Beyonsense at MoMA, NY and, Künstlerhaus Stuttgart.

Author: Weinmayr, Eva, Author: Jean, Marie-Josée, Author: Hart, Sydney, Author: Slavs and Tatars, Author: Sharifi, Payam, Contributor: Josh Olson, Contributor: Darren Heroux, Contributor: Ron Tran

Date created: 2012-10-12

Don Staniford 'Norwegian Salmon Farms'