Queers, Crips, and Mermaids: Disruptive Bodies as Performative Objects
(2021)
author(s): Kamran Behrouz
published in: Research Catalogue
This chapter attempts to analyze and unfold interlinked layers of a research-performance, in two interconnected site-specific Acts. First Act (Collision) happened in St. Moritz 2020 and the second Act was performed a year later in Bern 2021 . By adopting the notion of “cosmopolitics” as a method, this Performance attempts to speculate inter-relativity of human and non-human bodies within the capitalist matrix of species hierarchy. Through comparative analysis of different psycho-cultural/political narratives, this text attempts to map out interconnected traumas of transspecies; wounds and scars that are older than our bodies, older than ourselves. This text uses diffractive reading of these two Acts through the histories of the figure of the mermaid and the witch, In order to queer the hegemonic interpretations of both figures.
HALFLIFE
(2021)
author(s): shasti
published in: Research Catalogue
This exposition posits art as a form of contagious divination, a glimpse into the multiplicity of possible futures, and an examination of artists' ability to detect momentum towards unavoidable outcomes.
In 2014, I was selected by curator Heather Pesanti to participate in the City of Toronto’s annual Nuit Blanche festival, an overnight public art event spanning twelve hours in multiple neighborhoods that draws over a million people from the surrounding regions.
Spurred by my concerns about the inescapable gravity of mobile electronic media and "viral culture," my work was to be a performance premised on contagion, pointing to the monumental role that electronic media had assumed in mediating our direct experience, and the civic and societal fallout I believed would ensue. Little did I suspect how bizarrely prescient the work would turn out to be.
On October 6th, 2014, one hundred glowing “carriers,” dressed in fluorescent hazmat suits, wearing fluorescent LED-wired helmets in the dodecahedral geometric shape of an adenovirus, dispersed throughout the City of Toronto, each "testing" and “infecting” at least one hundred festivalgoers by marking their faces and hands with “spots” “lesions” and “rashes” using surgical swabs dipped into a beaker of invisible UV-reactive ink. Each "test subject" was then gifted a small UV pen lamp with built-in reactive ink marker and instructed to "infect" and "test" ten others.
It is estimated that HALFLIFE attained an "R-naught" value of ten, and through this performance, affected approximately one hundred thousand people.
Images of the performance went viral on Instagram for seventy-two hours, during which Toronto General Hospital admitted their first and only suspected Ebola case.
The Incidental Person: Reviewing the Identity of the Urban Acoustic Planner
(2016)
author(s): Sven Anderson
published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
At the intersection of the urban and the aural lies a territory that remains largely unplanned and frequently marginalized by more dominant agendas that shape contemporary urban development. This paper explores this territory – as both an experiential and an administrative space – through a two-year public art commission in which I initiated an artist placement for myself within the city council in Dublin Ireland, working in the self-declared position of urban acoustic planner. By stepping away from the centralizing concept of the soundscape and drawing parallels with participatory artworks that lie somewhat outside of the traditional canon of works embodied by contemporary sound studies, this paper seeks to discover the identity of this role at its most open, inclusive, and plural.
A taste of big data on the global dinner table
(2015)
author(s): Markéta Dolejšová
published in: Journal for Artistic Research
This exposition discusses artistic appropriations of issues related to the contemporary global food agenda and the possible impact of these interventions on the public’s food-related mindset. It begins with an overview of some of the most pressing concerns about the current state of global food production and continues by discussing how these concerns are affected by social networking technologies and online collaborations. Social initiatives and food activists, as well as artists and designers, have become interested in communal bottom-up efforts to refine the global flow of food commodities. The second chapter of this exposition discusses recent examples of contemporary food art/design works. Beside a theoretical overview, the author presents her own food art/design project ‘HotKarot & OpenSauce’ and offers an insight into the field from the perspective of a researcher-as-practitioner. The exposition aims to raise important questions about the potential of participatory art/design initiatives and critically address current global food issues, hence supporting consumers’ general awareness of what ends up on their plates, how it gets there, and under what circumstances.
Assuming Asymmetries. Extra Research Time 2020/21
(last edited: 2021)
author(s): Joanna Warsza
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
Assuming Asymmetries. Conversations on Curating Public Art Projects of the 1980s and 1990s is a volume based on the dialogues between the curators and participants from some of the most complex and yet underresearched European and US public art exhibitions of the 1980s and 1990s. The discussions include and unpack such influential projects as “Culture in Action” curated by Mary Jane Jacob in 1993; “Sonsbeek 93” curated by Valerie Smith; “Endlichkeit der Freiheit,” an exhibition initiated by Heiner Müller and Rebecca Horn, on both sides of the former Berlin wall in 1990; “Construction in Process,” an artist-initiated site-specific exhibition in early 1980s Łódz, Poland; “Five Gardens” curated by Carlos Capelán in 1996 in Simrishamn and Ystad, Sweden, and “U-media” in 1987 Umeå, Sweden. The dialogues focus on such questions as: How does one ethically and culturally deal with asymmetries? How have the notions of situated or embedded knowledge changed over the last decades? How can artworks actually create meaning from the place where they're produced? What were the early attempts of de-monumentalizing art outside of the museums; and, finally, what actually is non-extractive curating.
Both books are edited by CuratorLab at Konstfack University of Arts 2020/2021: Anna Mikaela Ekstrand, Giulia Floris, Vasco Forconi, Edy Fung, Julius Lehmann, Maria Lind, Marc Navarro, Simina Neagu, Hanna Nordell, Tomek Pawłowski Jarmołajew, Marja Rautaharju, Erik Sandberg, Joanna Warsza
The process was led by Joanna Warsza and Maria Lind
Hustadt project
(last edited: 2018)
author(s): Apolonija Polona Šušteršič
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
In 2008 I received an invitation from the City of Bochum to make a conventional public art work in Hustadt, a suburban neighbourhood on the city’s south-east edge with an interesting beginning and turbulent recent history. Built in the late 1960s for approximately 6,000 inhabitants, the area was intended to be a Universitätsrahmenstadt – a residential area framing the campus of the Bochum University – built to offer professors, students, academics, and public employees nearby housing. As a result of various social, economic, and political developments related to today’s global situation, Hustadt has since then encountered many changes.
Today’s inhabitants of Hustadt reflect a microcosm of the world; approximately 56 different nationalities live in the neighbourhood, with many different cultures, lifestyles, and habits coexisting every day in close proximity to each other. High unemployment, lengthy integration processes, and the constantly changing community limit the possibility for its inhabitants to relate to the place as their home. As a result, Hustadt has the reputation of being a ghetto; its bad name has stigmatised the area.
Planned to last only nine months, the project turned into a three-year process of negotiations, discussions, and actions. It evolved into a self-organised initiative together with local activists (Aktionsteam) and provoked a huge discussion within the city legislature. The Hustadt Project was finally accepted in the urban regeneration plan for “Innere Hustadt” as part of “Stadtumbau West” – the Urban Regeneration Programme for Hustadt, Bochum. We managed to expand the initial budget for public art by 500% and turned a conventional public art commission into a sustainable participatory project.
More than an architectural object or urban infrastructure, the Hustadt Project was mainly a process composed of several parts. With Akstionsteam we researched the existing situation, through many formal and informal meetings, discussions, and workshops with people living in Hustadt and developed different activities for the neighbourhood in order to test the location, to encourage them to act on and react to present conditions, outside of official social institutions, to create a place by themselves and for themselves, using the results as arguments in political discussions. The entire process led to the drafting of a proposal for and the eventual realisation of the Community Pavilion – Brunnenplatz 1, a multifunctional infrastructure for the main square in Hustadt, a meeting place for inhabitants.
The Community Pavilion – Brunnenplatz 1 became a self-organised mini cultural institution that will continue in the future to work closely together with its inhabitants (Summer Film Festival – Hustadt 2012). The custodian for the Community Pavilion has become the UmQ e.V. – University meets Querenburg, Association for Street Culture, which will also care for the Pavilion in the future.
The Hustadt Project became a platform that stimulated the imagination about the future of the place and its inhabitants. The project focused on and addressed distributions of power in public space; the role of the artist/architect within urban regeneration projects; the issue of “spatial justice”; and the appropriation of public space.
Augmented accidents / accidental augmentations
(last edited: 2015)
author(s): Chrystalleni Loizidou
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
An experiment on the Artistic Research Catalogue
This chapter attempts to analyze and unfold interlinked layers of a research-performance, in two interconnected site-specific Acts. First Act (Collision) happened in St. Moritz 2020 and the second Act was performed a year later in Bern 2021 . By adopting the notion of “cosmopolitics” as a method, this Performance attempts to speculate inter-relativity of human and non-human bodies within the capitalist matrix of species hierarchy. Through comparative analysis of different psycho-cultural/political narratives, this text attempts to map out interconnected traumas of transspecies; wounds and scars that are older than our bodies, older than ourselves. This text uses diffractive reading of these two Acts through the histories of the figure of the mermaid and the witch, In order to queer the hegemonic interpretations of both figures.open exposition comments (0)
At the intersection of the urban and the aural lies a territory that remains largely unplanned and frequently marginalized by more dominant agendas that shape contemporary urban development. This paper explores this territory – as both an experiential and an administrative space – through a two-year public art commission in which I initiated an artist placement for myself within the city council in Dublin Ireland, working in the self-declared position of urban acoustic planner. By stepping away from the centralizing concept of the soundscape and drawing parallels with participatory artworks that lie somewhat outside of the traditional canon of works embodied by contemporary sound studies, this paper seeks to discover the identity of this role at its most open, inclusive, and plural.open exposition comments (0)
An experiment on the Artistic Research Catalogueopen exposition comments (0)