As part of this course, we will propose examples of governing and curating art and culture projects through “mainstreaming” of non-normative practices of running art projects, producing and organizing contexts for and in the field of culture and art. Also, we will enable critical reflection of how we produce knowledge in the field, how we collaborate, or how we are to establish new forms of knowledge, of learning together, of de-colonizing knowledge, contextualizing knowledge, embodying knowledge, practice-based forms of knowledge, critical pedagogies, affective pedagogies, etc.
In addition, the course will include case studies and practices of “critical management” in culture, diverse examples of co-curatorial practices, discursive programs, etc., as well as knowledge and learning about cultural policies related to advocacy practices.
THEMES:
“New Schools” – new formats of teaching, including a dramaturgical/curatorial perspective on how different forms of knowledge, learning together, and de-colonizing knowledge are/could be established.
Performance, Politics and Policies – Activities and actions related to advocacy in the field, creation of new collaborative models, as well as political actions and reflections that concern the field.
Crisis Ordinary, Systematic Crisis and the Future of Knowledge in the Context of the COVID-19 Pandemic and Its Aftermath – exploring the lived experiences of the ordinary ongoingness in the period of crisis, in particular in relation to artists, performers, choreographers, dancers, curators, and what critical forms of knowledge, strategies, and politics of curating they might generate; what sort of entanglements are being reconfigured between new media, social media, online platforms, online communication and teaching, on the one hand, and the dimension of corporeal face-to-face interaction and liveness as constitutive of performative practices and arts, on the other hand.
LECTURES / SEMINARS / DISCUSSIONS:
SEMINAR - Kirsten Maar (Germany): New Schools: New Format of Teaching and Mediating
LECTURE - Lydia Bell (USA): Performance-Based Curatorial Strategies in New York City 2018-Present: Where Do We Go from Here?
LECTURE/PRESENTATION - Anastasia Proshutinskaya (Russia): Where Are You Staying “At Home”? (or “We Found Love in a Hopeless Place”)
DISCUSSION - Marijana Cvetković (Serbia), Jasna Jasna Žmak (Croatia), Rok Vevar (Slovenia) and Jasmina Zaloznik (Slovenia): Crisis Ordinary, Systematic Crisis and the Future of Knowledge in the Context of the COVID-19 Pandemic and Its Aftermath
How do we know what we know? How do we learn from each other? How do we deal with knowledge on an ethical level? And, how can we develop alternative forms of learning? Or establish “ecologies of practice” (Stengers)? Close to critical curatorial practice the field of mediation and teaching, the workshop-seminar asks for its own conditions, it looks at ways of mediating and producing knowledge in the cultural field beyond disciplines, within collaborative, practice-based and diverse research methods. We will work, based on short texts and material distributed beforehand (Moten/Harney, Manning et al..), starting with an input in the form of a lecture, going on in smaller working groups and then altogether to finally develop an adequate form of presentation.
BIO KIRSTEN MAAR: Kirsten Maar is a dance scholar and dramaturge. Since 2018 she has been working as a junior-professor at the Dance Department at Free University Berlin. From 2007-2014 she was a member of the DFG-Collaborative Research Centre „Aesthetic Experience and the Dissolution of Artistic Limits“. Her research fields are an intersection between visuals arts, architecture and choreography, social choreographies, changing discourses of gender and ethnicity, scoring practices and composition. Her post-doc research dealt with the issue of presentation of dance in the context of exhibitions concerning questions of canonization processes. Among many other publications, she is co-editor of Assign and Arrange. Methodologies of Presentation in Art and Dance (Sternberg 2014). Next to her academic research, she works as a dramaturge.
Lydia Bell, U.S.-based independent curator and creative producer, will speak about curatorial strategies within the context of recent dance and performance projects in New York City. Topics will include: collective research practices, institutional interventions, de-centering whiteness, and the historical imagination. Case studies will include Dancing Platform Praying Grounds: Blackness, Churches, and Downtown Dance, a Danspace Project Platform curated by Reggie Wilson in 2018 that examined the relationship between race, dance, and religious architecture in New York City. Another case study will be collective terrain/s, co-organized by Bell, Jasmine Hearn, and Tatyana Tenenbaum with Tendayi Kuumba and Samita Sinha in 2019, a collective research process into sounding in the body. Bell will also discuss the recent uprisings and protests across the U.S. in support of Black Lives Matter and how the dance and performance community is engaging with calls to action.
BIO LYDIA BELL: Lydia Bell is a Bessie Award-winning independent performance curator and creative producer based in New York City. From 2011-2014 & 2015-2020 she worked at the Danspace Project, most recently as Program Director & Associate Curator, a role in which she oversaw programming, publications, and research initiatives. Her recent curatorial projects include Aki Sasamoto: Phase Transition and collective terrain/s, co-organized with artists Jasmine Hearn and Tatyana Tenenbaum. From 2009-2011, she coordinated the Eiko & Koma Retrospective Project in collaboration with 15 partner venues, including the Walker Art Center and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. Additionally, Bell has worked on projects with Movement Research, Sam Miller/OAM Company, and the Institute for Curatorial Practice in Performance. She has presented at conferences and institutions including: Association for Performing Arts Presenters (APAP), Kino Kultura (Skopje, North Macedonia), New York Live Arts, Pew Center for Arts and Heritage, Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (PICA), and other. She has edited six Danspace Project Platform catalogues and contributed to publications such as Museum and Curatorial Studies Review and Movement Research Performance Journal. Bell is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Wesleyan University (B.A., Dance and Classics) and the Institute for Curatorial Practice in Performance at Wesleyan University.
The global stay-at-home during the Spring months of 2020, among other things, revealed the diversity of what one has as “home” and how precarious one may get staying there, or not. In this short presentation I would like to speak about locations of contemporary dance in Moscow, through the lens of my own diverse practice: within a public leisure center, within a theater, within a contemporary art museum. What are those “homes” for dance in Moscow? What did I learn about dance in those encounters? Is it too out-of-date an idea to have a place very own for dance? While we discuss fluidity of definitions and intermediality in arts, specificity of medium remains one of the pinches for institutional critique and advocating for artists’ sustainability.
BIO ANASTASIA PROSHUTINSKAYA: Anastasia Proshutinskaya acquired M.A. in Art Theory and History from the Moscow State University and M.A. in Performance Studies from The Southern Illinois University. Since 2012, she has been in charge of contemporary dance curating in ZIL Culture Centre, Moscow, with her focus being on the emergence of independent dance artists, knowledge and language in dance, as well as international encounters. Since recently, she is an independent curator and researcher. In 2020, she conducted a course on contemporary dance visuality for MA in Curating Contemporary Art (HSE, Moscow and Garage Contemporary Museum, Moscow). This made her interested in the peculiar presence of dance within the museum and visual arts discourse.
Through this discussion we will try to explore the lived experiences of the ordinary ongoingness in the period of crisis, in particular in relation to artists, performers, choreographers, dancers, curators, and what critical forms of knowledge, strategies, and politics of curating they might generate. What sort of entanglements are being reconfigured between new media, social media, online platforms, online communication and teaching, on the one hand, and the dimension of corporeal face-to-face interaction and liveness as constitutive of performative practices and arts, on the other hand?
The discussion was recorded, to watch the film on YouTube click below:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-5_YSMiTjo
BIO MARIJANA CVETKOVIĆ: Marijana Cvetković is a writer, researcher, curator, producer, teacher in the field of culture and cultural policy. She graduated in art history in Belgrade. She completed MA in management in culture and cultural policy (Belgrade and Lyon). Currently a PhD candidate at the Faculty of Dramatic Arts. Co-founder of Station Service for contemporary dance and the Balkan Platform Nomad Dance Academy. Cultural activist at the independent cultural scenes of Belgrade and Serbia, co-founder of associations other scene and Association of Independent Cultural Scene of Serbia. Actively participates in the initiatives Cultural Center Magacin, http://xn--zajedniko-rfb.org/ (platform for theory and practice of the commons) and the independent dance scene in Belgrade.
BIO ROK VEVAR: Rok Vevar is a writer covering contemporary performing arts theory and history, a contemporary dance historian and archivist published in numerous Slovene daily newspapers and international journals of performing arts and literature. At the Academy of Theatre, Film and Television in Ljubljana he taught history, dramaturgy, analysis, theory of contemporary dance, as well as theatre criticism. Since 2012 he co-curates the international dance festival CoFestival (Nomad Dance Academy Slovenija, Kino Šiška). He is an active member of the Balkan network for dance, Nomad Dance Academy, and its various artistic, educational, and production programs. As part of the Nomad Dance Institute project he initiated the archiving and historization of choreographic practices in the region, and published the findings of this research in the journal Maska. In 2012 he established the Temporary Slovenian Dance Archives in his own apartment, moving it to the Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova in Ljubljana in April 2018.
BIO JASMINA ZALOŽNIK: Jasmina Založnik is a dramaturge, theatrologist, critic and producer. Her primary focus is on contemporary dance; she deals with its historicization and reflection, and fosters initiatives that help create more encouraging conditions for its development. She is an active member of the Nomad Dance Academy Slovenija, regional network the Nomad Dance Academy, the City of Women Association, and a member of professional guild organizations: the Association of Theatre Critics and Researchers of Slovenia and the Contemporary Dance Association Slovenia. She is also a member of the editorial board of Maska journal and Dialogi journal, and is active locally and internationally as a writer, dramaturge, curator, moderator, consultant, researcher and art collaborator. She holds a master’s degree in philosophy and is completing her PhD thesis titled ‘Claiming the Space of the New Performative Art Practices: Ljubljana, Belgrade, and Novi Sad (1965 – 1987)’ at the University of Aberdeen (UK). In 2015, she received the Ksenija Hribar Award for dance in the category of criticism/dramaturgy/theory.
BIO JASNA JASNA ŽMAK: Jasna Jasna Žmak is a freelance dramaturge and writer based in Zagreb, Croatia, and working in the fields of performance, dance, literature and film. She is assistant professor at the Department of Dramaturgy at the Academy of Dramatic Art in Zagreb, where she previously graduated. She holds a PhD from the Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities of the University of Zagreb. Her research interests include different shades of performance dramaturgy, reflections of feminist perspectives and questions of queer possibilities. She was a member of the editorial board of the performing arts journal Frakcija. She writes performance texts, short stories, reviews, research papers, and essays. She has published several books, including “Lecture as performance, performance as lecture – on the production of knowledge in the arts” (Leykam International, 2019) and “Dirty words – essays on female sexuality” (Fraktura, 2020).