Stranger in the City

Isaac Julien, "Paradise Omeros" , 2002.


"Why are we afraid of globalization, that is the dissolving of the state frontiers monitored by armies of adequately equipped specialized police bodies? We are afraid of globalization because strangers will be constantly trespassing into our neighborhoods and lurking on our street-corners!

The next question then is: Why are we afraid of strangers? I am afraid of strangers because they might harm me. I am afraid to be assaulted and killed by strangers. This is why I feel safer with state-monitored frontiers.

And this leads to the third question: Were foreigners always considered dangerous and the well-guarded frontiers always necessary? Here we stumble on an intriguing diversity of attitudes: not all world civilizations consider strangers dangerous creatures. Where the 1930s Hollywood movie-makers put two pistols in the hands of the cowboy to make sure that the treacherous stranger who appeared at the frontier had no chance to escape death, the ninth century Baghdad story-tellers who crafted the Sindbad tales, made the Iraqi crowds love foreigners, because this hero gathered fabulous wealth by taking risky trips to India and China's faraway islands. "

Fatema Mernissi, Why Are We Afraid of Globalization

E-flux Video Rental

E-flux video rental is an ongoing work by Anton Vidokle and Julieta Aranda, comprising a free rental, a public screening room, and a film and video archive that is constantly growing. This collection of over 850 works of film and video art has been assembled in collaboration with more than 400 artists, curators and critics.
The art project initially presented at a storefront in NY Chinatown and made possible by Anton's and Julieta's large network of institutions and individuals gathered thru e-flux's (electronic flux corporation) newsletter and international biennials, came to Lisbon this summer after landing in Amsterdam, Frankfurt, Seoul, Paris, Istanbul, Canary Islands, Austin, Budapest, Boston, Antwerp, Berlin, Miami and Lyon.
The setting for exact replica of NY store (missing only the water dripping air condition mounted in front) couldn't be more unsettling- EVR was placed in a foyeur of a powerful private foundation with public interest, relying on oil traffic, which still remains the primary in-flux of money for this 'national' institution of good reputation, funded by an armenian emigré in the times of turkish genocide, and exercing unquestioned influence and power in the local art context.
But that's yet another of inumerous contradictions of our present condition.
EVR is a poetic exploration of alternative processes of circulation and distribution, and it is structured to function like a typical video rental store, except that it operates for free. VHS tapes can be watched in the space, or, once a new member fills out a membership form and contract, they can be checked out and viewed at home.
It's a great idea to enable public access to around 800 video works, that even the art goers that 'operate' internationally would have little chance to see, and have to content themselves with occasional stills spotted in this or that magazine, this or that electronic portal, a newsletter, an exhibition(but these are almost exclusively dedicated to a single artist or historical works, with some exceptions).
As well an emphasis on circulation (here Anton referred to Marx and video art in its beginnings) and use of out-dated technology (VHS video tape) work as a concept, but when you're there in the screening room, choosing and playing one video after another in an attempt to watch all, in fact the bad quality of the image can become very irritating, especially when you know that most of the videos are part of the current art production, HD, and imagine that some elites actually have the opportunity to see them in better screening conditions. Why archives have always to be so boring?
However, this horrible tech makes you aware of the circulation and distribution, that is the idea behind the art project.
To propose my personal 'cut' on the film and video works, to write history in the present, I would destaque An Artist Who Cannot Speak English Is No Artist by albanian Jakup Ferri, based on Mladen Stilinovic's conceptual work from the '70s. Here the artist appears talking to the camera in his studion in a kind of improvised creepy english, not articulated, repeating, with local sotaque, an outcast, impossible to understand, looking like he is trying his best to give meaning to this babbling, though in fact mocking with the artworld.
Letters à Francine consists of b&w stills, and a voice-over of a man, travelling in Istanbul who's dealing with uncurable disease attempting to comunicate his feelings and observations to beloved one, a woman called Francine. It evokes La Jetté.
Sunset at Corniche was repeatedly filmed by The Atlas Group, a project to investigate the contemporary history of Lebanon. I Only Wish That I Could Weep could be filmed as well in Lisbon or any other city by the sea, could it be? Sunset in Beirut looks so uncannily familiar.
Soviet illegal women in Turkey are the protagonists of Unawarded Performances by Gülsün Karamustafa. “When Soviet Union broke up, our families broke up.”
Another document, Khiam, provided by Hadjithomas&Joreige incitates the victims of torture perpetuated at Israeli detention camp to talk.
Oda Projesi Revisited documents the Istanbuli 'room projects', a socially oriented art practice engaging with the community, somewhat akin to esthetique relationelle, that was tested already by Claire Bishop in her widely discussed article Social turn: Aesthetics and Its Discontents in Artforum.
Hala Elkoussy's Candy Floss Stories are strange and poetic fictions about worker of wonders on a black and white Cairo beach accompanied by wicked elctronic beats and president's speech at the end.
This Day by Akram Zaatari is a feature, a political meditation about Bedouin and the Desert, employing documentary approach and tackling notions like space, nomadism, migration, perpetual movement and the reconstruction of history.
This autumn EVR is travelling to Colombia, Argentina and Brazil.
Having outlived the technology that made it possible, the project will be premanently archived at the Arab Image Foundation and Moderna Galerija, Ljubljana, in 2009.

Projects(Kusmi Tea Sweet Love)

Concept and Location:.
The project Kusmi Tea Sweet Love is a collaboration between a curator, lawyer, architect and a filmmaker based on the research conducted in Lisbon's multicultural and somewhat notorious neighbourhood Martim Moniz that reflects the shifts on global scale.
It adresses art and its markets by looking at the other, less familiar trading places and routes extending from Europe to Africa, Latin America and Orient.
Or is it the other way around?
The relations between contemporary art and theft, public space and speculation, artworld and black market, architecture and frontier, and micro-economy and immigration are being explored.
Set in an apartment rented on purpose in the same zone for one month and transformed into a temporary art space, it comprises of an art exhibition, lectures, screenings, discussions, a dinner take-away, a concert, documentation, a food store, tea service, etc.
The location shapes the project in unexpected ways.
We took a following text as a departure node:
In the midst of a black market, a town in town, a buissness spot with unlimited traffic, where micro economy based on exchange of all kind of goods except artworks, is performed daily by immigrants from India, Pakistan, China and Guiné Bissau. Thieves? Merchants? Speculators?
In the centre of Lisbon a small narrow street, where the red letters on ringbells are exclusively in chinese. Some of the apartments, however difficult to say which, host illegal chinese restaurants that differ little from common homes in order to hide their activity. The owners/cooks don't speak neither portuguese nor english and the clients choose from untranslated menus.
Located on the frontier with moorish and red light district, the zone is also known for delicious indian sweets of many colours.
Fiction?
Throughout the history and up to the present the site has been demolished many times, to be rebuild after according to the new ideology.
The huge square bears a monument to the conquest of the Arabs, over-shadowed by the totalitarian architecture of four-star Hotel Mundial, equally over-sized, or the unfinished construction plans on the side. The square serves as a resting area, unofficial market or a spot for encounters and socialising. In other words: unrestricted space, difficult to find in other european capitals and probably closer to the notion of public space in african cities.
The decadent four-storey “shopping centre” CCM (not to be mistaken with CCB- that's contemporary art centre) provides a wong kar wai-style corridors with neon lights where buissness keeps going on until late. The indian spices can be purchased along with sunglasses from Bangladesh and underwear from Brasil. There is a chinese restaurant with a view of 180 degrees and an african hairdresser, the best in town, to balsam your hair after visiting the music shop with the latest singles that could as well be in Kinshasa or Bamako.
The previous research conducted in the zone included a friendship with a young Pakistani buissness man who introduced me to the tricks of the market, a frequent lunch at chinese legal quiosque or a dinner from the clandestine menu, cutting hair at the african hairstudio, shopping Chai(the black tea with spices) at indian supermarket and take-away of the sweets form the restaurant around the corner, filming the square- men with turbans trading mobile phones and women walking down the square from CCM carrying enormous,black plastic bags on their heads. It involved also performing on the square dressed as a wealthy muslim woman(post 9/11), etc.
The collaboration is done together with a lawyer(who wishes to remain anonymous), a funder of the NGO dealing with the rights of the immigrants, foreigners and others, and immigrant herself. She is responsible for the legal questions, meaning that she will also do a lecture on the topic and provide free advisory for interested parties.
The architect of lively spaces and night conversations, and main cultural mover Sara G enters the project to deal with all spatial issues, including the exhibition design. She will also move the crowd gathering outside of her bar every night in direction Martim Moniz.
The capeverdian filmmaker Victoria Verrisímo will fly-in to produce a low-budget documentary film about the square and its notorious surroundings and document the event.
Though we are aware of the social turn in contemporary art and the potential of this project, Kusmi Tea Sweet Love doesn't attempt to improve anything in society, serve the community or bring art back to life. It just brings the artworld face to face with the market of a different kind and hopes to make them think.
The label Kusmi Tea was founded 140years ago by P.M. Kousmichoff. St. Petersburg, London, Paris, Berlin. Kusmi Tea initially spread its influence in Europe before offering the whole world exclusive and high quality blends.
The Kusmi Tea Sweet Love is said to be an exquisite spicy blend that stimulates the senses.
Sweet Love is made of Black China tea, ginseng and liquorice roots, spices, guarana seeds and pink pepper.
Some of the proposed topics for discussion/lectures can be found here:
“ More intriguing to me, however, is how conceptual practices have migrated to the platforms of larger buissness models and proved them quite successful in that context. This suggest a different level of correspondence between art and commerce. ” Tim G(ArtForum)
“ Modernity and renewal by their nature are connected to ideas of a rational and ordered mode of thought, of a planned and effective kind of production, with ideas of a thoughtful use of space and resources, with ideas of a well organized and equitable society. “ Igor Zabel(Individual Systems)
Artists:.
Irwin group opens a passport office, issuing official documents of the NSK State in Time.
Sislej Xhafa does an exclusive performance on the notion of “clandestino”. The artist is known for subversive performance works, which adress the social, economical and political realities of tourism and geographical relations, and the complex forces that form modern global societies.
Sancho Silva stages a new project contaminating public space. Orange Works is an ongoing collaboration project, started in 2004, to build unauthorized temporary urban constructions camouflaged as in-process construction sites in order to probe existing spatial pressures, and reorganize public spaces to allow for new social uses.
DJ/Rupture(Brooklyn) does a live mix for the vernissage and in addition to performance his weekly radio show Mudd-Up! is broadcasted every wednesday at midnight local time.
“New bass and beats plus live guests(musicians, Djs, poets) and an ear for the global south. Cumbia. Dubstep. Gangsta synthetics. Sound-art. Maghrebi. International exclusives.”
MioStoj, an emergent artist and architect based in Frankfurt shares a video shot in a dance club called Robert Johnson, after a famous jazz musician, that was recorded during one year without having a permission. Weekend never dies.
Emily Jouvet pays a spicy hommage to photography from a Paris' rooftop. The soundtrack of this short and stimulating video is by Portishead. The artist became known for the feature film One Night Stand, a close-up of the casual erotic encounters between girls, for which Roof is a short excercise in style.
The art duo Piglet&Butcherboy, in a duel since 1996, have their take on Tate Modern. Uninvited, they decided to contaminate the gallery with a pig while Olafur Eliasson's Wheather Project was on. Meanwhile, the tourists were having their lunch from MacDonald's peacefully underneath the huge sun installation.
Two very young and unestablished local artists are being included in the exhibition. Filipa Almeida shows her portraits of the legendary jazz musicians performing live in Lisbon. While Catarina Pedroso installs a series of large scale photos, blow-ups of the mouth, at the same time dangerous and erotic, playing with prejudices, and referring to advertising, anthropology and feminism.
Budget:.
The total budget including curator's fee, the artists' fees and trips, the installation and equipment, apartment rent, dinner service, a small publication(can be on-line), posters announcing the event, a salary for the staff, etc. is 30 000 euros, provided by the NGO, Gulbenkian Foundation(production of the exhibitions, up to 10 000 euros), City Council(offering a space), foreign cultural institutes and embassies(covering rtists' travel and stay), sponsorship by the restaurants for the dinner, drinks from Baliza bar, plus european funds if applicable.
Publicity Plan:.
Posters all over the city, unusual for art events here. If the budget allows also appears on e-flux, in addition to local press.

Silvia Kolbowski: After Hiroshima Mon Amour

The video After Hiroshima Mon Amour by Silvia Kolbowski currently on view at Mala galerija in Ljubljana and based on Resnais/Duras masterpiece is a work about our inability to fully understand and represent the past and present catastrophes.
Originally, it is a story of a French woman and Japanese men who meet in japan twelve years after the dropping of the bomb on Hiroshima and begin a one-night affair . They are an allegorical couple , standing for two different actors in the war- France and Japan- evoking challenging questions about disobedience, ethics and desire in a time of military conflict.
According to Jalal Toufic the most beautiful cinematic love stories take place against the backdrop of destruction of the city and possibly of the world, such as La jetté for example. Every love of a man and a woman takes place in seclusion from the world: every love of a man and a woman has for horizon the destruction of the world since they can restart the human race (this is one of the ways love is linked to death).
Rather than a reconstruction, this video uses repetition as a strategy where the diference is what matters. The story is re-enacted by ten different actors of ambigious ethnic origin and race, and unstable gender relations. It is contrasted by the found material that usually depicts violence and brutality, often from the point of view of the power.
As the video comes after the original it situates it in a contemporary political frame. We can observe the devastated streets of New Orleans after the hurricane Katrina, where the US government did nothing to secure the poorest population from the outcomes of the catastrophe. The shots problematize the relationship between the filmmaker and the viewer. We suddeenly burst into an apartment in Iraq along with american soldiers and face a man and an old woman screaming as they are confronted with machine guns. Also, we see a street, presumably in a Middle-Eastern city, from a viewpoint of a speeding driver and are placed on the side of watching the suffering of others. An uncomfortable position.
The texts that appear as titles are in fact a collage of Duras's original script for Hiroshima Mon Amour- fragmented and reassembled by Kolbowski- and Duras's written synopsis of the film. The narration oscillates between the third-person voiceover of the synopsis and a fascinating dialogue between the shifters “I” and “you”, which appear in the fragments appropriated from the film's script.
The dialogue between a French woman and Japanese man in the book Hiroshima Mon Amour beginns tellingly with:
“You have seen nothing in Hiroshima. Nothing.”
“I've seen all. All.”
In the video, the text doesn't fit the image, while sound, silence and colours appear as active actors that give meaning to the material.
The artist became known for her project an inadequate history of conceptual art for which she invited various individuals to tell her their memories of an exhibition, performance or event of conceptual art without doing further research. She would record the audio and display it in a separate room from a video showing their hands while speaking.

Projects(Franchise)

In the midst of a black market, a town in town, a buissness spot with unlimited traffic, where micro economy based on exchange of all kind of goods except artworks, is performed daily by immigrants from India, Pakistan, China and Guiné Bissau. Thieves? Merchants? Speculators?
In the centre of Lisbon a small narrow street, where the red letters on ringbells are exclusively in chinese. Some of the apartments, however difficult to say which, host illegal chinese restaurants that differ little from common homes in order to hide their activity. The owners/cooks don't speak neither portuguese nor english and the clients choose from untranslated menus.
Located on the frontier with moorish and red light district, the zone is also known for delicious indian sweets of many colours.
To link this all and to check how global Lisbon art scene is, I propose a project called 'Franchise', set in an apartment rented on purpose on the same small street and showcasing ten international and local artists, with some projects specially commissioned for this show.
Irwin group opens a passport office. Sisley Xhafa does an exclusive performance on the notion of 'clandestino'. Sancho Silva stages a new project contaminating public space. While Dj/ Rupture streams radioshow live. Mio Stoj shares a video shot in a club 'Robert Johnson'. Emily Jouvet pays a spicy hommage to photography from a Paris' rooftop. And Piglet&Butcherboy take on Tate Modern...
Note: an immigrant will be contracted to staff during the show.

Projects(Day for Night)

In a time of global crisis, over-heated art market, when artworks are increasingly transformed into speculative objects I'm prosposing an exhibition through which various discourses, artistic positions and strategies flow freely like people and capital in global and networked world.
Day for Night takes the title from the work by William Kentridge that resembles a star galaxy, a central piece of this exhibition, to which other artworks establish invisible relations. Infact, the whole structure of the exhibition revolves around small, unexpected constellations of artworks, falling stars, that occassionaly, and for limited period of time, enter in contact.
Kentridge's piece is, in accordance with the statement 'contemporary art objects are frequently not what they seem', actually made by filming ants crossing sugar linen, which makes the pulsating movement on the screen seem very organic. Afterwards, the shot was turned into negative, in a smart twist of what is known as 'nuit américaine', a trick used in '70s B-movies, that means basically shooting night scenes during the day so that they would look like night, resulting in fake night scapes. Instead of that we get a reflection on the process of filmmaking and the magic moment of film projection, leading us back to the beginnings of cinema.
The selection of artworks is based on Ellipse collection that is particularily vibrant in terms of still and moving image of the last thirty years. Both photography and video were not considered art forms in the beginning and had hard time trying to enter (even if contemporary) art history. Photography took over a century to legitimise its existence, while in the case of video this process is still going on and some of the works in this exhibition could intervene fundamentally in this regard.
Similarily, the artists were selected in non-hierarchical way, coming from very different backgrounds, generations and media. The little known artists find themselves in the same space with the undervalued artists and big names. Further, artists from the global South, living in the recently affirming art capitals like Luanda, Jo'burg or Istanbul mix successfully with those lucky(or not) to come from the self-proclaimed capitals of modernism.
The discourses fluctuating thru Day for Night range from queer theory, post-colonial studies, art history, post-feminism, economy(of art), film studies, late capitalism, religion and political philosophy in order to re-articulate contemporary art in our present condition of global unrest.
Artworks on their turn share an aesthetic quality, a beauty that can be political and is normally associated with the 'Other'. And this 'Other' can be nowadays anyone not in possession of right passport. That is, everyone not coming from the forementioned 'centers of modernism' (which undoubtedly still remain the centers of artworld's financial transactions), or global North in general, as well as artists living outside their homeland for any reason. Obviously, this reaffirmation of aesthetics in the works of Kentridge, Pierson, Julien, Orozco or Gonzalez-Torres has nothing to do with aesthetic concerns of modernism or a retroactive cry for ' art for art's sake'.
Most of the videoworks in this exhibition tend towards spatiality and non-linear narrative structure, that becomes kind of a paradigm when observed through a wider scope, it can be noticed in the pieces by Sala, Ahtila, Julien, Yonamine and to certain extent also Kentridge and Atay.
Some of the chosen artworks (art is the question of choosing, afterall) share the performative aspects or are carefully staged as is the case with Sherman, Lucas, Julien, Moffat or Serrano, Breuning and McGuinley to name a few.
Lots of them are playful and engage with the world in humorous way (Orozco, Baldessari, Simmons, Schütte, Breuning, McGuinley, Kelley).
Though what links most of them is desire, as a theme, but also a driving force behind everything we do and inherent to artistic practice.
During the exhibition some artists reappear, we encounter them in different rooms and constellations (Pierson, Orozco, McGuinley and Gonzalez-Torres).
Day for Night shares a room with Anri Sala's double screen projection Blindfold, exhibiting two different angles on the same scene shot in Tirana, showing that what we see depends on our perspective, it is therefore conditioned. The fact that video is local specific locates it light years away from the 'liquid', 'neutral' videoworks from the past decades.
The constellation that follows is charged with desire. There is an untitled photo of purple-toned flowers by Fischli&Weiss; a colourful metamorphosis by Cindy Sherman who is known to use herself as a protagonist for most of the photos she does, adding performative aspect to her practice; a black and white self-portait obviously influenced by her by smoking Sarah Lucas; sexually intense Indian Corn and Pommegranate by Tillmans; blown-up Stardust by Pierson where queer theory enters; A History of Sex explained by Serrano, one of most disquieting artists of our time; an incredibly contemporary work by Baumgarten from '68 called Pupile; and, finally, Islamorada, a paradisiac photo of a palm tree taken from the bottom up that might as well have to do with cuban illegal immigration to the States via deep blue sea.
Next room proposes two video projections that apparently have very little in common, except the strong presence of women protagonists. Wind is part of the Eina Lisa Ahtila's project Love is a Treasure and is essentially about women, their complexities and relationships, for which she spend some time with the patients of psychiatrical institution. Julien's Fântome Afrique in its turn is a triple screen projection dealing with phantoms of the past, colonial history, cinema and love, shot in the african capital of cinema Ouaga. Its protagonists are two 'phantoms', a man and woman, who despite the proximity of their trajectories will never meet, because spectres are invisible even to each other. It is a tale about impossibility of love, and that would actually connect both videoworks, besides their decidedly spatial orientation and non-linear narration.
What follows is not yet titled sculpture of burning drums by Violette Banks, a work yet to come, forming a 'community' with Heroine by Pierson that refers to popular culture, queer world and the killing drug, completed with a post-colonial flavoured painting of sculls, Hula girls, by Ashley Bickerton from Barbados.
Further, the viewer encounters works by Yonamine and Fikret Atay, first being part of Luanda's young artists launched internationally through controversial Check-list: Luanda Pop exhibition at last Venice Biennial, which affirmed Luanda as an art capital to be watched on.
A humour and exuberance enters the exhibition, generally more inclined towards night visions through this stargate: Lemonspeed by Orozco and a 'carroty' Game for two players by Baldessari, through Dieter and Klaus by Schütte coupled with c-print jigsaw puzzles in plastic bag- Loverboy and Fainted by cubanico Gonzalez-Torres, and to close the room Tracey Moffat's latino flavoured knife on the table together with Lady G, that is, a naked blond princess on the horse, by Olaf Breuning; frivolous Jessy by McGuinley in all her beauty; and Mike Kelley's toy-like object The Way is I Am.
The red colour links the pieces from the constellation to come, from horrific video Charlotte by Steve McQueen, to the filtered Shinjuku cemetery by Thomas Struth, or equally terrifying woman from I don't live here anymore by Rondinone, to the teasing Three Red Petit Fours by Laurie Simmons to finish and digest the nightmare.
Day for Night, is coming closer to an end now, its flickering stars turning into stardust, and the last room is again dedicated to still images. Bathtub full of ecstatic youth; Foam on the street without providing a clear idea where it comes from, but nevertheless soon to be dissolved, recalls Sloterdijk; Nudes on the Bed, another joyful session of twenty-somethings, quite common these days; Double
Falling Sunset- a climax making the transition from day to night easier; infinitely triste Last Light; and untitled Cold Blue Snow and Key West dispersal, in an interplay of two artists- Ryan McGuinley and Felix Gonzalez-Torres.
Curating, intended as 'statement in the space' would involve discussions with an architect, having 'nuit américaine' as departure node, and trying to avoid clichés of screening videoworks.
The project will be documented in a thin publication, relying on images of the exhibited artworks accompanied by detailed description of each work and a short intro by the curator.
The exhibition will be announced internationally via E-flux, in addition to usual adds in local press.
Day for Night is the first project in the series of three exhibitions appearing under the common title For the Love of God (present condition and contemporary art), that obviously appropriates the title of Hirst's diamond scull, an artwork known to be at the same time democratic and elitist. It will be followed by History of Violence that puts together Serrano's photo of a member of Ku-Klux clan with Wallstreet by Opie and mehrlicht by Abdelsemed, or for instance Ruff's Petra Grot with Soldiers by Dijkstra. The last being Eyes wide Shut, to close the cycle with yet another title taken from film history. The project is taking as its premise a concept by Slavoj Zizek known as parallax gap.

The Next Step conference

9-10 May Ljubljana

In Ljubljana has just finnished the inernational conference of museums of modern and contemporary art organized by Moderna Galerija. Its title refers to the state of affairs brought about by the rapid globalization and the growing doubts concerning the universality of the Western canon of art history.
The conference appears at the moment when virtually all principal museums in the region are closed for renovation or (re)construction.. Could this be the right moment for them to think about a new type of museum based on the production of knowledge on still-uncanonized histories?
The other questions proposed deal with the work of the museums under global economic crisis and the loooming financial restrictions, and the course of action to be adopted when new spaces are opening up whose art has not yet been integrated into existing canon.
The speakers from the institutions such as Reina Sofia, Centre Pompidou and Tate Modern were involved in the first panel discussion Include or change? that showed that two courses of action seem possible at the moment: one leads to the Other being merely subsumed into the existing art history system, and the other presumes the recognition of a need for a different approach to historicizing which would lead to a global transformation of the workings of the art system and the conception of the museum collections. It seems that all of them opted for the first possibility.
What is happening to the principal museum institutions in the region of former Yugoslavia were trying to respond the speakers from the museums of contemporary art in Belgrade, Skopje, Sarajevo, Zagreb and Ljubljana's Moderna Galerija.
The next question focused on the museum's original significance as a place of study and knowledge production and dissemination in the times of a neo-liberal economy and the global economic crisis, to which Charles Esche, Nina Möntman and Sabine Breitwieser were able to respond best and finish with lively discussion the first day of the conference at around eight o'clock in the evening.
On sunday followed the debate around the legacy of the museums in the countries of formerly repressive political regimes and the future they face based on the examples of Brasil, Poland and Eastern Germany. Museums in countries that used to be relatively isolated seem especially interested in including their local art in international context. How can this international context, specific yet global at the same time, in regions such as South America or Eastern Europe be problematized?
The final word was given to the artists who were asked to show how artists can help make histories presented by the museums more comprehensive.
Irwin quoted from their project East Art Map, which is an attempt to re-construct the art history from Eastern Europe of the last fifty years. Silvia Kolbowski presented her project an inadequate history of conceptual art, Tadej Pogacar his P.A.RA.S.I.T.E Museum of Contemporary Art and Gediminas Urbonas a winning entry for Guggenheim in Vilnius, a space ship by Zaha Hadid.
Artist on the move, Apolonija Sustersic talked about her own practice related to the critical analyses of space, and the processes and relationships between institutions, cultural politics, urban planning and architecture.