Program: March 1- 30th 2008
Saturday, March 1st
7-10 pm
open to public
Opening remarks, Anton Vidokle
Liam Gillick: Two Short Texts on the Possibility of Creating an
Economy of Equivalence
Day 1: The day AFTER closure of an experimental factory.
Bering in mind:
The book
Immaterial labor
Analogous mapping
Cultural echoes
Sites of production
Agency in relation to eco-politics
Coalescence/return of classical relations of production
Consensus models as a phantom parallel
Detailed work in the cultural frame
The factory/the wholesale transfer of activity
The management of time in the cultural sphere
Languages of production and development
How to work together
Nostalgia for the group
The day before/the day after
Conditions for the experimental but no experiments
Suspension/repression as a dominant model
The location of the projected problem always out
of reach or too close
The potential of refusal and collective ennui (the focus of the exercise
is permanently displaced)
Liam Gillick is based in New York and London. Numerous solo exhibitions
since 1989 include ‘Literally’, The Museum of Modern Art, New
York, 2003; ‘Communes, bar and greenrooms’, The Powerplant
Contemporary Art Gallery, Toronto, 2003; ‘The Wood Way’, Whitechapel
Gallery, London, 2002; ‘A short text on the possibility of creating an
economy of equivalence’, Palais de Tokyo, 2005. Selected group exhibitions
include ‘Singular Forms’, Guggenheim Museum, 2004; 50th
Venice Biennale, 2003; ‘What If’, Moderna Museet, Stockholm, 2000
and documenta X, 1997. Numerous public projects and interventions
include Ft. Lauderdale Airport in 2002; the new Home Office government
building in London in 2005 and the Lufthansa Headquarters in
Frankfurt in 2006.
Since 1995 Liam Gillick has published a number of books that function
in parallel to his artwork including Literally No Place (Book Works,
London, 2002); Five or Six (Lukas & Sternberg, New York, 1999);
Discussion Island/Big Conference Centre (Kunstverein Ludwigsburg,
Ludwigsburg, and Orchard Gallery, Derry, 1997), Erasmus is Late
(Book Works, London, 1995) and most recently PROXEMICS:
SELECTED WRITINGS 1988–2006 (JRP|Ringier, Zurich, 2007). Liam
Gillick has contributed to many art magazines and journals including
Artforum, Parkett, Frieze, Art Monthly and a regular column for
Metropolis M in Amsterdam and has taught at Columbia University, New
York, since 1997. A retrospective series of exhibitions opened in January
at Witte de With and the Kunsthalle Zurich, traveling to the Kunstverein
München in July and ending at the Museum of Contemporary Art
in Chicago in January 2009.
The re-launch of the WUNP – unitednationsplaza Radio Network
WUNP is a radio station produced by Valerie Tevere + Ángel Nevarez for
Unitednationsplaza MX. WUNP is a portal for broadcasting audio works,
conversations, and conceptual radio projects.
Angel Nevarez & Valerie Tevere
Since 2001 Angel Nevarez and Valerie Tevere (aka neuroTransmitter) have engaged in an artistic practice that focuses on the archeology of radio histories – particularly the resistant moments associated with the medium, the study of its architectural residues and monuments, and in considering new possibilities for the broadcast spectrum as discursive public space. Tevere and Nevarez have shown their work, performed and broadcasted live on local bandwidths, in public spaces, and museums internationally. http://www.neurotransmitter.fm
Sunday, March 2nd
4-7 pm
open to public
Liam Gillick: Two Short Texts on the Possibility of Creating an
Economy of Equivalence
Day 2: Reoccupation, recuperation and PRECISE renovation.
Monday, March 3rd
7-10 pm
open to public
Eduardo Abaroa: Cheap Nebula
A nebula is a discrete amount of dust, hydrogen gas and plasma. It is
the first stage in the formation of a star or group of stars. The didactic
materials for this course will be in a state of plasma: something resembling
both, liquids and gases, a fourth stage of matter.
The seminar will discuss a series of brief texts on different issues, the
limits of which may collide against or integrate with other issues. It
cannot pretend to have a defined program, but look for a stage of
possibility. Some videos will be shown...on a plasma screen, if possible.
Topics:
Homeopathic Curing
Pirate ships and Mercenaries, the role of art
Criticism in Mexico
An Archive of Moments and Places (video documents)
Microscopic Museology
Free Speech in Mexico Right Now, Please
Eduardo Abaroa is an artist and writer living in Mexico City. He has
shown his sculpture and video work in several international venues and
has produced a series of texts about the contemporary art practice in
Mexico, including "Art Log, artist run spaces in the 90's" which will be
published soon. He is a cofounder of the artist run space Temistocles 44
in Mexico City. Tuesday, March 4th
3-6 pm
Cheap Nebula workshop (open to core group participants only)
7-10 pm
open to public
Natasha Sadr Haghighian: 40 minutes between the boards
A series of black boards will be installed on the terrace of Casa Refugio.
Objects, sketched with chalk on those boards, will serve as coordinates
for a 40 minute walkthrough. The drawings will function as links to
theory, personal experiences and questions that arise from image
production and deal with other tricky representational formats. The
walkthrough will operate in-between those coordinates, reflecting on
defacement, renaming and other possible and impossible ways of
confronting representations one can't get rid of: representations that,
through their apparitional features, block the access to situations, to
negotiation and to change.
Natasha Sadr Haghighian's biography can be found at
http://www.bioswop.net
Wednesday, March 5th
2-5 pm
Workshop with Natascha Sadr Haghighian (core group participants
only)
Thursday, March 6th
7-10 pm (Confirm at PAC´s telephone)
open to public
Rirkrit Tiravanija: The Land
Initiated in 1998, the land (more direct translation from Thai to English
would be, the rice field) was the merging of ideas by different artists to
cultivate a place of and for social engagement.
Though initially the action to acquire the rice fields were initiated by
two artists from Thailand, the land was initiated with anonymity and
without the concept of ownership. The land was to be cultivated as an
open space, though with certain intentions towards community,
towards discussions and towards experimentation in other fields of
thoughts.
Born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, the Thai artist Rirkrit Tiravanija,
is widely recognized as one of the most influential artists of his generation.
His work defies media-based description, as his practice combines
traditional object making, public and private performances, teaching,
and other forms of public service and social action. Winner of the 2005
Hugo Boss Prize awarded by the Guggenheim Museum, his exhibition
there consisted of a pirate radio (with instructions on how to make one
for yourself.) Tiravanija was also awarded the Benesse by the
Naoshima Contemporary Art Museum in Japan and the Smithsonian
American Art Museum's Lucelia Artist Award. He has had a retrospective
exhibition at the Museum Bojmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam
that then was presented in Paris and London. Tiravanija is on the
faculty of the School of the Arts at Columbia University, and is a founding
member and curator of Utopia Station, a collective project of
artists, art historians, and curators.
5 pm (Mexico City)
Circuit Maps and Conceptual Networks
WUNP
www.unitednationsplaza.org/radio.html
Tevere and Nevarez will present historical and contemporary models related to the field of radio – as an artistic form, a communicatory tool, a facilitating device, and political and cultural force. Of particular focus, today’s broadcast will look at radio and telephony in the work of Max Neuhaus, Radio Alice, and Tetsuo Kogawa.
Friday, March 7th
3-6pm
Workshop with Rirkrit Tiravanija (core group participants only)
7-10pm
open to public
Martha Rosler, Essays
Presentation of “Imágenes públicas: La función política de la imagen”
Editorial Gustavo Gili, Barcelona, 2007
Mixing analysis and wit, Rosler challenges many of the fundamental
precepts of present-day art practice in investigating the role of the
artist as author and citizen.
Martha Rosler was born in Brooklyn, New York, where she now lives,
after spending the 1970s in California. She works in video, photo-text,
installation, sculpture, and performance, and writes on aspects of
culture. She is a renowned teacher and has lectured widely, nationally
and internationally. Rosler's work is centered on everyday life and the
public sphere, often with an eye to women's experience. Recurrent
concerns are the media and war as well as architecture and the built
environment, from housing and homelessness to systems of transport. Her work has been seen in the Venice Biennale of 2003; the Liverpool
Biennalel and the Taipei Biennale (both 2004); documenta 12 and
SkultpturProjekte Münster (2007); as well as many major international
survey shows, including several Whitney biennials. She has had
numerous solo exhibitions. A retrospective of her work, Positions in the
Life World (1998-2000), was shown in five European cities and at the
New Museum and the International Center of Photography (both in New
York), concurrently. Rosler has published fifteen books of photography,
art, and writing, most recently Imágenes públicas: La función política
de la imagen (Gustavo Gili, Barcelona, 2007). Decoys and Disruptions:
Selected Essays 1975-2001 was published by MIT Press in 2004. Books
of her photographs include Passionate Signals (Cantz, 2005), In the
Place of the Public: Airport Series (Cantz, 1997), and Rites of Passage
(NYFA, 1995). If You Lived Here (Free Press, 1991) addresses her Dia
project on housing, homelessness, and urban life. Rosler has been
awarded the Spectrum International Prize in Photography for 2005, the
Oskar-Kokoschka Prize in 2006, and Anonymous Was a Woman award
in 2007. She teaches at the Städelschule in Frankfurt and Rutgers
University.
Saturday, March 8th
2-5pm
Workshop with Martha Rosler (core group participants only)
7-10pm
open to public
Julieta Aranda & Regine Basha: Out of Tune
A presentation of audio/visual material collected over the past year by
Regine Basha and Julieta Aranda chronicling a displaced 1940s Iraqi
music scene and the possibilities and impossibilities of transmission in
the present day. Julieta Aranda, born in Mexico City, she currently lives and works
between Berlin and New York. Her work has been exhibited internationally
in shows such as Transmediale 08, Berlin; 9th Lyon Biennial,
Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art, MUSAC, Spain; REDCAT, LA,
ICA London; Moderna Galerija, Ljubljana; Museo Carrillo Gil, Mexico
City; Moore Space, Miami; Portikus, Frankfurt, Kunstwerke Institute for
Contemporary Art, Berlin; and VII Havanna Biennial amongst other.
Julieta received her MFA from Columbia University in 2006. She has
done residences at IASPIS in Sweden, and Récolletes in Paris, France.
She is represented by Galerie Michael Janssen in Berlin, and by
Fruit&Flower Deli in New York.
Regine Basha is an independent curator and art writer who has
worked nationally and internationally for the past 12 years having
worked with non-profit spaces in Montreal, New York, Istanbul and
recently as Adjunt Curator for Arthouse in Austin, Texas. She is a 1996
graduate of the Center For Curatorial Studies Program at Bard College,
New York. Her curatorial work has explored various exhibition formats
and specific modes of artists’ production and distribution in both public
and private spaces. She is co-founder of Fluent~Collaborative, and
Grackleworld.com. Her writing appears in numerous exhibition catalogs
most recently for Stephen Vitiello, Daniel Bozhkov, and Dario
Robleto/Jeremy Blake, as well as in the publications Cabinet, Modern
Painters, Art Papers, Bidoun and ArtLies. For a full exhibition list, see
http://web.mac.com/ginabasha.
Sunday, March 9th
5-7.30pm
open to public
Anselm Franke: From Animism to Animation: Moving Image in
Modern Culture
Introduction Anselm Franke
Guest speaker: Oksana Bulgakowa: Eisentstein in Mexico
Film excerpts "Que Viva Mexico"
Discussion
This seminar will focus on Eisenstein’s relation to "animism", animation,
and his obsession with images of death. Based on these, we invite
speculations on the relation between 'life' and 'death' as historical
dimensions of primitivism and the quest for a mode of 'visual thought';
and on mummification and animation in mass culture and the theory of
revolutions at large.
If artistic agency can be understood as intervention into collective
imaginaries, is it possible to identify the desires that define the relation
of power and autonomy in the realm of representations and popular
imaginings historically? For many seminal modern artists from Europe
and the United States, Mexico has variously operated as a screen on
which these desires have been projected, but also become historically
contested and readable.
This seminar departs from the case of Eisenstein, who, in 1931, coming
from Hollywood, has spent many months filming in Mexico. While
Eisenstein was not able to edit his own film material and complete the
film, he produced hundreds of pages of notes and drawings in Mexico,
thus making his time there one of the most productive of his life.
In Eisenstein' s universe, the experience of Mexico lead to far-reaching
revisions in his theory of the moving image in modern culture and the
revolution, such as his thinking about fetishism, and the European
model of the psyche as interior and individualised. More then a portrait
of Mexican culture, Eisenstein's 'Mexico' opens a unique perspective on
the Russian revolution, the agency of artists therein, emerging mass
culture globally, and particularly Eisenstein's own theory of montage.
The seminar opens with a lecture by renowned scholar and Eisenstein
biographer Oksana Bulgakowa, who will give an overview of
Eisenstein's relation to Mexico, followed by a discussion. The second
evening will be a presentation by Anselm Franke, drawing on material
and research for a recently opened exhibition on "Mimetisme" and a
future exhibition project including the drawings of Sergei Eisenstein.
Anselm Franke is a curator and writer based in Antwerp and Berlin.
He is currently the Artistic Director of Extra City Center for Contemporary
Art in Antwerp. Recent projects include Clinic: A Pathology of
Gestures at Hebbel Am Ufer, Berlin, November 2006, curated with Hila
Peleg and No Matter How Bright the Light, the Crossing Occurs at Night
at KW Berlin, September 2006, with Natascha Sadr Haghighian, Ines
Schaber and Judith Hopf. He has edited and published publications with
Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König and others and is a contributor
to magazines such as Parkett, Cabinet Magazine, Piktogram, Domus
and ARCHIS. Anselm Franke is currently a PhD candidate in Visual
Cultures/Center for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths College
London. Together with Hila Peleg, he is a co-curator of Manifesta 7,
Trentino - Alto Adige, Italy, 2008.
Oksana Bulgakowa. Professor of Film Studies at the International
Film School in Cologne, is a Moscow-born scholar who lives in Berlin.
She published several books on Russian and German cinema Sergei
Eisenstein: Three Utopias. Architectural drafts for a Film Theory, 1996;
FEKS - The Factory of Eccentric Actors, 1997; The Adventures of Doctor
Mabuse in the Country of Bolsheviks, 1995; The White Rectangle. Kazimir
Malevitch On Film, 1997 (English Edition 2002); Sergej Eisenstein.
A Biography, 1998; English edition 2003; Factory of Gestures, Moscow
2005), directed films (Stalin – a Mosfilmproduction, 1993; The Girl who
kissed Stalin, SR, 1995; The Different Faces of Sergei Eisenstein,
1998), curated a film section of an exhibit Moscow - Berlin, Berlin -
Moscow 1900-1950 and developed multimedia projects (a website The
Visual Universe of Sergei Eisenstein. Sketch book 1914, Daniel
Langlois-Foundation, Montreal, 2005; a DVD Factory of Gestures. On
Body Language in Film, Stanford Humanities Lab, 2008).
Monday, March 10th
7-10pm
open to public
A lecture by Anselm Franke
Tuesday, March 11th
7-10pm
open to public
Jan Verwoert: Yes, No And Other Options
Where do you want to go today? Possibilities are offered everywhere.
But in the end there are always only menues with preset options to
choose from. Are you for us or against us? This is the question of the
political. But can we really speak of choice when the options to choose
from are imposed by those in power? Do we even want to have
choices? Just-in-production, the new prevalent mode of labour, not just
in the cultural field, it seems, is all about pushing things to the point
where all options are exhausted and the only thing you can do is to do
what it takes to meet the deadline. Under the conditions of just-in-time
production labour is less and less work and more and more performance.
You perform to proof yourself. And to do so you have to be
ready anytime.
How do we want to live with these new standards of choice and
agency? There has to be a better solution than paranoia. What modes
and models of art and thinking can we develop to move beyond the
preset option menues and defy the pressure to perform? How can we
redefine the terms of choice and reinvent the pleasure (not) to
perform?
Jan Verwoert is an art critic based in Berlin. He is a contributing editor
to Frieze magazine and also writes regularly about contemporary art
for such art magazines as Afterall, Metropolis M. Teaches at the MA Fine
Arts department at the Piet Zwart Institute Rotterdam.
Who stands to gain from searing critiques of the North and Northwest,
or from upholding the aims of the East and South? An unresolved
tension here is the contradiction between the notion of artistic specificity
or autonomy, and the premise that art always testifies to a sociocultural
context. If art is a Euroamerican tradition per se, how can it be
globalized without a reasonable amount of epistemic violence? And if it
is irretrievably enmeshed with context, how to explain the miracle of
art being immaculately conceived all over the planet in a comparable
way? Though we cannot jump over our own intellectual shadows to
answer questions of such pretentious magnitude, we can, however,
take a good look at the xenophiliac fervor that fuels and complexifies
them.
The above research evolved into a premise more promising than
ethnicity, namely that of class hierachy, in the form of the exhibition
project Lapdogs of the Bourgeoisie, in collaboration with Nav Haq. To
what extent does class play a role in the production and dissemination
of contemporary art? The project is touring internationally from 2006
to 2009, investigating how and whether the ideology of socioeconomic
background still defines your art world career, and to which point such
a career might consolidate the ideologies in question. But although the notion of class is the thematic touchstone of the project,
the idea is not to use contemporary art to explore class structures
in society at large. Rather, the project hopes to develop a sense of art
world reflexivity, tracing hegemonic patterns within the field itself.
Moreover, in the light of recent changes in working conditions within
and without the arts, a main question here is whether the traditional
analytical tools at our disposal are still useful today. In the best of
cases, Lapdogs of the Bourgeoisie offers a venue for new working
hypotheses, pointed political speculation and much high-quality art,
but also a revisiting of what a group exhibition can offer in terms of
format, topic and discussion.
Finally, drawing on seminar experiences including the unp Berlin event
"That's Why You Always Find me In the Kitchen At Parties", or the
opening unp conference "A History of Productive Failures", Zolghadr
will raise a (self) critical discussion of the exhibition-as-school concept,
to contextualize it within larger debates and tentatively suggest new
directions. The above themes and contents aside, how does criticism,
discussion, theory render itself visible here, and to which extent can or
should it strive to do so. How to circumscribe the working definitions of
success and failure.
And how do those criteria sit with tendencies within the art field, e.g.
increasing demands for professional dexterity, and audiences with
increasingly varied educational backgrounds. More often than not,
professionals have been reacting to these demands with copy-paste
proficiency and vaguely intellectualized panic, and given the conditions
of labor within the field, a call for more “academic” approaches is
hardly realistic. What may prove more promising is to foster a critical
sense of the models and prototypes framing one’s theoretical armature,
to develop a notion of how they may compromise or at times
perhaps enhance the quality of the discussion.
irdad Zolghadr is a freelance writer based in Berlin and Tehran. He
writes for Frieze, Bidoun and other publications, and is editor-at-large
for Cabinet magazine. Zolghadr has also curated events in a wide range
of venues, also co-curating the international Sharjah Biennial 2005.
He's a founding member of the Shahrzad art & design collective, and
has published his first novel Softcore with Telegram Books London.
Writing and curating aside, Zolghadr filmed and directed the documentaries
Tehran 1380 (with Solmaz Shahbazi), winning the Young
Filmmaker's Award of Duisburg 2002, and Tropical Modernism, which
premiered at the Oberhausen Short Film Festival 2006.
Wednesday, March 12th
7-10pm
open to public
Jan Verwoert: Yes, No And Other Options
Part 2
11am (Mexico City)
on-air discussion with Taniel Morales
Today’s broadcast focuses on sound transmission in urban space. Taniel Morales is an artist, musician, and excellent cook based in Mexico City. He began his studies in mathmatics, yet when everything began to integrate into complex variables without explanations he changed his course to visual arts and radio. His work ranges from short historic sound capsules and radio montages, to broadcast interventions on public buses in Mexico City. http://tecnodiversidad.com/
Thursday, March 13th
7-10pm
open to public
Tirdad Zolghadr. Kitchen Party: revisiting Class Hegemony,
Ethnic Marketing and the unp
In the exhibition project Ethnic Marketing (2004-2006), the issue at
hand was to assess the emergent vicissitudes of the gradually “globalizing”
art circuit without repeating the curatorial clichés of recent years.
Having watched one example of critical internationalism after another
reduce itself to postcolonial platitude or self-congratulating adventurism,
TZ framed this project as an inquiry into Euroamerican xenophilia
in and of itself. Rather than try and build the proverbial Third World
“platform”, or “forum”, or “bridge”, the question is what makes the
bridging so attractive in first place.
Friday, March 14th
3-6pm
Workshop (core group participants only)
A Crime Against Art - A workshop with Hila Peleg (film making and
curatorial practice)
Hila Peleg is a curator based in Berlin. Born in Tel Aviv, Peleg studied
Art History at Goldsmiths College/University of London, where she is
currently a PhD candidate in Curatorial Knowledge/Visual Cultures.
Peleg organized and co-curated various international projects dealing
with artistic practices and culture from the Middle East. Other exhibitions
include: "The Imaginary Number" (KW Berlin, 2005), "Keren
Cytter: I was the good and he was the bad and the ugly" (KW Berlin,
2006) "Clinic. A Pathology of Gestures" (Hebbel Am Ufer Berlin, 2006).
Peleg is co-curator of Manifesta 7 that will take place in the region of
Trentino –Alto Adige / Südtirol in summer 2008.
7-10pm
open to public
Tirdad Zolghadr. Kitchen Party: revisiting Class Hegemony,
Ethnic Marketing and the unp
Part 2
Saturday, March 15th
1-10pm
open to public
Nikolaus Hirsch: The Architecture of Education
The seminar will explore the spatial parameters of knowledge production,
hence reflecting the model of unitednationsplaza as such. Since
this model proposes an “exhibition as school” we have to ask: What
and how do we display? Can we transcend the traditional boundaries
between research, education and display? What are the spatial formats
that determine the school?
Unitednationsplaza will be contextualized in a short history of school
models: a critical survey from ancient symposia, over modernist
schools such as the Bauhaus and the Blackmountain College, to new
sites of knowledge production such as the Cybermohalla Hub in Delhi.
What had started more than two thousand years ago as an informal
symposium of intellectuals joining for drinks, food and talk has evolved
into a highly differentiated structure of lectures, conferences, round
tables, workshops, reading groups, desk crits, pin-ups and tutorials. Its
spatial equivalent is the heavy luggage of architecture: the conference
room, auditorium, dormitory, laboratory, library, gallery and studio. Those architectural components and their walls, ceilings and floors are
more than just inert material but a trigger for a spatial practice as a
form of knowledge production. Speculating on a situation in which the
learning environment and knowledge production become interdependent,
the seminar investigates the potentials and limits for the creation
of a critical collective space.
Nikolaus Hirsch is a Frankfurt-based architect, who teaches at the
Architectural Association in London, the Institute of Applied Theatre
Studies at Giessen University, at UPenn in Philadelphia. His work
includes the Dresden Synagogue, the Hinzert Document Center, Bockenheimer
Depot Theater (with William Forsythe), music pavilion
“Soundchambers” at Museu Serralves in Porto, the architecture for
Bruno Latour´s “Making Things Public” at the ZKM and “unitednationsplaza”
in Berlin (with Anton Vidokle). Current projects include the
Cybermohalla Hub in Delhi, and the European Kunsthalle in Cologne.
Nikolaus Hirsch has curated “ErsatzStadt: Representations of the
Urban” at Volksbühne Berlin and is a member of the “Curating Architecture”
programme at Goldsmiths College in London. His work was shown
in numerous exhibitions such as "Neue Welt" (Frankfurter Kunstverein),
“Utopia Station” at Venice Biennal, “Can Buildings Curate” (AA
London) and Sao Paulo Biennal 2007. Most recently, Hirsch has
published his new book On Boundaries (Sternberg Press).
6-9pm
open to public
Chus Martínez: Attitude Relativism
A session on the notion of the “contract” established between the
artists and the audience.
Using diverse material, ranging from the suicide of the Argentinean
artist Alberto Greco, the production of filmmaker Raymundo Gleyzer to
some of the performances of the American stand-up comedian Andy
Kaufmann, Chus Martínez will reflect on the complicated issue of the
“agreement” that a work of art establishes with the audience.
Chus Martínez is a curator and critic, currently the director of the
Frankfurter Kunstverein since January 2006. Between 2002-2005 she
was the artistic director of Sala Rekalde, a public art space in the city
of Bilbao and between 2001-2003 the curator of the project room of "La
Caixa Foundation" in Barcelona. She writes for a number of magazines,
such as Afterall, and is a member of the advisory board of the upcoming
Carnegie International (2008).
Sunday, March 16th
4-6pm
open to public
Fia Backström: HERD INSTINCT 360°
INSTINCT 360° (2006), a staged gathering with sacred undertones,
including a performance, lectures, and communal intake where the
other side of human collective behavior, in society at large as well as in
the art-world, is investigated, spanning topics such as cult mentality,
corporate action and faux activism. Rather than in-the-news issues, the
performance addresses group dynamics from mass-psychosis to totalitarian
gatherings whether inspired by Malcolm X or Microsoft, in the
macrocosmic forms of political movements and global markets, of
which the art industry is one; or in the microcosmic form of artists'
collectives
Fia Backström is an artist based in New York, who is interested in
questions on the social interrelations of images and their signification
processes, as seen through the shifting faces of politics, marketing,
propaganda and art, including the audience.
Introductory narration-performance
Monday, March 17th
4-7pm
Workshop (core group participants only)
Chus Martínez: Attitude Relativism
Part 2
Tuesday, March 18th
7-10pm
open to public
Boris Groys: Art after Communism
The contemporary, post-communist situation is mostly understood as a
time after the full and final victory of the market over all the attempts
to put this rule into question. Accordingly, art is equated to the art
market and an individual artwork is seen primarily as a commodity.
Under this regime the only way for art to become "serious" is to
become "critical", which means that it tries to reflect explicitly on its
own character-as- commodity. It is telling that the art of the former
Communist or Socialist countries is regarded from this perspective as
non-serious because it is non-critical by definition; this art could not
reflect on itself as a commodity because it was not a commodity. (It
was not a commodity because there was no market, and certainly no
art market under Socialism).
But the equation between art and art market, be it critical or not, not
only brings about the erasure of a substantial part of the art heritage
of the 20th Century; it also - and this is the more important point -
ignores the non- market dimensions of contemporary art that functions
not only as commodity but also as propaganda (for example: Islamist
videos), as a means to organize a new type of communal space and a
new type of community itself. The goal of the seminar is to investigate
precisely these non-market aspects of contemporary art in its relationship
to the long tradition of non-market uses of art, related initially to
the Socialist-Communist tradition.
Born in East Berlin in 1947, Boris Groys studied Philosophy and Mathematics
at the University of Leningrad from 1965-71. Then, from 1971
to 1976 Groys worked as a research assistant at various institutes in
Leningrad and from 1976-81 he was employed at the Institute for
Structural and Applied Linguistics at the University of Moscow. In 1981
Groys emigrated from the former USSR to Germany. 1982-85 he
received various grants in Germany and worked as a freelance author
from 1986-87 in Cologne. Groys taught as Guest Professor in the
States at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia in 1988 and at
the University of Southern California, Los Angeles in 1991. He obtained
his doctorate in Philosophy from the University of Muenster in 1992.
Since 1994 Groys has been professor for Philosophy and Media Theory
at the Academy for Design in Karlsruhe, Germany. And since January
1st 2001 Groys also serves as vice chancellor at the Academy of Fine
Arts Vienna, which has since recieved university status. Member of the
Association International des Critiques d'Art [AICA].
Wednesday, March 19th
7-9pm
Workshop with Boris Groys (core group participants only) Monday, March 24th
7-9pm
open to public
Minerva Cuevas: Artistic Research
A discussion of methodologies of research in art projects.
Based in Mexico D.F., Minerva Cuevas uses social issues and activism
as the effect the virtual space of the Internet, museums or the urban
sphere. Her exhibitions are not solely presentations of work but active
environments in which images and artifacts are appropriated and
reconfigured and the context of their reception is questioned. In this
exhibition, Cuevas plays out her interest in the civilisational properties
of science and the museum, exploring the concepts of ‘evolution’ and
the opposition between notions of the ‘wild’ and the ‘civilized’.
Tuesday, March 25th
2-4pm
Workshop with Minerva Cuevas (core group participants only) Wednesday, March 26th
7-10pm
open to public
Jalal Toufic: You Said “Stay,” So I Stayed
The ordeal of the will is not only that one has to go through countless
recurrence and, in the guise of one’s computer emulations or of some
of one’s versions in other branches of a bifurcating universe, in
desperation commit suicide myriad times; but also that once the will is
accomplished, one thenceforth is going to have not only to accept
everything that happens, even vast catastrophes, but also, since a
genuine will is an ontological selector that automatically renders
anything that cannot be willed in the mode of eternal recurrence
impossible, to affirm its eternal recurrence: amor fati. Can genocides
be willed? This is possibly an empirical question: if emulations and/or
time-travel across parallel universes become possible and a will is
generated through countless repetition, then if genocides continue to
happen, they can be, and indeed are, willed.
He came to the realization that even the many suicides he—in the guise
of some of the versions in the other bifurcation branches of the
universe—committed during his countless recurrence ordeal may turn
out to be as nothing compared to his having to possibly deal with the
tragic not just acceptance, but downright willing, as he had never
before willed anything, of what he otherwise would have viewed as
unequivocally evil, no longer able to distance himself from it even in
the form of being nostalgic about the preceding period. It is our
chance, the lightness of our condition, that the will is not yet accomplished,
that we do not have to affirm everything that exists.
Jalal Toufic is a thinker, writer, and artist. He is the author of
Distracted (1991; 2nd ed., 2003), (Vampires): An Uneasy Essay on the
Undead in Film (1993; 2nd ed., 2003), Over-Sensitivity (1996), Forthcoming
(2000), Undying Love, or Love Dies (2002), Two or Three
Things I’m Dying to Tell You (2005), ‘Âshûrâ’: This Blood Spilled in My
Veins (2005), and Undeserving Lebanon (2007). His videos and
mixed-media works have been presented in such venues as Artists
Space, New York; Witte de With, Rotterdam; Fundació Antoni Tàpies,
Barcelona; Kunsthalle Fridericianum, Kassel; and the 16th International
Documentary Filmfestival Amsterdam (IDFA) in a “Focus Jalal
Toufic” program.
He has taught at the University of California at Berkeley, California
Institute of the Arts, USC, and the Rijksakademie, and he is currently
a Professor at Kadir Has University in Istanbul.
http://www.jalaltoufic.com.
5pm (Mexico City)
Domino Theory
WUNP
www.unitednationsplaza.org/radio.html
WUNP will conduct the first ever, live radio broadcast of a domino match between four artists.
Domino Theory was a mid-20th Century foreign policy term used during the Cold War by various United States administrations to justify global US interventionary politics. Domino Theory and the Domino Effect suggest that some change, however small, will effect another similar change nearby, and so on, and so, like a row of falling dominos…
Today’s broadcast stems more so from the title Domino Theory rather than its policy implications. A group of people has been invited into the WUNP studio to simultaneously talk theory and play dominos, a popular game seen and heard throughout Mexico City. Previously prepared topics of discussion have been distributed to participants.
Thursday, March 27th
7-10pm
open to public
Jalal Toufic: The Withdrawal of Tradition Past a Surpassing
Disaster
We live in a block universe of space-time, where nothing physically
passes and vanishes, but where occasionally things withdraw due to
surpassing disasters. Palestinians, Kurds, and Bosnians have to deal
with not only the concerted erasure by their enemies of much of their
tradition: the erasure by the Israelis of hundreds of Palestinian villages
in 1948 and their renaming with Jewish names, and the erasure of
hundreds of Kurdish villages during the Anfâl operation in Iraq, etc.;
but also the additional, more insidious withdrawal of what survived the
physical destruction.
To detect this withdrawal, whether symptomatically or otherwise, one
is well advised to look for it in messianic movements as well as in artistic
and literary works: “With regard to the surpassing disaster, art acts
like the mirror in vampire films: it reveals the withdrawal of what we
think is still there. ‘You have seen nothing in Hiroshima’ [Hiroshima
mon amour]. Does this entail that one should not record? No. One
should record this ‘nothing,’ which only after the resurrection can be
available.” After the surpassing disaster, the duty of an artist is either
to resurrect what has been withdrawn (Godard’s King Lear), or to
disclose the withdrawal (Duras’ Hiroshima mon Amour, 1961;
Boltanski’s Monument: La Fête de Pourim, 1988).
Friday, March 28th
8 pm
open to public
Mexico City Premiere:
A CRIME AGAINST ART
Director: Hila Peleg, Madrid/Berlin, 2007, 100 min.
A Crime Against Art is a film based on the trial staged at an art fair in
Madrid in February 2007. The trial, inspired by the mock trials organized
by avant-garde movements in the 1920's and 30's, theatrically
raised a number of polemical issues in the world of contemporary art:
collusion with the ‘new bourgeoisie’, instrumentalization of art and its
institutions, the future possibility of critical artistic agency and other
pertinent subjects. The trial begins with the assumption that a crime
has been committed, yet its nature and evidence are allusive and no
victims have come forward. The testimonies and cross-examinations
become an attempt by the Judge (Jan Verwoert), the Prosecutors (Vasif
Kortun and Chus Martínez) and the Defense Attorney (Charles Esche)
to unravel the nature of the puzzling crime against art. Set as a television
courtroom drama and filmed by four camera crews, A Crime
Against Art presents a condensed 100 minute version of a the trial.
Cast:
Defendants: Anton Vidokle and Tirdad Zolgdhar
Prosecutors: Vasif Kortun and Chus Martínez
Defense attorney: Charles Esche
Judge: Jan Verwoert
Expert witnesses: Maria Lind and Anselm Franke
Artist: Setareh Shabazi
Public: Keti Chukrov and Barnaby Drabble
With special contribution by Liam Gillick
Editing: Eric Menard and Hila Peleg. Sound mixing: Christian Obermaier
and Ekkehard Strauhs. Sound repair: Uwe Seyfert. Camera:
Michel Balague, Eric Menard, José Joaquin Silva Sevilla and Angel
Castillo Pascual. Technical team in Madrid: Rubén Diaz Garcia and José
Angel Ordonez.
Producer: unitednationpslazastudios
A Crime Against Art is based on The Trial in Madrid, February 2007,
organized by Anton Vidokle and Tirdad Zolgdhar.
worldwide diffusion jrp-ringier.com
Saturday, March 29th
TBA
Sunday, March 30th
4-6pm
open to public
Damián Ortega: Book Presentation. Selected Writings of Lawrence
Weiner. Ed. Alias, 2008
Damián Ortega was born in Mexico City and currently lives and works
in Berlin, Germany. He has exhibited internationally including solo exhibitions
at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2005), Tate
Modern, London (2005), Museu da Arte Pampulha, Belo Horizonte,
Brazil (2005), Kunsthalle Basel (2004) and Institute of Contemporary
Art, Philadelphia (2002). Group exhibitions include the São Paulo Biennial
(2006), Made in Mexico, Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston
(2003) and the 50th Venice Biennale (2003).
7-9pm
open to public
Presentation of a special UNP issue of Pazmaker – a free-distribution
quarterly publication edited in Mexico City by Perros Negros which
gathers text from local and international artists, writers and amateurs,
as well reprints in both Spanish and English. Edited by Adriana Lara.
Adriana Lara lives and works in Mexico City in individual and collective
projects, interested in exploring the relationship of art and other means
of production through a range of formats and disciplines. With a mixed
formation, she started developing her work on 2001 and moved to
Paris to attend in 2002-03 Le pavillon, an artist residency at the Palais
de Tokyo. Among her collective projects is Lasser Moderna with Emilio
Acevedo, created in 2002, Perros Negros co-founded with Fernando
Mesta and Agustina Ferreyra, an art production office that proposes
new platforms for discourse and art production, in order to expand the
circulation and reception of creative projects, as to reinforce their
inscription and potential value in today's Mexico. Among other Perros
Negros projects she is the cheif editor of Pazmaker, a free-distribution
quarterly publication.
10pm till the last person leaves!
SALON ALEMAN – UNP closing party with Tequila Sarabia by
Eduardo Sarabia
Tequila Sarabia was founded by artist Eduardo Sarabia in Guadalajara,
Mexico. Since 2002, Sarabia has been researching the traditional
production of tequila and developed 3000 liters of his own brand. Made
from 100% pure agave from the highlands of Jalisco. Tequila Sarabia
offers 3 distinct types of high-quality tequila, Silver, Gold and Añejo.
Each presented in a unique hand made bottle with a certificate of
authenticity. In 2006, Eduardo Sarabia sent 300 liters to Berlin,
Germany and opened Salon Aleman, a tequila bar/artist project.
The program is subject to change. |
