Art, Society and Politics : The School of Kyiv

ART, SOCIETY AND POLITICS : THE SCHOOL OF KYIV
On May 28 at Villa Vassilieff
From 2:30pm to 6:30pm

This half day con­fer­ence will explore the out­comes of "The School of Kyiv" (Kyiv, Sept 8 Nov 1 2015), a new format of an art bien­nial curated by Hedwig Saxeahuber and Georg Schöllhammer and con­ceived and orga­nized together with the Visual Culture Research Center Kyiv. During the Biennial, the works of more than 100 inter­na­tional and Ukrainian artists were on dis­play, while artists, activists and thinkers from around the world met and worked with the public in col­lab­o­ra­tive forums, exploring the rela­tion between art, society and pol­i­tics in Ukraine and beyond. The aim of this con­fer­ence will be to examine the whys and where­fores of holding an art bien­nial in a country riven by polit­ical ten­sions, and ques­tion how artistic prac­tices and spaces can reflect as well as encourage or facil­i­tate polit­ical change. The con­fer­ence will ques­tion main­stream media clichés, offering a new per­spec­tive on recent socio-polit­ical devel­op­ments in Ukraine.

This con­fer­ence is orga­nized and mod­er­ated by Rahma Khazam. Participants: Hedwig Saxenhuber (curator, Vienna), Georg Schöllhammer (curator, Vienna), Johannes Porsch (artist, Vienna), Malgorzata Grygielewicz (curator, Paris), Lesia Kulchynska (researcher and curator), Vasyl Cherepanyn (curator, Visual Culture Research Center Kyiv).

Presentations will be in English.

This event is sup­ported by the Open Society Initiative for Europe, the Austrian Cultural Forum and the Polish Institut of Paris.

PROGRAM

2:30pm - 2:45pm: Introduction by Rahma Khazam

2:45pm - 3:15pm: Malgorzata Grygielewicz: "Urbs Sacra - Journey to the East..."

At the begin­ning, there was a moving ques­tion : how could one make life/the city go on forever ? And why some cities should perish ? The syn­ergy between life and the city ques­tions us. And it is the syn­ergy that we will try to raise, in a per­spec­tive of both destruc­tion and cre­ation. By exploring this vocab­u­lary, we will realize the vital urgency of con­tem­po­rary aes­thetics facing the city’s destruc­tions and the con­se­quent prob­lems. « Cartago delenda est » shows the links between the end of the punic city and of the punic civ­i­liza­tion. After years of splen­dour and pros­perity, swept off the Earth and wiped off the map, its rickety ruins are now fading. Its ter­ri­tory is soon called « sacer », which means « cursed » in latin. « Urbs sacra », like Giorgio Agamben’s « homo sacer », do not have any civil right. The city, tra­di­tionnal loca­tion of the polit­ical, loses its fun­da­mental pur­pose. But then, what is left of it ? Through this inquiry, walking together with sev­eral artists, we will focus on the case of the art center Galeria Arsenal in Bialystok, Poland.

3:15pm - 3:45pm: Hedwig Saxenhuber: "Into the City"

All began anew in the late days of March 2015 with a can­cel­la­tion. Kyiv’s largest public art and event venue had with­drawn as an orga­nizer of the 2nd Kyiv Biennale. Encouraged by our artists and intel­lec­tual friends we decided to go ahead with the Biennial inde­pen­dently and autonomously and make the com­plex frame­work of the city of Kyiv and its art world one of the main sub­jects and actors and a main dis­play of the the Biennial. By reflecting upon this con­stel­la­tion and the con­di­tions of curating within this com­plex sit­u­a­tion, Hedwig Saxenhubers pre­sen­ta­tion of The School of Kyiv aims at recon­sid­ering the notion of „the uses of art“.

3:45pm - 4:15pm: Johannes Porsch: "Support Structures"

In his pre­sen­ta­tion Johannes Porsch will approach the genre of dis­play/exhi­bi­tion from the fol­lowing angles: dis­play/exhi­bi­tion as a the­atrical set up in the wake of min­i­malism and late mod­ernism, dis­play/exhi­bi­tion as a post-con­cep­tual object of relat­ed­ness as it was artic­u­lated in sculp­tural pro­jects of the 1990s and dis­play/exhi­bi­tion as a struc­ture that artic­u­lates pre­car­ious con­di­tions of con­tem­po­rary (art) pro­duc­tion. Johannes Porsch spent some time in Kyiv working on his piece and will talk about how his work oper­ates in a sit­u­a­tion like the Biennial.

Break

4:30pm - 5pm: Georg Schöllhammer: "Curating in a State of Crisis"

Georg Schöllhammer’s pre­sen­ta­tion will cir­cu­late around the con­cep­tual frame­work of The School of Kyiv and about curating in a sit­u­a­tion of crisis, aporia, of his­toricity, of apparent entrap­ment. Structured in terms of var­ious schools the pro­ject focussed on cen­tral themes: realism, land­scape, image and evi­dence, dis­place­ment, lone­some­ness, abducted Europe. All these schools, which encom­passed both exhi­bi­tions and series of dis­course-based events, were linked by the same under­lying ques­tion, namely how to estab­lish and main­tain a shared space for reac­tion that can bridge dif­fer­ences: a per­haps unstable, tem­po­rary space that would nonethe­less extend beyond the well-trodden paths of polit­i­cally prop­a­gated bar­riers or would con­struc­tively dis­tin­guish itself from the status quo.

5pm -5:30pm: Lesia Kulchynska - "The School of the Lonesome"

5:30pm - 6pm: Vasyl Cherepanyn - "The Political School of the Kyiv Biennial"

6pm - 6:30pm: Discussion

About the par­tic­i­pants

Rahma Khazam studied phi­los­ophy and art his­tory and holds a Ph.D. in art and aes­thetics from the Sorbonne. A researcher and art critic (key research areas: con­tem­po­rary art and archi­tec­ture, mod­ernism, theory and his­tory of sound art), she lec­tures inter­na­tion­ally and has pub­lished texts and arti­cles in exhi­bi­tion cat­a­logues, the­matic antholo­gies and con­tem­po­rary art magazines such as Frieze, Springerin and Artforum.com. She is a member of AICA (International Association of Art Critics) and of EAM (European Network for Avant-Garde and Modernism Studies).

Malgorzata Grygielewicz holds a Ph.D. in ancien phi­los­ophy. After Classics studies at Paris VIII University, she spe­cial­ized in ancient and modern phi­los­ophy as well as in phi­los­ophy of art. She cur­rently works together with art cen­tres and teaches art theory at the Ecole européenne de l’image, in Poitiers and Angoulême. She is par­tic­u­larly inter­ested by the ter­ri­tory of cre­ation and its prob­lem­atics, con­sid­ered as a place of rad­ical and polit­ical encoun­ters.

Hedwig Saxenhuber is a curator and co-editor of the arts peri­od­ical springerin - Hefte für Gegenwartskunst (Vienna). She was Founding  Di­rec­tor (together with Christian Kravagna) at Kunstraum Lakeside at Klagenfurt, from 2005 to 2015.  Her recent large-scale pro­jects include “The School of Kyiv“ (Kiev Biennal 2015), “Un­rest of Form – Imagining the Political Subject” (together with Georg Schöllhammer and Stefanie Carp, Vienna Festival, MQ, 2013);  "Bertha von Suttner Revisited" (Schloss Harmannsdorf, together with Susanne Neuburger, 2009);  "A Ladies Almanach“, (Tranzit Prag, 2009); "Art + Politics“, from the Collection of the City of Vienna (MUSA, Vienna, 2008); Parallel Histories, (ACF, New York, 2006);  Gyumri Biennal (Armenia, 2008); VALIE EXPORT, (Moscow Biennal, NCCA, 2007); and "Postorange, Contemporary Art from Ukraine” (Kunsthalle, Vienna 2006).

Johannes Porsch works as artist, curator and author : his texts, exhi­bi­tions and pub­li­ca­tions revolve around the topic of pol­i­tics of rep­re­sen­ta­tion and resulting pro­cesses of sub­jec­tivi­sa­tion. Among other works : What is Architecture (2001), Ottokar Uhl. Nach allen Regeln der Architektur (2005), The Austrian Phenomenon (2004/2009), Un jardin d’hiver, präsen­tiert (2006), Chinaproduction (2007), Suche Bauplatz für Moschee/ Aa (2008/2010/2012), Transitory Objects (2009), Tanja Widmann Sich in diesem Sinne ähnlich machen (2010), R.R., u.v.a. (2011), What Can a Group Do? (2011), The Purloined Letter (2011), Project Proposal (The Work Is How to Become an Artist) (2012), Parmi les Noirs/Unter den Schwarzen (2012), Unrest of Form. Imagining the Political Subject (2013), Capital of Desires, 14. Biennale di Venezia, Architettura (2014), and The School of Kyiv (2015).

Georg Schöllhammer is an editor, writer and curator based in Vienna. He is Founding Editor of springerin and head of tranzit.at. Schöllhammer has worked inter­na­tion­ally on cul­tural pro­jects including doc­u­menta, Manifesta, the Biennales of  Venice, Sao Paulo, Gumry and The School of Kiev 2015, Sweet Sixties, L’inter­na­tionale, Former West, the Vienna Festival or the Vienna Fair. He is chairman of "The Július Koller Society". From 2004 to 2007 he has been editor-in-chief of Documenta 12 and con­ceived and directed Documenta 12 magazines. Schöllhammers cur­rent research pro­jects include: “Sweet Sixties”, “Local Modernites” and »Soviet Modernism".

Lesia Kulchynska, Ph.D. in Film Studies, is a researcher at the Department of Film and Television Studies at the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine and a teacher at the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy. Curator at the Visual Culture Research Center. She writes on cul­ture and social issues for var­ious Ukrainian magazines. Lives and works in Kyiv.

Vasyl Cherepanyn (1980, Ukraine) is the Head of Visual Culture Research Center (VCRC, Kyiv) and an editor of the Political Critique  magazine (Ukrainian edi­tion). He works as a lec­turer at the Cultural Studies Department of the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy and holds Ph.D. in phi­los­ophy (aes­thetics). Also he worked as a guest lec­turer at the Institute for Advanced Studies of the "Political Critique" in Warsaw, Poland and the Krupp Wissenschaftskolleg Greifswald of the Greifswald University, Germany. In 2015, VCRC has received the European Cultural Foundation’s Princess Margriet Award for Culture for its activ­i­ties. Visual Culture Research Center was also the orga­nizer of The School of Kyiv – Kyiv Biennial 2015. More infor­ma­tions on the Visual Culture Research Center here.