new media center_kuda.org

PUBLIC CONVERSATION: THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF ART COLLECTIVES

TUESDAY 28.07.2020. at 7PM CET

Speakers: Sezgin Bojnik (KOS/FL) and Katja Praznik (SL/USA)

Moderation: Ana Vilenica and Darija Medić

The conversation series Vectors of Collective Imagination in Arts will be conducted through the Zoom platform, within which the audience will have the opportunity to actively participate through a chat discussion.

Join Zoom Webinar: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/88217073047

Meeting ID: 882 1707 3047

You will also be able to follow the conversation via live streaming on the kuda.org youtube channel.

The political economy of art collectives is the third in a series of discussions which will revolve around the influence of dominant economic models on the dynamics of work in art, ways of perceiving political economy in art and organising artists as cultural workers. Katja Praznik, a researcher from Slovenia who currently lives and works in Buffalo, New York, will tackle art as labour issues and the questions of the tactical advantages of such thinking for artistic organisation. Sezgin Bojnik, a researcher from Priština who lives and works in Helsinki, will deal with the role of art groups during the period of 'transition' in the former Yugoslavia. His focus will be on the art system and the specific relationship between art and ideology.

The conversation series Vectors of Collective Imagination in Art is a space for discussion about self-organised art groups, ad-hoc and mythical-real collectives, as well as artistic infrastructures for the collective production of knowledge and the struggle for commons. The series consists of three conversations that will deal with the political economy of art collectives, socio-political engagement of art groups, as well as imagining the anti-systemic collective practices in the period before World War II, during the socialist experiment in Yugoslavia, the anti-Yugoslav period of the 1990s. and the present situation.

Sezgin Boynik is a theoretician based in Helsinki. He completed his PhD on Yugoslav “Black Wave” cinema. He co-edited Nationalism and Contemporary Art: Critical Reader (MM & Exit, 2007), History of Punk and Underground in Turkey (BAS, 2008), Noise After Babel: Language Unrestrained (Spector Books, 2015, with Minna Henriksson). Recent publications include In the Belly of the Beast: Art & Language New York Project (Rab-Rab Journal Vol. 4, No. 2, 2017, with Michael Corris), Coiled Verbal Spring: Devices of Lenin's Language (Rab-Rab Press, 2018), and Free Jazz Communism (Rab-Rab Press, 2020). He is currently working on a project of translating Ilya Zdanevich's zaum play Yanko, Krul Albanskaya and on the collection of Yugoslav concrete and visual poetry to be published by OEI Press. He is the founder and editor-in-chief of Rab-Rab Press in Helsinki (www.rabrab.fi).

Katja Praznik is an assistant professor at the University of Buffalo’s Arts Management Programme/Department of Media Study. She is the author of the The Paradox of Unpaid Artistic Labour: Autonomy of Art, the Avant-Garde and Cultural Policy in the Transition to Post-Socialism (Ljubljana: Sophia, 2016). Her new book Art Work: Invisible Labour and the Legacy of Yugoslav Socialism if forthcoming with University of Toronto Press in spring 2021. Her research focuses on labour issues in the arts during the demise of the welfare-state regimes, and has been published in various academic journals, such as Social Text, Historical Materialism, ČKZ - Časopis za kritiko znanosti, and KPY Cultural Policy Yearbook, and in edited volumes, among them in NSK From Kapital to Capital (MIT Press 2015), and Crisis and New Beginnings: Art in Slovenia 2005–2015 (Moderna galerija 2015). Before moving to the United States, she had worked as a freelance cultural worker in the Slovenian independent art scene. She was the editor-in-chief of journal Maska and was engaged in the struggles for improving working conditions of art workers at Društvo Asociacija.

Concept and moderation: Ana Vilenica is a housing activist, a researcher and theoretician of social movements, urban changes, housing and art.

Chat moderation and technical support: Darija Medić is a digital practitioner and educator, researching the field of identity correction//building and labyrinths of contemporary technical practices through the poetics of language, technology and art.

Video document from the first conversation Collectivity outside art collectives held on July 8, 2020.

Video document from the second conversation of the Art Group and socio-political engagement held on July 18, 2020.

Conversations Vectors of collective imagination in art are part of the project Art Organisation - a long-term international research project that deals with the analysis of artistic (self)organisation in the (post)Yugoslav region. The focus of this project is on self-organised art initiatives outside the mainstream. The project covers a wide historical field from Surrealism in the 1930s to the present day. During 2017, our work on the project began with interviewing participants and protagonists of the contemporary art scene in Yugoslavia. This work continues in 2018 and 2019, when interviewees were theoreticians and art historians, as well as artists who had realised their practice through group art work. The result of this research is an archive consisting of interviews, documentation of works of art and critical texts written during the project trough the program Fragments for studies on art organisations. In July, simultaneously with the series of talks, a collaborative research working group will meet online to analyse and review the materials created during the project. This working group will create a space for collective critical rewriting of the art history of the (post)Yugoslav cultural space and critical work with the generated archive. The online format of the upcoming events and sessions was selected due to the changed circumstances that arose during the COVID-19 pandemic and represents a kind of a challenge for all those involved in this process.

Art Organisation is part of a wider project Vectors of Collective Imagination where kuda.org cooperates with partners: Multimedia Institute mi2 and Kulturtreger-Books, Zagreb (HR); Glänta Gothenburg  (SE); Kontrapunkt, Skopje (MK) and Berliner Gazette, Berlin (DE).

The project is supported by the European Commission through the Creative Europe program from September 2018 till September 2020, with the support of the FFAIART Foundation for Art Initiatives and local program support of the Ministry of Culture and Information of the Republic of Serbia and the City of Novi Sad.