World of Art participated at Summer School for Curators of Contemporary Art in Yerevan

WORLD OF ART
Laboratorium of Curatorial Practices
Season 11: 2007/08

July 21st – August 1st, 2008, Yerevan, Armenia

The 3rd International Summer School for art curators in Yerevan is a collaborative project organized by The National Association of Art Critics of Armenia (NAAC) in cooperation with SCCA-Ljubljana, SCCA-Almaty in Kazakhstan and Beral Madra Center for Contemporary Art in Istanbul.

This year’s summer school was comprised of a series of lectures, presentations, study trips, visit of artists’ studios and workshops that focused on issues related to the methodologies of curating, the role of the curator in the ever increasing globalization of the art market, strategies of representation and institutional structures in the contemporary art world.

The theme of the 2008 project Post-Socialism and Media Transformations: Strategies of Representation focused on aspects of new media representation in the specific context of post-Socialism. The aim of the summer school was a research on transformations in the uses of media for artistic production and the mechanisms of representation in the artistic scenes of former socialist countries, with an awareness of ideological connotations of new media utilization.

Petja Grafenauer Krnc, independent curator and tutor of Laboratorium of Curatorial Practices 2007/2008 within the World of Art program, gave a lecture and lead a workshop Painting in the Era of (New) Media Condition. Fourteen participants from East and West Europe, Asia, Canada, and New Zeland researched East-European painting, which is characterized by the use of images from mass media and by connecting different art media, such as installation, sculpture, video, performance… The workshop’s method was close reading of selected theoretical texts, accompanied by visits of artists’ studios. The participants’ final task was to prepare outline for theoretical and critical text about one selected art piece.

Dušan Dovč, SCCA-Ljubljana’s production manager, presented achievements of World of Art School of Contemporary Art, and gave a talk about programmes of SCCA-Ljubljana with emphasis on video art. During a three-part presentation he took take the audience to a journey with three main stops: curatorial education and practices; SCCA operation within the world of art; an overview of video art in Slovenia from the beginnings up to now.
The first stop was at World of Art, School of Contemporary Art and presentation of school’s history and background, future plans, and its separet segments: course for curators with final exhibition, seminar in writing, series of lectures and a yearly anthology.
Second stop was SCCA-Ljubljana as an organisation, developing a platform for contemporary arts, which is of vital importance for the balance between the artistic production and practice, the critical and curatorial reflections, the expert reception and the respond by the general public in Slovenia.
Ever since 1994, SCCA-Ljubljana systematically deals (collects, documents, researches, reflects and presents) with video production in Slovenia. This was third stop, presenting the extensive research and documentation project Videodokument and a project-in-progress: an online digital archive of video and media art DIVA, which will be a part of central online portal to media art in Europe, so called GAMA – Gateway to Archives of Media Art.
For a farewell Dusan Dovc applied curatorial practice in a form of research and documentation to video art in Slovenia. Videokument_presents, a curated video program, demonstrated how video art function as a platform for social and cultural change in (post)socialist countries. In the 70s video art was defined by documentary, communicational, analytical and experimental use, in the 80s the video was used in the alternative scene as a social, political and media tool, while in the 90s video art became narrative and aesthetic and led from various genres to new media. Nowdays, video is used in all the possible ways and roles.