WORLD OF ART
Laboratorium of Curatorial Practices
Season 11: 2007/08
Seminar – Workshop No.3
11th – 12th February, 2008
Application deadline: 5th February 2008
The frequent and successful presence of collaborative curatorial teams today on the international art scene come as no surprise when taking into account the evident shift in artistic practices from individual towards collaborative and participatory projects, or towards community research based activism. Pairs, couples, trios, collectives, elected teams and other form of collaborative groups became an inevitable part in most of the international art projects. Collaborative Curating will attempt on both promoting and questioning the new collaborative curatorial formats and other open models of professional interaction among curators. Is collaboration only a newly developed tool that is frequently used in the highly competitive field of curating as a pragmatic means or is it a theoretically justified practice?
Starting from the deconstruction of various concepts of authorship and moving towards various constructive concepts of collectivism and community as a tool for agency of social change the workshop will ponder in the challenges of collaboration. Collaborative Curating workshop will focus on both justifying and questioning the potentiality of collaboration in theoretical and practical terms. The project will contribute towards developing of new kinds of curatorial knowledge while reflecting on intersubjectivity, communitarianism or multitude.
Collaborative Curating is imagined as a two day workshop consisting of series of differently structured discussions on collaboration. Especially important will be the focus on application of critical thinking exercises by putting a particular emphasis on the assignments:
a) to evaluate exhibitions’ proposals by contextualising them in contemporary theoretical frameworks
b) to conceptualise a real space curatorial projects.
The experiment of making a project designed especially for a chosen real space located in other city will at the same time unite and combine the interdisciplinary skills of all participants and will enable the potentiality for remote curatorial collaboration.
Schedule:
Monday, February 11th
10.00-11.30 Introduction: Collective Curatorial Body
The staring theoretical point of this workshop is Jean-Luc Nancy’s warning that we forgot the importance of being-together, being-in-common and belonging and that we live our present time without relations. We will discuss the philosophical concept of ‘being singular plural‘ as it is formulated by Nancy. His concept of being is always already being with. According to him being always entails “with” as an inevitable conjunction that links different singularities. Nancy goes as far as saying that ‘there is no “self” except by virtue of a “with,” which, in fact, structures it.’ In order to attain this knowledge and the praxis of “we” according to Nancy it is important to understand the aporia of intersubjectivity: that “we” is not a subject in terms of self-identification, neither is that “we” composed of always the same subjects or components.
11.30 – 12.00 Break
12.00 – 13.00 Discussion
The participants divided in two groups will try to develop argumentative debate in favour of either individual or collective curating.
13.00 – 14.30 Lunch
14.30 – 15.30 Presentation of particular collaborative projects
Besides the introductory presentation of the workshop leader to the internationally known collaborative curatorial practices, the participants will be also expected to present local collaborative projects from their own context that they attended or curated.
15.30-16.00 Break
16.00-17.30 Evaluation of two collaborative projects’ proposals
that will be made available to the participants in advance.
Tuesday, February 12th
Morning session:
Collaborative work
on two different proposals: proposals for two collaborative structures to be built either in virtual or in real space.
Participants will be divided in two groups and each of the groups will be expected to propose a new original format of collaborative curating (exhibition, conference, network, TV show, publication, etc.)
Afternoon session:
14.30 – 15.30 Presentation
of the projects of the groups (30 min. each)
15.30 – 17.30 Evaluation
of the projects by each of the groups and closing discussion.
Workshop will be held in english language.
Literatature:
Suzana Milevska (1961)
Born in Bitola, Macedonia. She is a curator and visual culture theorist based in Skopje. Currently she is a Lecturer in Visual Culture and the Director of the Visual and Cultural Research Centre, “Euro-Balkan” Institute. She earned her PhD in 2006 from the Visual Cultures Department, Goldsmiths College – University of London where she was teaching from 2003 to 2005.
Participation fee is 10 € for individuals and 15 € for institution representatives. The number of participants is limited.
Application deadline: 14th January 2008!
Fill in your application and send it to: svetumetnosti@scca-ljubljana.si
or send/bring it personally to: Zavod SCCA-Ljubljana, Metelkova 6, 1000 Ljubljana
Working hours: 11.00-15.00
Contact:
Zavod SCCA-Ljubljana (working hours: 11.00-15.00)
Contact persons: Saša Nabergoj or Maja Lozić
Metelkova 6, 1000 Ljubljana, Tel.: +386 1 431 83 85
E-mail: svetumetnosti@scca-ljubljana.si