PRESENTATION

PRESENTATION

 
As opposed to the exhibition, the main and most privileged place for political economy of exchange of art, where meaning is constructed, maintained and occasionally deconstructed, UNIA artandthinking wishes to offer another means of discourse, from the institutional point of view, another means of communication of the contents and forms of current art practice, favouring processes of interaction between the author and his or her audiences and enhancing dialogue between them: the presentation of works and their open debate as a way of establishing a critical exchange. As opposed to expositional grammaticism, based on centricity of the presentation of the works of art, other mechanisms are favoured for representation and access based on documentary records and discursive reflection on the works or art processes. As if it were an essay, this series of conversations is stated as a means of open and critical thinking and at the same time a coherent and bonding means of communication, moving away from the terrain of silent and distanced observation of art into an approach and experience of its current presence.

The methodology we are suggesting for these encounters would be one in which certain artist’s works would be made known based on their fugues, their moments of highest force, their most intense actions to approach the references that construct them and the readings, images and speeches that shape them.

UNIA artandthinking wishes to put certain authors in touch with other artists and/or people interested with the aim of suggesting an encounter with hardly any mediation, enabling a certain depth of knowledge of the aesthetic proposals of each guest author in a short time span. These encounters are structured in two parts: the first is a closed door seminar/workshop for a selected audience in which the materials proposed will be examined and discussed; the second will consist of lectures which are open to the public at large.

Guest author of the first workshops in this series of approaches to contemporary art projects is Alice Creischer, who –on numerous occasions accompanied by Andreas Siekmann, German artist like herself, and other authors– has carried out a work in which aesthetics and politics converge, not only because her interests are focused on the associations between official representative policies, the large financial or banking corporations and culture in general as a lieu also for varied instrumentations, but also because her work is not solely dedicated to automatic denouncement of facts, but also takes up new mechanisms and narrative methods that inaugurate other ways of perceiving and thinking. By means of satire, fable, and scientific observation, Creischer develops a critical work that suggests new representations of cultural processes.

Socio-political issues are at the very crux of the artistic practice pursued by Alice Creischer. Rather than concentrating on the production of individual works, the artist centers on the process of inquiry to illuminate particular political histories of given contexts. Concepts of time, labour, and exploitation are investigated in projects whereby Creischer sets out a scenography in positioning her discourse. Adopting prop-like devices and meticulously crafted and sewn objects, Creischer choreographs a space within a system of coordinates that deconstruct yet another set of given historical relations. By setting up different scenarios in a simultaneous manner, Creischer transposes a world history in relation to Karl Marx's concept around the original accumulation of capital.

“I am interested in literary concepts that appear in both Romanticism and Mannerism. This involves literary collage, that is the Concetto, an obsessive handling of sources, that lavish world depository in the form of erudition. Then again, in Romantic literature we have a constant dialectic between drama and comedy, the serious and the banal. This dialectic fascinated me because it amounts to a possibility to go beyond political experience without flattening it, without sublimating it. I don’t know if this is enough to preserve a certain sensibility. In recent years a debate has often occurred about the possibility of transmitting political information in works by artists. Regarding this, I’ve ascertained that the mere facts don’t speak by themselves, but that on the contrary they desensitise people, whatever the design with which they’ve been presented. The unexpressed gap between the facts and the way they are transmitted is already a symptom of this desensitisation, in which political reality is not experienced but is limned in, in the hope that by means of this others might experience it. I believe that literary form is necessary in order to be able to narrate a political reality or the model of an historic disinterestedness. If one understands poetry as a way of condensing time, then this is a possibility of insisting, within the changeability of the world, on a ‘now’ whose disproportion constitutes an aesthetic programme”.

(Alice Creischer, Revista # 4, MACBA, spring 2008, at www.macba.es)

PROGRAMME

PROGRAMME

SEMINAR/WORKSHOP (Inscription is required prior to presence)

Tuesday_31st of March 2009

· 10:30 - 14:00 h. 
The Woman Painter´s Atelier. Real Allegory which Determines a Seven-year Period of My Artistic Life in the Berlin Republic. Work carried out in 2000 that states a re-interpretation of the painting work of Gustave Courbet, in which the artist rises up as the central figure of the medium in the midst of various members of the cultural and political circles of France in 1855. In the same way, Creischer transposes the characters and personalities that converge in Berlin during the 1990s and includes the artist and her friends.

· 16:00 - 18:30 h.
Science fiction episodes of a society free of work. An ongoing project that presents different episodes that take place in a studio, an amusement park, a shopping centre and an office block. This offers a series of considerations on the concept of work as an utopia and its obsoleteness in current societies.

Wednesday_1st of April 2009

· 10:30 - 14:00 h.
ExArgentina / Steps for the Flight from Labor to Doing. Parallel to her artistic practice and always in collaboration with other people and groups, Alice Creischer has been dedicated to research and curating projects. Between 2002 and 2006 she was curater along with Andreas Siekmann, of the project titled ExArgentina , a visual and narrative approach to the Argentinean economic and social crisis during the 1990s, which was a result of international lobbying operations with specific interests in the area.

· 16:00 - 18:30 h.
Principio Potosí. On the relationship of image production, hegemony and violence. (With the participation of Max Hinderer and Eduardo Schwartzberg)
Currently, Alice Creischer is working along with Max Hinderer, Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui and Andreas Siekmann in a project called Principio Potosí, which focuses its attention on the analysis of modernity and expansion of capitalism that started with the colonialisation of America. Starting off with examples in painting of the Viceroyalty era of the School of Potosí (17th-18th centuries), the research seeks to update historic artistic production conditions in current contemporary artistic production associated to large economic centres. “Principio” [principle] can have on one hand, a temporal meaning, a start. On the other, it can also have a technical meaning, like a mechanical principle, a rule. The project, produced by Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía of Madrid, in collaboration with Haus der Kulturen der Welt Museum of Berlin and Museo Nacional de Arte La Paz, consists of various seminars, publications and exhibitions.

Thursday_2nd of April 2009

· 10:30 - 14:00 h.
Principio Potosí II
(With the participation of Max Hinderer and Eduardo Schwartzberg)

· 16:00 - 18:30 h.
Presentation of the works of the people registered in the course

Friday_3rd of April 2009

· 10:30 - 14:00 h.
Presentation of the works of the people registered in the course

LECTURES (Free attendance)

Tuesday_31st of March 2009

· 19:00 h.
Alice Creischer: Intervention is not a closed term
The performance carried out in Documenta 12 of Kassel, All of a sudden and simultaneously. A feasibility study. Musical Scenes on the Negation of Labour, in which the artists suggest a science fiction story originally based on the idea of a society freed from work thanks to the advance of techonology (an idea that has disappeared from cultural memory), is the work that serves as a base for her talk. There she explores the potentialities of this term beyond a mere act of communication set in the framework of an artistic action.

Wednesday_1st of April 2009

· 19:00 h.
Max Hinderer and Eduardo Schwartzberg: Principio Potosí (1): the historic line
Presentation of the historic context and examples of paintings associated to the city of Potosí. Methodological approach of the reading of historic paintings: What is “sociology of image”? How do these paintings relate to the concept of modernity? What is their current context?

Thursday_2nd of April 2009

· 19:00 h.
Max Hinderer and Eduardo Schwartzberg: Principio Potosí (2): the mechanism
Presentation of the hypothesis: “The Potosí principle is virtually repeated in each place and time in the world”. Presentation of the aesthetic proposal and the system of global correspondences: Beijing, Moscow, London and the three crucial moments of the current principle: accumulation, hegemony and human rights.

SPEAKERS

SPEAKERS

Alice Creischer
She studied Philosophy and Literature in the University of Düsseldorf (1980-1986) and Beaux Arts in the Kunstakademie of Düsseldorf (1983-1989). From the beginning of the nineties, she has collaborated in numerous collective projects along with artist Andreas Siekmann. She has published articles in Springerin or Texte zur Kunst. She has been curator for projects such as Violence on the Margin of All Things in the Generali Foundation of Vienna in 2002, or ExArgentina (2002-2006). She has participated in Documenta 12 and her work has been a source of exhibitions in Austria (Wiener Secession, Vienna), Spain (MACBA, Barcelona) or Germany (Haus der Kunst, Munich).

Max Jorge Hinderer
He studied Art and Philosophy in Vienna and Hamburg. He regularly publishes critiques and essays in art and cultural publications as well as Internet forums such as Springerin (Vienna), The Thing (Hamburg), Texte zur Kunst (Berlin) or El Colectivo (La Paz). In 2007 along with Jens Kastner, he published the book Pok ta Pok. Aneignung-Macht-Kunst (Turia+Kant Publishers, Vienna) on the Mayan Pelota Game, Austrian colonialism and discourses on cultural hegemony in social fields. He currently lives in Berlin and is preparing his Doctorate thesis. Since 2008 he has been, along with Alice Creischer, Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui and Andreas Siekmann, part of the team of curators for the Principio Potosí Project.

Eduardo Schwartzberg
He studied in the National School of Folklore where he specialised in Ethnomusicology and Folklore. He has participated in the Guitar Festival and Competition in Havana (Cuba 1998) and in the Festival Culture du Monde Dans l’arc Atlantique (2003). He has been chief of the Municipal Schools of Arts, Cultural Management of the Local Government of El Alto (2006). He is currently carrying out his thesis in Sociology, which is based on the theme of “Author’s rights: capitalisation of the Community, groups and individuals in musical creation”. He is a member of the Culture and Arts Council of the city of La Paz.

REGISTRATION

REGISTRATION

Seminar/workshop >> This seminar is designed to professional artists or students of art, audiovisual communications, anthropology, sociology or economy as well as cultural producers and the audience in general who is interested in the relationships between politics, economy and culture, especially in the framework of modernity and colonialism.
Maximum number of participants: 20 people.
Number of hours: 28 h.
Registration fees: free of charge.

Applications should be presented in the UNIA before 2 p.m. of the 24th of March 2009 by completing the registration form attached to this document along (Download PDF) with a photocopy of the ID card, C.V. and a brief consideration on the reasons for wishing to participate in the seminar/workshop. Admission will be communicated personally to selected participants.

Selected participants who are interested and working on these themes on an artistic, academic or self-taught level, will have the opportunity to present their works if they wish to do so to contrast them with those of the speakers and other participants.

Certificates
Students registered in the seminar/workshop that can prove their attendance to at least 80% of the sessions and, if such is the case, they have passed the evaluation criteria estabished in the course, will receive an attendace certificate stating the number of hours of the course (28).

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REGISTRATION SHEET

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UNIA arteypensamiento
c/ Américo Vespucio 2, Isla de la Cartuja, 41092 Sevilla
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