SocialEast Seminar on Foreign Experience in Post-89 Art

Ludwig Museum - Museum of Contemporary Art Budapest
Thursday 7 May 2009

This seminar asks what attracted foreign artists and curators to the capitals of Central and Eastern Europe in the wake of the political changes of 1989 and what is their contribution to national art discourses and the idea of post-national contemporary art? Are we moving from a model of national artistic identities to a post-national understanding of contemporary art?

Speakers include:
Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez, Nada Prlja, Diana McCarty, Maja and Reuben Fowkes, Szabolcs Kisspal, Amy Bryzgel, Lena Prents and Oleksiy Radynski

Plus:
Minithon of interventions by foreign artists living in Budapest, including: EIKE, Katarina Sević, Claudia Martins, Alexander Schikowski, Catherine Burki and David Wilkinson

Plus:
Post-seminar Pan European Picnic at the Municipal Gallery - Museum Kiscell with workshop and party

Speaker biographies and documentation on socialeast.org

SocialEast Seminar on Art and Espionage

Courtauld Institute London
27 February 2009

This SocialEast Seminar considers the involvement of art during the Cold War with espionage, both on the level of international exchange and in specific national contexts. It deals with attempts within the Eastern Bloc to monitor artists through surveillance and networks of informers, the role of art espionage as an instrument of Sovietisation, and the methods used to control the involvement of artists in the international art world.  There will also be discussion of the parallel role of Western organisations in activities from cultural espionage to the use of art as a propaganda weapon. The seminar will also consider artistic responses to the phenomenon of spying and the wider legacy of artistic espionage for the topography of contemporary art.

A) WEST-EAST ART ESPIONAGE

Mark Boswell (Filmmaker, San Francisco Art Institute)
Gaczyne  (or) Deep Inside the KGB Infiltration of Walt Disney’s Brain

László Beke (Institute of Art History, Budapest)
Communication and Disinformation: Hungarian Aspects of the Cambridge Five

Catherine Fraixe (Ecole nationale supérieure d'art de Bourges)
Inventing a European Art : US Involvement in the Struggle for a United Europe

Kädi Talvoja (Kumu Art Museum, Tallinn)
Missionary Work of an Pollockian in Moscow in 1957

B) SECRET POLICE AND ARTISTIC UNDERGROUND

Doina Anghel (National Museum of Art Bucharest) and Raluca Voinea (Curator, E-cart.ro)
Surveiller et partir: Lists, informers networks, espionage, cultural censorship during 1945-1989 in Romania

Kata Krasznahorkai (University of Hamburg)
Code Name: "Schwitters". The First Hungarian Happening in the Reflection of a Secret Agents Report

Łukasz Ronduda (Center of Contemporary Art, Warsaw)
Neo-Avant-Garde Movements in the Polish Secret Services Files

C) CONTEMPORARY ART AND ESPIONAGE

Nina Levitt (Artist, York University, Toronto)
And She Was: Installations Inspired by Women in WWII

Anthony Downey (Sotheby’s Institute, London)
The Lives of Others: Artur Zmijewski’s ‘Repetition’ and the Ethics of Surveillance

Franciska Zólyom (Curator, Institute of Contemporary Art Dunaújváros)
Missing Evidence: an Artistic Attempt to Reconstruct the Story of an American Superspy

Paolo Cirio (Artist, Italy)
The Big Plot

Speaker biographies and documentation on socialeast.org

Sustainability and Contemporary Art: Hard Realities and the New Materiality

Central European University Budapest
26 March 2009

Since the last symposium on Sustainability and Contemporary Art held at CEU in February 2008, which took as its subject the Operaist dilemma of ‘Exit or Activism?’ and examined Paulo Virno’s idea of ‘exit’ as the ultimate form of resistance, the world has witnessed an intensifying fight for resources under the Arctic, the rocketing of food and oil prices, the Russian gas crisis, and the systemic failure of international financial institutions. These ‘hard realities’ have caused a switch from concerns of immaterial labour to recognition of the ‘new materiality’ of current circumstances.

This recent turn has been addressed by theorist Slavoj Žižek, who notes that while in the last decades it was ‘trendy to talk about the dominant role of intellectual labour in our post-industrial societies, today materiality appears in an almost vengeful way in all its aspects, from a future struggle for ever-diminishing resources (food, water, energy, minerals) to the degradation of the environment.’ The 2009 edition of Sustainability and Contemporary Art therefore brings together artists, theorists and environmental activists to investigate the implications of ‘hard realities’ and ‘new materiality’ for political action, artistic theory and practice, and sustainable living in the 21st century.

Speakers Alina Asavei, Marina Grzinic, Sebastjan Leban, Tadzio Müller, Tamás St.Auby, Janek Simon, Alan Watt,
Maja and Reuben Fowkes

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Symposium on Sustainability and Contemporary Art: Exit or Activism?

Central European University Budapest
29 February 2008

This symposium investigates the current state of thinking about sustainability in the light of the continuing mutations of post-Fordist global capitalism and its devastating effects on the environment, society and the individual. The axis of discussion will revolve around the strategic possibilities for resistance offered by tactical withdrawal versus relentless activism through contemporary art. On the one hand, the dilemma gives rise to a conscious decision to slow down, decline to participate, to seek a way out, or ‘exit’ as envisioned by Paulo Virno, or on the other, there is a passion to overcome political exhaustion and confront head on rampant injustice, environmental degradation and lack of liberty...(more)

Workshop on Sustainability and Contemporary Art

Central European University Budapest
11-12 April 2007

Following on from the Symposium on Sustainablity and Contemporary Art in 2006, this guest lecture and workshop will explore the rural as a site for contemporary art and architecture and discuss the possibilities and challenges of sustainable living. Artist and architect Djeribi and Stevens, coming from Leitrim Ireland , will present the state of the world as they see it and give an insight into their experience of art and sustainable living in a rural context...(more)

International Symposium on Sustainability and Contemporary Art

CEU Budapest
30-31 March 2006

Sustainability has been at the top of the global environmental agenda for more than a decade, but an understanding of ecological responsibility is only now beginning to have a visible impact on society and culture. The symposium aims to create a transdisciplinary space for discussion of the fundamental issues bridging the fields of art and environment, and an opportunity to be inspired by the response of leading international artists to the challenge of sustainability. This ground-breaking symposium was held in spring 2006 at CEU Budapest...(more)

1956: Legacies of Political Change in Art and Visual Culture

Oxford Brookes University
4-5 September 2004

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