Pedagogy+Play

Red Road Flats: Past, Present, Future….

  

  

PEDAGOGY & PLAY

 

Saturday 12th February 2011, from 10.30am – 4pm

In response to the exhibition Blueprint for a Bogey and using participatory methods, this workshop based Artist Teacher seminar will explore approaches within the visual arts to curricularising playful events. The seminar-workshop, hosted by Gallery of Modern Art, Glasgow, is premised upon creativity, criticality and art making.

The exhibition includes works by Andy Goldsworthy, Graham Fagen, Eduardo Paolozzi, Paulo Rego, Dave Sherry, Corin Sworn and a collaborative project by women from the Red Road Centre.

Imagining Europe, Representing Periphery: The Body Language

Current Issues in European Cultural Studies 2011

 June 15–17, Norrköping Sweden

Call for contributions

Stream: Imagining Europe, Representing Periphery: The Body Language

 The Berlin Wall is one of the symbolic walls that prevail in the geo-politics of Europe, despite its physical disappearance. A section of the Berlin Wall, now the East Side gallery, reminds us about the political, socio-economic and cultural divide between the West and the East. Symbolic walls are more powerful that their physical manifestations. It is being on the ‘right’ side of the wall that determines the versions of sovereignty, the citizenship-related entitlements, including the economy of the rights, and in a way, of the body.

The body can be seen as one of the signifiers of the wall crossing, the border crossing, migration routes and various diasporas.

We invite the artists and academics to submit a visual piece, an image, a documentary or a short film, addressing and questioning the possibilities for imagining Europe while representing its peripheries, either as a physical body or as a body of knowledge.

Please submit your proposals including visual material AND a 200-words abstract/description by email to both conveners.

Deadline 18 February 2011

Instructions for submission

Conveners

Dr Katarzyna Kosmala Centre of Contemporary European Studies, University of the West of Scotland, UK  Email: katarzyna.kosmala@uws.ac.uk

Prof Ryszard Kluszczyński Department of Media and Audiovisual Culture, University of Łódź, Poland  Email: rwk@uni.lodz.pl

Art+Labour

 

Art+Labour is a public conversation exploring the conditions and experiences of creative labour in the cultural industries, organised by Variant and hosted by the Centre for Contemporary Arts in Glasgow on Tuesday the 9th November between 12.30-18.00.

I am one of the panelists, addressing the questions of value and aesthetics in the contemporary artistic practice.

Theodor Adorno in Aesthetic Theory noted that artlessness or philistinism is the antithesis par excellence of aesthetic behaviour. Today the problem with framing the debate about artistic practice and value, purely in terms of cultural labour and the art market signification, is that it doesn’t necessarily account for the motivations of people to get involved in artistic production and to pursue a particular set of art practices.

Document8 @ CCA

On 27th October, I deliver the session  on the politics of representation and intervention strategies: Sex as Labour in the Context of ‘New’ Europe: Making Commodification Visible? followed by a public discussion @ Document 8 International Human Rights Documentary Film Festival  at the CCA Glasgow.

Document, a grassroots initiative aims to use film as an advocacy tool to debate discourses of human rights & social issues across the globe, bringing together emerging and established filmmakers from around the world, as well academics, researchers and students, promotes local and international discussion, cultural exchange and education.

Social Movements, Political Organizations and Governance: Collectivity for/in a ‘Sustainable’ World

 

 

Social Movements, Political Organizations and Governance, the collaborative stream in LAEMOS in Argentina, in Buenos Aires in April 2010, co-organised with colleagues from Kingston University, London and Universidad Nacional de General Sarmiento, Buenos Aires embraced multiplicity of views that reflect the desire for social, political and economic change that dominant market discourse has ignored for some time.

 

We explore the question of how anti-globalisation and activist movements, various grass-roots organizations and locally formed community groups have contributed to disrupting current governance forms, institutions and its logic of sustainability. We also draw on the art-based ‘social movement’ that somehow encapsulate this challenge to existing forms of governance through lens-based representation and through participation; a challenge of breaking the paradigmatic consensus in knowledge re/production.

Living Voids in Fabricas Recuperadas Inc

 

Buenos Aires-based research project explores living fabric of urban ‘voids’.

This project engages with the question of representation through heteroglossic story-telling of Fabricas Recuperadas Inc. What we hope to capture is how the local community through co-operative activist initiatives IMPA Ciudad Cultural and collaborations with Centro Cultural de la Cooperacion re-territorialise the crisis experience, bringing authenticity back into the globalisation-’framed’ narrative.

Old/New New/Old Exhibition @ Santral, Istanbul

I have curated the group exhibition Old/New New/Old: Aysun Oner, Anna Sznajder, Mirak Jamal in September 2010 @ Istanbul Bilgi University, Santral.

Memory is what makes us, memory is what’s often left to be translated of the old.
Memories are what we live by.
In the snapshots, in the fragments of memories
we create histories and re-write them in retrospect.

The exhibition explores the patterns of translation and displacements of cultural practices and visual moments as well as a contemporary position in relation to our tradition. Participating artists attend to the past and engage with the reiteration of the old through the new and rewrite the now by acknowledging the old. Istanbul forms an ideal meeting place to explore memory; a place of merging influences, negotiating frictions of the past that lie east of Bosphorus with cultural influences of the West. Tradition is enmeshed here with new trends; a juxtaposition of the old with the new creates tensions, irreconcilability and results in a peculiar fusion of a global hybridism. Geography and history are intertwined.

Aysun Oner, Istanbul-based artist, presents her documentary project about stencil-graffiti culture in Istanbul and Turkey. Istanbul Baskisi/Istanbul Press, exhibited within Istanbul 2010 European Capital of Culture, consists of a series of photographs taken between 2006-2008 (an artistic collaboration with poet Bahattin Sağlam). The project also includes Istanbul’da Stencil/Stencil in Istanbul, the video featuring the street art stencil graffiti artists.

The Bobbin laces, made by women of Bobowa, collected by Anna Sznajder form an action-intervention-comment on the disappearing tradition of local crafts in Southern Poland. Transformed into an art object, this heritage collection marks its presence in the gallery space. Sznajder addresses the questions of adjusting artistic strategies to current socio-economic realms and the market-driven reality of post-Socialist Europe.

Mirak Jamal, Berlin-based artist, presents History of our Forefathers through his Timeline of facial hair. He states: The past is not a separate space than now, and neither is physical distance that binds people beyond the border and territoriality. In his drawings, he explores his Iranian roots and searches for a synthesis of identity. The iconic imagery of kings, conquerors, and historical heros’ facial hair reflect shifting fashions and cultures. Versatility of styles, like the fu-manchu of Genghis Khan, the long beard of Cyrus, or a Qajar-Era imperial moustache, all come to represent certain timeframes for identification.

The works in the exhibition reflect aesthetic engagement based on the mixing of the old/the new worldviews and the ways of doing things. We face a particular moment – of ‘catching’ up with disappearing cultural forms, before they are lost, turn into memories and become possible versions of histories.

Boundless creativity/Urban subversion

The international collaborative project explores the themes of Boundless Creativity/Urban Subversions, inspired by the altermodern context and based on a series of departures and arrivals.

Drawing on Paul Virilo’s aesthetics of disappearance and Marc Augé’s idea of non-place, we have collated a series of the interactive initiatives to co-reflect upon the processes of knowledge exchange. A chaotic universe of communication, travel and migration reflect the multiple genre of representing. A place can be viewed as a relational zone, a geographical landmark, or an area still–to–be–filled with signification and meaning. Embracing the instability and movement, the project explores a domain of practice/research at the peripheries-spaces of dominant knowledge production.

The project arrived to Istanbul. I co-organized and co-convened the events at Bilgi University, Santral Campus on the 1st and 2nd September featuring the workshop with presentations and performances, the roundtable discussion and the group exhibition.

At the cross-roads of our academic, social and artistic expression we map the examples of creative practice at boundaries in order to reflect on alternative forms of organizing and processes of transient knowledge production, including:

Umbilical viators and exiles (Miguel Imas /Alia Weston, Kingston University)
Art installation making and resisting dominant (Katarzyna Kosmala, University of the West of Scotland)                                                                                                                                                                                 Market Estate Project: A triptych (Maria Daskalaki, Kingston University, London/Athens)
I love deadlines! Performing time (Jean-Luc Moriceau, Paris)
Breathing out as organizing beyond controlling (Nick Wilson/Howard Milner, King’s College London)

The question haunts us: Can creative borderline processes of a more nomadic nature carve a legitimate space for itself in a dominant culture of global markets, digital technologies and shifting social and political forces?

Don’t Die for Love!

 Labyrinth of Life, Women@ Play, Red Road, Glasgow

As a visiting research fellow at the European Centre for Gender Excellence GEXCEL @ University of Linköping, Sweden, from September to December 2009, I was involved in the research project, enveloped in feminist aesthetics that addresses invisibility surrounding violence in the context of sex-related abuse while simultaneously engages in the debates that contributes to deconstruction of the issues of gender inequality in the hetero-normative milieu.

The project aims to problematise a notion of ‘abuse’ in relational violence, drawing on representation from the arts installations. The intervention strategies are also addressed, situating the accounts of violences in the wider context including: Barbara Kruger’s project Don’t Die For Love and the Elbowroom organised in Glasgow in association with GOMA Glasgow and the Amnesty International, 2005 and Bruce Nauman’s video installations Anthro-Socio, exhibited as a part of his solo exhibition at Musee d’Art Contemporain in Montreal in 2007 and his installation Violent Incident from Tate Collection.

The second phase the project focuses on the critical issues associated with the crisis of heterosexual masculinity – in particular in relation to the problematic of an increasing disconnection and fragmentation – linking this crisis to the problem of relational violence and its conflation with entertainment.