Speakers biographical notes
April 18, 2009 4:38 pm
T.J. Demos
The Politics of Un-Belonging
With the legacy of postmodernism fated to managerial multiculturalism and essentialist identity politics, some art-world commentators have called for the reengagement of a politics of nomadism. A newly christened “altermodernism” is said to characterize contemporary art that rejects the restrictive capture of “belonging,” moving beyond a focus on origin and toward a concern with destinations, where the “journey-form” defines the paradigmatic procedures of recycling, translation, and postproduction montage (as developed recently by Nicolas Bourriaud in his Tate Triennial exhibition and his book The Radicant). This presentation intends to interrogate the utopian claims of this position, identifying its exclusionary privilege if it is not turned into a politics that can contest what Étienne Balibar has recently termed European Apartheid, that is, the geopolitical space of social hierarchy and economic privilege in which the pleasures of the nomadic are set.
T.J. Demos is a critic and a lecturer in the Department of Art History, University College London. The author of The Exiles of Marcel Duchamp (MIT Press, 2007), his essays on modern and contemporary art have appeared in international journals such as Artforum, Grey Room, October, and Texte zur Kunst. He is currently at work on a new book, provisionally titled Migrations: Contemporary Art and Globalization, which places artistic practice in relation to the emerging global field of political sovereignty and statelessness.
Demos was recently curator and director of “Zones of Conflict: Rethinking Contemporary Art During Global Crisis” (November 2008-February 2009), comprising both an international group exhibition at Pratt Manhattan Gallery in New York, and a series of research workshops in London (in partnership with Iniva, Tate Modern, Tate Britain, and UCL’s Centre for the Study of Contemporary Art).
Kati Kivinen
Kati Kivinen is a Helsinki-based art historian, working as curator for temporary exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art KIASMA. Before she has worked as coordinator for the Finnish Fund for Art Exchange FRAME in Helsinki. Recently she has curated, co-curated and coordinated at KIASMA Kasitonni’s Christmas – Kiasma @ Gallery Alkovi, 2008; ARS 06 – Sense of the Real, 2006; First We Take Museums, 2005; Heli Rekula – Desert: works from 1989 – 2004; 2005 and Repeat Pattern – Gunilla Klingberg, 2004. Other curated projects include Don’t Worry – Be curious! - the 4th Ars Baltica Triennial of Photographic Art, 2007-2008 (with Dorothee Bienert and Enrico Lunghi); Montages of Sound Atmospheres, Neue Berliner Kunstverein, Mannheimer Kunstverein, and Stadtgalerie Kiel, 2003 and Touching from a Distance – germinations 13, Crawford Municipal Art Gallery, Cork, Ireland, 2002. Currently she’s on research leave at the Finnish Museum of Photography writing her PhD work on the spatialisation of moving image and narrative in recent Finnish video installation art.
Solvita Krese
Solvita Krese is an art critic and curator based in Riga. From 2000 she is director of Latvian Center for contemporary arts (LCCA). She has curated a number of exhibitions, recent of them “Mobile museum”(2007) about the changing role of museum and art institutions, “Urbanologic”(2007), “Archaeology of reality” about women artists strategies, “Trassepassers. Contemporary art from 80ties” at National Art museum in Riga, “(un)dressed. The body in Baltic photography” in Berlin (2005). Her field of research and interest is exploration of transformation of public space and contemporary city, institutional critique and feminism strategies.
Suzana Milevska
“Whatever” vs. Negotiating Belonging
Contemporary globalised condition inevitably pushes towards hierarchised system of belonging in which belonging to a certain community, region, group or association according to appropriate particular properties or attributes becomes a basic requirement on which the negotiations of one’s own identity are founded. However, there is nothing to negotiate in belonging proposed by Gorgio Agamben: it is complete and unconditional, “being-such”, or more precisely “the belonging itself”. Whatever singularities, according to Giorgio Agamben, stand for“belonging without belonging”: for a kind of universal “belonging of a belonging” that would function without any specific attribute or property that usually defines belonging to a certain set or group.
Various phases of negotiation of our own position between these two radical oppositions, between the universal “whatever singularity” and the particularity of belonging, result in an endless oscillation. Actually such oscillation may reconcile or subvert the “representable condition of belonging”. Subject’s position therefore turns to be a position of continuous process of negotiating various belongings that give way even to potentiality not-to-belong. My question is actually how one negotiates such “belonging without belonging”, without abiding to the particular requirements of belonging, and whether potentiality of not-to-belong is also an issue of negotiation.
Prof. Dr. Suzana Milevska (b. 1961) is a curator and theorist of art and visual culture based in Skopje. Currently she teaches at Accademia Italiana and at New York University in Skopje. She holds a Ph.D in Visual Cultures from the Goldsmiths College in London where she thought from 2003-2005. From 2006-2008 she was the Director of the Visual and Cultural Research Centre in Skopje. In 2004, she was a Fulbright Senior Research Scholar. Her research and curatorial interests include postcolonial critique, gender theory and feminist art, participatory and socially engaged art. She curated over 70 art projects (exhibitions, conferences, TV talk-shows, etc.) among which “The Renaming Machine” (Ljubljana, Skopje Prishtina, Zagreb, 2008-2009) and the “Workers’ Club” at the International Contemporary Art Biennial 2005 - National Gallery, Prague. She is a member of I.K.T. and A.I.C.A. She publishes widely in art magazines and academic journals (Feminist Review, Third Text, contemporary, springerin, frameworks), and she contributed in many publications: ‘Curating as an Agency of Cultural and Geopolitical Change.’ Continuing Dialogues. Ed. by Christa Benzer, Christine Bohler, Christiane Erharter, Vienna: JRP/Ringier, 2008; ‘The Hope and Potentiality of the Paradigm of Regional Identity.’ Manifesta Companion. Ed. by Adam Budak and Nina Möntmann, Milano: Silvana Editoriale, 2008; ‘The Phantasm(s) of Belonging: Belonging without Having Something in Common’. Volksgarten Politics of Belonging. Ed. by Adam Budak, Peter Pakesch, Katia Schurl. Kunsthaus Graz am Landesmuseum Joanneum, 2008; ‘Becoming Woman from a Feminist Point of View.’ New Feminism: worlds of feminism, queer and networking conditions. Ed. by Marina Gr˛inić and Rosa Reitsamer. Vienna: Löcker Verlag, 2007; ‘Resistance that Cannot Be Recognised as Such – interview with Gayatri C. Spivak’. Conversations with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, London: Seagull Books, 2007.
Kristina Norman
On the possibility of a third opinion for Estonia
While being active both in contemporary visual art scene and documentary filmmaking, Kristina Norman is exploring her immediate social surroundings. She has dedicated three years of her life to the investigation of the case of the so-called Bronze Soldier monument. The abovementioned Soviet soldier monument has been removed from the centre of Tallinn (in April 2007) by the Estonian government for populist reasons. This symbol from the past era has become a constant source of conflict due to ambivalent semantic interpretations from two different memory communities inhabiting Estonia. Using methods and tools of relational aesthetics Norman intervenes into the matter and environment of her research. The artist inquires whether there is a space for a different position in today’s Estonian society that is strongly polarized via conflicting interpretations of historical past.
Kristina Norman was born in 1979 in Tallinn where she also currently lives and works. She graduated the Estonian Academy of Arts with a BA in Printmaking (2003), and she continues her MA studies there. Norman represented Estonia with experimental documentary “The Pribalts” in “Arrivals>Art from the New Europe” program, Modern Art Oxford, UK (2006). She participated in many international group exhibitions, amongs them, “Happy Together”, Tallinn Art Hall, Tallinn, Estonia (2009), “Dilemmas: Artists and the Idea of the Nation”, CEC ArtsLink, New York, USA (2008), “Friction and Conflict”, Kalmar Konstmuseum, Kalmar, Sweden (2008), 5th berlin biennial for contemporary art “When Things Cast No Shadow” (2008), “AgitPop”, LondonPrintStudio Gallery, London, UK (2008), “Is this Estonia we wanted?”, Rael Artel Gallery, Tartu, Estonia (2008), “Satellite Tunes – Art from the Post Soviet States”, Hungarian University of Fine Arts, Budapest, Hungary (2008), The Biennale of Young Artists, Tallinn (2007), “New Wave - Estonian Artists of the 21st Century” (curated by Anders Härm, Hanno Soans), Tallinn Art Hall, Tallinn, Estonia (2007), “KKK” - Exhibition of political art, (curated by Anders Härm), Tallinn Art Hall Gallery, Tallinn, Estonia (2007), “New Estonian Art” (curated by Anneli Porri), Võru Cultural Center Kannel, Võru, Estonia (2005). Her filmography includes “Monolith” (experimental documentary, 2007), “The Pribalts” (experimental documentary, 2006, Grand Prix of the Fideo ja Vilmi Festival, Pärnu, Estonia, 2006) and “The Field of Genius” (mocumentary, 2003). Kristina Norman will represent Estonia in the forthcoming Biennale of Art in Venice (2009).
