OCCUPY PPV #05: Curating "East" European Art

10 March 2023,

6:00 pm–8:00 pm

Location:

IAS Common Ground (G11)

Institute of Advanced Studies (IAS)

South Wing, Wilkins Building, University College London

Gower Street, London

WC1E 6BT

Please join this talk with contemporary art curators from Cell Project Space (London) and Museum of Modern Art (Warsaw) discussing curating “East European” art. They are to address the challenges and issues around curating art from the region i.e. infamous “New East” narratives (that fetishized post-Soviet aesthetics often divorcing it from any real politicality) around contemporary art; “exotic” packaging as a consumption model for the Western gaze; as well as the questions of how an ongoing russian aggression further complicates the idea of a collective Eastern European identity.

Speakers:

Natalia Sielewicz

(Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw)

Natalia is an art historian and curator at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw. In her exhibitions and essays, she addresses the issues of feminism, affect culture, biopolitics, and technology. The curator of the exhibitions: Fedir Tetyanych. The Neverending Eye (2022), The Dark Arts. Aleksandra Waliszewska and Symbolism of the East and North (2022, co-curated together with Alison Gingeras), Agnieszka Polska. The One-Thousand Year Plan (2021), Paint also known as Blood. Women, Affect, and Desire in Contemporary Painting (2019), Hoolifemmes (2017), an exhibition problematizing performativity and dance as tools of female resistance, the exhibition Ministry of Internal Affairs. Intimacy as Text (2017) on affect and the poetics of confession in literature and visual arts. She also curated Private Settings (2014), one of the first institutional exhibitions examining the impact of Internet 2.0 on the human condition in the age of late capitalism, and the exhibition Bread and Roses. Artists and the Class Divide (2015, with Łukasz Ronduda). She is part of the Sunflower Solidarity Center at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw.

Adomas Narkevičius

(Cell Project Space, London)

Adomas Narkevičius is a Lithuanian curator and art historian based in London and Vilnius, currently working as Curator at Cell Project Space, London. He is interested in nonlinear aspects of historical time as well as the body, sexuality, and the limits of representation. Adomas Narkevičius was Curator at Rupert Centre for Art, Residencies and Education. In 2020, his MA dissertation ‘Defiant Bodies: Untimely Art in the Baltics Under Soviet Rule’ at UCL, London, was awarded the Oxford Art Journal Prize. Among his recent selected projects are solo and two-person presentations ‘Dance As You Wrestle’ by Agnė Jokšė, Anastasia Sosunova; ‘Tensors’ by Cudelice Brazelton IV; ‘Sideways Looking’ by Peng Zuqiang; ‘A Glossary of Words My Mother Never Taught Me’ by Renée Akitelek Mboya at Cell Project Space; group exhibitions ‘The Prompt’ at Gianni Manhattan, Vienna (2022); ‘Authority Incorporeal’, Rupert, Baltic Triennial 14 (2021); ‘Avoidance’ at FUTURA, Prague (2021); symposium ‘Enacting Knowledges’ at Kaunas Artist House (2021) and the JCDecaux Emerging Artist Award at the Contemporary Art Centre, Vilnius.

Moderated by the OCCUPY PPV: Politics and Aesthetics convenors Vlad(a) Vazheyevskyy (Goldsmiths) and Daša Anosova (SSEES UCL).

This seminar is organised in support of the forthcoming evening of 'Eastern' European anti-colonial solidarity at Cell Project Space on Saturday 11 March. Performances by spalarnia, Liudmila, drag and poetry readings by Taras Gembik, T & Vlad(a) Vazheyevskyy as well as books, artist editions and merch from 'Eastern' Europe and its diaspora in a collective effort to support queer people displaced by Russia's war in Ukraine. All ticket proceeds and your donations will go to NGO Insight, providing psychological and legal support; medicines, hormones and food; relocation and safe houses for permanent stay to LGBTQIA+ people during the war in Ukraine. Tickets could be booked via TicketSource

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Visual credit: Voices of Love by Arsen Savadov and Heorhii Senchenko in “Alchemic Surrender,” 1994.

OCCUPY PPV #04 x Postsocialist Art Centre: Political Gardening

20 January 2023

6:00 pm - 8:00 pm (GMT)

Location:

IAS Common Ground (G11)

Institute of Advanced Studies (IAS)

South Wing, Wilkins Building, University College London

Gower Street, London

WC1E 6BT

This event is free but registration is essential.

Kateryna Aliinyk, Ukrainian garden, 2022, acrylic on canvas, 200 × 160 cm. Courtesy: the artist. Learn more about this artwork here

A panel discussion with artists and curators on the political potential of horticultural practice with Raluca Voinea, Dana Olărescu and Darya Tsymbaliuk, hosted by Vlad(a) Vazheyevskyy (Goldsmiths), Daša Anosova (SSEES UCL) and Maja and Reuben Fowkes (UCL Postsocialist Art Centre).

Gardening as a political practice unearths the radical potential of non-exploitative, self-organizing and collectivist approaches to tending plants by confronting social and environmental injustices, challenging the mistreatment of displaced communities, as well as contesting the extractivist ethos of industrial agriculture. An Experimental Station for Art and Life in the Romanian countryside draws on cooperative socialist legacies to reimagine horticulture as a emancipatory platform for institution building, while inner London allotments are reclaimed as spaces of social inclusion by East European migrants sharing knowledge and care for the biotic communities of the soil. At issue also is the extent to which human and plant relations are transformed by uprooting and displacement, with the war in Ukraine posing urgent questions of solidarity and resistance that transcend political and species divides. Political gardening will be explored in this discussion as a strategy for grassroots action in defence of endangered communities, as a field of social struggle and eco-utopian imagining that echoes the subversive histories of rural rebellion and as a rapprochement with other-than-human worlds in troubled times.

Speakers:

Raluca Voinea is curator and art critic, based in Bucharest. Since 2012 she is co-director of tranzit.ro Association. From 2012 to 2019 she managed tranzit.ro space in Bucharest. Starting with 2021, the ideas and approach that configured this space are continued in a new project, The Experimental Station for Research on Art and Life, realised by tranzit.ro together with a group of artists and other cultural workers in a village north of Bucharest. Her work is grounded in a local context, yet open for transversal and transdisciplinary collaborations. Tranzit.ro / people

Dana Olărescu is a socially engaged artist with a focus on challenging minority exclusion and environmental injustice. Through participatory methodologies that democratise access to art and knowledge, she aims to give agency to underserved migrant groups and people habitually excluded from decision-making processes, so they can become active co-producers of culture. Between 2011 and 2018, Dana formed one half of There There, a performance company concerned with reclaiming Eastern European identity in the West. Recent publications include ‘Practising Migration’ in Art, Migration, and the Production of Radical Democratic Citizenship (2022).Dana Olărescu (danaolarescu.com)

Darya Tsymbaliuk (St Antony’ College, University of Oxford) is a writer, researcher and an artist whose work lies at the intersection of environmental humanities and artistic research, and engages with feminist and decolonial methodologies. She is currently a Max Hayward Visiting Fellow (2022 - 2023) at St Antony’ College, University of Oxford, having most recently obtained her PhD at St Andrew University with a thesis on Multispecies ruptures: stories of displacement and human-plant relations from Donbas, Ukraine. darya tsymbalyuk

This event is co-organised by the OCCUPY PPV: Politics and Aesthetics convenors Vlad(a) Vazheyevskyy (Goldsmiths), Daša Anosova (SSEES UCL), and Maja and Reuben Fowkes (UCL Postsocialist Art Centre) within the framework of the SAVA project

Please consider supporting Ecoplatform - a Ukrainian vegan-anarchist eco-organization that promotes principles of horizontality and evasion from anthropocentric ideology. Learn more about how anarchist and vegan initiatives participate in the resistance to the Russian invasion of Ukraine here.

OCCUPY PPV #03: (Anti)fascist Architecture

26th November 2022

6:00 pm - 8 pm (GMT)

Join us for this workshop on the ways to challenge the indoctrinated ways we think about architecture.

Location: Online

Stream place: TBC

This event is held online.

Fascist architecture has long been propped up and fetishized in the Global West. Architecture has always been a brutal weapon, so maybe it can be reframed as Antifascist? Who are the Antifascist architects history books have erased?

The indoctrination of a contemporary architect in a globalised educational environment relies on consuming and recuperating any radical alternative to capitalism and regurgitating it as a design problem and not an ethical one.

Focusing on issues such as power dynamics, antifascism, language recuperation, representation, identity, contested heritage, public space, and ownership of memory, the speakers will offer tools to rethink architecture and heritage and allow some space for exchange.

Speakers:

Anela Dumonjić

(University of Graz)

Anela Dumonjić is a Bosnian activist, architecture photographer, artist and researcher. Dumonjić has obtained her Bachelor of Arts in Architecture at the Technical University of Munich, and she is currently enrolled in the Joint Master’s Programme for Southeastern European Studies in track of Politics and Law, at the University of Graz in Austria.

Her work currently aims at interweaving ex-Yugoslavian socialist material heritage with current oppressive societal and political structures. Other fields of her research are memory, trauma, transnational, gender and decolonial studies, as well as identity politics, which in contemporary culture pose the central core for any action, and resonate with diasporic difficulties of self-contextualisation.

Daniel Jonas-Roche

(Kean University School of Public Architecture)

Daniel Jonas-Roche is an adjunct professor of architecture, curator, and writer in New York City. Originally from Boston, his research focuses included socialist art and architecture, and U.S. labor history. His forthcoming book is entitled, ‘The Sloanist City: Alfred Sloan, Post-Fordism, and American Apartheid’ (DOM publishers, Berlin). His academic writings have been published by Princeton University, Rice University, and include forthcoming publications with the University of Puerto Rico and the MIT School of Architecture. He contributes to the Architects Newspaper and New York Review of Architecture, and is currently a lecturer at Kean University School of Public Architecture.

Andrew Santa Lucia

(Office Andorus/ Portland State University School of Architecture)

Andrew Santa Lucia is a Cuban American designer, educator, and prison abolitionist based in Portland, Oregon. He is Assistant Professor of Practice at Portland State University’s School of Architecture, where he teaches design studio, history/theory/criticism seminars, and is graduate thesis coordinator. He has lectured and exhibited internationally, including Art Basel, the Chicago Architecture Biennial and the Venice Biennale of Architecture. Andrew’s writing can be found in a broad range of media from academic journals to DIY zines. He runs Office Andorus, which designs architecture for activists, public institutions and private clients with the goal of influencing public perceptions through works of architecture. His work is a hybrid of bold colors, graphics, and shapes used to translate and amplify contemporary issues of social justice through aesthetics.

Chaired by the OCCUPY PPV: Politics and Aesthetics convenors Vlad(a) Vazheyevskyy (Goldsmiths) and Daša Anosova (SSEES UCL)

Please consider supporting Solidarity Collectives — an anti-authoritarian volunteer network from Ukraine.

Image: Andrew Santa Lucia's ALANAR (Altar to Antifascist Architecture) exhibited at the Bellevue Arts Museum Biennial 2021.