OCCUPY PPV #07: Pain and its Politics

26th May 2023

6:00 pm – 7:30 pm

Location:

Mimosa House

47 Theobalds Rd

London

WC1X 8SP

Please join the conversation with Dr Rachel Warriner on pain as a feminist method. Rachel will discuss the politics of representing suffering in feminist practice, focusing on artists whose work examines different kinds of hurt and injury. This conversation will explore questions of bodily empathy, the politics of emotions, and how a visual language of pain might act for feminism.

Image: Nancy Spero, Helicopter Blinding Victims, 1968. Gouache and ink on paper, 59.7 x 90, 4cm. A detail used on the cover of 'Pain and Politics in Postwar Feminist Art: Activism in the Work of Nancy Spero' by Rachel Warriner

Registration is free but essential.

Speaker:

Dr Rachel Warriner is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at The Courtauld, where she has been working on the project Feminist Arts-Activism, New York: Collectives, Actions, Agitations. She is also the convenor of The Courtauld’s Gender and Sexuality Research Group and Group Work Network, and Founder of and Curator at Pluck Projects with Sarah Kelleher.

This event will be chaired by Daša Anosova (UCL SSEES)

This talk is a part of the public programme contextualising the exhibition I AM NOT HERE TO BE STRONGER THAN YOU co-curated by Daša Anosova and Alexandra Tryanova at Mimosa House in London. The show is the first major presentation of works by Alyona Tokovenko and AntiGonna - contemporary Ukrainian artists working with transgressive practices, radical intimacy, and personal traumatic memories.

In the exhibition, autobiographical narratives are manifested through the acts of (auto)eroticism, transgression and pornographic imagery incorporating painting, sculpture, installation, video, and viscerally embodied live art. Hurt and injured bodies are present in the gallery space in the form of moving image and morphing canvases, while pain, as a visual language, and a key theme of the artists’ works, addresses the politics of the moment.

The talk will take place in the exhibition space where the participants will have an opportunity to learn more about both artists' artistic practices. Learn more about the show here.

In partnership with FRINGE: UCL's Centre for the Study of Social and Cultural Complexity.

OCCUPY PPV #06: Art Histories from the Ukrainian South

5 May 2023

6:00 pm – 8:00 pm

Location:

Mimosa House

47 Theobalds Rd

London

WC1X 8SP

Please join the conversation with curator Alexandra Tryanova on art histories from the Ukrainian South. Alexandra draws a speculative map of the region departing from artistic practices of different historical periods tied with the locality attempting to mark a unique northern Black Sea identity and matters that formed it.

The conversation will explore horizontal practices and community building, psychogeography, escapism, attitude to the body, music, and politics bridging Ukrainian South and Mediterranean culture.

Image: Stas Volyazlovsky “An non Spiritus Existunt?”, mid-2000, textile, ball-pen.

Registration is free but essential.

Speaker:

Alexandra Tryanova

Alexandra is an independent curator and researcher, a current fellow of the Jester (Genk, Belgium), and a member of the Culture Commons Quest Office at the Antwerp Research Institute for the Arts (Antwerp University). She graduated from the Kask Curatorial Studies course in 2022 and holds an MA in Cultural studies and Law. In her research and practice, Alexandra focuses on artistic practices connected with recreation, gender, collective memory, and Eastern European avant-gardes. Recent projects and exhibitions: Just like Arcadia, Kunsthal Extra City, Antwerp (2022); Series of online talks Conflict Zones at Jester, Genk (2022); Velniai, Klaipeda Cultural Communication Centre, Klaipeda (2021). Recent publications: Passivity: Between Resignation and Pacifism (co-edited with Pascal Gielen), 2023, Valiz, Amsterdam. Previously Alexandra held the position of curator at the Museum of Odesa Modern Art and PinchukArtCentre (Kyiv). Since 2017, She runs an independent non-production residency Kunsthalle Lustdorf based on temporary independent artistic and curatorial associations for open practices and technologies in the area of the Green Valley in the suburbs of Odesa. Lives and works in Antwerp, Belgium.

This talk is a part of the public programme contextualising the exhibition I AM NOT HERE TO BE STRONGER THAN YOU co-curated by Daša Anosova and Alexandra Tryanova at Mimosa House in London. The show is the first major presentation of works by Alyona Tokovenko and AntiGonna - contemporary Ukrainian artists working with transgressive practices, radical intimacy, and personal traumatic memories.

In the exhibition, autobiographical narratives are manifested through the acts of (auto)eroticism, transgression and pornographic imagery incorporating painting, sculpture, installation, video, and viscerally embodied live art. Hurt and injured bodies are present in the gallery space in the form of moving image and morphing canvases, while pain, as a visual language, and a key theme of the artists’ works, addresses the politics of the moment.

The talk will take place in the exhibition space where the participants will have an opportunity to learn more about both artists' artistic practices. Learn more about the show here.

In partnership with FRINGE: UCL's Centre for the Study of Social and Cultural Complexity.

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.