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
Follow OCCUPY PPV socials for more:
Web: ppv.life
Instagram: @ppv.life
Youtube: OCCUPY PPV
Visual credit: Voices of Love by Arsen Savadov and Heorhii Senchenko in “Alchemic Surrender,” 1994.