TEXT TASKS

The past months have been quiet on the blog – my PhD research has taken most of my attention together with a series of projects and events of which I’ll show a bit here.

From 2010 to 2012 I was engaged in UKK, Young Art Workers Association in Denmark. While co-directing the association, the directory also celebrated UKK’s 10 anniversary with an exhibition event at Overgaden – Institute of Contemporary Art in Copenhagen. With one of the working groups I made a survey about the working conditions among our members. It resulted in a publication and an international seminar launched and held during the anniversary. Basically, most of our members try to make a living outside of the gallery system and it takes about a decade after graduation to establish a steady income. The ten years UKK has existed have witnessed a lot of changes that have influenced the working conditions of artists, for instance: less (and less flexible) public benefit, professionalisation of the institutions of the art scene (but still no or little payment to artists and independent curators when they work with these institutions) and cuts in creative/artistic educations in general. These changes are important for young art workers, who cannot survive from teaching or benefit and who try to establish an exhibition record in a system that does not pay them for it. Read our comment in the UKK Survey 2012. Back in 2010, UKK also wrote a speech about education for Camel Collectives Second World Congress of Free Artists, which took place at Århus Kunsthal. Very soon, in a week!, they’ll be launching the speeches in a great publication at Independent Curators International in New York. Speaking about publications and education, in August this year Tina Helen organised a dinner event that were to take place in 1977 in which speeches had to address the future of education. This time, I participated myself with a speech and it will also be published next week on the 24th of October at Bureau Publik. The dinner event was quite an intimate, yet focused experience; a bunch of professionals both drinking and performing, in-between a family dinner that us Danes are so good at performing and a public conference. Am excited to see the result of both publications. Another publication that also had alternative knowledge production as its topic was the Officin production A feast is… edited by Ida Marie Hede, Ursula Nistrup and Trine Friis Sørensen. The book shows that it is the result of much care; all pages are printed manually on a Risograph. Authors could more or less decide what to contribute with and my text, Suitcase, is about the use of art historical references in a contemporary and global art scene. But the contributions are diverse, from fiction to dinner parties and research projects to photographs. A last text about knowledge production that I’ll mention here is a contribution to the Chilean magazine Observatorio Cultural. The magazine is published by the arts council in Chile, which is now under the direction of a right wing government, so I chose to write about the economic side of knowledge production and how knowledge production in the arts differ from the economic version by being non-utilitarian and rather visual thoughts not aimed for increasing productivity and efficiency. I showed this via analyses of artist Rabih Mroue’s Pixelated Revolution (2012) and Hito Steyerl’s The Kiss (2012). This link is to a pdf of the magazine – in Spanish.

The past months have also allowed for collaborations with artists here in Copenhagen. ‘Collaboration’ is probably not the right word, but I really enjoy to discuss artist’s projects and to engage in their thought process and practice, so it feels like an equal and very productive exchange. With Honey Biba Beckerlee I engaged in the text part of her exhibition Entangled Realities II at Koh-i-noor, which was a conceptually tight and visually clear exhibition (see kunstkritikk.dk’s review) about quantum physics and photography. With Stefan A. Pedersen I engaged in an interview about the exhibition Out of, In, On, and Off at Overgaden – Institute of Contemporary Art. His exhibition was made out of, in, on, and off China and an unfinished film his dad made in 1972 on a trip to China. Stefan followed his dad’s trip and re-created the film, but he made it out of new footage and a diary collage soundtrack. Blue curtains (that also appeared in the original film) divided the sound and the visuals reminding us of what one can/cannot see and hear. With Camilla Bachiry and Maria Diekman I engaged in discussions about their experimental audio guide to Rudolph Tegners Museum and Sculpture Park north of Copenhagen. Through historical and site-specific research they created artistic responses to the museum collection, the architecture, the sculpture park and life of Tegner. They also used music from Valby Lokalkor and other experimental musicians in Copenhagen. The way they aurally and conceptually decentralised the pompous figure of Tegner worked well, while still paying tribute to his somehow odd and off artistic production.

Another collaboration I engaged in was with 98weeks research project in Beirut, Lebanon. One of the directors, Marwa Arsanios, invited me to collaborate on a radio project about feminism. Our project called “On the politics of silence and speaking” was part of Our Lines are Now Open: A Radio Series on the Poetics and Politics of Language, which 98weeks organised in collaboration with Lawrence Abu Hamdan and Nora Razian. For our radio programme, Marwa and I invited the philosopher Nikita Dhawan, who directs the Frankfurt Research Centre for Postcolonial Studies and who has written extensively on transnational feminism. Her book Impossible Speech: On the Politics of Silence and Violence inspired us to invite her to do a workshop on feminism and speech. For five hours we went through Gayatri Spivak’s “Can the Subaltern Speak” with a mixed group of art students, young feminists, journalists, writers etc. It was very exciting as feminism is a subject of renewed interest and influence in Lebanon these years. Later the same day, I moderated a conversation with Nikita about the main topics of her research on speech, silence, feminism and postcolonialism. This event was held within the framework of Home Works 6 organised by Ashkal Alwan, the organisation that commissioned Our Lines… The conversation together with the rest of the programmes in the radio series were streamed online and broadcasted as part of the show “Ruptures” by journalist Ziad Nawfal on radio Lebanon 96.2 FM. Podcasts are available on Ibraaz, an online platform of contemporary visual culture in North Africa and the Middle East. Marwa and I will continue the collaboration on feminism in about a year together with 98weeks other director, Mirene Arsanios. The Danish Institute in Damascus has provided us with funding to carry out a research about women’s role in contemporary art and literature in the Middle East.

Finally, I’ll mention two projects where we discussed artistic production in an academic context. A fellow PhD student and I invited sociologist at Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung Ignacio Farías to our department for arts and cultural studies at University of Copenhagen (IKK) to present his research on artist studios. He has an ethnographic approach and based on his fieldwork he explained how the material an artist is working with partakes in shaping the art work. Despite the talk being held during autumn vacations (precisely a year ago today!), we had lots of guests (especially a lot of art academy students, which was a great surprise) and an engaged discussion. There is a video podcast of the event here: The Artist Studio as a Cyborg Machine.

About a week later, also a year ago, the cultural theorist and critic Mieke Bal came to our department to engage in a panel about “Visual Artefacts and Migrating Concepts”. We were five academics from IKK who had ten minutes each to ask Bal a question about her work informed by our own research. I chose to ask about the political context of artworks. Inspired by her book, Of What One Cannot Speak, on the artist Doris Salcedo, who works specifically with a political Colombian context, the questions were: How much contextual knowledge is it necessary to obtain to write about an artwork? Can an ethnographic approach help? Or should one stay with the books and the artworks? Bal was clearly tending toward the latter and did not approve of an ethnographic approach. At the time, I was working on the methodology for my PhD and read a lot of ethnography. It seemed quite helpful and I wrote an article about it for the South African journal Critical Arts: South-North Cultural and Media Studies. The article will be published in December and it also looks into one of my case studies, Home Works 1-6 (of which the collaboration with 98weeks mentioned before took part). Now I’m already doubting what I wrote, but Bal will be back for a PdH master class already next week, so maybe there’s a possibility to get clearer on the issue.