unitednationsplaza Mexico DF is an exhibition in the form of a temporary school. For this project, artist Anton Vidokle is organizing a month long program of seminars and workshops that use the Casa Refugio as a site to shape a critically engaged public through art discourse. unitednationsplaza is presented by PAC (Patronato de Arte Contemporáneo A.C.) as part of its new curatorial residency program, and will run from March 1st through March 31, 2008.
unitednationsplaza is thematically organized around a central topic: possibilities for artistic agency today. The program will comprise of a series of short seminars and workshops developed by a group of artists, writers, curators and theorists including Eduardo Abaroa, Minerva Cuevas, Anselm Franke, Liam Gillick, Boris Groys, Nikolaus Hirsch, Chus Martinez, Martha Rosler, Natascha Sadr Haghighian, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Jalal Toufic, Jan Verwoert and Tirdad Zolghadr. All topics will be addressed from the perspective of ongoing research and production, and as such will constitute the core structure of the school. The program will also feature discussions, screenings, performances and publications by a group of contributors including Julieta Aranda, Fia Backstrom, Regine Basha, Oksana Bulgakowa, Nico Dockx, Adriana Lara, Desiderio Navarro, Damian Ortega, Hila Peleg and Eduardo Sarabia. unitednationsplaza will operate a web-based radio station: WUNP, a project by Angel Nevarez and Valerie Tevere.
unitednationsplaza Mexico DF is the third in a series of art projects organized around a temporary school format, started by Anton Vidokle. Vidokle initiated his research into education as site for artistic practice for Manifesta 6, which was cancelled. In response to the cancellation, Vidokle set up an independent project in Berlin called Unitednationsplaza--a twelve-month exhibition as school involving more than a hundred artists, writers, philosophers, and diverse audiences. Located behind a supermarket in East Berlin, UNP's program featured numerous seminars, lectures, screenings, book presentations and projects including the Martha Rosler Library. Starting January 2008, Vidokle is presenting a related year-long program, called Night School, at the New Museum in New York City.
The Patronage for Contemporary Art A.C. (PAC) is a unique non-profit civic association formed by a group of individuals committed to promoting the development of contemporary art. PAC was founded in June 2000 as an initiative to bring contemporary art closer to an audience by way of collaboration with museums, galleries, curators, publishers, critics and researches in the field of contemporary art. Its board of directors concentrates the voluntary efforts of an independent group of cultural professionals. PAC's program is supported and developed thanks to the yearly contributions of individual and corporate donors.
Casa Refugio Citlaltépetl is a civic association based in Mexico City whose mission is to provide shelter and protection to prosecuted writers from any country. In addition, Casa Refugio also has an intense public cultural program which includes publication of the quarterly magazine "Líneas de Fuga", as well as the organization of conference cycles (known as "Literary Thursdays"); special events such as book launches and poetry readings, and literary workshops amongst other activities.
Unitednationsplaza Mexico DF
Program: March 1– 30, 2008
Saturday, March 1st
7–10pm
open to public
Anton Vidokle:
Opening remarks
Liam Gillick:
Two Short Texts on the Possibility of Creating an Economy of Equivalence
Day 1: The day AFTER closure of an experimental factory
BEARING IN MIND:
THE BOOK
IMMATERIAL LABOR
ANALOGOUS MAPPING
CULTURAL ECHOES
SITES OF PRODUCTION
AGENCY IN RELATION TO ECO-POLITICS
COALESCENCE/RETURN OF CLASSICAL RELATIONS OF PRODUCTION
CONSENSUS MODELS AS A PHANTOM PARALLEL
DETAILED WORK IN THE CULTURAL FRAME
THE FACTORY/THE WHOLESALE TRANSFER OF ACTIVITY
THE MANAGEMENT OF TIME IN THE CULTURAL SPHERE
LANGUAGES OF PRODUCTION AND DEVELOPMENT
HOW TO WORK TOGETHER
NOSTALGIA FOR THE GROUP
THE DAY BEFORE/THE DAY AFTER
CONDITIONS FOR THE EXPERIMENTAL BUT NO EXPERIMENTS
SUSPENSION/REPRESSION AS A DOMINANT MODEL
THE LOCATION OF THE PROJECTED PROBLEM ALWAYS OUT
OF REACH OR TOO CLOSE
THE POTENTIAL OF REFUSAL AND COLLECTIVE ENNUI (THE FOCUS OF THE EXERCISE IS PERMANENTLY DISPLACED)
Liam Gillick is based in New York and London. Numerous solo exhibitions since 1989 include ‘Literally’, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2003; ‘Communes, bar and greenrooms’, The Powerplant Contemporary Art Gallery, Toronto, 2003; ‘The Wood Way’, Whitechapel Gallery, London, 2002; ‘A short text on the possibility of creating an economy of equivalence’, Palais de Tokyo, 2005. Selected group exhibitions include ‘Singular Forms’, Guggenheim Museum, 2004; 50th Venice Biennale, 2003; ‘What If’, Moderna Museet, Stockholm, 2000 and documenta X, 1997. Numerous public projects and interventions include Ft. Lauderdale Airport in 2002; the new Home Office government building in London in 2005 and the Lufthansa Headquarters in Frankfurt in 2006. Since 1995 Liam Gillick has published a number of books that function in parallel to his artwork including
Literally No Place (Book Works, London, 2002);
Five or Six (Lukas & Sternberg, New York, 1999);
Discussion Island/Big Conference Centre (Kunstverein Ludwigsburg, Ludwigsburg, and Orchard Gallery, Derry, 1997),
Erasmus is Late (Book Works, London, 1995) and most recently
PROXEMICS: SELECTED WRITINGS 1988–2006 (JRP|Ringier, Zurich, 2007). Liam Gillick has contributed to many art magazines and journals including Artforum, Parkett, Frieze, Art Monthly and a regular column for Metropolis M in Amsterdam and has taught at Columbia University, New York, since 1997. A retrospective series of exhibitions opened in January at Witte de With and the Kunsthalle Zurich, traveling to the Kunstverein München in July and ending at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago in January 2009.
The re-launch of the WUNP – unitednationsplaza Radio Network
WUNP is a radio station produced by Valerie Tevere + Angel Nevarez for Unitednationsplaza MX. WUNP is a portal for broadcasting audio works, conversations, and conceptual radio projects.
Sunday, March 2
4–7 pm
open to public
Liam Gillick:
Two Short Texts on the Possibility of Creating an Economy of Equivalence
Day 2: Reoccupation, recuperation and PRECISE renovation.
Monday, March 3rd
7–10 pm
open to public
Eduardo Abaroa:
Cheap Nebula
A nebula is a discrete amount of dust, hydrogen gas and plasma. It is the first stage in the formation of a star or group of stars. The didactic materials for this course will be in a state of plasma: something resembling both, liquids and gases, a fourth stage of matter.
The seminar will discuss a series of brief texts on different issues, the limits of which may collide against or integrate with other issues. It cannot pretend to have a defined program, but look for a stage of possibility. Some videos will be shown...on a plasma screen, if possible.
Topics:
Homeopathic Curating
Pirate ships and Mercenaries, the role of art
Criticism in Mexico.
An Archive of Moments and Places (video documents)
Microscopic Museology
Free Speech in Mexico Right Now, Please
Eduardo Abaroa is an artist and writer living in Mexico City. He has shown his sculpture and video work in several international venues and has produced a series of texts about the contemporary art practice in Mexico, including "Art Log, artist run spaces in the 90's" which will be published soon. He is a cofounder of the artist run space Temistocles 44 in Mexico City.
Tuesday, March 4th
3–6 pm
Cheap Nebula workshop (open to core group participants only)
7–10 pm
open to public
Natasha Sadr Haghighian:
40 minutes between the boards
A series of black boards will be installed on the terrace of Casa Refugio. Objects, sketched with chalk on those boards, will serve as coordinates for a 40 minute walkthrough. The drawings will function as links to theory, personal experiences and questions that arise from image production and deal with other tricky representational formats. The walkthrough will operate in-between those coordinates, reflecting on defacement, renaming and other possible and impossible ways of confronting representations one can't get rid of: representations that, through their apparitional features, block the access to situations, to negotiation and to change.
Natasha Sadr Haghighian's biography can be found at
www.bioswop.net
Wednesday, March 5th
2–5 pm
Workshop with Natascha Sadr Haghighian (core group participants only)
Thursday, March 6th
7–10 pm
open to public
Rirkrit Tiravanija:
The Land
Initiated in 1998, the land (more direct translation from Thai to English would be, the rice field) was the merging of ideas by different artists to cultivate a place of and for social engagement.
Though initially the action to acquire the rice fields were initiated by two artists from Thailand, the land was initiated with anonymity and without the concept of ownership. The land was to be cultivated as an open space, though with certain intentions towards community, towards discussions and towards experimentation in other fields of thoughts.
Born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, the Thai artist Rirkrit Tiravanija is widely recognized as one of the most influential artists of his generation. His work defies media-based description, as his practice combines traditional object making, public and private performances, teaching, and other forms of public service and social action. Winner of the 2005 Hugo Boss Prize awarded by the Guggenheim Museum, his exhibition there consisted of a pirate radio (with instructions on how to make one for yourself.) Tiravanija was also awarded the Benesse by the Naoshima Contemporary Art Museum in Japan and the Smithsonian American Art Museum's Lucelia Artist Award. He has had a retrospective exhibition at the Museum Bojmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam that then was presented in Paris and London. Tiravanija is on the faculty of the School of the Arts at Columbia University, and is a founding member and curator of Utopia Station, a collective project of artists, art historians, and curators.
Friday, March 7th
3–6 pm
workshop with Rirkrit Tiravanija (core group participants only)
7–10 pm
open to public
Martha Rosler:
Essays
presentation of
Imágines públicas: La funcíon política de la imagen, Editorial Gustavo Gili, Barcelona, 2007
Mixing analysis and wit, Rosler challenges many of the fundamental precepts of present-day art practice in investigating the role of the artist as author and citizen.
Martha Rosler was born in Brooklyn, New York, where she now lives, after spending the 1970s in California. She works in video, photo-text, installation, sculpture, and performance, and writes on aspects of culture. She is a renowned teacher and has lectured widely, nationally and internationally. Rosler's work is centered on everyday life and the public sphere, often with an eye to women's experience. Recurrent concerns are the media and war as well as architecture and the built environment, from housing and homelessness to systems of transport. Her work has been seen in the Venice Biennale of 2003; the Liverpool Biennial and the Taipei Biennial (both 2004); documenta 12 and SkultpturProjekte Münster (2007); as well as many major international survey shows, including several Whitney biennials. She has had numerous solo exhibitions. A retrospective of her work, Positions in the Life World (1998-2000), was shown in five European cities and at the New Museum and the International Center of Photography (both in New York), concurrently. Rosler has published fifteen books of photography, art, and writing, most recently
Imágines públicas: La funcíon política de la imagen (Gustavo Gili, Barcelona, 2007).
Decoys and Disruptions: Selected Essays 1975–2001 was published by MIT Press in 2004. Books of her photographs include
Passionate Signals (Cantz, 2005),
In the Place of the Public: Airport Series (Cantz, 1997), and
Rites of Passage (NYFA, 1995).
If You Lived Here (Free Press, 1991) addresses her Dia project on housing, homelessness, and urban life. Rosler has been awarded the Spectrum International Prize in Photography for 2005, the Oskar-Kokoschka Prize in 2006, and Anonymous Was a Woman award in 2007. She teaches at the Städelschule in Frankfurt and Rutgers University.
Saturday, March 8
2–5 pm
workshop with Martha Rosler (core group participants only.)
7–10 pm
open to public
Julieta Aranda & Regine Basha:
Out of Tune
A presentation of audio/visual material collected over the past year by Regine Basha and Julieta Aranda chronicling a displaced 1940s Iraqi music scene and the possibilities and impossibilities of transmission in the present day.
Julieta Aranda: Born in Mexico City, she currently lives and works between Berlin and New York. Her work has been exhibited internationally in shows such as Transmediale 08, Berlin; 9th Lyon Biennial, Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art, MUSAC, Spain; REDCAT, LA, ICA London; Moderna Galerija, Ljubljana; Museo Carrillo Gil, Mexico City; Moore Space, Miami; Portikus, Frankfurt, Kunstwerke Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin; and VII Havanna Biennial amongst other. Julieta received her MFA from Columbia University in 2006. She has done residences at IASPIS in Sweden, and Récolletes in Paris, France. She is represented by Galerie Michael Janssen in Berlin, and by Fruit&Flower Deli in New York.
Regine Basha is an independent curator and art writer who has worked nationally and internationally for the past 12 years having worked with non-profit spaces in Montreal, New York, Istanbul and recently as Adjunt Curator for Arthouse in Austin, Texas. She is a 1996 graduate of the Center For Curatorial Studies Program at Bard College, New York. Her curatorial work has explored various exhibition formats and specific modes of artists’ production and distribution in both public and private spaces. She is co-founder of Fluent~Collaborative, and Grackleworld.com. Her writing appears in numerous exhibition catalogs most recently for Stephen Vitiello, Daniel Bozhkov, and Dario Robleto/Jeremy Blake, as well as in the publications Cabinet, Modern Painters, Art Papers, Bidoun and ArtLies. For a full exhibition list, see:
web.mac.com/ginabasha
Sunday, March 9
5–7.30 pm
Anselm Franke:
From Animism to Animation: Moving Image in Modern Culture
Introduction: Anselm Franke
Guest speaker: Oksana Bulgakowa, Eisentstein in Mexico
Film excerpts "Que Viva Mexico"
Discussion
This seminar will focus on Eisenstein’s relation to "animism", animation, and his obsession with images of death. Based on these, we invite speculations on the relation between 'life' and 'death' as historical dimensions of primitivism and the quest for a mode of 'visual thought'; and on mummification and animation in mass culture and the theory of revolutions at large.
If artistic agency can be understood as intervention into collective imaginaries, is it possible to identify the desires that define the relation of power and autonomy in the realm of representations and popular imaginings historically? For many seminal modern artists from Europe and the United States, Mexico has variously operated as a screen on which these desires have been projected, but also become historically contested and readable.
This seminar departs from the case of Eisenstein, who, in 1931, coming from Hollywood, has spent many months filming in Mexico. While Eisenstein was not able to edit his own film material and complete the film, he produced hundreds of pages of notes and drawings in Mexico, thus making his time there one of the most productive of his life.
In Eisenstein' s universe, the experience of Mexico lead to far-reaching revisions in his theory of the moving image in modern culture and the revolution, such as his thinking about fetishism, and the European model of the psyche as interior and individualised. More then a portrait of Mexican culture, Eisenstein's 'Mexico' opens a unique perspective on the Russian revolution, the agency of artists therein, emerging mass culture globally, and particularly Eisenstein's own theory of montage.
The seminar opens with a lecture by renowned scholar and Eisenstein biographer Oksana Bulgakowa, who will give an overview of Eisenstein's relation to Mexico, followed by a discussion. The second evening will be a presentation by Anselm Franke, drawing on material and research for a recently opened exhibition on "Mimetisme" and a future exhibition project including the drawings of Sergei Eisenstein.
Anselm Franke is a curator and writer based in Antwerp and Berlin. He is currently the Artistic Director of Extra City Center for Contemporary Art in Antwerp. Recent projects include Clinic: A Pathology of Gestures at Hebbel Am Ufer, Berlin, November 2006, curated with Hila Peleg and No Matter How Bright the Light, the Crossing Occurs at Night at KW Berlin, September 2006, with Natascha Sadr Haghighian, Ines Schaber and Judith Hopf. He has edited and published publications with Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König and others and is a contributor to magazines such as Parkett, Cabinet Magazine, Piktogram, Domus and ARCHIS. Anselm Franke is currently a PhD candidate in Visual Cultures/Center for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths College London. Together with Hila Peleg, he is a co-curator of Manifesta 7, Trentino - Alto Adige, Italy, 2008.
Oksana Bulgakowa, Professor of Film Studies at the International Film School in Cologne, is a Moscow-born scholar who lives in Berlin. She published several books on Russian and German cinema (
Sergei Eisenstein: Three Utopias. Architectural drafts for a Film Theory, 1996;
FEKS - The Factory of Eccentric Actors, 1997;
The Adventures of Doctor Mabuse in the Country of Bolsheviks, 1995;
The White Rectangle. Kazimir Malevitch On Film, 1997 (English Edition 2002);
Sergej Eisenstein. A Biography, 1998; English edition 2003;
Factory of Gestures, Moscow 2005), directed films (
Stalin – a Mosfilmproduction, 1993;
The Girl who kissed Stalin, SR, 1995;
The Different Faces of Sergei Eisenstein, 1998), curated a film section of an exhibit Moscow–Berlin, Berlin–Moscow 1900–1950 and developed multimedia projects (a website
The Visual Universe of Sergei Eisenstein. Sketch book 1914, Daniel Langlois-Foundation, Montreal, 2005; a DVD
Factory of Gestures. On Body Language in Film, Stanford Humanities Lab, 2008).
Monday, March 10th
7–10 pm
open to public
a lecture by Anselm Franke
Tuesday, March 11
7–10 pm
Jan Verwoert:
Yes, No And Other Options, Part 1
Where do you want to go today? Possibilities are offered everywhere. But in the end there are always only menues with preset options to choose from. Are you for us or against us? This is the question of the political. But can we really speak of choice when the options to choose from are imposed by those in power? Do we even want to have choices? Just-in-production, the new prevalent mode of labour, not just in the cultural field, it seems, is all about pushing things to the point where all options are exhausted and the only thing you can do is to do what it takes to meet the deadline. Under the conditions of just-in-time production labour is less and less work and more and more performance. You perform to proof yourself. And to do so you have to be ready anytime.
How do we want to live with these new standards of choice and agency? There has to be a better solution than paranoia. What modes and models of art and thinking can we develop to move beyond the preset option menues and defy the pressure to perform? How can we redefine the terms of choice and reinvent the pleasure (not) to perform?
Jan Verwoert is an art critic based in Berlin. He is a contributing editor to Frieze magazine and also writes regularly about contemporary art for such art magazines as Afterall, Metropolis M. Teaches at the MA Fine Arts department at the Piet Zwart Institute Rotterdam.
Wednesday, March 12
7–10 pm
open to public
Jan Verwoert:
Yes, No And Other Options, Part 2
Thursday, March 13
7–10 pm
open to public
Tirdad Zolghadr:
Kitchen Party: revisiting Class Hegemony, Ethnic Marketing and the unp
In the exhibition project Ethnic Marketing (2004–2006), the issue at hand was to assess the emergent vicissitudes of the gradually “globalizing” art circuit without repeating the curatorial clichés of recent years. Having watched one example of critical internationalism after another reduce itself to postcolonial platitude or self-congratulating adventurism, TZ framed this project as an inquiry into Euroamerican xenophilia in and of itself. Rather than try and build the proverbial Third World “platform”, or “forum”, or “bridge”, the question is what makes the bridging so attractive in first place.
Who stands to gain from searing critiques of the North and Northwest, or from upholding the aims of the East and South? An unresolved tension here is the contradiction between the notion of artistic specificity or autonomy, and the premise that art always testifies to a sociocultural context. If art is a Euroamerican tradition per se, how can it be globalized without a reasonable amount of epistemic violence? And if it is irretrievably enmeshed with context, how to explain the miracle of art being immaculately conceived all over the planet in a comparable way? Though we cannot jump over our own intellectual shadows to answer questions of such pretentious magnitude, we can, however, take a good look at the xenophiliac fervor that fuels and complexifies them.
The above research evolved into a premise more promising than ethnicity, namely that of class hierachy, in the form of the exbhition project Lapdogs of the Bourgeoisie, in collaboration with Nav Haq. To what extent does class play a role in the production and dissemination of contemporary art? The project is touring internationally from 2006 to 2009, investigating how and whether the ideology of socioeconomic background still defines your art world career, and to which point such a career might consolidate the ideologies in question. But although the notion of class is the thematic touchstone of the project, the idea is not to use contemporary art to explore class structures in society at large. Rather, the project hopes to develop a sense of art world reflexivity, tracing hegemonic patterns within the field itself.
Moreover, in the light of recent changes in working conditions within and without the arts, a main question here is whether the traditional analytical tools at our disposal are still useful today. In the best of cases, Lapdogs of the Bourgeoisie offers a venue for new working hypotheses, pointed political speculation and much high-quality art, but also a revisiting of what a group exhibition can offer in terms of format, topic and discussion.
Finally, drawing on seminar experiences including the unp Berlin event "That's Why You Always Find me In the Kitchen At Parties", or the opening unp conference "A History of Productive Failures", Zolghadr will raise a (self-)critical discussion of the exhibition-as-school concept, to contextualize it within larger debates and tentatively suggest new directions. The above themes and contents aside, how does criticism, discussion, theory render itself visible here, and to which extent can or should it strive to do so. How to circumscribe the working definitions of success and failure. And how do those criteria sit with tendencies within the art field, e.g. increasing demands for professional dexterity, and audiences with increasingly varied educational backgrounds. More often than not, professionals have been reacting to these demands with copy-paste proficiency and vaguely intellectualized panic, and given the conditions of labor within the field, a call for more “academic” approaches is hardly realistic. What may prove more promising is to foster a critical sense of the models and prototypes framing one’s theoretical armature, to develop a notion of how they may compromise or at times perhaps enhance the quality of the discussion.
Tirdad Zolghadr is a freelance writer based in Berlin and Tehran. He writes for frieze, Bidoun and other publications, and is editor-at-large for Cabinet magazine. Zolghadr has also curated events in a wide range of venues, also co-curating the international Sharjah Biennial 2005. He's a founding member of the Shahrzad art & design collective, and has published his first novel Softcore with Telegram Books London. Writing and curating aside, Zolghadr filmed and directed the documentaries Tehran 1380 (with Solmaz Shahbazi), winning the Young Filmmaker's Award of Duisburg 2002, and Tropical Modernism, which premiered at the Oberhausen Short Film Festival 2006.
Friday, March 14
3–6 pm
workshop (core group participants only):
A Crime Against Art: A workshop with Hila Peleg (film making and curatorial practice)
Hila Peleg is a curator based in Berlin. Born in Tel Aviv, Peleg studied Art History at Goldsmiths College/University of London, where she is currently a PhD candidate in Curatorial Knowledge/Visual Cultures. Peleg organised and co-curated various international projects dealing with artistic practices and culture from the Middle East. Other exhibitions include: The Imaginary Number (KW Berlin, 2005), Keren Cytter: I was the good and he was the bad and the ugly (KW Berlin, 2006) Clinic. A Pathology of Gestures (Hebbel Am Ufer Berlin, 2006). Peleg is co-curator of Manifesta 7 that will take place in the region of Trentino –Alto Adige / Südtirol in summer 2008.
7–10 pm
open to public
Tirdad Zolghadr:
Kitchen Party: revisiting Class Hegemony, Ethnic Marketing and the unp, Part 2
Saturday, March 15
1–10 pm
open to public
Nikolaus Hirsch:
The Architecture of Education
The seminar will explore the spatial parameters of knowledge production, hence reflecting the model of unitednationsplaza as such. Since this model proposes an “exhibition as school” we have to ask: What and how do we display? Can we transcend the traditional boundaries between research, education and display? What are the spatial formats that determine the school?
unitednationsplaza will be contextualized in a short history of school models: a critical survey from ancient symposia, over modernist schools such as the Bauhaus and the Blackmountain College, to new sites of knowledge production such as the Cybermohalla Hub in Delhi. What had started more than two thousand years ago as an informal symposium of intellectuals joining for drinks, food and talk has evolved into a highly differentiated structure of lectures, conferences, round tables, workshops, reading groups, desk crits, pin-ups and tutorials. Its spatial equivalent is the heavy luggage of architecture: the conference room, auditorium, dormitory, laboratory, library, gallery and studio.
Those architectural components and their walls, ceilings and floors are more than just inert material but a trigger for a spatial practice as a form of knowledge production. Speculating on a situation in which the learning environment and knowledge production become interdependent, the seminar investigates the potentials and limits for the creation of a critical collective space.
Nikolaus Hirsch is a Frankfurt-based architect, who teaches at the Architectural Association in London, the Institute of Applied Theatre Studies at Giessen University, at UPenn in Philadelphia. His work includes the Dresden Synagogue, the Hinzert Document Center, Bockenheimer Depot Theater (with William Forsythe), music pavilion „Soundchambers“ at Museu Serralves in Porto, the architecture for Bruno Latour´s “Making Things Public” at the ZKM and “unitednationsplaza” in Berlin (with Anton Vidokle). Current projects include the Cybermohalla Hub in Delhi, and the European Kunsthalle in Cologne. Nikolaus Hirsch has curated „ErsatzStadt: Representations of the Urban“ at Volksbühne Berlin and is a member of the „Curating Architecture“ programme at Goldsmiths College in London. His work was shown in numerous exhibitions such as "Neue Welt" (Frankfurter Kunstverein), „Utopia Station“ at Venice Biennal, „Can Buildings Curate“ (AA London) and Sao Paulo Biennal 2007. Most recently, Hirsch has published his new book „On Boundaries“ (Sternberg Press).
Sunday, March 16
4–6 pm
open to public
Fia Backström:
HERD INSTINCT 360° (2006), a staged gathering with sacred undertones, including a performance, lectures, and communal intake where the other side of human collective behavior, in society at large as well as in the art-world, is investigated, spanning topics such as cult mentality, corporate action and faux activism. Rather than in-the-news issues, the performance addresses group dynamics from mass-psychosis to totalitarian gatherings whether inspired by Malcolm X or Microsoft, in the macrocosmic forms of political movements and global markets, of which the art industry is one; or in the microcosmic form of artists' collectives
Fia Backström is an artist based in New York, who is interested in questions on the social interrelations of images and their signification processes, as seen through the shifting faces of politics, marketing, propaganda and art, including the audience.
Introductory narration - performance
6–9pm
open to public
Chus Martínez:
Attitude Relativism
A session on the notion of the “contract” established between the artists and the audience.
Using diverse material, ranging from the suicide of the Argentinean artist Alberto Greco, the production of filmmaker Raymundo Gleyzer to some of the performances of the American stand-up comedian Andy Kaufmann, Chus Martinez will reflect on the complicated issue of the “agreement” that a work of art establishes with the audience.
Chus Martínez is a curator and critic, currently the director of the Frankfurter Kunstverein since January 2006. Between 2002–2005 she was the artistic director of Sala Rekalde, a public art space in the city of Bilbao and between 2001-2003 the curator of the project room of "La Caixa Foundation" in Barcelona. She writes for a number of magazines, such as Afterall, and is a member of the advisory board of the upcoming Carnegie International (2008).
Monday, March 17
4–7 pm
closed to public – core group participants only
Chus Martínez:
Attitude Relativism, part 2.
Tuesday, March 18
7–10 pm
open to public
Boris Groys:
Art after Communism
The contemporary, post-communist situation is mostly understood as a time after the full and final victory of the market over all the attempts to put this rule into question. Accordingly, art is equated to the art market and an individual artwork is seen primarily as a commodity. Under this regime the only way for art to become "serious" is to become "critical", which means that it tries to reflect explicitly on its own character-as- commodity. It is telling that the art of the former Communist or Socialist countries is regarded from this perspective as non-serious because it is non-critical by definition; this art could not reflect on itself as a commodity because it was not a commodity. (It was not a commodity because there was no market, and certainly no art market under Socialism).
But the equation between art and art market, be it critical or not, not only brings about the erasure of a substantial part of the art heritage of the 20th Century; it also - and this is the more important point - ignores the non- market dimensions of contemporary art that functions not only as commodity but also as propaganda (for example: Islamist videos), as a means to organize a new type of communal space and a new type of community itself. The goal of the seminar is to investigate precisely these non-market aspects of contemporary art in its relationship to the long tradition of non-market uses of art, related initially to the Socialist-Communist tradition.
Born in East Berlin in 1947, Boris Groys studied Philosophy and Mathematics at the University of Leningrad from 1965-71. Then, from 1971 to 1976 Groys worked as a research assistant at various institutes in Leningrad and from 1976-81 he was employed at the Institute for Structural and Applied Linguistics at the University of Moscow. In 1981 Groys emigrated from the former USSR to Germany. 1982-85 he received various grants in Germany and worked as a freelance author from 1986-87 in Cologne. Groys taught as Guest Professor in the States at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia in 1988 and at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles in 1991. He obtained his doctorate in Philosophy from the University of Muenster in 1992. Since 1994 Groys has been professor for Philosophy and Media Theory at the Academy for Design in Karlsruhe, Germany. And since January 1st 2001 Groys also serves as vice chancellor at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, which has since recieved university status. Member of the Association International des Critiques d'Art [AICA].
Wednesday, March 19
7–9 pm
workshop with Boris Groys (core group participants only)
Monday, March 24
7–9 pm
open to public
Minerva Cuevas:
Artistic Research
A discussion of methodologies of research in art projects.
Based in Mexico d.f., Minerva Cuevas uses social issues and activism as the effect the virtual space of the Internet, museums or the urban sphere. Her exhibitions are not solely presentations of work but active environments in which images and artefacts are appropriated and reconfigured and the context of their reception is questioned. In this exhibition, Cuevas plays out her interest in the civilisational properties of science and the museum, exploring the concepts of ‘evolution’ and the opposition between notions of the ‘wild’ and the ‘civilized’.
Tuesday, March 25
2–4 pm
workshop with Minerva Cuevas (core group participants only)
Wednesday, March 26
7–10 pm
open to public
Jalal Toufic:
You Said “Stay,” So I Stayed
The ordeal of the will is not only that one has to go through countless recurrence and, in the guise of one’s computer emulations or of some of one’s versions in other branches of a bifurcating universe, in desperation commit suicide myriad times; but also that once the will is accomplished, one thenceforth is going to have not only to accept everything that happens, even vast catastrophes, but also, since a genuine will is an ontological selector that automatically renders anything that cannot be willed in the mode of eternal recurrence impossible, to affirm its eternal recurrence: amor fati. Can genocides be willed? This is possibly an empirical question: if emulations and/or time-travel across parallel universes become possible and a will is generated through countless repetition, then if genocides continue to happen, they can be, and indeed are, willed. He came to the realization that even the many suicides he—in the guise of some of the versions in the other bifurcation branches of the universe—committed during his countless recurrence ordeal may turn out to be as nothing compared to his having to possibly deal with the tragic not just acceptance, but downright willing, as he had never before willed anything, of what he otherwise would have viewed as unequivocally evil, no longer able to distance himself from it even in the form of being nostalgic about the preceding period. It is our chance, the lightness of our condition, that the will is not yet accomplished, that we do not have to affirm everything that exists.
Jalal Toufic is a thinker, writer, and artist. He is the author of
Distracted (1991; 2nd ed., 2003),
(Vampires): An Uneasy Essay on the Undead in Film (1993; 2nd ed., 2003),
Over-Sensitivity (1996),
Forthcoming (2000),
Undying Love, or Love Dies (2002),
Two or Three Things I’m Dying to Tell You (2005),
‘Âshûrâ’: This Blood Spilled in My Veins (2005), and
Undeserving Lebanon (2007). His videos and mixed-media works have been presented in such venues as Artists Space, New York; Witte de With, Rotterdam; Fundació Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona; Kunsthalle Fridericianum, Kassel; and the 16th International Documentary Filmfestival Amsterdam (IDFA) in a “Focus Jalal Toufic” program. He has taught at the University of California at Berkeley, California Institute of the Arts, USC, and the Rijksakademie, and he is currently a Professor at Kadir Has University in Istanbul.
www.jalaltoufic.com
Thursday, March 27
7–10 pm
open to public
Jalal Toufic:
The Withdrawal of Tradition Past a Surpassing Disaster
We live in a block universe of space-time, where nothing physically passes and vanishes, but where occasionally things withdraw due to surpassing disasters. Palestinians, Kurds, and Bosnians have to deal with not only the concerted erasure by their enemies of much of their tradition: the erasure by the Israelis of hundreds of Palestinian villages in 1948 and their renaming with Jewish names, and the erasure of hundreds of Kurdish villages during the Anfâl operation in Iraq, etc.; but also the additional, more insidious withdrawal of what survived the physical destruction. To detect this withdrawal, whether symptomatically or otherwise, one is well advised to look for it in messianic movements as well as in artistic and literary works: “With regard to the surpassing disaster, art acts like the mirror in vampire films: it reveals the withdrawal of what we think is still there. ‘You have seen nothing in Hiroshima’ [Hiroshima mon amour]. Does this entail that one should not record? No. One should record this ‘nothing,’ which only after the resurrection can be available.” After the surpassing disaster, the duty of an artist is either to resurrect what has been withdrawn (Godard’s King Lear), or to disclose the withdrawal (Duras’ Hiroshima mon Amour, 1961; Boltanski’s Monument: La Fête de Pourim, 1988).
Friday, March 28
8 pm
open to public
Mexico City Premiere:
A Crime Against Art
Director: Hila Peleg, Madrid/Berlin, 2007, 100 min,
A Crime Against Art is a film based on the trial staged at an art fair in Madrid in February 2007. The trial, inspired by the mock trials organized by avant-garde movements in the 1920's and 30's, theatrically raised a number of polemical issues in the world of contemporary art: collusion with the ‘new bourgeoisie’, instrumentalization of art and its institutions, the future possibility of critical artistic agency and other pertinent subjects. The trial begins with the assumption that a crime has been committed, yet its nature and evidence are allusive and no victims have come forward. The testimonies and cross-examinations become an attempt by the Judge (Jan Verwoert), the Prosecutors (Vasif Kortun and Chus Martinez) and the Defense Attorney (Charles Esche) to unravel the nature of the puzzling "crime against art". Set as a television courtroom drama and filmed by four camera crews,
A Crime Against Art presents a condensed 100 minute version of a the trial.
Cast:
Defendants: Anton Vidokle and Tirdad Zolgdhar
Prosecutors: Vasif Kortun and Chus Martinez
Defense attorney: Charles Esche
Judge: Jan Verwoert
Expert witnesses: Maria Lind and Anselm Franke
Artist: Setareh Shabazi
Public: Keti Chukrov and Barnaby Drabble
With special contribution by Liam Gillick.
Editing: Eric Menard and Hila Peleg Sound mixing: Christian Obermaier and Ekkehard Strauhs Sound repair: Uwe Seyfert Camera: Michel Balague, Eric Menard, José Joaquin Silva Sevilla and Angel Castillo Pascual Technical team in Madrid: Rubén Diaz Garcia and José Angel Ordonez
Producer: unitednationpslazastudios
A Crime Against Art is based on The Trial in Madrid, February 2007, organized by Anton Vidokle and Tirdad Zolgdhar.
worldwide diffusion jrp-ringier.com
Saturday, March 29
program to be announced
Sunday, March 30
4–6 pm
open to public
Damian Ortega:
Book Presentation:
Selected Writings of Lawrence Weiner, Editorial Alias, 2008
Damián Ortega was born in Mexico City and currently lives and works in Berlin, Germany. He has exhibited internationally including solo exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2005), Tate Modern, London (2005), Museu da Arte Pampulha, Belo Horizonte, Brazil (2005), Kunsthalle Basel (2004) and Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia (2002). Group exhibitions include the São Paulo Biennial (2006), Made in Mexico, Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (2003) and the 50th Venice Biennale (2003).
7–9 pm
open to public
Presentation of a special UNP issue of
Pazmaker – a free-distribution quarterly publication edited in Mexico City by Perros Negros which gathers text from local and international artists, writers and amateurs, as well reprints in both Spanish and English. Edited by Adriana Lara.
Adriana Lara lives and works in Mexico City in individual and collective projects, interested in exploring the relationship of art and other means of production through a range of formats and disciplines. With a mixed formation, she started developing her work on 2001 and moved to Paris to attend in 2002-03 Le pavillon, an artist residency at the Palais de Tokyo. Among her collective projects is Lasser Moderna with Emilio Acevedo, created in 2002, Perros Negros co-founded with Fernando Mesta and Agustina Ferreyra, an art production office that proposes new platforms for discourse and art production, in order to expand the circulation and reception of creative projects, as to reinforce their inscription and potential value in today's Mexico. Among other Perros Negros projects she is the cheif editor of
Pazmaker, a free-distribution quarterly publication.
10 pm till the last person leaves!
SALON ALEMAN – UNP closing party with Tequila Sarabia by Eduardo Sarabia
Tequila Sarabia was founded by artist Eduardo Sarabia in Guadalajara, Mexico. Since 2002, Sarabia has been researching the traditional production of tequila and developed 3000 liters of his own brand. Made from 100% pure agave from the highlands of Jalisco. Tequila Sarabia offers 3 distinct types of high-quality tequila, Silver, Gold and Añejo. Each presented in a unique hand made bottle with a certificate of authenticity. In 2006, Eduardo Sarabia sent 300 liters to Berlin, Germany and opened HYPERLINK "http://www.i-20.com/artist.php?artist_id=16"Salon Aleman, a tequila bar/artist project.
The program is subject to change.
