Tuesday, November 10, 2015, 10am-7pm
Situated Practices
Statements by Marion von Osten (Berlin), Anne-Julie Raccoursier (Geneva) and Grant Watson (London) with comments by Yann Chateigné (Geneva)
HEAD, Boulevard Helvétique 9, 1205 Geneva, seminar room CCC, salle 27, 2nd floor
When is it necessary to differentiate between the position of an artist in relation to a curator, an exhibition maker, a theorist, an activist, an academic or an educator? For whom. And for what? What if all those positions entangle in those research-based practices that insist in trans-disciplinary conditions to activate situated knowledge, to propose learning processes across geo-spatial settings, to re-think the forms of subjectivation and to question normative categories in contemporary art? After all, how does this discussion relate to educational economies in an art academy that is conditioned by institutional imperatives? The presentations will discuss these questions through statements by Marion von Osten, Anne-Julie Raccoursier and Grant Watson and commented by Yann Chateigné.
Marion von Osten will frame her statement Disobedience in the division of Art Labor from the perspective of an exhibition-maker as formerly an artist who tried to brake with normative roles in the cultural field in order to create disturbance in the asymmetries of institutionalized labor divisions in our extended Contemporary Art fields. Through the format of ‘project exhibitions,’ she approaches the exhibition as ‘a critical medium in its own right in order to intervene into hegemonic discourses on economy, gender and the governing of mobility […] as a transitory zone […] as an amplifier for anticipatory politics that turns on the creation of new thought in material form with unpredictable outcomes and becoming by using social and technological means to initiate alternate discursive and social realms that go beyond the modernist legacy of (artists/theorists) subjectivity.’
Anne-Julie Raccoursier will reflect on the means that she needs as an artist for her analytical observations of social behaviour under faculties of power. Her statement departs from her research-based video-works, installations and montage-projects that address the permanent struggle in becoming a subject who needs to learn, to understand, to adopt, to inhabit, to differentiate, to enact and to refuse in the everyday the visual imperatives when he or she wants to be part of a community, a group or of a citizenship. Her statement will bring into discussion the responsibility and the means of the artist in society in relation to the ongoing necessity for an ‘encoding/decoding model’ (Stuart Hall).
Grant Watson will discuss his ongoing interview project How We Behave, which explores subjectivity in relation to contemporary politics. Interviewees (artists, curators, theorists, activists and others) are invited through professional and friendship networks in Amsterdam, London, Sao Paulo, Los Angeles, San Francisco and New York (2012–14) and Athens, Delhi and Mumbai (2016). The focus is on individuals who have experimental life patterns, are interested in generating new social structures, investing in self-education, developing political consciousness, or different ways of thinking about gender and sexuality. Developed out of the curatorial research, How We Behave is positioned as a curatorial proposition, which approaches artists not as people who make works, but as subjects to work with.
The statements will be commented for discussion by Yann Chateigné.