INTERNATIONAL CURATING SYMPOSIUM. THE PAPERS OF THE EXHIBITION (1977-2017)
METTING DATE
8th and 9th February, 2023
SPACE
Bastida Hall
TICKET
€85 / €60 with Az Card
REDUCED RATES
Ticket sales only in person at AZ Info: 25% discount for professionals in the sector, students and young people up to 30 years of age, over 65 years of age and people with disabilities from 33% disability (show ID or proof when purchasing a ticket): €64 // 50% for a person in a wheelchair and companion*: €43
Azkuna Zentroa - Alhóndiga Bilbao and Bulegoa z/b present The Papers of the Exposition (1977-2017).
This International Curating Symposium examines different aspects of exhibitions, such as the cultural object responding to the historical conditions under which they take place, the institutional form that legitimises the representations displayed, the place for experimentation and the production of thought, an ephemeral device favouring moments of attention, etc. The aim is to study specific exhibitions that took place between 1977 and 2017, constructed around different encounters, with the participation of artists, art historians, curators, critics and essayists, among others.
After the prologue, which contains a preamble explaining some of the milestones that have taken place since the middle of the last century in the field of art exhibitions, the symposium is divided by decades. In the 1977-1987 edition, different perspectives on that period are discussed from a current standpoint, taking into account the geopolitical, cultural and social context of the time and its relationship with art and the idea of exhibition.
The decade from 1987-1997 marked the beginning of a series of changes that would impact successive decades: the geopolitical reorganisation following the fall of the Berlin Wall, the acceleration of globalisation, the AIDS crisis, etc. The decade from 1997-2007 coincides with a turning point in the development of digital technologies and the acceleration of globalisation processes, and their effects on the context of art. It was during this decade that some exhibitions would put the potential of the expositive device into practice.
The last edition focuses on the decade from 2007-2017, which coincides with the onset of what is known as a “new paradigm”. It starts with the 2007-2008 financial crisis, continues with the protest movements of the following decade (Arab Spring, 15-M, and Occupy Wall Street) and ends with Donald Trump winning the US presidency.
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Wednesday, February 8th, 2023
11:30 am -1:30 pm. Papers
Anja Isabel Schneider: Ten years after Seattle. One strategy, better two, for the movement against war and capitalism
Uxue Pellejero López: De efectos, afectos y desafectos
Andrea Rodrigo: Amarre
4:00 pm. Presentation
4:30 pm. Mckenzie Wark: The Cis Gaze and its Other
5:30 pm. Sagal Farah: FESTAC ‘77
6:30 pm. Arantza Santesteban: Narratiba militante lekualdatuak: zalantza besarkatzea leku politiko gisa
7:30 pm. Conversation
Thursday, February 9th, 2023
4:00 pm. Presentation
4:30 pm. Anik Fournier: If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution
5:30 pm. Azar Mahmoudian: Becoming Ground, Palm of the Hand and Foam
6:30 pm. Graeme Thomson & Silvia Maglioni: Dark Matter Cinema Tarot: A Nocturnal Committee in Bilbao
7:30 pm. Conversation
**Simultaneous Basque, English and Spanish translation of all lectures except in the presentation of Papers.
Mckenzie Wark: The Cis Gaze and its Others
Perhaps there are more transgender artists whose work is being exhibited, but perhaps this simply includes transgender art and artists within an existing mode of perception. What would it mean to see art in its totality from trans perspectives? Such a project might begin with a critique of the cis gaze, a way of seeing that orders the world through a standard model of the gendered subject, and treats anomalies to the standard model as exotic, humorous or dangerous. Perhaps we can develop another way of seeing, from the ways in which trans artists negotiate the cis gaze in their own practice.
Sagal Farah: FESTAC ‘77
Between 15 January to 12 February 1977 cultural practitioners from 56 African nations and their diasporas alighted in Lagos, Nigeria to participate in FESTAC ’77 – the Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture. In a listening session, Farah will share parts of the Somali participation in the 1977 festival and a personal archive of lived experiences. What does it mean for the body archive and for inter-generational knowledge transmission that the language of loss, that is so often used in the re-issue record industry, is used to speak about music that is very much alive in the minds, bodies and spirits of the generation who listen/ed and dance/d to it?
Arantza Santesteban: Narratiba militante lekualdatuak: zalantza besarkatzea leku politiko gisa
The main militant narratives inherited from the 20th century are partly based around the ideas of dichotomy –of us vs. them–, and of absolutes; ignoring the potential for uncertainty, ambiguity or contradiction as spaces of great political potential. Is it possible to inhabit a political space that encapsulates these ideas? Based around the process of creation of the film 918 GAU, we consider some questions that could lead to a debate on other forms of political agency within the current context.
Anik Fournier: If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution
If Can’t Dance I Don’t Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution (2005-present) is an organisation dedicated to exploring the evolution and typologies of performance and performativity in contemporary art. It is unique in its long-term collaborations with artists and researchers on the development, production and presentation of new work, and for operating without a fixed presentation venue, finding the ‘stage’ and conditions that best suits each commission. This structure allows the room to linger in the process, exploring performance methodologies beyond the presentation moment. The extended temporal and spatial framework also pose a different set of questions in terms of what and how each project is archived. This presentation will center a few past and recent commissions to unpack some of If I Can’t Dance’s archival methodologies, highlighting how the composite life-form of a work opens onto questions relating to performance and performativity in an expanded field.
Azar Mahmoudian: Becoming Ground, Palm of the Hand and Foam
In segregated societies, living in bubbles turns into a split experience. Insulation can create spaces of self-affirmation and growth, against systemic erasures and erosions. Thinking of cultural infrastructures, what is to be learned from conditions which require insulation, invisibility, or anonymity? While often associated with precarity, practicing such limits could also be understood as strong ethos, in interrupting the normative regimes of survivalism in the artworld; specifically, economies of visibility and modes of sociality produced by them.
This passage will speculate over potential unfoldings caused by inward moves: acknowledgment of the already existing, relying on kinships and reformulating relations with history. Respectively I reflect on how such questions inform my curatorial practice, in terms of self-organization, spaces of collective learning and, when necessary, withdrawal from exhibition making.
Esta intervención especula sobre los desarrollos posibles que provocan estos movimientos internos: reconocer lo que ya existe, confiar en las alianzas y reformular las relaciones con la historia. Hablaré sobre cómo estas cuestiones informan mi práctica curatorial, a través de la auto-organización, los espacios de aprendizaje colectivo y, cuando es necesario, dejar de hacer exposiciones.
Graeme Thomson & Silvia Maglioni: Dark Matter Cinema Tarot: A Nocturnal Committee in Bilbao
The Dark Matter Cinema Tarot is a way to open up new channels of infra-perception connecting different realms of personal, aesthetic and political experience and enquiry through cinematographic images. In conceiving the DMC Tarot, Silvia Maglioni & Graeme Thomson have replaced the traditional 78 Major and Minor Arcana with a selection of photograms drawn from the history of cinema. Each reading of the Tarot summons a Nocturnal Committee: participants pose a burning question to the cards and “read” them collectively by sharing future and past visions, hypotheses, fabulations, speculative narratives, memories. At once work and tool, the DMC Tarot, through both the readings and their photographic and textual traces, opens up a space between discussion, performance and exhibition.
ANIK FOURNIER
Is the Curator of Archive and Research at If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution (Amsterdam, NL) and teaches contemporary art theory at Base for Experiment Art and Research at ArtEZ (Arnhem, NL). Her current research and writing centers sounding and listening methodologies in the fields of performance art and pedagogy as crucial sites for the preservation and transmission of forms of embodied knowledge.
SAGAL FARAH
Writer and curator at SAVVY Contemporary - The Laboratory of Forms in Berlin. She has participated in the first iteration of the 2019 Lagos Biennale 2019 Intensive Curatorial Programme.
AZAR MAHMOUDIAN
Curator and educator. Her research focuses on how transhistorical links, intergenerational time and memory become infrastructures.
ARANTZA SANTESTEBAN
Historian, filmmaker, and researcher. She has directed the films Passatgeres (2012), Euritan (2017) and 918 GAU (2021). She researches issues related to cinematic representation, feminism, and contemporary political conflicts.
MCKENZIE WARK
Writer and lecturer. She has published essays on the legacy of the Situationist International (SI) and the social and cultural changes brought about by the pervasiveness of information and communication technologies in our everyday lives.
GRAEME THOMSOM & SILVIA MAGLIONI
Are filmmakers and artists whose work explores the porous borders between fiction and documentary, experimental cinema and installation, noise and music, the visible and the invisible. Their practice includes the creation of films (both features and shorts), mixed-media installations, sound works, film-performances, radio shows, vernacular technologies and books.
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