Program 2021
International Summer School Curating in Context offers critical reflection on diverse socio- political and economic contexts, as well as a possibility to develop curatorial methods to rethink the practices of contemporary (performing) arts in relation to activism, self-organization and critical thinking.
In 2021, International Summer School Curating in Context will be developed in three modules:
- Summer
School: 29 August – 4 September 2021;
- Mentoring
process and developing projects, texts, or ideas for a curatorial project:
October-December 2021;
- Editing
and Publishing of developed projects, texts, or ideas for a curatorial
project on the website as an e-publication which will be self-organized by
the group (2022);
Curating in Context is co-curated by Biljana
Tanurovska–Kjulavkovski and Slavcho Dimitrov.
Course teaching methods:
Curating in Context will give insight into diverse relevant
and recent themes dealing with the contemporary (performing) arts and the
curatorial approach, as well as practical methods in developing a project,
text, programme, etc.
The course will provide a collaborative environment, enhance
self-organized working modes and peer-to peer analyses, mentoring exchange and
other approaches that would enable fluidity of knowledge and its production
through a process of exchange.
Format:
The programme includes lectures, seminars, workshops,
artists’ and curators’ talks, discussions and interviews, as well as production
of curatorial works and co-curatorial publication.
Summer school lecturers include: Amelia Jones,
Barbara Bryan, Danae Theodoriadou, Dena Davida, Dominic Johnson, Jasmina
Zaloznik, Jovanka Popova, Kirsten Maar, Mira Gakjina, Paz Ponze, Ron Athey,
Suzana Milevska, and Voin de Voin.
Summer school participants include: Ana Lazareska, Elizaveta Spivakovskaya, Elena Light, Frida Laux, Lida Sherafatmand, Mahzabin Haque, Milko Nestoroski, Natalia Drozd, Sasha Kleinplatz, Simona Manceva, Sofija Risteska, Sotiris Roumeliotis, and Jana Stardelova.
Screenshots from the school:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/143801298@N08/albums/72157720238605304
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Lokomotiva team: programme director Biljana
Tanurovska-Kjulavkovski, project manager Blagica Petrovska, programme
coordinators include Zorica Zafirovska and Kristina Todoroska Petreska,
administrator Gjurgjica Hristovska, and PR Dino Chupovski.
Public Program:
Public lecture/ Artists and curators talks
“Queer Communion/Queer Performance” / Online
Amelia G. Jones, Robert A. Day Professor and Vice Dean of
Academics and Research in Roski School of Art & Design, USC
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PoMCJxu_f9o
Agenda of the summer school 2021 programme:
SUNDAY 29.08.2021
11.00 -12.30 INTRODUCTION AND CONTEXT PRESENTATION
Slavcho Dimitrov & Biljana Tanurovska-Kjulavkovski – co-curators of the summer school Curating in Context
13.30-15:00 LECTURE by Dominic Johnson, Head of Drama Department at Queen Mary, University of London /// Idiot Bliss: Charles Ray’s Plank Piece I-II (1973)
MONDAY 30.08
11.00 – 12.30 LECTURE & SEMINAR (part 1) by Suzana Milevska, PhD in Visual Culture from Goldsmiths College London, curator and theorist of visual culture /// Curating Participatory Art as Means for Social Change
13.30 – 15.00 SEMINAR (Part 2) by Suzana Milevska /// Curating Participatory Art as Means for Social Change
TUESDAY 31.08
11.00 – 12.30 SEMINAR (Part 3) by Suzana Milevska /// Curating Participatory Art as Means for Social Change
13.30 -15.30 WORKSHOP by Danae Theorodiadu, PhD in Dramaturgy of Contemporary Theatre and Dance from Roehampton University in London, performance maker and researcher based in Brussels /// Artificial Social Imaginaries: Curation of Live Events as Construction Sites for Social Alternatives
WEDNESDAY 01.09
11.00 -12.30 LECTURE by Kirsten Maar, junior- professor at Institute for Theatre Studies, Free University, Berlin, dance scholar and dramaturge /// On the Interventionist Potential of New Formats in Contemporary Dance and Performance
13.30-15.30 WORKSHOP (part 2), by Danae Theorodiadu /// Artificial Social Imaginaries: Curation of Live Events as Construction Sites for Social Alternatives
20.30-22.00 PUBLIC LECTURE by Amelia G. Jones, Robert A. Day Professor and Vice Dean of Academics and Research in Roski School of Art & Design, USC /// Queer Communion/Queer Performance
THURSDAY 02.09
15.00 -15.45 ARTISTS AND CURATORS TALKS /// Talk 1 Dena Davida, PhD, postmodern dance practitioner as a performer, improviser, teacher, researcher, curator and writer /// Presentation of Turba Journal for Curating in Live Arts
16.00 -16.45 ARTISTS AND CURATORS’ TALKS /// Talk 2 Voin de Voin, performer // presentation of his artistic work
19.00 -21.00 PUBLIC DISCUSSION /// ARTISTS AND CURATORS’ TALKS /// Talk 3 COLLECTIVE CURATING OR CO-CURATORIAL COLLABORATIVE PROCESSES /// with Jasmina Zaloznik, dramaturge, writer and producer / Paz Ponze, independent curator, writer & researcher of contemporary artistic creation / Jovanka Popova, curator in the Museum of Contemporary Art, Skopje, Mira Gakjina, senior curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Skopje
Moderators: Biljana Tanurovska–Kjulavkovski and Slavcho Dimitrov
FRIDAY 03.09
15.00- 15.45 ARTISTS AND CURATORS’ TALKS /// Talk 4 Barbara Bryan, Executive Director of Movement Research New York, independent art producer and curator /// presentation of her work as a curator and Executive Director in Movement Research.
16.00-16.45 ARTISTS AND CURATORS’ TALKS /// Talk 5 Ron Athey, performance artist /// presentation of his artistic work
SATURDAY 04.09
11.00-13.30 CLOSING SESSION
Reflections/ tasks for projects/ plans for further steps – projects/texts development, publishing and other
PROGRAM 2021
SUMMER SCHOOL CURATING IN CONTEXT
Abstracts on different sessions of the summer school programme, reading titles related to seminar topics, lectures, workshops and other presentations.
LECTURE: Idiot Bliss: Charles Ray’s Plank Piece I-II (1973)/ by Dominic Johnson, Head of the Drama Department at Queen Mary, University of London
Abstract: Charles Ray’s Plank Piece I-II (1973) stages a critical encounter between sculpture, performance art, and photography. The work is exhibited widely, but the precise means by which Plank Piece I-II makes – or forecloses – meaning has never been adequately accounted for. For Ray in the 1970s, the works ‘ha[d] no meaning — or rather their meaning is dynamic,’ and when he made such claims, “my friends laughed at me and said, “You idiot, it looks like the aftermath of a car wreck or a Goya print”.’ In an experiment in art writing, I pursue Ray’s ‘idiotic’ invocations, reading Plank Piece I-II in relation to car crashes, images of torture, the then-recent American War in Vietnam, and other contingent phenomena; I attempt to do so towards a possible refashioning of meaning and history in performance art and its documentation.
LECTURE, SEMINAR & QUESTIONNAIRE/// Curating Participatory Art as Means for Social Change by Suzana Milevska, PhD in Visual Culture from Goldsmiths College London, curator and theorist of visual culture
Abstract: Some of the main questions to be addressed in this lecture and seminar will be what kind of socio-political conditions and juridical structures call for, allow and/or prevent participatory art to fulfil the given promises for social and cultural change. The conundrums of participatory art are many. Curating Participatory Art as Means for Social Change is imagined as a curated participatory and self-reflexive back and forth conversation that will eventually result with a collaboratively composed cross-disciplinary questionnaire.
I’ve already discussed some of the crucial contradictions and frustrations of participatory art practices in the context of neoliberalism-driven cultural movements. For example, in the text “Infelicitous Participatory Acts on the Neoliberal Stage” (https://www.p-art-icipate.net/infelicitous-participatory-acts-on-the-neoliberal-stage/), I looked at the challenges that participatory arts face due to the systemic and institutional conundrums in contemporary societies, preventing the potentialities of such practices from realisation and fulfilment of their aims. Some of the important issues to be discussed are related to different processual hierarchies between the artists, participants and institutions, stemming out of the socio-political and economic systems and structures that condition the work conditions, means and relations of production, etc. The main paradox of participatory art, however, stems from the promise of social change, because the question of whether it’s possible to substantially change society with art that is produced by art institutions and structures created by that very same society still remains an unresolved puzzle.
The final outcome of the seminar will be The Questionnaire of Participatory Art. It will gather the most relevant and urgent questions about the aims, potentialities, and failures of participatory art when such art projects are curated as means for social change. The Questionnaire is not conceptualised only as a usual repository of questions, but it also functions as a participatory and collaborative research tool that invites the participants to formulate their own questions, and to “feed” the questionnaire in a processual and collaborative way. This will eventually enable them to develop new participatory artistic, curatorial and educational research methodologies. Last but not least important, the Questionnaire can be used as auxiliary educational tool in alternative educational and curatorial projects that focus on participatory art, or in an academic context.
Seminar methodology:
- Part 1 - presentation of the seminar’s concept and open discussion including answers to some of the preliminary questions about the methodology and format of the Questionnaire based on the information that is to be submitted to the applicants in advance, and discussing the questions submitted by the participants in their applications (2 questions each).
Participants’ profile: young professionals of various professions: artists, academic researchers, art historians, ethnographers, art and museum educators, curators, etc.
- Part 2 - offline: distributing a google.doc in which the participants will write their questions
- Part 3 - deadline for sending the written questions and comments and completion of the Questionnaire (offline).
Reading list:
- Suzana Milevska, “Infelicitous“ Participatory Acts on the Neoliberal Stage
WORKSHOP///Artificial Social Imaginaries: Curation of Live Events as Construction Sites for Social Alternatives/ by Danae Theorodiadu, PhD in Dramaturgy of Contemporary Theatre and Dance from Roehampton University in London, performance maker and researcher based in Brussels
Abstract: Through a series of individual and group tasks of reading, writing, discussing, questioning, designing and testing, this workshop will involve participants in a critical process that aims to reflect on the relation between curatorial practices and the emergence of social alternatives to capitalism. In this frame, we will approach the design of any curatorial project as an artificial construction site for the creation of new social imaginaries, i.e. as a concrete alternative proposal about the way we imagine and practice our social coexistence. The act of curating will, thus, be worked as a practice that moves away from the established norms and social habits; as the crafting of social encounters towards more imaginative, unknown directions, away from capitalist demands that strive for the ‘groundbreaking’, the ‘new’, the ‘successful’, the controllable, popular, profitable and effective product.
Key terms in our exploration will be the notions of ‘social imaginary’ (as this has been discussed by C. Castoriadis and other scholars), ‘dramaturgy as a working on actions’ (as discussed in The Practice of Dramaturgy – Working on Actions in Performance, a book co-authored by the workshop’s facilitator), ‘commoning’ (as a concrete practice within the discourse on ‘commons’), as well as the relation between art, crafts and materiality. Participants will be asked to read in advance two texts related to such issues, which will be further discussed and worked on in the workshop. In addition, participants will be asked to design and, at least partly, test different curatorial frames and exchange models that could act as artificial social imaginaries, through which they will attempt to detect the processes and working principles involved in such acts.
Reading list:
- D. Theodoridou, Performing Arts and Social Imagination - Redefining Art’s Social Role Through the Turn to Collectively Speculative Processes:
- 3 Principles of Dramaturgy,38-62
PUBLIC LECTURE ///Queer Communion/Queer Performance/ by Amelia G. Jones, Robert A. Day Professor and Vice Dean of Academics and Research in Roski School of Art & Design
Abstract: This lecture will present two overlapping projects, one of which is explicitly curatorial, and both of which address the relationship between queer (as a discourse and identification), performance, and history: Amelia Jones’s single authored book In Between Subjects: A Critical Genealogy of Queer Performance and her curatorial project Queer Communion: Ron Athey. What is “queer performance”, generally speaking? Can queer performance (for example, the work of Los Angeles-based Ron Athey) be “curated” into a gallery space, given the proximity and duration of live art in its original forms? Questions of community, queer survivance in the face of precarity, as well as the genealogies of the core concepts of “queer” and “performance” will be addressed.
Reading list:
- Gerald Vizenor, “Aesthetics of Survivance: Literary Theory and Practice,” Survivance: Narratives of Native Presence (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2008), 1-24
- Amelia Jones, “Queer Performativity: A Critical Genealogy of a Politics of Doing in Art Practice,” The Methuen Drama Companion to Performance Art, ed. Jovana Stokic and Bertie Ferdman (London: Methuen/Bloomsbury Press, 2020), 58-80
- LECTURE ///On the Interventionist Potential of New Formats in Contemporary Dance and Performance by Kirsten Maar, junior- professor at Institute for Theatre Studies, Free University, Berlin, dance scholar and dramaturge///
Abstract: The presentation aims to build up a historiographical informed understanding of new formats of practice and presentation, which change the relationship between production and reception in an interventionist manner. Intervention in this context is not only defined as an activist approach, but rather in the micropolitics of constant change in “minor keys” – between belonging and becoming (Stengers, 2005).
Reading list:
- Haraway Donna, Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective
- Stengers Isabelle, An Ecology of Practices
ARTISTS AND CURATORS’ TALKS ///Talk 1 with Dena Davida PhD, postmodern dance practitioner as a performer, improviser, teacher, researcher, curator and writer/// Presentation of Turba Journal for Curating in Live Arts
Abstract: Turba is the first journal for the study, theory, and praxis of curatorial strategies in live arts. In its pages, we will create a platform for the exploration of ideas, concepts, constraints, expectations, and contingencies which guide and drive curatorial practices. Through this biannual hybrid publication we seek to connect, amplify, and contextualise those movements and voices in which the past, present and future of live arts are experienced and imagined. Turba will serve as a seismographic observatory for the impact of live arts on societies and cultures globally. The first issue poses the seminal question 'Why curate live arts?', and is launched in spring 2021.
Reading list:
- Turba leaflet vol.5 –pdf
- Cica programme pdf
ARTISTS AND CURATORS’ TALKS/// Talk 2 with Voin de Voin, performer// presentation of his artistic work
PUBLIC DISCUSSION/// ARTISTS AND CURATORS’ TALKS/// Talk 3 with Jasmina Založnik, dramaturge, writer and producer/ Paz Ponze, independent curator, writer & researcher of contemporary artistic creation / Jovanka Popova, curator in the Museum of Contemporary Art, Skopje, Mira Gakjina, senior curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Skopje
Moderators: Biljana Tanurovska–Kjulavkovski and Slavcho Dimitrov /// COLLECTIVE CURATING OR CO-CURATORIAL COLLABORATIVE PROCESSES//
This
discussion will include curators from diverse contexts, discussing
about their experiences on collective curating, the processes involved,
the ways concepts are developed and decisions are made. They will also
try to explain what would be collective in curatorial, and their
perspective on what would co-curatorial stand for.
ARTISTS AND CURATORS’ TALKS/// Talk 4 with Barbara Bryan, Executive Director of Movement Research New York, independent art producer and curator///presentation of her work as a curator and Executive Director in Movement Research.
Abstract: As the Executive Director of Movement Research, my role is to innovate curatorial and programmatic structures that hold space for the amplification of artists’ voices in curation and programmatic planning. My goal is to conceive fluid and malleable formats that support evolving and emergent practices, and new voices in the field. Questions that I ask from a curatorial framework are how to be responsive, rather than reactive, to evolving discourse and trends in experimental dance and the intersections of socio-political contexts and activism? How do we develop frameworks that have flexibility built in to the fabric of the format, and thus are not formulaic, but are rather ideations that can be stretched, reshaped and reimagined by artists.
Since its beginning in 1978, Movement Research has operated through a visionary grass-roots leadership structure in which the organization is powered by artists from the very community it serves. My work is to curate structures that amplify the voices of artists through artist-driven and artist-initiated formats – curatorial, editorial and selection processes that engage groups of artists from our constituency, alongside a staff of working artists who are embedded in the artist community. Through programmatic offerings, Movement Research strives to reflect the cultural, political and economic diversity of our moving community, inclusive of race, national or ethnic origin, gender identity, sexual orientation, disability, age, and family/parental status. An inclusive participatory structure is thoughtfully calibrated to give agency to diverse voices and to centre equity, and is committed to ensuring that voices are heard through rotating curatorial, editorial, and teaching structures.
To offer an example, artists selected for the well-known Movement Research at the Judson Church series are selected through multiple processes that ensure a diverse representation of voices and perspectives. Artists may apply through an open call, and are reviewed by a Selection Committee of five artists recommended by the Artist Advisory Council, the Artists of Color Council, and the Accessibility Advisory Team in collaboration with MR programmes staff. Committee-selected artists show work alongside Artists-in-Residence, artists curated by the Artists of Color Council, artist participating in GPS & MRX Exchanges, and staff curated guest artists. By creating a range of contexts and allowing for several points of entry for artists, this multi-pronged programmatic strategy dismantles the historically predominant curator-as-decider model, which has limited access for artists and has often forced artists to fit into a constraining or reductive curatorial vision. As curators and programmers, we are called to continually reimagine and reshape our practices in order to advocate for and give primary agency to artists – honouring their ideas, visions, and the contexts in which they create.
ARTISTS AND CURATORS’ TALKS/// Talk 5 with Ron Athey, performance artist ///presentation of his artistic work
BIOGRAPHIES OF THE LECTURERS, ARTISTS, AND CURATORS
PROGRAMME CURATORS
PROGRAMME LECTURERS/PRESENTERS:
Dena Davida, PhD, has practiced postmodern dance as a performer and improvisor, teacher and researcher, and curator and writer for fifty years. Born in the U.S. in 1949 into a family of Jewish artists of Eastern European heritage, she immigrated to Canada in 1977, where she co-founded and curated Tangente (1980-2020), Quebec's premiere dance performance venue. At the Université du Québec à Montréal, she taught in the Dance Department (1979–2010) and completed her doctorate in artistic dance ethnography (2006) through the Programme d’études et pratiques des arts. She has published widely on dance and culture from a humanistic and politically engaged perspective, co-editing the anthologies Fields in Motion (2012) and Curating Live Arts (2014), and recently founded Turba: The Journal for Global Practices in Live Arts. Curation. www.denadavida.ca
Jovanka Popova (1980, Skopje) is a curator at Museum of Contemporary Art, Skopje, and curator and programme coordinator at Press to Exit project space, organization for contemporary art and curatorial practices in Skopje. She is PhD candidate at the Faculty of Media and Communication, Singidunum University in Belgrade, Serbia. She completed her B.A. and M.A. at the Faculty of Philosophy, Institute for History of Art in Skopje, where she was a teaching assistant on the subject of Macedonian Contemporary Art. She has curated exhibitions in the contemporary art field in Macedonia and worked on international curatorial projects. She was curator of North Macedonia’s Pavilion at the 58 Venice Biennale in 2019. She has also presented her work at the Humboldt University, Central European University Budapest, Goethe University Frankfurt, Hankuk University of Foreign Studies, Seoul, Kunst Historisches Institut, Florence, Bahcesehir University, Istanbul, Trondheim Academy of Fine Arts and other institutions. She was executive director of JADRO - Association of the Independent Cultural Scene, and she is president of the Macedonian Section of the AICA International Association of Art Critics.
Mira Gakjina (Skopje) is an art historian, art critic and senior curator at Museum of Contemporary Art in Skopje. She completed her postgraduate studies at the University of Zagreb, Faculty of Philosophy (2010) and she received her PhD in Art Management on the subject “Management of the cultural institutions – case study MoCA Skopje” (2017). From 2006 till 2009 she was teaching assistant at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Skopje on the subject „History and Theory of Art“. She has curated a number of exhibitions in the country and abroad and presented her work in New York, Chengdu, Taipei, Texas, Stockholm, Warsaw, Thessaloniki, Athens, Ljubljana, Zagreb, Pristina etc. She has published her writings in publications, catalogues and art and culture books and magazines as “Large Glass”, “Art Republic”, “Brooklyn Rail”, “Plasticity of the Planet: On Environmental Challenge for Art and Its Institutions”, “From Consideration to Commitment: Art in Critical Confrontation to Society” among others. She was curator in residence as part of the Prohelvetia Cultural program in Zurich, Bern and Geneva; Limiditi Temporary Art Project, Morocco; “Close connection”, curatorial program in Amsterdam; International Partnership among Museums programme organized by the American Association of Museums at Weil Gallery – Texas etc.; She is the commissioner of North Macedonia’s Pavilion at Venice Biennale in 2019. She is also a member of the Board of Directors of the Association for Contemporary Art and Curatorial Practices "Project Space Press Exit Skopje"; From 2013 till 2017 she served as President of AICA Macedonia. Since 2017, Gakjina is Director of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Skopje.
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Summer school Curating in Context is co- curated by Biljana Tanurovska-Kjulavkovski & Slavcho Dimitrov; Produced by Lokomotiva- Centre for New Initiatives in Arts and Culture, North Macedonia, as part of a collaboration with Brain Store Project within the Performance Situation Room activity of Life Long Burning project; supported by Creative Europe, the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of North Macedonia and the City of Skopje.
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More about the public program of the Summer School “Curating in Context” 2021
Public lecture by Amelia G. Jones: Queer Communion/Queer Performance
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