CRIC - Festival of critical culture (part 2)

PROGRAM

22.11.2019 (Friday)

19:30 – 20:30

Contemporary design and independent publishing practices as voice from the margins by Ariane Spanier

For the last 20 years Fukt Magazine has been exploring contemporary drawing and over the years has built an extensive archive of hand-drawn artwork, with latest editions critically examining various themes such as sex, text and words in drawing and systems. The talk will focus on the story of the publication, both on a personal level and in the wider picture of mark-making, design and above all the creative process. The past decade has seen a rapid development of independent publishing, especially among the artist community, with art book fairs arising around the globe and many new possibilities in production and distribution. What are the pros and cons to create your own platform and to be an independent publisher in today’s society?

With a focus on visual imagery and interviews the magazine sheds light on both established and emerging artists. As its design and layout changes with each issue depending on the topic, Fukt’s recent edition, The System Issue, communicates through a bespoke cover and a grid-breaking layout. Delving into the innately human desire to create systems, Fukt’s 18th issue explores how artists interpret and incorporate systems in their work. Whether it’s a critique of a political system, a methodical set of rules that the artist follows to create an artwork by following specific schedules and developing structures for their creative process, or by inventing new and utopian systems – the magazine burrows into a number of differing perspectives on the systems of drawing, artistic creation and mindsets.

29.11.2019 (Friday)

The Nation Without Qualities by Boris Buden

It is generally assumed that language is what makes a nation nation – the most prominent of all its qualities. Once it was seen to be the medium of the nation’s unique spirit. Today it is rather the very essence of its cultural identity, a sort of its super quality that makes possible other qualities, like national history, national culture or the common feeling of belonging. But what if national languages today, in the age of globalization and digitalization, are undergoing the rapid processes of marginalization and degradation? What if many of them are already in danger of digital extinction? The lecture will focus on the processes of the so-called re-vernacularization of national languages in today’s Europe and the far reaching social and political consequences of this development?

30.11.2019, (Saturday)

“Merely to Be a Person Who Does Nothing At All”: On the Question of Psychopower by Stefan Nowotny

“If all those leaps of attention, flexing of eye muscles, fluctuations of the psyche, if all the effort it takes for a man just to hold himself upright within the flow of traffic on a busy street could be measured, he thought – as he toyed with calculating the incalculable – the grand total would surely dwarf the energy needed by Atlas to hold up the world, and one could then estimate the enormous undertaking it is nowadays merely to be a person who does nothing at all.”

(Robert Musil, 1930)

The above lines by Musil, reflecting on an experience in the bygone “Imperial Capital and Royal City of Vienna”, touch on a question which today can no longer be restricted to locatable centers of power: the question concerning the micrological operations of power on subjectivity or the “psyche”, or again, the question how the “psychic” is today turned into a major site of social and political struggle. This shift calls for a consideration of a number of intersecting problematics, such as 1) the ever-increasing subsumption of subjective capacities, both active and passive, under capitalist valorization; 2) the extension of the privileged scenes of appearance of the psychic; 3) the role of contemporary communication technologies in building a connectivity that is not necessarily social; 4) contemporary reconfigurations of the “normal” and the “pathological”. In my talk, I will address some of these problematics – without losing out of sight the most important question Musil implicitly poses: What is the energy needed nowadays to “hold up the world”?

18. 12. 18.12.2019 (Wednesday)

Non-contemporary art: further speculations on the “not-now” by Branislav Dimitrijević

Keynote lecture followed by moderated discussion with Natali Rajcinovska Pavleska

The practice of contemporary art is undergoing an entropic endgame – it is increasingly dismissed for its perpetual deferring of meaning, its “indeterminacy”, its anti-conceptualism, its fetishisation of experience and denigration of thinking, and primarily for its cynical ideological complicity with the neo-liberal order. As it happened with every historical artistic movement, “contemporary art” has entered its late phase: manneristic, market-driven, elitist and alienated. Yet the proclaimed “exit” from its current condition is not embedded in recognising some emerging new practice of art – i.e. in the situation in which the practice of art will suddenly change to undermine the system, as it happened in the late 60s when the modernist art-paradigm was overthrown – but of speculating the different, non-contemporary ontology of art beyond the immediate experience of the “now”, but also beyond the legitimisation provided either by the ghosts of the past or by the robots of the future.

Bio:

Ariane Spanier was born in Weimar, Germany. She studied visual communication at the Art Academy Berlin-Weißensee. After a stay in New York she opened her design studio in Berlin in 2005. Many of Ariane Spanier’s clients have a cultural background such as galleries, artists, filmmakers, musicians, publishers and architects. The studio’s focus lies on the design of books, catalogues, posters, but identities, animations, illustration and digital design are equally part of the studios practice. Since 2006 Ariane has been the creative director of Fukt, an annual magazine for contemporary drawing. Spanier has won many awards, including from the Type Directors Club of New York, D & AD, the 100 Best Austrian, German and Swiss Posters Competition, the Graphis Poster Annual and, in 2011, the design competition for the design of Kieler Woche, the largest sailing festival in the world with its unique design history. Her work has been published in numerous magazines and design books. She has been a member of Alliance Graphique Internationale since 2013. Since 2018 she is a permanent juror overseeing the annual competition for the “Kieler Woche”. Ariane Spanier lives and works in Berlin.

Boris Buden Boris Buden is a writer, cultural critic and translator. He studied philosophy in Zagreb and received his PhD in Cultural Theory from Humboldt University, Berlin. In the 1990s he was founder and editor of the magazine and publishing house Arkzin in Zagreb. His essays and articles cover topics related to philosophy, politics, and cultural and art criticism. Buden has participated in various conferences and art projects in Western and Eastern Europe, Asia and USA, including Documenta XI. Among his translations into Croatian are some of the most important works of Sigmund Freud. He is the author of several books in Croatian and Der Schacht von Babel: Ist Kultur übersetzbar? (2004), Übersetzung: Das Versprechen eines Begriffs (2008, with Stefan Nowotny), Zone des Übergangs: Vom Ende des Postkommunismus (2009), Findet Europa, (2015), Transition to Nowhere (2019). Buden is a permanent fellow at the European Institute of Progressive Cultural Policies, Vienna. He teaches cultural theory at Faculty of Art and Design, Bauhaus Universität Weimar and University of applied Arts Vienna. Buden lives and works in Berlin.

Branislav Dimitrijević holds the position of Professor of History of Art and Visual Culture at the School for Art and Design (“Visoka škola likovnih i primenjenih umetnosti”) in Belgrade, and also teaches Art History at Academia Nova in Belgrade. Dimitrijevic studied Art History at the University of Belgrade (BA) and obtained MA degree in History and Theory of Art at the University of Kent (UK), with a thesis supervised by Professor Stephen Bann. Main fields of his theoretical and curatorial interests are: visual theory and visual culture, art in public space and relations of common culture, politics and ideology. For his text essays he was awarded the “Lazar Trifunović Award” for art criticism and “Dušan Stojanović Award” for film theory. Dimitrijevic edited books; publications and exhibition catalogues that are listed amongst the other selected published texts in the attached bibliography. His books include On Normality: Art in Serbia 1989-2001 (MOCA Belgrade, 2005), Against Art – Goran Djordjević, 1979-1985 (MOCA, Belgrade, 2014) and more recently, Potrošeni socijalizam: Kultura, konzumerizam i društvena imaginacija u Jugoslaviji 1950-1974 (Fabrika knjiga, Belgrade, 2016) and Slatki film Dušana Makavejeva (MOCA, Belgrade, 2017). For the selected texts and the CV see: https://independent.academia.edu/BranislavDimitrijevic

Natali Rajcinovska Pavleska is an independent researcher in the field of contemporary art practices, art criticism and theory. She graduated from the Faculty of Architecture, Skopje (2006), defending her thesis: context analysis and project “Center for Performing and Visual Arts”, MNT Plateau, Skopje. She received her Master’s Degree at the Faculty of Philosophy in Skopje, at the Institute of Art History and Archeology, Module Contemporary Art, defending her dissertation: “Conceptual Art in the Work of Marcel Duchamp, Joseph Beuys and Art & Language from the Beginning to the End of the 20th Century. Since 2018, she is a PhD candidate in Transdisciplinary Studies of Contemporary Art and Media in Interdisciplinary Studies at the Faculty of Media and Communications, University of Belgrade, Serbia. Her research incorporates a transdisciplinary analytical approach, often in relation to current theoretical streams and literary reference systems, through the intersection of contemporary artistic practices and diverse social and institutional contexts. She is an author of various art reviews, introductions to art books and catalogs of group and solo exhibitions, as well as a part of the curatorial team that developed and implemented the concept for presenting the Republic of Macedonia at the 15th Venice Architecture Biennale in 2016, with the project “No man’s land”.

Stefan Nowotny is a philosopher based in London. He teaches in the Department of Visual Cultures and is a member of the Centre for Philosophy and Critical Thought at Goldsmiths, University of London. Before joining Goldsmiths in 2011, he was a research fellow at the Centre de philosophie du droit at the University of Leuven/Louvain-la-Neuve (2001–2003) and taught at universities in Germany (Lüneburg) and Austria (Klagenfurt). He was part of the eipcp’s transnational projects Transform: New Forms of Institutional Critique (2005–2008), Translate: Beyond Culture – The Politics of Translation (2005–2008) and Europe as a Translational Space. The Politics of Heterolinguality (2010–2012), alongside various other project involvements and collaborations with both visual and performance artists.

He has published widely on philosophical and political topics, co-edited several anthologies, translated numerous texts from both French and English into German, and co-authored the volumes Instituierende Praxen. Bruchlinien der Institutionskritik (w/ G. Raunig, 2008) and Übersetzung: Das Versprechen eines Begriffs (w/ B. Buden, 2008).