Joanna Warsza

Miya Yoshia

In recent years, artists and curators have often been confronted with the political dilemma of engagement or disengagement. The ideological, economic, or ethically objectionable circumstances of certain biennials and art exhibitions have raised the question of whether to continue and, if so, under what circumstances, with what consequences, and to what ends? From 2013 to 2015, biennials in Istanbul, St. Petersburg, Sydney, and São Paulo demonstrated that curating and art production can't just carry on as if nothing had happened. This reader is the result of Joanna Warsza's course at the Salzburg International Summer Academy of Fine Arts in 2015. It examines four recent cases of boycotts, presenting their political, ideological, and economic contexts, timelines, statements, as well as interviews with parties involved. It reflects on how certain biennials became the place where the power of art is renegotiated and why one simply “can't work like this.”

A Reader on Recent Boycotts and Contemporary Art

I Can't Work Like This

Florian Malzacher

Performing Urgency IV

Performative Curating

Wojciech Szymański

Zachęta - Narodowa Galeria Sztuki

Archive Books

European Roma Institute for Arts and Culture

Re-enchanting the World

Małgorzata Mirga-Tas

During its impressive career over the last decades the term 'performative' has been attributed with many parallel meanings in the humanities, philosophy, arts, or economics. Empty Stages, Crowded Flats additionally applies the notion of the performative to the context of curating with the aim to unfold a potential that so far has been mostly unused. The book is following J. L. Austin, Judith Butler, and others in their belief in the performative capacity to transform reality with words and other cultural utterances, but it also emphasises the often dismissed, colloquial notion of the performative as something being 'theatre-like', believing that those two strands are in fact interdependent and intertwined. Empty Stages, Crowded Flats investigates an array of staged situations, from choreographed exhibitions, immaterial museums, theatres of negotiation, and discursive marathons, to street carnivals and subversive public-art projects, and asks how 'theatre-like' strategies and techniques can in fact enable 'reality making' situations in art, and how, as a consequence, curating itself becomes staged, dramatised, choreographed, and composed. With contributions by Frédérique Aït-Touati, Knut Ove Arntzen, Nedjma Hadj Benchelabi, Claire Bishop, Beatrice von Bismarck, Rui Catalão, Vanessa Desclaux, Tim Etchells, Galerie, Karin Harrasser, Shannon Jackson, Ana Janevski, Lina Majdalanie, Ewa Majewska, Florian Malzacher, Maayan Sheleff, Gerald Siegmund, Claire Tancons, Kasia Tórz, Rachida Triki, Jelena Vesić, Joanna Warsza, and Catherine Wood. A publication by House on Fire, Live Art Development Agency & Alexander Verlag Berlin. The book series Performing Urgency is supported by the Culture Programme of European Union.

Performing Urgencies 4

EMPTY STAGES, CROWDED FLATS. PERFORMATIVITY AS CURATORIAL STRATEGY.

Artur Zmijewski

This book is a reader of the 7th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art (2012) and a manifesto.Artur Zmijewski writes in his foreword: 'This publication is a report on the process of arriving at real action within culture, at an artistic pragmatism. What interested us were concrete activities leading to visible effects. We were interested in finding answers, not asking questions. We were interested in situations in which solutions are implemented responsibly. We were interested neither in preserving artistic immunity nor distancing ourselves from society. We consider politics to be among the most complex and difficult of human activities. We met artists, activists, and poli- ticians who engage in substantive politics through art. The book is the result of our encounters with those people.'Includes an audio CD created by artist, Teresa Margolles.

7th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art

Forget Fear

Joanna Warsza

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