Disobedience Archive (The Republic), Castello di Rivoli

Disobedience Archive (The Republic), 2005–ongoing. Installation view, Céline Condorelli, “The Parliament,” 2012. Photo courtesy Bildmuseet, Umeå, and Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Rivoli-Turin.

Disobedience Archive (The Republic)
April 23–June 30, 2013

Press preview: Tuesday April 16, 2013, 11am
Frigoriferi Milanesi – Open Care
Via Piranesi 10
Milan

Castello di Rivoli Museum of Contemporary Art
Opening: April 22, 2013 at 7pm
Piazza Mafalda di Savoia
10098 Rivoli (Turin), Italy

www.castellodirivoli.org
www.castellodirivoli.tv

Curator: Marco Scotini

After Van Abbemuseum (Eindhoven), Nottingham Contemporary, Raven Row (London), the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Boston) and Bildmuseet (Umeå), Disobedience Archive is presented at Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea within a format especially planned for the Museum.

The curatorial project dates from 2005, when Marco Scotini planned a travelling exhibition of videos, graphic materials and ephemera whilst in Berlin. The exhibition-archive explores the links between contemporary art practices, cinema, tactile media and political activism. Planned as a heterogeneous, evolving archive of video images, the project aims to be a ‘user’s guide’ to four decades of social disobedience seen through history and geography: from the revolt in Italy in 1977 to the global protests before and after Seattle and on to the current insurrections in the Middle East and Arab world. From the historic videotapes of Alberto Grifi to the films of Harun Farocki, from the performances of the American Critical Art Ensemble to those of the Russian collective Chto Delat, and from the investigations of Hito Steyerl to those of Eyal Sivan, the Disobedience archive has over the years gathered hundreds of documentary elements.

The exhibition, which will be hosted in the rooms of the third floor in the Castello di Rivoli, aims to offer a wide-ranging synthesis of the earlier editions. With the new title of Disobedience Archive (The Republic), the exhibition will include the production of a large Parliament-shaped structure and the publication of “La Costituzione” (The Constitution) as a concluding phase to the entire project. The archive takes place in The Parliament by Céline Condorelli (b. 1974), with a contribution by Martino Gamper (b. 1971), while the wall paintings accompanying it are by Mexican artist Erick Beltran (b. 1972). Aside from The Parliament, two rooms serve as thematic antechambers: the first, dedicated to the 1970s in Italy, amongst others, presents works by Joseph Beuys, Mario Merz, Gianfranco Baruchello, Laboratorio di Comunicazione Militante, Enzo Mari, Nanni Balestrini and Living Theatre beside documents by Carla Accardi, Carla Lonzi and Felix Guattari; the second, which considers the first decade of the 21st century, houses works by Nomeda & Gediminas Urbonas, Superflex, Chto Delat, Journal of Aesthetics & Protest, Oliver Ressler, Arseniy Zhilyaev, Critical Art Ensemble, Rene Gabri and Ayreen Anastas, among others. Technical instruments, props and published materials produced by the antagonist culture of those years are also displayed in these two rooms.

Disobedience Archive (The Republic) is a work in progress reflecting on the various events as they unfolded, in which form and content vary with each venue. In this sense, the exhibition constitutes a sort of atlas of the different contemporary antagonist tactics: from direct action to counter-information, from constituent practices to forms of bio-resistance, which emerged after the end of modernism, inaugurating new methods of being, saying and doing. The archive is divided into nine sections: “1977 The Italian Exit,” “Protesting Capitalist Globalization,” “Reclaim the Streets,” “Bioresistence and Society of Control,” “Argentina Fabrica Social,” “Disobedience East,” “Disobedience University,” “The Arab Dissent” and “Gender Politics,” which joins the other sections for the Castello di Rivoli exhibition.

The archive includes materials by 16 beaver, Atelier d’Architecture Autogérée (AAA), Mitra Azar, Gianfranco Baruchello, Petra Bauer, Pauline Boudry, Brigitta Kuster and Renate Korenz, Bernadette Corporation, Black Audio Film Collective, Ursula Biemann, Collettivo femminista di cinema, Copenhagen Free University, Critical Art Ensemble, Dodo Brothers, Marcelo Expósito, Harun Farocki and Andrei Ujica, Rene Gabri and Ayreen Anastas, Grupo de Arte Callejero, Etcétera, Alberto Grifi, Ashley Hunt, Kanal B, Khaled Jarrar, John Jordan and Isabelle Fremeaux, Laboratorio di Comunicazione Militante, Silvia Maglioni and Graeme Thomson, Angela Melitopoulos, Mosireen, Carlos Motta, Non Governamental Control Commission, Wael Noureddine, Margit Czencki/Park Fiction, R.E.P. Group, Oliver Ressler and Zanny Begg, Joanne Richardson, Roy Samaha, Eyal Sivan, Hito Steyerl, The Department of Space and Land Reclamation, Mariette Schiltz and Bert Theis, Ultra-red, Nomeda & Gediminas Urbonas, Trampolin House (Morten Goll and Tone O. Nielsen), Dmitry Vilensky and Chto Delat, James Wentzy.

The exhibition has been realised thanks to the collaboration of Open Care Servizi per l’Arte, Milan and NABA Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti, Milan together with the Biennio di Arti Visive e Studi Curatoriali.

Media Partner: La Stampa, Turin

Press Office – Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea
Silvano Bertalot – Manuela Vasco
T +39 011 9565209 – 211
C +39 33 87865367
E press@castellodirivoli.org, s.bertalot@castellodirivoli.org

Precarious Life (Moscow)

Precarious Life

Organized by: Maria Chekhonadskikh

Arthouse Squat Forum

September 24—October 22, 2011

Daily, 2 p.m. to 10 p.m.

Arthouse Residential Complex, Moscow

Participating Artists: Nikolay Oleinikov (Russia), Learning Film Group (Russia), KPd (Kleines Postfordistisches Drama) (Germany), Molleindustria (Italy), R.E.P. (Ukraine), Babi Badalov (France)

Curator: Maria Chehonadskih

Anxiety, uncertainty in the coming day, and the instability of social and economic situations have become the existential foundations of contemporary society. Before our very eyes, the institutions of permanent housing, pensions and social security are being destroyed, and in their place, we find a world of rented apartments with permanently increasing prices, fixed-term contracts, atypical employment, and a 14-hour workday that stretches across weekends. Today, the lives of millions of people depend on the fluctuations of stock exchanges and the decisions of international summits. This “precarious life” has no future and no elderly; it’s racing to fully consume the present, day after day. And in this sense, post-Soviet society is at the forefront of this trend, of its production.

But how we explain this social vulnerability? Under what conditions does our life become “precarious”? In the contemporary world the idea of “vitalism” is usually advanced in justification of the endless series of catastrophes and social upheavals. The human body and its survival can be reduced to simple biology: only the strongest survive. Instability, vulnerability and inequality are ingrained in the essence of nature itself. And thus, the state of emergency becomes the legitimate and “natural” norm. As such, the human body is cast out into a situation of extremity and nakedness – “bare life”; the person is then left alone with nature, his objective only to survive.

However, ever since the age of Aristotle, there has been a tradition of understanding human life politically. As social subjects, we are always dependent on our outside environment, but the outside environment is not some chaos of nature; it is an entire complex of institutions, civil laws, ecology and the physical surroundings. Vulnerability arises from the social life of our constituted bodies; it depends on the political structures that make us either confident or exposed (Judith Butler). Not every body has a significance, and not every body will be protected. And as such, these bodies are prone to disease, hunger, poverty and outside threats. What bodies does nowadays society protect? For whose bodies does it now build fences around houses, elite hospitals, restaurants, and highways? Which bodies remain unprotected and bare? “Traditionally,” it was the bodies of the excluded in many ways — women, migrant workers, students, intellectuals and artists.

The critical anthropology of instability has always been connected to the constitution of an alternative form of life; above all, exodus, resistance or rejection of social discipline characterize the lives of migrants, bohemians, and the inner city. Today we live in a society where one out of every three people – from pensioners to factory workers – have been forced into a “bohemia.” Neoliberalism puts society into this kind of precarious state, and in recent years, these processes are only growing stronger; even now, their formulation becomes increasingly relevant the Russian situation.

The exhibition “Precarious Life” demonstrates ways and forms of working with the problem of precarity, which comprises an entire range of aesthetic, activist and discursive methods of work. Each piece in the exhibition draws from the experience of self-organization and collective work, social and political movements, intellectual debates that have continued to this day. This exhibition endeavors to show the social face of “Precarious Life.” And as its curator and the artists who have agreed to participate in it all understand life politically, then it means that we refuse to see our existence as, once and for all, predetermined by nature or fate. We feel at home everywhere, while we are actually everywhere homeless; our place in the world has been questioned, and now we need to reestablish it, only in the type of world where we would want to live.

When One Has to Say “We” (Saint Petersburg)

The Critical Art Laboratory at the European University at Saint Petersburg presents:

When One Has to Say “We”: Art as the Practice of Solidarity

Participating Artists: Factory of Found Clothes (Gluklya and Tsaplya); Nikolay Oleynikov (Moscow); Street University; R.E.P. Group (Kiev); Alexander Veryovkin (Samara); Arseny Zhilyaev (Moscow); Babi Badalov and Jacques Crenn (Paris); Marina Narushkina (Minsk/Berlin); Darya Irincheeva; Sergey Chernov (Saint Petersburg); Nina Gasteva (Saint Petersburg); Anton Litvin (Moscow); Right to the City Movement (Moscow); Affinity Group (Saint Petersburg); Extra-governmental Control Commission (Moscow); Radek Community; Chto Delat Collective

along with the many other artists who will participate in a three-month program of seminars, screenings, and workshops that runs until late June 2010.

Curator: Dmitry Vilensky (Critical Art Laboratory at the European University; Chto Delat Collective)

Opening: 7:00 p.m., April 8, 2010

Gym of the European University at Saint Petersburg

Gagarinskaya, 3, Saint Petersburg, Russia

This project is realized as part of the international conference The Politics of the One: The Limits of Fragmentation and the Chances for Consolidation, organized by Smolny Institute of Liberal Arts and Sciences, The European University at Saint Petersburg, and Centre d’amitié franco-russe.

The exhibition is organized with financial support from the Chto Delat Foundation.

We gratefully acknowledge all the artists, volunteers, and friends who have made this project possible through their hard work and trust.

Premises

Many people are familiar with moments in life when it becomes clear that they have to unite with other people to accomplish simple and urgent tasks:

We, the residents of house no. X, demand that the illegal construction next to our house be stopped…

We, the workers of factory X, demand payment of back wages…

We demand an end to neo-Nazi terror…

What do these things have to do with art?

Even people who believe that artists are starry-eyed creatures living in an ivory tower sometimes catch sight of the fact that this tower has long ago been transformed from the tidy space of art for art’s sake into a factory where the majority are relegated (in the best case) to work on the conveyor belt. It thus becomes clear that change is necessary. Otherwise, without the possibility to realize ourselves with dignity, we will suffocate.To make this change happen we have to unite with other comrades, with people who also sense that things are going wrong.

The art system is not situated within the abstract realm of daydreams or the private world of the studio and the gallery. On the contrary, it is part of public life. To change this system we need to be sensitive to the general processes at work in society, and we need to take part in them.

Context

The exhibition is part of the international multidisciplinary conference The Politics of the One: The Limits of Fragmentation and the Chances for Consolidation. The conference is dedicated to forms of solidarity and multiplicity in the contemporary world. The speakers will address issues of contemporary philosophy, as well as collective political practices for transforming the world.

Social connectivity – in particular, sociopolitical solidarity – is in a state of crisis today. Social atomization enables globalization processes, the collapse of collectivist ideologies, and the technologization of state power. The available alternatives include nationalist or fundamentalist authoritarian movements, or bureaucratic attempts to manufacture solidarity on the basis of “constitutional patriotism” or around the figure of a “national leader.” For Russian society, which underwent a massive sociopolitical revolution during the eighties and nineties, social atomization and political apathy are particularly characteristic. People have a hard time cooperating with their next-door neighbors, not to mention finding solidarity with those more distant from them. At the same time, a multitude of small-scale collective initiatives have emerged in Russia. They differ both from traditional Soviet forms and established western practices. Analysis of these initiatives is one of the focuses of both the conference and the exhibition.

Concept

We want to create a public exhibition space that takes the form of a process in which all utterances – graphic works, seminars, film screenings or discussions – produce a context of cooperative co-existence and enter into dialogue with each other, thus accumulating new meanings and generating their own common history.

By relying on its acknowledged autonomous status in contemporary society, art has the capacity for continuous innovation, inquiry, and critique of the forms in which people organize their lives together, and it is these functions that define art’s role in social life. While preserving such generic features as freedom of expression and the constant overcoming of the aesthetic status quo, art is capable of questioning not only the consensus about what it can and should be, but also the basis of this consensus, which is contained in established forms of political agreement and unity.

The logic of this project is bound up with an expanded notion of art and the artist in today’s world. For us, art is not a narrowly specialized activity engaged in by professionals, but one of the principal elements of creative public speech, something that can be practiced by any engaged, passionate human being.

At the same time, we do not advocate an amateur, non-obligatory attitude to art. On the contrary, we believe that if they are willing to take seriously the issue of self-presentation and find unique ways of inscribing themselves into the artistic context, a multitude of creative and activist practices can acquire a completely different but no less important dimension in the process of interacting with a broad spectrum of contemporary art.

Image by R.E.P. Group

Radical East Performance (Montreuil)

le peuple qui manque

Mercredi 31 Mars 2010 – 20h30
Géographies fracturées #4
Radical East Performance
NON GRATA / R.E.P. GROUP / CHTO DELAT ?
Cinéma Le Méliès @ Montreuil

D’Europe de l’Est souffle un vent qui n’en finit pas de nous enthousiasmer. Encore méconnus en France, les groupes estoniens Non Grata, ukrainiens R.E.P. Group (Revolutionary Experimental Space), et russes Chto delat? (Que faire?) pratiquent un art performatif, signe d’un renouveau bienvenu et riche de promesses d’un art politique contemporain. En filigrane de leurs pratiques collectives de vidéo, performance ou réappropriation des espaces publics, ils mêlent théorie, art et activisme politique, redéfinissant des perspectives critiques sur l’histoire, le capitalisme, la production des images, des représentations et des subjectivités. Ce qui unit ces formes radicales, c’est! peut-être une indécidabilité permanente entre réel et fiction, une forme d’ensauvagement et de chaos, marquée par une forte prégnance d’une esthétique surréaliste,  absurde, carnavalesque, qui utilise autant la parodie, l’humour, la subversion, que la construction réciproque de l’imagination et des espaces politiques.

En présence des membres du collectif estonien Non Grata (sous réserve)

R.E.P. (Revolutionary Experimental Space) Group a été créé à Kiev en 2004 par de jeunes artistes ukrainiens, en réaction à la période historique de la Révolution Orange.  R.E.P. choisit l’espace public comme domaine de ses expérimentations artistiques. Montrées aux biennales de Prague et d’Istanbul en 2009, les vidéos de R.E.P. Group sont inédites en France.

Fondé début 2003 à St Petersbourg, le groupe de travail Chto delat? (Que faire?) est animé par un collectif d’artistes, critiques, philosophes et écrivains, qui développe des projets artistiques collaboratifs, notamment au travers d’œuvres vidéo, d’installations, d’émissions de radio ou d’explorations artistiques de l’espace urbain. Plate-forme pour la créativité engagée, Chto Delat? construit son travail depuis une perspective collectiviste et d’auto-organisation, s’attachant aux poétiques et politiques aujourd’hui, avec une attention particulière pour la situation de la Russie contemporaine. Dans ses vidéos, Chto Delat? utilise les procédés de détournement ou de re-enactement, remettant en scène en scène des films de Jean-Luc Godard ou des textes de Bertolt Brecht. Le travail de Chto Delat? a été montré en France au Plateau en 2007.

Non grata est un collectif de quarante artistes de performance venant pour la plupart d’Estonie (Tallin), mais aussi du Chili, de la Finlande, de l’Allemagne, de la Suède et du Québec. Le collectif Non Grata se distingue par l’anonymat de ses membres, sa dissociation de la scène artistique locale, son mépris pour les médias de masse, ses actions sauvages et ses performances pouvant se prolonger pendant plusieurs jours (les «ghettomarathons»). Montrées en Asie, Europe et aux Etats-Unis, les vidéos de Non Grata sont inédites en France.

Projections de

NON GRATA – National Security Law (2004, 5 min) – Sports monsters  (5 min) – Catolica Chile Santiago Action Lecture Series – Part 2 (2005, 3 min) – Action lecture series leccion 2 – classification of performance (2005, 4 min.) – Documentary film (2003, 9 min) / R.E.P. Group – REP Party, 2006, 4 min – Untitled action, 2005, 3 min – We will REP you, 2005, 11 min – Broadening of mind, 2005, 4 min – Smuggling, 9 min – Fast art, 2005, 9 min – Lirnyk, 2006, 13 min / CHTO DELAT? – 2 + 2 Practicing Godard (2009, extrait)  – Angry Sandwichpeople, or in a Praise of Dialectic (2006, )  – a video project by Chto Delat, réalisé par Olga Egorova, Nikolay Oleinikov, Dmitry Vilensky, texte de Bertolt Brecht

Programmation : Aliocha Imhoff & Kantuta Quiros / le peuple qui manque

Informations pratiques:
Cinéma Le Méliès, 7, Avenue de la Résistance, Montreuil 93100
M° Croix-de-Chavaux (sortie n°3).
Tarifs du cinéma, Plan du quartier

VILNIUS COOP: Another City, Another Life (November 11)

The Contemporary Art Centre is pleased to invite you to the next event from the public lecture and screening series which are a part of the VILNIUS COOP: gaps, fictions and practices project within the frame of the X Baltic Triennial of International Art. The series of events will be presented at 7 pm each Wednesday from September 9 until November 19 at the VILNIUS COOP exhibition venue at Gediminas Avenue no. 27 and other places in Vilnius.

VILNIUS COOP exhibition venue
Gediminas Avenue no. 27
Wednesday, 11 November, 7pm

Joanna Sokolowska Another City, Another Life – of the Archives, video screening with introduction

The programme consisting of photo and video works and documentation of artistic actions is conceived as a modified and extended version of an archive accompanying the project Another City, Another Life, which took place in Warsaw in 2008.

The aim of the archive is to map, how do contemporary artists represent and engage in spatial, esthetical, social and political regimes that have been developed in various cities of East Europe since the decisive changes at the end of the 1980s, early 1990s began.

The archive is constructed loosely around several thematic questions. What are contemporary consequences and potential of the abandoned ideas of the revolution, communism and of socialist modernity, that were implemented in urban planning and collective identities? What kind of new collective bodies, or shared experiences can emerge now in this context? Are there any new possibilities for the “lived”, subjective experiences of inhabiting the cities? How is the dialectic of destruction and building inscribed in diverse material layers of cities related to the memory work and to the processes of constant (re)writing/actualization of history? What is omitted, excluded in historical narrations and current images of the post-socialist cities, what kind of strategies do the artist use to render visibility to these phenomena? How do the artists position themselves within the ambivalent field of cultural production, what role can they play in the economy (symbolical capital), public and political spaces of cities undergoing transformation? Finally can the economical “grey zone”, in which – despite the rhetoric of cultural capitalism – many artists in the post-socialist countries still function, be transformed into an experimental fieldwork offering possibilities to break away from using art for the economic productivity?

The selection will include works by: Chto Delat, Skart, Zbynek Baladren, Mona Vatamanu & Florin Tudor, Khinkali Juice, Grigor Khatchatryan, Lusine Talalyan, Tadej Pogacar, Miklos Erhardt, R.E.P., Voina, Angelika Fojtuch, Karol Radziszewski

Joanna Sokolowska, (*1978) art historian, curator, currently at the Muzeum Sztuki in Lodz. She is mainly interested in economies of artistic production in relation to the changes of labour along with the urban transformations in post-socialist countries. Her recent curatorial work includes: “Arbeiter verlassen die Arbeitsstatte,” at the Galerie fur Zeitgenossische Kunst in Leipzig and “Another City, Another Life,” at the Zacheta National Gallery of Art in Warsaw and in diverse locations in the city.

This event is kindly supported by the Polish Institute in Vilnius.

No More Reality [Crowd and Performance] (Istanbul)

No More Reality
CROWD AND PERFORMANCE   

DEPO, Istanbul
Tütün Deposu Lüleci Hendek Cad. No.12, Tophane 34425/ İstanbul
January 31–March 5

Artists: Fia Backstrom [Sweeden/U.S.], Johanna Billing [Sweden], Susanne Burner [Germany], Chto Delat [Russia], Marcelo Exposito [Spain], Claire Fontaine [France], Igor Grubic [Croatia], Sharon Hayes [U.S.], Inventory[UK], Olga Kisseleva [France/Russia], Ligna [Germany], Ciprian Muresan [Romania], Marta Popivoda/Illegal Cinema [Serbia], Radek Community [Russia], R.E.P group [Ukraine], Revolution Will Not Be Televised [Brazil]. 

Lecture by Brian Holmes: Ecstasy, Fear & Number: From the “Man in the Crowd” to the Self-Organizing Multitude.

 

From the popular settings of art history we can recall two faces of the crowd: the first, recognized as the holder of political will (demonstrations or revolutionary masses), appearing in many historical or allegorical paintings, and the second one—more neutral and more dispersed, usually connected to the representation of the city, modernity and urban life. Of course, the crowd is never neutral…  Apparently nameless bodies, anonymous minds and ordinary settings are always producing narratives and images related to the dominant politics of public spaces.

The No More Reality [Crowd and Performance] exhibition examines the different models of collective acting. It is a theoretical-practical platform, which gathers a group of artists, activists, theorists, curators, magazines and radio broadcasters, investigating performative aspects of the crowd in the streets and the political implications of body practices in the public space.

No More Reality [Crowd and Performance] develops in stages starting from 2005. Exhibitions, publications and discussions accompanying this process are conceptualized as fragmentary situations and steps in the research, rather than the final projects with the fixed and definite conclusions.

For more details, please see attached .pdf file.

Curators: Claire Staebler and Jelena Vesić
Exhibition Producer: Vladimir Jerić Vlidi
Production: Depo-Istanbul and Anadolu Kültür
Exhibition Managers: Asena Günal and Balca Ergener