Boris Buden at Summer School as School 2018
July 27, 2018, 20:00
Venue: Boxing Club

Summer School as School
July 16 – August 2, 2018

Stacion – Center for Contemporary Art Prishtina is pleased to announce the presentation “Colonisation of the Vernacular. An artist’s impression” by Boris Buden, part of Summer School as School 2018 Public Program.

Mladen Stilinovic’s famous dictum “An artist who cannot speak English is no artist” evokes a historical condition that resembles rather the Middle Ages than the Global Contemporaneity of our present. It ascribes artistic creation exclusively to the elite spheres of the (new) Lingua Franca, while it denies it completely to the whole vernacular domain. This, in fact, contradicts the tendency of the global capital that sees today its biggest chance for expansion – for the new wave of its accumulation – precisely in addressing the vernacular audiences and opening vernacular markets. Will an art entirely devoted to English share the usual fate of all the lingua francas, which, as is well known, got killed by their own elitism?

Boris Buden is a writer, cultural critic and translator. He studied philosophy in Zagreb and received his Ph.D. in Cultural Theory from Humboldt University, Berlin. In the 1990s he was founder and editor of the Zagreb-based magazine and publishing house Arkzin. His essays and articles cover topics related to philosophy, politics, culture and art criticism. Among his Croatian translations are some of the most important works of Sigmund Freud. He has co-edited several books and is author of Der Schacht von Babel: Ist Kultur übersetzbar? [The Pit of Babel: Is Culture Translatable?] (2004); Übersetzung: Das Versprechen eines Begriffs [Translation: Promises of a Concept] (2008) (with Stefan Nowotny); Zone des Übergangs: Vom Ende des Postkommunismus [Zone of Transition: On the End of Post-communism] (2009); among others. Buden is a permanent fellow at the European Institute of Progressive Cultural Policies, Vienna. He lives and works in Berlin.