Course 5: A Conversation on Cooking as Curating, Honesty and a Guide for Cultural Workers
Course leader: Edi Muka
Course leader: Edi Muka
13 - 14 July, 2016
Course Description:
To compare cooking to curating might sound trivial but a closer look allows us to understand similar dynamics and consider revealing aspects of both practices. Beyond these dynamics there’s always a constant quest for inspiration and confrontation with the real. The times we are living through demand a questioning and rethinking of the set of rules and conventions that frame and immunize our lives, and assign our positions in the social hierarchies of global capitalism.
Can the art that we know contribute something along these lines? Can it somehow contribute to the task of finding ourselves engaged, which is to say, of interrupting the sense of the world, rediscovering the power of anonymity and acquiring inappropriate passions? It is hard for me to know but I do not stop wanting it. I want art, poetry, philosophy and teaching, to provide forms of engagement that first and foremost, radically affect and change the artist herself. Only after that can we hope that art, or whatever we shall end up calling it, might still present a horizon for the politicization of life.
Can the art that we know contribute something along these lines? Can it somehow contribute to the task of finding ourselves engaged, which is to say, of interrupting the sense of the world, rediscovering the power of anonymity and acquiring inappropriate passions? It is hard for me to know but I do not stop wanting it. I want art, poetry, philosophy and teaching, to provide forms of engagement that first and foremost, radically affect and change the artist herself. Only after that can we hope that art, or whatever we shall end up calling it, might still present a horizon for the politicization of life.
Biography
Since March 2014 Edi Muka holds the position of curator of temporary projects at the Public Art Agency, Sweden. Previously, from 2009 – 2014 he was the curator of Roda Sten konsthall in Göteborg, and together with Stina Edblom, shared the position of artistic director of Göteborg International Biennial for Contemporary Art 2013.
He is one of the founders and directors of the Tirana International Contemporary Art Biennial, as well as director and curator of TICA—Tirana Institute of Contemporary Art, an independent platform for research and production of contemporary art.
He is one of the founders and directors of the Tirana International Contemporary Art Biennial, as well as director and curator of TICA—Tirana Institute of Contemporary Art, an independent platform for research and production of contemporary art.
In 2015 he co-curated Local Stories – Global Practices, 3rd edition of the International Art Encounters of Medellin, Colombia. In 2007, he curated the fourth edition of the Göteborg International Biennial for Contemporary Art, titled Rethinking Dissent, together with Joa Ljungberg. In 1999, Muka curated the group show Albania Today – The Time of Ironic Optimism, the first Albanian Pavilion at the Venice Biennial, and in 2005 he was the commissioner for the pavilion.
His curatorial work is of international scope and based on close collaboration with artists.