Summer School as School
3- 18 July, 2016
Public Program
Wednesday, 6 July 2016 at 19:00
Jelena Vesić: Against the curatorial supernow
Exhibition history and canons of the contemporaneity
Venue: Boxing Club
Mark Isaku St. Prishtina
Republic of Kosovo
This lecture will deal with "critical writing" in the exhibition space, assuming that each exhibition presents a "scripted space" generated through communication and socialization, sometimes a joint action – as the space of the stage and the everyday life, or their mutual interconnection. It will look at the "cases" of artistic and curatorial critical interventions – the gestures of counter-exhibitionists, non-representationalists, communitarianists and discussionists – situated in the (post- ) Yugoslav historical space since the 1960s up to today. It will analyze the ways by which these critical gestures break with the linguistics of normality of the conventional exhibition-making, based on spectacularization of individual artworks, the figure of curator and the oblivious reality of the “supernow”. Is it possible to think the exhibition history outside of the contemporary academic cannons of classified and standardized knowledge production? Is it possible to think the history as the continuum of breaks with some of the ever dominant ”bourgeois” artistic tendencies? How "critical writing" in the exhibition space opens up this space towards broader social and political realities against the expanding present-ism and now-ism of contemporary art?
Jelena Vesić is an independent curator, writer, editor and lecturer, who is based in Belgrade. She was co-editor of Prelom – Journal of Images and Politics (Belgrade) 2001–2009 and co-founder of independent organization Prelom Collective (Belgrade) 2005–2010, active in the field of publishing, research and exhibition practice that intertwines political theory and contemporary art. She is also co-editor of Red Thread – Journal for social theory, contemporary art and activism, (Istanbul) since 2009 and member of editorial board of Art Margins (MIT Press).
In her research, she explores the relations between art and ideology in the fields of geopolitical art history writing; experimental art and exhibition practices of the 1960s and 1970s in former Yugoslavia and Eastern Europe; practices of self-organisation and self- management in contemporary cognitive capitalism, etc. Her curatorial practice often experiments with frameworks, methodologies, and contextual and collaborative aspects of art.
Recent projects: Oktobar XXX: Exposition – Symposim – Performance, Cultural Centre Theatre, Panč evo 2012/Bone Festival, Bern, 2013; Against Art: Goran Đorđević – Copies (1979 -1985), Museum of Contemporary Art and City Gallery, Ljubljana - Belgrade, 2012/13; Lecture Performance, Museum of Contemporary Art and Koelnisher Kunstverein, Cologne-Belgrade, 2009/2010; Political Practices of (post-) Yugoslav Art: RETROSPECTIVE 01, Museum 25th of May, Belgrade, 2009.