[oberlist] Drifting Identity | 11 October, 19.00 pm

Sat Oct 8 14:55:27 CEST 2011

apologise for cross-posting

________________________________________

Drifting Identity | 12 October - 5 November 2011
 Opening: 11 October, 19.00 pm
Project curator: Stefan Rusu

Participating artists:
Marina Naprushkina
Kristap Gulbis
Stefanos Tsivopoulos
Societe Realiste (Ferenc Gróf and Jean-Baptiste Naudy)
Tilmann Mayer-Faje

Seminars and workshops: DRIFTING IDENTITY STATION by Gülsen Bal and Stefan
Rusu
Location: Institut für Kunst und Gestaltung, TU Wien
11 - 18 October 2011

Round table talk/discussion: De-linking, de-coloniality by Marina Gržinić
Location: Open Space, Open Systems
3 November 2011, 19.00 – 20.30 pm

The Drifting Identity Station uses a model of former Soviet Polar Stations,
which was a trend in the 50's to explore the arctic environment while
experiencing extreme cold. Station operates in the harsh climate associated
with “political winter,” while researchers interested in the socio-political
environment by deploying various devices and methodologies in order to
collect and monitor the data that is relevant to the given context. While
exploring the frozen landscape, researchers analyze old trajectories
(derived
from the former USSR political construct and a new formation in European
Union progress) to identify what characterizes the mapping of states and
identities in an attempt to determinate the intensity and temperature of the
political debates connected to ongoing process of EU enlargement. The
process of formation of European Union have polarized the issue of the
identity of the states and its inhabitants in certain contexts.
The underlying idea of National Costume of the European Union developed by
Kristap Gulbis is a starting point for a debate concerning the identity
within a European context and the adjustability of various EU directives and
regulations to its historically and mentally diversified regions. Belarus in
figures by Marina Naprushkina is part of of a larger initiative Office for
Anti-Propaganda is focused on the critical examination of the contemporary
Belarus state which is authoritarian ruled by Alexander Lukashenko; The
opposition is oppressed and marginalized, the media are brought into line.
Because of this circumstances Belarus is also an outstanding example of how
to establish a modern dictatorship and how the western democracies handle
this case. Lost Monument by Stefanos Tsivopoulos takes upon a controversial
monument, a statue of former American president Harry S. Truman located in
downtown Athens that appears as though it were a still unidentified
archaeological find. The Truman Doctrine shifted American foreign policy
toward the Soviet Union and historians often use it to mark the starting
date of the Cold War. Societe Realiste (Ferenc Gróf and Jean-Baptiste Naudy)
shows two maps extracted from the collection London View. One is a map
superimposing the political frontiers that existed at the turn of each
century between year 0 and year 2000 on the European peninsula and its
surroundings. The other graphic is a colorimetric map of European
segmentations, where every single portion of land divided between these
frontiers has been associated to a specific taint, averaging their
respective trans-historical surrounding frontiers. Dulcification Measure by
Tilmann Mayer-Faje examines how people nowadays live in the huge skeleton of
the industrialized urbanization that took place in the Soviet time and
analyze how the functions of micro district could be transformed to the
contemporary life and needs of the inhabitants. While reproducing the
ornaments as they where stamped on the houses in order to indicate a local
identity, he plays with the failure of this machinery.
The Drifting Identity Station is initiated as a research platform to monitor
and preserve the data related to the evolving state of identity in a given
context, here in the context of European Union and the countries of Baltic
region and neighboring countries of the Eastern Partnership (Belarus,
Ukraine, Republic of Moldova, Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan). Visual art
projects and other contributions that will be on display in the Station
comment on the evolution
of the social engineering project of European Union, as a political
construct in progress and the political identity of the neighboring
countries at its current state. At the same time the artists assume the
posture of researchers that collect the samples from the field in order to
preserve the residual traces that rearticulate the post-socialist condition.
The area of research is extended to Mediterranean region that most recently
become a fertile ground for the export of European democracy.

About curator:

Stefan Rusu

Stefan’s artist and curatorial agenda is closely connected to undergoing
processes and changes occurred in the post-socialist societies after 1989.
Among his preoccupations are the aspects of mass-manipulation techniques,
political engineering strategies (political engineering), forms of
colonization and culturalization that culminated in some cases with the
construction of artificial entities, as it is the case of Republic of
Moldova. Rusu was trained as visual artist and later extended his practice
to curating, managing and fundraising projects, editing TV programs,
producing experimental films, TV reports and documentaries.

Starting from the year 2000 he is involved in the evolution of KSAK Center
for Contemporary Art from Chisinau where he develops curatorial projects and
art initiatives. In 2005/2006 he attended the Curatorial Training Program at
Stichting De Appel from Amsterdam where he co-curated Mercury in Retrograde
(http://mercuryinretrograde.deappel.nl/). His latest curatorial project
(completed in 2011) is CHISINAU - Art, Research in the Public Sphere – a
cross-disciplinary platform that investigated the connections between
political and cultural symbols and propaganda and its impact on the urban
environment, the interferences between personal narratives and imported
ideologies and cultural discourses in relation to the public sphere. The
project aim was to explore the dominant institutional and political
discourses that have shaped the society and the urban landscape of the city
of Chisinau in the course of its recent history. (http://www.art.md/2010/sfe
ra_publica_prezentare_en.html)

Seminars and workshops: DRIFTING IDENTITY STATION
Institut für Kunst und Gestaltung, TU Wien

11 - 18 October 2011
Seminars and workshops by Dr Gülsen Bal and Stefan Rusu
Language: English

Location:
Institut für Kunst und Gestaltung, Karlsgasse 11, Hochparterre, Seminarraum
2, 1040 Wien

Based on collaborative project work, Dr Gülsen Bal and Stefan Rusu will
offer a joint course in the Visual Culture programme at Vienna University of
Technology. In the first leg of the course, Bal, the founding director of
Open Space will introduce the current field of contemporary artistic
engagement with changing spatial and cultural realities. The second leg will
comprise a four-days workshop with the artist/curator Rusu, including
lectures, discussions and conceptual designs. Bal's contention resides in
line with Deleuzian reading by exploring the problem posed by an insistence
on the productive nature of theory in an understanding in which “the concept
is not given, it is created, or to be created; it is not formed, it posits
itself in itself [...] The two imply each other, since what is truly
created, from the living thing to the work of art [...] The more the concept
is created, the more it posits itself. What depends on a free creative
activity is also what posits itself in itself.” This introduces perhaps a
call for an expanded notion of what art practice
 Along side, Rusu aims to explore the residual traces that re-articulates
the post-socialist condition of the societies that are EU members (Estonia,
Lithuania, Latvia, etc.) as well as very recently integrated ones (Romania,
Bulgaria) to EU in which what happened after the fall of the Berlin Wall and
the dissolution of Soviet Union within the given context. His approach is
based on his recent artist and curatorial projects that explores the
political dimension of the public space as well the use of habitat as a
platform for democratization of the cultural discourse in the public sphere
of post-socialist societies.

Supported by:
bm:ukk
MA 7 - Interkulturelle und internationale Aktivitäten
ERSTE Foundation
European Cultural Foundation (ECF), STEP beyond
Mondriaan Foundation
kind support provided by:
University of Vienna - Department of Meteorology and Geophysics
cyberlab - Digitale Entwicklungen GmbH
In Cooperation with Institut für Kunst und Gestaltung, TU Wien

About Open Space, Open Systems:

Open Friday, Saturday 13.00 - 18.30 and open for the rest of the week days
by appointment only.
Admission free
Open Space, Open Systems
Zentrum für Kunstprojekte
Lassingleithnerplatz 2
A- 1020 Vienna
Austria
(+43) 699 115 286 32

for more info: office at openspace-zkp.org
http://www.openspace-zkp.org/

Open Space, Open Systems - Zentrum für Kunstprojekte aims to create the
most vital facilities for art concerned with contributing a model strategy
for cross-border and interregional projects on the basis of
improving improving new approach.

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