Friday, 20 November 2009
Friday, 13 November 2009
FrameWork
special public event program of press to exit project space
in Cultural Centre CK
Saturday, 14th of November, 6pm
On Saturday, November 14th, at 18h at the Cultural Centre CK, press to exit project space will held a special public event program titled “THINK! THINK! THINK!” curated by Yane Calovski consisting of promotion of 3 publications, a public discussion and a group exhibition curated by press to exit’s guest curator Fatos Ustek.
The public event reinstates the main programs of press to exit project space in one cohesive framework. The aim is to examine the productions and the narrative which were carefully crafted over the last 5 years and the meaningful trace press to exit project space has left on the Macedonian and international artistic and curatorial production.
The book titled “THINK! THINK! THINK! Expending the present, launching the future” is edited by Yane Calovski and Hristina Ivanoska as a collection of commissioned texts, interviews and artistic interventions by regional and international cultural practitioners as well as an index of events and projects dating from 2004-9. The book provides a medium for reflection on the issues facing the independent artistic and curatorial production in the region and beyond. In the frame of the promotion of the book a public debate will take place with the following list of participants: Antonia Majaca – curator of the Gallery Miroslav Kraljevic from Zagreb, the Macedonian artist Aleksandar Stankoski, Inga Zimprich – independent curator and curator from Berlin, Fatos Ustek – independent curator from Istanbul based in London, and Yane Calovski and Hristina Ivanoska.
Additionally, the books from the New Project Production series 2009 “Hidden Identities” by Neda Firfova and “1/8” by Flora Aliuce will be promoted.
press to exit project space was established in 2004 by artists Yane Calovski and Hristina Ivanoska as a special program-based artist initiative for research and production in the field of visual arts and curatorial practices.
This event is part of DIVERSions, a special program of the Swiss Cultural Programme, marking the 10 years of SCP presence in Macedonia.
THINK! THINK! THINK! is supported by Swiss Cultural Programme in the Western Balkans, Pro Helvetia – the Swiss Arts Council, and the European Cultural Foundation.
Publication
The exhibition is accompanied by a publication, that will be launced at the opening.
Editor: Fatos Ustek
Contributors: Ahmet Ogut, Claire Fontaine, Hildegard Spielhofer, Sofija Grandakovska, Ine Lamers, Daniela Paes Leao, Laura Kuch, Marjolijn Dijkman, Runo Lagomarsino, Yane Calovski
Design: Ruse Artov
300 copies
Printed in Skopje, Macedonia
On Delocalisation
Delocalisation is a proposal to be in the present of the present without the imagination of what we will feel within an encounter or what we will experience. To be in the present of the encountered is possible through allowing the experience to take its position in a way in which it is undefined or unanalyzed. Since, also according to Maurice Merlau-Ponty, defining and analyzing is an act of stocking the experience but not experiencing the encounter.
Leaving the phenomenological investigation aside, structurally delocalisation is not a counter movement but a position taken in response to the streams of localising and globalising values, let them be the human relations or addressed to objects, places surrounding us. In that sense, to delocalise is not a cleansed way of being in an encounter with a particular context, it is a proposal to allow a flux, a continuous change in framing things rather than generalising a specific encounter into an overall claim, or allowing an encounter to stand for the whole picture (if there can be a whole picture at all).
Delocalisation sprung from an investigation of a potentiality, thus the potential of realising a project without experiencing the particularities, singularities, generalities of the space / place / geography that the project would take place. It is at first a self-referential concept and then a question and a proposal to trigger responses. For the exhibition I have invited seven artists who have not worked with the specificity of Skopje, and asked them to come up with a proposal for a work or a work that would be re-embodied in Skopje. Before I start visiting each work in the exhibition and elaborating their presences, I want to underline the significance of movement for the whole project. Movement, for this project, does not only stand for changing location or travelling from one place to another but also stands for the ides, feelings, objects and materials being in a continuous change of positions. In other words, the project’s core point is the embodiment of movement in its pragmatic and abstract realities.
This project is homage to Lucy Lippard’s suitcase exhibitions that she has started in the late 60’s, with which she has enabled the visibility of art works in various other geographies than USA, such as Latin America and Europe. Lippard’s concept was packing the art works in a suitcase and unfolding the suitcase in her destination points in various art spaces. The suitcase exhibitions did not only allow the transportation of works but also grounded a possibility of sharing tendencies, ideas, and attitudes about and on art. The suitcase exhibitions were part of the era of dematerialisation of art (1966 - 1972), which grasps my interest in many ways. I wanted to investigate the possibility of realising a project akin to Lippard’s thus asked the artists to post me their works or proposals for their works. My main idea was not only to travel with ideas on an exhibition but also with the content of the exhibition that I would unfold when I reach the actual place of the show. My aim in this project is in a way enabling my curatorial practice to posit somewhere beyond than making a selection of art works and putting them on display or making them public. Hence, I have offered artists my presence in case they would favour to involve for the realisation of their works. In a way, I wanted to negotiate the space between the curator, artist and the artwork through shifting positions and labour. Laura Kuch and Marjolijn Dijkman decided to involve me directly in the realisation of their works, whereas other participating artists chose to involve me in the post-production stage. Additionally, unlike Lippard’s exhibitions, the artists in the project live and work in various countries of Europe and they did not only use postal mailing but also internet mailing. I only received three envelopes and the rest was delivered via e-mail. The physicality of movement consisted of sending works from Rotterdam, Amsterdam and Sao Paolo to London and me bringing them from London to Skopje. Moreover, translation plays an important part, literally and phenomenologically. Most of the works are either compiled in Macedonian or made available to access for the Macedonian audience. Additionally, I have chosen artists considering their artistic practices and the diversity that they can bring in the project not through illustrating the concept but through opening up various discussions and grounds of investigation in relation to the concept.
The exhibition Delocalisation is composed of various viewpoints and statements with a variety of influences. The concept is brought in front of the audience in Macedonia through a multitude of positioning, where the audience is asked to formulate their own relating. The exhibition is not a presentation of ideas, it is a gathering of stances to enable production of other stances. I want to revisit Laclau’s positioning of truth, where he says: There is no truth or value independent of a context. With delocalisation, I ask you dear reader: But how to determine a context?
Laclau concludes with the very fact that particular must be performative. Drawing lines of parallelism, I propose that Delocalisation as a verb and a noun (an act and a state of mind) shall be open, continuously redefining itself, its relation (complemantarity/ tension/ mutual exclusion,...) to the local and the global in order to fully realise itself, when we bear in mind that delocalisation is not an undoing but a re-approach to attributions, tendencies of categorisation, mystification, unification.
I would like end by giving my special thanks to Karen Mirza who has enabled my double presence in London and in Skopje; to Yane Calovski and Hristina Ivanoska who have been the causes of this project to take place in Skopje and who have been of great support in the realisation of the exhibition and the publication with their unending energy and enthusiasm; to Ruse Arsov for his unlimited energy and brilliant design capabilities; to Philip Nikolovski for his support in the production of the exhibition; to all the participating artists for their persona and input in the project and to you dear reader who has read till the last word of this pretty long foreword.
Fatos Ustek
Ahmet Ogut
Ahmet Ogut
Perfect Lovers, 2008
Claire Fontaine
Claire Fontaine
Untitled, (We are all whatever singularities), 2006
Five hundred A4 photocopy with carrier, free copyright.
Hildegard Spielhofer
Hildegard Spielhofer
City Chairs, 2009
Site-specific installation
Hildegard Spielhofer, with the support from Pro Helvetia and Swiss Cultural Program in Skopje, was able to travel to Skopje and produce a site-located work. City Chairs, 2009 is composed of a neon sign reading ‘Save this purple plastic chair’ in Macedonian and a body of chairs that are stacked inorderly in the yard of Press to Exit Project Space. The chairs are collected from donators living in Skopje, receiving a signed certificate from the artist confirming their participation in the production of the work. The ordinary everyday object becomes part of an artwork thus the artwork itself. If we recall the paraphrasing of Boris Groys, that artist is the one who can transform the objects of everyday into an artwork, Spielhofer is confronting us with this fact. Moreover, she is bringing us further with the framework of the whole piece. Plastic chairs are generic objects that can be found in anywhere all over the world, the possibility of producing them in large quantities for small amounts enables their mass production. For Spielhofer, ‘Delocalisation means the distance from a specific place, taking things away to put it somewhere else. It is the opposite of localisation. So the topic is not a specific place with its own language and culture, but it is about a daily movement of ideas, people and things. A situation everybody is affected by, nowadays. The notion of a site is based on the relation between physicality of things, so I will create relations at a specific site between things and humans.’
Ine Lamers
Ine Lamers
how many times can one repeat the same thing, 2009
work in progress DVD, 6.55 min
Laura Kuch
Laura Kuch
Transcendental Me, 2009
Marjolijn Dijkman
Marjolijn Dijkman
Neither Nor, 2009
30 photographs in collaboration with Fatos Ustek
Runo Lagomarsino
Runo Lagomarsino
The G in Modernity stands forGhosts, 2009
Runo Lagomarsino’s video piece The G in Modernity stands for Ghosts, 2009 is a film without sound. In the piece we see a small box filled with paper that is set on fire. As we watch the box burning slowly and producing smoke we are not informed on the content that is being destroyed. We witness a small gesture of destruction without knowing the cause or the source. The cardboard box is filled with crumbled pages from a world atlas. The gesture of burning an apparatus of orientation posits beyond its act. That is to say, the set of rules of understanding, relating, associating with the world around us is set on fire in order to empty space for other possibilities of perception to take place. Lagomarsino additionally points out that: ‘The title is an important aspect in the video which informs the audience in my interest in the discussion of the re-narration of modernity, which is seeing it from an other angle/position. For me this angle has been very much connected to the construction of Latin America, and the power relation between there and the ‘western world’, but looking through some discussions and exhibitions with people like WHW and the Antonia (Majaca) and Ivana (Bago) at the Galerija Miroslav Kraljevic .(I say this from a total amateur point of view), there are a similar interest and discussion of reformulations of modernity, So there is this construction/deconstruction and struggle about the "poles" of east-west and north-south...which in some ways are very similar but also totally different.’
Wednesday, 4 November 2009
Thursday midnight
The delocalisation sets in motion when we appropriate ( another foreign) language. leaving the mother tongue , moving, transforming slightly the body, the patterns of movement of the specific voice and speech instrumentation.
I m fascinated by the aura that languages have, symbolic power,taste and how they can be embodied or in other cases - even while being spoken out- very disembodied as if all the signifying features/expressive character of words have been drowned out ; this occurs when one who speaks has no idea of the meaning, nor of any social nor moral implications which are encoded( inherently apparant) in what s/he says. I am sure I cannot now make myself as clear as I would wish since English is not my native language . Still though domesticating it I try to express some notions on the appropriation of a foreign language ; where I think about the state of being inbetween languages, or being in neither language as a state analogue to being de- local- ised.
Delocalised as state that we wish to be in , a state of desire, a place to activate, I like to write a little more. I will tomorrow.
sleep all well, it is 1.49 here now.