 |
 |
|
|
|
|
||||||
|
|
| SocialEast Seminars | |
The Experience of an East European curator in the international art scene. A confessional first-person narration Although I have not curated large exhibitions about Eastern Europe, I would like to draw on my own curatorial parcours in my talk, going through my earlier and later writings and curatorial projects self-critically, narrating how I have been transformed from the typically Slovene/Central European “separatist” position - cynical, as the older generation of art academics is, towards the Eastern Europe - to the lover of the Balkans and promoter of the former Eastern European art scenes in France. On Being an International Artist Born in Sarajevo, and consequently moving to Skopje as a 10-year old child, I started my artistic career during the time of the SCCA support of the local art scene. It was a fruitful position to be in, for me and my generation, starting out at the end of the 90s. We were free of the market driven art scene of the West, being nationally promoted and sent to numerous festivals and biennales. The discovery was mutual – we were discovering the world outside the national borders of our enclosed country, while we were ‘being discovered by them’ too. Moving to London in ’99, many of my prejudices about this relation between the local and international art-scene, become re-adjusted. With this text, I would like to focus on a set of questions that have been oppressing me as a cultural worker:
When exhibiting in Central Europe, both nationalities (UK/Macedonia) are added to my personal name. Is there a national artistic identity in this world of post-national existence? Am I an international artist – and what has contributed towards becoming ‘international’? Has this ‘internationalism’ influenced my position toward my native country, toward my adopted country, or any/every other environment in which I have presence as an artist/cultural worker? Jet Set, Net Set, Easy Jet Set In the context of the SocialEast Seminar on Foreign Experience in Post-89 Art, I would propose to speak about net.art, net culture and post-89 euphoria of east/west European discourse networks. My focus is on the lineage of the MetaForum Conference Series, Nettime and related mailing lists, and city nodes of Budapest and Berlin. This lineage can draw direct lines from living room and cafe discussions in Budapest, to the net.time meeting at the Venice Biennale in 1995, back to Budapest, numerous international events, a tremendous amount of east/west and east/east networking, the Beauty and East Nettime Spring Meeting in Ljubljana and the Hybrid Work Space at Documenta X in Kassel. Taking an auto-ethnographic approach as a privileged foreigner, I would examine the kinds of questions and affinities that emerged in these networks, as well as the results on local and international levels. How rooted was the local, how diverse the international and why? Why was there never a Hungarian net.artist? Instead, Koz-Hely emerged, more along the lines of xs4all. I would also like to address political will in terms of funding support and its positive and negative role in culture. A contemporary example is the ongoing work with Prologue: New Feminism, New Europe. While the focus is on an inter-generational East/West discourse, many of the invited women live in Berlin (and only two are German nationals). Revolutionary Decadence: Foreign Artists in Budapest since 1989 Maja and Reuben Fowkes A presentation of curatorial research into the experience of foreign artists in Budapest since 1989. Timezones and Rituals 16 years ago I immigrated from point A to point B crossing two borders at the same time. The crossing itself was also doubled by the fact that there were many identities of mine engaged in it: vernacular and social, subjective and cultural, individual and historical, private and artistic.
Later I realized that the two points were actually the same, in spite of the changed perspective and all my identities are in a continuous transformation. When asked by some people from point B to take part in a show in point A, I created an anthem which was recorded on video as no choir was willing to perform it. Reconsidering the Avant-Garde: Afrika, the Russian Dog, and Marilyn Monroe Foreign Experience Against the Slipping Down Into the Intellectual Provincialism I invited artists from Minsk and also artists who live and work like me in West Europe and reflect from a different perspective their native town.
Beyond Soros Realism This research concentrates on two case studies that represent the reciprocal trajectories of artistic interactions between Ukrainian art scene and the global art world. Both of these cases are connected with the activity of Soros CCA in Kyiv, and both go beyond its patterns of international cooperation, closely tied to the neoliberal idea of art as an efficient tool of the normalization of society. Boris Mikhailov, the first Ukrainian artist to gain full international recognition who moved from Kharkiv to Berlin in late 1990, reacted to his experience of integration to the global art discourse with his book project Look at Me, I Look at Water (2004). Mikhailov compared this work to ‘an obscure quest, a quest which is also a sort of experiment’. American artist Sean Snyder moved from Berlin to Kyiv in the mid-2000s; his integration with the local intellectual community was crucial for the development of post-Soros art institution. Snyder’s video work Exhibition (2008), based on local media artifact, contains numerous insights into the functioning of contemporary art apparatus. These two research based artworks provide us with heuristic tools to question the demands of neocapitalist ideology implied in the discourse of post-Soviet art institutions.
|
|
copyright 2007-9 |
Returning back to my native country for an exhibition, I am seen as a foreigner – as the colonialist that brings westernized ideas, a social and political provocateur. This fortifies my position as an outsider/non-national artist. While working in ‘the west’, however, I am clearly seen as a representative of Macedonia…How does this effect my position as an artist? 
