27.09.2017
Bucharest
Looking Forward, Looking Back
Lectures by
Lia Perjovschi, CAA/KM & Borut Vogelnik, IRWIN
27 September 2017, 19:00
CEREFREA Villa Noël, 6 Emile Zola St., Bucharest
free access, event held in English
The Institute of the Present (IP) launches in the frame of the project Atlas of Personal Accounts the series of lectures Looking Forward, Looking Back. Departing from a closer look on artists’ self-involvement with historicisation, periodization and chronologies, with research of a parallel nexus of trajectories and recovery of models and narratives in the history of art and culture, the project introduces innovative approaches to recent art practice and theory. Centered on questions around (art) historical canons, artistic production, on the transfer, reception and circulation of contents, materials and ideas in a given cultural environment and geopolitical reality, the lectures aim at opening a discussion about the afterlife of histories and the role played by artists in reshaping our understanding of a possible future.
Lia Perjovschi: From My Body to the Body of Knowledge
Tracking the various personal registers in working with information, in organizing the various materials collected and archived and in producing a visual representation of the basic knowledge, From My Body to the Body of Knowledge resumes the conceptual frame for my ideas and work: the “International Archive for Contemporary Art 1990–today” (CAA), “The Center For Art Analysis 1999–today”, “Timeline 1997–today”, “Diagrams/Mind Maps 1999–today” and the “Knowledge Museum Project 1999–today”. This presentation reflects back on how I became “the subject and not the object of history”, discussing my subjective understanding of historicisation, the place of the archive, the survival strategies in an apathetic context. It subjects the experiments and research (diagrams and chronologies), the institution established (the archive), the interest in art and context (local/global), the interdisciplinary area (the Knowledge Museum), the planetary citizen, searching for sense and normality. This journey from my body to the body of knowledge opens up a personal storyboard, a space of postproduction, rethinking, recycling information and structuring ideas; a space of dizzydence and dialogue dedicated to the ones who helped and the Other.
Lia Perjovschi, born 1961, is an artist living in Sibiu and Bucharest, Romania. She is the founder and coordinator of CAA/CAA (Contemporary Art Archive and Center for Art Analysis), an informal institution functioning under different names since 1985, and KM (Knowledge Museum), an interdisciplinary and educational project based on a research started by artist in 1999 and continuing until today. Her work was presented in more than 500 exhibitions, lectures, and workshops around the world.
Borut Vogelnik: Retroprinciple Book Editions
Retroprinciple Book Editions consists of seven books, the final products of five projects extending over seventeen years. The beginning of the first project, Kapital, reaches back to the period of the socialist social system, which, however, was already over by the time we issued the first publication. On the other hand, the publication that addresses the last of the five projects came out in an integral version at a time when Slovenia was already a fully-fledged member of the European Union. Thus the project literally connects the two ends of the period called the transitional period. But it is not only this external overlapping that links the line of five projects with the notion of transition. Transformation itself is the theme and subject matter of the Retroprinciple Book Editions that opens with a thesis about the specific conditions of art production in the East. Through discussions, most of which took place during our journeys to Moscow and across the US, we tried to articulate this difference, which materialized in an open conflict during the Interpol project. Since the difference in regulating communication, articulation and inscription, which is tackled by the Retroprinciple Book Editions, gradually emerged as the key difference between Eastern and Western art systems, the series concludes with East Art Map.
Borut Vogelnik, born 1958, is an artist based in Ljubljana. He is co-founder of the artists group Irwin and of the art collective Neue Slovenische Kunst. He is also an associate professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Ljubljana.
The Irwin group was founded in Ljubljana in 1983 and consists of members Dušan Mandić, Miran Mohar, Andrej Savski, Roman Uranjek, and Borut Vogelnik. Irwin, along with music group Laibach and the performance group Gledališče Sester Scipion Nasice, comprises one of the core groups within the artists’ collective Neue Slowenische Kunst (NSK), established in 1984 in the Slovenian Republic of the Federal Socialist Republic of Yugoslavia. At the beginning of the 1990s the artistic collective NSK transformed from an organisation to a State in Time, in the framework of which Irwin played the role of protagonist as well as chronologist by analysing and recording the processes which had started in Europe after the fall of socialism. In the project East Art Map they created, together with collaborators, a history of contemporary art in Eastern Europe.
Atlas of Personal Accounts
Partners: CEREFREA – Villa Noël (Centre Régional Francophone de Recherches Avancées en Sciences Sociales), NEC – New Europe College
Media partners: Scena9.ro, Revista Arta, Zeppelin, România Pozitivă
Cultural project co-funded by the Administration of the National Cultural Fund.
Cultural project funded in the frame of the cultural program Bucharest Participative City by Bucharest Municipality through the Cultural Centre of the Bucharest Municipality – ArCuB.
The project does not necessarily represent the standpoint of the Administration of the National Cultural Fund. AFCN cannot be held liable for the content of the project or the manner in which the outcomes of the project may be used. These shall devolve entirely on the beneficiary of the financing.