Curators Anonymous #4
From Me to We: Reconfiguring Community
Convenors: Jana J. Haeckel and Laura Herman for Curators Anonymous
With Staci
Bu Shea,
Grace Ndiritu, Tereza Stejskalová and llse Ghekiere
Saturday 7 December 2019, 17-21h
La Loge, Rue de L’Ermitage 86, 1050 Brussels
Supported by La Loge, the Czech Center Brussels and the Goethe-Institut Brussels
From
Me to We: Reconfiguring Community

Barbora Kleinhamplová and Tereza Stejskalová, Sleepers' Manifesto, 2014
On
Saturday, December 7 from 17-21h, Curators Anonymous organises its 4th meeting during
which we will identify action steps for creating solidarity and a crisis ethics
amongst arts and activist organizations. Speakers and participants will suggest
alternatives to classical curatorial and artistic performances that often go hand-in-hand
with individualism, a competitive ethos, (art) market-oriented actions and
unpaid labor in hierarchical and oppressive environments.
We
invite artists, curators and cultural workers to briefly introduce their own praxis
which center on relations rather than on production; focus
on the maintenance of (social) infrastructures which are usually kept out of
sight; and examine ways of doing which redefine the criteria of success. The
presentations will be followed by one-hour workshops divided into several
groups, during which the speakers will co-develop concrete steps and proposals
as how to transform modes of relationality and integrity.
The
event will pursuit CA’s aim to conceive and develop new models of social
infrastructure with the primary goal to engage them in democratic processes that reflect open societies and
differing values. We are interested in community and socially-engaged practices and the question of how art institutions could
learn from these. We hope to develop a long-term, sustainable discourse and structural
change in order to overcome the capitalist regime of visibility, success and
CV-based actions. In other words, we aim to take our responsibility seriously
by providing imaginative spaces for communities to develop social
infrastructure and collective transformation, rather than spaces functioning as
displays for passive spectatorship.
Speakers
Staci Bu Shea is a curator, writer, and lecturer when working. With a focus on how we relate with one another, Staci is concerned with practices and representations of social life across art, institutions, activism, and the everyday. Staci is curator at Casco Art Institute: Working for the Commons, an institute based in Utrecht, The Netherlands that studies, presents and situates art for the commons and of the commons, and has organized the exhibition program there together with the [extended] team since 2017. At Casco Art Institute, Staci leads/follows Poetics of Living, a long term “study line” co-initiated with Rizvana Bradley on non-normative ways of living together in consideration of rapidly changing discourses around sexuality, health, communal life, and death.
Tereza Stejskalová (Czech Republic) is a curator and a writer
working at Tranzit and
a lecturer of art theory at the Film Academy in Prague (FAMU). Her curatorial
projects are research-based and collaborative. In 2017 she organized a six-month long
seminar Feminist (Art) Institution at Tranzitdisplay, Prague with the code of
practice and the alliance of eleven institutions from the Czech Republic and
Slovakia around this code of practice as a result.
Grace Ndiritu’s (Kenya/UK) archive of over
forty 'hand-crafted' videos; experimental photography, Post-Hippie
Pop-Abstraction painting and shamanic performances have been widely
exhibited. In 2012 Ndiritu began creating a new body
of works under the title Healing The Museum. It came out of a
need to re-introduce non-rational methodologies such as shamanism to
re-activate the 'sacredness' of art spaces. Ndiritu believes that most modern
art institutions are out of sync with their audiences’ everyday experiences and
the widespread socio-economical and political changes that have taken place
globally in the recent decades, have further eroded the relationship between
museums and their audiences. Museums are dying. Ndiritu sees shamanism as a way
to re-activate the dying art space as a space for sharing, participation and
ethics.
llse Ghekiere, a performer, writer and activist. She studied dance at the Conservatory of Antwerp and art history at The Free University of Brussels. In 2017 she received a grant from the Flemish government to research sexism in the Belgian dance scene. Since the publication of her article "#Wetoo: What Dancers Talk About When They Talk About Sexism" in the fall of 2017, Ghekiere has continued to work with projects related to issues around abuse of power in the arts. She is also the initiator of ENGAGEMENT, an artist-led movement tackling sexual harassment, sexism and power abuse in the Belgian arts field. Ghekiere lives and works in Oslo and Brussels.




Curators Anonymous #5
Saturday 15 February 2020 in Ghent
You can find an overview of past events in our archive.