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.