The Impossible Collection
Curator as Translator | Where have all the workers gone... When will we ever learn?
Workshop with Boris Buden and Stefan Nowotny
22-23 November, Wyspa Art Institute , PL
There is always trouble with a historic place. Even if we can eily identify with its auratic quality, we might be deeply disappointed by its narrative one: yes, it is great to be here, but why actually? Why is the shipyard in so important? Communism ended here. Yes, but what started here then? The workers won their freedom here. But where did they disappear thereafter? History happened here. Only to never happen again?
Every answer is automatically followed by another question. The reon is obvious: there is no mter narrative to forever fix the meaning of a historical event. Neither is there a subject of history to make experience of it. What we have instead is cultural memory. It never recalls the event in its alleged original meaning, but rather through different forms of its cultural articulation, in short, through its cultural translations: the culture of everyday life, cultural effects on gender formation, literary and visual culture, etc. This is where this atmosphere of uncanniness evoked by historical places comes from. They are familiar, yet strange because we always perceive them in a (cultural) translation of what imbues them with the actual meaning, namely the original event.
The workshop will deal with this trouble in the form of short presentations and a discussion.
Participants
Participants: Dorothee Bienert, Boris Buden, Galit Eilat, Stefan Nowotny, Livia Paldi, Els Roeland, Alina Serban, Simon Sheikh, Aneta Szylak, Antje Weitzel, Louisa Ziaja
A few reading suggestions
Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture, London, New York: Routledge, 1994. Introduction: Locations of culture 1-19. Boris Buden, “Cultural Translation: Why it is important and where to start with it?” http://translate.eipcp.net/transversal/0606/buden/en
Stefan Nowotny, “The Stakes of Translation” http://translate.eipcp.net/transversal/0606/nowotny/en Charity Scribner, Requiem for Communism, Cambridge Ma, London: MIT Press, 2003. Introduction:The Second World, 2-23.
Performance by Elzbieta JabłonskaThe performance by Elzbieta Jabłonska will take
place within her own installation “Kitchen”, from 2003, reconstructed
at Wyspa Institute of Art at the request of the “Translate: The
Impossible Collection” event. This well-known and thoroughly discussed
work is an oversized random kitchen in which both the artist and the
audience can barely reach the top of the cupboard. It has usually been
presented to date within the feminist framework. Here it appears in a
new dimension, as a voice in the discussion about the status of an
artwork, its materiality, issues of collecting and displaying a piece
as well as the artistic escapes from this framework. This performance
allows a new interpretation and recontextualization of artistic
intentions and the very piece itself. Curator: Maks Bochenek
Wyspa Institute of Art, 23.11.2007, 6p
for further reading: http://www.modelator.blogspot.com/
Mobile Archive
MOBILE ARCHIVE is
a project which arose at the Israeli Center for Digital Art in Holon.
The archive contains more than 1,200 titles, including works by Israeli
and international artists who have exhibited at the Center and works by
artists who have contributed works over the years.
Archive’s aim is
to present contemporary artistic practice. The video archive focuses on
the presentation of local and regional (Near East) works, the exchange
of information and knowledge, and the promotion of Israeli artists
abroad.
The idea of the Mobile Archive surfaced during several
conversations on the idea of bringing the archive to the Kunstverein in
Hamburg and how it could function there out of its original context.
The question was how to make the archive dynamic and valuable to the
local audiences at both ends.
From Hamburg, the Mobile Archive moves
to Wyspa and then to other art institutes that will also contribute
work to the original collection. The mobile archive will travel for
three years in European, Balkan and Middle Eastern countries, before it
returns to Holon.
In Wyspa Institute of Art, the collection will be
enlarged by video works made by Polish artists. To make the viewing
much more comfortable, it will be possible to sit and watch the chosen
works. it is presented in Gdansk as a part of “The Impossible
Collection” The archive touches upon the issues of accumulation, status
and distribution of artwork though the archival forms that differ from
that of the collection idea.
Curator of Polish contributors and coordinator: Ola Grzonkowska
On view: 23rd November –15th December 2007
|
