EVEN ANGRIER & KINDER: Three Tables for Testing Art & Political Action
Saturday 24 March, 15h - 18h
Beursschouwburg, Brussels
FREE EVENT - limited places / booking essential!
tickets@beursschouwburg.be
One year after 'SPIN Night #1: ANGRIER & KINDER', this fifth event in the SPIN series puts the emphasis on the urgency of art. Last time SPIN Night #1 delved into strategies and problems of combining artistic and political voice - and now for this new event artists Kate McIntosh, Anna Rispoli and Nicolas Y Galeazzi propose an altogether different format of discussion that confronts art and political action.
On a Saturday afternoon, participants are invited to bring their chairs to the table and join the argument. Three challenging artworks that engage with social-political action in differing ways are presented as flash-points to focus the structured group discussions that follow. At three moderated discussion tables the participants and artists are invited to articulate, test, and exchange key questions that arise from their own practices, and that might open new scenarios.
How does one choose the case to defend, and the scale of the action?
Do artists use their skills to support political movements?
What kinds of concrete activation do they expect from their work?
What strategies may be effective today?
The invited artists presenting at 'EVEN ANGRIER & KINDER' are:
Jeanne van Heeswijk (NL): www.jeanneworks.net
WochenKlausur (AT): www.wochenklausur.at
Heath Bunting (UK): www.irational.org
BAVO (BE/NL): www.bavo.biz
FREE EVENT - limited places / booking essential!
tickets@beursschouwburg.be
More information about the event will be emailed to booked participants….
SPIN proposes this afternoon as the fifth in a series of events to encourage critical discussions around different urgent questions within art practice today.
JEANNE van HEESWIJK (Netherlands)
Since 1993 Jeanne van Heeswijk has been working on socially committed art projects that take place in the public spaces. She sees herself as a mediator, an intermediary between a situation, a space, a neighbourhood and the people connected to these. Acting, meeting and communicating are the key concepts in her method of working. She generates “interspaces”, contexts and crossovers within which new relations and connections can be established between groups of people, institutions and conceptual frameworks that are always different. She herself has coined the term “urban curating” for her interventions. In the sedate Dutch art world in which all taboos appear to have been broken her work – uniquely – arouses fierce controversy. Often, this is linked to the question of whether her interventions belong to the realm of art and how she stretches and shapes her art practice / artistic strategy and positions her seemingly idealistic approach in an era which considers itself liberated from both ideology and idealism.
(Excerpt from a text by curator Mirjam Westen in 2003)
Links: www.jeanneworks.net
WOCHENKLAUSUR (Austria)
Since 1993 and on invitation from different art institutions, the artist group WochenKlausur develops concrete proposals aimed at small, but nevertheless effective improvements to socio-political deficiencies. Proceeding even further and invariably translating these proposals into action, artistic creativity is no longer seen as a formal act but as an intervention into society.
Links: www.wochenklausur.at
HEATH BUNTING
Heath Bunting was born a Buddhist in Wood Green, London, UK and is able to make himself laugh (currently, reduced to only smile). He is a co-founder of both net.art and sport-art movements and is banned for life from entering the USA for his anti genetic work. His self taught and authentically independent work is direct and uncomplicated and has never been awarded a prize. He is both Britain's most important practising artist and The World's most famous computer artist. He aspires to be a skillful member of the public and is producing an expert system for identity mutation. At 01:42 on 31/12/2011 at his home in Bristol, he invented web 3.0 and is offering it for sale for 100 million dollars. Links: www.irational.org BAVO BAVO is an independent research and activism office focused on the political dimension of art, architecture and planning. The office is headed by architect-philosophers Gideon Boie (Bruges, 1975) and Matthias Pauwels (Bruges, 1975), was founded in 2002 and is based in Rotterdam, Brussels and Pretoria.
Gideon Boie and Matthias Pauwels both studied architecture (Sint Lucas Gent) and philosophy (Erasmus University Rotterdam). Both conducted for some years research at the Theory Department of the Jan van Eyck Academy in Maastricht. BAVO has done research on a wide array of issues such as the status of the cultural avant-garde today, neo-liberal urban politics, creative city development, embedded cultural activism and the unresolved borders of Europe. It has enhanced debate about these issues by means of publications, symposia, interventions and actions.
Links: www.bavo.biz
Anna Rispoli
Anna Rispoli is an Italian artist, currently based in Brussels.
The relationship between humans and urbis being a central narrative in her work, she tests citizens’ possible appropriations of the public space via participatory practices, architectural performances and urban installations.
Her recent projects in Mülheim an der Ruhr, Riga, Brussels and Hannover use the city plans of urban revitalisation as a fictional backdrops to set contemporary naumachie, domestic light show, ephemeral monuments and watchtowers on the current state of utopia.
She is part of the Italian collective ZimmerFrei.
Links:
www.wiels.org/site2/page.php?node_id=107&lng=fr
NICOLAS Y GALEAZZI (Switzerland / Belgium)
Nicolas Y Galeazzi uses performance as an act of research. His work focuses on developing and questioning social discourses through artistic research projects and is articulated in various concepts, installations, performances and printed matter.
Originally trained as a theatre director at the Hochschule für Musik und Theater Zurich (CH), he worked as actor, director, set designer, and musician in theatre context. This crossover provoked the need to search for a redistribution of the responsibilities for the artistic outcome and to develop new models for collaboration and dissemination of art. Galeazzi sets up performative research frameworks where audience can experiment with political and social conditions. Galeazzi calls such events Mise-en-Discourse.
In collaboration with several artist collectives, such as GASTSTUBE° performance or the Berlin n@work EMANUELLE, he devised several long term performance projects in international contexts.
After ten years of practical engagement in art, he investigated the theoretical side of his practice in the MA Contemporary Art Practices and Dissemination at Dartington College of Arts (UK).
Currently he develops together with Joël Verwimp the COYOTL Yournal under VerlegtVerlag - a dispersed journal in a non-negotiated space for printed Performance.
He is mentor and member of the artistic board at the artistic research environment [a.pass] Advanced Performance and Scenography Studies in Antwerp and at the MA-SODA (Master for Solo dance authorship) Berlin. In this frames he is developing several series of workshops and conferences on artistic research, methods of collaboration and the re-appropriation of economy.
Links: www.jardinsgazeux.de