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circular economy engaging publics

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self-sustained environments

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https://www.e-flux.com/journal/116/378689/situating-the-curatorial/

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1. An Image of a Stone

An artist goes for a hike in the hills on the outskirts of Beijing. She is searching through the lush forest for a stone that bears no visible trace of human manipulation, and stumbles across a sizeable rock with an intriguing shape. It appears untouched by Homo sapiens, and she brings the rock back to her studio in Shanghai, a journey of 1,400 kilometers. As the stone is neither small nor smooth, the journey becomes a complicated and cumbersome project. Once in the studio, the rock becomes the model, or motif, for a 1:1-scale black-and-white picture. It sits at the center of a naturalistic depiction, covering most of the picture plane. As a lithograph, Refined Still Life #1 becomes a visual echo or afterimage of the artist Yu Ji's endeavor.

Why am I so fascinated by Yu Ji's work? I am not usually attracted to artworks like this. And yet my fascination is definitely connected to the simple effect of being drawn to something that I did not expect. The work has haunted me since I saw it in the artist's studio in 2016. Shortly afterwards, I invited her to exhibit the lithograph as part of the 11th Gwangju Biennale, but the work still continued to pose unexpected questions. In 2018, I returned to the work, exhibiting it in the group exhibition "Soon Enough: Art in Action" at Tensta Konsthall, after having written a column about it for Art Review. My curiosity was triggered not only by the artist's openness to allowing the unexpected and mundane to become part of the work. I was also drawn to her presumably boring and unnecessarily laborious act of transporting a perfectly ordinary rock-after all, most of earth's stones are untouched by human beings-over a great distance, which nonetheless testifies to an interest in the land and its properties and faculties. Somehow this resonates with art as a form of understanding that goes alongside politics, science, and religion, even encompassing such other forms of understanding while carrying a unique potential to also go against them.

Then there is the creation of the material artwork: it is complex without involving high production values (lithography being an old technique for reproducing images by drawing on the flat surface of limestone). The peculiar repetition of the object depicted and the picture itself is also captivating-an image of a stone without any trace of human hands, made precisely by human hands and the very same stone. Such tautologies can be gimmicky and nostalgic, but here the return to an old-fashioned technique arises from the work asking for it, rather than from melancholic attachment (such as in the frequent fetishization of celluloid film and slides by artists in the 1990s). The demand in turn has to do with something foundational in reproducing an image that is obviously not only pre-digital, but pre-electrical.

Every time I hear the argument in politically engaged art circles that art-making as we know it-whether discrete art objects, research-based work, or more performative practices-cannot continue under the conditions imposed by the politics of hard-line right-wing governments, I am reminded of Refined Still Life #1, because I disagree: now is the time to intensify our focus upon art as it has been practiced, in all its variety-perhaps with new distinctions. What was instructive about Yu Ji's work is connected to its combination of simplicity and something extremely laborious that points to the very ground on which we stand. The work was not meant to be majestic-quite the contrary-and yet in my eyes it is grand precisely because of its modesty. Such distinctions should warn us against focusing on a single privileged form of art or art-making aligned to the good political taste of the connoisseur. Rather, distinctions should be based on complexity, relevance, and urgency, often situationally so. We need to distinguish inquiry from gesture, pertinence from entertainment, uniqueness from routine. We need to ask what the artwork does, and test it with changing "wheres," "whens" and "hows." This amounts to various definitions of "quality" that need to be continuously debated. And simultaneously-and importantly-we need to make time for civic engagement, whether through art or not. Many of us are able to make the crucial decision about how we prioritize time.

In this context, the self-determination of the artist is not to be disregarded. Following through with counterintuitive thoughts is indispensable here-to believe in the spark of an idea, or even a shard of a vision, which at the stage of the making of the work is often unintelligible to others, yet this spark can be trusted. The challenge today-and for some time-has been to avoid becoming ensnared in political panic, and to avoid dropping everything because of it. In his 2017 exhibition "You Don't Have to Understand Everything" at Tensta Konsthall, artist Naeem Mohaiemen addressed the security panic in post-9/11 US, and how that triggered his interest in the 1970s as another period of security panic that overlapped with novel models of life and society. Faced with authoritarian, nationalist, and fascist forces, we need new beginnings, and new beginnings typically abound in places of uncertainty and fear.

This is also where relevant art, such as Yu Ji's lithograph, tends to arise. Awkward and hard to grasp, and yet insistent, it is about the possibility of seeing and doing things otherwise, and continuing to doing so. The kind of artistic intelligence at play in selecting, among innumerous untouched natural objects, a particular one that carries traces from millions of years ago, is about being proactive and procreative rather than reactive. It demands another kind of art-one that already exists, but tends to be marginalized, even among those with whom it shares many interests and concerns. At its best, art cultivates the counterintuitive, manifesting the notion that everything can be different-through means that we did not expect, have not yet imagined, or maybe even forgot existed. Just starting down this path means cultivating this already existing, yet marginalized, form of intuition.

2. The Curatorial

More than ten years ago I started to think in terms of "the curatorial." At the core of "the curatorial" lie connections-between artworks and other material, the space, the specific time of presentation. Colleagues and peers were interested in similar ideas: discussing the emergence of the field of curating, Beatrice von Bismarck has emphasized the "constellational mode" of "the curatorial," i.e., the dynamic field of constellations in which are embedded various activities having to do with making art public. Irit Rogoff has talked about curated projects as "events of knowledge," settings where different kinds of knowledge come together and something new is tested. Curated events contain epistemological processes and are presentational rather than representational, a distinction that Rogoff credits to the visitors to an exhibition. This is how I formulated it around the same time:

For me the term "curating" is used as the technical modality of making art go public. It is a craft that can be involved in much more than making exhibitions-beyond the walls of an institution as well as beyond what are traditionally called programming and education. This is "curating in the expanded field." The curatorial is understood as a multidimensional role that includes critique, editing, education, fundraising, etc. But even more importantly, the curatorial goes beyond "roles" and takes the shape of a function and a method, even a methodology.

Understood in this way "the curatorial" can be compared with Chantal Mouffe's notion of "the political." Searching for a more appropriate model of democracy than the prevalent representative forms-which are now being severely challenged in many parts of the world-Mouffe outlines a version in which opposition is crucial and consensus, with its tendency to minimize disagreement and dissensus, is the problem. Mouffe argues for "the political" as an ever-present potential that cannot be precisely located, but which grows out of the antagonism between friend and enemy. "The political" is the aspect of life that is connected to disagreement and dissent, and is therefore the antithesis of consensus. For Mouffe, "politics"-as opposed to the political-is the formal side of practices that reproduce social and structural orders. With this in mind, the politics/political distinction can be mapped onto the curating/curatorial distinction, with curating-as opposed to the curatorial-as a technical modality we know from art institutions and independent projects. "The curatorial," on the other hand, would be a more distributed presence aimed at creating friction and pushing new ideas through signification processes and relationships between objects, people, places, ideas, and so forth. "The curatorial" does not stop at the status quo.

3. Fuel to the Fire

Natascha Sadr Haghighian's installation Fuel to the Fire at Tensta Konsthall in 2016 can be seen as an example of the curatorial: it raised topical issues like the militarization of the police, images as testimonies, and institutionalized racism and violence. The patio heaters and fleece blankets usually associated with outdoor seating were used in Sadr Haghighian's work as markers of enclosure or exclusion. In one area the blankets carried screen-printed images of incidents of police violence that provoked significant protests. The installation also included parts of a balcony from a Swedish Million Program housing unit from around 1970, a sound piece with leaking headphones, and newspaper clippings echoing media stereotypes and alternative narratives. A newly produced Fuel to the Fire newspaper published material on the history of SWAT police and the role of eyewitness video in creating a crisis of legitimacy for the police. The free newspaper also included interviews with activist Hamid Khan, cultural geographer Irene Molina, and journalist Somar Al Naher, among others, and could be taken home as study material.

Fuel to the Fire was prompted by the fatal shooting of Lenine Relvas-Martins, a sixty-nine-year-old resident of the Stockholm suburb of Husby, near Tensta, on the night of May 13, 2013, by Piketen police-a Swedish SWAT team-in his own apartment. Neighbors were present and witnessed a crucial moment in which Lenine's dead body was carried out in a body bag, covered by a red fleece blanket adorned with a heart. The police claimed in their report that Lenine was injured during the incident and taken to a hospital. However, images taken by neighbors and freelance journalist Björn Lockström proved that they tried to cover up Lenine's death, and the police were forced to "correct" their report. The incident caused protests in Husby and resulted in a significant uprising in many major cities in Sweden. Nobody was held responsible for the fatal shooting, nor was it discussed in mainstream print media in the immediate aftermath of the incident. Instead, the media reported mainly on car fires and youth violence, furthering a stigmatized image of the northern suburbs of Stockholm.

Fuel to the Fire traced the Piketen police back to its beginnings in American SWAT teams. Standing for "Special Weapons and Tactics," SWAT was founded in Los Angeles in the late 1960s after the 1965 Watts riots and was first used during a raid against the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense. The story of the emergence of SWAT teams proves the intimate relation between police militarization, social segregation, and institutional racism. It also exemplifies how these developments have reached a global scale, with SWAT teams spreading literally across the planet since their origin in Los Angeles, including to a place as seemingly peaceful as Sweden.

After an open invitation in 2011, Sadr Haghighian began making intensive research visits to Tensta and other parts of Stockholm in 2014, meeting with both individuals and groups who all contributed to the shaping of Fuel to the Fire's narrative. Participants in Nyhetsbyrån (The news agency), Tensta Konsthall's long-term initiative for young people interested in developing storytelling skills through text, audio, or other artistic practices, followed the process. In autumn 2016, Nyhetsbyrån produced its own newspaper that took the exhibition as a starting point. Over the course of the exhibition and as part of Nyhetsbyrån's public program, Leandro Schlarek Mulinari, a PhD student in criminology at Stockholm University, formed an open reading group addressing issues like scare tactics, the police's own reporting, and how the suburbs are described by the media. Additionally, a film program and symposium further unpacked the themes and questions raised in Fuel to the Fire.

Fuel to the Fire can be described as an installation version of an agitprop work from the 1920s-clear, forceful, and taking a position, and even incorporating the characteristically bold red, white, and black palette of the Russian avant-garde. It caused debate both on social media and in the mainstream media, with some considering it polarizing or criticizing it for not allowing the perspective of the police to enter the discussion. This is a valid point: the artist consciously chose not to include this perspective since it has been given so much space in other contexts. And, of course, an artwork does not have to be "balanced."

The curatorial precisely attempts to inhabit this lack of balance and struggles to expand and amplify it, in contrast to "curating," which usually seeks to rebalance the work or otherwise hasten the return of equilibrium. When curating engages with the world outside the traditional boundaries of art and its institutions, it often assumes that this sphere is not only separate from the sphere of art but should also be left as is. Any work of art, project, exhibition, or programming at an art institution is then placed in service of that aim. The curatorial, by contrast, assumes that the world outside the institution, as well as the institution itself, is always already unbalanced, and for this reason, it does not shy away from tension and divergence. Condensed into the lithograph of the stone by Yu Ji, it is the relative deficiency of artistic routine and common sense that constitutes the curatorial.

4. Tensta Konsthall

Trying to situate the curatorial in the context of Tensta Konsthall, as its director from 2011 to 2018, meant emphasizing the mediation between artworks and people, driven by a sense that much of what a given artwork has to offer is rarely tapped into sufficiently. As a private foundation founded in 1998 by a locally based artist and his peers, the mission of the Konsthall-which applies for and receives support from the municipality, the national arts council, and the region-is to simultaneously work with contemporary art and to have a local presence in its Stockholm suburb of Tensta. Today, 90 percent of the twenty-thousand or so people living in Tensta have a translocal background. While more than one hundred languages are spoken in the area, many people come from East Africa and the Middle East. The population has a lower overall income than the national average, as well as higher unemployment rates, similar to other suburbs in Sweden's capital-one of the most segregated cities in Europe. More than an exception, Tensta can be seen as the new normal, pointing to the future.

Certain artworks already take mediation and untapped potential as their point of departure, such as Ahmet Ögüt's educational platform The Silent University. Founded in collaboration with Delfina, The Showroom, and the Tate Modern in 2012, The Silent University took the form of a language café at Tensta Konsthall in 2013, where people without legal papers could practice their language skills. In this way, the work activated the "silenced knowledge" of migrant populations, who are sometimes highly educated in their countries of origin but given little academic opportunity in their new home. The Silent University has taken different forms in the different places it has manifested. In Bremen, Paris, Athens, Amman, and elsewhere, lectures, seminars, and workshops were held for people whose legal status otherwise prevents them from using their academic credentials. Fahyma Alnablsi, who was trained as a teacher in Damascus but couldn't get a job as one in Sweden, was the receptionist at Tensta Konsthall and led the language café there, assisted by a handful of volunteers. Initially, the language café met once a week, but then began meeting twice a week, with monthly excursions to other parts of the segregated city of Stockholm.

The Silent University started at Tensta Konsthall as a part of the 2013 exhibition "Tensta Museum: Reports from New Sweden," which looked at history and memory in Tensta through the people there and the location itself. Works by around forty artists, architects, researchers, local associations, and musicians ranged from nineteenth-century watercolors of rooms rented by a single woman who was a member of the precariat living in Södermalm-socially similar in that period to Tensta today-to commissions by artists such as Petra Bauer and Peter Geschwind, archival material from the Kurdish Association, and a soundtrack by the hip-hop star Adam Tensta. Two Tensta Museum branches in the middle of the city, at the Stockholm City Museum and the Museum of Medieval Stockholm, emphasized the institutional play between a suburb often thought of as a ghetto and the fragile private foundation of the Konsthall and the established municipal museums in the primarily white and wealthy city center.

Through the adventure called "Tensta Museum," which also looked at Tensta as an example of a "new Sweden" that is different from the internationally recognized image of the country as a generous welfare state with a blond and blue-eyed population-the reality of which has changed significantly over the last thirty years-the team at Tensta Konsthall got to know many new people and organizations. One of them-a local Swedish language school run by the municipality-asked if they could hold their classes at the art center. A setup then emerged that functioned as a classroom, which in turn led to other groups, such as a homework assistance group, local city administrators who hold team meetings, and a Save the Children parents forum, holding meetings and activities in the space.

After that, "Tensta Museum" developed into a continuing program, through which a fragile organization run more or less as a project with insecure funding could pretend to have the stability and continuity of a museum. There were commissions from artists such as Laura Oldfield Ford, Ylva Westerlund, and Mats Adelman, and presentations of works by Jakob Kolding, Halil Altindere, and Lawrence Abu Hamdan, as well as original drawings by Tensta's planning architect, Igor Dergalin. This self-institutionalization generated the Nyhetsbyrån initiative (which became part of Sadr Haghighian's Fuel to the Fire) as a course for eighteen-to-twenty-five-year-olds to use journalism, art, and design to tell different stories about places in the city similar to Tensta. As a collaboration between the department of media studies at Stockholm University, the illustration department at Konstfack University College of Arts, Craft, and Design, and Tensta Konsthall, the course drew from all three fields and connected directly to Tensta Konsthall's exhibitions. Interestingly, it turned into a springboard for young people writing for the local newspaper or well-known blogs, producing TV programs, and even publishing their poetry.

5. Contact Zones

Known in different parts of the world as "education," "learning," and "programming," mediation in the context of my time at Tensta Konsthall was based on finding and establishing contact surfaces and shared concerns between artworks, artists, other cultural producers, and individuals as well as groups and organizations. Mediation does not aim at unanimity but rather underlines inquiry, debate, and unexplored possibilities. Instead of thinking in terms of "communities," we thought in terms of "contact zones," a notion developed by anthropologists Mary Louise Pratt and James Clifford, to emphasize transversality between various groups rather than coherence within them.

Pratt uses the term "contact zone" to describe social spaces where various cultures collide and try to deal with each other, often through asymmetrical power relations arising from colonial history, slavery, and their repercussions. Pratt also employs the term to reconsider the prevalent models of community in academic and social work. Seen as a contact zone, Tensta Konsthall sometimes included a certain amount of "auto-ethnographic" material-texts, images, and other documents in which participants describe themselves. This material also dealt with the representations that others make of the participants, as well as with material produced by people who do not live and work in Tensta. This form of "transculturation" whereby subordinate groups engage with material from a dominant group aims to replace reductive concepts of assimilation commonly used in colonial cultures. While some projects within this frame at Tensta Konsthall testified to the fact that subordinate groups cannot usually control what comes out of the dominant culture, it remains possible-and normal-to determine what gets absorbed and how.

James Clifford describes contact zones as "places of hybrid possibility and political negotiation, sites of exclusion and struggle." He uses the notion when discussing the work of North American tribal museums and minority cultural centers. Developing the vocabulary further, he talks about "contact perspectives" and describes the relations prevalent in contact zones as "contact relations" that make possible new collaborations and alliances. The work carried out there is "contact work." Like Pratt, Clifford emphasizes these zones as conflictual rather than consensual, with both negative and positive historical possibilities that need to be confronted. At Tensta Konsthall it seemed particularly relevant to bring such "contact phenomena" into discussions where different agendas and different views on coercion, exploitation, and ethnocentrism could share the same project and generate reflection and critique.

Placing art as the heart and brain of Tensta Konsthall meant showing both art exhibitions and other kinds of curated projects, which both were and were not related to the local area. An example of a classical, more straightforward art exhibition held at Tensta Konsthall was the 2013 solo show by Iman Issa, which featured abstract works about memory and the human ability to form associations. Using photography, text, sculpture, video, and audio, she presented fragments from everyday experience-a trip to the zoo, a day at school, a family vacation-that were described with barely any adjectives, names, or other details. Issa's process was to first strip down the description of a moment so that only the most common elements remained, and then to rethink and create anew the moment, inspecting the space that emerged. In this way, she reflected on how individual experience is linked to collective experience. Included in the show were several works that excerpted from the autobiographies of Arab intellectuals such as Nawal El Saadawi and Edward Said. In one interesting example of curatorial mediation, the Konsthall team took these autobiographies as a starting point to create a series of introductions to the show in Arabic, which were then sent to two women's centers in the Tensta neighborhood.

Remaining art-centric is essential, as is trying to find and develop contact zones with artworks, artists, groups, and individuals beyond a specific locale. At Tensta Konsthall, this entailed consciously aligning activities at the center with education curricula, in the shape of seminars, workshops, and lectures. One example was the seminars offered in collaboration with the Stockholm School of Economics, as part of Goldin+Senneby's dispersed retrospective "Standard Length of a Miracle" in 2016. Later that same year, as part of Marion von Osten's "Viet Nam Discourse Stockholm," a whole course in choreography was held at the Konsthall. Thanks to a collaboration with a number of universities across Sweden, a class entitled "Migration Course: On the Politics and Practices of Migration" also drew together professors and researchers specializing in migration to give onsite lectures and seminars in Tensta. All of this forms part of the contact and conflict zones, which in and of themselves constitute public, or semi-public, space.

6. The Eros Effect

Every so often, I play devil's advocate with myself, borrowing some of the arguments formulated by Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams in their 2015 book Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work. They warn against the danger of being content with the local and with the "prefigurative politics" they describe as a desire to realize a future world right away, as much art today exemplifies. Srnicek and Williams argue that privileging temporal, spatial, and conceptual immediacy leads to "folk politics"-"a collective and historically constructed political common sense that has become out of joint with the actual mechanisms of power." For Srnicek and Williams, the automatic praise of immediacy as authenticity is extremely dangerous. Fleeting practices are favored over systematic and structural work, tactics over strategy, and the past over the future. Small-scale projects and transparency occupy us with patching up little wounds rather than, as the authors write, "building counter-hegemony."

I agree: localism can certainly distract from larger concerns, and folk-political action can easily give the instant gratification of "having done something." The "independent blips of resistance" can be pacifying. Importantly, Srnicek and Williams bring up the long-term strategy of the ordoliberals in post-WWII Europe, who managed to create a neoliberal utopia based on a new political common sense through private elite organizations like the Mont Pelerin Society targeting "second-hand dealers"-journalists, academics, teachers, and the like. They managed to defeat Keynesianism and replace the law-based legitimacy of democracy with the efficiency-based legitimacy of a well-functioning economy. The impossible became the inevitable. In the face of this, the authors advocate cultivating some of the core concerns of left modernity-an image of historical progress, a universalist horizon, and a commitment to emancipation.

Let's return for a moment to the context of Sadr Haghighian's Fuel to the Fire. It was part of an ongoing series at Tensta Konsthall entitled "The Eros Effect: Art, Solidarity Movements, and the Struggle for Social Justice," a multiyear inquiry into the relationship between art and solidarity movements, which after 2015 unfolded through a series of commissions, exhibitions, workshops, presentations, and film screenings. Inspired by the many research-based projects by artists on emancipatory postcolonial struggles and liberation movements during the 1960s and '70s, and faced with fascist parties gaining ground in Europe and an increasingly tough social climate, it seemed important to return to the notion of solidarity in order to test its validity today. Will solidarity still be relevant in the future, or is it a historical concept? Is it necessary to find new ways to describe the political movements of today and their struggles, sympathies, and commitments? What does recognizing the urgency of a situation imply, and how do we act upon it?

The entirety of "Eros Effect" borrowed ideas from a 1989 essay of the same name by the researcher and activist George Katsiaficas, which argues that the emotional dimensions of social movements are just as important as their political dimensions. The concept of the "eros effect" turns away from earlier theories that considered "mass movements" as either primitive, impulsive emotional outbursts, or as exclusively rational efforts to change social norms and institutions. Katsiaficas instead suggests that social movements have always been both, and that the struggle for liberation is equally an erotic act and a rational desire to break free from structural and psychological barriers. Franz Fanon made similar observations when he stated that resistance to colonialism has positive effects on the emotional life of individuals.

To stay with a question and develop themes over time has proven a rewarding methodology that is not unlike a strategy. It has facilitated being internationally connected and locally embedded at the same time, combining theory and practice, history and current affairs, present and future scenarios. It has meant shifting from micro to macro without necessarily being scalable. Maintaining an active interest in abstraction can be advantageous in this; while it might not be human scale, it is nevertheless small scale, not unlike Yu Ji's rock functioning as a prism moving from a geological fragment to the volcanic beginnings of the earth, from the here-and-now to prehuman history. Here, proximity is more critical than immediacy. Moving slowly but steadily is possibly more rewarding for art in the long run, and for the people who engage with it. We are individuals and groups who make up a kind of constituency, in the middle of something that could be called "the curatorial." Maybe these are, in fact, modest and searching moves towards building a counterhegemony-an art-centric one.

×

This text is based on a paper presented at e-flux in 2017 in response to the premise "current political circumstances have made us think again about what it means to share knowledge in a clear and direct style."

Maria Lind is a curator, writer and educator from Stockholm. She is currently serving as the counselor of culture at the Embassy of Sweden, Moscow. She was the director of Stockholm's Tensta Konsthall 2011-18, the artistic director of the 11th Gwangju Biennale, the director of the graduate program, Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College (2008-2010) and director of Iaspis in Stockholm (2005-2007). From 2002-2004 she was the director of Kunstverein München and in 1998, co-curator of Europe's itinerant biennial, Manifesta 2 in Luxembourg. In 2015 she curated Future Light for the first Vienna Biennial, and in 2019 she co-curated the Art Encounters Biennial in Timisoara. She has taught widely since the early
1990s, including as professor of artistic research at the Art Academy in Oslo 2015-18. Currently, Lind is a lecturer at Konstfack's CuratorLab. She has contributed widely to newspapers, magazines, catalogs and other publications. She is the 2009 recipient of the Walter Hopps Award for Curatorial Achievement. In 2010 Selected Maria Lind Writing was published by Sternberg Press, and Seven Years: The Rematerialization Art from 2011 to 2017 appeared in the fall of 2019.

© 2021 e-flux and the author

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An artist goes for a hike in the hills on the outskirts of Beijing. She is searching through the lush forest for a stone that bears no visible trace of human manipulation, and stumbles across a sizeable rock with an intriguing shape.

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Theaster Gates’s Dorchester Projects in Chicago

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Theaster Gates’s Dorchester Projects in Chicago

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https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0096144214563507

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This year's Man Burn was live-streamed so Burners across the globe could enjoy and feel a sense of connection. Check out this recap of the Burn and enjoy the performances from Fire Conclave groups around the world.
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# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
This year's Man Burn was live-streamed so Burners across the globe could enjoy and feel a sense of connection. Check out this recap of the Burn and enjoy the performances from Fire Conclave groups around the world. LEARN MORE Communities are not produced by sentiment or mere goodwill.

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How Is the Curatorial Changing? Expanded Practices In and Beyond the Exhibition

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How Is the Curatorial Changing? Expanded Practices In and Beyond the Exhibition

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draft question:
How and why to engage publics with collective and artist-run initiatives in curatorial?
Collectivity in curatorial? Why to bring people together?

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lumbung 'rice barn'

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no hierarchy between members

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An artist can aspire to a certain sovereignty, which today implies that in addition to producing art, one also has to produce the conditions that enable such production, its channels of circulation. Sometimes the production of these conditions can become so critical to the production of work that it assumes the shape of the work itself. This should not be confused with the job curators have and the work they do. As an artist, I would not attempt to propose a solution for curators; they themselves need to come up with ways of thinking and working that do not undercut the sovereignty of artists.

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Museums must evolve or they will not exist: the existing model of the institution as one of the pillars of European enlightenment must be questioned and its discontents revealed. Museums must be humble, self-critical and open to the polyphony of voices from outside their walls. People should be able to use institutions as spaces in which to say anything and do anything.

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counter educational formats/artist run initiatives

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future of curatorial - collectives?

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https://www.e-flux.com/journal/16/61285/art-without-artists/

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It is clear that curatorial practice today goes well beyond mounting art exhibitions and caring for works of art. Curators do a lot more: they administer the experience of art by selecting what is made visible, contextualize and frame the production of artists, and oversee the distribution of production funds, fees, and prizes that artists compete for. Curators also court collectors, sponsors, and museum trustees, entertain corporate executives, and collaborate with the press, politicians, and government bureaucrats; in other words, they act as intermediaries between producers of art and the power structure of our society.

A press release for a recent conference on curatorial practice (at which I originally presented this paper) portrayed the figure of the curator as a knowledgeable and transparent agent moving between cultures and disciplines-a cultural producer par excellence. Furthermore, it seemed to suggest that art has become a subgenre of "the Curatorial":

The conference "Cultures of the Curatorial" aims at positioning the Curatorial-a practice which goes decisively beyond the making of exhibitions-within a transdisciplinary and transcultural context and exploring it as a genuine method of generating, mediating and reflecting experience and knowledge. . . . Between art and science forms of practice, techniques, formats and aesthetics have emerged which can be subsumed under the notion of the "Curatorial"-not dissimilar to the functions of the concepts of the filmic or the literary.

The necessity of going "beyond the making of exhibitions" should not become a justification for the work of curators to supersede the work of artists, nor a reinforcement of authorial claims that render artists and artworks merely actors and props for illustrating curatorial concepts. Movement in such a direction runs a serious risk of diminishing the space of art by undermining the agency of its producers: artists.

1. Overreaching

Curatorial practice is predicated upon the existence of artistic production and has a supporting role in its activity. While artists may well produce art in the absence of curators, if no art is being produced, curators of contemporary art, at least, are out of a job. For this reason, attempts to curatorially "produce" art and artists by the simple expedient of including them in a show often result in little more than a curatorial embarrassment, as in the famous case of Roger Buergel's inclusion of celebrity chef Ferran Adrià in the last Documenta.], who, in my view, conceives of the political space as something merely festive and communal." Jennifer Allen, "MACBA Director Takes On Culture and Cooking," Artforum, → (accessed April 25, 2010).] While Adrià may indeed be a genius as a chef, his talent does not automatically turn his cooking into a new form of art, and neither did Buergel's framing of it. As Buergel said shortly before the opening of the show:

I have invited Ferran Adrià because he has succeeded in generating his own aesthetic which has become something very influential within the international scene. This is what I am interested in and not whether people consider it to be art or not. It is important to say that artistic intelligence doesn't manifest itself in a particular medium, that art doesn't have to be identified simply with photography, sculpture and painting etc., or with cooking in general; however, under certain conditions, it can become art.

All true up to a point, but what is that point? What are these "certain circumstances" that Buergel alludes to, under which cooking can come to be considered art? Part of the reason why the transformation of cooking into art did not take place at Documenta is that Adrià's cooking was not already anchored in the stream of commodities and careers constituted by the art system; in this regard it is interesting to note in comparison that Rirkrit Tiravanija cooks and is still recognized as an artist, though in reality he is only an average cook. The extraordinary aspect of his cooking is not its quality as cooking, but rather its presentation by Tiravanija himself as an artist who cooks. It is important to distinguish between the artistic decision to include an activity within an artwork and the curatorial power to designate something as art or like art through its inclusion in an exhibition.

Another example of how curatorial power can be distinguished from artistic authorship by its legislative authority over what takes place within the space of art could be seen in the last São Paulo Biennial. Whereas, in a kind of grand authorial gesture meant as a comment on the crisis of biennials, the curators first announced that the entire biennial would be devoid of art, the concept later changed, presumably when this gesture was found to discourage professional visitors from attending. The void became merely partial: only the second floor of Oscar Niemeyer's biennial building was to remain empty, while the ground floor became a "public square," "opening itself up as the ágora in the tradition of the Greek polis, a space for meetings, confrontations, frictions." However, when a group of local graffiti artists decided to intervene and tag the second floor, the curators reacted in a punitive, institutional fashion by having one of them arrested and then testifying against her in court, leading to her being jailed with common criminals for nearly two months and eventually sentenced to four years' probation.

This incident again brings to mind the work of Tiravanija, who also encouraged indeterminate, open spaces. At an opening of one of his early exhibitions in New York in the early 1990s, a belligerent visitor picked up some of the raw eggs Tiravanija was intending to cook with, and proceeded to smash them against the gallery's walls. But in this situation, no one was punished, or even asked to stop and leave. This negative action was allowed to run its course, just as any other activity in the space of Tiravanija's artwork, and this person eventually stopped and left the gallery.

Yet another example of such a tendency is the "Curating Degree Zero Archive," a traveling exhibition of "curatorial research" designed as a kind of artistic installation. Conceived by curators, the exhibition circulates through a network of public art institutions largely run by curators. The issue is not whether curators should have archives or open them to others, or to what degree this is interesting or not; rather, the question concerns whether the people in charge of administering exhibitions of art should be using the spaces and funding available for art to exhibit their own reading lists, references, and sources as a kind of artwork. Even more ludicrous is the fact that the dissolution of the self-contained (autonomous) artwork is cited as a justification for supplanting the work of artists in the museum altogether, as shown on the website of this curatorial project:

Archives have become an increasingly common practice in the art world since the 1960s. On the one hand, there are archives founded by artists or collectors; on the other, a more recent development, there are those founded by curators, who sought to make their collections of materials accessible and make their selection criteria public. That desire may have arisen from the dissolution of the notion of the self-contained artwork, which has been eclipsed by a contingent art object that makes a new form of cultural memory necessary and always contains a note of protest and a critique of museum practices.

2. The Job

Curatorial work is a profession, and people working in the field are not free agents but are rather employed to perform a task on behalf of an institution or a client. It's a job, both for those affiliated with institutions and for so-called independent curators. With the job come institutional power, a degree of security, and a mandate for a certain range of activity, which may involve a certain sense of institutional authorship, but emphatically, to my mind, does not include artistic claim to the artwork on which this activity is predicated.

While some artists occasionally do work as curators, it's important to acknowledge that the relationship between artists and curators is structurally somewhat like the relationship between workforce and management: like the workers, most artists suspect that their "supervisors," the curators, do not really understand the art, that they are controlling, egocentric, and ignorant, and are mismanaging the (art) factory and mistreating the producers (something like the scene from Godard's sausage factory in Tout va bien). Yet there is real resentment out there, not very different from the feelings artists harbored towards art critics in the 1960s and '70s. Many artists-from extremely established artists to younger practitioners new to the field of art-feel that curatorial power and arrogance are out of control.

For artists, precarious working conditions have been a reality for most of the history of modern and contemporary art. Artists have never benefitted from the kind of organization that many Fordist factory workers or other unionized laborers managed to achieve, and whose improved wages, hours, and working conditions improved the situation even in many non-unionized fields. Artists, in their capacity as artists, have always worked as independent producers, mostly without stipends, salaries, pensions, unemployment protection, or contracts.

Naturally there have been exceptions, such as the artists' union in the USSR. However, it's enough to read the letters of Rodchenko to realize that the union was more of a problem than a solution: it was an instrument of a totalitarian state, the ideology of which by that time excluded Rodchenko's type of production. Consequently, he was unable to receive a pension and died in poverty. Meanwhile, at the center of the so-called "free world," Mondrian also died in poverty in New York. Neither ideological structure provided much security for even the most accomplished artists.

Before we attribute the rise in popularity or social relevance of curators since the 1990s to larger ideological, geopolitical, or economic shifts such as that from Fordism to Post-Fordism, let's again consider the institution of art: it seems to me that this increase in social significance came partly from the declining power of art criticism, with curators assuming the agency of the critic in addition to their executive power in the museum. It may be argued that art critics did deserve to be marginalized for having vastly overreached at a certain point in the 1960s, when it seemed more culturally significant for a certain art critic such as Clement Greenberg to write about a work of art than for that work to have been made in the first place. But imagine the frustration of the artist who believes herself to be liberated from the tyranny of the critic only to discover that the situation has changed: rather than two competing powers-the critic and the curator, who could be played against each other-there is now only a single totalizing figure that she cannot bypass!

Furthermore, are we sure that this curatorial gain does not bring a correspondingly diminished status for the artist? The nightmare scenario for artists is that the supervisors bypass the workers altogether and begin producing art themselves, or automate the process of art production to render artists redundant. For owners of the culture factory-whether state or privately owned-it would be rather convenient if artists, who are a historically disobedient group, could be replaced with a disciplined contingent trained to obey authority, and production costs slashed through the elimination of a large part of the labor force. In such a scenario the economic gain would be enormous, entailing the replacement of a group that holds the rights to their own production with one comprised of salaried employees.

3. Curator as Producer

Last year I was invited to speak at a conference in Philadelphia on "curatorial activism." One of the participants spoke about her salaried directorship of a New York art institution as an activist practice. When I pointed out that people who are paid to go to a demonstration are not activists, but essentially hired bodies, the audience became visibly uncomfortable. But my point was less about money than why it is not enough these days to take on a challenging job, do it well, with real dedication and engagement, and take pride in that, without trying to upgrade its status by presenting it as activism, cultural production, or the production of art.

In fact, the debate with regard to the boundary between curatorial practice and artistic production is one that curators are engaging in among themselves, as Michelle White makes clear in a recent conversation with fellow curator Nato Thompson:

I also think that the term cultural producer, aside from the particular conditions of our moment, is a healthier or more honest way to articulate the contemporary role of the curator. It acknowledges the complexity of the collaboration that has to happen when something like an exhibition is organized or a project is carried out, which involves, as you said, a much more complex institutional web of financial as well as physical logistics from the relationship of collectors, patrons, boards of trustees to the possibilities of display space. It is certainly beyond the simple curator/artist dichotomy. But at the same time, in working on site-specific projects or exhibitions with living artists where collaboration is essential to produce meaning, I have found myself questioning the boundaries of my involvement in the aesthetic and conceptual production. So, I wonder, are there risks in assuming this more egalitarian position as producer?

To respond to this question: yes, there are big risks for artists. As an artist, how do you exactly say no to the curator who invited you to participate in a show, but seems to want to credit herself as a collaborator or co-author, when you risk not being invited the next time? While perhaps politically and socially well-meaning, this type of approach runs the risk of making an unsolicited claim of co-authoring artists' works commissioned by the curator. I really do not think that many artists feel that collaboration with a curator is essential to produce meaning. To my mind, this type of claim would be an extremely unwelcome and unwarranted intrusion, particularly if one keeps in mind that the figure claiming this share of authorship is not some underpaid art installer or intern researcher, but someone with the power to include, commission, or exclude artworks.

Similarly, it seems to me that we should also be very careful to avoid assigning any kind of meta-artistic capacity to curatorial practice. While steps taken in this direction have often been made with good intentions, invoking the expansion of a more general category of "cultural practice," they nevertheless carry with them the danger of lending credibility to something like a potential colonization of artistic practice by academia and a new class of cultural managers. If the artist is already expected to question the social, the economic, the cultural, and so forth, then it goes without saying that when a curator supersedes the artist's capacity as a social critic, we abandon the critical function embodied by the role of the artist and reduce the agency of art.

If there is to be critical art, the role of the artist as a sovereign agent must be maintained. By sovereignty, I mean simply certain conditions of production in which artists are able to determine the direction of their work, its subject matter and form, and the methodologies they use-rather than having them dictated by institutions, critics, curators, academics, collectors, dealers, the public, and so forth. While this may be taken for granted now, historically the possibility of artistic self-determination has been literally fought for and hard won from the Church, the aristocracy, public taste, and so on. In my view, this sovereignty is at the very center of what we actually understand as art these days: an irreducible element considered to be the "freedom of art."

I suspect that it's not coincidental that the rise of the "independent curator" has taken place alongside a pattern of increasing privatization over the past couple of decades in the cultural field. Curators and institutions of art, whose authority is in part derived from representing public interests and being responsible to the public, are increasingly becoming private agents guided largely by self-interest. For this reason they have begun to assume the appearance of something with authorial characteristics, while still retaining a certain claim to objectivity in their evaluation of art and in their obligation to public address.

It has recently been pointed out to me that as artistic production becomes increasingly deskilled-and, by extension, less identifiable by publics as art when placed outside the exhibition environment-exhibitions themselves become the singular context through which art can be made visible as art. This alone makes it easy to understand why so many now think that inclusion in an exhibition produces art, rather than artists themselves. But this is a completely wrong approach in my opinion: what most urgently needs to be done is to further expand the space of art by developing new circulation networks through which art can encounter its publics-through education, publication, dissemination, and so forth-rather than perpetuate existing institutions of art and their agents at the expense of the agency of artists by immortalizing the exhibition as art's only possible, ultimate destination.

4. Artist as Curator

On the other hand, there is quite a history of artists making use of certain aspects of curatorial and organizational work in their practice by assuming the role of curator. At times this has been a response to the inadequacy of existing institutions, their hostility to artists, or their total absence-prompting the creation of many of the artist-run spaces of the 1970s-or as a response to a particular emergency, as with ACT UP and Gran Fury. As Group Material, Martha Rosler, and other artists in the 1980s demonstrated, curating can become a part of artistic practice just as any social form or activity can. For example, Martha Rosler's If You Lived Here began as an immediate response to a lack of institutional support for an exhibition she was invited to do at the Dia Center for the Arts. Rosler felt that the best way to do something there was by positioning herself as curator/organizer-a kind of one-person institution rather than an individual artist. This resulted in a project comprising several exhibitions on housing and homelessness involving numerous artists, architects, activists, and community groups, which then turned out to be a seminal artwork that influenced several generations of artists including Rirkrit Tiravanija, Renée Green, Liam Gillick, Jeanne van Heeswijk, Marion von Osten, and many others.

Likewise, what passed largely unnoticed in Paul Chan's production of Waiting for Godot in New Orleans was Chan's peculiar positioning of the artist in relation to the work: he did not write the play, direct it, or act in it. The set was essentially a city street. Chan's artistic involvement consisted largely of spending many months teaching as a volunteer in a local college, building close relationships with local community groups and grassroots organizations-in other words, creating the conditions necessary for the production and reception of the play, while ensuring that part of the money raised for the project would go to local needs other than culture.

I feel that whereas artists' engagement with a range of social forms and practices not normally considered part of the vocabulary of art serves to open up the space of art and grant it increased agency, curatorial and institutional attempts to recontextualize their own activities as artistic-or generalize art into a form of cultural production-has the opposite effect: they shrink the space of art and reduce the agency of artists.

An artist can aspire to a certain sovereignty, which today implies that in addition to producing art, one also has to produce the conditions that enable such production, its channels of circulation. Sometimes the production of these conditions can become so critical to the production of work that it assumes the shape of the work itself. This should not be confused with the job curators have and the work they do. As an artist, I would not attempt to propose a solution for curators; they themselves need to come up with ways of thinking and working that do not undercut the sovereignty of artists.

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Art Without Artists? - Journal #16 May 2010 - e-flux

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It is clear that curatorial practice today goes well beyond mounting art exhibitions and caring for works of art. Curators do a lot more: they administer the experience of art by selecting what is made visible, contextualize and frame the production of artists, and oversee the distribution of production funds, fees, and prizes that artists compete for.

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‘Museums must evolve or they will not exist’: Curator Adam Szymczyk Speaks Out on the Future of Museums, Colonialism and his documenta 14

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‘Museums must evolve or they will not exist’: Curator Adam Szymczyk Speaks Out on the Future of Museums, Colonialism and his documenta 14

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https://www.frieze.com/article/museums-must-evolve-or-they-will-not-exist-curator-adam-szymczyk-speaks-out-future-museums

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The Bauhaus: Case Study Experiments in Education

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The Bauhaus: Case Study Experiments in Education

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https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/ad.1873

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Architectural education as an abbreviated sphere of national collaboration: re-examining the Bauhaus

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Architectural education as an abbreviated sphere of national collaboration: re-examining the Bauhaus

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https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/14608944.2012.702741?needAccess=true

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Black Mountain College : experiment in art

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Black Mountain College : experiment in art

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About Us

Edible Estates is a partnership of organisations which work together to promote community greenspace projects. We work across a variety of communities, but our approach is particularly well suited to social housing estates. We use food growing as a tool for urban regeneration, promoting individual health and well-being, and community cohesion.

Project models

In working with communities over the years, we have developed several project templates which communities can implement in their neighbourhood, or use as a starting point to develop their own project.

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About Us Edible Estates is a partnership of organisations which work together to promote community greenspace projects. We work across a variety of communities, but our approach is particularly well suited to social housing estates. We use food growing as a tool for urban regeneration, promoting individual health and well-being, and community cohesion.

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The Queens Museum (QM) has embarked on a Year of Uncertainty (YoU), a framework for strengthening connection among the Museum, our communities, and constituents, focused on creating new possibilities for culture, kinship, and mutual support. Centered around themes of Care, Repair, The Future Play, Justice , and , this program responds to hyperlocal and international states of precarity that have been heightened by the COVID-19 pandemic, including the crises of inaction and unaccountability toward racial justice and xenophobia, climate reparations, and income disparity. QM will dedicate resources to becoming a center for learning, research, collaboration and production; its public-facing efforts will be opened to internal processes, and vice versa. Taking indeterminacy as an invitation, YoU will explore new ways for institutions to support individuals and publics navigating a world that is always and increasingly shifting.

At the center of is a cohort of creative interlocutors that will become a part of the fabric of QM: six YoU Artists-In-Residence (AIR) with diverse research-based and socially engaged practices encompassing discursive and participatory forms as well as object-based work; nine Community Partners (CP) from across the borough, tackling issues such as gender-justice; mental health; environmental justice; youth enrichment; gun violence prevention and intervention; LGBTQ+ activism; and civil rights for TGNB people and sex workers; and twelve artists, designers, scientists, writers, architects, and activists have been invited as Co-Thinkers to share their expertise and knowledge with AIR's, CP's, and the QM staff.

As we contemplate the present and imagine possible futures, the history of QM's building as a site of significant convenings and world-building events as well as its archive and collection will provide fertile guidance. With a critical contemporary perspective, YoU extends the legacy of these events while further centering the concerns of artists, advocacy organizations, and our audiences. YoU will build upon QM's long history of connecting art and culture to civic participation and urban life via commitments to engagement, education, and partnership in our local communities and beyond.

In Fall 2021, outputs of this learning and co-creation process will be shared through public conversations, activations, and presentations across all spaces and platforms of the Museum. YoU will conclude with collective reflection on this period of experimentation, leading to new, flexible, working methods that will help QM sustain and grow our commitments to culture, accessibility, equity.

The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty; not knowing what comes next. - Ursula K. Le Guin , The Left Hand of Darkness, 1969

YoU Artists-In-ResidenceGabo Camnitzer
Tecumseh Ceaser
Utsa Hazarika
Mo Kong
Julian Louis Phillips
Alex Strada & Tali Keren

YoU Community Partners
BordeAndo
Caribbean Equality Project
Colectivo Intercultural TRANSgrediendo
Guardians of Flushing Bay
LIFE Camp
Malikah
MinKwon Center for Community Action
Rockaway Development & Revitalization Corporation
Sakhi for South Asian Women

YoU Co-Thinkers
Tremaine Emory
Shannon Finnegan
Cas Holman
Nora N. Khan
Suzanne Lacy
Mae-Ling Lokko
Guadalupe Maravilla
MIXdesign
Naeem Mohaiemen
Xaviera Simmons
Sable Elyse Smith
Kenneth Tam

Nandini Bagchee and Vyjayanthi Rao, UNIT 25, Spitzer School of Architecture, City College CUNYSocial Practice Queens (SPQ), Queens College CUNY Program Partners

The Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture , Columbia University
Montez Press Radio

The Year of Uncertainty artist residencies and community partnerships are made possible by generous support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Rockefeller Brothers Fund, the Lambent Foundation, and the Jerome Foundation.

Major funding for the Queens Museum is generously provided by the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature.

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The Queens Museum (QM) has embarked on a Year of Uncertainty (YoU), a framework for strengthening connection among the Museum, our communities, and constituents, focused on creating new possibilities for culture, kinship, and mutual support.

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Tate Papers ISSN 1753-9854

This issue offers new perspectives on the work of Joseph Beuys and his engagement with European history, mythology and geopolitics during the 1970s and 1980s. Subjects covered include the work he made in response to a devastating earthquake in Italy in 1980; the legacies of his counter-educational Free International University; Beuys's interest in the notion of Eurasia; his collaboration with Danish composer Henning Christiansen; and his involvement in the exhibition Strategy: Get Arts, held in Edinburgh in 1970. Other articles in this issue include a technical study of Frank Bowling's materials and techniques, and an exploration of Antony Hill's semiotic approach to concrete painting in the 1950s.

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Tate Papers ISSN 1753-9854 This issue offers new perspectives on the work of Joseph Beuys and his engagement with European history, mythology and geopolitics during the 1970s and 1980s.

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Black Mountains College - We are teaching the Future

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We all know the world needs to change. New ways of thinking and working begin with education. Study at Black Mountains College. Join us for short courses and free full time vocational training in future skills.

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During Soeharto's New Order era (1965-98), the progressive term 'alternative', used as an idea or to describe art spaces, signalled an opposition to the authorities. The reform period that followed, the reformasi, ushered in a time when ideas spun quickly, buzzing almost, and in which a number of alternative media and local civil initiatives developed. This increased activity reflected the intensity of local cultural production in Indonesia and was partly encouraged by the urgency to express the long- suppressed counterculture movement. Sensitive as these projects were to the social and political situation of the region, their lifespans varied, but the significance of what they produced proves that 'alternative' and 'initiative' are keywords by which to understand Indonesian society post-1998.

Ruangrupa is a Jakarta-based arts organisation established in 2000, when reformation ideas were still in the air. It functions as an outlet for studies of visual culture through exhibitions, the publication of a journal and writing workshops, and as such mirrors the shift of artistic practice from the production of objects to research. It was founded by a group of artists (Ronny Agustinus, Oky Arfie, Ade Darmawan, Hafiz, Lilia Nursita and Rithmi Widanarko), who met as students in different cities in the archipelago.

Youth and students played an important role in the demise of Soeharto's New Order. During the reformasi, youth culture was given previously denied freedoms, and allowed to question things previously taken for granted. Writing about ruangrupa is writing about a youth movement.

At the same time, describing an artists' collective is like remembering a long list of names - detailing those who came and worked for the collective, those who left and those who were replaced by others. It means telling the stories of a group of individuals, with different educations and paths, who develop their own attitudes towards work and eagerness to test their thoughts on arts and culture. Perhaps an artists' collective resembles a sanggar, an Indonesian term for a collective space where members share their learning experiences under the auspices of a mentor. Ruangrupa is a contemporary sanggar, but without mentors.

Ruangrupa is divided into several parts: Art Lab; Support and Promote; Research and Development; and Video Art Division, which runs the well-known biennial OK Video festival. The organisa- tion is comprised of visual artists, video-makers, film-makers, performance artists, graphic designers, photographers, writers, researchers, music activists and architects.

In this conversation, Ade Darmawan, the group's director, told me he was afraid he might confuse people with his answers. The conversation was conducted mainly through email and Yahoo! Messenger. Some of his emails came with attachments, essays he has written on alternative initiatives; others came with promises of further elaboration.

In compiling this text, I feel I am being forced to become a scavenger, collecting his thoughts from different sources - his writings, archives of Messenger conversations and files of his conversations with art critics and curators. I am wary of losing the trail of his thoughts, and afraid that I might lose some important aspect of our discussion in the translation process. I am worried that feelings that occurred during the conversation have been effaced by my translation. As I was translating his words and thoughts, I could not help thinking that English is more concise than Bahasa Indonesia. And are these questions enough? Shall I ask more?

This conversation is about the struggle of ideas in an arts organisation. My questions aim to capture insights into the relation between youth and the state, the state and society, artists in their environment; and about what might be gained from discussing the principles and work practices of an organisation that takes on these questions.

Artistic claims and statements are always changing. The ideas lodged in this interview should not be seen as fixed: as the artists' collective grows older, new questions and doubts will emerge. The spread of the terms 'state' and 'local people' in the conversation inevitably makes the tone sound pompous, but this may serve as a reminder to stay alert to and question the fate of reformasi, which marked the beginning of the story of contemporary alternative spaces in Indonesia. Will the doors to freedom stay open? What have local initiatives done to keep them so? - Nuraini Juliastuti

The Relation Between Artists and the People

Nuraini Juliastuti: The story of my relations with ruangrupa (often called Ruru) began with Karbon, the quarterly art journal it began in 2002. There are two striking things about Karbon: firstly, the logo of 'RAIN Artists' Initiative Network' that appears on its cover, signalling its connection to a global art network. Secondly, its longevity. Ruru may not be the first organisation to publish a visual art journal, but it is one that has lasted. Could you speak a little about Karbon?

Ade Darmawan: Karbon works to fill in the gaps in the publication of visual art reviews and cultural analysis, and functions as an intermediary medium between cultural writers and art critics. Each edition was initially designed to reflect our organisation's programmes, and to provide space for our research findings, but Karbon has developed to be a separate research division in the process. As regards RAIN, its members are artists' initiatives from Southern countries such as Mexico, Argentina, South Africa, Brazil, Mali and India. We see RAIN as an important network to build on apart from the local and Southeast Asian network we participate in.

NJ: This is a classic question: what is the role of an artist in today's Indonesia? Do you think that art should have a significant impact on the local level? Can an artist walk and move without 'feeling guilty' or 'feeling the need to give a hand to the people', as popular expressions have it?

AD: [Laughing.] I think it has to do with how we see our works. An artist, for me, must be able to constantly shake the faith of the people and everything that surrounds him or her, and contribute critically to social negotiations over existing values. Artists, local people, corporations, religious institutions, art and cultural institutions go head-to-head everyday. An artist is no longer positioned as the saviour of the world. It sounds so 1980s! It is too heroic.

NJ: But by publishing a journal, you are undeniably heroic. Even if the word 'heroic' sounds exaggerated, Ruru attempts to improve art infrastructure at the local level. In an interview with the art critic Hendro Wiyanto, you said that the shift in artists' working patterns from production to research is the only possible way of augmenting visual art's critical power.

Meanwhile, the scholar Melani Budianta defines post-1998 cultural activities as part of 'an emergency activism'. They are a response to an emergency situation; activities conducted to fill in holes in our environment and to oppose the state. Connecting your explanation of Karbon to Budianta's remark, Karbon is indeed an emergency activity. It is also part of the knowledge production of alternative spaces.

AD: We are witnessing artists' active roles in the development of the local contemporary art infrastructure, and indeed we see our works as alternative initiatives. The state has long been absent from our art and cultural landscape. Various forms of support for the production of visual art - such as vigorous art critics, strong educational institutions and art publications, spaces for art discourse and art appreciation - are at a minimum. If the system of visual art production is a chain, we have a broken one. Some artists' initiatives and cultural organisations have been trying to mend this chain and to elevate the scope of their work to a higher level. But I do not see their work as a direct opposition to or an antithesis of the state. Rather, it is a response to an ever-changing society. The organisations develop relevant visual art practices to local social problems. They work as fixers. Importantly, such visual art practices are independent from the state's art infrastructure. They do not connect to, for example, local arts councils in provincial capitals. In Indonesia, there is no partner- ship among independent arts organisations nor state institutions based on mutual benefit, and this reflects the failure of the state-designed art infrastructure to deal with the rapid development of ideas on the local level. I prefer to look at the works of initiative spaces as 'contextual responses'. Performing a series of experiments in their local environments, they develop an applicable model to respond to local needs. Such contextual responses, occurring in different places and sometimes short-lived, develop into local survival strategies. In the absence of formal art infrastructure, they work to improve the local system. They attempt an ideal system, even if that is only an illusion.

Alternative

NJ: Rather than protesting anything commercial and mainstream, in the conversation with curator Haema Sivanesan for the Gang Festival in Sydney in 2006, you stressed the importance of developing a strategic and long term plan for an art infrastructure that differs from the Western model.5 Your use of the term 'fixer' to refer to work practices of alternative spaces is also interesting; it overlays such practices with an underhanded or illicit character - or with an alternative character, to be precise. We are now entering a period where the concepts on which an alternative space bases itself need redefinition: 'the local', 'the empowerment of society', 'development', 'public participation', 'communities' and even 'people' all need reviewing. In regard to this matter, I remember you talked about 'the bottle cap philosophy' - of how to open a bottle without a bottle opener, but with a nail instead, during our discussion at the 'Cultural Performance in Post-New Order Indonesia: New Structures, Scenes, Meanings' symposium in Yogyakarta in 2009. How would you explain the trajectory of the meaning of 'alternative'?

AD: We are in the middle of failed modernism, illusive nationalism and national identity, and the products of corrupted power. Instead of keeping clear orientations, they lead to disorientations. We are left with only one position, to become greedy consumers. What I am trying to say is that through our works we are developing an alternative system. As the consumers of the products of social and cultural history, we are capable of developing an attitude that is a mixture of collaging, mix-and- match activities and destruction and reconstruction of practices so as to accord with local needs. What is dysfunctional is functional. The dysfunctional bus stop story is a good case in point. There are so many dysfunctional bus stops around us. I do not think our public transportation system acknowledges the bus stop concept, as in Indonesia one can get on and off a bus anywhere. Bus stops often transform into a kind of convenience store where organic alliances take place. In the afternoon we see bonds between a newspaper seller and a cigarette seller, and during the night the bus stop changes into a food stall.

Such talent for developing new attitudes is the capital for an experiment in exploring social designs in a wider context. It is the self-organised design where new negotiations are taking place. The nail that serves as a bottle opener is a metaphor for strategies designed by alternative initiatives. The Yogyakarta-based Cemeti Art House conducted its activities in a rented house - like many post-1998 initiatives do - which was converted into a contemporary visual art gallery in 1988. I began to see these alternative initiatives as medium-scale public institutions. A rented house is the headquarters, which also serves as a studio, a gathering and exhibition space and a music venue. It is a situation where the artists-cum-activists of an alternative space - the valid representation of the people - envisage their positions among the people. As such, it imbues the space with local values. An artist shares a position with the local community, and local communities participate in the initiative's activities: local festivities, workshops for kampong youth, an Independence Day celebration, a public cinema, etc. The debate over whether or not something is considered 'art' eventually disappears.

Jakarta

NJ: What kind of an environment does Ruru need to make its work? I understand your personal closeness to Jakarta and how you see it not only as a living space, but also as an ideal working space. I initially thought it was just a romantic choice. But from what I have seen of Ruru's works, as well as some of your works, I have begun to understand that Jakarta is, as you say, 'a necessary condition for the organization to exist'. It may offer the disorderliness that we need.

AD: The emergence of local artists' initiatives often responds to the specific needs of particular infrastructure. Artistic strategies are designed in accord with the ecosystem in which an artists' initiative lives. In Ruru's early years, we wrote a series of critical essays on Jakarta. It is a city that has lost its social functions in favour of commercial activities and therefore one whose inhabitants have the potential to develop creative capacities. The relation between visual art systems and the city's infrastructure is an important context of our works. Since 2004 we have organised the biennial Jakarta 32°C. It is an event for university students in Jakarta that consists of workshops, presentations, discussions, film screenings and art exhibitions. The early stages of Ruru's development took place while we were still students, and students have always been important participants in our activities. If we always say that the local infrastructure for art education is lacking, we have to try to develop an alternative method. This biennial is one of our attempts at developing such a method. During the event, a series of meetings takes place to map what forms of creative and critical spaces are needed, and how the youths view the city space. A student network and spaces for public discussion are organised. We hold public workshops to invite students to examine the details of city spaces, aspects of visual culture, city designs, local city regulations, local practices and local economic infrastructure. Students are challenged to offer their statements, interact with a wider public and speculate on alternative visions. Local people's changing views of the city are an important factor. The scope of our battles is no longer limited to the vertical area - of state and society - where we face the authorities. We have been battling against corporations, our own neighbours and those who have different perspectives on how certain ideologies and beliefs should be articulated. As the battle zone has been narrowed to horizontal relations, a city becomes more important than the state. Our artistic approach - and the artistic role we take - will only grow well relevant to the messy, sweaty and untidy space of Jakarta.

Key Artistic Practice

NJ: What is the key artistic practice for Ruru? That may sound a little bit formulaic, but in the case of Ruru, at this particular historical juncture, it may be an important question to ask. It is also a reflective one: a reflection of the original impetus for the organisation, and a series of tensions that revolve around its artistic production.

AD: Since its inception, Ruru has held that the research process constitutes a great proportion of its artistic production. It is a critique of and an attempt to transform the artistic tradition at the local level. Taking this further, we hope to not only develop it into a critical cross-disciplinary practice, but also a social practice. Our works focus on project-based artistic works, articulated in collaborations with other artists and artists-in-residence projects. Our method of presenting works also allows the audience to read and examine the archives of our research and production processes. Seeing an artwork is not the only way of appreciating and approaching the idea behind it. If we see an artwork as finished, through such a presentation we hope to expand and complicate its ideas.

Network

NJ: 'Network' is one key concept in discussing cultural productions in post- 1998 Indonesia. In 2010, you organised two exhibitions of alternative spaces and visual art communities, 'Fixer' and 'Ruru&Friends' at North Art Space and National Gallery in Jakarta, respectively. Both exhibitions underlined 'network' and 'alternative' not only as two essential concepts in analysing art and cultural practices at a local level, but also as the crucial value to staying alternative and participating in a particular network. Here I want to explore the meaning of 'network'. Why do you think it is constantly being contested, and what aspects serve as a basis for Ruru's network development?

AD: We are already connected. What matters is what is communicated and exchanged within these connections. The word 'network' often translates into an infrastructure development that ultimately does not engineer ways for people to have discussions with one another. It is like providing a table and chairs for a meeting. In the digital era, the concept of the 'network' needs redefinition. In a network situation where there is no need for communication, nothing will happen. There will be no new ideas created.

In the case of Ruru, a network is a precondition for our work; it is like the idea of building a friendship. It is organic, spontaneous and open. Often, building a network also means a political act. Over the last ten years, we have witnessed the rise of independent art groups in Java, from big cities like Jakarta, Bandung,Yogyakarta,Surabaya,Semarang and Cirebon to Jatiwangi in West Java. They emerged as new vibrant cultural centres where large-scale activities, such as international biennials and festivals, are taking place with a DIY spirit that connects these events to local and state infrastructure. The creation of national and international networks among art projects with critical ideas, social impact and new artistic approaches is an interesting phenomenon, which works to redefine and correct the relation between centre and periphery. Artists and cultural activists are now the negotiating partners of the government, and are allowed to participate in the decision-making process, in spaces that would otherwise be impossible to access. However, what is lacking at the local level is an alternative network that serves as a platform for organisations, which share the same vision to strengthen the bargaining positions within wider social, cultural and political contexts.

Art of the Present

NJ: Here I want to explore the relation between Ruru and the 'youth', which is a problematic category. It may refer to the output of the organisation, which talks about a history of the present. OK Video festival, in particular, suggests a form of support for video art development of the moment and indicates a need for examining the politics of visual culture at a local level. But 'youth' may also refer to the founders of the organisations, who are still considered young. Why do you think we all choose to talk about the 'history of the present'?

AD: It is true. We talk about today's realities. It makes people identify us with 'newness' and 'youngness'. There is always a strong sense of cynicism towards 'old people' in our generation. Contemporary things are more relevant to our life, but history is important nonetheless. It needs to be continuously discussed, reread and connected to the present.

Religious Readings

NJ: What books or other reading materials inspire Ruru?

AD: We are part of the 1990s generation, which greatly admires that of the 60s. The span of our reading materials is wide, but we share similar interests. We read history, philosophy and cultural textbooks, postcolonial writings, leftist radical books - anything really. Maybe we are just a bunch of nerds. As visual art and design students, we admired Art Spiegelman's Raw comic books, Juxtapoz and Ray Gun magazines and David Carson's works. The founders of Ruru share similar social and economic backgrounds. We come from the families who chose to not to be rich during New Order. I suppose our critical thoughts are partly informed by that.

NJ: Can you explain the knowledge- transfer process operating within the organisation? How do certain views of Ruru activists circulate within the organisation, to be used as the basis for works?

AD: Ruru is like a beehive or an ant colony, where each person piles up his or her own knowledge, and lets the others take from it. Informal discussions take place spontaneously and new ideas emerge from exchange practices. Rather than a knowledge-transfer process, what we see is a knowledge transaction. Ruru works like a football team. Each person works and plays hard by his and her own strength on a horizontal field. We have visual artist-cum-band manager Indra Kusuma, performance artist Reza Afisina, writer Mirwan Andan and architect-cum-writer Ardi Yunanto, among others. We believe that our idea supply is abundant, and therefore consider ownership issues to be minor. Ideas will be shared and combined with others' ideas. It has to do with our commitment to collaborative practices as an important working method. It has informed the way we view the ownership of an idea and knowledge transaction.

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Afterall - Ruangrupa: A Conversation on Horizontal Organisation

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During Soeharto's New Order era (1965-98), the progressive term 'alternative', used as an idea or to describe art spaces, signalled an opposition to the authorities. The reform period that followed, the reformasi, ushered in a time when ideas spun quickly, buzzing almost, and in which a number of alternative media and local civil initiatives developed.

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Last year Southeast Asia hosted two significant media art shows, both daring to juxtapose recent work from the region with seminal collections from the First World. In 'Video, an Art, a History 1965-2010', the Singapore Art Museum (SAM) tentatively aired its nascent Southeast Asian collection alongside a roving blockbuster from the Centre Pompidou in Paris. At the National Gallery of Indonesia (Galnas), the Jakarta artists' collective ruangrupa held the fifth instalment of their video art biennial, OK Video, featuring a curated selection from the catalogue of Electronic Arts Intermix in New York. Both exhibitions were rare treats, featuring contemporary video works from Indonesia, Thailand and Vietnam, side by side with works by Western artists including Bill Viola, Dan Graham, VALIE EXPORT and Vito Acconci - the first time this canon had alighted on the region en masse. In both exhibitions worlds came together, but they were worlds apart.

I found myself wondering what it would be like if these two worlds were swapped, if SAM were to take over the ageing halls of Galnas, and ruangrupa the colonial nooks and crannies of SAM. For a start, we would see OK Video with fewer mosquitoes, and comfortable seats; with an injection of Singaporean efficiency, Galnas would get a much needed overhaul. SAM would meanwhile be unrecognisable, revived by a shot of the spontaneity and personality it lacks. Alas, it was wishful thinking. One can only dream of a day when the region's resources are effectively shared.

It could be objected that I am not comparing apples with apples. SAM is a well-funded public museum, with its own collection, but, like all of Singapore's institutions, it suffers from the overweening attentions of its bureaucratic parents. Galnas, meanwhile, is a criminally neglected child - a 'national' space for hire - and ruangrupa, while by now a de facto institution, is an autonomous artists' collective, with no collection and largely free from bureaucracy. Yet the comparison was telling: SAM baulked at the task of integrating their works (either spatially or intellectually) with the visiting ones, leaving Southeast Asia a peripheral plug-in for the touring Euro-American canon. At OK Video, the foreign material was not the main event; carefully selected to feed and challenge Indonesia's thriving video communities, it was circumscribed architecturally in its own pavilion, but nested within a locally curated smorgasbord. The contrast was a stark demonstration of the raw value of curatorial vision, a value not proportional to budgets.

Context certainly helps. In Singapore's slick matrix of consumption, small curatorial fumbles will stick out like sore thumbs, while amidst the humming disorder of Jakarta - a city of some ten million souls, with a metropolitan population three times that - a little direction goes a long way. Yet the integration of local and international work was an important achievement, not least because the former draws upon, and critiques, the latter, but also because they are connected, whether consciously or unconsciously, through the history of the video medium itself, with shared formal parameters and shared referents in the world beyond the gallery. When it comes to exhibiting media art, it bears remembering that the museum itself is a medium, one to which a lot of media art is not native. The task of domesticating it is therefore fraught, especially in locations where institutions and curatorial practice are relatively young. So how is it that Jakarta, a chaotic mega-city with little infrastructure for contemporary art, has given rise to this sort of curatorial assuredness?

Site and Sound: Jakarta Calling (or, Karaoke as Method)

By far the most developed of Indonesia's 922 inhabited islands, Java is about half the size of the UK, with roughly twice the population. It dominates the national economy, and in creative industries increasingly casts a shadow over its richer neighbours. Of its three artistic hubs, Bandung and Yogyakarta (Jogja) are the established centres of learning and production. Jakarta has long been the business hub, with the most commercial galleries. Given its strong non-commercial agenda, ruangrupa might seem out of place in Jakarta - an hour's flight to the south- east, Jogja's cheap rents and slower pace make it an obvious base for collectives. But ruangrupa is bound to Jakarta in every sense: physically, spiritually and conceptually, it is through and through a creature of the capital. This speaks volumes about the group's significance and the unique path it has taken in Indonesia's current contemporary art boom.

The collective was founded in 2000 by a group of young artists in a city then devoid of platforms for contemporary practice and collaboration. Their work- shops and exhibitions fast became magnets for artists, designers and researchers, eliciting broad-based community participation, distinguished by the group's knack for critical exploration of their urban surroundings. This urbanism has been their most consistent refrain. Though they have consistently worked with artists from elsewhere, ruangrupa has made a profound commitment to Jakarta as both site and subject, to its people as both audience and authors. Since day one the group has taken the city itself - a noisy engine room of commerce and administration, not traditionally seen as a font of culture - as the primary protagonist of an epic adventure in collective storytelling. Heuristic as their approach may be, it is not without a certain realism, focused by an insistence upon the vitality of Jakarta's contemporary culture, as rooted not in some timeless past, but in a dense demo- graphic and cultural stew of diverse and inextricable ingredients.

A pre-modern cosmopolitanism was forged here during the Srivijaya maritime empire that dominated the Malay world until the thirteenth century. Sunda Kelapa, as Jakarta was then known, had already long been a melting pot of regional and diasporic trading communities when the Dutch arrived in 1619. Renamed Batavia, the city was colonised and modernised, then nationalised as Jakarta. It is now being globalised, but this doesn't mean homogenisation - rapid economic growth has come with an equally rapid dilation of the public sphere, and for a porous organisation, the city's syncretic soil is fertile indeed. Such an environment puts a premium on openness, a trait ruangrupa exhibits inside and out. While the founders may worry that a new crop of decision- makers has been slow to emerge, a strong DIY ethos and a lack of hierarchy have been key to the group's sustainability. Their suburban headquarters in the south of the city boast a well-used exhibition space, but it's more like a clubhouse: always open, always peopled - a studio, a library, a research lab and a party venue, all in one. It would be lazy to call their collaborative house style 'inclusive'. Ruangrupa is shareware, their partnering indiscriminate - witness the soup of logos on their sponsor rolls. They tap every level of the institutional food chain, with a reach only possible in the last decade or so: from foreign NGOs and municipal and national governments, down to the humblest grassroots initiatives - a big tobacco company here, a national media network there, a small business around the corner.

According to Bandung-based curator Agung Hujatnikajennong, Indonesian contemporary art has seen two distinct phases. The first reflected civil society's atrophy under the authoritarian New Order (1965-98) of the country's second president, Soeharto. The second, which is ongoing, reflects its flourishing and democratisation since the wave of popular disgust ( reformasi) that finally unseated that regime amidst regional financial crisis in 1998. In the earlier period, the social conscience that had long been a corner- stone of national aesthetics - modern art's sine qua non since the independence struggle against the Dutch - found expression in a figurative modernism still loosely social realist in its scope. Its story remained that of nationhood, of the people (as, or against, nation), seasoned here and there with the 'local' or the 'traditional'. Artists emerging since reformasi, however, are more playful and individualistic, enjoying the latitude of a liberalised public sphere, and the fruits of the country's steady rise in the global neoliberal pecking order. But while exemplary of this new generation, ruangrupa strives to retain something of the representational logic of the old.

The result is a remarkably stable compound of activism and populism. The group's early embrace of lo-fi copy cultures and digital and open publishing models dovetailed with a neo-Situationism that was de rigueur at the couch-surfing stratum of global art in the early 2000s. Since 2000, ruangrupa has published Karbon, a journal devoted to urban visual culture, which promotes criticism but also favours plain language. The biennial Jakarta 32°C, which they have organised since 2004, brings students' work into the museum under the group's curatorial umbrella, democratising the first steps to exhibition-making. Jakarta-based festivals like OK Video, meanwhile, become launch pads for nationwide tours and workshops, as did their tenth anniversary festivities in 2010, held under the project banner 'Decompression #10'. And while in an earlier phase workshops were more hands-on and skills-based, as contemporary art production has flourished ruangrupa's educational focus has sharpened around the critical faculties of writing and curatorship. The collective's prodigious capacity for outreach makes for an unruly aesthetic, encompassing everything from punk and street cultures, through documentary and ethnographic research, to conceptual and process-oriented experiments. Binding it all together is a firm conviction that the participants are agents in a living social history, one that is fundamentally urban and modern.

To profile ruangrupa is to describe an event: time-based, immediate and loosely structured; with a sense of purpose, yet more celebratory than agonistic. If one had to choose a single medium to characterise it, that medium would be karaoke. Indonesians love to sing, and a rich musical patchwork is an ever-present accompaniment to daily life. The refrains of old folk songs segue into distinctive modern genres like the racy dangdut, a hybrid of Malay, Indo- Arabic and 1970s rock sounds. A vivid medley of subcultures jostles with local and global pop, especially in the streets, where chronic traffic jams create a captive audience for wandering ngamen (buskers). It is no accident that live music and a certain chaotic, mob-karaoke ritual have become trademarks of the ruangrupa experience. Indeed, this carnivalesque sonic profile betrays something of the group's curatorial programme - it is prophetic in the sense Jacques Attali reserved for composition, presaging a new regime of cultural production that is live, open source and, above all, poly-vocal.

In his compelling account of Javanese modernity, anthropologist John Pemberton describes an extraordinary process whereby the island's eighteenth-century aristocracy, whose role was rapidly becoming ceremonial, re-encoded the technologies and trappings of Dutch colonial might. The once terrifying sound of cannon fire, for instance, came to announce official diplomatic correspondence, or to mark a royal birthday or wedding; a hybrid pageantry was improvised, retrofitted and elaborately codified. Pyrotechnics made for a spectacle of new order, distracting attention from the drastic defeat of the old. Pemberton also recalls how Soeharto, going through the motions of electoral democracy during the Cold War, took these vestiges of contest and refurbished them once again, as tradition, in the name of another 'new order'. Ruangrupa, we might say, represents the opposite aural evolution. It is a stethoscope held to the rattling yet still growing chest of the metropolis, amplifying the hum of a popular sovereignty - long suppressed by colonialism and authoritarianism - over the ceaseless urban din.

Ruangrupa as Curatorship?

In a recent essay on ruangrupa, art historian Thomas Berghuis takes up some topical vocabularies for lassoing contemporary art's vast diversity of ractices and newly integrated territories. With nods to Nicolas Bourriaud's relational aesthetics and Terry Smith's reckoning with contemporaneity, he casts the group in the uncertain light of 'the global', as a laboratory for an art to come. In the clamour of the Jakarta art world, many would say a breath of speculative air is just what the doctor ordered. But what is missing from this picture is a sense of the intense struggle - in this region, quite peculiar to Indonesia - over creative and intellectual labour. In this struggle the curatorial faculty is crucial, not only because curators are pivotal in capturing talent, but also because curatorial functions have long preoccupied many of the most talented. Some of ruangrupa's core members exemplify this bind, but they stand out for having maintained both their independence from the market and their standing with respect to the curatorial cartel that serves it. They are not the only collective to have thrived since reformasi - there are dozens - but their endurance and success, at home and abroad, prompts the question: has it perhaps been by appropriating the function of curatorship that this independence has been secured?

As a vocation, curatorship in Southeast Asia is tenuous. But in Indonesia, where a bullish market has the profession in its clutches, it is the craft that is tenuous, not the worker. One much sought-after Jogja painter makes enough from the sale of a single picture to buy a large house. Curators have not missed out on the bonanza. This newly struck professional mould, still setting, is guarded by a small band of entrenched taste-makers. In a country where an ample meal can be had street-side for a dollar, they are well rewarded - an anomaly in the region - especially a senior cohort whose number may be counted on one hand. But most of the throughput is handled by a younger generation who came of age during reformasi.

At worst, their job entails the perfunctory anointment of new product for the market. For some, the whole process may be done on a smart-phone: syncing calendars, browsing and selecting images, cutting and pasting together a recycled curatorial 'essay', before parachuting into town for the opening reception. It's a well-oiled assembly line, by far the region's most efficient. The conscientious few will manage some conversation with the artist, maybe even write something new, but a backlog of shows leaves little time for research; the typical project- window lasts weeks, not months. It's a pity, for most were trained as artists and have a good grasp on matters of process; they speak persuasively of aesthetic currents, and artists' places within them. But for all their mobility, their horizons as curators are limited by a parochial market, and a lack of credible institutional systems of validation and power.

If Asian modern art history has seldom ventured beyond national framings, this is not without reason. Rarely the product of organic urban fermentation, modern art has more often been a state-sanctioned project. But the unravelling of the Cold War has set the stage for a new mode of circulation and a new currency for the visual - a currency now called the contemporary. Gaining new patrons and markets, artists have filtered out certain modernist strains, and spun what's left in the direction of international trends. But curatorship, by contrast - at least, curatorship as we now know it, unhinged from the collection that once grounded the role - has more or less had to invent itself from scratch. In the first proper regional study on the subject, Patrick Flores confirms that the role has always been the province of discursively inclined artists, and not defined around collections. He identifies pioneers such as Apinan Poshyananda (a Thai) and Jim Supangkat (an Indonesian), who plugged Southeast Asian art into international circuits in the 1990s, as the key midwives of this contemporary. Not incidentally, both were trained as artists; no less significantly, neither has ever taught curating, nor trained worthy successors. Entangled by bureaucratic and market strictures respectively, they seem to have accrued powers too precious to be handed down. Today's curators have inherited an invisible suit from these pathfinders, with little sense of professional continuity. And the corollary of this failure of professional memory is a failure to historicise exhibition-making per se. Ruangrupa and its collaborators stand out here for having kept alive a parallel world for historically informed - if not always art historically informed - ways of working.

Getting Modernity

I recently asked an Indonesian curator - trained and still practicing as an artist - what he thought of the curatorial studies programmes sprouting up around the world. If he were younger, where would he go to study this craft? His answer was revealing: 'The Netherlands. And Japan.' For an emerging leader from the global periphery, the prospect of acquiring curatorial expertise in emerging territories remains dim. And it is more than ironic that he should nominate both of his country's former colonial masters, both wealthy nations with developed infra- structures for art, both steady fonts of the aid that has helped shape professional horizons in Indonesia. The pairing also serves to dramatise a certain historical polarity, perhaps collapsing now, between two very different demographic orders, as the vanguard cosmopolitanism of the Netherlands shrinks into something more akin to Japan's insular nationalism. But my friend was answering, I suspected, with an eye on the past, not the future, which his explanation confirmed: 'Because these two places really got modernity.' The emphasis is his, and richly ambivalent - they 'got it' in the sense of understanding it, but perhaps also in the sense of copping it, of being on the receiving end of some painful but irrevocable gift. 'Getting' this most 'contemporary' métier would thus entail getting a certain modernity first. Clearly we were no longer talking about modern art, about this or that modernism, but about a lived modernity. The key knowledge for curating in Indonesia would be found where an antecedent modernity had taken root, whence Indonesia's own modernity was grafted.

Upon reflection, this insistence on a source modernity also runs counter to the romantic nomadism that still pervades the curatorial discourse of a would-be 'global' field. Against the tide of this globalisation wades the stubborn figure of the modern nation - nation as product of modernity and modernity as the flagship product of nation - a structure that seems almost archaeological amidst the recent vogue for fallen utopias. But decaying though it may be, this concrete modernity in Indonesia's cities is by no means the picturesque relic of a bygone international- ism. It is the everyday built environment, still being refurbished, still humming with life. Thus are Bandung's colonial bungalows repurposed as factory outlets. The weary framework of Jakarta's Taman Ismail Marzuki, a public facility for modern culture inaugurated in 1968, is the subject neither of fond portraits nor of ideological ghost stories - it still functions as a rare and valued piece of public infrastructure.

This unfinished modernity has done nothing to limit ruangrupa's contemporary currency. For the dematerialisation of art, too, is an incomplete project, and the 'relational' turn, far from transcending it, has only upped the ante. As the artwork becomes activity (participation, social engagement, conviviality) the market moves to outflank it, at once celebrating the ephemeral and unreified spirit of the work, whilst perfecting its titration into parallel currencies. As a collective exhibiting internationally, whose core activity is the production and dissemination of knowledge rather than things, ruangrupa is hardly immune. Indeed, the collective seems to exemplify that merger of artist and curator so often mooted in the ballooning discourse on exhibition-making. In a recent edition of Manifesta Journal devoted to this subject, positions are staked around Walter Benjamin's 1934 lecture 'The Author as Producer'. We can hardly doubt the enduring relevance of this text in the post-industrial world, where museum may be likened to factory, and the mere prospect of collectivisation, as John Roberts points out, no longer distinguishes artist from curator. But these conditions are far from universal, and are by no means the manifest destiny of contemporary art in Asia. For Roberts, the curator unprepared to be an artist should step back into the wings and make way for those truly committed to thwarting art's instrumentalisation. Such a synthesis has the whiff of an undead Hegelianism about it: the 'artist-curator as producer' must finally take responsibility for his own philosophy of production, as Arthur Danto might have put it. But if anything, Southeast Asian artist-curatorship ought to be read against the grain of this telos. Even for the region's most conspicuous trailblazers (Apinan and Supangkat), the outcome was precisely the opposite: a renewed separation of roles.

However ruangrupa might seem to embody the disciplinary merger, then, in attributing to the group the form of a curatorship to come, with or without the italics, we run the risk of mistaking tactical moves for a strategic programme. And however appealing the image of their 'contemporaneity', the group should first be seen in another light, a light in which modernity and nation still matter, and instrumentality is not (yet) the arch-enemy of art; a light in which artists make artworks and curators curate, and it is possible to do both. Perhaps ruangrupa is more a spirit of curatorship - not limited to a single body, yet somehow tied to a place - that would defend the autonomy of artists, singular or plural, but not necessarily that of the artwork. For this spirit the audience, rather than the work of art, may be the ultimate object of curatorial care.

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Afterall - Who Cares a Lot? Ruangrupa as Curatorship

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Last year Southeast Asia hosted two significant media art shows, both daring to juxtapose recent work from the region with seminal collections from the First World. In 'Video, an Art, a History 1965-2010', the Singapore Art Museum (SAM) tentatively aired its nascent Southeast Asian collection alongside a roving blockbuster from the Centre Pompidou in Paris.

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https://www.documenta14.de/en/public-programs/

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The Parliament of Bodies, the Public Programs of documenta 14, emerged from the experience of the so-called long summer of migration in Europe, which revealed the simultaneous failure not only of modern representative democratic institutions but also of ethical practices of hospitality. The Parliament was in ruins. The real Parliament was on the streets, constituted by unrepresented and undocumented bodies resisting austerity measures and xenophobic policies.

The Parliament of Bodies acts against the individualization of bodies but also against the transformation of bodies into a mass, against the transformation of the public into a marketing target. Against essential origins, reified borders, and identity politics, the Parliament of Bodies proposes to act as a space for cultural activism, inventing new affects and creating synthetic alliances between different world struggles for sovereignty, recognition, and survival. Inspired by micropolitical self-organization, collaborative practices, radical pedagogy, and artistic experiments, the Parliament of Bodies is a critical device to queer both the ruins of democratic intuitions as well as the traditional formats of the exhibition and public programs. It brings together artists, activists, theorists, performers, workers, migrants, et cetera to experiment collectively on a radical transformation of the public sphere and the proliferation of new forms of subjectivity. The Parliament of Bodies is neither a bank nor a collection of data, neither "folk" nor a corporation.

In 1787, eleven friends founded the Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade in England, with the aim of informing the public about the treatment of enslaved Africans within England, in the colonies, and on plantations, campaigning in favor of a new law to abolish slave trade locally and oversees, and establishing areas in West Africa where Africans could live free of the risk of capture and sale into slavery. The members of the Society pursued these proposals vigorously by writing and publishing antislavery books, abolitionist prints, posters, and pamphlets and by organizing public lecture tours and theatrical displays in English towns and cities. A year later, following the same model of action, La Société des Amis des Noirs was founded in France. Organized as "societies of friends," both groups promoted the creation of social and friendly bonds between those who were considered legally and politically unequal. Two years later, in 1791, the revolt of slaves on the Caribbean island of Saint-Domingue developed into the first major antislavery revolution. Serving as a backdrop to the revolts of slaves within the colonial empires, the societies functioned as a countercultural public program to develop an epistemological, discursive, political, and poetic imagination alternative to the colonial regime.

At the turn of the last century, African thinker Achille Mbembe developed an urgent decolonial critique of Michel Foucault's concept of "governmentality," the process through which techniques of...

Public Programs

The Apatride Society of the Political Others:
Integrated World Capitalism and the Ithageneia Condition

Coordinated by: Max Jorge Hinderer Cruz, Nelli Kambouri, and Margarita Tsomou

In Greek the word most...

Public Programs

The Noospheric Society:
Rituals and Attempts to Transform Consciousness

Coordinated by Angelo Plessas

"As we keep gaining knowledge and wisdom from the cybersphere, at some point we will transform into...

Public Programs

Coordinated by Arnisa Zeqo

Je m'appelle Ulises
et toi comment t'appelles-tu?

The Society of Friends of Ulises Carrión takes the work and methods of the Mexican artist Ulises Carrión (1941-89) as...

Public Programs

The world needs cooperation. The crisis of the last ten years has been a crisis of trust: debts, loans, and derivatives are means by which capital produces political control in neoliberalism. It has been...

Public Programs

Coordinated by Ayse Gülec, Initiative 6. April, and Kassel postkolonial

On April 6, 2006, twenty-one year-old Halit Yozgat was killed in a family operated internet café in Kassel's Nordstadt. Halit...

Public Programs

You are invited to be part of the Parliament of Bodies documenta 14 public program, hosted in the Athens Municipality Arts Center at Parko Eleftherias in September 2016. What will happen here during ten days of programming is neither a conference nor an exhibition.

We have avoided conventional museological names that establish distinctions between talk and performance, theory and action, criticism and art. Instead, we invited forty-five participants to "exercise freedom" within the building, which, not long ago, served as the headquarters of the military police during the dictatorship years. We understand freedom, with Foucault, as neither an individual property nor a natural right, but rather as a practice. We drift in history. There is a space. There are some bodies. There are some voices. But what does it mean to be together, here, now? What can be done? Who and what are made visible? Whose voices can be heard and which remain silent? How can the public sphere be reorganized?

Your Neighbor's Son: The Making of a Torturer, Jørgen Flindt Pedersen and Erik Stephensen, Denmark, 1981, 52 min.
Film screening

by Angela Brouskou - Theatro Domatiou and MiniMaximum ImproVision

Cayeron en Guatemala
Cayeron en Honduras
Cayeron en Nicaragua
Cayeron en El Salvador
Cayeron en Panamá
Cayeron en Venezuela
Cayeron en Perú
Cayeron en Colombia
Cayeron en Uruguay
Cayeron en Paraguay
Cayeron en...

They Glow in the Dark, Panayotis Evangelidis, Greece, 2013, 69 min.
Film screening and discussion with director Panayotis Evangelidis...

An invitation to partake of the pleasures and perils of water. In collaborating with local artists, activists, musicians, sex workers, refugees, and other humans and non-humans.

Note: Please bring some...

This performance is inspired by all those people who at some point, in some place, in some way reacted to what was putting them down by posing thousands of questions. By all those who, if only for a brief...

The revolution in Rojava in western Kurdistan has been gaining international traction across leftist groups and organizations. Despite the immense socio-political gains and the colossal fundamental changes...

# Direnayol (#Resistayol), documentary by Rüzgâr Buşki, Turkey, 2016, 60 min.
Film premiere

A group of friends get together in Istanbul to make a film about the Turkish trans and sex worker activist Şevval...

Gizem Oruç aka 6zm is a musician, producer, and multimedia artist. After receiving a Masters in Chemistry at Boğaziçi University, Oruç started studying Sonic Arts at Istanbul Technical University...

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The Parliament of Bodies, the Public Programs of documenta 14, emerged from the experience of the so-called long summer of migration in Europe, which revealed the simultaneous failure not only of modern representative democratic institutions but also of ethical practices of hospitality. The Parliament was in ruins.

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ruangrupa ist die künstlerische Leitung der documenta fifteen. Die Arbeit des 2000 im indonesischen Jakarta gegründeten Kollektivs beruht auf einer ganzheitlichen sozialen, räumlichen und persönlichen Praxis, die stark mit der indonesischen Kultur verbunden ist, in der Freundschaft, Solidarität, Nachhaltigkeit und Gemeinschaft eine zentrale Bedeutung haben. „ruangrupa" bedeutet frei übersetzt „Kunstraum" oder „Raumform".

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documenta fifteen:Awaiting ruangrupa.A Performative Walk through Kassel, September 2021

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documenta fifteen:Awaiting ruangrupa.A Performative Walk through Kassel, September 2021

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https://muse.jhu.edu/article/851964/pdf

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ruangrupa and Adam Szymczyk moderated by Nora Sternfeld

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ruangrupa is the Artistic Direction of the fifteenth edition of documenta. The Jakarta-based artists' collective has built the foundation of their documenta fifteen on the core values and ideas of lumbung (Indonesian term for a communal rice barn). lumbung as an artistic and economic model is rooted in principles such as collectivity, communal resource sharing, and equal allocation, and is embodied in all parts of the collaboration and the exhibition.

lumbung members & artists

Towards documenta fifteen, ruangrupa invites community-oriented collectives, organizations, and institutions from around the world to practice lumbung with each other and work on new models of sustainability and collective practices of sharing.

This is a historical website. The imprint available here was valid on the date of the website's publication and is only kept in the original for archival purposes. Here you can get the imprint currently valid for this site and further information.

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documenta fifteen will take place from June 18 until September 25, 2022 in Kassel. The Jakarta-based artists' collective ruangrupa is the Artistic Direction.