Saturday 24 October 2009, 09.30–17.30
The 28th State
European Borders in an Age of Anxiety
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Black Pig City
Bunker Lotus 2005 © Black Pig City |
‘The 28th State,’ seeks to explore how cultural practitioners in Europe are engaging with the idea of borders – both literally and metaphorically. What is the role of art in framing visions of contemporary / future Europe? How are practitioners engaging with the idea of borders when much of contemporary practice is peripatetic? What do terms like ‘cross-cultural’ or ‘trans-national’ mean now? How will Diasporic experiences affect the Europe we are creating?
This one-day, practice-led conference aims to explore these key ideas through presentations, conversations and interventions by a range of artists, designers and thinkers from different parts of the EU. It will encourage dialogue and debate, as well as encouraging new thinking around one of the most pressing issues facing contemporary Europe.
‘The 28th State: European borders in an Age of Anxiety’ is organised as part of Chelsea Programme’s ‘Borderline’ season, in partnership with Tate Britain, and with the support of City Inn Westminster.
Programme:
9.30 – 10.00 Registration
10.00 – 10.05 Welcome by Paul Goodwin, Cross Cultural Curator, Tate Britain
10.05 – 10.15 Introduction to conference and Raimi Gbadamosi, Chair, by Sonya Dyer
10.15 – 11.00 Keynote 1: Shaheen Merali
11.00 – 11.35 Margareta Kern – On being a guest (or when histories become stories and stories histories)
11.35 – 11.50 Break: tea/coffee and biscuits
11.50 – 12.25 European Alternatives
12.25 – 13.00 Metahaven
13.00 – 14.00 Lunch (not included)
14.00 – 14.45 Keynote 2: Elvira Djangali – Making Borders Mist (Or how to keep out being in a place of memory)
14.45 – 15.20 Emilia Telese
15.20 – 15.40 Break: tea/coffee and biscuits
15.40 – 16.25 Paula Roush and Ines Amado in conversation with Lucia Marques – Participatory Architectures (archive, memory, revolution)
16.25 – 17.00 Reflection/ open discussion
17.00 – 17.30 Continued conversation over drinks in the foyer
About Borderline
Many parts of the EU are undergoing a period of rapid population change due to non-European migration, and migration from Eastern Europe, as well as continued prejudice against Romany / Traveller communities.
We are also witnessing the mainstreaming of far-right politics, as a reflection of unease amongst sections of the wider population.
Through ‘Borderline,’ Chelsea Programme aims to create a space for public art projects, web content and public discourse concerning the challenges being faced by artists wishing to propose alternative visions of contemporary Europe.
For further information, please visit – http://borderlineproject.org.uk/
Chelsea Programme - http://cltad.arts.ac.uk/users/chelseaprogblog/
Speaker info:
Keynote Speakers:
Shaheen Merali
The images resulting from the interventions at the Tate galleries provide an intriguing way by which to consider and understand many such performances by Cai Yuan and JJ Xi, also known as Madforreal. The primary source of their recorded images is derived from their public performance, captured haphazardly on clandestine cameras which have often been smuggled into institutional spaces, where their action on monuments and guarded cultural artefacts is recorded and then distributed using existing networks including journalism and social networks.
Imagine a scenario - an ordinary king-size bed, soiled and bounded by condoms and the remnants of a drug-induced life, further tinged with the despair of an attempted suicide, was suddenly and further defaced by two Chinese artists from the Diaspora, who decided to use this piece as a trampoline.
Cai Yuan and JJ Xi’s selective and impertinent act of jumping on the infamous Young British Artist Tracey Emin’s My bed, which had already received an affirmed critical reception for the Turner Prize entry, was an act of palimpsest expediency and one in which the artists took advantage of the situation to vent their particular concerns.
There are a number of interesting details about the way that the “British,” as represented by the security guards and press, reacted to the intervention. Primarily, the guards believing that Cai Yuan and JJ Xi were Kung-Fu experts, decided to take their time in disarming the intervention and secondly, their shirtless antics were seen purely as a protest “to call attention to the presence of Chinese artists in the UK..... As well as to expose the sensationalism of contemporary British art and its press”.
The talk will examine their work as marking the paradigms of control exerted by a sense of programmed Britishness - if not a shared European heritage which can assist in highlighting the cultural contest between the superannuation of race, postmodernit(ies) and economic powers (5) which has been the mocking manner in which so much of the new millennium can be contextualized.
Elvira Djangali
Making Borders Mist
(Or how to keep our being in a place of memory)
This isn’t the first time I read through bell hooks’ belonging, it won’t be the last, since finding a place to belong remains an ongoing issue for someone of my origin.
Being black and growing up in Europe, one of the most common questions I am asked is ‘where do you come from?’ That ‘innocent’ question established a fundamental distinction between the respondent and the speaker; the latter considers that the first does not come from the same place than they come from. Here, issues of belonging are challenged. The speaker performs an exercise, in which they are on the ‘right’ side of a virtual and abstract border, with the respondent on the wrong side. In this moment, the speaker is the citizen; and, the respondent becomes, the other, the outsider, the foreigner, the stranger.
This paper explores, through some curatorial and artistic projects, strategies that aim to challenge those discriminatory positions. Showing that sometimes holding an identity in transition it is the only way to cross a border and keep what/who we are, safe.
Speakers:
European Alternatives will present a theoretical/political reflection on the question of borders in the form of a story about the 28th state, intermingled with theatrical interventions and utopian speculation as a means of encouraging a open discussion.
Margareta Kern
On being a guest (or when histories become stories and stories histories)
As part of my recent art residency in Berlin, I researched an organised mass labour migration from the socialist Yugoslavia to the capitalist West Germany, which took place in the late 1960s. The labour migrants were called ‘Gastarbeiter’ or ‘guest workers’, alluding to their temporary stay. Many of these temporary workers never returned home. Through personal interviews with those who stayed in Berlin, and research into the specific historical and political contexts of the time, a narrative began to emerge, filled with tension between a yearning for home, an aspiration for material and social wellbeing and precarious immigration laws and policies, all connected by the ever-changing needs of the labour market. Through the format of ‘live visual collage’, I intend to explore this tension, as well as the construction of narratives, its role in re-creating and re-covering (hi)stories and memories and its place in the construction of contemporary collective social and political identities and myths.
http://guestworkerberlin.blogspot.com/
Paula Roush & Ines Amado in conversation with Lucia Marques
Participatory Architectures (archive, memory, revolution)
Participatory Architectures presents the results of the first field trip to Meia Praia, Algarve, for an investigative art
project focused on the politics of space and mobility in the Southern Europe. It unfolds the architectural archive of the
SAAL- the housing programme initiated after the Portuguese revolution of 1974- in the context of the touristic coastline of
the European Union.
The quarter 25th April, made out of 41 houses built collectively by the so-called Índios (Indigenous) of Meia Praia is a radical experiment in participatory architecture, articulating the strong association between the local community and
the littoral, a linkage that transformed the quarter into the vulnerable target of a spatial segregation campaign since the
extinction of the SAAL programme in 1976.
The first phase of the Participatory Architectures project, is a cumulative work tracing the historic migration route of the
Índios of Meia Praia, the SAAL archives, and the memory of the site in the context of current media representations of the case. The presentation
will discuss the project within an ethics of artistic intervention, exploring technological platforms and an architectural
re-enactment that mobilises archives and collective memory for an installation at the Parade Ground in January 2010.
Metahaven
Vinca Kruk will present Metahaven’s explorations into the discrepancy between Europe’s different types of self-image and identity, the significance of the Euro-‘prefix’ and the ‘EU’ suffix, and the possible consequences of these observations for design, in and about Europe.
Emilia Telese
Emilia’s contribution will focus on the international ‘No Borders’ movement and the contrast between the different levels of openness / censorship and free information available between different states in Europe. She will discuss how these reflections led to the creation of the programme Radio Sophia, her independent UK radio programme on Italian underground culture. She will also talk about Dreamland, her art installation in collaboration with Isidro Lopez Aparicio at the Tifariti Art Festival, taking place in the controversial border of the Liberated Territories of Western Sahara.
Speaker biographies:
Shaheen Merali is both a curator and writer, currently based in London and also Berlin, where he was the Head of Exhibitions, Film and New Media at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt from 2003 to 2008, curating several exhibitions including The Black Atlantic; Dreams and Trauma, Moving images and the Promised Lands; and Re-Imagining Asia, One Thousand years of Separation.
In 2006, he was invited to be the co-curator of the 6th Gwangju Biennale, Korea.
Recent exhibitions ( 2009 ) include The Dark Science of Five Continents, (BMB Gallery, Mumbai) and In the absence of Iran (Brot Fabrik, Vienna). In February 2009, he curated Indian Popular culture (and beyond):The Untold (the rise of) Schisms, at Alcala 31 in Madrid, accompanied by a publication that traces the rise of the political right within popular Indian culture and its neighbouring regions.
Merali has edited several publications, including Far Near Distance, Contemporary Positions for Iranian Artists (2004); Spaces and Shadows, Contemporary Art from Southeast Asia and About Beauty (2005): New York-States of Mind and Re-Imagining Asia (Saqi Books 2007) and the seminal Everywhere is War (and rumours of war) for BodhiMumbai, India. (2008)
Elvira Dyangani Ose (1974, Spain / Equatorial Guinea) is a Curator of Contemporary Art and Graduate Student in History of Art and Visual Studies at Cornell University, New York.
Graduated in History of Art, Elvira holds a Master in Theory and History of Architecture by the ETSAB, at Universtat Politècnica de Catalunya, Spain. She is a founding member of the Laboratory for Oral Resources in Equatorial Guinea, an independent research group on Equatorial Guinea oral tradition studies, and also member of the research group Afroeuropeans at the University of León, Spain.
As a freelance curator she developed several interdisciplinary projects, focusing on recovering collective memories, interventions in public space or urban ethnography, most significantly, Authentic Fiction, Attempt to Exhaust an African Place, Terrain Vague o Africalls? As a specialist in contemporary African art, she has been a guest professor at the University of Barcelona, and invited to participate in conferences, lectures and cycles addressing contemporary African artistic productions and cultures. She has contributed to international magazines as Nka Journal of Contemporary African Art and Atlantica Revista de Arte y Pensamiento.
In the last three years she curated various exhibitions such as Olvida quién soy / Erase me from who I am, or Tres scenarios/Three scenarios, both of which took place while she was curator at the Centro Atlántico de Arte Moderno, CAAM, Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain. Recently, she worked as curator at the Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo, Seville, Spain. Currently, she is general curator of Arte inVisible an artistic program of the AECID, the Spanish Agency for International Development Cooperation, at ARCO, the International Contemporary Art Fair in Madrid, Spain, in its editions 2009 and 2010.
Elvira Dyangani Ose is member of the Advisory Committees at the Casa Africa and the Centro Atlántico de Arte Moderno, CAAM, both institutions in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain.
European Alternatives is an independent cultural and political organisation devoted to promoting intellectual and artistic engagement with the idea and possibility of a new transnational politics and art.
Based in London, Paris, and Bologna, European Alternatives publishes a monthly magazine, Europa, organises conferences, workshops, and artistic projects throughout Europe and in China and Saudi Arabia, and produces research.
Dr Raimi Gbadamosi (Chair) is an artist, curator and writer who is interested in questions of social politics and cultural difference. He was born in 1965 and earned his PhD in Fine Art at Slade School of Art. In addition to being published in a number of academic journals, like Third Text, Gbadamosi has a number of book titles to his credit including Incredulous, Ordinary people, Extraordinary People and Contents. He curated When in Rome at Lewishham Art House in 2002 and co-curated Homelands at Spacex in 2004. Gbadamosi’s art work has been exhibited widely including at the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds, and Shrine at Market Gallery, Glasgow. Today he is based in London where he is an honorary research fellow at Slade School of Fine Art.
Margareta Kern (b. 1974, Croatia/Bosnia-Herzegovina) is a London based visual artist whose works explore ways in which the socio-political currents influence personal spaces and narratives. A graduate of Goldsmiths College (1998) and currently a Masters student at UCL (School of Slavonic and East European Studies/ Anthropology) Kern has shown extensively internationally and nationally, including the Tate Modern, Impressions Gallery Bradford and HDLU gallery Zagreb; receiving support and awards for her work from numerous bodies including the National Media Museum, the Arts Council England and most recently by the British Council for the residency in Berlin which forms part of the wider group exhibition project Journeys With No Return. Kern’s touring solo exhibition ‘Clothes for Living & Dying’ is currently at the Kunstverein Worms, Germany.
Paula Roush (Portugal/UK) works in social media contexts, including performative installation and participatory intervention. She teaches and researches digital humanities at the London South Bank University and theory in the MA in Art and Media Practice MA at the University of Westminster.
www.msdm.org.uk/
Ines Amado (Portugal) is a Visual Artist, Researcher, Academic and Curator based in England.
Her work spans several media, sculpture, video, site-specific installation, and performance with a particular interest in interdisciplinary, collaboration and participatory projects through a process of dialogue, interaction and exchange.
She is the founder and organizer of Bread Matters an intercultural platform of discussion, debate, exchange and exhibition, which has travelled to Lublin Poland, Museum of Water Lisbon Portugal and was part of the programme Cork European Capital of Culture in 2005.
Amado has held one person shows in Portugal, Norway, Italy, England, Poland, Belgium and the USA. She is also a part time Lecturer at De Montfort University in Leicester, UK.
Lúcia Marques is a contemporary art independent curator.
Born in Lisbon (1974), where she lives and works, she graduated in Art History and is finishing her MA on Curatorial Studies at the Faculty of Visual Arts (University of Lisboa/Gulbenkian Foundation) about the impact of migratory flows on visual arts.
She has regularly published her texts in newspapers, magazines and catalogues, and, in 2001-2006, was part of the team of the Institute of Arts of the Portuguese Ministry of Culture. Her teaching experience has been focused on photography’s history and in contemporary curatorial practices.
She was the curator of the visual arts programme in Brussels for the Portuguese Presidency of the EU (July – December 2007) and curated an international tour of “Displacements” project (July 2008 – May 2009) for the cultural centres of Camões Institute in S. Tomé (S. Tomé e Príncipe), Maputo (Mozambique), Brasília (Brazil), Luanda (Angola) and Praia (Cape Vert).
She is presently coordinating the INOVART Programe (International Internships in Cultural and Artistic domains), an initiative of the DGARTES/Portuguese Ministry of Culture.
Metahaven (Vinca Kruk, Daniel van der Velden, Gon Zifroni) is a design studio based in Amsterdam and Brussels, that explores the ruptures in the fields of design, research and geopolitics. They operate with strategies of fiction and allegory to revise and mobilize the role of corporate identity and aesthetics in projections of political and economic power. They stage their speculative inquiries in highly visual and conceptually dense assemblages, which can take shape on the printed page, as a client brief, in ephemera like stamps, posters and architecture or take on the form of exhibitions, lectures and debates.
Publications include White Night. Before A Manifesto (2007) and Uncorporate Identity: Emblem and Void with Lars Müller Publishers, out in November 2009 .
Emilia Telese (b.Italy 1973) is an artist and writer based in Sussex.
Emilia graduated in painting from the Fine Arts Academy in Florence in 1996, following studies in literature and philosophy.
Emilia has exhibited worldwide since 1994, presenting work in the New Forest Pavilion at the Venice Biennale (Italy 2005), Brighton Jubilee Library (UK 2007) Ars Electronica (Austria, 1999, 2003), ZKM (Germany 2002), Chashama (NYC, USA 2004), Centro Cultural Telemar (Rio De Janeiro, 2005), Manege (St Petersburg 2000), Leeds City Gallery (UK 2006), ArtSway(New Forest 2002, 2003) and the Freud Museum (London 2006).
Her practice spans several art forms, including interactive and body-responsive technology, film and live art, installation, literature and public art. Her work often involves site-specific interventions in non-conventional spaces.
During her career, she has slept in the New Forest; been chased by paparazzi in Venice; landed by helicopter in a Danish football field; changed her brainwave frequencies in the former stables of the Tzar of Russia in St Petersburg; shut herself in a suitcase in Southend; eaten rosaries in Sigmund Freud’s home; and built Brighton’s Royal Pavilion out of ten tons of rice.
Emilia founded the Edible Construction Company in 2006 with Chris Biddlecombe and Guyan Porter, an artist-led initiative creating socially engaged art in the public realm. She is also a founding member of the international artist group The Global Collective and the Brighton based writing and contemporary art initiative The Doomsbury Set. She produces and presents Radio Sophia, a bilingual radio programme in Italian and English language on Brighton community radio Radio Reverb FM.
Emilia Telese is an Artsway Associate and Artists' Networks Coordinator for a-n The Artists' Information Company and works with UK and international arts organisations as an independent artists' trainer specialising in professional development advice for artists.
Organised in partnership with Chelsea Programme, Chelsea College of Art & Design, supported by Arts Council England and City
Inn Westminster.
Tate Britain
Auditorium and Clore Gallery Foyer
£25 (£15 concessions), booking recommended
Price includes drinks afterwards
£25 (£15 concessions), booking recommended
Price includes drinks afterwards
