Saturday 21 November 2009, 14.00–17.00

This panel discussion gathers thinkers, artists and curators to discuss the role played by art in revolutionary processes around the world. How the idea of revolution - so dear to radical political discourse - has fuelled human imagination throughout time, shaping its visual nightmares and dreams. 

Yet, revolution itself often seems to be just one commodity amongst many. The event traces the visual language of revolution from France in 1789, via Eastern Europe and the bloody failure of Tiananmen Square in 1989, to revolutionary artistic practices today, including models of resistance that articulate the desire for radical political change.

14.00 Welcome by Marko Daniel, Curator of Public Programmes

14.05 Introduction by Magda Raczynska, Head of Literature, Polish Cultural Institute

14.10 David Crowley Spectres of October

'October' was represented as an elixir which would stimulate the revolution around the world. Yet within months, Soviet Russia set about reifying this spirit in a set of conventions and rituals played out on its public stages. By the 1960s it seemed as if 'revolution' was an entropic concept in the Soviet Union, full of inflated symbolism but drained of vital meaning. October was not, however, over. 

In this short talk, David Crowley will plot its traces in art, film and in action on the fiftieth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution in 1967, the eve of another set of revolutionary events and expressions of dissent in Paris, Warsaw, Prague and ...Moscow.

14.30 Grzegorz Klaman in conversation with Aneta Szylak

Grzegorz Klaman is one of the most influential and legendary artists of his generation in Poland, an art teacher and leader of the independent art movement in Gdansk. Since the beginning of his artistic practice in the mid 1980s Grzegorz Klaman, co-founder of Wyspa in Gdansk with Aneta Szylak, has employed the tension between the body, space/site and the political. He pioneered context-related activities in Poland as well as activism through establishing independent structures for production and presentation of contemporary art. His practice addresses art and activism in the field of cultural, social and political life as one. He will discuss the innovative and radical artistic positions that him and fellow artists helped create in Gdansk with Aneta Szylak Director of Wyspa Institute of Art. Aneta's exhibitions are characterised by a strong response towards cultural, political, social, architectural and institutional specificity. She has been involved in collaborations with Grzegorz Klaman for over a decade.

15.00 John Jordan On the Cowardice of Contemporary Art or Why too many Acts of Obedience might Terminate Life on Earth

From Gustave Courbet pulling down the Vendôme column during the 1871 Paris Commune to the Polish Orange Alternative's 1980's Polish 'Gnome' street happenings in defiance of marshal law, artists have been at the centre of engineering revolutionary forms. Often they have been some of the first to ferment the spaces of disobedience that allow a new culture to emerge.

Today however, at this bifurcation point of capitalism, most "political art" prefers to represent revolution rather than participate in radical social movements, fearing disobedience outside the cotton wool safety of the art world. My presentation looks at examples of artists who are blurring the line between art and revolution and creating new ways of conceptualising how art can ferment radical social change in what could be our last century.

15.20 Cai Yuan

The work of Mad for Real is directly informed by recent changes of Chinese history, from the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s to the Tiananmen 'incident' in 1989, up to the recent Beijing Olympics in 2008. Personal and collective memories are played out in their radical practice. 

Mad For Real's oeuvre has continually questioned the relationship of power to the individual. Using a position of resistance Cai and Xi have consistently produced work which is oppositional yet the warmth and humour of their work also acts to draw viewers in. Their works have acted radical gestures calling to mind notorious artists of earlier radical art movements but the historical, linguistic and political context of their practice is also informed specifically to their origins: the Chinese revolution.

15.40 Panel discussion with all the day's speakers chaired by Tim Beasley-Murray

16. 30 Q+A chaired by Tim Beasley-Murray

17.00 End of event

Tate Modern  Starr Auditorium
£12 (£10 concessions), booking recommended
includes wine reception

    

Speakers

Tim Beasley-Murray is Senior Lecturer in European Thought and Culture at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, UCL. He was born in the Congo. He studied Modern Languages (Czech, German and Russian) at Cambridge and, after a year at the ENS in Paris, joined SSEES in 1996 as Lecturer in Slovak Studies. His PhD was on conceptions of experience in Mikhail Bakhtin and Walter Benjamin. A revised version of this came out with Palgrave Macmillan in 2007. 

He has published on aesthetics, literature and political theory. Currently he is an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies, Freiburg University, where he is working on a research project on conceptions of speech and silence in political philosophy.

David Crowley is a historian with an interest in Eastern Europe who teaches at the Royal College of Art in London. He is the author of various books including Warsaw (Reaktion, 2003) and three volumes co-edited with Susan Reid: Style and Socialism, Modernity and Material Culture in Post-War Eastern Europe (2000); Socialist Spaces. Sites of Everyday Life in the Eastern Bloc (2003) and Pleasures in Socialism. Leisure and Luxury in the Bloc (forthcoming). 

He was consultant curator of "Cold War Modern: Design 1945-1970" which was exhibited at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London in 2008 (and co-author of the accompanying book). He is currently writing a book on the intertwined histories of photography and communism.

John Jordan is a professional amateur, sometimes he organises direct actions, from Reclaim the Streets to Climate Camp, the Clown Army to The Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination. Sometimes he writes"We Are Everywhere: the irresistible rise of global anti-capitalism" (Verso), sometimes he works on films The Take (with Naomi Klein). But he's always most happy balancing on the tightrope between art and activism.

Grzegorz Klaman, born in 1959, is one of the most influential and legendary artists of his generation in Poland, an art teacher and leader of independent art movement in Gdansk. He is a professor of the Academy of Fine Arts. He was a Fulbright Scholar in Florida Atlantic University in 2007 where he subsequently had a one-person exhibition at Schmidt Art Center. Recently his works were included in the exhibition Messiahs at Modem in Debrecen, and History of Violence at Haifa Art Museum and Chosen in Digital Art Lab Holon. Earlier group exhibitions include: In-Between, Chicago Cultural Center (2001), Lodz Biennale (2004), Dockwatchers (2005), Over and Over Again (2009).

His upcoming shows include a large presentation of his newest work at Wyspa Institute of Art in Gdansk and National Museum in Warsaw as well a the new commission at the Nobel Museum in Stockholm (all in 2010). The monograph of the artist edited by Kamila Wielebska including contributions from Dieter Roelstraete, Hadas Maor and Artur Zmijewski will be published in Spring 2010.

Magda Raczynska is a writer, sociologist and art theorist, interested in the interstices of art and politics. She has graduated from Sociology at Warsaw University (PhD dissertation on employee participation and the chances to democratise the sphere of work), and from Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths College (MA in Contemporary Art Theory, dissertation on the notions of singularity and body politics in the artistic practice of Joanna Rajkowska). 

She collaborates with the Wyspa Institute of Art, Ha!art Corporation, Krytyka Polityczna and the Obieg magazine. Currently works at the Polish Cultural Institute in London where she runs literature and conference program.

Aneta Szylak is co-founder and current director of Wyspa Institute of Art in the former Gdansk Shipyard premises, Poland, and Vice-President of the Wyspa Progress Foundation.

In 1998, Ms Szylak founded with Grzegorz Klaman the Laznia (Bathhouse) Centre for Contemporary Art and was its Director until Spring 2001. Her exhibitions include: Over and Over Again, 2009, Wroclaw Centennial Hall, Chosen in Digital Art Lab in Holon, Israel (with Galit Eilat),  Ewa Partum: The Legality of Space at Wyspa, 2006,  a group show You won't feel a thing: On Panic, Obsession, Rituality and Anaesthesia in Kunsthaus Dresden and  Artur Zmijewski: Selected Works at Wyspa (all in 2006). Dockwatchers, 2005, Wyspa, Palimpsest Museum 2004, I Lodz Biennale, Health & Safety, 2004, Wyspa, Architectures of Gender, 2003, SculptureCenter, New York, All You Need is Love, 2000, CCA Laznia.
Her writings have been published in Aprior Magazine, n.paradoxa, Art Journal, ArtKrush. Art Margins. 

In 2005, she was given the Jerzy Stajuda Award "for independent and uncompromising curatorial practice". She has lectured at many art institutions and universities, including New School University, Queens College and New York University, both in NYC, and Copenhagen University and worked as a guest professor at the Akademie der Bildende Kunste in Mainz, Germany. Since 2005 works collaboratively with artist Hiwa K. She is currently writing her PhD thesis at Goldsmiths College in London and Copenhagen Doctoral School Copenhagen University.

Cai Yuan, born in China in 1956, has been living and working in the United Kingdom since the 1980s. He studied at Nanjing College of Art, Chelsea College of Art and the Royal College of Art.  He started working as a performance duo with JJ Xi in the late nineties as Mad For Real. Since 2000, Mad for Real has performed and exhibited national and internationally. Their recent exhibitions include; Aircraft Carrier Project, Tokyo Gallery+BTAP, Beijing and English Lounge, Tang Contemporary, Beijing, Lilith Performance Studio.