16 February - 30 March 2008
City-wide contemporary art
event
All symposium podcasts
Session 1 (Thursday 28 February): Jan
Verwoert, with Diemantas Narkevicius.
Session 2 (Friday 29 February): Jan Verwoert
with Babak Afrassiabi and Irit Rogoff.
Session 3 (Friday 29 February): Becky Shaw,
Jennifer Johns and Annika Eriksson.
Session 3 (Friday 29 February): Breakout
session with Nasrin Tabatabai and Babak Afrassiabi.
Session 3 (Friday 29 February):Breakout
session with Jeanine Griffin and Katy Woods.
Plenary (Friday 29 February)
Speakers Biogs
Session 1: Thursday 28 February, 3pm
- 5pm
Can we rediscover latent potentials in the exhausted conflicts and promises of modernism?
Programmed & chaired by Jan Verwoert. Speakers: Nikolaus Hirsch, Deimantas Narkevicius.
Jan Verwoert is a Berlin-based critic and art historian. He is a contributing editor of Frieze and writes for various publications including Frieze, Afterall and Metropolis M. He teaches at the Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam. His book Bas Jan Ader — In Search of the Miraculous was published in 2006 by Afterall Books/MIT Press. Over the last 18 months ha has been working with Sheffield Contemporary Art Forum on the ART SHEFFIELD 08 festival for which he wrote the text which provides a conceptual framework for the event and co-curated the city-wide exhibition.
Nikolaus Hirsch is an architect based in Frankfurt am Main, who teaches at the Architectural Association in London and at UPenn in Philadelphia. His work includes the internationally acclaimed Dresden Synagogue, the Hinzert Document Center, the European Kunsthalle in Cologne and United Nations Plaza (with Anton Vidokle) in Berlin. He has curated ErsatzStadt: Repräsentationen des Urbanen at the Berlin Volksbühne. His work has been awarded a number of prizes, including the World Architecture Award 2002, and has been shown in exhibitions such as New German Architecture in Berlin, Utopia Station at the Venice Biennial and Can Buildings Curate, AA London/Storefront Gallery in New York. He is currently working with Raqs Media Collective in a project for Manifesta 7.
Deimantas Narkevicius has become an internationally known film and video artist, since he represented Lithuania at the 49th Venice Biennale in 2001. On the surface, his films seem to reflect the communist experience in Lithuania, but in fact they go far beyond. Narkevicius explores the perception of history, which can be modified by ideologies and utopias, as well as the social processes by identifying the existential interconnection of his films' protagonists with their urban and economic environment. In order to reflect these links, different cinematographic techniques and narrative procedures overlap in his films. In his art he wants to identify places and elaborate their specific structures.
He has recently shown his work at Skulptur Projekte Münster 07, The Slovenian Pavilion, Venice Biennial, 2007, Prague Biennale 3, 2007 and has had recent solo shows at Index, Stockholm, Mücsarnok Kunsthalle, Budapest, Secession, Vienna and DAAD Galerie, Berlin. He is based in Vilnius, Lithuania.
In his presentation Deimantas Narkevicius will talk about several of his film and and photographic works, including "Disappearance of a tribe", "Once in the XX century", which is the continuation series of work examining the period of radical social experiment that took place in Soviet Europe in the post war period.
Session 1 will be followed by a screening of his work Energy Lithuania at 5.45pm (on Thursday 28 Feb)
Session 2: Friday 29 February, 10am – 12 noon
Revolution & Exhaustion
Programmed & chaired by Jan Verwoert. Speakers: Babak Afrassiabi & Irit Rogoff
Jan Verwoert (Chair)
Jan Verwoert is a Berlin-based critic and art historian. He is a contributing editor of Frieze and writes for various publications including Frieze, Afterall and Metropolis M. He teaches at the Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam. His book Bas Jan Ader — In Search of the Miraculous was published in 2006 by Afterall Books/MIT Press. Over the last 18 months ha has been working with Sheffield Contemporary Art Forum on the ART SHEFFIELD 08 festival for which he wrote the text which provides a conceptual framework for the event and co-curated the city-wide exhibition.
Babak Afrassiabi
A place of eventuality - a reading of Tehran University's forecourt
After the revolution, when the irregular and the extraconstitutional have already given way to a regulated life, are there any remainders of that revolution in the city...? While the revolution was still being fought in the streets of Tehran in 1978, Tehran University was already re-appropriated into the locale of the revolutionary discourse – a discourse that came to define much of public life, up until today. But one spot that almost entirely escaped this re-appropriation is the forecourt of the university. Since the revolution, the forecourt has remained to be the stage for negotiations between students and the state police, characterized by political headway and retreat, into or from the street and the university. What makes the forecourt bear such encounters is its unique urban layout characterized by a spatial ambivalence in relation to both the university and the city; being neither a part of one nor the other. In time the forecourt has come to signify both the postponement and inevitability of minor revolutions. It is its very spatial ambiguity that provides a disposition for revolt, but also an eventual presence on the streets.
Babak Afrassiabi is an artist living in Rotterdam and working both in Tehran and Rotterdam. He collaborates with Nasrin Tabatabai to publish the journal Pages - a bilingual (Farsi/English) periodical, pursuing an exchange between Iranian and international authors and artists with critical views on art, culture, urbanism and social issues. (see session 3)
Irit Rogoff
Temporalities of Political Exhaustion
In inhabiting long term and chronically unresolved political conflicts, such as the one that has been ongoing between Israel and Palestine, we come to moments of total exhaustion. This sense of exhaustion derives from spent energies, disappointed good intentions, numerous conflict related deprivations on both sides, the utilisation of bankrupt models of political analysis, the inability to foresee a constructive future strategy and numerous other dimensions of living out a long term conflict.
At these moments of political exhaustion, we might actually exit a mode that seeks resolution and enter another temporality which is one of 'inhabitation'. In this state we move beyond 'criticism' of regimes and players and intentions and from 'critique' of the underlying political and ideological structures that have captured and seized the conflict and continue to hold it ransom to their logics, and towards 'criticality' - a condition in which we both see through the conditions of our lives while continuing to live out their difficulties. What do the politics of criticality , so much less directed and goal oriented than political resolutions, have to offer to the exhausted?
Irit Rogoff is a writer, theorist and curator who works at the intersections of the critical, the political and contemporary artistic practices. Irit Rogoff is Professor of Visual Culture at Goldsmiths College, London University and was Director of "Translating the Image - Cross Cultural Contemporary Arts" (AHRC Research Project 2001-2006) from which 2 volumes will be published by Koenig Verlag in 2008. She is currently heading the PH.D program Curatorial/Knowledge at Goldsmiths. She is the author of "Terra Infirma - Geography's Visual Culture" (Routledge 2001). Her upcoming books "Unbounded" and "Looking Away - Participating Singularities - Ontological Communities" will both be published in 2008. Recent curatorial projects include "De-Regulation with the work of Kutlug Ataman" (Antwerp 06, Herzylia 06, Berlin 08); "Academy - Learning from the Museum" (Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven 2006) and "SUMMIT: Non-aligned Initiatives In Education Culture" (Berlin 2007).
Session 3: 1pm – 5.00pm
On the Circulation of Artistic Labour: Performing
the local and distributing the International and vice versa.
Programmed by Sheffield Contemporary Art Forum and chaired by Becky Shaw. Speakers: Jennifer Johns & Annika Eriksson. Break Out sessions
speakers: Nasrin Tabatabai and Babak Afrassiabi, Stephen Beddoe & Russell
Martin (ArtQuest), Jeanine Griffin (SCAF) and Katy Woods, Cylena Simonds (Iniva)
Becky Shaw is an artist, making work that explores the relationship between objects and people. Since 1995 she has devised live, photographic, sculptural and written responses to large organisations including schools, universities, workplaces, public housing centres, hospitals and galleries. Current works are less responsive to place, focusing more on objects that move through space via production. This includes 'reverse engineering' a vodka bottle mould (initiated on a residency in S06), and an investigation of the interweaving of human and material life in an aggregate floor tile (for Firstsite Newsite 08). In 1998 she received a doctorate, and since then has continued to work across academic and art production. Between 2000 and 2006 Becky was co-director of Static Gallery, Liverpool, an organisation focused upon energising critical thinking in the city. She is currently a visiting lecturer at Sheffield Hallam University.
Dr Jennifer Johns, lecturer in Human Geography, University of Liverpool
Jennifer Johns is a Lecturer in Economic Geography at the University of Liverpool. Her research interests are broadly concerned with the unevenness of economic activity across space and processes of globalisation. She adopts network approaches to economic development and previous research has two interrelated strands: global production networks and local economic development, and the geographies of local and transnational labour markets. Specific areas of research include creative industries and the geographies of temporary staffing. Her research on creative industries includes PhD research on Manchester’s film and television industry which traced the connections between firms and individuals to reveal the inherent power relations within and between production stages that underpin the industry. Jennifer’s research on the video games industry formed part of a larger research project on global production networks and involved mapping the structure of the industry at the global scale. To date, her primary research has been conducted across the UK, Western Europe, Central and Eastern Europe, North America and Asia Pacific.
Annika Eriksson, artist in AS08 – performing the local and distributing the international and vice versa – a personal perspective
In her work Annika Eriksson creates situations in which specific groups of people are invited to perform an activity that represents their work or special interests. She, for instance, worked with the Copenhagen and Stockholm postman orchestra in 1996 whom she asked to play the song Sour Times by Portishead. The videos of their performances resemble a group portrait in motion. Eriksson created similarly dynamic, time-based portraits of people at their workplace. For example, the entire staff of the 2002 Sao Paolo Biennial, was asked to introduce themselves to camera, one after another, and then join the slowly growing line-up of workers.
By purposefully, without comment, reducing the framework for a group portrait to its most basic form, Eriksson’s works raises the question of how communities today constitute their identity.
For Art Sheffield 08 Eriksson will create a new work ‘Maximum Happiness’ in which she has the facade of the Park Hill housing estate illuminated by floodlights for one night. Filmed documentation of the event will be on display at Millennium Galleries.
Nasrin Tabatabai and Babak Afrassiabi
Presentation of Pages Project
Pages began its activities in February 2004 by publishing a bilingual (Farsi/English) periodical, pursuing an exchange between Iranian and international authors and artists with critical views on art, culture, urbanism and social issues.
Soon after publishing the second issue of the magazine, Pages began to develop collaborative projects with practitioners in different cultural fields. Its activities transcended the magazine format into other layouts, these may be installation works, video essays, workshops and presentations. As supplements to the magazine, the projects were often accompanied by publications such as a newspaper, posters, booklets etc.
Pages is interested in those cultural productions that communicate the specific conditions and circumstances in which they are produced, those socio-political conditions against which an artistic production is inevitably read as a discourse. In particular through a series of projects, Pages tries to examine the possibilities of interaction and juxtaposition of various local discourses and conditions. As such Pages constantly searches for ways to surpass predefined and geographically bound discourse of subjectivity and locality
Pages bilingual magazine already forces Pages into constant rethinking of its position within specific social and political contexts. In effect this seems to reassert a certain unpredictability into the pages of the magazine. Pages tries to constantly point to those intricacies and dissonances within local currents that give way to alternative chains of meanings, relations and coincidences.
Nasrin and Babak are artists living in Rotterdam and working both in Tehran and Rotterdam. Nasrin’s piece ‘Passage’ is presented in Millennium Galleries as part of Art Sheffield 08
www.pagesmagazine.net
Stephen Beddoe & Russell Martin (Artquest)
Artelier Project – international studio exchanges - Why, What, How
Artelier will be a user-driven, international temporary studio exchange website provided by Artquest to compliment our existing international activities.
Responding to a lack of opportunities for visual artist and craftspeople to engage in international exchange, dialogue and networking Artelier will be available to practitioners at all stages of their careers.
Through this new facility artists will be able to organise studio and flat swaps with artists nationally and internationally, developing peer-to-peer opportunities and intercultural dialogue. Artists developing these new artistic opportunities and network swill then also be able to share their experience and working practices with others making bespoke recommendations and offering useful professional and personal contact all over the world.
Stephen Beddoe joined University of the Arts London in 2001 to develop, launch and lead Artquest, the Arts council of England funded advice and information service for London visual artists and craftspeople. Since 2005 Stephen has also been a Specialist Advisor (Visual Arts) to the Scottish Arts Council and is a Trustee of Space Studios and a non-executive Director of Creative Capital.
Russell Martin is one of Artquest's Programme Co-ordinators as well as a practicing London-based visual artist and writer. Past projects include co-directing HÔTEL BELLVILLE, a Waterloo-based artist led space, and the Speakeasy peer-mentoring discussion group for London-based practitioners. Since 2005 Russell has co-directed and programmed Rational Rec, an interdisciplinary arts event held monthly at Bethnal Green Working Men’s Club which opened its third season in November 2007. Artelier will be launched in Spring 2008
www.artquest.org.uk
Jeanine Griffin (programme director at SCAF) and Katy Woods - AS08 & Sheffield Pavilion – supporting and presenting local artists in international contexts
Jeanine Griffin is Curator/Projects Manager at Site Gallery and Manager of Sheffield Contemporary Art Forum and the artistic programme of the ART SHEFFIELD 08 festival. She ran the ART SHEFFIELD 03 and 05 festivals as well as ART SHEFFIELD 08: Yes, No & Other Options. She recently edited and managed The Sheffield Pavilion and co-edited (with Steve Dutton) an AN magazine research paper on Biennials and City-wide Events.
Sheffield Contemporary Art Forum (SCAF) is a not-for-profit company working to further the presence and awareness of contemporary art in Sheffield through joint programming, audience development and profile raising activities. The directors of the company are representatives of BLOC studios, Sheffield Galleries & Museums Trust, Sheffield Hallam University, Site Gallery, S1 Project, Yorkshire ArtSpace Society and independent artists.
Sheffield Pavilion (Summer 2007) was a project designed to take advantage of a harmonic convergence of super exhibitions – the Venice Biennale, Documenta XII and Skulptur Projekte Münster. This nexus of projects falling together(an event which only occurs once every 10 years) offered a unique opportunity to symbiotically present the work of Sheffield based artists and promote the contemporary art activity taking place in Sheffield in an international context. Therefore, the aim for this project was that it would act for a portal to contemporary art in Sheffield, representing artist’ work, practice and methodology as a vital part of the city and making Sheffield-based artists more visible to an international network.
Katy Woods graduated from the MA in Fine Art at Sheffield Hallam University in 2006. She has exhibited in national and international groups shows and screenings and is taking part in the LUX Associate Artists Programme, London. Her work looks at slippages, blips, ruptures and gaps in the seamless flow of everyday life, considering imagery, places and occurrences that are easily passed by, invisible, unnoticed, overlooked or quickly forgotten. She was invited to take part in both The Sheffield Pavilion and Art Sheffield 08 and her newly commissioned work 'Sailing Dinghy Hawk 20 Passing Lookout on Passage from Gull Rock Towards Falmouth, Gull Rock is Starting to Disappear in the Mist' will be shown at Sylvester Space.
Cylena Simonds, curator at Iniva (Institute of International Visual Arts), London – States of Exchange: Artists from Cuba - supporting and presenting international artists in local contexts.
Iniva is a leading UK contemporary visual arts organisation which creates exhibitions, publications multimedia, education and research projects. Iniva was established in 1994 to address an imbalance in the representation of culturally diverse artists, curators and writers. Iniva aims to bring the work of artists from culturally diverse backgrounds to the attention of the widest possible public. Anchored in the diversity of contemporary British culture and society, Iniva engages with culturally diverse practices and ideas, both local and global.
In 2004 Iniva published ‘Changing States’ which charts a decade of artistic programming at Iniva in the context of global economics and local politics. In October Iniva relocated to their newly built premises Rivington Place in London.
Cylena Simonds is co-curator of States of Exchange: artists from Cuba,
‘At a time when borderless communication is assumed to be the global standard and economic powers no longer adhere to old boundaries of East and West, Cuba is a country caught in flux. With two legal currencies (the Cuban Peso and Cuban convertible Peso) and growing divisions between those who have access to resources from beyond the island and those who don’t, the residents of Cuba have become experts an negotiating exchange between each other as well as with the rest of the work’.
This group show focuses on six artists living and working in Cuba today. Cylena will talk about the details of the project, including the professional development support given to the artists when they visited the UK.
Cylena Simonds is a curator and writer who curates and implements Iniva's exhibitions programme, including off-site and public art projects. She also works with institutional partners and other curators to facilitate Iniva's collaborative exhibition projects. Originally from USA, Simonds moved to the UK ten years ago. Simonds has a BFA in Film and Photography from the School of Arts Institute of Chicago, a MA in the Social History of Art from Leeds University, and was a curatorial fellow at the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program.
www.iniva.org