A Nation of Art without a Future? Discussion

What is a nation? And what do we need to be considered part of a nation? This event aims to consider our identity as curators, as Italians, as Europeans in a precarious time, especially because of politics and economics.
We are living in hard times: both Ireland and Italy are suffering due to the global crisis and our governments are forced to cut funds to support culture. Thus the art system is in danger and a lot of people have decided to leave their own country to find other possibilities abroad. The “new emigration”, composed of graduates and highly educated people, art professionals, doctors, engineers, is changing an entire social system, especially in Italy.
Taking inspiration from the financial crisis and funding cuts, the event will focus on the reaction of artists to these issues, their interpretations of the causes and effects, and their strategies to address or overcome them.

Quoting Boris Groys, “artists today are using the same forms and processes around the world, even though they are using them in different cultural and political contexts. The context in which the work is produced is often an intrinsic dimension of the work itself. Works of art do not simply tell us about themselves, for they also allude to the context in which they can immediately be perceived as signs and symbols, and as information that tells the spectator about the particular conditions that exist in the area of the world they come from.”

As a consequence of that, some artists’ approach is to bring today’s economic and political decision-making models into serious question. Some artists’ works are detached from institutions and from the normal places of art, interacting directly with the public space. In our own practice as artists and curators, we sometimes assist with these alternative models of public action.
The project consists in a panel discussion moderated by Alessandra Saviotti and Marianna Liosi, involving one Italian and one Irish curator whose research
and practice is related to these issues. Through the discussion and the comparison between the Italian and Irish context, we are interested in highlighting how artists use creative processes to face both current and possible realities. The talk will be accompanied by some examples of Irish and Italian artists, used as pretexts to analyse in depth two different contexts of action.

about the guest curators

Luigi Fassi is the director of ar/ge kunst Galerie Museum in Bolzano, Italy, where he curated, amongst other, monographic exhibitions of Runo Lagomarsino, Chto Delat?, Mark Boulos, William E. Jones, Eva Kotatkova. A 2008-2009 Helena Rubinstein Curatorial Fellow of the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program in New York, he has organized several exhibitions internationally, including “Theoretical Practice”, ISCP, New York (2009); “Archeology of Mind” at the Malmö Konstmuseum, Sweden (2008);  “In Search of the Miraculous” at the Kunsthalle Helsinki, Finland (2007). His writings appears in publications such as Mousse, Artforum, Domus, Site, Flash Art, KLAT and he is a co-author of Clement Greenberg. L’avventura del modernismo, Johan & Levi, 2011 and Time Out of Joint: Recall and Evocation in Recent Art, Yale University Press, 2009.
Mick Wilson is a researcher, educator, artist and writer. He is currently the Dean of the Graduate School of Creative Arts & Media, Dublin, Ireland where he works with artists, designers, curators, musicians, cultural historians/theorists, and policy analysts to investigate aspects of public culture and contemporary cultural practices. He has lectured internationally on art research, public culture, critical education and urbanism. He is a member of the European Arts Research Network (EARN www.artresearch.eu). He is the principal investigator for “SHARE (2010-2013)”, a major European research network for the creative arts with participants from 30 different countries jointly led by ELIA and GradCAM.
He was co-curator with Daniel Jewesbury of re : public (2010) an expanded exhibition platform on the nature of public culture and urban politics and he is a co-curator of the food thing (2011-2013) a project investigating contemporary food cultures and politics.

Where

Sample Studios, 2nd Floor, Former Government Buildings, O'Sullivans Quay, Cork

 

When 26/11/11