Session 4
Ebadur Rahman bng/usa
“A naive pre-history of pluripotent prajna(knowledge)”
I attempt to disentangle resilient euro-eccentric models of arts platforms+practices: the knowledge-lineage of people without history, accessing a symbiotic subjectivity of (a)moral bodies and, its capacity to be contaminated by combustion, transmission, infiltration, mutation, virality, failure, interdependence; knowledge production as unfolding zones of contacts contra the Enlightenment-values, involuted, diverse and desperate enterprises to manage and, maintain “contemporary art’ as an “aesthetic project”; I would (de)historisize, and delimit a parable of affects to overlap with art-architecture-design as a living organism-- and not a philosophy-machine--that overtly mobilize a triangular interrogations:
- What is an art-architecture-design which has to operate outside History or has to resist art-architecture-design as-an-aesthetic-project in order to being-in-the-world?
- Can the "underdeveloped" subject from the position of a meta-historical outreach become art-architecture-design ?
- How "underdeveloped" subject performs the ethical potential space?
Rakhee Balaram ind/usa/fra
“‘Critical Unfoldings’: Reconfiguring Spaces of Art and Pedagogy in South Asia”
How does South Asia, in particular India, confront a stagnant art market? The recent demonetization policy in India also continues to impact the way in which many in the country live and work. At the same time, new and existing modes of art production are continuing to flourish in spite of market and economic fluctuations. Looking at configurations such as SANA, or the South Asian Network for the Arts, the successful “Student Biennale” in Kochi, the rise of micro-biennials in India, and NGO initiatives, I propose thinking about diverse philosophical concepts of the pli, or the fold, to consider the multiplication of venues, spaces, practices, and markets and the way in which they fold, unfold and refold under the current conditions of capitalism. I employ this model to think about how alternate pedagogic models challenge and/or reinstate geographic and social/class boundaries in the region.
Miklós Peternák hun
“The two decades of Intermedia & C3 Foundation. Parallel strategies or social schizophrenia?”
The talk will be about my experiences with two institutions I was involved in during the past (more than) twenty years. The first is the Intermedia Department of the Hungarian University of Fine Arts, founded in 1990 after the political changes in the region, a faculty which provides MA degree based on a five-year curriculum. The second – in chronological order – is C³: Center for Culture and Communication, raised as a three-year long, fully founded pilot project in 1996. After its success it became a new legal body, a foundation, in other words a non-profit NGO, without further permanent financial support. Which system is more adequate for facing the challenges of dealing with the complex field of (contemporary media) art? To act inside a state-supported university or to create the framework of an independent NGO? Is this an alternative or a fundamentally wrong question?