The fourth CEI Venice Forum for Contemporary Art Curators was held at the beginning of June this year.
Almost all conferences, forums, seminars, and other similar events, offer a great opportunity to all of us to escape from everyday life, to meet others sharing same, similar or different ideas, and to exchange our experiences about art and culture. This year, the Venice forum gathered more than fifty cultural professionals: artists, curators, editors and journalists. The program was divided into four parts. Two of them offered a critical standpoint to the issues of current debates in the art field. Apart from the presentations of two impressive projects, the Taswir project – Pictorial Mappings of Modernity and Islam, and Istanbul Portable Art Project, we had a great opportunity to hear the artists from Central Asia (Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan and Tajikistan) who gave as an insight into their cultural and artistic works, as well as the developments of their art scene.
It would be impossible to inform you about all presentations and lectures that I attended during the Forum. I will, therefore, focus only on a few issues that struck me as interesting and that have been occupying my mind in the aftermath of the Venice Forum. But first of all I would like to stress one important issue which is related to the fact that culture and art have a strong relation to the context in which they are created.
More specifically, as Stuart Hall stressed, the whole cultural field is a continuously variable area which is conditioned by societal relationships and inequalities. So here the question of relationships between culture and hegemony arises, revealing that the class struggle in and around culture is a very important issue. Manifestations of cultural processes, cultural power and cultural struggle are totally different, and they can take forms such as inversion, resistance, negotiation and empowerment, all depending on the moment in which they appear. If we apply these remarks by Stuart Hall to our discussion on creativity, we can see that creativity can be analysed in a similar fashion.
So, for instance, what is creative in Belarus, it is not necessarily creative in Croatia, or in Italy for that matter. Following this logic, in Belarus, all types of art and culture can be creative and innovative. There, even traditional and established forms of art, even those using the copy-paste method, are creative and innovative. Why? Because of the totalitarian system that forbids any form of art and culture so that performances take place in privately owned apartments and houses. About this Belarusian context you can find more here in the interview which was taken with Natalia Kolada, General Director and Co-founder of Belarus Free Theatre from Belarus during the Forum for Creative Europe. So let us not forget the strong relation between creativity, innovation and the context in which they appear.
Let us go back to the Venice Forum. In regard to what I just reminded us of, I must say that I was personally strongly impressed by the presentations that offered us exactly this kind of analysis of art and culture. Here I isolate two such examples.
The first one is related to the Hungarian award for young and upcoming artists. The Hungarian artist and art curator Balázs Beöthy raised a question of whether one should or shouldn’t be proud of this award. He draws attention to the fact that these days we all live in the society which produces so many awards for artists and that we should ask ourselves whether these awards really honour the best work or whether they are rather more concerned with politics or other issues unrelated to art. Balázs Beöthy opened up a series of questions related to this and he gave us one great example of how an artist can react in the situation when he/she receives this award. I will not give you the full story here and I would like to ask you to be patient till the interview with Mr. Beöthy that I am planning to make in which we will have an opportunity to see an artist’s subversive work as a reaction to the moment, occasion and context.
The second example is related to the Bulgarian case of presenting at the Venice Biennial or rather its absence from the mentioned Biennial. In the last couple of years Bulgaria did not have its pavilion in the Venice Biennial. This situation prompted the Bulgarian artist Nedko Solakov to talk about what are hidden messages behind art. I am planning to return to this issue as well through an interview with curator Maria Vassileva who will present Solakov’s artwork related to the Bulgarian absence from the Venice Biennial.
Since I mention the Venice Biennial let me tell you more about the artwork that impressed me the most at the Biennial. Incidentally, I was in Venice on the first day of the Biennial when it opens its door for the press and cultural professionals. So I went there and looked around with my two new Hungarian friends and colleagues Mr. Beöthy and Adrien Török who talked at the Venice Forum about the newest developments in presentations of video and media art in Hungary.
In the Giardini, we heard raving comments from many colleagues about the artwork in the pavilion shared by both the Czech and Slovak Republics. After more similar comments we frantically went searching for this pavilion. And we finally found it. When we entered the pavilion we stared in wonder and whispered to each other: it is magnificently simple with numerous ways of interpretation. What did the Slovak artist Roman Ondák do there? As I already mentioned, Czech and Slovak Republics use the same pavilion to represent their countries. This year, they invited the Slovak artist Roman Ondák to present in their pavilion. His work Loop developed for the Venice Biennial is a sculptural in-situ work (here you can see the photos of his work).
It was described by curator Kathrin Rhomberg with these words: “It deals with the relationship between reality and art by taking a section of this reality – the park landscape between the exhibition pavilions with their greenery, the bushes, trees and paths – and closely replicating it, then shifting this copy into the interior of the pavilion. The path to the pavilion leads without interruption or obstacles into the building on one side, crosses through it and leads out of it again on the other side.” It is obvious that this work opens up a series of possible interpretations. For me, one of them is surely about the relationship between the Czech and Slovak Republics. If we ask ourselves what these two countries share, one of the first answers will surely be land. This is a very obvious answer. What are other things not similar for the both countries? One of the first answers popping up will be politics and this offers us a vast area of possibilities. When we enter the pavilion we do not have a feeling that we left our everyday reality and we are not sure in which territory we are – everything melts into one another and differences disappear. Ondak’s work invites all of you who have seen or who will see it to continue the interpretation of his installation.
And finally it is time to finish my blog. It was great to be in Venice and I would like to thank Trieste Contemporanea which organised this Venice Forum and gathered various voices at the same place at the same time.
LabforCulture is a partner initiative of the European Cultural Foundation. LabforCulture is grateful for the support provided by its funders.
