2010-08-15
Here you can read the detailed programme of the 5th Summer Seminar for Art Curators which is taking place in August 15-20, 2010 in Ijevan and Yerevan.

 5th Summer Seminars for Art Curators

Communities and Contextual Translation of Communal Art

Yerevan and Ijevan, Armenia
August 15-20, 2010

Participants: Elke Krasny/Armenak Grigoryan/Michelle Kasprzak/Karin Grigoryan/Sarah Rifky/Arevik Grigoryan/Patrycja Rylko/Marlène Perronet/Harutyun Alpetyan/Adnan Yildiz/Aykan Safoğlu/Carmen De Michele/Gor Engoyan/Nvard Yerkanian/Natuka Vatsadze/Liana Khachatryan/Viviana Checchia/Sona Melik-Karamyan/Ida Hirsenfelder/Pau cata i Marles/Taguhi Torosyan
Volunteers and free participants: Shoair Mavlian/Özge Çelikaslan/Emanuele Braga/Maddalena Fragnito/Narek Tovmasyan

Program
Yerevan, 15.08-17.08
Aesthetic Communities

15.08 Sunday

10:00-10:30 Opening Remarks and Introduction

10:30-12:00 Lecture (Mkhitar Sebastatsy educational complex, Fine Art High school)
Dr. Margarita Tupitsyn

Russian Art as a Sisyphean Project

In 1990 I curated the exhibition The Work of Art in the Age of Perestroika, which was largely devoted to Moscow conceptual art. My reference to Walter Benjamin’s famous title made the claim that perestroika was a revolutionary moment capable of changing the fate of the Soviet neo-avant-garde the way the October Revolution had done with the historical avant-garde. Presented for the first time as seminal postwar movements in my exhibition Russian New Wave, Sots Art and Moscow conceptual art enjoyed a positive reception in New York, culminating in museum exhibitions in the years of perestroika.  At the time, there was reason to believe that Soviet alternative art of the 1970s and 1980s had the chance to consolidate its position in the genealogy of international postwar culture. Paradoxically, twenty years later, under much more favorable conditions for the integration of models of national cultures, and amid a curatorial zeal (if only superficial) to consider national specificity, the status of Russian art both as historical and contemporary phenomena has lapsed.

In fact, global curators who take pride in their commitment to providing equal opportunities to artists of all nationalities, to the extreme of giving their mammoth exhibitions titles like Against Exclusion, remain far less enthusiastic about Russian cultural production than, say, Chinese, Indian, or African. Such an attitude may be categorized as a new Orientalism, a new West/East binary into which Russian culture barely fits. Moreover, the degree of referential debt assigned at the outset of modernism to Asia, Africa, and Russia (precisely in that order) has paradoxically remained intact. Under these circumstances, any serious presentation of a Russian artist or movement in the West is an absurd endeavor, a Sisyphean project, in which, to quote Albert Camus, ‘The struggle itself…is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy’. That said, in this paper I would discuss why I believe why I believe it’s worth pushing a boulder up a mountain for a little longer, even if only to see it roll down.

12:00-1:30 Lecture
Dr. Vardan Azatyan

 Myths and Visions of Artistic Avant-gardes in Armenia

I discuss artistic avant-gardes in Armenia in connection with dominant nationalist and religious discourses that historically played and continue to play some crucial role in Armenian societies. By doing so, I situate perhaps the paradigmatic conception of contemporary art in Armenia – art as a strategy of living free – in structural connection with historical liberation visions and aspirations of Armenian people. My discussion shows that the avant-gardes however subversive (sometimes precisely because of their subversiveness) remain within the larger trajectories of dominant projects of political liberation.
I argue that contemporary art practices need to radically rethink their subverting strategies as directed against dominant discourses and strive for a strategy which would go beyond the logic of dominance and subversion however multilayered and nuanced are the terms by which this logic is conceived. I conclude the paper by suggesting a possible strategy for artistic avant-gardes in Armenia.


18:00- 20:00 Presentations (The club)
Marlène Perronet

The Tea Ceremony

Since twenty years, the TRAM network association federates about thirty art centers in the region Paris - Île de France. It aims “to promote contemporary art and to give to the largest possible number an access to our epoch's creation” (from the website). With an exception of one private foundation, these art centers are mainly associations, municipal and departmental corporations as well as two public art schools. This network weaved around Paris contributes to decentralize the cultural production at a regional level and, in this precise region which is all considered in the collective mind as a periphery of the main city, at the level of the suburbs (“banlieues”).

Such institutions give a great importance to “audiences” and reconcile them with forms they sometimes consider as provocations. They favor a direct presence of the artists, themselves regularly producing artworks especially for these places, their environment (off-site events) and contexts. At the scale of the exhibition length, processual forms integrate the dimension of speech, performances and experiments involving a transmission, or a relation with the visitors. I will try and analyze some shared tendencies among projects that took place in this regional network recently.

Elke Krasny

Notions of Transversality: Dialogues of Aesthetics, Ethics, Politics

The presentation focuses on four case studies to develop an aesthetic understanding and an analytical concept of how to create and interpret the specificity of artistic, curatorial and cultural production allowing for transversality by way of creating aesthetic communities. These case studies are "Macondo - Life on Earth in Vienna" by Cabula6 (2009), Bellevue. Das Gelbe Haus/The Yellow House in Linz by Peter Fattinger, Veronika Orso and Michael Rieper (2009), Het Blauwe Huis/The Blue House in Ijburg/Amsterdam by Jeanne van Heeswijk (2004-2009) and Annenviertel! The Art of Urban Intervention (curated by rotor association for contemporary art; curatorial team: Margarethe Markovec, Anton Lederer, Elke Krasny). Using my experience to unfold different perspectives, transversality is explored as aesthetics of changing perception, creating spaces, places and situations for a dialogue overcoming the conventional boundaries of hierarchical structure and introducing shared territories and shared aesthetic experiences. Transversality of aesthetics, ethics and politics and of all the actants involved is understood as a driving force for creating, re-reading, transforming or questioning the given within contexts and using contextualization as a vehicle for change through aesthetic strategies.

Adnan Yıldız and Aykan Safoğlu

Artistic Dialog+ Curatorial Grammar
“AH OH” by ğ (soft g)

Berlin/Istanbul based curatorial collective  will present their first project, “AH OH” an exhibition that is designed to develop a dialogue between LGBT organizations and contemporary art practitioners. Questioning some terms such as community, artistic dialogue, curatorial grammar, group identity, social responsibility, critical knowledge, identity, activism… within this experience,  will also refer to some historical incidents, local references, and personal histories.


16.08 Monday

10:30-12:00 Lecture
Victor Tupitsyn

Seeing Through a Crack

Following the death of Lenin in 1924, there began a period of collectivization. The peasantry, which in pre-Revolutionary Russia had constituted the overwhelming majority of the population, was, for the most part, forcibly recruited into collective farms or, in smaller numbers, wiped out or banished to distant regions of the country to perform forced labor. A significant number of others were compelled to migrate to urban areas. This phenomenon engendered a housing problem of enormous proportions. Stalin’s course was to exploit the situation so as to further his project of “de-individualizing” the consciousness and daily life of the Soviet people. City apartments, as provided by law, became as populous as anthills and beehives. Families of every variety, belonging to various social, national, and cultural-ethnic groups, were forced to cleave together in a single communal body. Such “uplotnenie” reached its climax when two or three different tenants had to live in one room. The inhabitants of the communal thermae (known as kommunalka) were drawn into a process of “serial” talking -- be it relatively harmless gossip or extreme cases of verbal abuse. Everything (including vision) was ruled by speech rituals. In short, communal vision can be defined as seeing through the eyes, or on behalf of the “collective other.” Caused by this optics, an individual ends up being treated as a baby glued to a societal mirror.

This observation can be applied to an exemplary infant terrible, placed in a global orphanage known as “art.” Self-perception as an eternal child harks back to a time when the burden of adulthood was placed on government bu¬reaucracy. Everyone else was inculcated with the idea that “the only privileged class in the USSR is chil¬dren.” Therefore, the prospect of the loss of such (class) pri¬vileges caused the tempo of matu-ration to slow down. Hence, the naive longing for accidents combined with the carnival-like (festive) perception of acts of violence: the conviction that “even dying is good if the world is watching” best illustrates this. Translated into the language of urban problems, immaturity is the ghetto, and those who came out of this ghetto often turned out to be the most zealous guard dogs of conven¬tion and orthodoxy, the angelic host entrusted with protecting the authoritarian power.
Despite their chronological proximity, the contexts of childhood and youth are not metonymically close: unlike childhood, youth does not feel comfortable in the position of onlooker fascinated by the conflict and the unity of opposites. It is characterized by so¬cial altruism, rebellion and intolerance toward everything in-vested with “paternal” prerogatives. On the other hand, the ico¬noclas¬tic gesture does not befit childhood (eternal, stagnant child¬hood), for which inertia and a taste for an apocalyptic vision of the world are “appropriate”  - whereas youth is aflame with a desire to alter the existing order of things. In other words, both youth and the youthful are missing from present-day world, where childhood and adulthood remain the principal psy¬chosocial niches.

12:00-13:30 Talk and Round-Table: Curatorial Interventions
Sarah Rifky
(Mkhitar Sebastatsy educational complex, Fine Art High school)

 Reconjugating the Curator-Function: a case study in curating contemporary art, thinking about cultural policy and producing publics in Cairo
The shifting functions of artist, critic, work of art and curator within contemporary artistic practices, are constantly demanding a re-evaluation and definition of the role and function of our practices. The traditional distinction between audience and producer no longer hold true. In contexts within which contemporary art practice, in its lateral definition, is still struggling for definition and grappling to expands its forms of engagement with its publics, how do we negotiate our curator-function? I propose to discuss a number of decisions within my own curatorial practice in the last year, within my current capacity as Curator at the Townhouse Gallery of Contemporary Art in Cairo, an integral art institution founded in 1998, that contributed to the radical shift in expanding the potential of contemporary art practices in Cairo over the past decade, towards questioning curatorial-responsibility and the ‘task of the curator’ within that context. The case studies will include a recent exhibition held at the gallery, “Invisible Publics”. Through this example, I meditate on the experience of producing the Cairo Complaints Choir, an extension of the Complaints Choir project initiated by Oliver and Tellervo Kochta-Kalleinen in Helsinki in 2005. Furthermore, a delineation of proposals concerning the programming decisions in the upcoming year will be highlighted, including “Jump Cut Curate” towards insinuating the relevance of curating as a medium (as intermediate or agency), situated not only between the artist, art work, art space and public, but located and housed within the intricate practicalities that inform day-to-day cultural policy.
18:00- 20:00 Presentations (3)
Michelle Kasprzak

The Transient and Mutable Monument

Monuments are objects that cover a wide scope of possible formal categories including architecture, art, design, (and even performance), but they are grouped and defined as monuments by their intention and the ideas, events or persons that they honor. They engage a wide range of social and design issues in their execution, maintenance, and display. 

My thoughts are very much inspired by the work of Estonian artist Kristina Norman, whose recent work explores the issues surrounding the Bronze Soldier monument in Tallinn. The Estonian government moved this monument from its prominent central location to a more remote place in 2007, prompting riots which were used to portray Russians negatively in the media. Two years later, Norman placed a full-sized replica of the Bronze Soldier in its former place, and created a quasi-documentary film that recorded the reactions, on both sides, to this intervention. Similarly, Antony Gormley’s recent work, One and Other on the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square, London illustrated the importance of site for monuments more than the actual monument itself. Taken together, Norman and Gormley’s projects represent a uniquely contemporary re-thinking of the ways in which monuments can be viewed both as art objects and as modes of interaction for all.

 My presentation will make the case for the development of speculative designs and/or instructions for a new unstable and impermanent monument, using common materials and raw human resources, which would be openly released and shared. Developing an “open source” monument design to be shared globally poses a unique challenge.

Joanna Warsza

The Logic of the Projects in the Public Realm: A Talk on Slalom between
a social involvement and the politics of the hidden agendas (based on my
curatorial practice)

Over the last three years I commissioned projects on the ruins of the 10-th Anniversary Stadium in Warsaw and in ex-Warsaw Ghetto based on the critique of Israeli youth trips to Poland. Her work refers to the perception shifts, the unspoken and the ephemeral.

The 10th-Anniversary Stadium was built in 1955 from the rubble of war and
preserved Communism’s good name for forty years. In the early 1990s it fell into ruin, and was only revived by Vietnamese and Russian traders. Since then the area has become an open-air market, an Asian inner city, a primeval garden, a storehouse of urban legends, a piece of Land-Art, or a work camp for botanists. The heterotrophic logic of the place and its long-standing (non-)presence in the city, inspired me to curate series of live art projects The Finissage of Stadium X and the related reader, Stadium X; A Place That Never Was.

Public Movement from Israel together with Polish collaborators in April 2009 led a walk in the former Warsaw Ghetto, in the footsteps of Israeli and Jewish youth delegations. The starting point for the project was the hermetic and strictly ritualized procedures of Israeli Youth Delegations to Poland. Public Movement explores the political and aesthetic possibilities residing in the manifestations, spectacles or public marches. They invent and re-enact moments in the life of individuals, communities, social institutions, peoples or states.

Ida Hirschenfelder

Land Art in SFRJ – Reinterpreted Monuments
 
A specific party policy on artistic expression in Socialist Federative Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRJ) has led to some astonishing artistic achievements. Although connected to the party authorities, these works had far surpassed any similar attempt of the artists to utilize the ideology in order to realise their own grandiose landscape architecture. In the past ten years when we were able to see these political landmarks from a contextual distance, several contemporary artists such as photographer Marko Lulić in Modernity in YU, David Maljković in Scene for a New Heritage (numbers 1 & 2, 2004 & 2006), Marijan Crtalić in Nevidljivi Sisak (2007-2010) or curatorial collective WHW on sculptor Vojin Bakić, have attempted to see beyond the obvious. These memorials to WWII have been frequently dubbed as ugly socialist landmarks, »following flat-footed abstract rhetoric crushed under its own weight«. However I will argue that such one-sided interpretation is of this monuments is merely a product of persistent political dualities of the cold war. The question that should be asked is how are the Land Art works by Robert Smithson from 60s and 70s any different from Bogdan Bogdanović’s primitive land marks? Are the public structures of Sol LeWitt any different from Vojin Bakić’s constructions? And why the formally superb sculptures by Miodrag Živković can be called »overblown and joy-killing Titost monuments«!? The initial idea for the ongoing project on SFRJ monuments is to reinterpret these landmarks through a series of photographic exhibitions and publication of a critical reader that would help to restore the decaying monuments which are not only the victims of time but also the victims of misunderstanding of their historical value.


17.08 Tuesday

Visit to art institutions in Yerevan

18:00 –20:00
Round-table discussion on cultural and institutional politics organized by Rene Gabri and Ayreen Anastas

AND AND AND is an artist run initiative, which will use the time between now and dOCUMENTA (13) in 2012 to consider with individuals and groups across the world the role art and culture can play today and the constituent publics or communities, which could be addressed.
The disintegration of the Socialist Bloc and the Soviet Union produced massive transformations which are still underway. Candy colored revolutions interspersed with increasingly manufactured conflicts are the most extreme manifestations of the struggles and disagreements which remain an intrinsic part of those processes.

Given the larger questions concerning these transformations, as well as the specific focus of this year's summer seminars, AND AND AND has proposed to organize a roundtable discussion at the Center for Contemporary Experimental Art (NPAK) in Yerevan. The discussion will involve artists and organizers within the Armenian context, who have attempted over the last few decades to construct institutions for contemporary artistic practice, ranging from contemporary art centers to schools, biennials, or less formal associations.

Where is the place of contemporary art today? What can an art school or a contemporary art center best do in a place such as Yerevan, Armenia - given its histories, the specific concerns and struggles present today, as well as its shared place in regional and global processes?


18.08 Wednesday
Travel to Ijevan

                   Encounters on Borders
                                                                       Summer Festival
                                                                       August 18-21, Ijevan, Armenia

Organizers: Arevik Grigoryan/Armenak Grigoryan/Gor Yengoyan/Harutyun Alpetyan/Karin Grigoryan/Liana Khachatryan/Nazareth Karoyan/Nvard Yerkanian/Sona Melik-Karamyan/Taguhi Torosyan/Vahram Aghasyan

Volunteers and free participants: Anais Gyulbudaghyan, Ashkhen Minasyan, Elizabeth Torosyan, Sona Baghdasaryan, Tsovinar Ghazaryan, David Vardanyan, Vaghinak Ghazaryan

Festival concept

The Festival focuses on temporal and spatial borders in general. Borders, which pass between historical-cultural heritage and present social-political context, between the city and the nature,  geopolitical centers and peripheries, between public and private sectors, the arts and other fields of activities. These are neutral places which lie beyond the hegemony of any rule or regime; here the socio-political, urban, environmental, cultural, linguistic and other tensions are accumulated. These limits emerge on every moment and each step. Is it somehow possible to avoid such cases or incidents, to refrain from wars and destructions by turning the borders into appointments of communication and benefit?
Unlike the representational art producing “author” and “spectator”, “Encounters on Borders” summer arts festival is promoting a community art overcoming borders.


PROGRAM
Ijevan, 18.08-21.08

19:00-19:30 Festival Opening (Ijevan gallery)
19:30-20:30 INTERMEDIATE POSITIONS Exhibition opening

The subtlety of transition times is arduous to gin in twilight. This is a tense of dusk and chiaroscuro when it seems that the body movements are in slow motion.
Catching sight of transition cracks is also complicated in social reality, when everything is changing very fast. The individual seems to appear in a trap between two political systems; one of the formers is a zombie, a remnant in social memory, and the other simulates visions and legends of future.
In such positions of fragile transitions the artist’s role becomes crucial; one appears as an actor of paradigm changes, proposing them to the attention of wide social formations.
But in order to fix this transformation the subject is compelled to bustle from one community and identity to another. By unfolding and occupying the cracks emerging between different territories, between “before” and “after”, the artist gives birth to new subjectivities, new urban identities.
Those are the flexible characters who mark and at the same time blur the borderlines between times and regions.
Artists: Mher Azatyan, Tigran Khachatryan, Norayr Chilingaryan, Gagik Charchyan

21:00-22:00 Concert Mano Grigoryan: Pogo Right and Pincet group


19.08 Thursday

10:00-11:30 Lecture (Tourism and Buisnes Development Centre of Ijevan)
Julian Vigo

Public Art in Haiti: The Goudou Goudou and the Museum of Disaster Relief

Haiti’s earthquake killed approximately 300,000 people, among of which were hundreds of fine artists, metal sculptors and artisans whose living depended upon the sales of souvenirs sold to foreigners. The earthquake of January 12, referred to as the Goudou Goudou, broke down the divisions between what had been seen previously as elite artists and their artisan counterparts, and as such the schism between high and low art.

After the Goudou Goudou, scavenging the thousands of piles of debris by children and young men was a task of survival and pulling the metal out of the rubble to craft lawn chairs, souvenirs of local flora, the transformation from metal rod to a voudou god, or the placement of a crushed car in the middle of a road all became occasions for celebrating life after death and for conterminously commemorating death through life. News reports told of thousands of paintings destroyed in the Centre d’Art, College Saint Pierre, Musée Galerie d’Art Nader on Rue
Bouvreuil and the destruction of the Cathédrale Sainte-Trinité which all housed valuable artworks such as those of Haitian masters Hector Hyppolite, Philome Obin, Prefete Duffaut and Wilson Bigaud. Yet, the true loss of Haiti cannot not be measured through the numbers of buildings or artworks as the devastation of life took center stage. The recuperation of Haitian art quickly became conflated with the spirit of humanitarian projects on the ground and as a result artwork in Haiti was repositioned in the world theater through its sale and collection now rendered
“fundraising.” Internet sites such as “Haitian Earthquake Relief Art Sale” put artworks on virtual auction announcing that proceedings would be “donated to the relief efforts”, and the Smithsonian set up a camp in a former UNDP building to restore the lost art. In this way Haitian art was recast on the world scene as an art of tragedy and the Goudou Goudou gave birth to the museum of disaster relief in the context of communal art.

My paper will examine the nexus between developmental models utilized by humanitarian NGOs on the ground in Haiti and the recuperation of Haitian art through the similar networks which attempt to save Haitian art as if a human life. My work questions the relationship between public spectatorship and communal art and likewise interrogates the problematic ties between the international interception and mediation, local construction and consumption of these pieces, and the representational force of this art. Ultimately, I call into question the representational form of communal monuments and their co-optation under the guise of development or aid.
What are the implications for treating Haitian art through human rights and political discourse? How can communities continue to produce art when the bottom line of art to be sold to an international audience must maintain a narrative of disaster, or at the very least, tangentially through a meta-discourse which consistently deterritorializes disaster in the framework of relief and humanitarian aid? Most importantly, is it possible that this artwork produced since the Goudou Goudou comes to represent the local communities’ relationship to their own history, their own memory, and even their own death without bearing the traces of disaster relief?

12:00-14:00 Panel Discussion
Art criticism and curatorial training school

"1985-1991 Ijevan Sculpture Symposium: Post Factum"
(Tourism and Buisnes Development Centre of Ijevan)

By stressing the importance of cultural decentralization policy and the necessity of reinterpretation of public memory, the graduates/alumni of Art Criticism and Curatorial Training School are inviting you to take part in a panel discussion on a sculpture symposium that was held in Ijevan during 1985-1991 and the heritage it left to the city.
The archive of the symposium has appeared in students' attention not only as a research topic or subject; this is an opportunity for symposium to become historicized not only in the context of cultural decentralization policy but also in cultural past and present realms of Ijevan.  
The print media archive of the symposium subsequently underwent content and conceptual analysis and during the research work talks and meetings were held both with symposium organizers and participant sculptors.                         

15:00-17:00 Presentations (4): Anthropology of the Communal
Pau Cata i Marles
(Tourism and Buisnes Development Centre of Ijevan)

Theory as Practice: A Creative Practitioner-based Research on CASAMARLES’ Local Context

The focus of this presentation, which more precisely could be qualified as an experiment, is to undertake a researcher-based exercise using a self-analytical methodology to investigate one’s own experience of lived place and space. Its aim is to break down acquired theoretical knowledge while testing its usability. This self-analysis is conducted by creatively documenting and critically commenting on a series of ordinary activities and local rituals in the context of Llorenc del Penedes: the village where I grow up and where I have been living for the last three months. These activities and rituals have marked the researcher’s ‘everydayness’ when living in CASAMARLES, an interdisciplinary living and working space for creativity and cultural research developed since January 2008. Paying special attention to non-artists, the documentary and presentation will attempt to describe every day, un-important and subtle activities and tricks used by individuals and collectives of my village in order to underline the relevance of the different strategies used in the creation of a sense of belonging, in short a sense of ‘locality’.
Carmen De Michele
Tepito: Art in the “Rough Neighbourhood”
Tepito is, without exaggeration, the most famous neighborhood in Mexico. This small area north of the Historic Center in Mexico City is better known as the “Barrio Bravo“, the “rough neighborhood“. It is the legendary home of thieves, prostitutes, gangsters and also the cradle of several world-champions in boxing.
Living in Tepito is a way of life”, its dwellers claim. Many of them have never left their “barrio“. In late 1970s, a group of artists decided to give Tepito a public identity through their art. They founded “Tepito Arte Acá“. Inspired by the highly political art of the muralist movement in the 1920s, their work focused on the “tepiteños“and their struggles. They were the first of many artists of that neighborhood who tried to catalyze their anger and discontent through art.
Tepito is changing. A large influx of immigrants pours in from the nearby city of Neza. They work in the markets and start altering the life in the “barrio”. A group of young artists has become the new voice of the “rough neighborhood“. They significantly call themselves “Neza Arte Nel“.
Natuka Vatsadze

From Apt Art to Art in the Apartment

My friends and I created an art group in Georgia which we called Bouillon. It produces performances, actions and artistic interventions in public space. The main focus of our activities is investigation of the space and adaptation of art works to non artistic spaces. The group made series of apartment exhibitions using private space for performance, happenings and installations. In contrary of soviet apartment exhibitions where the private space played the role of the gallery for presenting unofficial artworks, Bouillon group’s use of the private space underlines the artistic importance of the non artistic space itself.  First we search for a space that becomes motivation for our artworks.

My presentation concerns the apartment exhibition series arranged as underground activities in Soviet times in South Caucasus and other Soviet republics and post-Soviet apartment series as artistic interventions in non-artistic spaces. If possible, I would like to work with a group of artists in Armenia who are interested in private space interventions and make a project of an apartment exhibition as a final result of the Summer Seminars for Curators. 

Ruben Arevshatyan

Red Thread e-Journal
The project Red Thread is envisioned as an active network and platform for exchange of knowledge and collaboration of artists, curators, social scientists, theorists and cultural operators from the Balkans, the Middle East, the Caucasus, North Africa, and beyond. It aims to create and widely disseminate new knowledge about paradigmatic socially engaged art practices in a wide geopolitical context, thus challenging the predominance of Western narratives in official art histories and exhibition making.  Through initiating research, meetings, panel discussions and an active online site for exploring both historical and contemporary approaches that deepen and challenge broader relations of art and society, Red Thread intends to reopen the issues of joint modernist legacies and histories between various so-called "marginal" regions, and attempts to create new approaches to deal with questions of auto-histories, self-positioning and reinterpretation of art history.
The title of the project indicates a critical cultural and artistic engagement that has been present in the peripheral zones of the European modernistic project in different conceptual manifestations since the 1960s, when the crisis of the project of Western monolith high modernism in its relation to ideas of social progress became apparent. Metaphorical meaning of the expression 'red thread' suggests not only way out of labyrinth, but also a fragile, elastic link between different intellectual, social and artistic experimentations that share a desire for social change and the active role of culture and art in this process.
17:30-18:00 Presentation
Nvard Yerkanian, Harutyun Alpetyan

“The City: Borders and Definitions” workshop
(Between students of Yerevan Open University and Yerevan State University, Ijevan Brach)

Despite being a product of human activity, “the city” scarcely goes in for definitions. On one hand, it introduces itself as a whole system; on the other hand, it seems as if it’s constantly trying to hide its underlying binary principle. This principle is manifested in various phenomena: in architectural solutions, social relations, and different psychological processes. The presence of opposing processes in balance already refers to the existence of the city. However, it doesn't come to those contrasts being in balance: the city itself gives birth to unbalanced states.

Civilization, civility and politics: in the context of these paradigms, the concept of citizenship refers more to the subject’s social space rather than the physical space of its existence; that is, the habitat. The initial stage of being conscious of oneself as a citizen is the realization of the urban context in which the individual has appeared. Subsequently, the subject repositions himself with respect to the given context, specifying demands and responsibilities in one's environment, since, as a point of support; it also has the perception of the other in its mind.

What are the factors by which reorientation and self-consciousness are conditioned? Where do mine end and the other’s - begin? Is it (somehow) possible, to follow that process? These practical lessons aim at outlining various paths to approach these issues. Yerevan and Ijevan will become those other environments where the city’s borders and definitions are played out.

21:00 Film program
(Sculpture Garden)

20.08, Friday

10.00-11.30 Round table: On cultural Exchange and Dialogue
Moderated by Eva Khachatryan
(Tourism and Buisnes Development Centre of Ijevan)
It is been more than 15 years since partnership links between Contemporary art scene in Armenia (in Caucasus region as well) and Europe were established. But one of these fine days the following question can suddenly arise: how to establish connections between Caucasus and Europe through Contemporary art? Which means that we are on 0 degree again and that we have to start with introducing ourselves to the world. Or, connections within the contemporary art scenes of Caucasus and Europe have no influence or impact on cultural and political relations between these two parts of the world. How can this gap be filled? What kind of networks should be established? Are there any crude strategies and undiscovered links and connections that still should be founded? Is it about miscommunication between local art and society, or it is more an international issue connected to the known center and unknown periphery?
These are some questions that will be raised and discussed by the participants of the round table and the audience.

12:00-13:30 Talk and Round-Table: Curatorial Interventions
Ida Hirshenfelder

SCCA- World of Art Curatorial Course
16:30-18.00
General Round-Table (House of Culture)

19.00-20.00 “Inwards” context responsive art exhibitions (next to the ropeway building)

The group project designed for the theoretical discussions, workshops and lectures section of the festival can be considered as an artistic performance and intervention. By penetrating into the cityscape of Ijevan, we wish to shape a new attitude towards public art. The event is aimed at turning the outlook of city resident inwards, towards the space they are living in by raising public issues which heretofore have been invisible.
Inwards is a group event; the projects are autonomous and based on personal experiences of the authors.

Participant-authors/artists:
Sona Abgaryan/Susan Amujanyan/Manan Torosyan/Natuka Vacadze/ Temo Kartvilishwili/Koka Kitiashvili/Zura Kikvadze/Garik Yengibaryan/Edgar Amroyan/Tigran Araqelyan/Arev Arakelian/Gor Yengoyan/Yuri Manvelyan

 (8.00-13.00 INWARD (optional)
Walk tour with Gor Engoyan along Ijevan-Tsltan non-functioning ropeway

The touristic paths are the most preferable cultural and social layers; churches, landscapes, etc. And what can the unrealized tourist roots and their traces show? Ijevan‘s half-built  ropeway station carried out in the 80‘s is attractive  by its unfinished form, but at the same time it refers to current  socio-political instability in Armenia. The station should hav been connected to the recreation zone called "Tsltan"; this route is now passable only by feet and cross-country vehicle. A few ha were deforested for the purpose of building the upper station. The volunteer expedition will move from inner to the upper station, examining the traces of the corrupt project, inaugurating the route estimated for the ropeway and symbolically continuing the process of its construction.

21:00 Concert
Arni Rock & Apricota

21.08, Saturday

Visit to historical sites of Tavush region









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