28 Şubat, Cumartesi, 17:30
Garaj Istanbul
Tomtom Mahallesi, Yeni Çarşı Caddesi,
Kaymakam Reşat Bey Sokağı, No:11a Galatasaray
Konferans İngilizce'dir, simultane çeviri vardır.
Will the art industry continue to cling to art’s traditional analog status, to insist that the material, buyable object is the only truly legitimate form of art, which is what the painting revival of the last few years has really been about? Will contemporary art continue to be, as it is now, a fancyish Fortunoff’s, a party supply shop for the Love Boat crew? Or will artists — and teachers, and critics — jump ship, swim for land that is still hard to locate on existing maps and make it their home and workplace?
I’m not talking about creating ’60s-style utopias; all those notions are dead and gone and weren’t so great to begin with. I’m talking about carving out a place in the larger culture where a condition of abnormality can be sustained, where imagining the unknown and the unknowable — impossible to buy or sell — is the primary enterprise. Crazy! says anyone with an ounce of business sense.
Right. Exactly. Crazy.
Some of the works are jarring, challenging fundamentalist interpretations of Islam that forbid depictions of human figures. Others suggest peace, reconciliation and the triumph of good over evil. For Iraqis, the mere fact of the exhibition was a sign that Iraq’s artistic traditions might have not only survived years of war and chaos, but also emerged reinvigorated.
Hassan Nassar, who owns a gallery called Madarat, one of the few that stayed open during the worst of Iraq’s violence, called the Sadrists’ patronage of the arts welcome, if unexpected.
...
For Baghdad’s artists, anyway, the opening of any gallery space amounts to an artistic revival after years of despair. Art suffered like everything else during the country’s descent into sectarian warfare. Museums and galleries closed. Art sales evaporated, depriving artists of means to live.
Many fled the country, among them Akram Naji, a ceramicist who went to Syria for medical treatment and stayed for two years. He returned last year and, for the exhibition, created a triptych of bright ceramic forms. The colors, he said, were a response to the violence.
The exhibition took place in a gallery and studio called Biyarq, which means flag. It is located in a worn house in Baghdad’s Waziriya neighborhood, a cultural region of sorts, anchored by the Academy of Fine Arts.
Its director, Hasim Hamid al-Hashami, opened the gallery six months ago as an artistic oasis, with workshops and lectures as well as exhibitions. Standing on the gallery’s roof, he gestured to a lot below, spotted with weeds and broken furniture, and imagined a theater for the performing arts. There are already separate studios for painters, designers, sculptors, actors and playwrights.
The gallery is even putting up Adel Dawod, 39, a painter who recently arrived from Nasiriya, striving to make it in his country’s capital. “I wanted to live the life of art in Baghdad,” he said.
The gallery is independent, an artists’ collective, but it welcomed the Sadrists’ commission: a series of works focused on Imam Hussein’s example of resistance and martyrdom in the fight against injustice, a foundation of Shiite faith.
Signal is forced to close down
Dear Friends, Colleagues and Audience,
It is now definite that Signal- Center for Contemporary Art is forced to close down in January 2010 after obtaining the final decisions from our main financiers.
After many years of petitioning the Swedish Arts Council, the Arts Council of Region Skåne and the City of Malmö, the economical situation has not changed.
The main financiers have individually chosen not to respond to Signal’s appeal for securing the basic funding needed to continue the exhibitions and activities.
We cannot continue to provide a qualitative and professional programme, an international network and a local infrastructure without adequate resources.
We are therefore forced to terminate a successful organisation that has in its ten years developed into a natural meeting place for both audience and
practitioners within the field of contemporary art, a “city trademark” and a significant art institution on the international scene. For this we are truly sorry.
We want to thank all our collaborators throughout the years, all the artists and participants in our programme, in the Artist Archive, in our residency programmes
and international exchanges. We regret that we cannot offer you the resources of Signal in the future.
Finally and above all we want to thank our fantastic audience for the great support and interest you have shown in Signal. Thank you so very much!
You can find the support letters here.
2009 – Final year with Signal
In 2009 we are working on an extensive research project dedicated to and primarily focusing on the independent art initiatives that existed in the south of Sweden
during the period of 1968-2008. The result will be presented in the form of a book, an exhibition and an international seminar.
Book release: September 19, 2009
Exhibition: September 19 - December 6, 2009
Seminar: October 23-25, 2009
"Stanislav Markelov and Anastasia Baburova were murdered on January 19 in the center of Moscow.
Why do their murders concern each person who lives in Russia, each person who aspires to have the rights for which people like Markelov and Baburova fight? Why should we come together to share this pain and express our outrage?
Because our silence is tantamount to acquitting the people who terrorize us. It is tantamount to admitting that they are right. They terrorize us with these murders, which are the latest in a long series of violent acts against social and political activists. These terrorist acts have become the dangerously familiar backdrop to our daily lives.
After such outrageous murders, the time has come for us to decide: do we want this violence to continue in our country? Are we prepared to make our peace with the fact that criminal investigations into violent attacks against social and political activists never lead to convictions?
You lose your job. You lose your home. You lose your rights. The people who defend you are murdered. How far must this humiliation go before you stop putting up with it in silence?
People who say or think that such things are typical the world over are mistaken. Russia ranks third (after Iraq and Algeria) in numbers of murdered journalists. In every country that has gone through a similar phase in its history, people took to the streets in order to change their country.
It is enough for thousands of people to take to the streets in order to put an end to this “criminal immunity”—immunity for those people who terrorize free society. We need mass protests to reverse the direction our society is headed."
STANISLAV MARKELOV was no ordinary lawyer. He was one of a handful of lawyers who defended workers, railroad men, evicted dormitory residents, cheated apartment co-op members, anti-fascists, refugees, and victims of police abuse. He fought for the rights of Mikhail Beketov, editor-in-chief of the newspaper Khimki Pravda, who was viciously beaten this past autumn for criticizing the local administration. Markelov took on the cases of social activists, whose work is invaluable for our society. Markelov helped many of them pro bono.
Stanislav represented the victims in the trial of Colonel Yuri Budanov; the Nord-Ost hostage tragedy; neofascist attacks on anti-fascists and migrants; and the massive police pogrom against the residents of Blagoveshchensk. He worked with Anna Politkovskaya, traveled to Chechnya on many occasions, wrote critical articles, and participated in environmental protest camps.
He understood that society is something you have to build yourself, and so he organized the Rule of Law Institute, which gives legal assistance to journalists, lawyers, activists, homeowners, and workers.
ANASTASIA BABUROVA was a fifth-year student in the journalism faculty at Moscow State University. She worked for Izvestia, Novaya Gazeta, and several other publications. She was an activist in the anarchist and environmental movements. She participated in many protest actions and civic initiatives, in particular, the European Social Forum in Malmö (2008). Nastya covered non-mainstream youth movements, street actions and protests, and court trials.
Stanislav was thirty-four; Nastya, twenty-five. Both of them were just beginning their work: they could have accomplished a lot more had they not been killed. They took on toughest, most important problems of our time. They were people who understood quite clearly that freedom in our society could only be fought for and won—fought for and won by citizens themselves. If citizens don’t fight for this freedom, it will become less and less, until society is strangled by totalitarianism or fascism.
for more copy+paste: http://chtodelat.wordpress.com/
