VIDEO DOCUMENT: ART GROUPS AND SOCIO-POLITICAL ENGAGEMENT

VIDEO DOCUMENT: ART GROUPS AND SOCIO-POLITICAL ENGAGEMENT within the programe VECTORS OF COLLECTIVE IMAGINATION IN ART, 18.07.2020. 

 

Art Groups and Socio-Political Engagement

Speakers: Vida Knežević (SR) and Jacopo Galimberti (I)

Moderation: Ana Vilenica and Darija Medić

 

 

The conversation series Vectors of Collective Imagination in Art is a space for discussion about self-organised art groups, ad-hoc and mythical-real collectives, as well as artistic infrastructures for the collective production of knowledge and the struggle for commons. The series consists of three conversations that will deal with the political economy of art collectives, socio-political engagement of art groups, as well as imagining the anti-systemic collective practices in the period before World War II, during the socialist experiment in Yugoslavia, the anti-Yugoslav period of the 1990s. and the present situation.

 

Conversations Vectors of collective imagination in art are part of kuda.org the project Art Organisation - a long-term international research project that deals with the analysis of artistic (self)organisation in the (post)Yugoslav region. The focus of this project is on self-organised art initiatives outside the mainstream. The project covers a wide historical field from Surrealism in the 1930s to the present day. During 2017, our work on the project began with interviewing participants and protagonists of the contemporary art scene in Yugoslavia. This work continues in 2018 and 2019, when interviewees were theoreticians and art historians, as well as artists who had realised their practice through group art work. The result of this research is an archive consisting of interviews, documentation of works of art and critical texts written during the project trough the program Fragments for studies on art organisations. In July, simultaneously with the series of talks, a collaborative research working group will meet online to analyse and review the materials created during the project. This working group will create a space for collective critical rewriting of the art history of the (post)Yugoslav cultural space and critical work with the generated archive. The online format of the upcoming events and sessions was selected due to the changed circumstances that arose during the COVID-19 pandemic and represents a kind of a challenge for all those involved in this process.