State of Concept
Athens

State of Concept, in the framework of the first solo exhibition of Ahmet Öğüt in Greece “Labour after Pay, Love before Work – An Artworkers VIP Lounge”, is happy to announce two lectures by Nagehan Uskan & Katarzyna Wojtczak on Friday, 15th of September 2023 at State of Concept Athens, starting at 18:30, at the Artworkers VIP Lounge. 

Artworkers VIP Lounge is a newly commissioned installation that includes previous works, the artist is re-creating visually a VIP Lounge for precarious cultural workers, making a potent comment on the precarious conditions of freelance art workers in Greece and beyond, that many times work for free, without contracts or with short term zero hour contracted jobs. The work comes at a poignant time when discussions in the Greek art scene are leading to the formation of a union and collective struggles for contemporary art work to be recognised in the tax system. Within the installation previous pieces of the artist are activated, and the viewer can see examples of past collaborative and collective projects. 

More info about the program

Nagehan Uskan

Lecture 

Collective Interventions in Knowledge Production: the Examples of Silent University and Off-University

18:30 

Available on our YouTube channel here

Off University – University without Borders was founded by academics from Turkey and Germany in response to the threats posed to academics in opposition in Turkey. It aims for a less hierarchical and free academia while creating new strategies to uphold and sustain academic life and knowledge, which is under threat from anti-democratic and authoritarian regimes.

Nagehan Uskan has run several visual storytelling workshops and courses that brought together undocumented migrants with no access to academia, students, artists and activists, forming co-research projects in Lesvos Island and Berlin. During this lecture, two collective videos and the related booklets, which were produced collectively as a result of these workshops, will be analysed and discussed in relation to practical and ideological principles and strategies of “The Silent University” initiated by Ahmet Öğüt.

https://off-university.com/

https://thesilentuniversity.org/

Katarzyna Wojtczak

Lecture

Off with the limelight, heed the flashlight!

19:30 

Available on our YouTube channel here 

To become a community of care is an experiment in which we learn possible conditions by failing to meet the planned ones. She will share the practice based on mutual learning processes with artists at risk of social exclusion regarding political tensions (queer community, sex-workers, senior artist female visibility and rights) and pushing the boundaries among various – both formal and informal – entities such as municipality (and its officials), local tenants and community emerging from the project as expanding the notion of the commons.

 She will discuss a transition potential of decentralizing access and redistribution of the resources and knowledge within homogeneous societies through working as a coalition with Belarusian and Ukrainian artistic diasporas (since 2020) and creating Eastern European platform for relearning and how this practice is transferable to a cooperative which she is forming in Greece. 

DOMIE is an artistic and architectural-economic model of collective self-care with social values, manifesting the need for good practices and services in the field of contemporary art, culture and sociopolitics. DOMIE’s activities are based on an alternative, community-oriented model of social and economic sustainability, in which resources, ideas and knowledge are shared and developed between the collective running DOMIE and the communities – the one formed around the project and the local. DOMIE is located in a building which is its main narrative axis. The building is a residential ruin, a free-standing post-home of Poznań’s Kaiserpanorama. 

https://blokmagazine.com/necessary-unlearning/https://arsenal.art.pl/product/acting-together/

Limited places, first come first served basis. 

For more information please contact [email protected] 

The event will be conducted in English, without translation 

Part of the research platform

With the support of the Mondriaan Fonds