Thursday 11th of May 19:30 at State of Concept
Nato Thompson – “Culture as Weapon”
Book presentation and discussion with Nato Thompson (artistic director Creative Time New York) and iLiana Fokianaki (director State of Concept, curator Extra City Kunsthal).
Nato Thompson presents his new book “Culture as Weapon” and discusses it with iLiana Fokianaki. The conversation will be in English.
The production of culture was once the domain of artists, but beginning in the early 1900s, the emerging fields of public relations, advertising, and marketing transformed the way the powerful communicate with the rest of us. A century later, the tools are more sophisticated than ever, the onslaught more relentless.
In Culture as Weapon, acclaimed curator and critic Nato Thompson reveals how institutions use art and culture to ensure profits and constrain dissent — and shows us that there are alternatives.
NATO THOMPSON is Artistic Director at Creative Time, one of New York’s most prestigious and exciting art organizations. He is the editor of Experimental Geography: Radical Approaches to Landscape, Cartography, and Urbanism (Melville House), The Interventionists: A Users’ Manual for the Creative Disruption of Everyday Life, and Living as Form: Socially Engaged Art from 1991–2011. His most recent book is Seeing Power: Art and Activism in the 21st Century (Melville House).
Friday 12th of May 15.00 at State of Concept
Tania Bruguera – “Arte Util”
Arte Útil roughly translates into English as ‘useful art’ but it goes further suggesting art as a tool or device. Arte Útil draws on artistic thinking to imagine, create and implement tactics that change how we act in society.
Whether through self-organised groups, individual initiatives or the rise of user generated content, people are developing new methods and social formations to deal with issues that were once the domain of the state. Arte Útil case studies show how these initiatives are not isolated incidents, but part of a larger historical trajectory that is now shaping our contemporary world. For the past ten years the artist Bruguera has been teaching and researching Arte Útil through an academy in Havana; the Arte Útil lab at Queens Museum, residencies at Immigrant Movement International, New York and the Museum of Arte Útil, in the Old Building of the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven. The Arte Útil archive has been presented and activated through numerous workshops, exhibitions and seminars throughout the world organised by the Asociación de Arte Útil. Bruguera will be also presenting Instituto de Artivismo Hanna Arendt (INSTAR), a hub for civic literacy in Cuba.
TANIA BRUGUERA is an installation and performance artist whose works often expose the social effects of the power of political force. She participated in Documenta 11 and established the Arte de Conducta (Behavior Art) program at Instituto Superior de Arte in Havana. Her work has been shown in the 2015 Venice Biennale, at Tate Modern, London, Guggenheim and MoMA, New York, among others. Bruguera has recently opened the Hannah Arendt International Institute for Artivism, in Havana – a school, exhibition space and think thank for activist artists and Cubans. She lives and works in Havana, New York and Cambridge.
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