De-visions in “We”-sions. Collectivity, what is that?

SEMINAR

18-19.10.2019


Collectivity, what is that?
A seminar on the subject of organising in the art field and collective practices. Sharing and discussing experiences in self-organised groups, occurring structural difficulties and limitations, as well as imaginaries of how to organise and work collectively within the art field and beyond it.

What are “we” organising for? How are “we” constituted?

When is the moment of realisation that “we” cannot continue this way? What is the way to handle it? What are the blind spots? What are the rounds and rounds that “we” are stuck in, while wanting to progress? Does a collective ever die?

What is the outside of the organization that frames what is possible and potential to do? How this relationship is defined?

Can larger institutions, such as trade unions ever represent our cause adequately?

When to collectivise and when to build alliances? How to practice solidarity?

Guests: Julia Wieger/SKGAL, Airi Triisberg, akcg (anna kindgren and carina gunnars), Viivi Koljonen
Moderation: Karolina Kucia
Host: Art School Maa
Context: Exhibition “Minor Characters” by Minna Henriksson and Tero Nauha

HAUNTINGS IN THE ARCHIVE! reflects on the hi/herstory/ies of the Austrian Association of Women Artists (VBKÖ) through its century-old archive of letters, photos, catalogs, and thousands of other documents. The Secretariat for Ghosts, Archival Politics and Gaps (SKGAL) assembles the material to conjure up the specters of the multiple lives of the VBKÖ that share the scene in the film: Ghosts of National Socialism encounter colonial fantasies, as well as old and new feminist agencies. The film was awarded with 2018 WOMEN'S VOICE NOW BEST DOCUMENTARY FEATURE.

akcg (anna kindgren and carina gunnars) is a collaborative artist relationship that explores the connection between art, discursive fields such as “sustainability”, gentrification, digitalization and power, as manifested not least by categories such as class, color, gender.

Minna Henriksson is a visual artist based in Helsinki whose work in Minor Characters exhibition, Kiila Feminist Archive is an attempt to compile artists’ group Kiila’s lost archive through readings of works by its early female members. The archives of Kiila from its founding in 1936 until 1944 have gone missing. The history of Kiila has been written after WW2 from a male perspective, although majority of Kiila’s founders were women.

Viivi Koljonen is an art historian and translator, currently working as a producer at Art School MAA. She is also a vice chairperson of TAKU board (Art and Culture Professional's Trade Union). Her interest lies in equality and responsibility of the working life on the cultural field.

Karolina Kucia is a visual artist with the background in sculpture and intermedia as well as in performance studies. At the moment she is also a doctoral candidate in artistic research in Theatre Academy of the University of the Arts Helsinki. She combines theoretical and practical work with objects, group processes and performances in both site-specific and staged context. Her main interests are lapse, error and stutter as well a parasitism and monstrosity in context of precarization of labour in neoliberal capitalism and in the current form of art institutions.

Tero Nauha is a performance artist and the professor in Live Art and Performance Studies (LAPS) at the Theatre Academy of the University of the Arts Helsinki. His work in Minor Characters exhibition, Détroit Oceanique is based on a collaborative project with Karolina Kucia and the immigrant workers in Andalucía. This work opens up the on-going process. It uses the textual and visual materials through the methods of ‘fictioning’. Here, fictioning is not understood as uses of narrative means, but how the artistic process may condition the possibility for futures. 

Airi Triisberg is an independent curator, writer and educator based in Tallinn. She is interested in the overlapping fields between political activism and contemporary art practices, issues related to gender and sexualities, illness/health and dis/abilities, self-organisation and collective care practices, struggles against precarious working conditions.

Julia Wieger works in art and architecture. With Nina Hoechtl she has founded a research-based collective Secretariat for Ghosts, Archival Politics and Gaps (SKGAL). Through lecture performances, workshops, texts, videos, exhibitions or programs SKGAL has grappled with history, historiography and archival materials in the context of art and culture since 2012. It is important for SGKAL to do so through feminist and decolonizing lenses. 

The seminar is funded by Austrian Embassy Helsinki, Swedish Cultural Foundation in Finland and The Swedish Arts Grants Committee.