By Zdenka Badovinac
Fall 2012 | ArteZine
The site of cultural production, be it a museum, institution or exhibition, offers an instructive look at how paradigm shifts affect cultural production. Two sites in Eastern Europe reveal the role politics and culture conspire to shape society’s understanding of its own history, as well as the way that artists and institutions can operate in this shifting milieu. Moderna galerija in Ljubljana and the network L’Internationale.
In the late 1980s, the postwar paradigm of the world, which had been significantly determined by the Cold War, began to fall apart and the phrase “the end of history” began to be used. At the same time, however, the predominant Western canons of art history and models of art production were called into question. These paradigm shifts challenged the prevailing model of the institution of the museum, in addition to the dominant approaches to knowledge production, the existing discursive positions, value systems, methods of work, etc. Globalization provided the conditions for spreading the potent forms of cultural production (Western epistemological concepts, the model of the museum institution, the art market), and on the other hand triggered processes that undermined them.
We could argue that only with the advent of globalization could we comprehend the full extent of the inequality amongst the positions from which cultural dialogue entered. Numerous critics gained insight into particular local situations and began to warn against the dangers of homogenization and pointed out the importance of diverse cultures working together. At the same time, however, many disregarded the inequality in terms of material conditions, which perpetuated historical patterns of dominance. One of the most influential theoreticians guilty of this is Nicolas Bourriaud; he sees globalization primarily in terms of “planetary negotiations, discussions between agents from different cultures” which define the so-called altermodernity. Although it is indeed important to “translate the values of cultural groups and to connect them to the world network,” we cannot settle for that. We need to ask ourselves: What are these particular local conditions? Is this planetary communication equally accessible to all? Who seems to dominate in it? How is it codified in the first place?
We can agree that there still exist channels of cultural distribution financed by multinational capital and serve primarily Western cultural and epistemological positions. Naturally, multinational capital does not enable equal representation of different cultures, and discourages their active participation in imagining new politics and new forms of social production. This is what makes alternative forms of cultural production that have emerged from local practices and international anti-hegemonic and decentralized networks all the more significant.
Installation view of the exhibition The Present and Presence – Repetition 1, Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova, Ljubljana
Towards a Critical Museum I would like to introduce our local example of instituent practice, which I call “a critical museum.” The concept of “instituent practices” refers to strategies and initiated processes that in some respects take their bearings from traditions of institutional critique, even as in other respects they go beyond anything recognizable in the movement now canonized as part of an art history.
The precondition for a successful critical museum should be permanent self-reflection and self-criticism. These preconditions involve two main areas: one dealing with the issue of what a museum represents (e.g. art in terms of race, gender, class or region), and the other dealing with the question of whom it addresses (in terms of audiences from various social groups). Nowadays, museums internalize institutional critique, which has opposed political, economic, racial, gender, and class inequalities since the 1960s. Of particular interest to me are spaces on the margins of the global art system, including Eastern Europe. In these arenas, a special variant of institutional critique has developed, which primarily targets ideology and geopolitical hierarchy. Over the past twenty years the focus has been on geopolitical strategies found both in institutional critique and the museum politics. These issues have also featured prominently in my work at the Moderna galerija.
We could say that a museum becomes a critical museum when it internalizes art institutional critique. On the other hand, not all museums can be labeled thus, even though most museums adopt—at least in principle—a more politically correct representation and a more equal approach to various audiences. We could say that both the critical museum and its opposite, the mainstream museum, are striving for a greater democratization of the museum. The difference, however, is that the critical museum engages in this practice to oppose the total neoliberal commodification and homogenization of the various spheres of social life, whereas the mainstream museum does it to attract the greatest possible number of audiences qua consumers for its museum industry. For example, Tate Gallery concurrently featured Alighiero Boetti exhibition for more demanding audiences, a Damien Hirst show for those craving spectacle, while the Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama addresses the globally-oriented ones.
Let us take a closer look at how differently this varied “supply” can be perceived in the context of the post-socialist parts of Europe. In our countries, programs that cater to a variety of tastes still retain ideological baggage. Consequently, the freedom of choice in a cultural institution is not so much related to consumer logic as it is to correcting wrongs from the recent past. Reactions to our new display of works from the national collection of 20th century art at the Moderna galerija/Museum of Modern Art in Ljubljana constitute an explanatory example. In this case we dedicated some exhibition space to the art of the Partisan Resistance, which is presented as a distinct genre, equal to other art styles in the museum collection. This decision has been criticized on the grounds that if we are presenting the art of the Partisan Resistance, we should also be presenting the art of the White Guard, a movement that collaborated with the occupying forces during the Second World War. The title of the exhibition of the national collection is Continuities and Ruptures. The line of continuities present the line along which art styles developed in Slovenia parallel to the development of Western art. This meandering line crosses with a line of ruptures, that is, the line of the avant-gardes who ranged from practitioners in 1920s, to the art of the Partisan resistance, the avant-gardes of the 1960s, and the retro-avant-garde of the NSK in the 1980s. Every artistic concept on this line strove to genuinely impact its time and effect change in its local social context, breaking free from homogenizing Western styles. The prewar avant-gardes dealt with the bourgeois art in their environment, and the avant-gardes from the period of socialism used their collective creativity to criticize the fake, ideologically imposed collectivism.
Installation view of the exhibition The Present and Presence – Repetition 1, Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova, Ljubljana
The most socially emancipatory among the avant-gardes was Partisan art: it was intended to agitate, raise the morale among the fighters in the National Liberation Struggle, and mobilize the creative potential of the masses. This kind of emancipatory potential cannot be found in the art produced by the White Guard, and therefore, the latter could not be included in the line of ruptures. The expectation that a national collection should fairly and equally include all the diverse social and cultural movements reflects the ideology of reconciliation espoused by certain intellectuals in Eastern Europe. This can, certainly, be justified in terms of a reaction to the historical wrongs perpetrated under the communist regimes. But at the same time, we should keep in mind the danger of equating emancipatory and reactionary historical movements. Making a distinction between the different understandings of democracy is particularly important today, when both right-wing and left-wing politicians draw on similar rhetoric of the democratic society. As a result, the democratization of the museum doesn’t resonate everywhere. In regions where the museum industry is highly developed, the rhetoric of the democratization of the museum serves primarily the market logic of “something for everyone.” In Slovenia, as well as in many other countries however, democratization is understood as reconciliation between former enemies by some, and as referring to the emancipatory local traditions in order to accumulate symbolic capital with which these spaces are now entering international communication on a more equal footing by others. The non-Western museum does not see itself merely in terms of the position of power of an institution that can open to various marginalized social groups, but as a representative of the margin, which must still secure for itself a position of more active participation to shape global trends in culture.
When a critical museum speaks about representing various social groups within a museum, it does not aspire to proportional representation of the various social, political or ideological groups, but to acknowledge deeper, more fundamental changes in the conception of the museum. These changes require taking a stand that can at times also be antagonistic toward various sociopolitical options. A critical museum takes the side of traditions that have historically proven to have emancipatory social potential, building on its efforts to challenge the homogenizing processes of the neoliberal society. It draws up programs that contribute to decoloniality in its various forms, and to political and corporate deinstrumentalization of life. It keeps in mind that it cannot equally represent all traditions and address all social groups, nor can it provide an encyclopedic picture of the world. But what it can do is draw, through its new museum politics, a more just mental map of the world that can be realized on a micro level. A critical museum not only exhibits works of art, it also shows the reasons for, and the consequences of, their representation. It addresses their non-representation as it were, as well as their exclusion from the dominant art system, which is especially true of non-Western parts of the world. A critical museum exposes the hierarchic relations between various local histories, emphasizing that it is not enough to include local histories within broader international histories, but to also make known the ways in which they have influenced the global imagery and the dominant cultural paradigms. Such museum politics is based on constant self-reflection. It is only through self-reflection that a museum can avoid merely reproducing what is already known. Repetition is not relevant as a method to reaffirm the dominant mental frameworks, but as reiterating the traumatic and the unresolved. It is this aspect of repetition that is the focus of our latest exhibition in the new museum unit MSUM, entitled The Present and Presence – Repetition 1.
It is constructive to present this exhibition from the vantage point of its radical difference from exhibitions that merely reproduce established formulas. Exhibitions are increasingly expected to bring previously unseen things: new faces, new regions, new media. This understanding does not necessarily relate to exploring the ways in which such differences and novelties impact existing cultural paradigms and relations. Rather, it serves to meet the need for multicultural tolerance or simply builds on the effect of surprise, on spectacle. Thus we often see pseudo-events, which do present new and different exhibits, but do not change the dominant paradigm of museum politics. The exhibitions that do bring about change do not necessarily look completely new, and they are often attributed the significance of an event retroactively. They can become “initiating events” in Badiou’s sense, and act as points of reference for whole generations of artists and curators to come. The exhibition The Present and Presence, is not an initiating event, but rather takes as its focus initiating events and stresses the importance of repetition as a precondition for constructing a narrative and an art system. The Present and Presence – Repetition 1 was staged at the Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova in Ljubljana and predominantly featured works from the museum’s collection. The exhibition centered on various ideas of time—Lived Time, Future Time, No Future, War Time, Ideological Time, Dominant Time, Quantitative Time, Creative Time, Time of the Absent Museum, Retro Time, Time of Passage—and marked the opening of the new museum. Now, a few months later, this first installation of the exhibition is being partially changed and expanded to include a special concept of repetition. Complementing the repeated exhibition, which presents works primarily from the Arteast 2000+ and Moderna galerija’s national collections it includes five special projects: The Body and the East Archive, The Bosnia Archive, NETRAF: Portable Intelligence Increase Museum, An Archive of Performance Art, and An Archive-in-becoming. Underlying as a uniting principle, repetition is here conceived as yet another dimension or form of time, added to our original “list” of times.
Installation view of the exhibition The Present and Presence – Repetition 1, Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova, Ljubljana
Repeating an Exhibition, Recycling in a Moment of Crisis
The motives leading us to repeat The Present and Presence exhibition are as follows:
1 – Moderna galerija and its new unit, the Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova, have had their exhibitions program budget so drastically cut that it hardly allows for new exhibitions and catalogues to be produced. Repeating an exhibition is a recycling in a moment of crisis, a revamp of an existing product. It aims to maximize on the potential of the preceding exhibition, to re-examine its contents and fashion a new product. This recycling builds on the foundations of past work (including a few other exhibitions staged by the Moderna galerija), bringing to the fore the potential of the conditions of crisis. In our case, recycling has become the only way we can work—a critical reaction to the existing local and global conditions rather than a response to the pressures of the market.
2 – We live in a time when culture and art are succumbing to the dictates of capital that drives consumers to crave new things. The market is flooded with content that has to rapidly become obsolete and be replaced by new content; repeating what already exists is boring, and if something old does get repeated, it is done just for effect, as a fad, and not to articulate some complex relations. Our repetition, on the other hand, aims to draw critical attention to the excessively fast and superficial consumption of intellectual content and underscore the significance of rereading.
3 – Repetition is one of the fundamental features of contemporary art and of the time as well as the place we live in. For example, the usual method of showing video art in a gallery is the video loop—repetition par excellence. Apart from this, what we are largely dealing within contemporary art exhibitions is the documentation of a particular art process, which is in itself a kind of repetition and which can also serve as the basis for possible later repetitions. International curatorial jargon is full of such words as redefine, rethink, revisit; reenactment is one of the popular art genres today. Particularly in spaces that have recently undergone great historical change, local history is something that needs to be revisited. All social actors do this—from politicians, for whom history is an instrument in their games of power; to historians, who must constantly redefine it; to contemporary artists, who seek in it the points of trauma that are important for an understanding of their own practices.
4 – Repetition is one of the crucial principles by which history is created. There is far too restricted emphasis placed on the key role repetition plays in the construction of narratives. As Hal Foster has noted, no work becomes historic at the moment of its creation but only later, through the “retroactive effect of countless artistic responses and critical readings.” In order to facilitate this kind of repetition, a developed art system that enables continual reference to art practices through research, publications, collections, and, not least of all, the art market must exist. Today, for spaces outside the dominant system, it is important to analyze the traumas of local histories in this light as well.
5 – Repetition is driven by trauma, the same kind of trauma that had led Moderna galerija in 2000 to found its collection Arteast 2000+, now one of the conceptual cornerstones of the Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova. Here our interest rests principally with two traumas associated with the territory of Eastern European art: the trauma of the absence of a developed art system and the trauma of the unrealized emancipatory ideals of communism. Many of the key thinkers who shaped today’s understanding of the world, from Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Freud to Lacan and Deleuze, have seen the repetition of some unrealized past potential as a way for the subject to be free. Repetition, as Mladen Dolar writes, “concerns some piece of the past which troubles us and drives us to act it out (Agieren, says Freud), to re-enact it, to perform it.”
The exhibition The Present and Presence – Repetition 1 presents mainly Eastern European artworks from the Arteast 2000+ collection, seeking to underscore the significance of collections in constructing histories. Collections are the traditional trophies of the victors and, at first glance, it hardly seems possible they could be anything else. Each object is placed in a collection as a way of repeating the victorious view of history. And, it seems, the only way to challenge the dominant view is through objects that testify to other, different, past events. However, simply adding testimonies about a different past is not enough to change the existing system. In the process of historicization, the challenge for the system is to be taken over by the defeated. To put it another way, for the museological work on the East to be done by the East itself—for the East itself to trigger the initiating event of its own historicization. With regard to our exhibition, we can say that one such initiating event was the creation of the Arteast 2000+ Collection, which was, essentially, the first collection of Eastern European post-war avant-garde art.
And how, in concrete terms, are we repeating the exhibition The Present and Presence? In its original installation, the exhibition occupied one of the floors of the new museum. In the Repetition, we focus on certain sections of the exhibition, to which we are adding new elements. The exhibition is now larger by an entire floor, where we have expanded one of its eleven “times”: namely, Lived Time. This section presents various time- and site-specific works, which develop in real time. We have decided to repeat Lived Time as the Repetition also looks more closely at the material conditions under which art is made. Special emphasis is placed on performance art: in performances, artists deliberately relive the patterns in which social circumstances determine an individual’s conduct. American anthropologist Katherine Verdey recognized a “social schizophrenia” in socialist Romania, which she described as an ability to experience “a real meaningful and coherent self only in relation to the enemy party.” In his films, Romanian artist Ion Grigorescu fights a double of his own body. Verdey’s observation can also be applied to other Eastern European performance and body artists, not just Romanian. Serbian artist Marina Abramović tests the limits of her physical and mental endurance in performances in which she tortures herself, or invites others to do so. Czech artist Petr Štembera treats his body as if it were his enemy, exploring his self under impossible conditions.
Installation view of the exhibition The Present and Presence – Repetition 1, Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova, Ljubljana
Shifting Terms
In addition to the works selected from our collections, two special projects have been included in the Lived Time section: the archive of the exhibition Body and the East and An Archive of Performance Art. Body and the East was the exhibition with which Moderna galerija began historicizing Eastern European art in 1998 and the first show to offer an integral overview of body art practices in the region, highlighting both the fact that they were present in virtually all formerly socialist countries and their conspicuous absence from museum collections. Added to the archive of this exhibition is the special project An Archive of Performance Art, which is the first compilation of the history of performance art in Slovenia as it developed from its beginnings as borderline practices in gallery and theater venues.Alongside the performative nature reflected in the artwork presented in Lived Time, in the Repetition we also emphasize the reiterative nature of historicization. This finds expression in the section Time of the Absent Museum, which relates to the trauma of the absent art system. The Time of the Absent Museum section has had new elements added to it, most importantly, the Questionnaires about the presence of artists from our collection in other public and private collections in Slovenia and abroad—the West and elsewhere. We had sent these Questionnaires to the artists represented in our collection with the aim of having the best possible view of the presence of their works in various collections from the 1960s to today. In the exhibition, the Questionnaires are presented as wallpaper, a method by which we hope to convey the fact that the art system is an important element in the production of art. And indeed, the art system, or rather its absence, is precisely what concerns the artists exhibited in this group. This concern brings them close to what is generally known under the label institutional critique. To problematize universal terms, we decided on the title Time of the Absent Museum instead. We deliberately avoided the label Eastern institutional critique, as this modifier would have emphasized the subordinate role of such practices to the canonized Western institutional critique, which determines all other particular institutional critiques.Time of the Absent Museum neither proposes a new terminology nor completely rejects the old one, but rather points to what stands behind the different labels associated with these and similar practices, namely, the material conditions. Thus, the Questionnaires, as individual works, are tied specifically to these conditions. Let’s examine this a little more closely.Time of the Absent Museum is in fact a time of absent history. Artists from different generations—such as the members of the Croatian group Gorgona from the first half of the 1960s, the members of the Slovene group OHO from the second half of the same decade, and the movement Neue Slowenische Kunst (NSK) from the 1980s—were all trying through their works to organize the field in which they operated. In a way, their activities substituted those of institutions. Doing the work of mostly absent institutions and the nonexistent art market they were changing the real conditions of their work. They were not so much critiquing institutions and the market as Western artists were, but were trying, a certain symbolic extent, to substitute them. This, they believed, was crucial for the contextualization of their own work and, to some degree, for their survival. Over the past fifty years, artists have been gathering in order to create, through a genuine collectivity, an alternative to the absent art system and, also, to the compulsory socialist collectivity. Through their self-organized forms of work, artists—not only in the socialist period but also, to a large extent, today—have created their own economies, opened galleries, organized international networks, and addressed collectors. The artists from Time of the Absent Museum are reacting to the absence of a network for interpretation, representation, and distribution that enables the repetition as a key process in the creation of history. And one of the conditions for such repetition is, in fact, the presence of works in art collections. The statistical data gathered through the Questionnaires shows us how limited works by Eastern European post-war avant-garde artists are represented in public and private collections locally and internationally. Despite the fact that the disastrous results for the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s have improved slightly over the past twenty years, the arithmetic mean of the results gathered by the Questionnaires remains somewhere around zero. These merciless statistics, then, tell us that the conditions for repetition as a way to consolidate history do not exist in the East. Within the collection itself, meanwhile, the presentation of the Questionnaires points to the repetition of a traumatic experience, and it is the awareness of the latter which represents a potential for the future. In this way the exhibition The Present and Presence – Repetition 1 becomes performative in nature, since it not only represents artworks, but indirectly affects them by raising the visibility of the material conditions under which Eastern European art has been functioning. After all, this is all happening within a collection of Eastern European art in an Eastern European museum.Two special projects have been added to the Time of the Absent Museum section: An Archive-in-becoming, which focuses on oral histories as parallel methods of historicizing in Eastern Europe, and the archive of Hungarian artist Tamás St.Auby, NETRAF: Portable Intelligence Increase Museum, relating to the idea of self-historicizing, which is dealt with more extensively in the Retro Time section.Unlike most Western artists, who in one way or another continually return to the initiating events of their own canonized history, the artists in the East return to the traumas of their spaces, to what is absent, marginalized, or suppressed. The possibilities for all that had long been excluded from official histories to get its legitimate place only opened after the fall of the socialist regimes. But the great social changes brought along also new amnesia and new traumas that will, in all likelihood, take a long time to overcome. On the territory of the former Yugoslavia, one such thing was undoubtedly the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina. It is twenty years now since it began, and to draw attention to this we have conceived a special project, The Bosnia Archive.
Installation view of the exhibition The Present and Presence – Repetition 1, Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova, Ljubljana
In 1996 Moderna galerija staged a project entitled For the Museum of Contemporary Art Sarajevo 2000, which presented the works donated to the Bosnian capital by thirteen preeminent international artists. The museum in Sarajevo was expected to open by 2000, but unfortunately there is no telling even today when this might actually happen. What far worse is that today Sarajevo is a town of floundering or closed cultural institutions. Local authorities are unable to come to an agreement as to whose responsibility the museums and their collections are. National and international heritage is deteriorating there in full view of the entire world, so to speak. Similarly, as during the war in Bosnia, nobody seems to be able to help.To this we might add: in 1996, the Moderna galerija was able to collect works by thirteen artists that rated very highly on the international art market, stage a presentation of them on its own premises, and send them to Sarajevo. Furthermore, it organized an international symposium Living with Genocide: Art and the War in Bosnia, and did several other things to help. Today, being in dire financial straits, Moderna galerija can no longer support others. The Republic of Slovenia has decided to tackle the economic crisis also by curtailing the fundamental mission of its museums. A decade and a half after it helped with the founding of what is now the Ars Aevi collection in Sarajevo, our institution is unable to purchase a single work for its own collections. We have temporarily exchanged, for the exhibition The Present and Presence – Repetition 1, a work with the Ars Aevi collection. We have sent the photograph by Irwin / Andres Serrano Mystery of the Black Square to Sarajevo, borrowing from them Marina Abramović’s Cleaning the Mirror (1995), which she had donated, on our intercession, to the future Sarajevo museum.The present and future repetitions of The Present and Presence exhibition aim to consolidate the memory of the material conditions of Eastern European art. Let us recall the example of the Russian avant-garde: canonized Western history describes it primarily as a formal innovation, rather than as an ideological and propagandistic activity as Boris Groys has defined it. Material conditions are precisely the thing dominant histories most tend to suppress. Historical materialism, on the other hand, draws attention to the unresolved contradictions these conditions produce. Despite variations, material conditions are common to all. Their difference results in diverse constructs of history. For this reason, a new, common history can only grow out of an articulation of the ramifications of the different material conditions. Thus we can say that it is the repetition of the Eastern European traumas which raises our exhibition above differentiating between the East and the West, aspiring instead for a new, common history.
Installation view of the exhibition The Present and Presence – Repetition 1, Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova, Ljubljana
L’Internationale
Art institutional critique tackled the unrealized promises of the Enlightenment, critiquing the institution that had insufficiently contributed to the development of a democratic public sphere. In this, it frequently remained trapped in its own critique, without substantially changing the actual conditions of work. Today institutional critique can be said to have been incorporated by various agents, from individuals such as artists and activists to diverse art spaces such as critical museums and independent art centers. These agents share similar interests and oppose neoliberal forms of cultural production (corporate culture, cultural industries, etc.)Staring from similarly defined urgencies and priorities and a shared desire to formulate common knowledge, these agents together create new fields of interaction, a new public space, the space of the commons. Another important agent in the new cultural production is decentralized networks, which develop a plurality of narratives, common methodologies and archives, and partly also shared economies.One such network is L’Internationale, which is comprised of seven European art institutions and was initiated in Ljubljana in 2010. The founding partners of L’Internationale are the Moderna galerija, Ljubljana; the Július Koller Society, Bratislava; the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA), Barcelona, the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven; and the Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst, Antwerpen (M HKA). This year Salt in Istanbul and Museum Reina Sofia, Madrid, joined our network. Our long term project bears the name of the song L’Internationale that proclaims internationalism as a kind of weapon in the struggle for equitable and more democratic society. By choosing the name of that particular song we wanted to emphasize that there are different sorts of internationalism, ranging from one based on a modernist understanding of cosmopolitan living in world capitals to the idea of a global citizen for whom it is not important any more where he or she lives. By choosing this name we have decided for another tradition of internationalism, the tradition of workers’ unions, whose goals have been directed at concrete changes above national or state citizenship, at the same time taking into consideration both levels, the local and the international.Our collaboration derives from the need to overcome certain constrains of our professional work, and especially from the need for more equal dialogue and exchange of ideas in the global art world, which has been ruled by the hegemonic ambitions of largest contemporary art institutions. To date we have staged three exhibitions presenting works from our collections and archives and organized several conferences and workshops. In addition, the element that has played the most prominent role in our collaboration is developing common knowledge, methodologies, values, visions, and common economies. This represents the skeleton of a new institution of commons, basically located in the field of interaction between distinct, autonomous institutions. One of the most important results of this collaboration is the production of common knowledge as a widely accessible public good.In addition to being one of the objectives, the production of common knowledge is the focus of a special vocabulary entitled Common Knowledge, which Moderna galerija aims to produce in the next few years. It is conceived as an interactive project, not only of the institutions constituting the network, but also of other individuals, collectives, movements, and networks that are interested in the new forms of cultural production. The terms we wish to collect, select and include in our vocabulary relate, above all, to new forms of cultural production, such as new instituent practices, which include both the work of institutions and artistic practices with emancipatory potential from various local traditions.The terms in the vocabulary will relate to two main areas, one entitled Horizontal Connections, and the other one, Verticality in the Service of Common Knowledge. The first part will focus on the new global conditions and on the fact that we require more equality to create knowledge under these conditions, and the second one, on the need to redefine institutions so that they can attune themselves to this new situation. Horizontal Connections are about a new, more horizontal dynamic for creating knowledge whereas Verticality in the Service of Common Knowledge is about reconsidering the role of institutions that would be capable of forming stronger connections through horizontal processes of integrating the knowledge from the bottom without capitalizing on the work produced by their less powerful counterparts.This project will relate closely to a number of other projects organized by other institutions in the network L’Internationale under the common title Uses of Art, as our collective focus for the next five years is on rethinking the use value of art, or the usage of art; reconsideration of the participation and direct engagement of art and of new forms of cultural production in critical thinking.
Photos by Dejan Habicht, Courtesy of Moderna galerija, Ljubljana
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