Conference: Doubling Space

 Saturday March 8, 10:00 – 19:30
Home of the Croatian Visual Artists, Trg žrtava fašizma 16, 10000 Zagreb
HDLU Club

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Mies van der Rohe, Seagram Plaza, copyright Carlos Coutinho, 2014

 

In conjunction with the exhibition BORROWORROB: in search of symmetry, the HDLU is hosting a conference on the relationship between art, the city, economy, and space.  Artists, designers, activists, anthropologists, cultural workers, and lawyers will address these relationships in terms of two interrelated themes: Doubling Space and Space as Asset.
Doubling Space
In many ways, contemporary art practices double and fold the space of the city back into itself.  In the late 19th century, Manet’s Bar at the Folies-Bergerè (1882), in which issues of class, gender, spectacle are raised to the surface of a new visibility concurrently through the transformation of painting as a social, commercial, and formal enterprise.  What are some of the important contemporary gestures in which space is doubled, folded, and repeated in the urban context through artistic or political practices and what are their effects? How do these practices constitute forms of spatial redistribution and new forms of visibility?  What are the historical, economic, social, and political forces of which they are the product?  What histories do they seek to establish?  To what extent are they distinct from or contribute to global influences reshaping the urban environment?
Space as Asset
On a global level, the financialization of art has created extremely strong markets that have outperformed many others, even during times of financial crisis.  From this perspective art operates globally as a form of currency.  But there are other forces, organizing practices that are creating new spaces and new economic relations, in which both “practice” is spatially redistributed.  As art becomes increasingly developed as a global form of investment, and simultaneously, as the global fair circuit is doubling every few years, mining local cultures and geographic regions for “undervalued” practices and trends, critical contemporary artistic practices are reshaping art as commodity, as asset, or as object.  How are these challenges being explored today in Zagreb, regionally in the Balkans, and in what way do the historical forces that have shaped the region point to, away from, or against many of these global systems?  What are the spatial assets that art seeks to redistribute, how are they redistributed, and for whom?
Borroworrob: In Search of Symmetry is generously supported by FACE Croatia, The City Office for Education, Culture, and Sport Zagreb, Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Croatia, EPSON, Pozor, AkzoNobel – Dulux, The Sheraton, Urban Stay Zagreb.

 

Schedule
Space as Asset
10:00- 13:00
Introduction: Peter Macapia
Keynote: Paolo Cirio
Tomislav Tomašević and Teodor Celakoski
Iva Marčetić
Zlatan Krajina

Doubling Space
13:00 – 17:00
Introduction: Peter Macapia
Keynote: Ana Hušman
Sonja Leboš
Bojan Mucko
14-14, Marko Salapura

Conference Keynotes
17:30-19:30
Franklin Boyd
Vito Acconci

 

Vito Acconci is known for his controversial Body Art of the 1960s and ’70s. Vito Acconci has led a diverse career, one that has taken him from poetry through performance, video work to architecture. In Acconci’s subversive and highly physical performances, the artist was known to bite himself, burn off his body hair, and masturbate under a wooden ramp in a gallery while fantasizing through a loudspeaker about the people walking above him. Acconci’s interest in the human body and its relationship to public space later evolved into architectural, landscape, and furniture design practice and establishing ACCONCI STUDIO based in New York.

Franklin Boyd is a member of the faculty of the Sotheby’s Institute of Art New York. Franklin Boyd lectures on the intersection of Art & Finance, the Art Market and Art Law. Franklin founded Boyd Level, an arts advisory for new collectors, 15 years ago and maintains a private legal practice that focuses on art and entrepreneurial matters. She was recently cited in the United States Copyright Office’s report to the United States Congress on Artist Resale Rights as having developed a model for best practices in the alternative resale rights space. Franklin serves on the board of directors of Art in General (New York) and Zer01 (Silicon Valley).

Ana Hušman, born in Zagreb in 1977. Studied multimedia and art education department graduating in 2002 from the Academy of Fine Arts Zagreb, Croatia. Attended number of Croatian and International festivals and shows.  Currently she is working on Academy of Fine Arts, Department of animated film and new media.  For her last works she received numerous international awards.  Her works has been shown at festivals and exhibitions including; 9th Gwangju Biennale, 53rd Oktobar Salon, Beograd, Medienturm Gallery, Graz; On the Eastern Front, Ludwig Museum of Contemporary Arts, Budapest; “lucy” bodig & ART ON STAGE, URA, Istanbul, Stuttgarter Filmwinter; IFF Rotterdam, 25 fps, Zagreb; DOK, Leipzig, Deutschland.

Sonja Leboš established the Association for Interdisciplinary and Intercultural Research (AIIR) in Zagreb in 2002. Since then she has been working in inter-mediative fields, connecting cultural theory and practice in contexts of different projects, investigating the role of institutions in public and non-governmental sectors as well as vox populi in situ. She has created various interdisciplinary research methods and platforms for articulation of multilayered urban issues and cooperated with different organizations.  Some of the on-going projects Sonja Leboš has instigated within AIIR platform: “Cybercine”, (http://www.cybercine.org/); “Mnemosyne-Theatre of Memories”, (http://www.theatreofmemories.eu/); ‘’res urbanae’’, (http://resurbanae.wordpress.com/) and ‘‘aRs PUBLICae’’, (http://1postozaumjetnost.wordpress.com/) .

Bojan Mucko holds a master degree in philosophy, ethnology and cultural anthropology from the Faculty of Humanities and Social Science in Zagreb and is a student of MA program in New Media at the Academy of Fine Arts Zagreb. He has been engaged with urban-anthropological issues, reviewing the disciplinary boundaries between contemporary art practices and cultural anthropology through interdisciplinary projects with several NGOs and organizations such as the Association for Interdisciplinary and Intercultural Research, Shadow Casters, BLOK, Zagreb Society of Architects, Ethnographic Museum Zagreb. He was part of the editorial board of the architecture magazine Man and Space and is part of the organization of the ETNOFILm festival.

Paolo Cirio is an innovative conceptual artist working with various media and domains. He works with the idea of shaping flows of social, political and economic structures, and in doing so explores contemporary systems of control, knowledge and information. Cirio’s work deals with various present issues in fields such as privacy, finance, copyright, democracy, militarism and environmentalism. Cirio’s artworks have been presented and exhibited in major art institutions, including Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, 2013; ZKM, Karlsruhe, 2013; CCCB, Barcelona, 2013; CCC Strozzina, Florence, 2013; Museum of Contemporary Art of Denver, 2013; MAK, Vienna, 2013; Architectural Association, London, 2013; Museum of Modern Art, Rio de Janeiro, 2012 and many more.

Dr Zlatan Krajina, Lecturer, University of Zagreb.  Zlatan Krajina is the author of “Negotiating the Mediated City” (London and New York, Routledge, 2014). He was awarded MA and PhD in Media and Communications at Goldsmiths, University of London. Previously he worked as a news and documentary producer and presenter. He has worked as an undergraduate lecturer at Goldsmiths, and is currently based at the University of Zagreb, Croatia, where he teaches postgraduate courses on “Media and the City” and “Media Audiences.”

Iva Marčetić holds an MA in architecture from the University of Zagreb’s School of Architecture. As part of Pulska grupa she represented Croatia in the 13th biennial of architecture in Venice. In 2011/2012 she was a fellow at Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart, Germany and in 2013 she was a resident of Kuda.org from Novi Sad, Serbia. She wrights extensively on housing rights and commodification of land and it’s consequences on city planning and architecture in both post-socialist Yugoslavia as well as Europe. She is a part of editorial team of the magazine “Nepokoreni grad” (Undefeated city) published by the Young antifascist association of Zagreb.

Tomislav Tomašević is currently Ecology Programme Coordinator in Croatian office of Heinrich Bӧll Foundation. He has a BA and MA in Political Science from University of Zagreb, with his dissertation focusing on the critique of a neo-liberal city and an MPhil in sustainable development from the University of Cambridge, in which his dissertation focused on the potential of urban commons. Tomasevic was involved in youth, environmental and urban activism as executive president of Croatian Youth Network, executive president of Friends of the Earth Croatia and co-founder of Right to the City in Zagreb. Tomašević also participated in numerous UN conferences on sustainable development and was Youth Advisor for Europe of United Nations Environment Programme.

Teodor Celakoski is a cultural worker and activist from Zagreb. His work ranges from coordinating cultural programs, networking and cultural advocacy, to institutional innovation and political activism, and is guided by a vision of culture as a form of transformative agency.  In the 1990s with a group of friends and colleagues, he established the Multimedia Institute. In 2001 he co-initiated Clubture, the network for exchange of independent cultural programs within Croatia. Teodor played a key role in the establishment of Kultura Nova – public foundation for the development of non-profit independent contemporary culture, and POGON – a hybrid cultural center. He is an active member of the Right to the City alliance, Zagreb.

Peter Macapia is a New York based artist, architect, and theorist.  He is a native of Vashon Island in the Pacific Northwest of the US.  He is the principal and founder of labDORA.  Macapia’s art and architecture focus on the geopolitics of public space, structural engineering, algorithmic computation, and the geometry and topology of matter/energy relations. He has exhibited and performed at The Storefront for Art and Architecture, and internationally at Art Miami/Basel with solo shows in New York, Hong Kong, London, and Los Angeles. He has taught at Columbia University and Sci-Arc, ESA Paris, TUS Tokyo, and TU Delft.  Macapia studied at RISD and Harvard and received his PhD from Columbia.  He is currently professor at Pratt GAUD.