Re–Directing: East 2016 – Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art

The Re–Directing: East Curatorial Residency is a peer-learning workshop, a curatorial seminar, extended site exploration and a research opportunity for a group of international curators-in-residence, local participants and the Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art team. It has been organised since 2013 in order to facilitate collaborations in-between art initiatives, which due to geopolitical conditions hasn't had many opportunities to exchange knowledge and experience in a horizontal way. 

The Making of Collective Agencies is a fact and a task, a strategy and set of issues related to contemporary artistic practices, which will be the subject of this year’s curatorial workshop. We would like to (self)reflect from a curatorial perspective what is going on outside or on the edges of formal institutions and on the practices which draw their inspiration from critical, social, and collective modes of action for the commons. The starting point for the discussion will be examples of: social practices (e.g. cooperative work, like the Indonesian "gotong royong," or the already non-existent Polish "communal work," which has been replaced by modern forms of the "exchange platforms"), artistic (e.g. activities supporting the self-governance of artistic circles and also "alternative" institutions and forms of presentation and creation of art) or post-artistic practices within politics, economics, and social life (protests, cultural resistance, informal education). The questions which will be discussed are (among others): What are the different strategies and consequences of entangling curatorial and artistic practices in collective actions? Does it mean implementing within their frames political commentary regarding the position of specific collectives? Who and what these collectives are, on behalf of those and within the frames of those which artistic statements are created?

Participants of the 2016 edition of Re–Directing: East curatorial residencies and seminar: Tainá Azeredo (Brazil), Dorian Batycka (Germany), Renan Laru-an (Philippines), Mika Conradie (South Africa) and Open Place: Yuriy Kruchak and Yulia Kosterieva (Ukraine).