Instituent Communitas
Organized by Dorian Batycka
Please join us for a two-evening meeting at at the space of “Gotong Royong. Things We Do Together” exhibition, on the subject of instituent art communities and how they form in cases where artists are facing political risk.
24/01/2018
18:00 - 20:00
Styrmir Örn Guðmundsson, Enrico Floriddia and Dorian Batycka
The first evening will start with a short performance by Icelandic / Warsaw-based artist Styrmir Örn Guðmundsson, who will present a short preview of his new work wHAt You Are dOing WIth mY Life? (2017). Througout there will be a presentation by Enrico Floriddia, an artist representing the French city of Poitiers, though primarily interested in interdisciplinary concepts of memory, cultural capital, transition of ideas and their storage in the collective memory of social (and national) groups. Together with Dorian Batycka the two will present the second iteration of their Mobile Mapsa participatory geopolitical mood board.
25/01/2018
19:00 - 21:00
Jan Moszumański, Artists at Risk, Erkan Özgen and Dorian Batycka
The second event of “Instituent Communitas” will start with a lecture performance of Jan Moszumański /over seeing without watching/. It will be followed by the showcase of the work of Artists at Risk, at the intersection of human rights and arts, founded by Marita Muukkonen and Ivor Stodolosky, together in conversation with artist and filmmaker Erkan Özgen. The program will follow a screening of Özgen’s work Wonderland (2016), following the narration of a young deaf and mute boy named Muhammed, who found refuge with Özgen’s family outside a in the small Northern Syrian village of Kobani. The film traces Muhammed’s story of escaping the war, presenting his heart wrenching story as one of resistance and rupture. Together, Artists at Risk and Özgen will discuss the importance of art in relation to social and political issues, and what the implications are for artists and curators working in tense political climates.
/ over seeing without watching /
is a performative lecture combined with elements of sound acoustic mimesis. In face of technological augumentation of judicature and proportionally to progressing of the state apparatus automation ‒ the administration gradually takes over the duties of the law enforcement agencies and forces preventing social unrest. Taking as a starting point Jacques Rancière’s observation, that in order to function all administration necessarily needs language (The Ignorant Schoolmaster, 1987) the lecture explores a scenario in which we gradually withdraw to pre-linguistic means of communication, as an emancipatory strategy allowing the possibility of developing a language whose rules would evolve at a pace rendering its use as a basis of repression impossible.
ARTISTS at RISK (AR)
New institution at the intersection of human rights and the arts. AR is dedicated to mapping the field of persecuted visual art practitioners, facilitating their safe passage from their countries of origin, hosting them at “AR-Safe Haven Residencies” and curating related projects. Artists, writers, curators, critics and scholars are targets of politically motivated threats and persecution in great parts of the world. Perpetuum Mobile (PM) initiated Artists at Risk (AR) to provide a platform and network to support these art practitioners in a time of need. This encompasses facilitating a safe exit from countries of origin; assistance in the procurement of travel documents; providing legal assistance; and matching ARs with so-called AR-Safe Havens and residencies in the AR network. AR liaises with several cities and networks which provide “artists at risk” a safe place to live and work for a period of time.
Dorian Batycka
art critic and curator cooperating among others with Hyperallergic, Selections, Frieze Blog and Nero. Interested in wide-range studies covering art practice, sociology and geopolitics. As a curator, he has been involved in numerous international exhibitions and projects at such venues as the Royal College of Art, London; Bait Muzna for Art Film, Oman; and the Maldives National Pavilion at the 55th Venice Biennale. Since October 2015, a curator at Bait Muzna for Art Film (BMAF), a new institution located in Muscat, Oman. The institution explores discursive developments in contemporary art and film, with a focus on the Arab world, by providing access to film production studios and exhibition space.
Jan Moszumanski-Kotwica
b. 1990, Kraków, Poland) works with film, sculpture and sound. He was studying fine arts at academies in Krakow, Oslo and Malmö. His work is concerned with emotional landscape of ideological systems influencing his life, and the relativity of value of material and immaterial labour. He is occupied with the economy of sublime and its expression in monuments, as well as the invention of commodified experience of fear through Horror fiction, that took place parallely to the Industrial Revolution, in other words affinity between the mist and the smog. In his multisensory Sturm-und-Drunk new not-so-romantic black noise show Death Wind he is challenging the pathos of romantic image of affective relation between human and weather (nature).In November and December 2016 he worked as an assistant to Bouchra Khalili's project commissioned by documenta 14 in Athens. Currently he is working on a video dedicated to problem of recursion in contemporary mechanisms of shaping identity VR Porn Must Be Third Person View or the Fun Is Gone: a Bubblecore Essay, as well as on the project for Ghetto Biennale, Port-au-Prince, dedicated to research on a model of spirituality that would work well within the framework of New Materialism. Occasionally under alias Jan Moss.
Erkan Özgen
is an artist who has previously worked with Artists at Risk at the AR Pavilion in Athens in 2017. Originally from Amed in Eastern Turkey (Diyarbakir in Turkish), Özgen remains based in Diyarbakir where continues to make art.