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For the past forty years, U. F. O. s (Universal-Cultural Futurological
Operations) have occupied the art space above Bratislava. U. F.
O. s are realistic, anti-illusionist objects and actions, anti-happenings
and anti-images, which, ironically, are fully embedded into a cosmology
of the uncertain and, as part of the pseudo-sciences, embedded into
an empire of extraterrestrial flying objects, designed and navigated
by the 'Ufo-naut' Július Koller.
After 1960, the landscapes and cities of former Eastern Europe are
replete with spirits and forms that transmogrify, transform, and
then dissolve into thin air. The star-maps that are used to survey
these artificial worlds often serve to navigate the private public.
The world is full of eerie displacements, gestures of the uncanny,
and the constellation of the real exists in a plethora of doubled
forms: one speaks of near-death experiences, and the roaming of
subjectivity in 5 dimensions meets noontime fauns. Question marks,
meanders, rows of numbers, and persons of the line belong to the
inventory at hand. Communication machines emerge and shut themselves
up before they have the chance to become immaterial and disappear.
Inconspicuously, poses and gestures from private photo albums appear
in the photographers' studios of Vanity Fair. The stories and spirits
of a parallel avant-garde, whose silhouettes have yet to be found
on the walls of the Western canon, lie at the heart of the teachings
of Georg Schöllhammer.
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Dorothea von Hantelmann
& Tino Sehgal
30th of August - 3rd of September
Peep Show: Technologies of the Self
'Technologies of the self' are techniques or practices that allow
individuals to work on themselves by regulating their bodies, their
thoughts and their conduct. Referring back to ancient philosophy,
the notion of technologies of the self was introduced by Michel
Foucault, who posited it in relation to three major types of technologies:
first, technologies of production that serve the production and
transformation of things; second, technologies of sign systems,
which enable us to manipulate signs and symbols; and third, technologies
of power that serve to determine human conduct with the aim of exceeding
power. To this he adds a fourth type, the 'technologies of the self',
by which he means those operations that individuals perform 'with
their own bodies, with their own souls' in order to shape their
existence, or to enable their subjectivity to reach specific states
of being such as 'happiness' or 'clarity' or a certain kind of spiritual
power.
Tino Sehgal , Dorothea von Hantelmann
There are multiple traditions for self-technologies in our culture
and in others, e.g. techniques of self-analysis or Christian techniques
of confession or mediation. Foucault's motivation to explore those
techniques was to readdress the question of the subject and its
self-knowledge in relation to its concrete existence in practices
and modes of self-transformation. He notes that in ancient thought,
philosophy and spirituality are never separated, and that an act
of knowledge is always accompanied by an act of self-transformation
that entails some kind of action on one's very being.
This is a line of thinking we would like to follow: in which way
or how far are forms of knowing oneself related to practices of
transforming oneself? What is the relation between knowing and doing,
between theoretical reflection of, and a practical acting upon,
reality? Which kind of practices and technologies are available
to us today to shape our subjectivity, our conduct, and our modes
of being? The idea is to explore these questions in three parts:
first, by becoming familiar with theoretical approaches to the concept
of technologies of the self; second, by visiting different people
in Warsaw (intellectuals, activists, artists) who introduce, reflect
upon as well as realize practices and technologies of the self;
and third, by thinking about the possibility of inventing new practices,
conducts, rituals or habits that could lead to a further differentiation
of our subjectivities.
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Bojana Cvejic
& Jan Ritsema
4th of September - 10th of September
Bojana Cvejic
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Jan Ritsema |
Police or Disagreement: The Politics of Aesthetics.
Rehearsing Thinking
When art declares that it's political, there is a good chance that
it's doing something political on account of doing nothing political
at all.
Everyone wants you to represent yourself, to appear visible, to
include yourself in a role within an order which could be called
'police'. 'Police' is the term the French philosopher Jacques Rancière
employs to denote the general law that determines the distribution
of parts and roles; in other words, time, space, and attention in
a community as well as its forms of exclusion. 'Police' is the distribution
of what can be seen, heard, said and thought. The distribution applies
to everything: it is the city or your TV, your food diet or your
choreographic regime. However, contrary to what is often said and
heard, not everything is political. Politics are only there where
laws, rules, habits, values, mechanisms, and protocols for perception
and cognition are disrupted. The political is the dispute that challenges
the established framework of identification and classification,
for instance, what art, theatre or dance is or could be or isn't
allowed to be. So police is always there, while politics only occur
sometimes, in the acts of disagreement.
During the week of this course, we will explore the art and thinking
which have been rendered invisible, or at least less representable,
because of their disagreement with the dominant modes. We will explore
why certain artistic and discursive practices have become invisible,
or were so. There are many images we can attribute to the ghostly
invisible: the inhabitant who becomes trespasser (and vice versa),
the itinerant nomad, the one who shifts shapes with the shifts around
him, the one who persists in speaking a minor language, the one
doing not-quite-the-right-thing, not being the right-person-in-the-right-place,
the one who prefers not to.... It's interesting that invisibility
occurs everywhere, but always for specifically different reasons.
We will begin with a selection of texts that we will give you in
advance. Likewise, we ask you to bring in materials - i.e. works
of art in whichever medium, cultural artefacts or other texts -
which could be the starting-point for a conversation. We will do
the same. And we will then see where this leads us. Our discussions
may also take off into performance: interventions, speech-situations,
lectures for other academy participants, or any other form we would
like to act out. Ultimately, we would like to practice thinking
out loud, allowing ourselves to think beyond received opinion, and
even to think about the conditions in which we can expand possibility
beyond opportunism, or our relationship with the possible in so
far as that is feasible.
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