9th Futurological Congress, Bratislava Chapter

TALK TO ME! (The Future of Language)

Slovak Radio Building

Mýtna 1,  Bratislava

22-23 September 2018,  15:00 - 20:00

TICKET SALE: https://tootoot.fm/sk/events/5b9e703a0a8f650a78225236

PROGRAM

Day 1: Saturday September 22nd  15:00 - 20:00

Doors open at 14:30 pm

3:00 - 3:15   Peter Sit - Introduction

3:15 - 3:30 Julieta Aranda. Introductory remarks

The 9th Futurological Congress : As a manner of speaking, Language beyond the spoken word.

3:30 - 4:00 radioee.net  (remote conversation)

4:00 - 5:00     Radioee.net

The Language of Gezi Park

Live Broadcast

5:00 - 5:40    Daniel Grúň

Body-Transmitters. Slovak Conceptual Art as Paranormal and Parainstitutional Activity

5:40 - 6:00   20 MINUTE BREAK

6:00 - 6:30 Boris Ondreička

Against Ontological Future

6:30 - 7:30 Ayumi Paul

Why I Blushed

Lecture-performance

7:30 - 8:00 Q+A with all participants

Day 2: Sunday September 23rd  15:00 - 20:00

Doors open at 14:30 pm

3:00 - 3:15   Julieta Aranda

Introductory remarks to day 2

3:30 - 4:00   Tony Yanick

STO.RE, cultural practices of mnemonic immediacy

performative lecture

4:00 - 4:30 Nicoline van Harskamp

PDGN

screening and  discussion

4:30 - 5:00 Karl Holmqvist

Understanding is Overrated

Performance

5:00 - 5:40 Chaosdroid & Boris Vitázek

Language Exercises for Sonic Spaces (LESS)

Audio-visual performance

6:00 Final remarks

An upcoming iteration of The 9th Futurological Congress will take place in Bratislava on 22-23 September of this year, 2018. The congress has been invited to Bratislava by Apart, and it will be hosted at the auditorium of the Slovak Radio Building.

The main interest of the 9th Futurological Congress is to look at the future from several discrete perspectives, avoiding totalizing gestures or predictions - we are curious about the future, and we want to work on it… yet we don’t want to dictate what the future should be.

For the Bratislava iteration of the Futurological Congress, we are concerning ourselves with The Future of Language. Looking at it from the broadest perspective, language is many things: There is voice, there is text, there are musical notation systems… Language is communication. A way of communication is through words, but there is also the silence that helps give shape to those words. There is singing, there are stories passed around from voice to voice, there are misunderstandings, shibboleths, strange accents and mistranslations. There is the language of the body, and the means of communication used by those who are not able to speak. There are musical instruments, animal interactions in frequencies that are inaudible to the human ear, there is the cadence and lilt of poetry when it is being performed, and the difference from when it is only read on paper. There are bird mating calls, there is the low rumble of the earth, there are lexicons and idioms that belong to particular generations, and there are also lexicons and idioms that belong to specific political positions. There is the language of universalism, and there is also the terrible language that is spoken by the sound of war.

Julieta Aranda, Peter Sit

Julieta Aranda is one of the chairpeople of the 9th Futurological Congress. She is also an artist and editor of e-flux journal.

Peter Sit is a artist, curator, organizer and co-founder of APART

Participants :

Daniel Grúň

Body-Transmitters. Slovak Conceptual Art as Paranormal and Parainstitutional Activity.

Július Koller and Stano Filko are considered to be the founders of action and conceptual art in Czechoslovakia. However, a significant part of their lifelong work is difficult to grasp in the categories of Western art canon terminology. The relationship of both artists to non-artistic spheres, especially parapsychology, must be re-examined in order to understand the political dimension of their complex artistic worlds. Because there is an important synopsis of their engagement and effort to change thinking in relation to the world, society, and ultimately to ourselves and our own body. The lecture will focus on the futurological link of both artists in the wider context of Central and Eastern Europe. Based on a comparison of works and archives, I will try to indicate the relationship between paranormal and parainasational in their creation and the work of other artists generations.

Daniel Grúň is an art historian, curator, writer and art critic. Currently he works as an teacher in the Department of Theory and History of Art, Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Bratislava, and as a researcher of the Július Koller Society (since 2009). In 2010 he won the Igor Zabel Award for Culture and Theory.

Nicoline van Harskamp

PDGN

PDGN is a fiction video that portrays a future in which the world is no longer run by national governments or global corporations, and that is neither utopian nor dystopian. A new link language is developing between people across this world through voluntary self-instruction.

The script for PDGN was constructed from actually spoken, non-native English in a series of workshops. Some aspects of language and narrative were borrowed from feminist fiction that proposes systems of language-change, such as Marge Piercy’s Women on the Edge of Time (1976) and Suzette Haden Elgin’s Native Tongue (1984). The language of the script was further developed by applying common and expected factors of language evolution in the areas of syntax, lexicon, and phonetics. These ‘distorting factors’ were conceptualized with the help of academics in fields such as creole studies, computational linguistics and language acquisition as well as Esperantists, recreational language inventors, and the lead actresses Ariane Barnes, Mouna Albakry and Paula So Man Siu.

Nicoline van Harskamp  is an artist whose recent works use and explore the English language that is created among non-native speakers worldwide, and imagine the (aesthetic) properties of a future spoken global language. She studied at the Royal Academy of Visual Arts (KABK), The Hague and the Chelsea College of Art and Design, London and was a resident at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam. Van Harskamp currently teaches as a head tutor in Fine Arts at the Sandberg Institute, Amsterdam.

Karl Holmqvist

UNDERSTANDING IS OVERRATED

An artist’s presentation by Karl Holmqvist briefly outlining a visual arts practice that favours language over images. How rhythms and patterns in language and voice can access areas of hidden meanings and shared memory. The future lies in the powers of a collective imagination.

Karl Holmqvist is a poet and visual artist. In his publications, readings, collages, wall texts and installations he problematizes the text and the mutable potential of language as the bearer of meaning-content. He studied Literature and Linguistics at Stockholm University, Stockholm.

Boris Ondreička

Against Ontological Future

(in two chapters)

Through metaphores of Lurianic phenomenons of Tzimtzum and Shevirat ha-Kelim Ondreička tries to pseudo-speculate around the conflict between metaphysics of and ontology of time, biosemiotic sense of birth, life and processual death (decay as a source of unlimited creativity, in terms of Zalamean Transmodernismo) as means of possible political effect.

Boris Ondreička is a curator, artist, author and singer based in Bratislava, SK and Vienna, AT. He has been working as project coordinator at Soros centre for contemporary arts, Bratislava, SK, director of art–initiative tranzit.sk, Bratislava, SK, and since 2012 curator at Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary.

Ayumi Paul

WHY I BLUSHED

a lecture-performance

On thoughts about language, sound and ecology.

With music composed for a mountain drawing by Sophie Madeleine Jaillet, a 360 degree videoclip by Richard Reed Parry, a xylophon song for hermaphrodites, music from the 18th century for solo violin, a work by Yoko Ono, SEA WALKING composed by Elliott Sharp for Ayumi Paul and other findings.

Ayumi Paul is a Berlin-based violinist and composer. Her work combines site specific concert, composition, performance, and installation. The intrinsic sound of body, material, and the surroundings is essential to her conceptual approach to creating highly sensitive and often durational performances which expand the possibilities of listening. She trained as a classical violinist at Hochschule für Musik Hanns Eisler in Berlin and Indiana University and gave her solo debut at the Berlin Philharmonic Hall in 2003 from where she continued to perform at the world´s most sought after concert halls while at the same time developing her own distinct approach to music. In recent years she became more widely known in the visual and performative art context.

RADIO Espacio Estacion (RadioEE.net)
The Gezi Park Language

How is slang transmitted and sustained through codes and contradictions? What can fluid word formations tell us about how ideas immigrate? How does learning transform when it shifts from the grammars of schools to words of wisdom from the streets?

RADIO Espacio Estacion (RadioEE.net) is a mobile, multilingual, online radio channel broadcasting conversations about mobility and movement while on the move. It is led by a collective of artists, graphic designers, writers, and curators including Sebastian Bellver, Stephanie Sherman, Agustina Woodgate, and Hernan Woodgate.

Chaosdroid & Boris Vitázek

Language exercises for sonic spaces

(LESS) merges sound, visual and virtual reality in a playful exploration of spoken and unspoken language(s). The Futurological Congress iteration focuses on the distant future of human language, speculating on its practice solely as art. Language slams, A.I. opera and library index fugues are but a few of the possible manifestations into which our augmented and unfathomable descendants may indulge. Listen to your third ear.

Chaosdroid & Boris Vitázek

Amalia Roxana Filip (Chaosdroid) plays mostly with sound, live visuals and still images. She has been a member of various cultural initiatives, she participated as visual artist in festivals and exhibitions, and she played sounds in various clubs and cultural spaces - as herself or as part of multimedia projects. Few highlights: coordinator of a.live festival of live visuals, graphic designer for Kloaka literary magazine, co-author of the new media performance Skúmanie javov (Phenomena Research) and the transmedial project "liminal/lucent" (with Zuzana Husárová), erratic member of The Blackwood Incident sound project, VR researcher and mentor.

Boris Vitázek is an artist and designer, characterized by a combination of media and technology. His works include, for example, a theater combining elements of virtual reality with dance, or oversized projections based on sound and image generation in the form of mapping.

Tony Yanick

STO.RE, cultural practices of mnemonic immediacy

Sto.re (/stôrē/ pronounced ​story​) is the ongoing research project into the problems of making sense of the complexity we face in the so-called hyperconnected era, specifically in terms of knowledge (and information) practices, attention, and general intellect. In terms of the future of language, I am interested in how sociotechnical systems condition new ways of reading and writing. Conveying knowledge through the audio-visual medium is becoming more and more the preferred method, yet we still lack the interfaces that enable us to acquire intimacy. The following will scrub the history of audio-visual technical memory and witness a new archival economy of memory emerging: the re:search and re:mixing of the the media archive. The future I explore is not the temporal indication of a future out there, rather to think of the future as an operator or a cut in the present. This spatial understanding of future (as a point, putting into relationship the fragments of information) poses not a speculative design, but rather reorients the question towards creating the spaces (virtual and actual) for these practices to emerge. What types of interfaces exist or could exist to access this future space? What sorts of collective intimacy emerges when practices of reading and writing, consuming and producing blur (where reading is writing)? To approach these questions, Sto.re explores transtextuality, the filmic-essay, hypermedia and distributed anarchives, and finally, machine learning and vision.

What can a (hyper)image do?

Tony Yanick is a philosopher, computer engineer, & multimedia artist from the United States. Currently, he is a PhD candidate at the University at Buffalo in the Media Study department.

The organizers reserves the right to make changes to the event program.

Organized by APART in cooperation with tranzit.sk

for more info contact us info@apart.sk

www.apart.sk

sk.tranzit.org

APART is a Slovak artist cooperative. Today, its members include Denis Kozerawski (* 1990), Peter Sit (* 1991), Magda Schery (* 1990), and Andrej Žabkay (* 1987). APART was formed at the turn of 2011 and 2012. APART performs research, creative-artistic, project- and exhibition- creative / curatorial, publishing, and archiving activities. The artists initiate, create, organize, and exhibit group manifestations (often giving space to other artists and theorists, as well), or work on their own. APART is a meta-participatory platform. It works on a proto-institutional basis, putting its polysubjectivity into directly related or desired contexts according to the principle of sharing economy.

tranzit.sk is a contemporary art initiative active in Bratislava since 2002. It is part of the international network tranzit.org, made up of similar organisations set up in Hungary, The Czech Republic, Romania and Austria which main partner is ERSTE Foundation.  In the last five years tranzit.sk has focused on the relationship between art and society as well as on multidisciplinary approach. Its research-based exhibitions, lectures, discussions and workshops address a broad thematic spectrum, among others the heritage and culture of minorities, community and collective practices, the urban space, neighbourhood, the art system and the conditions of artistic production.

Supported using public funding by Slovak Arts Council, Erste Foundation, Július Koller Society

Media partner: Kapitál

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ART IS WORK

curated by Apart collective
Krokus Gallery, Bratislava

15 Feb - 29 Mar 2018

Behind every exhibition opening, festival and biennale is hidden creativity and artistic labour. In the contemporary world of art and the global art market, a great deal of artistic labour remains unrecognized, eventhough the existence of the whole environment stands and falls on its tangible results.

The exhibition Art Is Work aims to establish a discussion about the underfinanced cultural sector in the Slovak art scene, in particular about the lack of financial evaluation for artists and in adequate conditions for their work.

Presented art works, planned lectures and debates in various forms ask questions about the value of artistic work, point to its precarization and its relation to capitalism, and its forms and transformations in (neo) liberal society. It seems,
that in order forthe system of unfair redistribution, in which we live today, to reproduce itself, certain “work” must disappear in order for another “work” to appear. Whether it is the work of a cultural employee or artist, wage worker or artistic installation, which is a result of artistic
labour. In spite of its necessity, we are not allowed to see certain”work” so that we do not see
the malfunctioning of the system.

ART IS WORK v spolupráci s / in collaboration with: A2 kulturní čtrnáctideník, APART collective, Feministická (umělecká) instituce, Liam Gillick, Anetta Mona Chişa & Lucia Tkáčová, Jana Kapelová, Barbora Kleinhamplová, Bojana Kunst, Nulová mzda, Mohammad Salemy, Krisdy
Shindler, Jiří Skála, Tereza Stejskalová, Pavel Sterec, Raša Todosijević, Anton Vidokle, Working Artists and the Greater Economy (W.A.G.E.)

produkcia / production by Ema Hesterová, Katarína Neubelerová
architektúra / architecture by Andrej Žabkay

Ďakujeme / Thanks to: e-flux, Krokus Galéria, Miro Gajdoš, Martina Hajachová, Klaudia Kosziba, Maureen Paley, Andrej Sádecký, Lise Soskolne, tranzit.sk, laureáti Ceny Oskára Čepána 2017 – Katarína Hrušková, Nik Timková, Zuzana Žabková

publication

Anthropocene is the new geological epoch of our planet. As hinted at by its ancient Greek root of anthropos (άνθρωπος), it is the age of humans. Today, humans hold the position of the main powers shaping the Earth. According to some authors, the beginning of this era dates back to the end of the 18th century when Watt’s invention of the steam engine opened the gates of the industrial revolution and fossil fuels became the drivers of early capitalism. The aroma of burnt oil products has since then become our daily companion. Other scientists place the turning point between the Anthropocene and the preceding epoch of Holocene (which started at the close of the most recent glacial period) in the 20th century. Sometimes they even cite a very concrete date – namely July 16th 1945, when the first atomic bomb was detonated as part of tests carried out in New Mexico. The invisible, thin layer of radioactive substances which enveloped the planet after the explosion, has been forever imprinted in the future layers of the Earth’s core, which will be studied one day by geologists of the distant future in their core samples.

As it tends to happen with technology, new inventions generate new accidents. What Chernobyl means for nuclear energy, climate changes means for technologies driven by fossil fuels. The way we approach our future can therefore leave nothing to chance – we must plan, think, recalculate and contextualize our existence within the planetary ecosystem. That is why we need radical political and technological imagination which pulls down the ideas of what the limits and possibilities of individual human bodies are. The theoretician Benjamin H. Bratton even challenges the humankind to engage with prudence in the practice of committed geodesign to avert the impending ecological disaster. In other words – we need more daring geopoetics and less stupid geoengineering. This calls for sensible interfaces set up for the frequencies of interspecies diplomacy, which may include the use of the Sun as the supreme source of energy for human and extra-human activities, from the level of individual cells through our bodies to large collectives of heterogeneous agents.

The Anthropocene is a daunting epoch, anticipated and ushered in by the horrors of modernization. Modernization took many shapes and forms and we intentionally opt for a very non-Western variant – namely the modernization that China went through under Mao Zedong. By the gesture of including one of his poems in our exhibition we want to show that the brutal modernity and the no less brutal Anthropocene share the strangely delusional sense for the planet combined with a total negation of its autonomy – the Earth does not belong to us, yet we pretend that it is in fact ours.

With our exhibition, we want to escape from this paradox by means of patient construction of a new planetary perspective which does not differentiate between nature and society, the wild and the city, or people and plants – on the contrary, our perspective draws its energy from the radical idea of equality of all things; including people.

Thus, we ask: How to write the planet? That is to say: Not to straightforwardly follow its lines or fold its pages, but to genuinely co-write the planet?

Text: Lukáš Likavčan

Translation: Michal Spáda

Photo: Jan Trnka

Sound: Chaosdroid

Graphic design: APART

Documentation: Peter Sit, Andrej Žabkay

Video: Denis Kozerawski

20. 9. – 22. 10. 2017
opening 20. 9. 18:00
open wed-sun 2-8:30 PM

Socialist feminism 
Antifašistički front žena 
Jewish Labour Bund 
Panfilia 
Cosmohumanism 
Družina 
Biocosmists 
Trotskyism 
Anarcho-demokraták 
Gaudiopolis 
Solidarność 
Anarcho-collectivism 
Davisti 
Levy Front Iskusstv 
Strandzha

We are constant participants of a conference call. Voices are constantly speaking to us, seeking our attention. But who leads this call? Who speaks and what does he tell us? Who has the voice in today's monolithic society and whose voice was denied? Who must take it violently to be heard? Who listens and who lets others to be heard? Who do we choose to listen to?

http://www.futuraproject.cz/en/karlin-studios/event/270-apart-collective-a-part-of-monolith

What is a human being is if he is not a citizen? What are his rights at the moment in which it is not possible to characterize them as rights of a citizen of  state ?

Human rights. Fiction. Our hallucination. The world found itself in ruins of human rights the moment it faced a man who lost everything else except for the pure fact of being a man.

We perceive the rules of language and Declaration of Rights from 1789 as immutable meta-rules and values, which bound us  to respect them instead of thinking about them in a context of our present days towards a  better future in order to reflect our modern world in relation to our needs.

Mladen Stilinović  told us more than 20 years ago : AN ARTIST WHO CANNOT SPEAK ENGLISH IS NO ARTIST. Today we could add : AN ARTIST, A CURATOR, A GALLERY INTERN WHO CANNOT SPEAK ENGLISH IS NO ARTIST, NO CURATOR, NO GALLERY INTERN.

If in the contemporary world an artist who doesn't speak English is not an artist and if a man  who is not a citizen, doesn't want to be or can't be naturalized or sent back to his homeland,  lost all his rights and doesn't want to conform to the new national identity is not a human being, then who is Babi Badalov ?

Anomaly
Deviation
Divergency
Azimuth
Human
Future

Some people wish he was, as Babi Badalov writes, just their „hallucination“.

In the situationist dictionary, Mustapha Khayati writes that the language is the house of power, the refuge of its violence. If the political power restrains from using physical violence, it relies on language to guide its order. Each new interpretation authorities call  misinterpretation and  dictionary is the guardian of meaning.

For situationists, the critique of predominant language became permanent new revolutionary theory.

Babi Badalov is a poet, an artist, which disposes language of its status of exclusive commodity and turns it to a gift, to  a theft, to  an excrement, to waste. Using exclusively found objects on which he notes down his orna-mental poetry, he disposes  language of its  aura of holiness and glorification.

By means of his visual poetry, he creates a language, which is not an objective reflection of the present times, but which tries to speak the truth to its power. He is an intellectual. A person, who works from exile, from periphery, marginally. He is not a professional in the selected field, but rather an uninvited „outsider“, who unlike an „insider“, does not follow his individual interests, who breaks the limits of human thinking. He is powered by a belief that nothing is given that  there is not only one truth and everything is allowed.

He is a prisoner of language and at the same time the only one who can see its bars and is challenged by its totalitarian order on a daily basis.

Contemporary art world  is the world translated to English.

As the status of a refugee is always considered  a temporary state, which leads either to naturalization or repatriation likewise is the non-acquaintance of English language deemed temporary.

In his status of a refugee, Babi Badalov calls into question the  unity of holy trinity  of state/ nation/ territory and touches what nation considers its own – its  language. He is  a thief of   a language. If all departures from the normative/ totalitarian/ hegemonial/ official grammar are its deviation, then he makes the language deviated.

Giorgio Agamben wrote that refugee is breaking up the identity  between  man and  citizen, between nativity and nationality. By his existence he threatens the basis of national states, in which limitations growing number of people can no longer be represented and casts doubt on the original illusion of their sovereignty.

As  International Art English, defined as an amateurish English used in art press releases, is a space of conflict, fight and controversy, diversion of language and doubting of its sovereignty so is the category of a refugee the one through which we can perceive  forms and limitations  of future political community.

International Art English, which has become a sort of universal language of communication between artists, curators, institutions and international public and without its knowledge it became  almost impossible to create, which has the potential to unite people and alienate them at the same time, is the house of power, a tool of oppression and exploitation.

By means of  his short disruptive impulses in the authoritative world of grammar and inviolability of language syntax he outlines future publics outside of our territorial and class models.

For this exhibition he will find himself in a dialogue with  software. As a sustainer of Dadaist tradition, he applies  principles of  dada creation to the technology of predictive writing. The language, with which the algorithm of predictive writing manipulates, is based on the ability to predict what his user will say next, based on what has been previously inserted into it. He is aware of the dominance of  English language, which has always been the tool of the empire and whose spreading is currently accelerated by technological progress. However, he does not radically rejects  its dominance nor does he  negate it, but he understands it as an offering of the room for confrontation, a space where he can insert absurdity into otherwise rational algorithm.

Contrary to the software, Babi Badalov is not trying to find a logical system in absurdity, but he allows himself to stay in chaos, in not-knowing  and admits the impossibility of predicting the contingency and creative thinking. He is not trying to find recourses. For this exhibition, in terms of his performance, he finds himself in a  dialogue with software. In a dialogue, in which human and machine don't understand each other, because they can not (not yet).

Kristína Országhová

Possibility of Preserving by APART  with Parallel Practice, PLURAL, Kristína Országhová, Karaoke Tundra, András Cséfalvay, Aleš Čermák, Josef Dabernig, Nicoline van Harskamp, Marianna Simnett, Lucia Gavulová

Kunsthalle Bratislava 
Opening: 30/3. 2017 6pm
Through: 25/6 2017.

The "Possibility of Preserving / Možnosť uchovávania" project is a creative work of the APART artistic group that brings together young visual artists Denis Kozerawski, Peter Sit, and Andrej Žabkay. The work of the group is not limited to author's production only, but also includes the organization of activities related to the advancement of the discourse on contemporary visual arts (editorial, curator's, and exhibition activities as well as cultural activism). Each aspect of the way the group functions is also reflected in the way it approaches the creation of the exhibition. The core lies in interconnecting various perspectives and settings, including also other invited authors from the field of visual arts, based on the method of trial and error. Here, the primary importance is put on the process itself, while the final output remains unpredictable and, in principle, secondary. The authors enter a dialogue, exploring the fragile boundaries of artistic production - (non)production by way of subverting and questioning the approved procedures. Pursuing the collective approach to the project, they, by definition, challenge the work of art in its final form - as an ultimate artifact. Similarly, they test the exhibition format through their directorial, regulative, and stage-managerial inputs. The viewer thus encounters and becomes part of the emerged situations, legitimizing them through his or her very presence.

The alchemistic symbol of transformation is a principal element of the entrance object of the exhibition - a pump propelling water circulation through the whole exhibition area in the shape of a gallery. The circulation is secured through the supply of solar energy, generated by way of a solar panel that has been installed by the authors on the roof of the House of Art building. Its physical placement in the space navigates the viewer to move around the exhibition area, dominated by the light gradient of transition from absolute glare to darkness enabling one to perceive film screenings in the end of the exhibition area. Towards the end of the exhibition the viewer is encouraged to change his or her vertical position to a horizontal one when invited to lie down, to free him or herself from the context of the exhibition/institution/surrounding environment and to perceive without interruptions the flow of consecutive screenings related to the theme of the exhibition. The omnipresent vocal accompaniment introduces the visitor to a vision of the future era, characterized by the full automation of human labor. Thus, it outlines a possible state of affairs in the "hereafter", metaphorically embodied by Pangea Proxima as the ultimate form of an ancient-new arrangement of the continents. The authors interconnect various notions, while drawing from the ideas of Russian cosmism and manifold contemporary speculations about transhumanism and the evolution of humankind in the future.

They use a database of texts to choose passages that - in their new arrangement - create a meta-text responding to the authors' visions of a human gathering based on ADA, a collective artificial intelligence. The latter has transformed society for human's sake and enabled an ideal state of society where work is not required as a necessity, generated by the capitalistic system. Rather, work is transformed into the principle of creative thinking/ art production. Art has become the ultimate social capital. It has become everything; the definitive phase is emerging when art permeates everyday life. ADA describes the newly-emerged society and how it must have defined itself over against the presently existing social problems. The authors call the new establishment ERA (Earth Recharging Association). This is meant not in the sense of a corporation. Rather, it is envisaged as a society that may represent a business entity, but also (and especially) a human gathering - a system of collective human existence and interaction.

The exhibition is a utopian and futurological story that draws from the contemporary discourse on the issues of minorities, gender questions as well as the issues such as corporeality, mortality, social establishment, identification, culture, and overall world order. However, it offers neither answers nor solutions. Instead, it asks questions and admits failures. The key moment represents the conditions that predetermine human transformation and emancipation into a higher form of being, with the machine becoming equal to the human as the former begins to feel for itself. The environment of the exhibition is supposed to evoke the ideal state of affairs, when a being is introduced into and becomes an inseparable part of a total artistic installation. The being is encouraged to pursue a frame of mind when no energy output is required; to become one with the environment and to resign oneself to the care of technology.

The ideas and points of departure of the exhibition are integrated in the image of a child that symbolizes the exhibition's visual identity. It represents a straight-forward answer to the question of what the world will look like at the moment that work ceases to exist. Is preservation possible? Everyone (not only parents) would like that...

Lucia Gavulová

Opening + Book launch

November 18, 2016 7pm

HIT Gallery

Hviezdoslavovo námestie 18, Bratislava

The exhibition continues until December 6th 2016
Opening hours: Tue - Thu 3pm - 6pm
The exhibithion is prolonged till 13 Dec - The ame day will be finissage & curatorial guided tour - 6pm

APART collective has for the first time encountered with the work of Mehraneh Atashi at the group exhibition DUST in Ujazdowski Castle in Warsaw. Her work Entropy Pump (2013) struck their attention. Earlier this year members of APART visited Mehraneh in Amsterdam and then agreed on common project for The HIT Gallery in Bratislava. The work of the artist were premiered in Slovakia in June as a part of an international  project Forming of Inevitable Blue, curated by the APART collective.

Process of transformation is central to Atashi’s practice, whereas the reactions in between the different materials, seemingly irreconcilable in their nature, create a connection. Atashi’s landscapes are in resistance, she says, they provide the conceptual ground for addressing the native, ecological and environmental complexities in relation to energy, memory and transformation - whereas the landscape can be thought both in a micro and macro dimension. The self becomes a material in these landscapes, it is a found object which can be amplified, modified and documented. Atashi creates complex sign systems, in an endeavour to form the reality and change the past. Atashi’s sign systems may require more than our full attention to be deciphered, as magic is forming and reforming reality.

Along with the exhibition Safe Landing APART prepared together with a team of curators Laura Amann, Frederica Bueti and Sara Giannini a profile publication of the artist. In addition to the curatorial texts the publications also contains a contribution of a  Slovak visual artist Martin Vongrej,  a  common textual-visual conversation with Mehnrahe Atashi. Safe Landing is the first solo exhibition of Mehraneh Atashi in Slovakia and Eastern Europe.

Mehraneh Atashi was born in 1980 in Tehran and is currently living in Amsterdam, where she was a resident at the Rijksakademie in 2013/14. Her work was presented in several gallery and museum exhibitions, including at the Galerie Gabriel Rolt, Amsterdam (2016),Luckman Gallery, California State University, Los Angeles (2016), Triumph gallery, Moscow (2016), Centre for Contemporary Art at Ujazdowski Castle, Warsaw (2015) Victoria & Albert Museum, London (2012), the Musee du Quai Branly, Paris (2009/2007) and in other exhibithions and venues.

APART @ HIT GALLERY

www.apart.sk  

www.galeriahit.com

www.itsjustdelusionoftouch.com

thanks to: Laura Amann, Martin Vongrej, Sara Giannini

poster: Ondrej Jób

Supported using public funding by Slovak Arts Council, & Europapier.

BOOK: Mehraneh Atashi

Milan Adamčiak – Panphilia
curated by Daniel Grúň
guests: Matej Gavula, APART
opening 28 October 6 - 8 pm
duration until 16 December 2016
ZAHORIAN & VAN ESPEN Bratislava

Panphilia by Milan Adamčiak (1946) is a site of interaction, contact, and conjunction sounding of the relation between author and imaginary co-authors – interprets, in which visual imagination of music becomes real. Panphilia consists of various unrealized projects that exist only in form of manuals and instructions, as following: concerts for fictive orchestra, fictive music publisher and legal documents with fictive author’s heraldry. The word Panphilia actually comes from Greek language and means a state of loving or accepting all things. Panphilia in its genealogy activated by Milan Adamčiak has its root in Dada and Pataphysics. Because its source is everyday life, it becomes an alternative to any established institutions of art and it brings to light a different experience with this world. Panphilia has something very spontaneous and imminent in itself, it is a gift.

Milan Adamčiak is one of the first Czechoslovak artists who began systematic research into intermedia overlaps. It was principally creatively that his research was conducted, in the field of experimental poetry, action art and the so-called new music. In the second half of the 1960s he created cycles of diverse kinds of typographic grids, in which the graphic and semantic realisation overlapped with an acoustic rhythmisation of the text. Hence one part of his work has its premise in experimental poetry, taking the form of directions and instructions for various activities. Another part opens the way to visual music, with unconventional notations and graphic scores. A third links the inspirations from the two preceding parts in performative presentation: a game-playing experimentation and a non-completion of the compositional process, which significantly open up the possibility of perfecting the work using both classical and non-classical instruments and unusual settings.

Matej Gavula and APART collective are the guests of the exhibition. Variable installation by Matej Gavula consists of glass mosaic cladding, which formerly was used on the surface of public building and with decline of the socialist era lost its function. Gavula, inspired by creative processes introduced by Milan Adamčiak, plays with this material as with independent composition freed from former use. APART produced a publication dedicated to the artist that newly interprets work of Adamčiak and is presented as integral part of the exhibition.

Photo: Marko Horban / Courtesy of ZAHORIAN & VAN ESPEN

PUBLICATION

Lesson of Relativity

(Milan Adamčiak, APART, Peter Bartoš, Mária Bartuszová, Stano Filko, Matej Gavula, Anetta Mona Chişa / Lucia Tkáčová, Július Koller, Denisa Lehocká, Roman Ondák, Boris Ondreička, Milan Tittel, Martin Vongrej, Jana Želibská)

Curated by Nina Gažovičová

ZOYA Gallery, Ventúrska 1, Bratislava

September, 21 – October, 16 2016

Open daily 2PM – 7PM

Lately the art of central and eastern Europe has aroused increasing interest. Its reputation spreads among art historians, curators and artists established in the western milieu. The neo-avantgarde’s achievements in the onetime Eastern-bloc countries are gradually being written into European art historiography. Having been ignored for decades, this territory of ours now has the satisfaction it had been waiting for since the fall of the Iron Curtain in November 1989.

Hitherto our art had been almost an unknown quantity in the broader European sphere. Slovakia is a young and small country which, before the culmination of its own self-identification process, had always been on the periphery – marginalised not only by several larger and historically more important neighbours but also within the united Czechoslovak state. Although Bratislava had once in distant times had a phase of historical importance, its modern history unfolded principally in the shadow of Budapest and Vienna, and eventually also of Prague. Foreign observers have only recently begun to discover the autonomous character of our art, its particular evolution and strikingly experimental orientation. There is a growing perception of Slovakia as one of the focal points of central European conceptualism, with a remarkably strong concentration of authentic, though not exclusively conceptualist, artistic programmes (Milan Adamčiak, Peter Bartoš, Mária Bartuszová, Stano Filko, Július Koller, Juraj Meliš, Alex Mlynárčik, Rudo Sikora, Jana Želibská...).

Lesson of Relativity (the exhibition title is taken from an article in DOMUS magazine by Pierre Restany, Bratislava : une leçon de relativité, where the author gives quite a detailed report on art in Slovakia after the year of rupture 1968) does not aspire to be a cross-section and overview of Slovak art in the past fifty years. Our aim has not been to disturb an art-historical canon nor artificially to create a new one. Rather, we have tried to direct attention to examples of visual art which on reflection, and in an overall evaluation of the art of eastern Europe, may be considered authentic, and which despite the change in the situation they began from, still retain their vitality in our setting. Along with selected artistic programmes of the founding figures of Slovak art of the 1960s, the exhibition presents artists from the first “free” generation, making their entrance following the change of regime in November 1989, and their younger successors, who show a natural partiality for the historically tested but still currently applicable heritage of the domestic avantgarde.

The work of creating such interaction became an opportunity, without regard to historical associations, to conduct dialogue and to communicate and mediate combination among artists, some of whom had been in occasional or long-term collaboration, while others were meeting for the first time on the occasion of this project. Such a rearward look to past times, and in particular to the artists who played a decisive role in the formation of Slovak visual art in the 20th century, is not a novelty in Slovakia. As far back as 1997 the young curators Petra Hanáková and Alexandra Kusá presented their ambitious exhibition project 60/90, which premiered the intergenerational linking of art couples with Filko – Ondreička, Koller – Ondák, and Bartuszová – Lehocká.

One might have the impression that the individuals represented have no points of contact in their ultimate product, and that given such individual programmes, showing a divergent and broad range of themes and media, it is almost impossible to find common denominators. And yet unquestionably the selected group of artists generates an outline of common themes, trends and considerations, and even common functioning in the artworld context. Here is evidence of an affinity of creative principles, formally and conceptually. Proof is given of a certain local tradition, a common effort of thinking across various decades. It confirms that a common encounter need not be achieved at a single distinctive point but may be enacted wherever configurations that are at first sight incompatible find a way to one another.

Given that the osmotic model – where the public permeates the private – manifested itself in socialist society, so also for the key figures of our 1960s art (Koller, Filko, Bartoš, Adamčiak etc.) life and art, the personal and the universal were interwoven. In the entirety of their work there is a confluence of creative art and life, a conscious extrication of oneself from fact, an adoption of positions beyond reality, a fanatical inner sense of duty... These artists showed that one could exist and survive without any kind of institutional support or market environment, purely by faith in one’s inner vision. One could function in difficult circumstances (conservatism, animosity of the official scene, incomprehension by the theoreticians, insufficient reflection) on the verge of destitution. Despite everything, they remained convinced of the truth of their art. To this present day they defy time-space coordinates (with projects that are unfinishable and unbounded, older works repeatedly taken up again, antidating, reversions, unlimited time of duration) and they convince all in their environs of the validity and timelessness of their individual system, conception, structure, or personal repertoire of symbols.

Contemporary Slovak artists in their own work willy-nilly follow on from these programmes. They rely on personal, artistic or autobiographical, sometimes self-enclosed connotative systems; individual coding, vision, or “merely” concentrated observation of the world (Lehocká, Ondreička, Vongrej), confrontation with fact, relationship to reality. Similarly there is a “reverence” for the everyday, the uniqueness of the moment (Gavula, Tittel), an inclination to intimacy, fragility, what one has personally been through (Lehocká), processes of detailed classification, or conversely cumulation (Ondák, Lehocká), visual poetry of shapes (Lehocká) or words (Ondreička). The key theme continues to be the question of one’s own identity, with reflection on the concept of art, cultural practice, and criticism of how they are conventionally conceived (Tkáčová/ Chişa). Situations and collaborative activities (APART) reappear on our scene after the 1990s, in a new, contemporary form... It is precisely this perseverance in values which are transgenerational and timeless that is the most important, and to this day still vital, heritage of the art of the 1960s.

The APART art collective in its praxis favours diverse forms of collaboration and a collective perception of an experience. Collaborative projects, situations and performances come into being in an egalitarian model where the question of authorship is not fundamental. A common feature of these microinitiatives, covering a broad range of media and thematically un-bounded, is their performative character, thematising various forms of temporariness, evanescence, unrepeatability. Apart from the basic team, which comprises Denis Kozerawski, Peter Sit and Andrej Žabkay, APART has had collaboration (long-term) with Erik Janeček and (occasional) with Milan Tittel, Matej Gavula and Martin Vongrej.

For the members of APART the artistic act (art?) represents a certain form of totality: it is a synthesis of a relationship to reality, a quest for associations, a way of considering the role of the artist in contemporary society. The ephemeral quality of initiatives (frequently nothing objective remains from the actions) only confirms the radicalism of their thinking. The authors’ transgressions, actions and interventions are an intelligent expression of engagement within the social, political and cultural context. With remarkable sensitivity they work with the genius loci; being local is “enough” for them, and that is one of the attractive things about their initiative. They direct attention to things which are familiarly known, and they do not shirk confrontation with the past: in a surprisingly complex and apposite way (especially considering their age) they respond to the history or collective memory of the place.

Erik Janeček’s situation It’s not certain whether she’s dead or only sleeping (2014) is played out in a location which in past times was a space for spectacular military and sporting parades. Afterwards it became an urbanist symbol of socialist Bratislava, especially because of the architectural design of the square with its principal dominant: the monumental marble sculpture group in honour of Klement Gottwald, the first communist president. That was blown up in November 1990, following the change of regime. Today the square is a half-abandoned and dilapidated space in the city centre. In November 2014 Janeček placed a thousand sparklers in the centre of the fountain, which he subsequently lit. This was not simply a wordplay: the fountain as an architectonic element or a pyrotechnic term. The dramatic exchange of elements (fire instead of water) is equally a visual reflection on whether changes return in waves and the posing of a question when will the dead, expired element come newly to life and begin doing damage… What results is a highly effective aesthetic moment: a photograph recording an eruption, relating to the launch of a space rocket, showing the starting ramp for a common flight to the cosmos…

And similarly with the situation You cannot touch property in personal ownership (2016). Here the artists E. Janeček and A. Žabkay respond with a sculptural intervention to the shape of a monument which suggested to them the paw of some prehistoric animal with its claws sawn off. By completing it (filling in the claws as a symbol of power) they respond to questions of freedom, its fragility, and its unclear future, and they draw attention to the political and power-centred manoeuvres of the present day. Indirectly they advert to the inviolability (in the western world, needless to say) of private ownership, which was liquidated in Czechoslovakia after 1948, being changed to collective, socialist ownership. It was precisely this act which was the main ideological and also economic instrument in the seizure of power by the state administration. On the morning when the claws were installed their activity was reported by a woman out walking her borzois; later the city police removed the claws from the monument, put them in a car and went off with them forever …. You cannot touch property in personal ownership….

The cult Germany-based band Chicks on Speed comprising an Australian and an American was formed in Munich the same year as Pohoda Festival (1997). The band are one of the most significant representatives of electroclash. Their concerts feature performance art with multi-genre music, design as well as fashion… and, last but not least, fun.

Throughout their career, Chicks on Speed have collaborated with the likes of Yoko Ono or Peaches. With Peaches, they recorded their best-known track “We Donʼt Play Guitars.” Their live performances and gigs remove differences between digital and analogue; between virtual and handmade art. Besides varied music, their shows feature all sorts of props (sewing machine, iron, etc.). At their shows, you donʼt have to be afraid of heavy contemporary art. Most of all, Chicks on Speed have a good deal of fun to offer. Just like our production manager, Mišo Sládek, Monika Satková (booking assistant) experienced the best shindig at Pohoda 2006. For her, it wasnʼt the Gogol Bordello concert, but the rescheduled night slot of Chickson Speed.

An all day event dedicated to presentation of self-publishers and music labels from Slovakia.

Introducing art press publications from Magazine X, APART Label, Sputnik Editions, Banská St a nica , PORT No. 21 and music labels LOM and Proto Sites.

HARVEST

In collaboration with the London based collective MOR HO! (https://morho.co.uk/about/) and in continuation with their previous events, HARVEST presents the latest titles from initiatives of independent Slovak collectives and individual artists. This project aims to create a dialogue and space for future collaboration between Slovak and London based artists.

APART

Since 2012, the main objective of this project is publishing works that are mapping demonstration of visual arts in local environment. Its focus is on the tendencies in modern art display, exploring its individuality with special attention to creation of archive of this specific cultural environment. Rather than mapping wide artistic practices, APART pays close attention to those forms and expressions that are in line with their subjective preferences in art practice.

http://apart.sk/

Magazine X

Artistic community working internationally in the field of illustration, publishing Magazine X, bilingual publication distributed in several countries across Europe. The pages of expert written content are bound in distinct form of folder that
contains reproductions and originals of illustration and graphic design works.

http://magazinex.org/

Sputnik Editions

Slovak publisher producing art projects in book form, focusing on printed matter as an artistic expression. Sputnik editions has so far published 15 titles, distributed internationally.

www.sputnikeditions.com

Banska ST A NICA

ST A NICA is a hub for wide spectrum of culture activities – workshops, symposiums, residencies and publishing.

PORT No. 21

A magazine focused (not only) on photography and visual arts.

www.photoport.sk

LOM

Record label LOM focuses on experimental musicians and their production.

https://zvukolom.org/

Proto Sites

Internationally distributed record label focused on crossing borders and boundaries between experimental / club / other music. A collection of new sonic and visual topographies.

https://protosites.bandcamp.com/

poster by: David Kalata

Statement of the Selection Jury

In two long and intense days, from the morning hours until the evenings, we have studied carefully almost nine hundred entries. These viewings gave us plenty of interesting and telling insights into various forms of graphic design practice: a wonderful chance to see vast quantities of entries from diverse international contexts, comparing common themes, or recognising dramatically varying interests and cultural perspectives. We very much enjoyed it.

From a certain level of quality, the submitted works displayed a relative conceptual and formal homogeneity, and perhaps a distinct lack of the extreme, or, say, nonconformist and highly idiosyncratic positions – however surprising, or not surprising this may be. We would also have liked to include more projects from the commercial sector, as well as more projects with a time- or online-based character, or works that operate outside more conventional formats and media...

Overall, we saw our task in striking an interesting balance between established and emerging designers, concept-based works and projects with an emphasis on craft or experimentation. Yet in a climate of relative comparability, we sought out positions that have not been exposed to the public that much – instead of only already well-published design and designers – hence allowing alternatives and works from the margins to be seen. We also found it important to include submissions that highlight particular issues of current design practice that we wanted to put to the fore, i.e. the often anonymous work of in-house design teams, or fringe design that operates outside agreed formal codes.

The vast majority of our decisions were made unanimously, and we allowed good time for discussing crucial positions. As required, our choices were made in strong correspondence to this year’s decision by the organisers for a rather di erent exhibition concept and display, with all their new opportunities and occasional limitations. In this we faced an unusual and exciting process of selection – taking into account that the development of the nal exhibits in consistent displays is yet to come. Bearing the Brno Biennial visitors in mind, we were drawn in our selection to projects that could excel in such display environment. Now we are very curious and looking forward to the nal presentation.

We have tried to produce, through our selection, an insightful portrait of practice, celebrate its explorations and instigate discussion. In that, and in this short explanation of our procedure, we hope to both inspire and demystify graphic design and its evaluation.

Serge Rompza, Chair of the jury
Oliver Klimpel
Tereza Rullerová
Ľubica Segečová
Willi Schmid

The point of departure of the exhibition in the HIT Gallery is the film Walser by Polish artist Zbigniew Libera, which became a motif when considering the concept of a curatorial project by the artists collective APART. Its central theme is the question of parallel history/future with an apocalyptic vision/ the power conflict of man and his standing in society. The aim of the exhibition, using the gallery’s basement spaces, is to separate the strata of this theme, drawing on a variety of approaches to artistic form and content by artists living in countries such as the USA, Holland, Germany, Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovakia. The exhibiting artists are Mehraneh Atashi, Ján Gašparovič, Floris Kaayk, Martin Kohout, Tavi Meraud, Pavel Sterec and Zbigniew Libera, whose film will be screened on June 15 in the Mladosť cinema. 

curated by APART
http://apart.sk/

www.galeriahit.com/

Realised in the framework of Small/Big World project smallbigworld.net

documentation

12 - 13. Sep 2015  

Museum #1
micro residency
artists: Miroslav Csölle, Matej Gavula, Peter Sit, Milan Tittel, Martin Vongrej

Sitič's Grandmum Residency began in september 2015, by micro residency of artists Miroslav Csolle, Matej Gavula, Peter Sit, Milan Tittel, Martin Vongrej. They prepared a project, ready for this space called Museum. In 2016, Erik Janeček, Denis Kozerawski and Andrej Žabkay will arrive, they participate on the Museum project as well. From 2017 we are preparing international residencies with the duration of 3 weeks, repeating one or two times a year.

Photoport
19.2. 2016 - 9.3. 2016

Bachorík, Blažo, Ďurček, Gavula, Grúň, Janeček, Kochan, Kozerawski, Sit, Tittel, Žabkay

photos of opening: Filip Vančo
photos of installation: Andrej Žabkay  

dokumentácia

Kunsthalle Košice
11.6.2015,  18:00
curated by Vladimír Beskid
until 16.8.2015

On the the exhibition with the name “There is no place like home. East or west, home is the best ” at Kunsthalle/Hall of art, will present seven artists to the public – Cyril Blažo, Miroslav Csolle, Matej Gavula, Erik Janeček, Denis Kozerawski, Peter Sit, Milan Tittel, Martin Vongrej and Andrej Žabkay. Viewers can familiarize with their works from 11 th of June till 16 th of August. Together they are focused on demonstrating performance, discovering various ephemeral, banal situations of everyday reality, sometimes with a hint of analysis and sometimes from a position of observers and non-interested witnesses. Presentation of their collective work will start with the opening ceremony on 11 th of June at 6 o'clock in the evening. In connection with the mark of XYZ, artists create an specific form of collective existence and artist's reflection of reality. More than material artifacts – objects, to them are comments of experienced and thought, discovered situations, found relations, which they often materialize and visualize with minimalistic ways forms their characteristic expression. “Original plan to present works of group XYZ (Milan Tittel, Matej Gavula) expanded into free meetings of Bratislava's middle and younger generation artists. Their common starting points are post-conceptual approaches, short video actions and sketches, various small inputs, commentaries and interventions into public space,” said the curator Vladimir Beskid. He adds that the central projection at the exhibition will be a montage of looped videos, which capture numerous actions and interventions in urban space of Bratislava. Intuitive and parallel were the interests in certain points, places and situations in the city( Námestie Slobody, waterfront of the Danube, ArtHall etc. ). Besides that, there should be several more video projection in the space and objects, prints, archives of thematically selected photographs (solar, lunar, astronomical etc.) should be found there as well. Finally the group of artists will prepare several actions right in the city of Košice as their own video analysis of the city, capturing the unique and unrepeatable atmosphere of the east metropolis without its metro. Exhibition at Hall of Art in Košice is a collaboration sequel of group XYZ with collective of young authors, featuring under the label “APART” (Erik Janeček, Denis Kozerawski, Peter Sit and Andrej Žabkay). Together they realized such conceptual outputs as “Coast of Goofnes” , “29 th august” , in the flat of Miroslav Csolle, “Videogoulash” at Photoport Gallery, etc. This event is co-funded from grant system of Slovakian Ministry of Culture

Vladimir Beskid

documentation