Seminar / Stijn Van Dorpe:
De transformatie van de kunstruimte als politiek?
Friday 2 October 2020, 14:00 -18:00
Seminar: The transformation of the art space as politics?
by Stijn Van Dorpe, with presentations by Matthijs De Bruijne, The Post Collective, Magdalena Kwiatkowska & The Laundry Collective with Tomaš Kajanek (via skype), Reinaart Vanhoe
In English
Friday 2 October 2020, 20:00 - 21:30
Performance: Zwart vierkant, scène 1 de kade
by Stijn Van Dorpe, with Avsin Azak and Bas Schevers
Introduced by Bert Puype
Book your place: for the seminar and/or for the performance
Facebook event
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14:00 -18:00
Seminar: The transformation of the art space as politics?
by Stijn Van Dorpe, with presentations by Matthijs De Bruijne, The Post Collective, Magdalena Kwiatkowska (via skype), Reinaart Vanhoe
In this seminar we focus on the question of the meaning of the art space, conceived as an artificially constructed space that is usually considered as a place in which artistic actions, interventions or presentations take place. The art space can take many forms: it can be very visible (such as the museum or the art gallery) or rather mental (such as an internalized frame of reference) and therefore we better speak of art spaces in the plural. The starting point is that these places, contrary to what they might make appear, are never or can never be neutral. They are always marked by values and powers.
We investigate how art workers, art collectives and artists who attribute a strong social or political significance to art relate to these art spaces. My thesis is that when the relationship between art and society is taken seriously, art cannot ignore these spaces and must focus on transforming them. At the same time these transformations should be approached as an artistic/aesthetic process. It means that artistic actions, interventions or presentations do not really take place within an art space, but that they show the ambition to create new (art) spaces themselves, where other power relations apply.
Stijn Van Dorpe is an artist, researcher, educator and initiator of this seminar.
About the participating artists:
Matthijs de Bruijne is a Dutch artist whose practice is built on and imbued with political commitment. With his work he investigates relationships between economics, culture and social life, with a view to a critical collective consciousness. At some point he concluded that creating awareness about social injustices among a small, specialised art audience is not enough to bring about change. He was looking for other ways to step outside the realm of art and in 2010 he started working for the Union of Cleaners of FNV Bondgenoten. About this he said that it was not his priority to further develop his career as an artist. Above all, the work of art should support the union's campaign (see: De Witte Raaf, edition 198)
Magdalena Kwiatkowska & The Laundry Collective - The Laundry Collective emerged from the collaboration of a group of homeless women, Lgbtq people and the Polish artist Magdalena Kwiatkowska, living and working in Prague. From November 2019 to January 2020, she was a resident at INI Project, an independent platform for contemporary art in Prague. She used the exhibition space at her disposal to meet up with homeless and Lgbtq friends where together, they came up with Magdalena's laundry project. In this way they also found protection from the cold winter. Because the art residency required presentation moments, they organised small public moments such as a workshop 'packing cigarettes', or 'exercises to warm the body after a cold night'. However, the owner of the building closed the project prematurely.
The Post Collective is a young collective that wants to create an autonomous platform of co-creation, co-learning and cultural activism, set up by and for refugees, asylum seekers, sans-papiers and accomplices. The aim is to create different artistic, cultural and employment opportunities and to provide an overall collaborative environment for those involved, regardless of their legal status. The collective originated from the Open Design Course for Refugees and Asylum Seekers 2018 at the KASK school of arts in Ghent, after some alumni and teachers decided to continue the collaboration. They want to facilitate a position in which they are not assimilated, but instead, together as a community, can critically re-conceptualize a future. The Post Collective is working in the development programme of Kunsthal Gent in 2020.
Reinaart Vanhoe is an artist whose practice consists of all kinds of collaborations and in which teaching at the Willem de Kooning academy in Rotterdam has an important place. His working method contains elements that are similar to anarchistic ways of organising. He conceived the concepts of Also-Space and (g)Locally Embedded Art Practise (gLEAP) as approaches that re-evaluate the production and positioning of the artist. "How can we develop an artistic practice that does not define itself as an 'alternative' or 'in-opposition' to the society in which it exists, but rather as an integral part of the different communities in which the artist functions, produces or lives, and is therefore very much a part of?(Excerpt from Also-Space, From Hot to Something Else: How Indonesian Art Initiatives Have Reinvented Networking, Reinaart Vanhoe, about, among others, the Indonesian art collective ruangrupa).
This seminar is supported by Research Unit Image - Luca School of Arts
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20:00 - 21:30
Performance: Zwart vierkant, scène 1 de kade
by Stijn Van Dorpe, with Avsin Azak and Bas Schevers Introduced by Bert Pype
The performance Zwart vierkant, scène 1 de kade (black square, scene 1 de kade) is based on a workshop for blind and partially sighted youngsters from the school Spermalie Bruges in which they painted a black square, among other things. The workshop was also set up as a film recording in which the youngsters were made very aware of the presence of the cameras. However, the presentation in Kunsthal Gent does not include a film montage. Together with Avsin Azak - a girl with a beautiful voice and vocal ambitions who took part in the workshop - and instrumentally accompanied by visual artist Bas Schevers, Stijn Van Dorpe presents a musical translation of a conversation that took place during the workshop. The workshop and the performance were initially made for the exhibition 'objet trouvé' (curated by Bert Puype, 7-3 to 29-3 2020, Bruges) but the public presentation that would take place during the finissage was cancelled due to corona.
The performance is a first stop in a work in which Stijn Van Dorpe brings the black square of Kasimir Malevich into environments that deal with explicit forms of vulnerability. His interest in the black square involves the discrepancy between Malevich's highly democratic aspirations with his work, namely the ambition to be meaningful to everyone, and the infinite vulnerability of the painting. A vulnerability that consists in the fact that the work has never been or will never be seen by the masses as special. By bringing this together, Stijn Van Dorpe wants to explore precarity as a place from which new political aesthetic forms can emerge, where established power relations are broken down and other relational relationships are at play.
With thanks to De Kade, Spermalie Brugge
