Category: Interviews

This interview was conducted as part of the author’s research for a doctoral dissertation entitled “Challenging the Legacies of the Olympics: Cultural Afterlives of Mexico 1968 and the USSR 1980.” One of its reference sources was the exhibition The Age of Discrepancies: Art and Visual Culture in Mexico 1968-1997, co-curated by Cuauhtémoc Medina, Olivier Debroise, Pilar García de Germenos, and Álvaro Vázquez Mantecón, and presented at the Museo Universitario de Ciencias y Arte (MUCA) in Mexico City in 2008. Age of Discrepancies was one of the first shows to present a panorama of all the art movements and tendencies that … Read more

This conversation is part of a series of interviews with artists from Eastern Europe who live and work in Berlin. The city has attracted artists from Eastern Europe for a long time: especially during the Cold War and into the 1990s, its peculiar geo-political situation gave it a unique ambience that attracted artists from all over the world, but especially from the East. How do these artists experience the city today? How do they look back on the hopes and expectations with which they once arrived? Have they settled for good, or are they considering moving elsewhere? Do their Eastern … Read more

Angelika Markul (b. 1977, Poland) lives and works between Malakoff and Warsaw. After graduating from the École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts de Paris in 2003, she has researched the natural world and the cycles of life, through her video installations and sculptures. The artist has stated that she is influenced by artists as diverse as Miros?aw Ba?ka, Joseph Beuys, Christian Boltanski, Pierre Huyghe, Tadeusz Kantor, Jannis Kounellis, Alina Szapocznikow, and Tatiana Trouvé. Her 2016 solo exhibition What is Lost is at the Beginning at Zamek Ujazdowski Centre for Contemporary Art in Warsaw (Angelika Markul, What is Lost is at … Read more

The Slovenian sociologist and performing arts theorist Katja Praznik recently published the study The Paradox of Unpaid Artistic Labor: the Autonomy of Art, the Avant-Garde, and Cultural Policy in the Transition to Post-Socialism (Ljubljana: Založba Sophia, 2016). Before coming to the United States, she was long active in the independent Slovenian cultural scene. Today she teaches cultural policy and sociology of art at SUNY Buffalo, and deals with questions of the “autonomy” of arts and the social conditions of cultural production. The following interview was conducted on the occasion of Katja Praznik’s lecture at Zagreb’s Multimedia Institute.

Jasna Jasna … Read more

This interview was conducted with Moscow-based artist Olga Chernysheva on the occasion of her solo exhibition Vague Accent at The Drawing Center in New York (October 7 – December 18, 2016). It featured a series of new drawings made after a month-long residency at the Drawing Center in 2015. Combining images and texts, her drawings “show things that are already visible… things not asking to be looked at,” gleaned from everyday life in the urban landscape of New York, a city Chernysheva lived in as a foreigner. This interview discusses the drawings in the exhibition as well as their connections … Read more

Katalin Cseh-Varga and Kristóf Nagy started working on the interrelation of sport and neo-avant-garde in January 2016, based on an in-depth research of Hungarian painter László Lakner’s Foot Art project (1970), which was further developed into an exhibition-action draft by art organiser László Beke designed for documenta 5 (1972). During the intense research period in June 2016 the European Network for Avant-Garde and Modernism Studies arranged two conference sessions on Avant-Garde and Sport in the framework of which Katalin got acquainted with the work of Przemysław Stro?ek who at that time talked about the world cup of 1934, politics, art … Read more

This conversation was conducted by email correspondence over the period between December 15, 2016 and January 8, 2017. In the past, it was Nelli Sargsyan, Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Marlboro College in Vermont, who initiated and conducted the interview-conversations with Queering Yerevan Collective (QYC), a loose network of artists, writers, cultural critics and activists queering and using Yerevan as an experimental space. This time the conversation was initiated and conducted by QYC. In common (academic) practice, the initiators (interviewers) get credited as authors of the text. In this case, however, since we are also interested in creating new modes … Read more

This interview was conducted with Riga-based artist Ieva Epnere on the occasion of her solo exhibition Sea of Living Memories (September 17–November 5, 2016), a New Commission for Art in General in Brooklyn, NY, and part of an international collaboration curated by Zane Onckule of kim? Contemporary Art Centre, Riga, Latvia, where the show opened on December 8. Epnere’s exhibition, her first solo presentation in the United States, addresses the Soviet legacy in Latvia through the lens of those who lived and served in the former Soviet military cities along the country’s long coastline.

Ksenia Nouril: What brought you to … Read more

In the spring of 2016, a group of students, activists, and artists began to discuss the formation of a collective to oppose the hegemonic structures of capitalism and neoliberal politics and economics in contemporary Albania. From these discussions, a group of street artists—individually anonymous but known collectively as Çeta—emerged. The group is made up of members of various ages and backgrounds: designers, political scientists, architects, artists, and physicists. Different members carry out the design and execution of individual works at different times, according to the needs of the group and their commitments to other forms of political action in a … Read more

The following dialogue took place on the occasion of Marrakech Biennale 6: Not New Now/Quoi de neuf là, (February 28-May 8, 2016), curated by Palestinian curator Reem Fadda. After visiting the biennial and attending a curatorial seminar organized by Independent Curators International (ICI), the journal The Exhibitionist staged a discussion with seminar participants María del Carmen Carrión, Mohamed Elshahed, Renaud Proch, Eszter Szakács and ?pek Ulusoy. The conversation below ranges from discussions of contemporary art, craft, archaeology, and postcolonial therapy to politics and aesthetics across the Arab world, and is part of an ongoing collaboration between ICI and The Exhibitionist… Read more

Vardan Azatyan is an art historian, theoretician and translator. He is Associate Professor of Art History and Theory at the Yerevan State Academy of Fine Arts. He also teaches at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Yerevan. Azatyan has taught at Columbia University and the Dutch Art Institute. His articles were published in Oxford Art Journal, Springerin, ARTMargins and other international publications. Together with Malcolm Miles, Azatyan edited Cultural Memory (2010). He is the author of Art History and Nationalism (Yerevan: Actual Arvest, 2012) and has translated George Berkeley and David Hume into Armenian.

Angela Harutyunyan: Your 2012 … Read more

Much like Sadek’s other interventions since the proclaimed end of the Lebanese “civil war,” his allegorical sensibility throughout this interview inhabits the unnerving proximity of transitoriness and eternity. One of the fundamental questions raised by Sadek is the specific nature of an openness to a world struck by the historical violence and structural dislocations of capitalist modernity. This is because sectarianism – another of Sadek’s key themes – is both a symptom of capitalist relations and something from which the figure of the survivor emerges; sectarianism is imbued with guilt-saturated relations in the face of guiltless commodity relations that have … Read more

It is with great sadness and a sense of enormous loss that we learnt of the recent death of Piotr Piotrowski. Piotrowski was a professor in the Art History Department of Adam Mickiewicz University, Pozna?, and a research fellow at the Graduate School for East and South-East European Studies at the universities of Munich and Regensburg. He is the author of several books, including: Meanings of Modernism (2009, 2011), In the Shadow of Yalta (2009), Art after Politics (2007), Critical Museum (2011), and Art and Democracy in Post-Communist Europe (2012). Between 2009 and 2010, he was the director of the … Read more

Moritz Pankok is a German scenographer, director, curator and fine artist living in Berlin. A great-nephew of expressionist artist Otto Pankok, who documented Sinti life in late Weimar-era Germany and was labelled a degenerate artist by the Nazis, he is interested in socially engaged art projects. Pankok is the art director of Galerie Kai Dikhas, a private gallery in Berlin dedicated to Roma contemporary art. He was curator of the recent exhibition of work by the Austrian-Romani painter Ceija Stojka, which ran until October 6 at Gallery8, Budapest, the nonprofit counterpart of Kai Dikhas.(We Were Ashamed, Gallery8, Budapest, Hungary, … Read more

The three-day conference Performing Arts in the Second Public Sphere (org. by Katalin Cseh and Adam Czirak, Free University Berlin, May 9 -11, 2014) focused on the second public sphere as a space belonging to unofficial, event-based activities in the countries of the former Eastern Bloc between the 1960s and ’80s. The organizers’ idea was to redefine the borderline between the official and the unofficial cultural realms by examining underrepresented artistic practices located in the often invisible niches of the state-socialist cultural apparatus. The topics addressed by conference participants ranged from subversive artistic practices and the role of gender in … Read more

In 1996, Nina Czegledy co-conceived the multiplatform Aurora Project, which has brought together a range of specialists working within the arts and sciences. Under the umbrella of the Aurora Project several exhibitions and programs have been produced, including the Aurora Feast Public Art Project and Aura/Aurora. The project partners and contributors include artists interested in addressing mythological, aesthetic and cosmological readings of the Aurora Borealis, scientific researchers measuring electromagnetic frequencies and the social and psychological effects of spectacle, and computer scientists exploring how amorphous information is represented.

Janeil Engelstad: Your collaborative project Aura/Aurora interprets and explores the natural phenomena … Read more

Tamás Kaszás was born in 1976 in Dunaújváros, Hungary. He is a graduate of the Intermedia Department of the Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts, Budapest. Inspired by theoretical research, Kaszás’ projects are based on social questions and spiritual science. He mixes poetic images with practical “inventions,” creating large installations the artist calls “visual aid constructions.” Kaszás aspires to an economic and ecological art practice, designing easy-to-make structures from inexpensive and recycled materials using techniques readily available to anyone. The artist has exhibited his work at the 12th Istanbul Biennial, Istanbul (2011); Open Space, Vienna; SMAK, Gent; Ludwig Museum, Budapest; Storm … Read more

Maja and Reuben Fowkes’s essay, “Green Critique in a Red Environment: East European Art and Ecology under Socialism” can be found in ARTMargins print journal (#3.2. 2014) as part of this online/offline project. In the following interview, they reflect upon contemporary artists that are addressing environmental and sustainability concerns, as well as larger issues connected to these themes.

Janeil Engelstad: Taking a broad look at Central European artists working today in ecology and with sustainability, do you sense that there is a collective art/environmental scene? And if so, do you see this work as strengthening the larger Environmental Movement?

Maja … Read more

Alexei Yurchak is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology and core faculty member in the Department of Performance Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. In 2006, Yurchak published a groundbreaking study of the late-Soviet period, Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation (Princeton University Press), which earned him widespread recognition. Analyzing a variety of major shifts in political representation and meaning after the middle 1950s, and ensuing changes in late Soviet everyday practices—from Soviet ideological language to the fascination with Western rock music, the spread of popular jokes and anecdotes, among others—the book … Read more

Igor Kova?evi? is an architect and a founding member of the Center for Central European Architecture (CCEA), a nonprofit organization in the Czech Republic devoted to the research and promotion of contemporary architecture (www.ccea.cz). The CCEA formulates a theory of architecture that takes into account the Central European experience and organizes projects, publications, lectures and workshops. Many of its projects deal with the social and political context of the urban environment, for instance Vision for the Prague Magistrala studies the history of Prague’s main arterial road and tries to create pressure on local politicians in order to alleviate car traffic … Read more