Category: ARTMargins Online: Interviews

C.U.K.T. (The Central Office of Technical Culture) was established in 1995 in order to disseminate and distribute technical culture. C.U.K.T uses its own stamps and distributes official forms; it exchanges correspondence with other institutions as well as with local and national authorities. Since 1995, C.U.K.T has collaborated with a number of institutions, such as schools, local leisure centres, galleries, and museums. It also co-operates with local and national authorities such as the County Council of Bytow, the City Council of Gdansk, the Marshal Office of Pomorze County and Lubusk County, the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and the Polish Ministry … Read more

Why should the demolished Orthodox monasteries of Bucharest be rebuilt? After ten years, could this possibly still be a relevant issue in Romanian public and cultural life? Very much so: two prestigious Bucharest cultural journals, 22 and Dilema, recently published articles asking for the restoration of some form of sacred architecture on the concrete wasteland that fifteen years ago came to replace one of the most important sanctuaries of the Orthodox world: Vacaresti Monastery in downtown Bucharest. A bit of history, then: the monastery was built in the third decade of the 18th century by a series of princes from … Read more

Olia Lialina (born in Moscow) currently teaches at the Hochschule fuer Gestaltung, Karlsruhe. One of Russia’s best-known practitioners and theoreticians of the internet, Lialina was also the first to found a commercial online gallery for web-based art.

Sven Spieker talked to Lialina on the occasion of her recent visit to Los Angeles.

S. S.: What is the situation of the net art and net artists in Russia?

O. L.: As far as the Russian internet is concerned, the internet itself is obviously about the abolishment of borders. It is true that in the age of the internet it has become … Read more

Jo Anna Isaak is a writer and curator living in New York City. Her recent exhibitions include: Laughter Ten Years After (1996-98) and Looking Forward Looking Black now touring in the U. S. Currently she is working on Aquaria, an exhibition about water, scheduled to open in Linz, Austria in January 2002. Her publications include: Feminism and Contemporary Art: The Revolutionary Power of Women’s Laughter (Routledge, 1996) and Nancy Spero (Phaidon, 1996). She teaches Art History at Hobart and William Smith College, Geneva, New York.

M. P.: Since the 1970s, the impact of women artists on contemporary art has increased … Read more

Joanne Richardson: Neue Slowenische Kunst (NSK) was formed in the early 1980s in Slovenia from the discrete groups Laibach, whose musical performances exhibited a fanatical overidentification with totalitarian rituals, the visual arts group Irwin, whose montage paintings juxtaposed fascist and communist symbols with avant-garde iconography, the theater group, Scipion Nasice Sisters, which proclaimed an exorcism of religion and ideology into the mirror image of art, and the design group, New Collectivism, best known for a scandal that ensued in 1987 when their remake of a Nazi poster was awarded a prize in a national competition–thereby showing the proximity between socialist … Read more

Katarína Rusnáková was appointed Director of Collections at the Prague National Gallery at Veletržní Palác on August 1, 1999. She previously worked at the Povážská galéria in Žilina, Slovakia.

L. L. & K. C.: Over the past three years, a total of four people have worked in the position of director of the modern and contemporary art collection. In what state did you find this institution when you arrived in early July?

K. R.: When I arrived here, I intentionally put aside all illusions and prejudice. I entered an environment which I expected to be marred by several years of … Read more

Austrian critic Heike Wegner in a kitchen dialogue with Pawel Pepperstein, co-founder of the Medical Hermeneutics group, about the former enfant terrible of Petersburg’s neo-avantgarde, Afrika (Sergei Bugaev).

Heike Wegner: Missing an adequate language of my own, I started to collect statements by others about Afrika, so that I might be able to write about him. If you were asked what is important to you about Afrika, what would you say?

Pawel Pepperstein: Generally speaking?

H. W.: Yes. Maybe as an artist, maybe as a good friend. Perhaps you could say something concrete about his connection to the circle of … Read more

S. S.: In your reviews and critical essays, the mechanisms of art collection and their respective institutions, such as the museum and the archive, play a central role. In this conversation, I would like to focus on these concepts, but also on the related issues of memory and forgetting. I want to begin with the activity of collecting and its relationship with the museum. How do you see this relationship? Does the collection shape the museum, or is it on the contrary the museum that determines the collection?

B. G.: The art museum established itself as a collection of originals. … Read more