“I am trying to bring together invisible borders”
Published in The Brussels Times Magazine (September 2019)
Diana Campbell Betancourt has chosen Brussels as her base for many reasons. “It is not really an art world center”, she highlights. But it is a meeting point in terms of flights, trains and at the same time an ideal calm place to retreat yourself from seasonally swarming places like Basel and Venice or constantly hectic Paris and London. Brussels is a place for thinking and processing.
She is convinced that art can make a difference in places beyond those familiar names, which had become the attractor points for the art world tourists. She is a chief curator and initiator of Dhaka Art Summit, “an international, non-commercial research and exhibition platform for art and architecture related to South Asia”. The Summit’s core focus is on Bangladesh. It was founded in 2012 by the Samdani Art Foundation—which continues to produce the festival—in collaboration with the Ministry of Cultural Affairs, People’s Republic of Bangladesh. The Summit also has the support from the Getty Foundation’s Connecting Art Histories initiative. DAS is hosted every two years at the Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy.
Denis (D): You work mostly with so-called MENASA (the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia) region - geopolitically defined area.
Diana (DI): Kind of, although the problem with ‘MENASA’ is that Islam will be the overarching header within which to frame Bangladesh. But we are much more interested in this kind of ‘global majority’ dialogue in this edition of the Summit. In the previous edition, we looked at Bangladesh as being the cross-section between South and Southeast Asia. India dominates South Asia discussion, while Singapore dominates the Southeast Asia discussion - so the two don’t meet yet. But if you look at indigenous cultures weaving South and Southeast Asia there are tonnes of connections - so it is absolutely essential that these two meet. These are the stories that are talked about in one of the shows that was commissioned for the last Summit, which was curated by Cosmin [Costinas] from Para Site [independent art space in Hong Kong] and the show traveled from us in Bangladesh to Hong Kong, from there to the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw and so on.
D: Is it your intention to critically redraw this geopolitical mapping?
DI: Absolutely. For instance, Bangladesh and Thailand are in fact much more connected than Bangladesh and India, for example, you can’t get a direct flight from Delhi to Dhaka, so traveling gets expensive, for Bangladeshis getting visa to India is really complicated. And there are tonnes of daily flights to Bangkok. So the perception that India and Bangladesh must be very close in the current geopolitical climate is actually wrong. Then you can look at other lines of connection - like copper trade and so on.
D: Do you plan to expand beyond Bangladesh in the spirit of “global majority”?
DI: Yes, absolutely, that’s why I just spent a month in South America, and I speak Spanish and Portuguese, so I was able to draw these connections. The whole art world is operating in English and this is the biggest critique of myself. I like the idea of the epicentre - because it can erupt anywhere, right?
D: Indeed. Speaking of the topic of the next Summit in Dhaka - “Seismic Movements” - could you name three top political seismic shifts of nowness you’d consider the most important?
DI: Personally, I would say that an agency for women is a seismic shift that needs to happen. Obviously, we’ve seen the #MeToo movement, but there are move shifts that need to happen in this direction.
Then it is the power of an assembly to instigate change. I am super impressed by what I am seeing in Hong Kong right now - it is one of the largest protests ever in the region.
Then racism is a huge problem. The way that I construct my team is diverse in terms of gender, race, class, and language. What is interesting in the context of Dhaka is that there is nothing in terms of the Western style of art structures - so I can build what I want to see, almost leading by example.
D: How do you safeguard from possible attempts of censorship or possible tensions that can arise in programming the Summit?
DI: The government is not involved at all in the contents of the Summit. Basically, the give us the building, which is a lot as without it we couldn’t do this. The thing we try to do with the summit is to keep it purposely messy. There are over 300 artists shown and it is not about being the best, excellence, etc - it is something I really try to fight against.
Dhaka Art Summit “Seismic Movements” will take place in February 7-15, which full program being an announcement in September.
State of Noland
image - Avenir Institute
What is the State of Noland?
It is a condition of not aligning with nation state and particular geopolitical territory as well as possible formations of practical replacement of nation-state functionality with rhizomatic (“rhizome” - is a modified subterranean stem of a plant that is usually found underground, often sending out roots and shoots from its nodes), pastiche, assemblage alternatives. Nation state is a modern fiction, a child of Thomas Hobbes “Leviathan” and birth of nationalism in 19 century. None of the existing countries on the political map of today fulfil the requirements of the concept of nation state in political theory. Can we imagine the rhizomatic organs without the body (functionality without the current system frame), inverting and developing ideas of Antonin Artaud in theatre and and Gilles Deleuze in philosophy and applying it to politics?
by Denis Maksimov
The lecture was given in the programme of “EUROVISION” event at Centre culturel Brueghel in Brussels on April 20, organised by Giuseppe Porcaro (Head of Communications, Bruegel) and included contributions of Teresa Cos (artist and researcher), Ryan Heath (Senior EU Correspondent, POLITICO) and Giacomo Filibeck (Deputy Secretary General of the Party of European Socialists).
Listen to the audio recording here.
Contemporary art in a dialogue with socio-political realities
Dichotomy of Vorstellung/Darstellung in Gadamer’s hermeneutics was a point of departure in analysing art market, financial & stock market, political ideology and regimes of aesthetics in relation to “political”.
The lecture was given for The Modern Education and Research Institute in Brussels in December 2016.
Do You Speak Synergy?
group exhibition at Harlan Levey Projects gallery curated by Denis Maksimov with support of Harlan Levey
Emmanuel Van Der Auwera. “Cabinet d’affects” (2010), exhibition view
In his essay “Cézanne’s Doubt,” l French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty describes Cézanne’s impressionistic and paradoxical approach to painting, and implicitly draws a parallel to his own concept of radical reflection. Looking at the relationship between science and art in the context of Cezanne’s struggle to apply “intelligence, ideas, sciences, perspective, and tradition” to his work, he concludes that theory and practice stand in opposition to each other. He sees art as an attempt to capture an individual’s perception, and science as anti-individualistic. From this perspective, natural science cannot grasp the profundity and subjective depth of the phenomena it endeavors to explain.
Ella Littwitz. “Uproot” (2015), exhibition view
Art and science may indeed oppose each other in certain senses, but they also share many things, for example a vigorous research drive that goes beyond practicality. In the currents of contemporary cultural discourse, this characteristic is becoming challenging to maintain, for science and art alike. “Key performance indicators” are applied literally to everything, including the traditionally metaphysical subjects of love and death. Art risks leaning towards the language of “social engagement” in regard to state funding, falling into categories of purely utilitarian design or vanity symbols for luxurious consumption. Science, on the other hand, is getting cornered exclusively into the “applied” category. This process is not a novelty: with constant re-learning and easy forgetting, valuable insights and original perspectives are often lost in favor of the “mode du jour” – sometimes by chance, sometimes in result of deliberate decisions by dominating institutions of a particular time.
Imposed planning and bureaucracy turn both artist and scientist into “eternal applicants” for grants rewarded to visionaries for design “solutions.” Research, findings, and output of each are quickly translated to market speak: Where is the business case? What is the product? Is there a customer for this? How are you going to promote it? The discourse of market economy is perhaps the most crippling enemy poetry has ever seen.
Benjamin Verhoeven. “Sculptural Movement, chapters I & II” (2015), still from video
Both art and science resist. Fundamental scientific research eludes pressure by forecasting long-term outcomes to illustrate a future where we’re all dead already anyway, and artistic energy continues to insist on the power of purposelessness in unveiling the truth content in art and commodities in general. A growing number of collaborations between artists and scientists, formed under the flag of “artistic research” firmly establish a vocabulary for this discourse. Following the logic of Merleau-Ponty, “Do You Speak Synergy?” aims to “return to phenomena.” It does this through a transdisciplinary conversation about the poetic essence of scientific and artistic investigation. The notion of “transdisciplinary” investigation is used more and more often in discussions about the future of research. However, the pathway towards meta-levels of inquiry is not so straightforward. Research has become the victim of an obsession with efficiency, predictability and target driven utilitarianism.
Haseeb Ahmed. “Fish Bone Chapel” (2013), exhibition view
The selected artists share the research language of transdisciplinary inquiry while remaining free from any disciplinary or corporate mandates. Modern physics calls this their “unified field,” ² which we refer to as “synergy,” where fundamental forces and elementary particles are approached as if they compose a single field – a field of truly universal language.
References:
¹ Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Le doubt de Cézanne” in Sens et non-sens, Gallimard, Paris, 1945. English translation by Hubert L. Dreyfus and Patricia Allen Dreyfus in Sense and Non-Sense, Illinois University Press, Chicago, IL, 1964.
² Peter Weibel, Beyond Art: A Third Culture. – A Comparative Study in Culture and Science in 20th Century Austria and Hungary. Passagen Verlag, Vienna, 1997.
pdf version of the book “Do You Speak Synergy?” co-written by Denis Maksimov and Harlan Levey
more images from the exhibition
How to understand contemporary art critically?
courtesy of ENCATC and BRAFA Art Fair
‘Our speaker, Denis Maksimov, aesthetico-political theorist, critic and strategist introduce to our guest to the notion of 'the art world’, and gave a dynamic talk with the aim to foster reflection on the importance of questioning narratives in art history and contemporary art, the actuality of connoisseurship and expertise, and the strategies of collecting art.’ - ENCATC Secretary General, GiannaLia Cogliandro Beyens.
more information about the event
Almanac of Contemporary Culture
Russian Centre of Science and Culture, Brussels
Modern media technologies push protagonists to become ‘smupid’ (term coined out of merging 'smart’ and 'stupid’ by Douglas Coupland) - 'I am really smart, there is just no wifi access here’. The abundance of media content and visual information in form of carpet bombardment from numerous screens contributes to losing the ability to focus and go in depth in understanding of essential issues. This leads to inevitable lack of comprehension of totality of ideological frame, which we inhabit. How to preserve the ability to self-reflect and deconstruct the attempts of manipulation in the midst of acceleration and attention deficit?
The future of the ‘Artist’: challenges of transdisciplinarity and the expanding field of art
Participants: Matteo Lucchetti (freelance curator, curator Visible), Tobias Sternberg (artist), Daniel Blanga-Gubbay (researcher, founder Aleppo), Moderator: Denis Maksimov (theorist, curator and researcher)
Artists take over more and more the status of different specialists: the artist as anthropologist, artist as scientist, artist as philosopher, etc. Due to the stronger liberalisation and flexibilisation of our current economy, the role of the artist seems to be turning into a flexible, self-motivated and innovative individual: artist becomes a ‘transdisciplinary agent’ and 'cross-sectoral diplomat’. Increase of artists collectives is another interesting trend that illustrates transformation of the artist’s role and function in the society. How is this change affecting their work and how can they develop their practice under these circumstances?
How is this influencing our notion of 'art’? What are the effects of co-productions between different fields in the realisation of artworks, artists infiltrating into other fields, cross-disciplinarity and knowledge exchanges? Which new discourses or art forms have been created because of this shift and how could the outcome function as a way to reinvent and rethink the present day to change tomorrow?
FRANCIS
FRANCIS booth at Poppositions alternative art fair in 2015
FRANCIS is an artist-led initiative which was founded for the participation of the POPPOSITIONS Art Fair. it’s aim is to develop a holistic utopian benchmark for speculating the position of Francis, a young meta-artist, who they have selected to represent and whose name also inspired the title of the project. Francis’ practice incorporates varied and variable processes, methods of production and visual outcomes. FRANCIS’ contributors consists of 10 international artists; Rens Cools, Tiago Duarte, Eleanor Duffin, Adrijana Gvozdenovic, Koyuki Kazahaya, Garry Loughlin, William Ludwig, Denis Maksimov, Vijai Patchineelam, Julie van der Vaart, who collaborate in the administrative running of this project.
FRANCIS – post catalogue POPPOSITIONS 2015
Innovative methods of teaching: competitiveness of future university
Hogeschool Universiteit Brussel, Brussels
The academic education is challenged by the further development and sophistication of the online education platforms. Orientation of the industries on practical knowledge and skills disregard the diploma is a risk for university standard to become a mere fetish in upcoming future, holding position of prestige at the maximum.
How university can compete with changing landscape of education and stay relevant in the post-Internet age?
Understanding the contemporary art world and it’s key actors
How to approach and analyse works of contemporary art? What is art and what is not? What mediums, subjects and artists define ‘modernity’? What are the key roles and functions in 'the art world’? How do galleries, art fairs and museums work in relation to each other? Why do people invest in contemporary art? How to talk and what to ask in conversation with artists? How does art influence the way we perceive the world around us?