May You Live in Interesting Times
The review of 58th Venice Biennale Arte for the 2019′ summer issue of The Brussels Times Magazine
Tomas Saraceno. “The Aero(s)cene”, 2019
Venice Biennale is known as a sublime contemporary carnival or the Olympic games of arts: members of the art world both love and loathe it, criticising its largesse world-making ambitions while anticipating and happily participating in it. This year the event is directed by the American London-based curator Ralph Rugoff, who chose as a title for the ancient Chinese curse “May You Live in Interesting Times”. For stability-desiring society, living in ‘interesting times’ means the permanent disturbance of the harmony - the most important value in many Eastern civilisations. The phrase comes out more like an affirmative statement assessing the current time we are living in.
The two main exhibitions of the Biennale occupy the large main exhibition halls in Giardini della Biennale and what was formerly Venetian Arsenal, just a brisk walk away from one another. Both main exhibitions are directly intertwined as they feature a work (at least one) by each of the artists that were selected by Rugoff to represent those ‘interesting times’ we are living in.
In Arsenale, Jon Rafman video room is standing out as a confusing and disturbing cinema. Rafman’s ongoing series of depicting a never-ending surreal, repulsive and seductive dream is rolling for almost 2 hours. The ‘Xanax’ girl, a main protagonist, goes through unimaginable mix of weird events that transcend understanding of physical, moral and ethical presuppositions. Is that a similar experience to flipping through the endless list of TV channels and series on multiplying streaming platforms such as Netflix and HBO?
Ed Atkins. “Bloom”, 2018
Ed Atkins multimedia installation consists of the theatre props with costumes and screens with CGI (computer-generated imagery) wearing them in the evolving narrative featuring, among other characters, the boy and the monk. Their eyes are often full of tears and the skin produces hyperreal sweat. Bridging their ‘unreal’ status with the reality of produced by them emotions, they travel from one screen into another. Presence of the costumes suggests breaking the boundary between the computer-generated fictions and reality of theatrically-generated ones that we play everyday as soon as we put on the ‘costumes’ of office workers, civil servants, service(wo)men, teachers, etc. Maybe The Wachowski’s Matrix is not that interesting as the discovery of possible conspiracy against ‘realness’ but rather is telling us about the structures we’ve created for imprisoning ourselves?
The Chinese duo Sun Yuan and Peng Yu show the most impressive dynamic sculptures that make one tremble. In Giardini, there is a transparent large box with the strange robot inside. The robot is about three meters in size and has an animalistic body with the saddle, which makes it look like a post-apocalyptic horse. Instead of the head, it has a shovel. And this shovel methodically cleans the floor of the box, which is all covered in blood-like red substance. More to that, it doesn’t perform this duty unemotionally - it actually dances producing movements like ‘ass shakes’, almost twerking around the blood that it shovels around. This spectacle is so mesmerising you stand there frozen for at least some minutes (a lot of time in the current context of ever-shortening attention span when the artwork on average received 3-4 seconds of the viewers attention before being captured by smartphone, uploaded on social media to never be looked at again). In Arsenale, also trapped in the large glass box, there is a marble throne resembling the one on which Abraham Lincoln statue is sitting in the Washington memorial. Just instead of the seated leader, there is a metallic whip. First, it rests motionless but after some minutes the mechanism activates it and it starts crazily moving inside of the box whipping the walls of the box and scarring them, while producing the thrilling noise of damage. An astonishing way of portraying the political power.
Sun Yuan and Peng Yu. “Can’t Help Myself”, 2016
The winner of the Golden Lion, the ‘art Oscar’, is an American video and installation artist Arthur Jaffa who presented in Giardini his latest film on whiteness in the USA. As usual for his oeuvre, the video is comprised entirely from the found on the internet footage. The main part of the story, although ‘story’ isn’t the right word for what you are witnessing, is the ‘confession’ on the present of the race question in the US coming out through the live stream of the sort from the white American seemingly redneck, who calls the things as they are now: the racism, the intolerance, the ignorance towards the historical guilt and so on. An uncomfortable for the very many silent and latent deniers.
Argentinian, Berlin-based artist Tomas Saraceno adds up some light to the ocean of societal critique you are facing in the exhibition. His two pavilions - one devoted to spiders’ wisdom and another one to the rethinking our relations with the air - are suggesting the audience to question the very foundations of what they think and know about the currents of our world. The Spider/Web Pavilion presents arachnomancy cards, reinterpreting the Tarot readings anew and providing us the tool to rethink our relations with ecology of nature, economy and politics. The Aerocene pavilion in Arsenale shows a beautiful utopian vision of the world without fossil fuels, living in harmony with the clean skies. The tools, which Saraceno’s studio develops, are showcased as well - including the backpack that folds out into the flying balloon that can cross the national borders over the air using only the power of the sun.
British artist Jesse Darling shows in Arsenale the installation made of the chairs from the waiting room on abnormally high legs, many of which appear crippled. The chairs are painted bright pink: the association of the stuck and broken promise of the queer project of denormalisation towards a more tolerant, inclusive and not repeating the same mistakes world comes to the mind. Will we ever be there or are we doomed to turn any new movement for liberation into another exclusive club of power-dwellers?
Closer to the exit and the end of the main exhibition in Arsenale, the Ukrainian artist Zhanna Kadyrova reduces the overall tension of the exhibition with ever-growing sculptural installation representing the ordinary market that you could find in almost any area of Kiev (and many other cities in the post-Soviet space). The market, which is indistinguishable and bizarrely cosmopolitan, stands as an existential testament to people’s aesthetics or everyday, beyond white cubes and conceptualist thinking outside of the real world. The realness of the market, in which the fruits and vegetables as well as other props are made into sculptures with poor materials such as bathroom tiles, stands as the beacon of the everyday aesthetics.
Zhanna Kadyrova. “Market”, 2017-ongoing
Outside of the main project pavilions, the national cultural elites present their ‘creme de la creme’ of the last 2 years of artistic reflection on the state of the world and its possible futures, often through the prism of the past.
Belgian pavilion in Giardini (the oldest structure there by the way) is showing mechanical life-size figures of the folk ‘Belgians’ methodically performing their duties as the dolls in the ethnography museum. The irony of Harald Thys and Jos de Gruyter, the artists commissioned to represent Belgium, is relevant: the re-opened Royal Museum for Central Africa in Tervuren raised a lot of tension in relation to objectification of the African cultures, their dehumanisation and ongoing colonisation by the oppressive, unreflective European imaginary. Turning ‘Belgians’ into dehumanised mechanical toys with all their everyday cultural habits being shown as props equalises them with the approach of Leopold II towards the people who used to populate his ‘private estate’ of continental proportions.
Brazilian pavilion in Giardini stuns the audience with the bold video installation ‘Swinguerra’. It opens up to the world the evolving and beating with life culture of the resistance dance of the Brazilian North. In the context of the ‘Trump of the Tropics’ rule being established just several months ago, with the abolition of many cultural programmes and social cohesion initiatives while returning to the praise of dictatorship, the project is truly daring. Barbara Wagner and Benjamin Burca shot the reality and dreams of queer, trans and other endangered communities representatives who became more precarious after the recent political changes. In the shadows of the main event I’ve overheard people saying they are afraid the pavilion would be shut by the government after the reviews will go out to print as it might anger Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro and his vision of queerness as the decease that is supposed to be eradicated. The gesture of the curator and the artists with this project is both inspiring and disarming: but is it really the last bastion of resistance we have left?
The debut of Ghana in Arsenale is a definite highlight: it’s existential, light and at the same time deeply philosophical take on contemporaneity of the country in the context of changing ‘now’ is captivating. The three-channel video installation of John Akomfrah is showing the poetic force of nature, while Ibrahim Mahama’s and El Anatsui’s sculptural interventions touch upon the complex layered reality of contemporary Ghana dealing with post-colonial legacy that is persistent in the minds and setting up the new elites towards becoming the new oppressors. “Freedom”, the title of the pavilion project, is as ephemeral and unclear as it is always. However it is not the definition that is required to move ahead: but the making of a space where the right questions about futures can be asked. Without a doubt, this pavilion is a marvellous example of making this happen.
Lina Lapelyte, Vaiva Grainyte and Rugile Barzdziukaite. “Sun & See (Marina)”, 2019
The pavilion-winner of the Golden Lion is the one representing Lithuania. “Sun & Sea”, staged in the Venetian Arsenal (in the part of it which still has some connection to the former Serenissima’s military might), is an artificial beach created inside of the building with 2 floors. The second floor is meant to provide the observation platform. All of the actors playing the sunbathing crowd are actually opera singers who perform individual arias but also turn into the chorus. The happening lasts for the full opening hours of the pavilion, around 8 hours, with the singers sporadically rotating. You find yourself in an unusual opera: it is hard to make the decision to leave the installation before you spent there at least half an hour (incredible amount of time in comparison to the most of the things you see in Venice - I mentioned the attention span problem before). The libretto of the opera is mesmerisingly philosophical and mostly refers to the apocalypse coming upon us in the form of the climate change. “I cried so much when I learned that corals will be gone… I cried so much then I understood I am mortal, that my body will one day get old and wither. And I won’t see, or feel, or smell ever again…”. Apart of existential philosophy and political critique, they also sing about 3D printing, tanning, elections, fatigue, burnout, vacations and glitter. Although the project is definitely eye and ear catching, I would rather had presented the award to it in the context of the Biennale Teatro (taking place in Venice this year as well) as for the Biennale Arte we are aiming to praise the projects that are not available exclusively for the eyes of the previewing crowds or those who are privileged enough to be able to travel to Venice on specific dates when the full version of the spectacle is presented.
Together with Michal Murawski, Kasia Sobucka and Annie Jael Kwan, I myself co-curated the The Palace of Ritual in Palazzo Dona Brusa during the crazy preview days. We have presented the programme of performances, screenings and talks, where the concept of ‘the ritual’ and its function was addressed in relation of its perverting the political power potential. The academic and conceptual artist Alena Ledeneva, the author of the Global Encyclopaedia of Informality, presented three sculptural installations which embody the various transcultural strategies of power-holding and the danger that comes onto those who value the perfect power above all without realising the ephemerality of their grip on it. AVENIR INSTITUTE had presented in the form of lecture-performances The Penelopiad Project and The Pythian Games of Futures, which are delving into liberating Europe from the imaginary trap of singular vision of itself and open up potentialities for different outlook on the futures of power in the this cultural context.
Alena Ledeneva, Jasmina Cibic, Denis Maksimov & Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll. "The Palace of (Soft) Power", panel talk at The Palace of Ritual, 2019
The preview days of Venice Biennale are also used by growing number of other cities that stage their own spectacle. This year, Helsinki Biennale announced its launch there for 2020 with the activation of the island in the close proximity from Helsinki for the exhibition. In close geographical proximity, Riga Biennale announced its second edition to be opened in the same year. The first edition was curated by Greek Brussels-based curator Katerina Gregos to a critical acclaim. Mark your calendars art lovers and look up the the tickets to Venice this summer: we indeed now going through quite interesting times, and this edition of the Venice Biennale didn’t fail to grasp the multiplicity of the phenomena that we are anxiously swimming through.
The Palace of Ritual
Artists: Isadorino Gore, Enam Gbewonyo, Florence Keith-Roach, Alena Ledeneva, Karolina Łebek, Lynn Lu, Nissa Nishikawa, Sabina Sallis, Zorka Wollny, Khadija Von Zinnenburg Carroll and Mengting Zhuo
Curated by: Annie Jael Kwan, Denis Maksimov, Michał Murawski and Kasia Sobucka
Palazzo Donà, San Polo, Venice
May 9-11 2019, 2 – 6pm
The Palace of Ritual is a programme of immersive, intimate performances, screenings and discursive workshops that aims to activate heterodox knowledges and practices of healing, sourced from myths, ritual and cosmology. Participants are invited to awake from the artificial psychological coma of the accelerating and verticalizing present, via healing rituals of care, levelling, perversion and futuring.
The programme explores why a return to ‘nature’ is an increasingly pressing need for many people today. Does our ‘post-contemporary’ (or metamodern) world, mediated as it is by unprecedented layerings of artificially intelligent technologies, paradoxically make so-called ‘traditional’ practices and rituals more desirable? What do the concepts of attachment to ritual, spirituality and nature mean today? We will revisit older, more divisive rituals, investigating what can be learned and appropriated from their obsolete and hierarchical but seductive styles, shapes and rhythms; and we will explore how rituals have been invented, reinvented and adapted today.
Ritual brings together aesthetic creation and a mythos-reinforcing re-enactment of collective histories; it caters to our primaeval need to belong; it consolidates but also – in liminal moments –perverts established social norms and hierarchies. The typology of the Palace – whether a Venetian Palazzo, a Qing dynasty summer residence looted by Lord Elgin or a socialist-era “people’s palace” – provides a grandiose and spectacular backdrop for rituals of every kind. The Palace of Ritual – and its interregional, intersectional programme – will explore some winding paths for forging new ritual bodies, ritual aesthetics and ritual politics: perverted, progressive and planetary.
The Palace of Ritual is initiated by Arts Territory and it launches its new pathway of nomadic, fluid and open agency: offering new models of arts commissioning and curating, supporting radical artistic experimentation, research and collaboration, alongside testing the new forms of curation.
The programme is devised by Arts Territory together with PASAR: Post-Asian School of Alternative Rites, is a new practice-based research project curated by Annie Jael Kwan; Perverting the Power Vertical, a research and arts initiative led by Masha Mileeva, Denis Maksimov and Michał Murawski; by the FRINGE Centre at University College London and by Avenir Institute.
The programme comprises performances; screenings; micro-symposia; and installations.
PERFORMANCE PROGRAMME
Enam Gbewonyo, Florence Keith-Roach, Lynn Lu, Karolina Łebek, and Mengting Zhuo
Enam Gbewonyo
Nude Me/ Under the Skin: The Awakening of Black Women’s Visibility one Pantyhose at a time.
(Performance of Healing that pays homage to Senga Nengudi’s R.S.V.P body of work.)
Enam’s work speaks to the sensuality of the female form as well as the elasticity and malleability of the human body. It represents the many forms of bondage that constrict the black woman to fit a mould that is not for her. Her movements morph into the traditional Ewe dance, Agbadza, this is the point of resistance and awakening. This dance functions as a process of healing which creates a flow of expansion and contraction linked to the body’s backbone. The piece centres around activating an artwork made from nylon tights and it includes sound and video installation. A hand knitted circular floor covering symbolising the third eye with an opening in the centre symbolising an oculus. Coupled with performance the third eye and oculus act as a portal to channel the stories of Enam’s matrilineal ancestors. The performance sees the artists as a central figure in conversation with four imaginary figures, the audiences will take position along the edges of the room. The piece includes the black women’s reclamation of self in the present achieved by channelling the pain of ancestors past and releasing it to arrive at a point of healing through accessing their (ancestors) love and acknowledging their beauty and worth.
Florence Keith-Roach
Straight Lines: reading of play excerpt with musical accompaniment.
Claire (30, British) and Kuba (33, Polish) are trapped in a never-ending queue outside a nightclub in Berlin, a famed palace of perversion whose doormen have a long-standing aversion to couples like them: square, straight, and clad in ill-fitting, borrowed, squeaking PVC outfits. They are cold, fractious, anxious and chafing. Over the course of their sojorn in this eternal, painfully straight queue, with the club and its intimidating promise of purchasable sexual ‘liberation’ looming ahead, the latent tensions that have led them to this imposing portal start to pulsate and pound to the surface.
Lynn Lu
The ocean’s refusal to stop kissing the shore
Referencing a poem by diaspora poet, Sarah Kay, PASAR presents a new performance-as-research project by Lynn Lu that recalls mythical vanished lands including Atlantis, Hyperborea, Thue, Mu, Rutas, Lemuria and Kumari Kandam, and scientifically confirmed ones such as Zealandia, Dvārakā, Sundaland, Kerguelen Plateau, Beringia , Maui Nui, Ferdinandea, Ravenser Odd, Dadu Island, Tebua Tarawa, and Abanuea. Sited at the fragile yet resilient island of Venice, slowly tilting and sinking since the 5thcentury, old and reinvented rituals memorialise the eventful reconfigurations of land pay tribute to the rising waters. At The Palace of Ritual, with an accompanying audio track of mourning chants, the artist will lead a participatory-making session in which visitors can create personalized floating offerings for the sea using flowers, incense, etc. All the offerings will be set afloat in a nocturnal ritual. At different sites around the island – the artist leads a process of live inscription
~ at dawn, using a brush and brine - of the names of submerged and submerging land masses. As the sun grows hotter and evaporates the water, these names materialize in salt crystals. As the city awakens, pedestrian footfall gradually wears away the crystalline calligraphy.
~at the water’s edge and key locations - using Blutpudre which becomes visible when wet - so that the lapping waves or the next shower simultaneously exposes and washes away the names.
Karolina Łebek
Purge – DJ set
Purge, DJ set with vocals, approx. 40 mins Drawing on ancient practises of shamanic healing, Karolina Lebek will present a new sound performance, mixing live vocals with a specially designed immersive soundscape. Through an interest in mysticism and spirituality, Lebek will create a sonic space in which weaving a tapestry of pulsating rhythms will strive to reveal hidden energies and potentialities achieved through collective listening.
Mengting Zhuo
Six Crosses
PASAR presents Six Crosses, a durational participatory performance by Mengting Zhuo that offers a one-to-one experience of ‘Six Crosses’, a Chinese divination method stated in the I-Ching. Six lines or broken lines make a hexagram, and reading them can lead us to understand ‘synchronicity’, a term coined by the psychologist Carl Gustav Jung, who argues that we live in a space-time continuum. Six Crosses offers participants the opportunity to delve into their subconscious and reconnect the dots between signs, symbols and reality.
SCREENING PROGRAMME
Isadorino Gore, Karolina Łebek, Nissa Nishikawa, Sabina Sallis and Khadija Von Zinnenburg Carroll
Isadorino Gore
The Return of the Gift
This film documents a ritual dance, enacting the receipt and return of a gift given by power, performed in July 2018 in the newly-opened Zaryadye Park in Moscow, adjacent to the Kremlin. The film documents ritual meditating on and enacting ‘democratic’ forms of spending time, an entreaty (chelobitye) and an expression of heartfelt gratitude to the Tsar. The Kremlin features in (almost) every shot, a silent participant in the ritual.
Karolina Łebek
Watra
In her work Karolina Lebek explores her Lemko heritage through the medium of traditional song and singing as one of the factors that continue to unite this now dispersed community. The artist investigates themes of migration, displacement and assimilation informed by experiences of the Lemko community - an ethnic minority forcibly removed from their ancestral homeland in the Carpathian Mountains in a series of violent deportations, culminating in Operation Vistula in 1947. Throughout the tragic history of the banished Lemkos, worship and singing have remained crucial and unifying factors in recognising and maintaining a shared sense of cultural identity, revealing unique mythologies, forgotten rituals and rites of passage. Lebek draws on the cultural, spiritual and personal accounts of violence, trauma and shame manifested through generations to create a musical, performative and visual experience in which the wounded voices of the past mould into a song in the present, striving for recognition and reparation. This work takes inspiration from the ‘watra’ - a large bonfire, built to evoke memories of things past, or to revive a sense of community.
Nissa Nishikawa
Relations of Fire
Fire is regarded as the highest active and adaptable element. One in essence, though manifests itself in three general species-celestial, subterraneous and culinary. It is the cause of all motion, consequently of all mutation or change in nature. It is the principle of all generation and the primal source of all forms. It is the nature of light. Found in the sun and the fixed stars, all light proceeds from this. The planets and comets and earth reflect it. And we, the bodies on the earth, observe this light. Turning towards the wild, this open-air performance regards dance, sound and installation and its relationship to pyromancy and husbandry, observing the lyricisms in their violent and concentrated actions.
Sabina Sallis
Thought World and the Society of Nature, 2017
These are video-thoughts- collages that were made during a residency at Labverde in the Amazon Jungle, Brazil. The videos are singular meditations upon the Amazonian landscape, its thoughts and its ‘living logic’. Drawing from diverse ideas such as Eduardo Kohn’s notion of semiotic beings and sylvan thinking, and Descola’s framework of the ‘four ontologies’- animism, totemism, naturalism and analogism. The video-thoughts employ methods of thinking and making that magnify how we relate and profoundly interact with complex ecosystems, and how mindful, humane and sustainable politics can grow out from appreciative and sensitive engagement with nature-culture.
Zorka Wollny
Slavness
The aim of the Slavness is to mark the field of the meaning of a woman’s freedom and the categories of pace, sound, movement, light, voice, gesture and hearing. The title is based on the play of words between the naming of doing something unhurriedly and the situation of subordination. “Being docile to someone” means submissiveness, submission, loss of control, immobilization. Being subordinate releases the desire to be released from bondage, the need for self-determination. The necessary revolution is not always visible, but it will sprout subcutaneously, underground, under the ice, under the crust of visible surfaces. Doing something slowly, in concentration, is also a matter of daily effort, which enables long-lasting, persistent and joint action.
Khadija Von Zinnenburg Carroll
Cook’s New Clothes
This film documents two processional performances – held on the grounds of palaces of British maritime imperialism, the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich and Queen’s House in Plymouth – commemorating 250 years since Tupaia, the Tahitian priest, navigator and translator, boarded the Endeavour with Captain James Cook in 1768. Cook’s New Clothes comprises two monumental, collaborative and subversive processions, which critically reimagine and reconfigure the aesthetics and politics of Cook’s voyages.
INSTALLATIONS
Alena Ledeneva, Zorka Wollny
Alena Ledeneva
Patterns of Informal Power
The FRINGE Centre for the Study of Social and Cultural Complexity will present Patterns of Informal Politics, a new series of artworks by Professor Alena Ledeneva (University College London). Ledeneva’s piece is composed of three monumental components: Inner Circle, Scapegoat and Suspended Punishment. ‘Complex phenomena are best to communicate in a non-verbal communication mode: visual, emotional, associative. Patterns are not intended to illustrate the workings of informal politics, but to reveal the hidden patterns of power – both modern and ancient – and to provoke the audience to develop insights into power’s four dimensions.’
Zorka Wollny
Healing Song
SYMPOSIA
A programme of performative and perverted symposia, convened by Perverting the Power Vertical and the Avenir Institute.
Perverting the Power Vertical
Towards a Perverted Palatiality
What are the uses of the “Palace”, and of different types of grandiose, monumental, luxurious, vertical and patriarchal objects – and the rituals, processions and parades, which take place within and around them; how can we seize, appropriate, repurpose, undercut, trick, twist and pervert palatial forms?
With: Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll, Professor of Global Art, Birmingham, artist; Michał Murawski, Lecturer in Critical Area Studies, SSEES, UCL; Denis Maksimov, Avenir Institute; Maria Mileeva, UCL
The Palace of (Soft) Power
What does it mean to give a Palace as a gift? What are the aesthetics, architectures and rituals of informal economic and political practices, of bribery and subterfuge, of scapegoats and inner circles?
With:Alena Ledeneva, Professor of Politics and Society, UCL; artist; Jasmina Cibić, artist, London; Peter Zusi, UCL
LECTURE-PERFORMANCES (by AVENIR INSTITUTE)
The Pythian Games of Futures
During lecture-performance, Avenir Institute will present the results of investigation of the Delphi archaeological site as the transcultural centre of the rituals of futures-making and foresight methodologies. They will focus the speculative analysis of what is currently called Temple of Athena Pronaia and Tempe of Apollo in the past and their possible futures. The Athena Pronaia Foresight Centre and The Dionysos Thrice-Born Avenirologic Centre, the institutions referring to the truthful nature of the mentioned Delphic sites which are currently in charge of the preparation of the Pythian Games of Futures, will be presented. With Denis Maksimov and Timo Tuominen
The Penelopiad Project
During lecture-performance, Jeanne Pansard-Besson and Denis Maksimovwill readout parts from Homer’s Odyssey and Margaret Atwood The Penelopiad, enacting the dialogue of authorship across the millennia of history within the omnipresent narrative. The irony will clash with epos and the invisible props will enter the conversation with the highlighted heroes. The audience will be served figs, watered down wine and honey - as were the suitors for Penelope’s hand in Ithaca.
PROFILES OF DEVISING COLLECTIVITIES
Arts Territory is a not-for-profit arts organisation with a mission to support artists in creating new work. We work across borders and facilitate dialogue between artists, curators and communities internationally. Operating as a nomadic, fluid and open agency, Arts Territory offers a new model of arts commissioning, supporting radical artistic experimentation, research and collaboration, alongside testing new forms of curation and expanding the agency of curating.
Perverting the Power Vertical: Politics and Aesthetics in the Global East
PPV – convened by Maria Mileeva, Michał Murawski and Denis Maksimov –is an anomadic seminar, event and research platform operating from within the interstices of UCL. PPV deploys the idea of the “Power Vertical” – a term used in some parts of the Global East to refer to various styles of post-Soviet authoritarian politics – as a loose conceptual pivot. PPV seeks to understand how the power vertical works, and to map its styles, shapes and affects; but it also aims to develop tactics to ridicule, trick, twist, undercut, queer, resist and pervert it.
AVENIR INSTITUTE is a think-do tank at the intersection of epistemology, politics, technology and aesthetics with a focus on critical analysis of potentiality in futures. We produce and present transdisciplinary research and design as academic publications, lectures, foresight consulting, exhibitions, performances and festivals. The Institute was co-founded in 2015 by Denis Maksimov and Timo Tuominen and established nodes in Brussels, Berlin, London and Athens since then.
THE FRINGE Centre for the Study of Social and Cultural Complexity explores the roles that complexity, ambivalence and immeasurability play in social and cultural phenomena. A cross-disciplinary initiative bringing together scholars from the humanities and social sciences, FRINGE examines how seemingly opposed notions such as centrality and marginality, and clarity and ambiguity can shift and converge when embedded in everyday practices. FRINGE is based at UCL’s School of Slavic and East European Studies (SSEES) and Institute of Advanced Studies (IAS).
PASAR – POST-ASIAN SCHOOL OF ALTERNATIVE RITES is a new practice-based research project curated by Annie Jael Kwan that explores how artists might confront contemporary anxieties including global environmental and climate changes, coastal frontiers and the oceanic, via decolonial and feminist strategies. PASAR (translated as ‘market’) presents a diverse and bustling diasporic post-Asian world where co-existent gods, ghosts, spiritualism, magicks, predictive texts, cosmographic rites continue to persist in and pervade socio-political systems, cultural life, and in the cyclical and non-linear exchanges and transactions between generations and communities.
SUPPORTED BY
Adam Mickiewicz Institute,
The School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London,
The FRINGE Centre for the Study of Social and Cultural Complexity, Istituto Polacco in Rome.
The PASAR: Post-Asian School of Alternative Rites is presented in collaboration with Something Human and Asia-Art-Activism and additionally supported by Arts Council England.