SYMPOSIUM of The Second Ural Industrial Biennial of Contemporary Art (Sept. 13-15, 2012)

SYMPOSIUM
OF THE 2ND URAL INDUSTRIAL BIENNIAL
OF CONTEMPORARY ART

Organizer: The Ural Branch of the National Center for Contemporary Arts
Strategic Partner of the Intellectual Platform: Ural Federal University
Curator: Andrey Shcherbenok
Coordinator: Elizaveta Yuzhakova
http://en.uralbiennale.ru/catalog/item/234

PROGRAM*
* (presentation summaries below the schedule)

13 September (Ural Federal University, conference hall)
10:00 – 13:00. Session 1
– Dmitry Bugrov (Ural Federal University), Alisa Prudnikova (NCCA, Ural Branch), Katerina Norkina (Ekaterinburg Expo 2020 Bid Committee)
Opening Remarks

– Inke Arns (Hartware MedienKunstVerein)
Why Art is not Making the World a Less Dangerous Place – and Why It Should Not Do So
– Axel Wieder (Arnolfini Gallery)
Negotiating Spaces
– Daniel Andujar (“Technologies to the People” project)
Contemporary Art Practice and the Postcapital Frame
– Iara Boubnova (Institute of Contemporary Art, Sofia)
Why We are Still Doing Exhibitions?

13:00 – 14:00 LUNCH

14:00 – 16:15. Session 2
– Anton Vidokle (E-flux)
Artistic Sovereignty, Contemporary Art and a Curated World
– Pascal Gielen (University of Groningen)
Rebuilding Common Ground in a Flat Wet World
– Sergey Kropotov (Ekaterinburg Academy of Contemporary Art)
The Aesthetic of Camouflage in Industrial Culture: From Simeon of Verkhoturye to Street Art
– Nicholas Fraser (NYC artist)
Quiet Infusion: Public Performances and the Performing public
– Andrea Lissoni (Hangar Bicocca Foundation)
What I Learned from a Future that Never Happened

14 September (Ural Federal University, conference hall)
10:00 – 12:00. Session 3
– Olga Shishko (MediaArtLab)
AllVision
– Christiane Paul (The New School)
Measuring Disturbances: How Media (Art) Sees the World
– Vlad Strukov (University of Leeds)
Screen Tactics: The Art of the Digital Era Looks Back
– Andrey Shcherbenok (Saint-Petersburg State University)
Technological Gaze and Social Reality: Why Dziga Vertov Did Not Invent YouTube

12:00 – 12:15 COFFEE BREAK

12:15 – 14:00. Session 4
– Domietta Torlasco (Northwestern University)
The Disappearing Eye: from Michelangelo Antonioni to New Media
– Olesya Turkina (The Russian Museum)
An Eye for a Gaze
– Phillip Warnell (Kingston University)
The Glance as a Blow

September 15 (Ural College of Applied Art and Design, Nizhny Tagil)
14:00 – 16:00. Session 5
– David Raskin (School of Art Institute of Chicago)
Pattern Disruption
– Tal Ben Zvi (Kibbutzim College)
The Diaspora Project
– Lilia Nemchenko (Ural Federal University)
Labor As Festivity (“The Soviet Urals” Newsreel Series)
– Hadas Maor (independent curator)
Contemplating the Possibility of Criticality within the Field of Visual Art

16:00 – 16:15 COFFEE BREAK

16:15 – 18:00. Session 6
– Willem Jan Renders (Van Abbe Museum)
Between Dispersion and Transparency: The Van Abbemuseum Looking for Its Function
– Huib Haye van der Werf (TAAK International Platform)
Tactics in Contemporary Art: Infiltration and Art in the Public Domain
– Katerina Norkina (Ekaterinburg Expo 2020 Bid Committee)
World Exposition Movement Legacy in World Culture
– Tamara Galeeva (Ural Federal University)
TBA

PRESENTATION SUMMARIES
Session 1
– Inke Arns. Why Art is not Making the World a Less Dangerous Place – and Why It Should Not Do So
Why should art (be able to) make the world a less dangerous place? Couldn’t art with a ‘soothing’ – or ‘healing’ – effect be considered rather dangerous in itself, helping the ruling classes to cover existing problems (and thus ‘save the world’)? Art should not make the world a less dangerous place. It should rather address the dangers existing in the world, and it should do so by rubbing salt into our wounds. Art is about asking questions, not about giving answers.
– Axel Wieder. Negotiating Spaces
Exhibitions are social spaces. Their critical implication depends on the way in which they relate to the public, propose broader social questions, and enable exchange or even conflict. The presentation will discuss the potential of exhibitions, inside or outside of the traditional limits of institutions, to engage with the world and to invest at the same time in an inquiry into forms and formats of representation.
– Daniel Andujar. Contemporary Art Practice and the Postcapital Frame
The talk will address the consequences of information and communication technology on the processes of production, transmission and appropriation of symbolic goods and the models of construction of subjectivity and social organisation. It analyses the ensuing change in the concept of artistic practice, which becomes processual, analytical, informative, critical and activist, emphasising the horizontal idea of exchange, collaboration and de-hierarchized experience that can be transferred beyond the restricted confines of art public and institutions.
– Iara Boubnova. Why We are Still Doing Exhibitions?
Ever since the 1980’s art has had a problematic relationship with the world of real life, politics, social issues and engagement. At the time (1980’s) theory was claiming and art criticism was upholding the fact that any art-based intervention into the world with either image or action beautifies reality by making it aesthetically acceptable. Over the next decades there have been numerous twists of practical artistic solutions for how to avoid the traps of aesthetisation of the world. However, that was ultimately a lost battle: while giving life and the world the treatment of “art” – that is anything that was sanctified by biennials, museum shows, conferences and publications as “art” -- the practices ended justifying themselves retro-actively by the use of old-age loaded terminology which defused the chance of not-beautifying the world and life = if you make art, you beautify even without wanting to! “Sight is autonomous as a result of its dependence on the object of attention which is unavoidably located outside; the eye never sees itself.”

Session 2
– Anton Vidokle. Artistic Sovereignty, Contemporary Art and a Curated World
In the 1990s popular imagery, contemporary art practices became assimilated: everyone was expected to have something like a conceptual art project in their daily life. But the early nineties also mark the ascendance and rapid proliferation of the figure of the curator, and two decades later, with the rise of the internet and social platforms, arguably it is curating that comes to dominate the popular imaginary as a primary creative act: self-design accomplished through selective aggregation of facebook friends, images, words, brands, and so forth, takes the place of the act of artistic creation. As our experience of life becomes to a large extent a curated experience, what are the possibilities for a work of art in a curated world?
– Pascal Gielen. Rebuilding Common Ground in a Flat Wet World
>From the 1990s, we live increasingly in a flat wet world. The network society makes relationships and cultures horizontal, while the ruling neo-liberalization generates a hyper-relativism of cultural differences. Within the dictum of the number and the market, cultures and creative commons are made liquid. What are the effects of these transformations on a macro-sociological level for art institutions such as museums and biennials?
– Sergey Kropotov. The Aesthetic of Camouflage Industrial Culture: From Simeon of Verkhoturye to Street Art
Every new socio-economic order uses mimicry for self-legitimization; thus, the affirmation of the industrial can proceed though visual forms of pre-industrial culture. Such secondary valorization of cultural codes coincides with the active negation of the socio-economic and mental order that originally gave rise to them and the symbols of rest and stability become, as in Walter Benjamin, the allegories of arrested mobility. The paper traces the use of the pre-revolutionary iconography of the sower in the monument of the minister of heavy industry Sergo Ordzhonikidze in the Uralmash plant, architectural hybrids of classicism and constructivism, and the
case of the use of a sacred and brutal industrial ruin in Timofey Radya’s project Loss of Strength.
– Nicholas Fraser. Quiet Infusion: Public Performances and the Performing public
The paper will discuss Ground Rules, which considers the difficulties of switching games and learning unfamiliar rules. In the industrial city of Nizhny Tagil, Nicholas Fraser will recruit, train and equip two softball teams from the local citizenry and improvise a field for a series of games in a public park. This temporary field doubles as an ephemeral installation, with texts of the 'cardinal' rules of the game embedded inside each chalk line defining the field.
– Andrea Lissoni. What I Learned from a Future that Never Happened
“VariaVision” (1965) by Edgar Reitz is a visionary, groundbreaking 16-screen installation that questions the boundaries of the definition of expanded cinema while inquiring the perception of time in space. The scope of VariaVision was to understand how the acceleration of conveyances and the revolution of communication media influenced human perception. This presentation will depart from VariaVision’s uniqueness in both the history of film and contemporary arts, raising the problematic of multidisciplinary researches related to the history of expanded cinema and film installations, contemporary art, industrial film and the study of universal exhibitions.

Session 3
– Olga Shishko. AllVision
The problem of the possibility of objective vision and exploration of the outside world was important for artists inspired by the early XX century idea of “extended vision” by Mikhail Matyushin. The believe that a device free of individual peculiarities and limitations of a human eye can see a different, extended reality. To achieve this, they design apparatuses capable of self-programming and self-guiding, study cognitive aspects of the notion of “looking”, create complex optic phenomena. By making visible the mechanics of their works and baring the artificiality of the illusion the artists demonstrate the interconnections between reality, perception and image.
– Christiane Paul. Measuring Disturbances: How Media (Art) Sees the World
Media and media artworks are one way of measuring disturbances in our cultural and socio-political environments. Media themselves can be seen as a disturbance of reality, being able to technologically record, refocus, edit and replay the world surrounding us. The talk will use the exhibition FEEDFORWARD–The Angel of History (co-curated by Christiane Paul and Steve Dietz) as a starting point for exploring the aesthetics and strategies of the media; the effects of simulated realities; relationships between media and consumerism; and the role of art in activating change.
– Vlad Strukov. Screen Tactics: The Art of the Digital Era Looks Back
The paper will examine new deterritorialized spaces of production and analyze the screen as an intersection of projection, activism and participation. Examples will be
drawn from various artistic projects to illustrate how the digital gaze problematizes the relationship between labour and capital and seeks new ways of engagement.
– Andrey Shcherbenok. Technological Gaze and Social Reality: Why Dziga Vertov Did Not Invent YouTube
Many ideas of Dziga Vertov from the 1920s – catching life “unawares”, union-wide network of amateur kinkors filming everything around and immediately exchanging their filmed materials with each other via a Moscow ‘server’, the kino-eye as a machine of truth superior to human vision – all anticipate the defining technological phenomena of today’s world, from surveillance cameras to the Internet to artistic experiments pushing the boundaries of human vision. These striking parallels, however, ignore the fundamental peculiarity of Vertov’s implied notion of reality – the one quite essential for his visionary technological utopia. The analysis of this peculiarity will make it possible to better describe the blind spot of contemporary new media and its attending artistic practices.

Session 4
– Domietta Torlasco. The Disappearing Eye: from Michelangelo Antonioni to New Media
What are the consequences of cinema’s simultaneous persistence and dissolution amid the new technologies of vision? What would an archive of cinema look like in the digital age? The talk addresses Marco Poloni’s multimedia installation The Desert Room (2006) as it displays the disorienting stratification of our current audiovisual landscape, blurring the boundaries between the architecture of cinema and the architecture of the world and foregrounding a differentiation of the visible that radically exceeds intentional consciousness.
– Olesya Turkina. An Eye for a Gaze
The opposition between the gaze and the eye, developed by Jacques Lacan, is one of those that define contemporary criticism. The gaze is something that always already finds itself on the side of the object. The gaze of the Other creates our idea of ourselves. A work of art as an object of an act of seeing is a gaze which also defines a particular social position.
– Phillip Warnell. The Glance as a Blow
The fleeting look aims a projected trajectory, striking an oblique glancing blow that touches the object of its attention. Natasha Demkina's purported, seemingly penetrative vision conjures further ideas of extramission, where rays and forces permeate dynamically. Her visionary, diagnostic analysis also suggests supra-organic subjectivity, placed in a world occupied by shadowless persons and transparent bodies. Amid such strange forces of musical, magnetic and medical observation, Phillip Warnell will discuss the notion of an organic cinema - both film and visionary direction - including images from his 2008 film made with Demkina's participation, The Girl with X-ray Eyes.

Session 5
– David Raskin. Pattern Disruption
The best art creates less than we need. Its visual information remains emergent rather than becoming transcendent. The classic modern instance is Josef Albers’ Homage to the Square paintings, since their staggered, shifting stripes create patterns that endlessly proliferate. This talk looks at unhinged works by younger artists that create mismatches between expectations and sensations. These moments defy the habits that shape people to social norms, briefly leaving us without any set place. We mindlessly wallow in patterns not recognized but simply felt, and must wait for the change that lets us handle the input.
– Tal Ben Zvi. The Diaspora Project
The presentation will address the work of Masha Rubin, Maria Pomiansky and Irina Birger -- artists and friends who immigrated to Israel in the early 1990s -- within the framework of “accented cinema” as defined by Hamid Naficy. It will discuss the immigration culture as an exilic culture of transition that relies on a retrospective view, archival and album photos, clips from feature and documentary films which form a spatial and temporal sequence designed to overcome the recurrent geographic splits.
– Hadas Maor. Contemplating the Possibility of Criticality within the Field of Visual Art
The talk will look into works by Israeli artists such as Roi Kuper, Gilad Ofir, Gaston Zvi Ickowicz, Shai Kremer who mostly work in the field of photography and address in their works issues relating to post war landscapes and architecture. The talk will raise the question whether works which document scenes of death, destruction and extinction, yet while doing so, elevate their appearance into the realm of the sublime and beautify horror, are able to promote or deliver a critical stance toward their own subject matter.

Session 6
– Willem Jan Renders. Between Dispersion and Transparency: The Van Abbemuseum Looking for Its Function
For a period of 5 years the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven (the Netherlands) has researched the role of the museum of contemporary art in the XXI century. Many questions were addressed, such as the role of the museum in society, the local and the global, the museum as agency, how the museum can be dispersed and how it can become transparent. This presentation looks at the recent past and the near future of the museum.
– Huib Haye van der Werf. Tactics in Contemporary Art: Infiltration and Art in the Public Domain
When an artist or curator is placed in a context and infrastructure outside the institutional realm, this position requires a certain management of the unique social, economic and even cultural conditions. Their handling of this situation can lead to both successful/prosperous and devastating/aggressive result in regards to the audience as well as commissioners, so they must be adept at presenting themselves and their underlining concept(s) in such a light that promotes trust and cooperation. This is, in fact, a form of infiltration. When limited to just a practical tactic this can be seen as a mere pragmatic position, but in our contemporary society, in which indirect visibility and communication has become fundamental, this notion of infiltration has much more potential for both the contemporary artistic practice and the realm that practice is infiltrating.
– Katerina Norkina. World Exposition Movement Legacy in World Culture
World Exposition (Expo) is one of the world’s largest international events with long history, held once every five years and lasting 6 months. There are states, international and nongovernmental organizations, corporations and private individuals among its participants. Each World Expo characteristically embraces a wide topic of universal interest. Many buildings, works of art and monuments were constructed for Expos but continue to play a cultural role to this day. Ekaterinburg, the site of the Industrial Biennial, is a candidate to host Expo 2020. The presentation will use the examples of previous World Expo cities to outline the possibilities it opens up for the city.

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