Curating, Art and the Pedagogical Turn
October 30 2009, 18.30-20.30 / İTÜ Taşkışla Campus, Conference Hall No.109
Speaker: Paul O'Neill
This lecture/presentation will unravel the notable turn to pedagogical models across a range of recent contemporary curatorial projects, art practices, and artwriting as evidenced in a range of projects in recent years. For their biennial, WHW have outlined many desires, including how to employ the biennial to advance, to stimulate and to problematise Brecht's idea for how can art might operate as a means of 'popular education and political agitation.' 'Education' has become a prevalent aspect of all museum programmes, fairs, and large-scale exhibitions: 'Pedagogy' adopted as one of the three leitmotifs of documenta12 in 2007; the unrealized Manifesta 6 experimental art school as exhibitionary construct for Nicosia and the associated volume 'Notes for an Artschool'; unitednationsplaza; 'proto-academy'; Cork Caucus; Future Academy; para-education; Free Copenhagen University; A-C-A-D-E-M-Y; Mark Dion's School; Tanya Bruguera's Arte de Conducta in Havana; ArtSchool Palestine; School of Missing Studies, Belgrade; and many other examples. Instances of curatorial models and art practice conceived as critical cultural pedagogies (often construed as speculative –'open'– emancipatory projects) are widely in evidence across the international scene. These developments are consistent with a turn to discursive models within curatorial practice, especially noticeable since the mid-1990s. O'Neill and Wilson seek to critically describe, locate, reflect upon, and think through the potentiality of this turn to pedagogical models and practices.
This lecture hopes to accompany the launch of the publication Paul O'Neill ve Mick Wilson (haz. | eds.), Curating, Art and the Turn to Education (Amsterdam and London: de Appel and Open Editions, 2009); which includes contributions by: Andrea Phillips • Irit Rogoff • Wouter Davidts ve Daniel Buren • Cornford ve Cross • Eva Diaz • Marion von Osten • Edgar Schmitz • Anton Vidokle • William Keizen • Emily Pethick • Dave Beech • Jan Verwoert • Janna Graham • Liam Gillick • Peio Aguirre • 16 Beaver • Sally Tallant • Simon Sheikh • Raqs Media Collective • David Blamey ve Alex Coles • Stewart Martin • Radical Philosophy and others.
Seeking Public Space: Questions for Secularism
November 7 2009, 17.00-19.00 / İTÜ Campus, Conference Hall No.127
Speakers: Paul Domela (moderator), Fulya Erdemci, Orhan Esen, Janna Graham, Ziauddin Sardar
In debates on art and public space religion has been conspicuously absent as a perspective or subject for discussion. However in recent years –much as earlier debates on race, ethnicity, sexuality and gender claimed equal recognition and respect in society– religion has put complex questions to the assumption of secularity in public life.
Is it possible to see this space other than through the prism of ones particular point of view? In the case of irreducible difference what are the possibilities for mediation if we acknowledge that irrationality and unreason are part of the picture? How might artists engage with this complex and charged terrain?
Coming out of conversations between Liverpool Biennial and Istanbul Biennial about the different trajectories and specificities of these issues in the UK and Turkey, we pose the necessity of exploring further the idea of public space as entanglement between tradition and modernity, private and public, religious and secular concepts.
The subject will be explored in a keynote address by the eminent author Ziauddin Sardar and particular case studies by the historian and urbanist Orhan Esen, Fulya Erdemci, director of the public art agency SKOR in the Netherlands and Janna Graham, project curator of Edgware Road for the Serpentine Gallery in London and member of Ultra Red. The panel is chaired by Paul Domela, Programme Director of Liverpool Biennial.
This important debate touches on artists and art organizations, as well as writers, architects and urbanists, who engage different audiences in public space.
