<nettime> Cultural Practice and War

[Jordan Crandall <crandall@blast.org>]

<voti><blast>
CULTURAL PRACTICE AND WAR

the summer of 1999
an online public forum presented by the X Art Foundation and VOTI 


Artists, critics, curators, and other cultural producers are today
struggling with the terms of their own practice, in a global context of
crisis when much of their work seems insignificant. How to navigate this
relation between aesthetic and political intervention is a nagging
question, made all the more acute during times of war. What are the
terms of our involvement -- do we fight at the frontlines, do we devote
ourselves to humanitarian efforts, or do we rather make strong
interventions in the realm of symbolic production?  Because clearly we
are faced with wars of images, of communications networks and propaganda
machines.  Where are we needed most?  Have we developed useful tools
with which to decode images, that can have practical consequences in a
situation where television continually overwrites reality?

Recently an extraordinary thing has happened on the Internet. As Robert
Fleck has pointed out, it is the first time we have been able to
communicate nearly in realtime with people on the 'other side' of a war
front. The war in Yugoslavia has exposed the promise and limitations of
the net and has revealed anew the tangled intersections of
representations, politics, and histories that must be navigated in order
to engage in effective cultural practice. It has revealed many things
about how such assemblages cross with daily embodied realities,
uprooting traditional formats of place, identity, and geography
especially during times of national and international crisis. Working in
areas of cultural production, we must learn to contend with the new
forms of cultural identification that are arising, with the faultlines
of ethnic tension that contest national borders, and with the underlying
processes of militarization.  

The <voti><blast> forum will address these issues in the context of a
3-month online public forum, beginning today and ending September 1,
1999.  We invite you to join us.  

FORUM HOSTS: 

ZDENKA BADOVINAC, Director of the Moderna Galerja, Ljubljana, Slovenia; 
BART DE BAERE, organiser and writer, Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele
Kunst, Ghent, Belgium; WAYNE BAERWALDT, independent curator in Winnipeg
and Santa Monica; CARLOS BASUALDO, poet and freelance curator, project
director of Apex Art Curatorial Projects, New York; DANIEL BIRNBAUM,
Director of IASPIS, Stockholm; WALING BOERS, curator and publicist,
director of BüroFriedrich, Berlin; FRANCESCO BONAMI, Senior Curator at
the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, Artistic Director Fondazione
Sandretto ReRebaudengo per L'Arte, Torino, and Artistic Director of
Pitti Discovery , Florence; DAN CAMERON, Senior Curator at the New
Museum of Contemporary Art, New York; CAROLYN CHRISTOV-BAKARGIEV, art
critic and independent curator, Rome; UTE META BAUER, curator and head
of the Institute for Contemporary Art at the Academy of Fine Arts
Vienna; CHRISTOPHE CHERIX, curator Cabinet des Estampes, Geneva; LISA
CORRIN, Senior Curator at Serpentine Gallery, London; JORDAN CRANDALL,
artist and media theorist, New York; AMADA CRUZ, Director of Exhibitions
at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, New York; OKWUI
ENWEZOR, curator, Artistic Director of Documenta XI; CHARLES ESCHE,
writer and exhibition organiser, co-director of The Modern Institute,
Glasgow; ROBERT FLECK, independent critic, curator, and director of the
post-graduate program at the Ecole Regionale des Beaux-Arts in Nantes;
DOUGLAS FOGLE, Curator of Contemporary Art, Walker Art Center,
Minneapolis; JESUS FUENMAYOR, curator and writer, Caracas; BETTINA
FUNCKE, associate publications editor, Dia Center for the Arts, New
York, and doctoral candidate at ZKM Karlsruhe; REBECCA GORDON NESBITT,
curator, founding member of Salon3, London; HOU HANRU, independent
critic and curator, Paris; SUSAN HAPGOOD, Curator of Exhibitions,
American Federation of Arts, and Senior Fellow, Vera List Center for Art
and Politics, The New School, New York; MARIA HLAVAJOVA, Director, Soros
Center for Contemporary Arts, Bratislava, Slovakia;  JENS HOFFMANN,
independent curator, New York; UDO KITTELMANN, Director, Kölnischer
Kunstverein, Cologne; VASIF KORTUN, writer, curator, educator, and
founder of the Istanbul Contemporary Art Project, Istanbul; MARTA KUZMA;
CORNELIA LAUF, art historian and curator, founder and director of Camera
Oscura, San Casciano dei Bagni, Tuscany; MARIA LIND, Curator of
Contemporary Art, Moderna Museet, Stockholm; ROSA MARTINEZ, historian,
art critic and independent curator, Barcelona, and curator of III
International Site Santa Fe Biennial; LAURENCE MILLER, Founding Director
of ArtPace, San Antonio, Texas; VIKTOR MISIANO, independent curator,
Moscow; AKIKO MIYAKE, Program Director for CCA Kitakyushu, Japan;
STEPHANIE MOISDON TREMBLAY, art critic and freelance curator, Professor
at the Universite Paris I - St. Charles, la Sorbonne; ASA NACKING,
associate curator at the Louisiana Museum, Denmark; MICHELLE NICOL,
curator, art and film historian, Zurich; HANS-ULRICH OBRIST, independent
curator, Paris, Vienna and London, operator of the Migrateurs program at
Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; PEDRO REYES, artist and
critic, curator at the Museo de Arte Carillo Gil, Mexico City; KATHRIN
RHOMBERG, curator of the Vienna Secession, co-curator of Manifesta III;
JOSE ROCA, curator and critic, Visual Arts Department at the Biblioteca
Luis Angel Arango, Bogotá; NANCY SPECTOR, Curator of Contemporary Art at
the Guggenheim Museum, New York; JON-OVE STEIHAUG, independent curator
and critic, Oslo; BARBARA VANDERLINDEN, founder and director of Roomade,
Brussels; HORTENSIA VOELCKERS, Director of the Wiener Festwochen,
Vienna; OCTAVIO ZAYA, independent curator and writer, New York.

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Presented by the X Art Foundation and VOTI 
as part of the Blast 7 program (http://www.blast.org/agencies)

The VOTI website is located at http://www.blast.org/voti

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