Image courtesy of Falke Pisano as part of the project 'Where Shall We Begin?’ (Superhost 2022), at M KHA until the end of the year
This gathering departs from emerging theoretical and experiential knowledges with regard to labour and value producing mechanisms in the field of art. During How Do We Proceed From Here?, speakers, respondents, and audiences are invited to navigate some of the paradoxes in the politics of labour and value producing mechanisms in the arts that are perceived, for example, in the nexus between (in)visibility, speculation, and narrative.
With a growing, collective desire for sustainability, justice, and solidarity in the arts – especially in the present moment and increasingly anchored in policies – this exchange aims to nurture and add to these critical issues and queries in their emancipatory potential. Concretely, it will do so by foregrounding the ongoing precarity as experienced by various workers, some of the intricacies surrounding creating socially safe working environments, and finally, dealing with tensions and discomfort. Throughout, the aim is to arrive at multiple possible answers to the following questions: What preconditions are required when working collectively and creatively in, through, and with institutions* in different capacities? Which alliances are available and practiced, and which are potentially foreclosed? And lastly ‘What happens when labour becomes not just a thematic or an image for artistic production, but when artistic production is re-imagined as itself a form of labour? What kind of politics might this lead to?’**
Invited speakers are artists and educators Sami Hammana and Falke Pisano. Respondents include activist and academic Zouhair Hammana and intermediary, creative producer, and researcher Yue Mao. Curator of the event Katayoun Arian will join the conversation. Moderation by Philippine Hoegen.
No reservations required, language English
Free admission
How Do We Proceed from Here? is part of Symposium on Tour, a series of events initiated by Club Solo around the subject of how we work together in the arts. Earlier iterations took place at Casco, Utrecht and Kunsthal Gent.
*Here, the term ‘institutions’ [of art] is understood both as foundations, that is, organised entities with boards, eligible to receiving municipal and national funds for the purpose of making artistic programmes, and as formally acknowledged graduate and post-graduate educational organisations.
*Vishmidt, Marina, Speculation as a Mode of Production: Forms of Value Subjectivity in Art and Capital, 2018, p. 135.