Seminar: Systemics #4: Avantgarde as Network
In connection with the exhibition Systemics #4: Aarhus Rapport – Avantgarde as network (or, the politics of the ultralocal), Kunsthal Aarhus holds a day seminar. The event is developed and moderated by Marianne Ping Huang (Aarhus University).
The notion of the avant-garde as an artistic, social, and political force operating on the edge of history has been challenged with a more recent focus on the 20th Century avant-garde movements. For the last decade or so avant-garde tactics and events have been – conceptually, theoretically, and historically – re-investigated and re-enacted as part of networked geographies and histories. The seminar Avantgarde as Network continues this investigation and discusses various aspects of its re-invention.
Seminar Schedule
11.00 Marianne Ping Huang (Aarhus University): Welcome and introduction to the seminar
11.10 Joasia Krysa (Kunsthal Aarhus) and Lars Bang Larsen (Copenhagen University): Introduction to Aarhus Rapport – Avantgarde as network (or, the politics the ultralocal)
11.30 Sanja Perovic (King's College): The French Revolution as Performance Event: Rethinking the Origins of the Avant-Garde
12.00 Tania Ørum (Copenhagen University): 1960s Avant-Garde Networks
12.30-13.00 Discussion
13:00-14:00 Lunch break
14.00 Marianne Huang and Anne Kølbæk Iversen: (An)archival Avant-Gardes
14.30 Jacob Lund (Aarhus University): Avant-garde and Contemporaneity
15.00-15.30 Discussion
15.30-15.45 Break
15.45-16.30 Discussion Panel
Discussants / participating artists, curators, institutions: Dave Hullfish Bailey, Lea Porsager, Mathias Kokholm, Morten Søndergaard and Mogens Jacobsen, Jakob Jakobsen, Museum of Ordure.
Booking information
The event is free of charge but space is limited. Please RSVP to secure your place by 20 September by sending an email to: comm-assistant@kunsthal.dk, or call Ricarda Bross, Communications Assistant at Kunsthal Aarhus on +45 86206050.
Participants
Tania Ørum is Associate Professor at Department of Art and Cultural Studies at Copenhagen University and has written widely on modernism and the avant-garde. Among her recent publications is De eksperimenterende tressere (2009) on the cross-aesthetic experiments of the Danish avant-garde of the 1960s. Coordinator of the Danish research network ”Avantgardernes genkomst og aktualitet” (The Return and Actuality of the Avant-Gardes) supported by the Danish Research Council for the Humanities 2002-2004. Director of the Nordic Network of Avant-Garde Studies (www.avantgardenet.eu) supported by the Nordic Research Council, Nordforsk 2005-2009. Chairman of the European Network for Avant-Garde and Modernism Studies (www.eam-europe.ugent.be) 2007-2008. Member of the Steering Committee of EAM from 2007. Main editor of the 4 volumes of The Cultural History of the Nordic Avant-Garde under publication (Rodopi, Amsterdam & New York 2012-2016).
Sanja Perovic is Lecturer in French at King’s College, London and researches 18th-century literature and thought with a specific focus on the relations between the Enlightenment and Revolution. She also has broader interests in the representations of time. Her first book The Calendar in Revolutionary France: Perceptions of Time in Literature, Culture, Politics (Cambridge UP 2012) considers the unique role played by the French Republican calendar in the construction of revolutionary time. Her current project World History as World Court: The Theatrical Origins of Human Rights considers how the eighteenth century came to construct history as a universal, moral tribunal. Sanja has also published on 17th and 18th century French theatre, exemplary history, encyclopedisms, censorship and other aspects of revolutionary culture.
Jacob Lund is Associate Professor of Aesthetics and Culture and Director of the research programme in Mediality, Materiality, Aesthetic Meaning, Aarhus University, Denmark and Editor-in-Chief of The Nordic Journal of Aesthetics. His authored books include Den subjektive rest: Udsigelse og (de)subjektivering i kunst og teori (The subjective Remnant: Enunciation and(De)subjectification in Art and Theory, 2008), and Erindringens æstetik – essays (The Aesthetics of Memory, 2011). His current research focuses on image-politics and the concept of contemporaneity.
Anne Kølbæk Iversen is a freelance researcher and curator inspired by the notion of archival order and disorder. For the exhibition Systemics #4 she has collected and organized material for the archive section, presenting the archive as a dynamic network with open ends. From 2013-2014 she worked at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Roskilde, and is currently working as a residency coordinator at Fabrikken for Art and Design in Copenhagen and lecturer in literature and mediation at Copenhagen University. She holds a MA in Modern Culture from Copenhagen University.
Marianne Huang has written on avant-garde tactics in contemporary art and on the connections between artistic, social and political avant-gardes. She has collaborated with Tania Ørum on coordinating the Danish research network The Return and Actuality of the Avant-Gardes (2002-2004) and the Nordic Network of Avant-Garde Studies (2005-2009), and co-edited En tradition af opbrud. Avantgardernes tradition og politik (2005)
Dave Hullfish Bailey (born 1963 in Denver) lives in Los Angeles. Bailey’s work is research-based and speculative, concerning geographic sites and co-evolutionary relations between social, natural and infrastructural systems. His methods often engage local communities in research, pedagogical workshops and expeditionary fieldwork. His work has been shown in solo museum exhibitions [Malmö Konsthall; Raven Row, London; Casco Office for Art, Design and Theory, Utrecht; Secession, Vienna; and others], significant international group exhibitions [including Berlin, Lyon, and São Paulo Biennales], public projects and publications. Bailey is Core Faculty in undergraduate Fine Art is artist and teaches at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California.
Lea Porsager (b. 1981, Frederikssund, Denmark) was educated at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen and the Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main. She received her MFA from the Royal Danish Acadamy of Fine Arts in 2010. Her recent exhibitions include Henie Onstad Kunstsenter, Høvikodden 2013–2014; Lunds Konsthall, Lund 2013; The Emily Harvey Foundation, New York 2013; Open Studio, ISCP, New York 2013; Neue Gesellschaft für Bildende Kunst, Berlin 2013; Contemporary Art Centre (CAC), Vilnius 2013; Museum voor Moderne Kunst, Arnhem 2013; Kunsthal Aarhus, Aarhus 2013; Fotografisk Center, Copenhagen 2013 and KUMU, Tallinn 2012. In 2008, Porsager was awarded the Montana ENTER Prize for her work LEAP – The Awakening of the Dark Muses. In 2012, she participated in dOCUMENTA (13) with the Anatta Experiment.
Morten Søndergaard is Associate Professor of Interactive Media Art at Aalborg University Copenhagen (DK) where he is head of research of the Unheard Avant-garde project at the LARM audio archive infrastructure. He is also an independent and internationally operating Media Art Curator. Contributing editor at LEA (2011-) and Associated Curator at Kasa Gallery, Istanbul (2013-). Previously Curator / Deputy Director at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Roskilde (1999-2008); Senior Curator and General Chair of the re-new festival of digital arts – www.re-new.org – in Copenhagen (2009-12).
Jakob Jakobsen is a visual artist and organiser (antipool.org).
He was co-founder of the Copenhagen Free University in 2001 (copenhagenfreeuniversity.dk); the trade union Young Artworkers (UKK) (ukk.dk) in 2002; the artist run television station tv-tv in 2004; and Nebula Books in 2010 (nebulabooks.dk). He was professor
at the Funen Art Academy from 2006 to 2012. Recent exhibitions include Image Politics/Billed Politik at Overgaden, Institute of Contemporary Art in Copenhagen (billedpolitik.dk) and This World We Must Leave at Kunsthal Aarhus in 2010 (thisworldwemustleave. dk) and Trauma 1 - 11: Stories about the Copenhagen Free University and the surrounding society in the last ten years at
the Museum of Contemporary Art in Roskilde in 2011 (https:// vimeo.com/29529903). He was part of And And And / dOCUMENTA (13) (andandand.org) with the The Antiuniversity Research
Project (antihistory.org) initiated with MayDay Rooms, London
in 2012. In 2013, his work on Antiknow was shown at Flat Time House, London, and he was also part of Systemics #2 exhibition at Kunsthal Aarhus, Denmark.
Museum of Ordure is a self institution which explores the cultural value of ordure through ts projects and ongoing public collections. It takes a special interest in the management of human waste and its impact on the concept of the public sphere and civil society.
Mathias Kokholm / Antipyrine is an independent publishing project initiated in 2013 by editor/curator Mathias Kokholm. It publishes works of theory, literature, art, economics, aesthetic technologies, vandalism, madness, science fiction and conceptual poetry. Exploring publishing as aesthetic medium and practice, Antipyrine is an open situation, research-based, and works collectively on a curated list of nuanced and polemical titles, together formulating a vision of the present. Antipyrine organizes seminars, workshops and exhibitions, runs a bookstore in Kunsthal Aarhus, and publishes the art magazine Monsieur Antipyrine edited by artist Jørgen Michaelsen, art-historian Mikkel Bolt, author Mikkel Thykier, and Claus Handberg.
Lars Bang Larsen is a researcher at the Institute of Art and Cultural History at the University of Copenhagen and a visiting professor at the Haute École d’Art et de Design in Geneva. He wrote his PhD, A History of Irritated Material, on the subject of psychedelia and the neo-avantgarde. His books include Networks (MIT and Whitechapel Gallery, 2014), The Phantom of Liberty (With Tone Hansen, Sternberg Press, 2014), and The Model. A Model for a Qualitative Society (1968) (MACBA, 2010). He has curated exhibitions such as Concept After Concept: Before Normal (Roskilde Museum of Contemporary Art, 2014), Reflections from Damaged Life (Raven Row, London 2013).
Joasia Krysa is curator and researcher, currently Artistic Director of Kunsthal Aarhus (Denmark). Prior to this she was Associate Professor in Art and Technology at Plymouth University, UK (2000-2012) and part of dOCUMENTA (13) curatorial team (2009 – 2012). She is an author of anthology Curating Immateriality (New York 2006) and is currently co-editing a monograph of Finish artist and technology pioneer Erkki Kurenniemi (forthcoming from MIT Press, 2015). Her chapters were published in, among others, Software Studies (MIT 2008), Curating New Media in the White Cube and Beyond (Barkeley University Press, 2008) and The Routledge Companion to Art and Politics (forthcoming from Routledge 2015).