CrossSections: Processing Artistic and Curatorial Research 9783110716566, 9783110716481

Table of contents :
TABLE OF CONTENTS
CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION
CROSSSECTIONS
CROSSSECTIONS PROCESSING ARTISTIC AND CURATORIAL RESEARCH
THE OPENING MOVE
THE (UN)KNOWN UNKNOWNS
CHAPTER 2. THE PROCESS
PHASES / MEETINGS
THE CORE MEETINGS
MAKO ISHIZUKA'S PAGES ON THE CORE MEETINGS
WHERE ARE WE NOW? WHAT ARE WE GOING TO DO?
THE SHARE MEETINGS
TOWARDS THE REIGN OF THE CAT
THE PERIPHERAL MEETINGS
THE PUBLIC MEETINGS
RESIDENCIES
CHAPTER 3. REFLECTIONS OF THE PARTNERS
CHANGING PERSPECTIVES
INVESTING IN THE UNKONWN
A PLATFORM FOR ARTISTS AND CURATORS
PROMOTING EXPERIMENTATION, REFLECTION AND DISCUSSION
PROVOCATIVE COMMUNITIES
A PROGRAMME IN DIALOGUE
OUR DIALOGUE
EMBRACING UNCERTAINTY AND SERENDIPITY
OPEN-ENDED PROCESS
DIALOGUE AND PARTNERING
CHAPTER 4. THE CONTENT
ARTISTS, ARTISTIC RESEARCHES, PROJECTS, CURATOR
BARBARA HOLUB
SHADES AND SHADOWS OF THE SOCIAL: THE BLUE FROG SOCIETY
BEHZAD KHOSRAVI-NOORI
SYNECDOCHE, YUGOSLAVIA
BENJI BOYADGIAN
IMAGINARY
BENJI BOYADGIAN & BEHZAD KHOSRAVI-NOORI
REGULATING TIME: THE OWLS, THE QUEEN, AND THE MAQUETTISTE
BRONWYN LACE
MIRROR MIRROR
EBRU KURBAK
INTERSECTING DIMENSIONS: CHRONOLACE STUDIES
EGLE ODDO
SPLITTER
HEBA Y. AMIN
OPERATION SUNKEN SEA: FLIPPING THE HISTORICAL NARRATIVE
INMA HERRERA
DRAWING OUT NEW SOUNDS FROM ONE’S INSTRUMENT
ISA ROSENBERGER
... THE VAST LAND FROM WHICH SHE COMES
LINA SELANDER
ON ÖVERFÖRINGSDIAGRAM NR 1 [DIAGRAM OF TRANSFER NO. 1]
MARCUS NEUSTETTER
DEFINING LINES
NIKOLAUS GANSTERER
THE GESTURE
NISRINE BOUKHARI
LANDSCAPES OF UNCERTAIN TIMES
OTTO KARVONEN
JAILBIRDS
RAMESCH DAHA
I AM HEALTHY, I CANNOT WRITE THIS LETTER MYSELF
RICARDA DENZER
RICARDA DENZER’S AUFZEICHNUNGEN
TAMSIN SNOW
SPARE FACE
TIMO TUHKANEN
SONIC INDEPENDENCE
YANE CALOVSKI
OBSESSION, THINGS, AND NARRATIVES
BAŞAK ŞENOVA
CHAPTER 5. THE PROCEEDINGS
EXHIBITIONS
EXHIBITIONS AS CURATORIAL READYMADE FORMS OF ESCAPE
A CONSTRUCTED MODEL: THE CROSSSECTIONS EXHIBITIONS
DESIGN OF THE EXHIBITIONS
UTILIZING “TABLE” AS A DESIGN ELEMENT IN A RESEARCH-BASED CURATORIAL AND SCENOGRAPHIC PRACTICE
CROSSSECTIONS_INTERVALS: EXHIBITION WITH ENDLESS COMPLEXITIES
CROSSSECTIONS_POTENTIALS
CROSSSECTIONS_INTENSITIES
CROSSSECTIONS_INTERVALS
PERSPECTIVES
CROSSECTIONS_PERSPECTIVES
SUPPORT STRUCTURE: THOUGHTS AFTER AN OPENING
CROSSECTIONS_NOTES
MODELS
THE FIRST MODEL
THE TRAVELLING MODEL
THE TRAVELLING MODEL
SOLO EXHIBITIONS
SHADOW OPTICS
...THE VAST LAND FROM WHICH SHE COMES
BLUE FROG SOCIETY / A HABITAT WITHOUT TERRITORY SPEECH TO THE BLUE FROG SOCIETY IN ROMANES BY NANCY BLACK
THE WORLD IN COMMON
CROSSSECTIONS IN CLIMBING THROUGH THE TIDE EXHIBITION
COMMUNITY ACTIVATION: B7L9 – BAHR LAZREG, TUNIS
ARTIST TALKS, PERFORMANCES, PRESENTATIONS, & GUIDED TOURS
GUIDE
BOOKLET
BOOK
ARTIST BOOKS
CHRONOLACE, SEQUENCE #001
FRAGMENTS OF A FROZEN MOMENT
SCREENING PROGRAMME
CHAPTER 1, CHAPTER 2, CHAPTER 3, COORDINATES
NOTES FROM THE POST-PRODUCTION PROCESS
CHAPTER 6. EDUCATIONAL AND CREATIVE CHANNELS
CO-TEACHING AND CO-PRODUCING
DEPARTMENT OF DESIGN, CRAFTS AND ARTS, KONSTFACK/CROSSSECTIONS
EXPERIENCING AND EXPERIMENTING WITH THE CONDITIONS AND THE PROCESS
EXPERIENCING AND EXPERIMENTING WITH THE CONDITIONS AND THE PROCESS
CRAFT/CROSSSECTIONS
ALTERNATIVE CHANNELS
KUNSTHALLE EXNERGASSE — WERKSTÄTTEN UND KULTURHAUS (WUK)/ FEDERAL CHANCELLERY [BUNDESKANZLERAMT] & KULTURKONTAKT/CROSSSECTIONS
PARALLEL VIENNA 2018
UNIVERSITY OF APPLIED ARTS VIENNA/CROSSSECTIONS
B7L9, KAMEL LAZAAR FOUNDATION/CROSSSECTIONS
THE CROSSSECTIONSHUB
ALIEN PALACE BIRDHOUSE COLLECTION
EXHIBITION #2
EXHIBITION #4. VIENNA IS A MUSEUM
THE LOG
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
IMPRINT

Citation preview

BOOK SERIES OF THE UNIVERSITY OF APPLIED ARTS VIENNA EDITED BY GERALD BAST, RECTOR

EDITED BY BAŞAK ŞENOVA

PROCESSING ARTISTIC AND CURATORIAL RESEARCH

TABLE OF CONTENTS CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION CROSSSECTIONS

12 13 16

CrossSections: Processing Artistic and Curatorial Research BAŞAK ŞENOVA The Opening Move BAŞAK ŞENOVA in conversation with JONATAN HABIB ENGQVIST The (Un)Known Unknowns ANDREAS SPIEGL

CHAPTER 2 THE PROCESS 18 Phases / Meetings 20 The CORE Meetings 24 Mako Ishizuka’s pages on the CORE Meetings 28 Where are we now? What are we going to do? BJÖRN NORBERG

31 The SHARE Meetings 32 Towards the Reign of the Cat JONATAN HABIB ENGQVIST

37 The PERIPHERAL Meetings 39 The PUBLIC Meetings 43 Residencies

CHAPTER 3 REFLECTIONS OF THE PARTNERS 45 Changing Perspectives ANDREA LÖBEL & KLAUS SCHAFLER, Kunsthalle Exnergasse (KEX) — WUK

46 Investing in the Unknown MARIA LANTZ, Konstfack — University of Arts, Crafts and Design

47 A Platform for Artists and Curators JONATAN HABIB ENGQVIST & BJÖRN NORBERG, NFK — The Nordic Art Association

48 Promoting Experimentation, Reflection and Discussion JOHANNA VAKKARI, Academy of Fine Arts, Helsinki

49 Provocative Communities BARBARA PUTZ-PLECKO, University of Applied Arts Vienna

50 A Programme in Dialogue HRISTINA IVANOSKA & YANE CALOVSKI, Press to Exit Project Space

51 Our Dialogue MIKE BODE, Nya Småland

51 Embracing Uncertainty and Serendipity JUHA HUUSKONEN, HIAP — Helsinki International Artist Programme

52 Open-Ended Process JOHAN POUSETTE, IASPIS

53 Dialogue and Partnering MARJA KARTTUNEN, Saastamoinen Foundation

CHAPTER 4 THE CONTENT ARTISTS, ARTISTIC RESEARCHES, PROJECTS, CURATOR

56 BARBARA HOLUB 60 Shades and Shadows of the Social: The Blue Frog Society PAUL O’NEILL

64 BEHZAD KHOSRAVI-NOORI 66 Synecdoche, Yugoslavia SANJA HORVATINČIČ

70 BENJI BOYADGIAN 72 Imaginary JACK PERSEKIAN

76 BENJI BOYADGIAN & BEHZAD KHOSRAVI-NOORI 78 Regulating Time: The Owls, The Queen, and The Maquettiste BAŞAK ŞENOVA

82 BRONWYN LACE 86 Mirror Mirror KOULLA XINISTERIS

90 EBRU KURBAK 92 Intersecting Dimensions: Chronolace Studies BAŞAK ŞENOVA

96 EGLE ODDO 98 Splitter LORI ADRAGNA

102 HEBA Y. AMIN 106 Operation Sunken Sea: Flipping the Historical Narrative BAŞAK ŞENOVA

110 INMA HERRERA 114 Drawing Out New Sounds From One’s Instrument RUTH PELZER-MONTADA

118 ISA ROSENBERGER 122 . . .the vast land from which she comes BAŞAK ŞENOVA

126 LINA SELANDER 128 On Överföringsdiagram Nr 1 [Diagram of Transfer No. 1] OSCAR MANGIONE

132 MARCUS NEUSTETTER 134 Defining Lines WILHELM VAN RENSBURG

134 Illuminating the African Archive MARY CORRIGALL

138 NIKOLAUS GANSTERER 140 The Gesture ANDREAS SPIEGL

144 NISRINE BOUKHARI 146 Landscapes of Uncertain Times JENNIE FAHLSTRÖM

150 OTTO KARVONEN 152 Jailbirds JUKKA RELANDER

156 RAMESCH DAHA 160 I Am Healthy, I Cannot Write This Letter Myself MARTI MANEN

164 RICARDA DENZER 168 Ricarda Denzer’s Aufzeichnungen BRANDON LABELLE

172 TAMSIN SNOW 174 Spare Face SUSANNA DAVIES-CROOK

178 TIMO TUHKANEN 182 Sonic Independence BJÖRN NORBERG

186 YANE CALOVSKI 190 Obsession, Things, and Narratives ASTRID WEGE

195 BAŞAK ŞENOVA

CHAPTER 5 THE PROCEEDINGS 197 EXHIBITIONS 198 Exhibitions as Curatorial Readymade Forms of Escape PAUL O’NEILL

201 A Constructed Model: The CrossSections Exhibitions 202 Design of the CrossSections Exhibitions BAŞAK ŞENOVA

204 Utilizing “Table” as A Design Element in a Research-Based Curatorial and

206 209 212 214 220 221 226 227

Scenographic Practice FUNDA ŞENOVA TUNALI CrossSections_intervals: Exhibition with Endless Complexities NIA TABAKOVA CrossSections_potentials CrossSections_intensities CrossSections_intervals Perspectives ANNE KLONTZ CrossSections_perspectives Support Structure: Thoughts after an Opening ANNA-KAISA RASTENBERGER CrossSections_notes

232 MODELS 232 The First Model, Parallel Vienna 2018 233 The Travelling Model, CrossSections_notes 234 The Travelling Model, CrossSections_perspectives 235 SOLO EXHIBITIONS 236 Shadow Optics, LINA SELANDER 237 . . .the vast land from which she comes, ISA ROSENBERGER 238 Blue Frog Society | A Habitat Without Territory, BARBARA HOLUB 239 The World in Common, EGLE ODDO 240 CROSSSECTIONS IN CLIMBING THROUGH THE TIDE EXHIBITION 241 Community Activation: B7L9 — Bahr Lazreg, Tunis LINA LAZAAR, Kamel Lazaar Foundation

244 ARTIST TALKS, PERFORMANCES, PRESENTATIONS, & GUIDED TOURS 246 GUIDE 246 CrossSections_intervals, Kunsthalle Exnergasse — WUK, ed. by BAŞAK ŞENOVA 246 BOOKLET 246 Speeches by BARBARA HOLUB 247 BOOK 247 Shadow Optics. Lina Selander, ed. by BAŞAK ŞENOVA 248 ARTIST BOOKS 248 Chronolace, Sequence #001 by EBRU KURBAK 249 Fragments of A Frozen Movement by INMA HERRERA 250 SCREENING PROGRAMME 250 Chapter 1, Chapter 2, Chapter 3, Coordinates 251 Notes from the Post-production Process GİZEM AKGÜLGİL

CHAPTER 6

EDUCATIONAL AND CREATIVE CHANNELS 254 CO-TEACHING AND CO-PRODUCING 254 Department of Design, Crafts and Arts, Konstfack/CrossSections 254 Experiencing and Experimenting with the Conditions and the Process BAŞAK ŞENOVA

255 Craft/CrossSections BELLA RUNE

260 ALTERNATIVE CHANNELS 260 Kunsthalle Exnergasse, Federal Chancellery & Kulturkontakt/CrossSections 260 Parallel Vienna 2018 261 University of Applied Arts Vienna/CrossSections 261 B7L9, Kamel Lazaar Foundation/CrossSections 262 THE CROSSSECTIONSHUB 262 Alien Palace Birdhouse Collection, OTTO KARVONEN 264 Times of Dilemma, BARBARA HOLUB, transparadiso 264 Clogged, BENJI BOYADGIAN 265 Vienna is a Museum by BRONWYN LACE & MARCUS NEUSTETTER 266 THE LOG 269 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 271 IMPRINT

CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION

The CrossSections project is an interdisciplinary platform contemplating on artistic research, dialogues, and production. The project reflects on “process” with the aim to articulate critical reactions to the political, economic, and social disturbances facing us today. The project emerged from the need to challenge the ‘status quo’ across the political spectrum and support the development of effective and critical forms of discursive and artistic productions. Therefore, the project has operated as a collective interdisciplinary research platform and network to propose a curatorial model that prioritizes and presents the process of the artistic research along with the production, and to share and articulate diverse critical reactions and collective strategies in the context of art. The project has aimed at discussing and sharing diverse realities, conditions, and strategies in different geographies. By placing the artistic production of 19 artists at the centre of its research and plot, it was shaped by the cumulative interdisciplinary input and data gathered through meetings, residencies, performative presentations, and publications in the course of three years. Its research process involved different focus groups, institutions and educational bodies engaged with the re-positioning of perspectives by prioritising production. 9

ARTISTS Barbara Holub (AT)

Egle Oddo (IT/FI)

Nisrine Boukhari (SY/SE/AT)

Behzad Khosravi-Noori (IR/SE)

Heba Y. Amin (EG/DE)

Ricarda Denzer (AT)

Benji Boyadgian (FI/PS)

Inma Herrera (ES/FI)

Otto Karvonen (FI)

Bronwyn Lace (ZA)

Isa Rosenberger (AT)

Ramesch Daha (AT)

Ebru Kurbak (TR/AT)

Lina Selander (SE)

Tamsin Snow (IE/UK)

Marcus Neustetter (ZA)

Timo Tuhkanen (FI)

Nikolaus Gansterer (AT)

Yane Calovski (MK)

CURATOR

Başak Şenova (TR/AT)

PARTNERS

KUNSTHALLE EXNERGASSE WUK (Werkstätten und Kulturhaus) in Vienna KONSTFACK University College of Arts, Crafts and Design in Stockholm NFK The Nordic Art Association in Stockholm NYA SMÅLAND in different locations in Sweden IASPIS The Swedish Arts Grants Committee’s International Programme for Visual and Applied Artists in Stockholm UNIVERSITY OF THE ARTS HELSINKI Academy of Fine Arts, Helsinki HIAP Helsinki International Artist Programme PRESS TO EXIT Project Space in Skopje CCA Estonian Centre for Contemporary Art in Tallinn

SUPPORT Alongside from its partners, the CrossSections project was primarily supported by Saastamoinen Foundation. The project received support from the Austrian Cultural Forum Istanbul; Consulate General of Sweden in Istanbul; the 15th Istanbul Biennial, organised by the Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts (IKSV); TECHIZART; Federal Chancellery [Bundeskanzleramt]; University of Applied Arts Vienna, Zentrum Fokus Forschung in Vienna; Publics, Helsinki; Pera Museum; Art Council of Ireland, and Culture Ireland. 10

NETWORK VIENNA HELSINKI STOCKHOLM CAIRO TALLINN CAPE TOWN SKOPJE LONDON TEHRAN RAMALLAH BERLIN DAMASCUS MADRID JOHANNESBURG PALERMO JERUSALEM TUNIS ABU DHABI ISTANBUL DUBLIN ROME GRAZ

INITIAL KEYWORDS intervals

dialogues

repression

lapses

potentials

production

conflict

freedom

intensities

responses

despair

perspectives

sources

oppression

fear

phases

production

sharing

borders

orientation 11

CROSSSECTIONS PROCESSING ARTISTIC AND CURATORIAL RESEARCH BAŞAK ŞENOVA This book traces CrossSections, a project that evolved gradually before its launch in 2017 as it followed my journey of physically relocating from one country and context to another, while also transiting to multiple geographies along the way. This migrant, processoriented, and context-sensitive nature of the project coincided with the diverse social, political, and economic impulses and cognitions that existed and were tested not only through my curatorial practice and existentialist point of view, but also with the shared input and experiences of the artists and other actors involved in the project. Respectively, one of the crucial and initial objectives of the project was to create a cognized platform to share and witness personal stories, urgencies, initiatives, expectations, goals, and strategies. Subject to this objective, the project took a reverse path—compared to the majority of the big scale art exhibitions, biennials, and projects across the globe—where instead of beginning with meta-narratives, its take-off point connected key words extracted from my own research and practice as well as those of the participating artists. Taking a diverse and subjective position as a compass was the key to developing a process-based project validated with the CORE meetings (one of the four types of complementary meetings that form the structural pillar of CrossSections as a process-oriented experiment). Designed to last at least for 42 hours, the CORE meetings created temporary intimate communal studio situations where discussions on artistic research and outputs were encouraged and stimulated. As a form of engagement, the potential and opportunity in these meetings was to ignite change and new ideas in the ways to acknowledge and internalize the project. Having genuine ‘dialogical conversations’ and prioritizing them as a crucial element of the project generated mutual trust and solidarity among the artists and strengthened the conceptual ‘core’ of CrossSections. CrossSections unfolded in three sequential phases. The Preliminary Phase, which was designed to develop through process, was the period in which partners were connected, the artists selected, objectives set, and the structure of the project communicated. The Development Phase took place in three partner cities and designated the meetings, residencies, events, screenings, solo and group exhibitions, as well as the exhibition trilogy at Kunsthall Exnergasse — WUK, along with the Climbing Through the Tide exhibition at B7L9, Kamel Lazaar Foundation in Tunis. The educational programmes and activities were developed in partnership with Konstfack — University of Arts, Crafts and Design, Academy of Fine Arts in Helsinki and University of Applied Arts Vienna. The Conclusion Phase gathered two major group exhibitions in Stockholm and Helsinki, along with a number of launches of artist books and publications. In retrospect, CrossSections produced a significant amount of publicly available content, resonating with and inspiring a truly experimental/improvisational method in which a modular-based system of curating allowed for unplanned ideas to be heard, developed, negotiated, and curated as singular events with content, logistics, and funding. The 12

“open” curatorial approach allowed me to engage with artists and partner institutions in the decision making process. Therefore, the algorithm of each case was shaped by the different permutations of the relationships and roles of all the actors of the project in which I remained a constant and consistent presence, coordinating the direction of the collaboratively developed and self-initiated ideas by conducting the production pace and the research process. In this way, the project experimented with long-term commitments between the artists and the curator, between the curator and the institutions, and between the artists and the institutions. Like an unspoken promise, the notions of responsibility and transparency were powerful tools in establishing sustainable commitments for all of us. The project was not only trying to map and manifest diverse artistic methodologies in different modes of presentation, but it was also an attempt to propose models of collaborative intelligence, engagements, and commitments under changing conditions and terms. The proposed exhibition-making model brought two phases together: the research phase and the production phase. Both research outputs and artworks were simultaneously curated by making the various information and the sections of the process visible and accessible. Without any exception, all the projects featured by CrossSections were research-based, multi-layered, and predominantly interdisciplinary. They were articulated and developed experimentally and presented to the public in various stages of completion. The meetings, activities, and the exhibitions were set to present works while in progress, encouraging the artists to also revisit older works and concepts, after which the findings and research process were publicized. CrossSections aimed at communicating artistic research and preliminary thoughts of the creative process, along with the end results as “art works” and/or documentation of the artworks, with curated exhibitions. Each exhibition was curated as an orchestration of different worlds, rendering different moments of time and space by capturing and revealing the proximity of the knowledge that they generated. This book does the same and more: it offers an extended and permanent view into the archive of the project.

THE OPENING MOVE BAŞAK ŞENOVA IN CONVERSATION WITH JONATAN HABIB ENGQVIST JONATAN HABIB ENGQVIST: When you started with the CrossSections project, I remember that it was out of a sense of fatigue with the art world business-as-usual and a desire to return to the core. The project seemed to stem from quite fundamental questions, such as: where is the sense of agency in art today? What can we hope to achieve through formats provided by the art world such as exhibitions, discussions, etc. and can we further develop these formats? How can one devise a system that allows for a long-term commitment to process 13

and research-based art? In the end, I have the feeling that you managed to find a way to discuss these primary and vital questions on several occasions without falling into rhetorical traps.

BAŞAK ŞENOVA: As I see it, the CrossSections project managed to absorb and integrate ongoing outputs of collective experiences, ideas, thoughts, dreams, projections, and concerns along with opportunities and obstacles. Every single experience became an aspect to process through meetings, artistic productions, exhibitions, and activities. For sure, we produced more questions than solutions for the rethinking of the agency of art today through its intersection with different fields and disciplines and the ways in which they can be presented. Nevertheless, throughout the project, we succeeded in proposing new models of engagement; decentralised temporary formation for artistic—and curatorial—research and production; and consolidation of immateriality while discussing and presenting what we produced. The different types of activities opened up a critical space of self-reflexivity by generating a model that allowed for those long-term commitments. In a sense, every step was taken as an opportunity to re-evaluate where we were standing. Hence, the level of the engagement was an individual choice—even for the participating institutions

JONATAN HABIB ENGQVIST: For me, an impressive aspect of this project was that every physical manifestation, whether it was a talk or an exhibition, came across as a trace, rather than the result of ongoing processes. For instance, the artists were encouraged to develop a series of works between two public iterations and were supported in that development by peers through the more intimate formats. This, of course, is something that requires some sensitivity in terms of who you invite and how. So, first, I would like to ask you about the selection and invitation process of the artists.

BAŞAK ŞENOVA: Compared to many contemporary curatorial practices, I believe I take a rather reverse path for building up a project or an exhibition. Mostly, I start a project with a sense of urgency, a desire to continue a previous line of inquiry, research and/or an incomplete question yet to be articulated. Therefore, the driving force is never the concept. The concept always follows an inspiring artist work, or an artistic methodology, or a venue (since most of the venues that I’ve curated shows are not really conventional art spaces). In the same vein, I tend to have long and committed relationships with particular artists that continue as a trace throughout many different projects and exhibitions. For instance, the same names can appear many times in my projects. So, even before the project was launched in 2017, I already had a list of artists whom I knew I wanted to have on board, such as Yane Calovski, Benji Boyadgian, Barbara Holub, Timo Tuhkanen, Ramesh Daha, Bronwyn Lace, and Marcus Neustetter. Along the way, there were some artists that I had been following and was eager to work with, but never had the opportunity before, such as Heba Y. Amin, Lina Selander, Isa Rosenberger, Egle Oddo, Nisrine Boukhari, Tamsin Snow, and Ebru Kurbak. Then, for the third wave, I made studio visits to the artists whom the partner institutions proposed and based on these meetings, I selected names to invite to the project such as Otto Karvonen, Nikolaus Gansterer, Ricarda Denzer, Behzad KhosraviNoori, and Inma Herrera. 14

Nonetheless, before inviting any of these artists, I had meetings with the partner institutions in which I made presentations of each artist, stating my reasoning followed by discussions, and therefore all of the participating artists were not only being confirmed, but also thoroughly introduced to the partner institutions. This procedure was a way of commencing the long commitment process between the artists and the institutions.

JONATAN HABIB ENGQVIST: So, the post-publication is actually a perfect format for this curatorial approach! It becomes the moment when one finally can explain to the rest of the world what it, at least in part, is “about” but also plays a part in summarizing and sustaining all those institutional commitments and relationships. Now that it is coming to a point of closure through this book, I want to ask if you think that many, or perhaps even all, of these artists have been able develop their work differently through the course of the project, and if so, how?

BAŞAK ŞENOVA: Apart from the common denominator of being artists that work on long-term research-based projects, the participating artists in the CrossSections project are extremely diverse in terms of the content and issues that they process; their artistic methodologies, strategies, and even the media they use! It was an interesting dynamic; I already had a mind map of their connecting and intersecting points, but they discovered most of these points gradually through our shared meetings, exhibitions, performances, residencies, talks and other activities that were scattered between three cities over the course of three years, and I definitely also discovered new connections together with them. I witnessed—with pleasure—how they affected, inspired, resisted, and supported each other, and of course, on different levels and in different proportions, the harvest of this dynamic resulted in some changes in their work.

JONATAN HABIB ENGQVIST: The CrossSections project is, in other words, both intimate and intense. And as such, it is quite an expansive project; not only is there this malleable group of artists working in different geographic locations and with different methods, but the meetings are also spread out in time and space and with numerous partners. Certain parts of the project are open to the public; many of the conversations take place in smaller groups. So how did you find and structure support and funding for such a project? It must have been quite an undertaking.

BAŞAK ŞENOVA: Indeed, I must say that the funding was the most experimental part of this project! Not least due to the fact that there has been no centrally secured funding for the entire project from the beginning to the end. Apart from the generous funding received from the Saastamoinen Foundation for most of the meetings, the final exhibition in Helsinki, and this book, the partner institutions mainly supported the project by providing residencies, hosting exhibitions and activities. Yet, together with the partner institutions, and sometimes with the artists, I went through fundraising processes for each individual activity that was realised; I also managed to merge some of the CrossSections activities with other projects that I have been involved with for these past three years. In fact, several of these intersecting endeavours ended up with productive associations both for the project and for several of the artists on an individual level. 15

THE (UN)KNOWN UNKNOWNS ANDREAS SPIEGL The concept of artistic research was politically promoted in the nineties as an equivalent of scientific research, and as an alternative mode of production of knowledge. Arts and sciences should be treated as related—and yet different—actors in the fields of research. Accordingly, art schools, such as the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, have been assigned university status and treated as “art universities” in order to underline the equivalence of both types of institutions. The difference between scientific and artistic ways of research was related to sets of allegedly adherent methods that have been ascribed to each; generally speaking, a clearly defined paradigm of rational argumentation and traceability of the methodological steps on the one side, and a realm of experimental and incalculable ways on the other. This methodological dichotomy neither considered the experimental and incalculable moments along the processes of scientific research, nor did it pay attention to the scientific characters included in the artistic practice. This institutional dichotomy consequently neglected the inherent experimental, and inter—and transdisciplinary features embedded in both realms, in other words, common moments that emerge when articulating questions beyond (and even within) disciplinary segregations and entering fields of the unknown (including unfamiliar sets of relations between topics and parameters, unknown markets and economies, purposes of use or results independent of utilisation and critical to hegemonic assumptions or supposedly proofed knowledge). On the one side, the concept of scientific research was squeezed into the predictability of (exploitable) results, and on the other hand, the concept of arts was split into arts and a distinct field of arts based on artistic research. Historically speaking, the arts have often and regularly included moments of (scientific and artistic) research—e.g. the history of impressionistic painting is inseparably linked to the scientific and medical research on human perception in the 19th century—even before it was called artistic research and outlined as a field of its own. The very partition between arts and artistic research seems less the result of an immanent epistemological development in the arts at the end of the 20th century, and more a product or an effect of institutional and economical moments that are related to the context of (neoliberal) politics. Artistic research was (fortunately and finally) provided an alternative mode of (national or institutional) funding beside scientific research programmes and next to arts that consequently remain allegedly distinct from research practices. Yet, it is doubtful that there could be either a concept of science or art without research—independent of their (divergent or common) methods. Research is not an additional practice on top of sciences and arts, but intrinsically belongs to their concepts. Talking about artistic research projects next to artistic practices does not only imply the opening of a (supposedly) new field of arts, but also carries an ideological moment often inscribed in the practice of competitive selections for their funding. The procedure of applying for the funding of a project that is outlined as artistic research usually includes a competition and juries that should separate one from the other. The applications should regularly define the intended methods and “milestones” as clearly as possible. The more open and unknown the parameters of a project are described and the more unpredictable the (probable) deviations from the original concept might be, the less likely a project is taken into consideration. That means that the notion of (artistic) research tends to the production of expectable results within the horizon of (implicitly) institutionalised (and 16

Extracts from Inma Herrera’s sketches on her notebook regarding her artistic research on the Sanskrit term “Samādhi” and ink (2018)

affiliated scientific) knowledge and references. The field of the unknown (as a common basis of artistic and scientific research) is increasingly constricted into a realm of probabilities and predictabilities in order to minimize not just the risk of errors (which also could be of significant meaning and are inseparably linked to the concept of experiments), but of deviations from the original plan. The paradoxical moment embedded in the concept of planning the unknown or making a plan for the unpredictable result (that should retroactively confirm the starting point at the end) is outlining a politics of legitimation that is not just afraid of deviations, but of research as such. The role of the competition (between applications, projects, and utilisable outcomes) establishes and affirms a concept of knowledge that should be of a competitive nature. By that, it draws lines that should enable comparisons and parameters that should represent a seemingly neutral point of view, in other words: a notion of knowledge and research beyond the contradictions and oppositions included in cultural, social, economic, and political relations as their context. The competitive moment not just supposes a common basis for the comparison, but also neglects the different meanings and ideological inscriptions in the concepts of knowledge. Seemingly paradoxical, the competitive moment basically erases the diversities of knowledge; it neutralizes the intrinsic ambiguities that are incorporated in it. And consequently, the competition within institutional frames defines the parameters of what is considered to belong to research and of what does not fulfil those criteria, such as those excluded from the realm of research and therefore considered not to be contributing to it. Even if research is based on the unknown, it tends to establish mechanisms of its partial inclusion and exclusion—segregating a mode of the “known unknown” from an “unknown unknown”. It could be a task for the arts in the fields of research to further question and challenge the “known unknown” that is politically fostered in the horizon of neoliberal politics. It could go on to articulate a politics of knowledge that is aware of the historical and, consequently, conflictive ingredients in the common notion of research and its constitutive role for knowledge. 17

CHAPTER 2

THE PROCESS

PHASES In the course of three years (2017—2019), meetings, workshops, exhibitions, talks, and performances were held with the participation of 19 artists, scholars and cultural workers mostly in three cities: Vienna, Helsinki, and Stockholm. The project had three phases: (i) the Preliminary Phase was to structure the project by gathering artists and institutions, along with funding sources; (ii) the Development Phase was based on developing ideas and projects by extending the geographical coverage. This phase involved different focus groups, institutions, and educational bodies engaging with the re-positioning of perspectives by giving priority to production; (iii) the Conclusion Phase anchored the implementation of the project’s outcomes through exhibitions and book launches. The website, with its edited content, accompanied and documented the project: crosssections.kex.wuk.at

MEETINGS The project started with meetings in August 2017 that continued to take place in different cities in Europe. Accordingly, four types of complementary meetings took place in various cities in Europe: CORE Meetings were designed to last for 48 hours with the participation of the artists and curator; SHARE Meetings were for discussions with the organizers, the curator, and the other actors (artists, curators, academicians, and cultural workers); PERIPHERAL Meetings included different focus groups along with academicians; PUBLIC Meetings gave information about the project by sharing and discussing the developments of the project with the public. The inspiration for these meetings were the hidden tunnels in the fortress island of Suomenlinna (Helsinki), which suggest different pathways to follow while enabling a vision “to see” what is to come, but are designed “not to be seen” from the outside. Camouflaged under the vast landscape, there lies a network of paths through tunnels, which are of varied distances and scales, created through segments that correspond to the source of light coming from the openings at the sides. These tunnels have no connection with the metaphor of ‘light at the end of the tunnel’, as the tunnels are never straight. While walking along a tunnel, it is impossible to foresee whether the tunnel ends at a certain point as it takes sharp turns by following the topography of the island. Along with the retired Vesikko Submarine of the island, these tunnels are also reminiscent of the dazzle camouflage (razzle dazzle) ships of World War I and II that were used to confuse the German submarines— the U-Boats (Unterseeboot). The patterns misled the enemy regarding the ships’ direction, scale, and speed. In like manner, these tunnels create a sense of endlessness and confusion of orientation. The perspective that was created with the meandering routes of the tunnels, along with the light segments and the unforeseen chambers throughout the path, designates phases as intervals. Visualizing and mimicking the tunnels of Suomenlinna, the CrossSections project aimed to process the notion of ‘intervals’ in two layers: (i) as the phases of the 18

project, and (ii) as potentials to be detected in our diverse daily realities with discussions and artistic production. Hence, the project was developed through the accumulation of related dialogues by placing the artistic production at the centre of its research and plot. Each and every dialogue anchored a possibility to show a new perspective, and to build up a strategy to read—and also to respond—to the shifting situations that are beyond our control. The cumulative interdisciplinary input and data as the result of the project’s process were transformed and translated to different kinds of narrations and documentations as a set of intervals. They served as sources and potentials for other future implementations and articulations. On this basis, the project envisioned four types of meetings that were connected to each other: the CORE meetings, the SHARE meetings, the PERIPHERAL meetings, and the PUBLIC meetings. 19

THE CORE MEETINGS The CORE meetings were designed to last for 42 hours with the participation of the artists and the curator of the project. The aim of these meetings was to talk about the artistic research and production of the artists by navigating through certain keywords, and to have further discussions that would shape the project.

VIENNA CORE MEETING I Kunsthalle Exnergasse Studio (KEX) — Werkstätten und Kulturhaus (WUK) (17.—18.10.2017) participating artists: Barbara Holub, Ricarda Denzer, Nikolaus Gansterer, Isa Rosenberger, Ramesch Daha, Gözde İlkin, Tamsin Snow, Behzad Khosravi-Noori, and Benji Boyadgian curator: Başak Şenova

In the first CORE meeting, the artists were asked to present their previous works, researches, and/or issues that they were processing by referring to any of the project’s initial keywords listed by the curator. Then, the content presented was discussed by adding new keywords to the framework of the project: history memory remembering dialogues exchange the archive oral collecting reducing the historical origin conditions reasons technological design medical innovation cryonics animation

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the proposition of death suspension of consciousness terminal event [technological] singularity architecture labour unknown threshold passage site process dimensioning negotiations becoming listener

perplex voice performative simultaneously sideline primary secondary action index notations words fragments consequences borders freedom information propaganda mapping

resonance distance pattern macro-utopia anticipatory fiction ambiguity silent activism imagined proven scientific forensic pathology medicine emotion obsession depression visualisation

heritage timeline death the undead the ghostly microhistories hyperpolitic displacement phantasmagoria dialogical mise en abyme materiality witnessing interviewing autopsy archival research cross disciplinary research

VIENNA CORE MEETING II Kunsthalle Exnergasse Studio (KEX) — Werkstätten und Kulturhaus (WUK) (16.—17.11.2017) participating artists: Heba Y. Amin, Yane Calovski, Gözde İlkin, Otto Karvonen, Barbara Holub, Marcus Neustetter, Ricarda Denzer, Nikolaus Gansterer, Inma Herrera, Nisrine Boukhari, Timo Tuhkanen, Bronwyn Lace, Isa Rosenberger, Egle Oddo, and Ramesch Daha curator: Başak Şenova

The second CORE meeting followed the approach of the first. All the participants were once again asked to make presentations. The artists who had already participated in the first CORE meeting started to introduce their new and/or ongoing projects. The content presented was discussed after each presentation by adding new keywords to the framework of the project: fragility contamination trace movement obedience instability extreme social conditions surveillance collectiveimagination

collectiveintelligence border transparency push and pull body as an archive appropriation event succession permanence

instrument independence sonic discovery stability fragmentation deconstruction subversion satirical humour intolerance

manipulation pressure visual paradigms linear perspective occupation speculation hidden archives restoration seeds artistic tactics ecosystem

violence mechanic plants forest natural resources political interventions urban landscapes hydrosocialspaces mythopoetics

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STOCKHOLM CORE MEETING NFK — The Nordic Art Association (05.—06.02.2018) participating artists: Barbara Holub, Ricarda Denzer, Nisrine Boukhari , Timo Tuhkanen, Egle Oddo, Ramesch Daha,Tamsin Snow, Yane Calovski, and Benji Boyadgian curator: Başak Şenova reviewer: Björn Norberg The first part of the third CORE meeting was dedicated to discussions and suggestions about the development of the project with exhibitions, residencies, and other activities planned for 2018 and 2019. The artists investigated ideas responding to the intersecting points of their research and projects with the outputs of CrossSections. In the second part of the meeting, artists talked about their ongoing research and future plans on how to process them. Some peer to peer discussions between the artists and curator also took place. The entire group of participants discussed every project with its artist, and even suggested new references and ideas. The CORE meeting was monitored by the Swedish curator Björn Norberg, who also represented NFK — The Nordic Art Association, the hosting partners of the project. The duration of this meeting was 72 hours rather than 48 hours. The spacious studio space of the NFK provided optional settings for different sessions. Furthermore, the group had the opportunity to visit art centres, museums, and galleries in Stockholm together; hence, the discussions continued and carried out among the participants.

curatorial note: In 2017, I was invited to the Resident Fellow Programme of the Academy of Fine Arts, Helsinki, implemented in partnership with Saastamoinen Foundation and HIAP. During my residency in Suomenlinna Island, I organised an event at my studio together with the Praxis students from the Academy of Fine Arts, Helsinki, the HIAP team and other resident artists. There were presentations, readings, and some performances by Marina Noronha, Erol Mintas, Tamsin Snow, Shieko Reto, Omer Krieger, Ann Rosen, Riikka Pelo, David Chisholm, and Harrie Liveart (Meri Linna and Saija Kassinen). Each followed by discussions, the event lasted 12 hours. This event functioned as a prototype for the CORE meetings of the CrossSections project. BŞ

One of the notable features of these CORE meetings was the collective cooking process. These repetitive processes became naturally collaborative acts as part of the meetings. Cooking and sharing food started another track for telling stories, dreams, and even concerns in a broader spectrum. The discussions were kept up and enriched by the diversity of cultural inputs through food, cooking, eating, and drinking. 22

HELSINKI CORE MEETING HIAP Suomenlinna Studios (21.—22.05.2018) participating artists: Behzad Khosravi-Noori, Benji Boyadgian, Egle Oddo, Isa Rosenberger, Lina Selander, Nikolaus Gansterer, Tamsin Snow, Otto Karvonen, and Timo Tuhkanen curator: Başak Şenova reviewer: Björn Norberg and Juha Huuskonen

The fourth CORE meeting started with discussing solo presentations along with exhibitions and forthcoming residencies. Then, the artists presented their ongoing projects, followed by discussions. Peer to peer meetings between the curator and the artists also took place. This CORE meeting was also monitored by Björn Norberg of NFK — The Nordic Art Association and Juha Huuskonen of HIAP — Helsinki International Artist Programme. 23

curatorial note: After a couple of meetings with Mako Ishizuka, who was the resident artist of Kunsthalle Exnergasse in Spring 2019, I asked her to reflect on the CORE meetings of the CrossSections project in her notebook. In relation to her practice, Ishizuka decided to focus on the food experiences and second-hand relationships. Based on the information provided by myself along with some of the artists of the project, she presented these pages in August 2019. BŞ

WHERE ARE WE NOW? WHAT ARE WE GOING TO DO? BJÖRN NORBERG THE CORE February 2018. Başak Şenova opens the “CORE meeting” in Stockholm by posing two open and vast, but elementary and simple questions: Where are we now? What are we going to do? 12 of the 19 artists participating in the CrossSections project have gathered around the table with Şenova. My first reaction to the questions is to find them a bit trite, a strange choice of opening questions coming from the curator and manager of the project. However, I would soon start to understand their importance. Where are we now? It is a question with many implications, but quite significant for the nomadic CrossSections project. The participants seem to be on a continuous journey with no final destination. They constitute an ongoing and irregular orbit between exhibitions and residency programmes, research, production and artistic work. What are we going to do? The question is an expression of the transparency and open discussion format of the CrossSections project. It is a question posed to the project’s participants individually as well as to the collective. These two questions indicate the fundamental philosophy of the project, which I will elaborate on below.

THE PROCESS In science, a research project normally starts with a question, a problem. To find an answer to the problem, the scientist does background research and then constructs a hypothesis. The hypothesis is then transferred to an experiment. If the experiment isn’t successful, the scientist troubleshoots the process, and if it works, the data is analysed. Final conclusions are made where the result and the hypothesis are compared. Afterwards, the results are published. This process might take time and asks for resources, but it is the way to guarantee scientific quality. The standard process within the art world is a bit different, even if there are similarities. The curator starts with the question, does research, and constructs a synopsis. The curator then puts great effort into finding funding, and in the best case, ends up getting only a small portion of was is needed. Funding or no, the project starts and contacts with institutions are made. The original idea is now formed and re-shaped with the influence of collaborators, funders, and the premises available at the institutions. Following a short production process, an exhibition opens, perhaps an additional seminar is held, and sometime later a catalogue is published. If it is a group exhibition, the participating artists only meet for a short time during the final installation stage, or at the opening and the eventual seminar. The focus is always on the result, the exhibition. If the curator is lucky, it will be reviewed. Compared to the scientific model, there is a great lack of reflection and focus on the methodology towards the results. On top of that, there is very little room for failure. With CrossSections, Şenova aims to challenge this standard art project format. The aim is, instead, to create a research based project and focus on the process where the participating artists discuss and share their individual processes, methodologies, and where different realities and geographies are 28

connected on a deeper level. The aim is a project with transparency, with space and time for long term perspectives and evaluation. These aims do not make CrossSections unique. Many have tried to work in similar ways, but very few have succeeded. What makes CrossSections unique is that Şenova does succeed.

THE CURATORIAL METHOD TRANSPARENCY CrossSections includes 19 artists from 13 countries, all with a process and research-based practice, but with great differences in methodology and artistic practice. Someone said that Şenova works like a conductor, making all these different voices work together. But which conductor would dare to open a two-day long rehearsal with the questions where are we now? and what are we going to do? Şenova’s initial question opens towards total transparency where she asks everybody to contribute in an open-minded process. The meeting in Stockholm was labelled a “CORE meeting” where the artists were invited to present their present status in their process, where they were going, and what topics they were struggling with. Each presentation was then discussed, artistic choices analysed, with artists making suggestions and critiquing one another’s projects, openly sharing experiences and ideas. The session was structured in a way that you might sometimes find at universities if you are lucky enough. Rather than a conductor, Şenova resembles more a professor here. The fact that the curator’s choices and the project’s forthcoming steps were analysed and discussed makes CrossSections a unique project. Although this open discussion may seem to imperil Şenova’s authority and leadership, she actually secures the trust of the participants with this transparency by demonstrating that she has no hidden agendas.

COMMUNITY BUILDING Not every artist would feel comfortable exposing their own process to other artists and having their work discussed in detail. With CrossSections, Şenova manages to create a secure environment, an atmosphere where all participants feel safe to expose their current process —an environment based on trust. I have experienced this myself to a certain degree in the process of some of my own projects and experienced how a certain group energy can be generated when a group comes together for a long period of time, sharing memories and experiences not only in the seminar room, but also in common activities such as cooking and eating together. This creates a community where people will help, critique, and support one another.

RELOCATING AND RETHINKING 19 artists from 13 different countries is a challenge. It means efforts in managing schedules, travels, fees and the coordination of many wills, ideas, and cultures. The different backgrounds mean different possibilities for funding, since public funding is almost exclusively connected to nationality. Many of the CrossSections artists are in transit, going from one country to another in search of opportunities and experiences. For some, it is almost impossible to return “home” or to their native country because of economical, political, and personal reasons. 29

This created strong bonds inside the group. The CrossSections project is clearly coloured by these circumstances and takes the form of a nomadic project with bases in Vienna, Stockholm, and Helsinki and with additional satellite projects in Tunis and Rome. The migration mirrors the structure of the project (and our contemporary times), but I also think that circumstances have forced Şenova to always look for opportunities, to be prepared to move and change plans to make progress. The strategy of the participants and the project seems to be of the same nature. This creates a constant flow and a project, though derived from a few basic and constant elements, that is always developing. The transparent discussions and the open critique of the artistic and curatorial work also mean that there is time and space to rethink the practice, and redefine the project and its different parts. It remains a hub for artistic research, and its process is in simultaneous communication internally within the group, with the collaborating institutions, and with the public audience.

SHARING Transparency is one key to Şenova’s curatorial strategy. Another key, very much related, is sharing. By sharing experiences and resources, the project gets stronger in structure, organisation, and concept. The artists share their experiences with each other generously, but additionally, Şenova constantly presents the results within the project and is in constant negotiation with different institutions. Through a series of smaller groups and solo exhibitions, she shares the results with the public audience throughout the project.

THE RESILIENCE CrossSections is unique in the way of showing and displaying the progress of the project. It gives those both inside and outside the project a unique possibility to study different aspects of the curatorial work, and how funding systems and hierarchies within the art scene work. The project asks for huge efforts and commitments from both curators and artists. The Helsinki meeting that followed the Stockholm meeting lacked the energy of the first, and I could feel some scepticism among the participants regarding how the project was developing. You could see that Şenova was forced to divert from the initial plans in order to procure funding. Thanks to Şenova’s energy and the addition of new projects and collaborations, the project was able to continue and developed successfully. The structure of CrossSections was kept intact. By being adaptive, the project has become very resilient and seems able to transform without losing aim and momentum.

THE END As the project nears completion, one starts to wonder if it can end, not how it will end. Şenova has built a mobile institution and an infrastructure. She is more a director and professor than a conductor, and she has proved capable of adapting to the local conditions in any country and locality with globality. CrossSections is a transformer, a migrant, and a survivor. It is hard to see that CrossSections will end here and now; it is easier to see how it will continue by morphing into something new. The questions are still there and restlessly waiting for answers. Where are we now? What are we going to do. 30

THE SHARE MEETINGS The SHARE meetings were designed as closed sessions to discuss the structure and budget of the project with the partner institutions and the curator. These meetings served to discuss the management and implementation plans of the CrossSections project to coordinate activities, exhibitions and residencies in three cities: Vienna, Stockholm, and Helsinki. The SHARE meetings also considerably engaged in fundraising processes and budget discussions. Each meeting took two to three hours.

ISTANBUL SHARE MEETING The Consulate General of Sweden (15.09.2017) participating institutions: Kunsthalle Exnergasse — Werkstätten und Kulturhaus (WUK), iaspis — the Swedish Arts Grants Committee’s International Programme for Visual and Applied Artists, Konstfack — University of Arts, Crafts and Design, NFK — The Nordic Art Association, Nya Småland, HIAP — Helsinki International Artist Programme, and Press to Exit Project Space curator: Başak Şenova

VIENNA SHARE MEETING Kunsthalle Exnergasse Studio (KEX) — Werkstätten und Kulturhaus (WUK) (09.01.2018) participating institutions: Kunsthalle Exnergasse — Werkstätten und Kulturhaus (WUK), NFK — The Nordic Art Association in Stockholm, Nya Småland, and Press to Exit Project Space curator: Başak Şenova

STOCKHOLM SHARE MEETING iaspis — the Swedish Arts Grants Committee’s International Programme for Visual and Applied Artists (08.02.2018) participating institutions: Kunsthalle Exnergasse — Werkstätten und Kulturhaus (WUK), iaspis — the Swedish Arts Grants Committee’s International Programme for Visual and Applied Artists, Konstfack — University of Arts, Crafts and Design, NFK — The Nordic Art Association in Stockholm; Nya Småland, HIAP — Helsinki International Artist Programme, and Press to Exit Project Space curator: Başak Şenova

HELSINKI SHARE MEETING HIAP Suomenlinna Studios (22.05.2018) participating institutions: NFK — The Nordic Art Association, Nya Småland, and HIAP — Helsinki International Artist Programme in Helsinki curator: Başak Şenova

SKOPJE SHARE MEETING MoCA the Museum of Contemporary Art (05.12.2018) participating institutions: NFK — The Nordic Art Association, Nya Småland, and Press to Exit Project Space curator: Başak Şenova 31

TOWARDS THE REIGN OF THE CAT (POSSIBLY IN CONVERSATION WITH THE CROSSSECTIONS PROJECT AND MARCEL BROODTHAERS’ CONVERSATION WITH A CAT)

JONATAN HABIB ENGQVIST I have been coming and going in this project like a cat. Congruently, this brief—if not succinct, then hopefully at least somewhat enjoyable—text momentarily attempts to share a process without really, yet somehow, dedicating itself to being part of the larger picture. Talking about feline friends and curious idioms is an attempt to sketch out some rudimentary thoughts from my notebooks.1 Through Marcel Broodthaers and Alice in Wonderland, this is a crack at revisiting some thoughts on anonymity and curiosity without becoming too academic about the subject. My prospect is that these cats can somehow elucidate why openended investigative projects like CrossSections are not only noble, but indeed imperative in an age where most things seem to require immediate justification in terms of means and ends. It is worth noting that the main language spoken in this project is English and that this text is thus written in English—even though it is the second, third, or even fourth language spoken by the CrossSections participants. The idea is to take this lingua franca of the 21st century art world as a curious point of departure. As a non-mono-linguist (rather than as a polyglot), it is intriguing to note how saturated the English language is. For instance, one might note the voluminous number of idioms and metaphors there are about cats. Oddly, many of them involve a variety of methods for killing them, which, from a Middle Eastern or Nordic perspective, is quite peculiar, to say the least. For instance, skinning cats supposedly means that there are many ways of doings things, and when the weather is bad, they fall from the sky together with their canine counterparts. Another remarkable phenomenon in the English language is the number of homonyms— words that sound like other words. Words where the word that is spoken, and sometimes also the written word, can only be understood by its surrounding context. Words where the context surrounding an individual term is the only clue as to how to understand and interpret which word means what. A meaning that comes and goes at will, as it were. And sometimes you don’t know what´s what unless you see it spelt out and written down. Take, for instance, the title of this text: the reign of the cat. As written above, it seems to be prompting the sovereignty of a specific feline, probably above other species. Spelt differently or read out loud—and given the aforementioned plethora of cat metaphors—it could also be about the weather (another topic that curiously abounds within the English language). Or it

1. This text is based on a talk originally presented at Kunsthalle Exnergasse — WUK, in the spring of 2018 where the CrossSections participants encouraged me to turn it into a text. On this occasion, Bronwyn Lace also pointed my attention towards the 1970 performance by Marcel Broodthaers in Düsseldorf, transcribed and inserted here. 32

could be a question of superstition. In fact, even with the way it is written here, the phrase is intended to be interpreted as referring to yet another idiom involving the assassination of felines: the peculiar expression that curiosity killed the cat... Which is kind of weird, because the point is the claim that it was good to be curious. Like a cat. So to be clear: rather than killing them simply because they have so many lives (Turkish cats incidentally seem to have two more than the ones in Northern Europe), and without becoming too Pharaonic about it, the idea is to propagate for the importance of the high-risk attitude of curiosity in what we do. Since this is, I believe, the reason why we do what we do in the first place.

*** In 1970, the following conversation was recorded at the Musée d’Art Moderne, Département des Aigles, Düsseldorf: Marcel Broodthaers: Is that one a good painting? Does it correspond to what you expect from that very recent transformation, which goes from Conceptual Art to this new version of a kind of figuration, as one might say? Cat: Miaow. MB: Do you think so? Cat: Miiaaw...mm...miauw...miauw. MB: And yet this colour is very clearly redolent of the painting that was being done in the period of abstract art, isn’t it? Cat: Miaaw...miaaw...miiaw...miaw. ***

In Swedish, we say that one behaves like a cat around hot porridge when one doesn’t get to the point. Or maybe I am, as they say in Japan, wearing a cat on my head: pretending to be nice, and hiding one´s claws (the Japanese incidentally seem to have plenty of remarkable cat idioms). Or as one might say in Portuguese, I might be hunting with a cat because I don’t have a dog: making do with what I´ve got. But in terms of curiosity, I have a favourite quote that I contentedly keep returning to, like a cat that swallowed the cream. Three and a half decades ago, there was an interview with an anonymous cat-loving thinker in a French newspaper where s/he made an argument for the need to focus on curiosity, rather than disciplines within academia. Historically, this thinker argued, being curious has been pilloried, by, in turn, religion, philosophy, and a certain conception of science. One could, if only out of curiosity—or more plausibly, out of academic habit, laziness, or simply as a way to get started—point at the etymology of this word. Stemming from the Latin Curiosus “careful, diligent; inquiring eagerly, meddlesome”, akin to cura “care”. The term also suggests concern, care, and engagement with whatever surrounds us. Being curious is indeed a kind of care for, and attention directed towards, what exists and what potentially could exist. One might even say that being curious is being prepared to see—or even desiring to see—something outstanding, unique, strange, or profound in that which is all too familiar. Finding something particular in a casual, everyday movement: synchronised hand clapping at the theatre, reconstructions of the memory of an intimate moment, a personal collection 33

of tools, and so on. It´s actually quite odd that this part of the etymology of “curating” isn’t brought up more often, instead of constantly focusing on a kind of disinterested (in the Kantian sense) notion of care. Perhaps it’s not seen as serious enough. “Curious” says Alice as she sees that smile without a cat. And the curious approach is, as our thinker puts it, “a certain relentlessness to break up our familiarities” and to regard the same things with a different gaze. To consider what already is present or what is missing in what is present; to interpret using different parameters and thereby question predetermined categories and hierarchies of what is understood as important. This is perhaps one reason why our interviewee wished to remain anonymous: What is central is not who is speaking, but the curiosity that can be evoked by what is being said. The author is, as they say in Sarajevo, a cat’s cough; nothing to be concerned with. You might call this a cat and mouse game, or say that he or she was trying to be the cat’s whiskers, but I do think that the notion of anonymity stresses the point in a pertinent manner. At one point in the interview, the question is posed whether our age is lacking great minds – the ‘true geniuses’ for our age. In response, our friend eloquently, almost prophetically, replies: “I dream of a new age of curiosity. We have the technical means for it; the desire is there; the things to be known are infinite; the people who can employ themselves at this task exist. Why do we suffer? From too little: from the channels that are too narrow, skimpy, quasi-monopolistic, and insufficient”. There is no point in adopting a protectionist attitude to prevent ‘bad’ information from invading and suffocating the ‘good’. Rather, we must multiply the paths and the possibility of comings and goings. Understood in this way, one might even argue that curiosity should be a foundational principle for any research, let alone interdisciplinary research: knowledge acquired and collected for the purpose of sharing it with others, rather than assessing its ‘intellectual property’, or proving its utility within a certain field. Researching—or researching: as in looking-once more, does indeed require a deep curiosity at its core in order to localize which forces are at play... and to dare to identify them. So, instead of acting like a cat on a hot roof, let´s let the cat out of the bag. The citations above from our anonymous thinker can be found in an interview performed by Christian Delacampagne for Le Monde. Eight years after being published there, four years after the interviewee’s death, the text was republished in a book titled The Masked Philosopher, which is a collection of essays by Michel Foucault. Does that change anything? In any event, and given the original context of his statement, I don’t think it is fair to understand the answers as a call for general dabbling in this or that, or as an appeal for an overall entrepreneurial bricoleur. Neither does it seem to be propagating for the singular creative subject, who, through technological advancements, suddenly is able to accomplish what previously only several individuals could make collectively thanks to their particular skills, resources, or technical abilities. To me, it would seem that it is rather a call for the opposite: A plea for a true interdisciplinary, non-disciplinary, or even better an undisciplined approach where many particular skills are collected in one common context. Even if we don´t stand a cat’s chance in hell, we can be curious enough to try. 34

As John Cage once noted in a text written twice, two decades apart: “What is needed is not that the several activities of different people come together in one person, but that the distinctions between the roles of different people be blurred, so that they themselves may come together.”2 I believe that the CrossSections project similarly has struggled with how to embody and communicate these notions, how to bring curiosity back to curating, and encourage artists to (re)invent their own methodology along the way—using the language that none of us speak and making it up as we go (the mono-linguists are the most handicapped here3). At this stage, the outcome of such an investigation is impossible to fathom or summarise, let alone evaluate—as experimentation with the means of presentation, to some extent, is also part of the research process itself.

*** Marcel Broodthaers: Are you sure it’s not a new form of academicism? Cat: Miauw. MB: Yes, but if it’s a daring innovation, it’s still a contestable one. Cat: Miaw. MB: It’s still… Cat: Miaw. MB: Er…It’s still a matter of markets… Cat: Miaauw. MB: What will the people who bought the previous things do? Cat: Miauw. MB: Will they sell them? Cat: Miiauw..mia. MB: Or will they continue? What do you think?…Because, at the moment, a lot of artists are wondering about that. Cat: Miaauw..mm..mii..miauw..maaw..miaauw.. MiAUW! MB: In that case close the Museums! Cat: MIAUW! ***

2. Cage, John. 1937. The Future of Music (Credo). 3. In the words of the pseudonym writer Savanah Bob: “Isn’t it the case that the English spoken in the English global art world often transcends many monolingual English native speakers’ capacity for comprehension? Indeed, it could even be a disadvantage for the advantaged to speak it too well. Ya acabo – does the real artist have to learn to Verfremdungseffectivley speak English as if it were a langue estranger, or une launge mineure in order to become a part of the echt Kunst Welt? Perhaps linguistic fàngzhú is the only solution for the poor Anglo-native artist who only speaks inglés and a-priori can conclude; “An artist who cannot speak English is no artist?”. http://www.tsnok.se/en/2013/miscellaneous/mladen-stilinovic-an-artist-who-cannot-speakenglish-is-no-artist-1992/405 35

Marcel Broodthaers, Interview with a Cat (Detail), 1970. CD, published by Marian Goodman, New York (1995)

`Curiouser and curiouser!’ cried Alice (she was so much surprised, that for the moment she quite forgot how to speak good English)—Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland, 1865. When first published in 1865, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland struck new ground largely because of a female protagonist whose defining characteristic was not virtuous obedience or domestic docility, but an impetuous curiosity. Even if we don’t stand a cat´s chance in hell, we can be curious enough to try, she seems to say. And remember—the Cheshire cat is the only character in Wonderland who actually listens to Alice. With subtle and less subtle remarks, she is guided not through the rules, but perhaps a few of the possible routes that can be pursued… Much like that Cheshire cat, our masked philosopher—like a cat among the pigeons—pays attention, but also challenges us by stating that “the possibilities are endless”. Without challenging the presuppositions that govern our way of perceiving the world, we will only use new tools according to our habits and as replacements for the old ones. In the overabundance of things to be known, in all things “fundamental, terrible, wonderful, funny, insignificant, and crucial at the same time”, as Foucault puts it, “there is an enormous curiosity, a need, a desire to know.” Unlike cats, we only have this one life to explore them. If you try to coax it or call it, a cat will avoid you. It will never come. But if you pay no attention to it and go about your business, you’ll find it rubbing up against your legs and jumping into your lap. You´ll just have to take my word for that, or as they say in Germany, und die Katzeim Sack kaufen – and buy the cat in the sack. *** Marcel Broodthaers: This is a pipe. Cat: Miaouw. MB: This is not a pipe. Cat: Miaouw... 36

THE PERIPHERAL MEETINGS The PERIPHERAL meetings were planned to include art institutions, educational bodies and other different focus groups in the project. One of the objectives of the project was to introduce the artists of the project to some specified audience with a similar interest. These meetings nurtured the project through the interaction between the focus groups and the content presented by the project as one of its objectives. The duration of the PERIPHERAL meetings varied depending on the context and focus group.

STOCKHOLM PERIPHERAL MEETING Konstfack — University of Arts, Crafts and Design (18.04.2018) The CrossSections project and A Case Discussion with Nikolaus Gansterer: How to do things with lines and what do lines do with you? Drawing between the lines of connection, lines of distinction, lines of deviation.

Research Seminar at Konstfack (Stockholm, 2018)

The first PERIPHERAL meeting was realised as a “Higher Seminar”, a research platform led by Magnus Bärtås at Konstfack. Başak Şenova first talked about the research strains and the structure of the project. The discussion was followed by Nikolaus Gansterer’s lecture which was navigated through his practice. speakers: Başak Şenova and Nikolaus Gansterer participants: The senior researchers and doctoral candidates of Konstfack 37

VIENNA PERIPHERAL MEETING Vienna Contemporary (28.09.2018)

Meeting at Vienna Contemporary (Vienna, 2018)

The Commercial: Curators discussing with artists The focus was the art market, and the artistic positions and curatorial practices in response to the commercial context; followed by critical inquiries around ethics, politics, and economics. participating curators: Andrea Löbel, Klaus Schafler, Başak Senova (Vienna), Tevž Logar, (Ljubljana), Nadim Samman (London), and Maayan Sheleff (Jerusalem) participating artists: Tamsin Snow, Ramesch Daha, Isa Rosenberger, and Nisrine Boukhari

SKOPJE PERIPHERAL MEETING MoCA — Museum of Contemporary Art (06.12.2018) Archiving as a Collective Act of Resistance In this meeting, the participants discussed how artistic research uses the concepts of fragmentation, discontinuity, and contingency as tools for re-contextualising knowledge from an archive along with critical reflections on the emergence of a more comprehensive research culture around artistic production and curatorial practices. participants: Mira Gakina, Director MoCA; Jovanka Popova, Curator, MoCA and Program Coordinator at Press to Exit Project Space; Jasminka Namiceva, Senior Curator Museum of the City of Skopje; Hristina Ivanoska and Yane Calovski, Co-founders of Press to Exit Project Space; and Başak Şenova

STOCKHOLM PERIPHERAL MEETING Konstfack — University of Arts, Crafts and Design (28.05.2019) CrossSections project and Discussion with Ricarda Denzer: “Humming, Warbling, Whistling” In link with the operational logic of the project, the discussion was directed towards the investigation of open forms; a sonic way of thinking; and performative phenomena such as the voice, the spoken word, forms of narrative, and language. speakers: Başak Şenova and Ricarda Denzer participants: The senior researchers and doctoral candidates of Konstfack 38

THE PUBLIC MEETINGS The PUBLIC meetings were designed to give information about the project by sharing and discussing the developments of the project with the public. The PUBLIC meetings were the ocassions to introduce and discuss the research strains of the project with partners, collaborators and the audience. They were a way to evaluate the progress of the project with the feedback provided from the public. They lasted mostly 2 hour.

ISTANBUL PUBLIC MEETING The Consulate General of Sweden (15.09.2017) Part of the Public Programme of the 15th Istanbul Biennial

Meeting at the Consulate General of Sweden, located in the Swedish Palace (Istanbul, 2017)

artists: Heba Y. Amin, Yane Calovski, Gözde İlkin, Behzad Khosravi-Noori, and Benji Boyadgian representatives of partners: Andrea Löbel and Klaus Schafler of Kunsthalle Exnergasse — WUK, Juha Huuskonen of HIAP, Maria Lanz and Gunilla Muhr of Konstfack — University of Arts, Crafts and Design, Johan Pousette of iaspis, Jonatan Habib Engqvist of NFK and Nya Småland, Yane Calovski of Press to Exit Project Space, and Saastamoinen Foundation curator: Başak Şenova This first PUBLIC meeting was a kick-off event oriented to launch the CrossSeections project by introducing and discussing the research strains and the three leading keywords— ‘intervals’, ‘intensities’ and ‘responses’—with partners, collaborators and the audience. The expectations and the objectives of the artists and partner institutions were transparently expressed by also hovering around the possibility of “failure”. Hence, the entire project was envisioned a structure which is open, flexible, unpredictable, bold, and experimental. 39

VIENNA PUBLIC MEETING Kunsthalle Exnergasse Studio (KEX) — Werkstätten und Kulturhaus (WUK) (17.11.2017) Studio visit with cultural journalist Alexandra Matzner Vienna Art Week 2017

Meeting at KEX Studio within the framework of Vienna Art Week 2017

speakers: Heba Y. Amin, Yane Calovski, Gözde İlkin, Otto Karvonen, Barbara Holub, Marcus Neustetter, Ricarda Denzer, Nikolaus Gansterer, Inma Herrera, Nisrine Boukhari , Timo, Tuhkanen, Bronwyn Lace, Isa Rosenberger, Egle Oddo, Ramesch Daha, Başak Şenova, Andrea Löbel, and Klaus Schafler This public meeting was designed as a studio visit with cultural journalist Alexandra Matzner at KEX Studio at WUK within the framework of the Vienna Art Week 2017. As the research resident of the Kunsthalle Exnergasse, Başak Şenova presented and discussed the structure of the CrossSections project by navigating through some of the main research strains and research processes of the participating artists.

STOCKHOLM PUBLIC MEETING iaspis — the Swedish Arts Grants Committee’s International Programme for Visual and Applied Artists (07.02.2018) speakers: Yane Calovski, Ramesch Daha, and Başak Şenova other participants: Barbara Holub, Ricarda Denzer, Nisrine Boukhari, Timo Tuhkanen, Egle Oddo, Tamsin Snow, Benji Boyadgian, and Björn Norberg The meeting in Stockholm specifically aimed to consider the way in which we can understand the notions of ‘archiving’ and ‘activism’ through the artistic, theoretical and design practices of the invited speakers. The participants first introduced and discussed the research strains and three of the main key words of the project: ‘responses’, ‘potentials’, and ‘sharing’. In the discussion part of the meeting, some of the participating artists, along with the partners of the project, gave their input. 40

HELSINKI PUBLIC MEETING ExLab, Academy of Fine Arts Helsinki (19.05.2018) Part of the Public Programme of the 15th Istanbul Biennial Exhibition Laboratory hosted the PUBLIC Meeting of the CrossSections project in Helsinki. As the speaker of the meeting, Başak Şenova introduced and talked about the research strains and the leading curatorial motive of the project. The meeting specifically aimed to discuss the curatorial methodology and structure of the project. In the second part of the meeting, some of the participating artists including Behzad Khosravi-Noori, Benji Boyadgian, Egle Oddo, Isa Rosenberger, Lina Selander, Nikolaus Gansterer, Tamsin Snow, Otto Karvonen, and Timo Tuhkanen, along with representatives from NFK, Academy of Fine Arts, Helsinki and HIAP discussed the project with the audience.

ABU DHABI PUBLIC TALK Abu Dhabi Art Talks, Manarat Al Saadiyat (14.10.2018) Thinking through CrossSections Başak Şenova participated in a panel at Abu Dhabi Art Talks with Olga Kanzaki Sooudi and Antonia Carver, moderated by Atteqa Ali, and discussed the validity of “research” in the art market through the CrossSections project by tackling the issues of sustainability in art production, artistic research, material and immaterial productions, resources and networks.

VIENNA PUBLIC TALK University of Applied Arts Vienna, (11.04.2019) The Angewandte hosted this meeting in Vienna. The meeting was a conversation between the curator of the project and Barbara Holub, Isa Rosenberger, as well as Andrea Löbel and Klaus Schafler of Kunsthalle Exnergasse — WUK.

Meeting at iaspis, 2018, Johan Pousette introducing the project and the speakers: Başak Şenova, Ramesch Daha, and Yane Calovski, 41

BIRZEIT PUBLIC TALK Faculty of Arts, Music and Design, Birzeit University (21.05.2019) speakers: Benji Boyadgian and Timo Tuhkanen moderator: Tina Sherwell

Birzeit University Campus, facing the Mediterranean coast, positioned on Khirbet Birzeit

TUNIS PUBLIC TALK B7L9, Kamel Lazaar Foundation (21.05.2019) Finissage of Climbing Through the Tide Exhibition speakers: Nisrine Boukhari, Yane Calovski, Ramesch Daha, and Başak Şenova Başak Şenova was in conversation with Yane Calovski. First, they gave background information about CrossSections and their long-term collaboration; they discussed, explained, and exemplified the curatorial methodology and open structure of the CrossSections project, which echoed in the Climbing Through the Tide exhibition.

HELSINKI PUBLIC TALK ExLab, Academy of Fine Arts Helsinki (26.10.2019) Research Pavilion #3: Research Ecologies Concluding Seminar speakers: Başak Şenova and Anne Klontz CrossSections was invited to the Concluding Seminar of the Research Pavilion Project’s third iteration, curated and moderated by Mika Elo and Henk Slager. Anne Klontz reflected on the CrossSections_perspectives Exhibiton at Konstfack. Başak Şenova gave information about the CrossSections project by explaining the curatorial goals, long-term commitments of the artists and institutions, funding structures, collaborative processes of micro-management of the project, and experimental nature of the exhibitions. 42

RESIDENCIES From 2017 to 2019, CrossSections provided various types and lengths of research and production-based residencies for the project participants. These residencies were mostly affiliated with the partner institutions of the project; only in a few cases, they were presented through special agreements with other institutions as collaborations with the project. RESIDENT

RESIDENCY

DURATION

CITY

Yane Calovski, artist

Iaspis

3 months

Stockholm

Egle Oddo, artist

HIAP

3 months

Helsinki

Ramesch Daha, artist

HIAP

1 month

Helsinki

Bronwyn Lace, artist

Kunsthalle Exnergasse — WUK

1 week

Vienna

Behzad Khosravi-Noori, artist

Kunsthalle Exnergasse — WUK

1 week

Vienna

Benji Boyadgian, artist

Kunsthalle Exnergasse — WUK

1 week

Vienna

Marcus Neustetter, artist

Kunsthalle Exnergasse — WUK

1 week

Vienna

Başak Senova, curator

Kunsthalle Exnergasse — WUK

7 months

Vienna

Inma Herrera, artist

Kunsthalle Exnergasse — WUK

1 week

Vienna

Tamsin Snow, artist

Kultur Kontakt

3 months

Vienna

Başak Senova, curator

Nordic Art Association

10 days

Stockholm

Isa Rosenberger, artist

HIAP

1 week

Helsinki

Nikolaus Gensterer

HIAP

1 week

Helsinki

Behzad Khosravi-Noori, artist

HIAP

1 week

Helsinki

Tamsin Snow, artist

HIAP

1 week

Helsinki

Lina Selander, artist

HIAP

1 week

Helsinki

Isa Rosenberger, artist

HIAP

1 week

Helsinki

Ricarda Denzer, artist

Nordic Art Association

1 week

Stockholm

Barbara Holub, artist

Nordic Art Association

1 week

Stockholm

Benji Boyadgian, artist

Nordic Art Association

1 week

Stockholm

Egle Oddo, artist

Nordic Art Association

1 week

Stockholm

Timo Tuhkanen, artist

Nordic Art Association

1 week

Stockholm

Benji Boyadgian, artist

HIAP

1 week

Helsinki

Lina Selander, artist

HIAP

1 week

Helsinki

Ramesch Daha, artist

Konstfack

1 week

Stockholm

Barbara Holub, artist

Konstfack

1 week

Stockholm

Yane Calovski, artist

Konstfack

1 week

Stockholm

Ramesch Daha, artist

Iaspis

3 months

Stockholm

Lina Selander, artist

Kunst Haus Wien

1 week

Vienna

Egle Oddo, artist

Konstfack

1 week

Stockholm

Marcus Neustetter, artist

Saastamoinen Foundation

1 week

Helsinki

Bronwyn Lace, artist

Saastamoinen Foundation

1 week

Helsinki

Başak Senova, curator

Saastamoinen Foundation

1 week

Helsinki 43

CHAPTER 3

REFLECTIONS OF THE PARTNERS

KUNSTHALLE EXNERGASSE — WUK KONSTFACK NFK ACADEMY OF FINE ARTS, HELSINKI UNIVERSITY OF APPLIED ARTS VIENNA PRESS TO EXIT PROJECT SPACE NYA SMÅLAND HIAP IASPIS SAASTAMOINEN FOUNDATION

CHANGING PERSPECTIVES ANDREA LÖBEL & KLAUS SCHAFLER

KUNSTHALLE EXNERGASSE (KEX) — WERKSTÄTTEN UND KULTURHAUS (WUK) Başak Şenova was invited as ‘researcher in residence’ at Kunsthalle Exnergasse (KEX) between 2017 and 2019. Within the framework of her residency, she developed and shaped the concept for the long-term project CrossSections. At KEX, what appealed to us was her enthusiasm to create a new basis and international network for the design of an interdisciplinary research platform that would specifically be dedicated to the essence and processes of the artistic work before it entered into the dynamics and system of art institutions and the art market. Şenova developed the structure of the CrossSections project as a multi-layered platform for artistic research, discussion, and production by integrating the collaborative working methods of meeting, sharing, exchanging, and showing amongst project-involved artists, and then institutions and the public. A vivid and sustainable CrossSections artist community was generated in which artists shared and opened up their thought processes, their methods of research and production to each other, and where all participants kept an open-mind for feedback and about potential collaboration amongst artists, curators and art institutions. Before the project launch of CrossSections, KEX, as a partnering institution, was asked to suggest artists to participate in the project and organised a series of studio visits for Şenova. As the project gained momentum, KEX hosted a series of exciting exhibitions and artist residencies, and enjoyed participating in various project-related meetings and talks in Vienna, Stockholm, and Istanbul. One aspect that will definitely remain from this wonderful collaboration with the CrossSections project is the elaborated idea and exemplary model of how a potential redefinition or repositioning of the relationship between artistic work, curatorial models, and art institutions can be transformative—a possible guide for changing perspectives by thinking through ‘potentials’, ‘intervals’, and ‘intensities’.

curatorial note: My collaboration and connection with Kunsthalle Exnergasse (KEX) — Werkstätten und Kulturhaus (WUK) started during the “Black Sea Calling” project at the Artist-in-Residence Exchange Programme in Vienna between 2012­—2o13 with KEX later also becoming a partner for NOMAD (an Istanbul-based association where I have been a director, focusing on digital culture and sound art through the perspectives of various other disciplines). All throughout the CrossSections project—from the development and research phases in 2017 until the end of 2019—I acted as “researcher in residence” at Kunsthalle Exnergasse — WUK. Therefore, Vienna has served as the base of the project. KEX provided residencies for myself and some of the artists; the KEX Studio hosted two CORE meetings, a SHARE meeting, and a PUBLIC meeting during the Vienna Art Week (2017). The studio was also used by the resident artists. Since the project started, the KEX Exhibition Space has hosted a trilogy of three group exhibitions in 2018, and Isa Rosenberger’s solo exhibition in 2019 within the framework of the project. These exhibitions were accompanied by a series of talks, screenings, performances, and outdoor events. KEX also cooperated with the exhibitions, events, and talks that took place at CrossSectionsHUB and Parallel Vienna in 2018. BŞ

45

INVESTING IN THE UNKONWN MARIA LANTZ KONSTFACK — UNIVERSITY OF ARTS, CRAFTS AND DESIGN Being in charge of a state founded educational institution in Sweden means you need to argue for every penny spent. Not because there is a need to save money, but since the outcome of the activities you use the money for needs to “serve education and research so that the highest possible level of quality is secured.” Thus, the expected outcome of a new idea somehow needs to be known—and anchored within the organisation—before a budget is decided. But what if you don´t know the outcome at all, and not knowing is the whole point? Personally, I had no trouble with putting my trust in the CrossSections project; on the contrary. First of all, with Şenova as the curator and with the list of artists presented, there was no doubt that this setting was an extremely exciting point of departure. Second, the idea of following processes instead of results was totally in line with our philosophy, where we have pronounced risk taking as part of doing something new. Third, I always wanted Konstfack to be able to invite research-based artists to show their works at Konstfack, not only have them come and go as guest lecturers. After all, we are not only a school but also an art institution with public programmes and shows. And yet, bringing forth a budget for CrossSections (although small) to the board was still a challenge. “What is it good for?’’, “Is it considered research or education?’’, “Or is it maybe internationalisation?’’ The answer was: all of that… and so much more; but also a completely new way for Konstfack to work. The budget went through and the project kicked off, first in Istanbul, then in various locations. Artists came to, and travelled from, Stockholm. One of the first participants I had an encounter with was Nikolas Gansterer. He attended a research seminar at Konstfack and I happened to have time to join in that day. His works and methods were amazing and we—the group of participants—got to know in detail both about his beautiful animation technique and his investigation on diagrams, philosophy, natural science, and the power of the black board. The next encounter at Konstfack was a couple of teaching sessions where Şenova worked with students at the Craft Department. A small publication and an exhibition in our library were two of the obvious outcomes here, and when Ramesch Daha joined in the teaching, I also learnt new things about my own institution and how the craft students interacted with artists from other areas. But most important of all was the students’ experiences of new teachings focusing on “methodologies”. It will stay with them forever. Eventually, the CrossSections exhibition in our large gallery space Vita Havet came up in the fall of 2019. Hard work, late nights, little sleep—but a lot of engagement from everyone. For the first time, a curator from the outside had put together an exhibition with a mix of artists from near and far in the premises of our school. Some of the works came fresh from the workshops at Konstfack, and all together they related to the key words that Başak Şenova and the team had put up during the first workshops two years earlier. If I was to choose from the list of words to describe the exhibition, I would perhaps choose heritage, depression, and 46

border, but also becoming, humour, and restoration. To me, the first three words describe the world and our situation in it today, something many of the artists deal with conceptually in their works (and also have experienced in their lives). The other three words describe the artistic practice and the results. Altogether, the exhibition showed how great art works can have the ability to heal, and free us from despair and difficulties without diminishing them. This was indeed worth every penny of our budget—and much more. We had shown how committed artists could achieve so much together. Finally, I cannot fully express my heartfelt appreciation for the CrossSections projects’ artists, for Şenova, the students, and all the faculty involved. Anne Klontz, who co-curated the show at Konstfack, also did an amazing job. Keeping all these people in the loop for over two years was a huge endeavour, and since the exhibition at Konstfack—and later in Helsinki—was only one out of many encounters, it cannot be considered the end: CrossSections is no longer a project, but a set of deep, long lasting relationships.

A PLATFORM FOR ARTISTS AND CURATORS JONATAN HABIB ENGQVIST & BJÖRN NORBERG NFK — THE NORDIC ART ASSOCIATION The Nordic Art Association (NKF) was formed in 1945 with the mission to create new possibilities for Nordic artists to meet, collaborate, and exhibit. The war had isolated the different countries and there were few chances for artists to encounter one another. The work within NKF has since been devoted to building bridges between artists and institutions, and to creating new opportunities inside the Nordic region. The Swedish section of the association runs an artist in residence programme connected to a studio and apartment in central Stockholm. A few years ago, we received proposals from curators who were looking for residencies. At the time there were no other programmes for curators, so we started the CRIS project where we offer shorter residencies for curators in our studio. The project has been very successful, and we had the opportunity to invite Başak Şenova and the CrossSections project as a guest within the framework of CRIS (Curatorial Residency In Stockholm). Şenova turned the guest studio into a generous workshop where she invited the CrossSections participants for the CORE meeting. The CORE meeting was composed of social gatherings, lunches and dinners in which artists from all over the world exchanged experiences, discussed their practice, and the CrossSections project. CrossSections is about creating, producing, exchanging ideas and giving people time to meet at a time in history when political instabilities create obstacles. These aims and values match the statutes of NKF. We believe that a platform for artists and curators strengthens the art scene both locally and internationally. Projects like CrossSections that encourage dialogue between people and across national borders, and generate new possibilities for collaborations are keys to the development of mutual respect and understanding. Today, this is perhaps more important than ever. 47

PROMOTING EXPERIMENTATION, REFLECTION AND DISCUSSION JOHANNA VAKKARI ACADEMY OF FINE ARTS, HELSINKI As Academy of Fine Arts, we believe that art cannot exist through inspiration alone; it requires commitment and investment in art education. Emerging talent must be nurtured if artists are to achieve international renown. In 2017, Başak Şenova was our resident fellow for the “the Resident Fellow programme” of the Academy of Fine Arts. The Resident Fellow programme is aimed at international artists, who are invited to the Academy of Fine Arts to inspire its teaching activities and to raise students’ awareness of the diverse range of artistic practices and cultures. The Resident Fellow programme is linked not only to the international artist’s own art and interaction with students and teachers, but also to the academy’s curriculum. Therefore, the programme enables international artists and writers to work closely with the Academy of Fine Arts’ community, the aim being to promote experimentation, reflection, and discussion relating to art and society. The Resident Fellow Artists’ teaching periods are fully integrated into basic teaching at the Academy of Fine Arts. The programme is implemented in collaboration with Saastamoinen Foundation and HIAP — Helsinki International Artist Programme. The Resident Fellow programme is a part of a joint project of Uniarts Helsinki’s Academy of Fine Arts and Saastamoinen Foundation that fosters dialogue between teaching in fine arts and the international art community, all the while renewing the Finnish education and research in fine arts. Şenova has been collaborating with Anna-Kaisa Rastenberger and her Praxis students since her fellowship in 2017. Led by Rastenberger, the Praxis Master’s Programme is intended for visual artists and students/undergraduates specialised in art theory and cultural studies, whose interests lie in the theories, presentation methods and curating of contemporary art. The goal of the programme is to understand the world of arts and its underlying forces and development of one’s own thinking on the exhibition and mediation of art and the society. The studies train professionals to take on the many responsibilities in the field of art; to become experts who are able to use their skills and knowledge in critical, innovative ways. Heading in the same direction, we are glad that the CrossSections Project served as a living laboratory for the students of University of the Arts Helsinki’s Academy of Fine Arts. All CrossSections activities that took place at Exhibition Laboratory—the PUBLIC meeting of the CrossSections project in 2018; Şenova’s lecture to the Praxis Students; the CrossSection’s presentation by Şenova and also Anne Klontz of Konstfack during the Research Pavilion’s Concluding Seminar Research Pavilion #3: “Research Ecologies”—, and the final comprehensive exhibition of the project CrossSections_notes with its accompanying talks and performances in 2019, were exceptional cases for the students to interact, to experience, and to reflect on.

* Some parts of this text was first published on the websites of the Academy of Fine Arts, Helsinki and Saastamoinen Foundation. 48

PROVOCATIVE COMMUNITIES BARBARA PUTZ-PLECKO UNIVERSITY OF APPLIED ARTS VIENNA Given the present constitution of the world, we need to rethink the position of the artist in relation to social, economic, and political structures. And we need to reflect—with consistency—on what is meant by art and education today and how we can conceive of it in the future. Often, processes of a provocative nature—such as experimentation, the dissolution of boundaries, the breaking of rules and sequences—have a part to play as an impetus in artistic exploration. In this sense, every artist faces decisions: every artist—in varying degrees—goes either along with or against current values that society establishes as signposts; every artist goes either along with or against prevailing modes of thinking, formats and practices considered to be fail-safe. Indeed, provocation (from Latin “provocare”, meaning “to stimulate”, “to excite”, “to arouse”, “to challenge”, “to expect something of someone or something”), is a quality that is not only encoded in the practice of any given art, it is also a dynamic process of sensuous and affective stimulation that is directly at its source. It is precisely these multifarious “provocative communities” that, in an institution such as our university, constitute that vital, constructive space for debate in which a critical—which also means self-critical— emancipatory and transformative practice can steadily evolve. In order to maintain these productive spaces and to ensure the continuation of the debates that they stimulate, it was a wonderful opportunity and inspiration to have Başak Şenova as a critical friend and guest in the Angewandte Resident Artist Programme in 2019. Şenova focuses on composing the display of research-based artistic methodologies in a specific setting. By developing such projects, she aims at creating collective, interdisciplinary research platforms and networks; she has set out to propose a curatorial model that prioritizes the “process” of artistic research and production, and its presentation; and she seeks to share and elaborate diverse critical reactions and collective strategies in the context of art. During her residency in spring 2019, Şenova presented the CrossSections Project at the Angewandte along with a panel with Andrea Löbel, Klaus Schafler, Barbara Holub and Isa Rosenberger; three chapters of the CrossSections Screening Programme; and a talk on the exhibition Climbing Through the Tide, Tunis with Lina Lazaar—the director of Kamel Lazaar Foundation and Petra Swais. Earlier in 2017, a workshop of the project had already been hosted by Zentrum Fokus Forschung. All these activities, which carried cross-departmental perspectives, stimulated future collaborations with the university’s Institute for Art, Sciences and Art Education. We very much appreciate how much these collaborative endeavours contribute to further developing a space for collective thought and action, and how they foster a reflective, critical, and emancipatory contemporary art practice. 49

A PROGRAMME IN DIALOGUE HRISTINA IVANOSKA & YANE CALOVSKI PRESS TO EXIT PROJECT SPACE Envisioned as a three-year-long curatorial undertaking by Başak Şenova, CrossSections challenged the primordial ways we display process and research in artistic practice. With each of its activities, it tried to create settings for critical discussions of socio-political issues that affect us in the present. Just as Thelma Golden’s statement that “an exhibition is in many ways a series of conversations: between the artists and the viewer, curator and viewer, and between the works of art themselves,” similarly, this notion of dialogue between the artists, the intuitions, and the audiences is the conceptual core of Şenova’s project. As the project progressed, these dialogues were stimulated through a number of meetings, exhibitions, and talks taking place in Vienna, Stockholm, Helsinki and Skopje, carrying forth the urgency that we recognize in artistic practice as a critical tool in addressing the multiple realities of the present political moment. The project Şenova created is a curatorial model not bound by traditional methodologies of research and production. Quite the contrary, her preferred exhibition format suggests inherent flexibility gifted both to the artists and audiences, always as an integral part of the research practice. So, the emerging question of the project seems to contemplate how we curate, design, and make the intimacy of the process and the dialogue discursive in search of its contextual form. Conceptually, Şenova highlighted the possibility of interconnectedness within the diversity of artistic positions, and designed an intricate exhibition programme to reflect her curatorial process. Considering that artists undertake creative processes that at times can be experienced as insular or at least private, CrossSections also opened a transient notion of space where sharing of knowledge was encouraged, leading to something communally engaging and publicly relevant. As Press to Exit Project Space, we invited Şenova to give a public lecture and presentation at the MoCA in 2018 where she discussed the unfolding of the project. Şenova critically engaged curatorial concepts that have defined her practice over the years, which was very inspirational and relevant for us with the information it conveyed. This has been one of the significant benefits of partnering with CrossSections over the last three years as we have become trusted interlocutors, deepening our collaborative dialogues. Looking in retrospect, CrossSections was a collaborative “programme in dialogue”, rendering itself as a plethora of individual and organisational capacities built around artistic research methodologies, subliminal forms of knowledge, and performative appearances. Şenova’s ultimate methodology is to combine disciplines and use the exhibition as a research platform where design, architecture, and theory collide in creating space for the artistic work to stand out. Her curating is reminiscent of conducting an orchestra while drafting a cross-disciplinary environment where the trans-mutability of ideas is encouraged. While the project concluded in 2019, one can’t help but feel that the participating artists and partner organisations have all gained valuable experience that will reflect in shaping future narratives and collaborations. Ultimately, we are grateful that we were able to build mutual trust and camaraderie, as well as widen the socio-political context in which we live and work by constructing a fresh critical position within artistic research. 50

OUR DIALOGUE MIKE BODE NYA SMÅLAND Nya Småland investigates questions of entrepreneurship, emigration and migration, and the relationship between the urban and the rural. These three notions characterise the common, as well as the historical, understanding of Småland in Southern Sweden. Through the Nya Småland project, we have come back to the question of collective enterprises, methodology, and how to work on a long-term basis with artists, which has become central to our process. Our dialogue with the CrossSections project has opened up shared thoughts on time, the value of informal meetings, and not least how to mediate and cultivate research-based artistic practises and strategies, particularly those dealing with the topics of emigration and migration. The programme is the peak of a series of collaborations that where initiated by four art institutions, three regions, and a university. We have, among other things, organised a number of conferences, seminars, residencies, workshops, and international collaborations in the entire landscape of Småland. The ongoing discussion with the CrossSections project has been an important element in our attempts to develop a model that supports long-term relationships on the one hand, while also allowing for experiments on the other. For this we are immensely grateful.

EMBRACING UNCERTAINTY AND SERENDIPITY JUHA HUUSKONEN HIAP — HELSINKI INTERNATIONAL ARTIST PROGRAMME The CrossSections project evolved when Başak Şenova was invited to the Resident Fellow Programme of the Academy of Fine Arts, Helsinki, implemented in partnership with Saastamoinen Foundation and HIAP in 2017. During her fellowship, she stayed at Palmstierna studio complex of HIAP in Suomenlinna Island. CrossSections has made the rare choice of embracing uncertainty and serendipity by providing time and space for artists’ individual work processes, as well as enabling their collective process to evolve freely. Since HIAP’s goal is to support experimental, crossdisciplinary art practices and to actively contribute to topical debates within and around the context of art, the CrossSections approach was a very good match with HIAP’s mission, making it possible for the project to intertwine itself with the HIAP residency programme over subsequent years. The artists who took part in CrossSections gained immensely from the frequent public and collective sessions that were arranged over the duration of the programme. I would think that many of them saw this as an optimal way to develop artistic work or research—like being back in school while avoiding the unpleasant parts. As for the exhibitions, the clever use of plain tables in the exhibitions worked well for visually arranging the space. Moreover, the tables also communicated the nature of CrossSections, indicating that the project was about ongoing work and what we saw were samples of a larger body of works. Furthermore, I believe the one floating table in the ceiling was also a necessary additional touch; otherwise it would have seemed that all things were nailed to the ground, which goes against the spirit of CrossSections. 51

OPEN-ENDED PROCESS JOHAN POUSETTE IASPIS — THE SWEDISH ARTS GRANTS COMMITTEE’S INTERNATIONAL PROGRAMME FOR VISUAL ARTS, DESIGN, CRAFTS AND ARCHITECTURE Explorative and interdisciplinary artistic practices, together with process-oriented thinking, are the very core of Iaspis’ activities. As the Swedish Arts Grants Committee’s international programme for visual arts, design, crafts and architecture, Iaspis characteristically incorporates interdisciplinary artistic practices. Mauricio Corbalan, architect-in-residence in 2019, compared the programme to a wide border zone. A zone with room for encounters between different people and fields, and perhaps also for inspiring confusion over the boundaries between artistic disciplines. It was natural, therefore, to accept the invitation to take part in CrossSections. Besides aiming to provide an interdisciplinary platform, the project reflects on open-ended processes that encourage critical explorations of the challenges we meet every day. What made this collaboration especially interesting was the ambition to share experiences, to discuss critically and to work on collective strategies. To make room for artistic creativity in open-ended processes is largely the motto of the residence programme. The material for these processes is time, unconditional approaches, and the encounter between artists in a new place. The artists are always at the centre of our activities at Iaspis and the Swedish Arts Grants Committee. And this was certainly true in our collaboration with CrossSections. Out of the 19 artists in the project, six have had previous contacts with the Iaspis programme: Before we entered into the collaboration, Lina Selander, Nisrine Boukhari, and Benji Boyadgian had been artists-in-residence. As part of the project, Yane Calovski and then Ramesh Daha were invited to be Iaspis residents, and Bronwyn Lace was invited for a project at a later stage. My own experience of working with open processes dates back to 2004, when we tried an innovative residence format at the Baltic Art Centre. PIR stands for Production in Residence, and its intention was to give artists a unique opportunity to produce new works in a completely unconditional process. Yane Calovski was the first artist we chose for the project. He collaborated with the Swedish band Sebastian & Sebastian and the artist Tobias Sjöberg to compose a sound work based on a text from Robert Barry’s 1970s “Art Work”. Bronwyn Lace was invited to Collectively, produced by Iaspis in collaboration with the French curator Gregory Castera. The project gathered 80 artists from more than 20 countries working with collective methods. For three days, we discussed and physically tested how this approach could benefit artistic development and give a deeper understanding of society, which ultimately could lead to alternative ways of working, thinking, and living together. Lace works as an artist, and also manages projects for William Kentridge within the framework of “The Less Good Idea”. A collective three-year-project modelled on the concept of the South African proverb “If the good doctor can’t cure you, find the less good doctor.” In a rapidly-changing society, some facets of contemporary visual art are moving towards greater social and political commitment to complex issues. A freer approach to what art can be has been established. Today, artistic practices are often more interdisciplinary, collective and research-oriented. The ambition of Iaspis is to monitor and support artistic development, an objective we share with CrossSections. 52

DIALOGUE AND PARTNERING MARJA KARTTUNEN SAASTAMOINEN FOUNDATION A grant was provided by Saastamoinen Foundation to the CrossSections interdisciplinary platform for the mobility of the artists, the curatorial work, and its publication. This project is an excellent example of the Saastamoinen Foundation’s long-term commitment to and support of international networks and residencies for contemporary art. Developed by the Turkish curator Başak Şenova, CrossSections drew from her innovative work in the fields of education and international curating. Şenova was granted a threemonth Resident Fellowship through our collaboration with the Academy of Fine Arts in Helsinki in 2017. This project was developed as one of the outcomes of her fellowship. The fact that it explored artistic research and education through dialogue and production was significant to us. In the same vein, as with other projects of the foundation, international dialogue, networking, and research were constant themes of the CrossSections project. In this respect, the project was twofold: to strengthen dialogue in the field of artistic research and art education; and to provide an outreach for the ideas developed by the participants in the project. As the last chapter of the project, the CrossSections project landed in Helsinki at the Academy of Fine Arts with the exhibition CrossSections_notes in 2019. The exhibition featured the work of the nineteen participating artists at Exhibition Laboratory. It was a privilege to experience the dynamic opening where the artists came to meet and discuss their research and work with the audience. Along the same line, the publication of this book makes the ideas and relationships developed through this three-year project visible. We hope that it will prove to be a useful tool for curators, artists, and all others who take up the challenge of international dialogue and research in the future.

curatorial note: As mentioned earlier, in 2017, the idea of the CrossSections project imperatively unleashed during my fellowship residency at the Academy of Fine Arts, Helsinki. Due to the political turmoil in Turkey and its (personal) consequences, the time I spent in Finland was a timely gift to reconsider my objectives as a curator. The residency played an active and dispositional role for the content and structure of the CrossSections project. The staff of the Academy of Fine Arts, students, artists, the other residents, and all the other actors in Finland played an important role in this incubation period. There was one other extraordinary actor: Saastamoinen Foundation, which funded the programme. Discovering the foundation’s distinctive and attentive approach towards the individuals, institutions, and projects which they support was very refreshing and promising. During my residency, I had many opportunities to present and discuss my ongoing and future projects with them. Saastamoinen’s encouraging commitment, personal touch, and engagement during my residency was never limited to the financial aspects of the project, but always in the spirit of sharing, distributing, and discussing ideas, actors, and networks. BŞ

53

CHAPTER 4

THE CONTENT

ARTISTS ARTISTIC RESEARCHES PROJECTS CURATOR

BARBARA HOLUB BEHZAD KHOSRAVI-NOORI BENJI BOYADGIAN BRONWYN LACE EBRU KURBAK EGLE ODDO HEBA Y. AMIN INMA HERRERA ISA ROSENBERGER LINA SELANDER MARCUS NEUSTETTER NIKOLAUS GANSTERER NISRINE BOUKHARI RICARDA DENZER OTTO KARVONEN RAMESCH DAHA TAMSIN SNOW TIMO TUHKANEN YANE CALOVSKI

BARBARA HOLUB Barbara Holub studied architecture at the Stuttgart University of Technology. In 1999, she founded transparadiso with Paul Rajakovics as a transdisciplinary practice between art, architecture, urban intervention, and urbanism. Holub addresses urban societal issues in which she creates situations for “silent activism” in the urban/public space, the exhibition space, or in company contexts. Her and transparadiso’s exhibitions and projects include: (2019) BONE Performance Festival, Bern (with Christine Hohenbüchler); Call Against the Border, Festival der Regionen/A; Platform for Arguments, Public Art Vienna; (2018) “Times of Dilemma”, The Island is What the Sea Surrounds European Capital of Culture, Valletta 18, Malta; (2017) Advancing, pursuing, Peithner-Lichtenfels Gallery, Vienna; Harbour for Culture, trieste contemporanea, Trieste; (2016) Waste Value Rising, Kunsthaus Vienna; Request for the unrequested voluntary interlinguisticality, Pottenhofen, Public Art Lower Austria; (2015) The Laughter that Gets Caught in Your Throat, 1st Vienna Biennale; Operation Goldhaube, Salzburg Museum; (2014) Bye, bye Bakchich Système, Sousse/ Tunisia; The Dignity of Man, House of Art, Brno; Museum of Contemporary Art, Sarajevo; The First World Congress of the Missing Things, Baltimore/ USA; “Part of the Game”, nGbK, Berlin. Holub was president of the Vienna Secession (2006—2007); recipient of the Austrian National Art Award, 2018; recipient of the Schindler Grant, MAK Center for Art and Architecture, Los Angeles, 2004; member of the advisory board of Art & The Public Sphere Journal (UK); member of the advisory board of World Council of Peoples for the United Nations, New York; member of the Innovation Fund “Culture in Public Space“, Stuttgart; Visiting Professor, University of Applied Arts Vienna, 2015; lecturer at the Vienna University of Technology since 2010; and member of the editorial board of dérive-magazine for urban research, Vienna, since 2002. Holub lives and works in Vienna.

BLUE FROG SOCIETY | A HABITAT WITHOUT TERRITORY Installation 2010—ongoing presented at CrossSections_potentials (2018), Vienna; CrossSections_perspectives (2019), Stockholm; CrossSections_notes (2019), Helsinki The Blue Frog Society is a messenger of a future society. It pushes the borders of the “possible” to make space for the unplanned and unthinkable, emphasizing civic engagement and the need for new social values, new commons and forms of living together beyond cultural, social or geographical borders. After presentations at the Czech Mission to the UN/Czech Centre (New York), the 64th UN DPI/NGO conference in Bonn, and many other public venues and internal meetings, the The Blue Frog Society gathered in Vienna, where it originated in 2010, and published the 10 Issues of the Blue Frog Society. 56

“Collaborating

with a curator and artists who are all engaged in socio-political issues and developing new formats of exchange and collaboration inspired me to start a new phase of the “Blue Frog Society”, namely “A State Visit to the Blue Frog Society by European Minority Cultures”, dedicated to further exploring the role of art in society.

”

BARBARA HOLUB TIMES OF DILEMMA —Paul Rajakovics, transparadiso Photographs and video 2018 presented at CrossSections_intensities (2018), Vienna In a collaborative process, the Għana-singers (Għannejja) and authors produced a contemporary Għana-dialog, transforming this spontaneously improvised traditional Maltese singing into a scripted dialogue discussing the rapid transformation of Malta, and the contradictory interests between economic prosperity and regaining communal values. For the performances by the Għannejja, transparadiso conceived two large megaphonesculptures, creating a “situation” for the Maltese to take action, offering a sound transfer of 320 metres between St. Roche Chapel (from where the priest used to preach during the times of the plague), and Manoel Island, which will be transformed into an exclusive new urban development for the rich. In this way, the dialogue between the two locations addresses today’s “plague”, namely uncontrolled urban development in Malta. The project was part of “The Island is What the Sea Surrounds” exhibition, curated by Maren Richter, under the coverage of the European Capital of Culture, Valletta 18. A STATE VISIT TO THE BLUE FROG SOCIETY BY MINORITY NATIONALITIES BLUE FROG SOCIETY | A HABITAT WITHOUT TERRITORY Installation with two-channel video Videos by Nancy Black, Selma Selman (Romanes); Costanza Travaglini, and Gabriele Zanello (Friulan) 2018—ongoing presented at CrossSections_intervals (2018), Vienna; and CrossSections_perspectives (2019), Stockholm Currently, we are facing an increasingly difficult state of democracy resulting in the violation of basic human rights, such as freedom of movement and freedom of speech being under threat—in Europe and in neighbouring countries, including the Mediterranean and North Africa. The unresolved situation of finally acknowledging migration as a result of a century-long exploitation, and the growing unequal distribution of resources and wealth will be an ongoing issue which will determine our future and unsettle the still propagated belief in planning. On a parallel level, various minorities in Europe tend to claim their own nation state. Both developments uproot the idea of a common society and living together beyond borders. The Blue Frog Society invited representatives of some of these communities to pay a state visit to the non-territorial grounds of the Blue Frog Society by giving a short speech. The act of a state visit was an official symbol of acknowledgement, of recognizing the other party as an equal. The speeches were held in the dying languages addressing expectations of being part of the Blue Frog Society, potentials of mutual enrichment, and hopes and aims for a common future. 57

BARBARA HOLUB

> Holub, A State Visit To The Blue Frog Society by Minority Nationalities. Installation. CrossSections_intervals (Vienna, 2018) Photos by Başak Şenova and Barbara Holub

SHADES AND SHADOWS OF THE SOCIAL: THE BLUE FROG SOCIETY

BARBARA HOLUB

PAUL O’NEILL Blue is one of the three primary colours. Blue can be melancholic and a little bit sad. But blue is also very much alive and breathing. Blue is vibrant, celebratory and evocative of living things. Blue is a mood. Blue takes up most of the space on the world map. When children draw water or the sky, they colour them blue. Blue is also a feature-length film by British artist Derek Jarman from 1994. The film’s only image is the colour blue. Blue is the film’s visual surface and its metaphysical terrain. Here, blue is gigantic, monstrous and all-encompassing. Blue is the film’s monochromatic backdrop. The film is bathing in blue. Its Chroma fills the screen. The whole world is blue, nothing but. Projected blueness washes over the viewer, overlaid with voice and sound, with musical score and words to listen to and reflect upon sight, on life, and terminal illness. Jarman made the film while partially blind, unwell and knowing he was dying from an AIDS related illness. Silence = Death. Act up; life is activism. Read my lips. Personal is political. Blue is brave, meditative, occasionally funny, beautiful, and one of my favourite films. Jarman singled out the colour blue as the means to confront the complexities of life and illness through art. In life, there is a distinction between the undying and the undead. It’s a question of what is inevitable. Of what is known, imminent, and what has yet to come. Jarman’s Blue is a film about living a single life in connection to all life. Blue is a film dedicated to a life of colour. Yves Klein too dedicated much of his artistic life to the colour blue, a specific blue pigment known as ‘International Klein Blue’ (IKB). It could be described as cyan-blue, royal azure, or ultramarine. Jarman’s chromatic blue is similar, perhaps they are the same, but we know them to be different. Chromas are friends in common, unruly bedfellows. Blue is their mutual. The colour for Jarman’s Blue is like the shade of blue delphinium, a flower from the artist’s much loved garden in Dungeness. * Blue come forth * Blue arise * Blue ascend * Blue come in 1 The Blue Frog Society is an idea. It is blue-sky thinking. Blue here is social. The Blue Frog Society takes blue as its territory, as metaphor, and as evocation. The Blue Frog Society has its own rules and objectives, which are unfixed and open. The Blue Frog Society is a collective. The Blue Frog Society is a micro-utopia. The Blue Frog Society is an artwork by Barbara Holub. Holub is the founder of The Blue Frog Society and one of its most fervent members, but the artist is one among many others. The Blue Frog Society supports its own habitus and that of its allies, comrades and co-conspirators. The Blue Frog Society is of special importance to those interested in the commonwealth of all living beings, including the frogs of the world.

1. From the opening paragraph of Derek Jarman’s script for the film Blue (1993). 60

Frogs are as important as human beings. Frogs are mostly green, but they come in other colours, such as brown, yellow, red, black and blue, too. Frogs are included in The Blue Frog Society and have a special position within it. They are symbolic. Certain frogs are more important than others. This is how society works. It has a hierarchy and a structure. Some beings are more welcome than others. This is unthinkable for some, but for good or for bad this must be accepted. Society is not altruistic, after all. Blue frogs, also known as blue poisonous dart frogs, are real and mostly live in Northern Brazil. Their skin is the shade of Klein blue, with small black dots of various sizes and shapes across the body. Like DNA, these black spots are unique to each frog, enabling individuals to be identified. Like humans, they have their own language, speech. Like humans, the blue frog can be poisonous too. The Blue Frog Society is under formation, yet it already exists. It is pragmatic and fantastic. It is para-institution and meta-fiction. It understands society in general as well as abstract terms. The Blue Frog Society imagines the impossible and takes the primary meaning of society as one of active companionship, of fellowship, and of kinship. Society is that to which we all belong. Society is the system of common life by which we are governed and that we may wish to transgress, subvert or overcome. Therefore, there are always multiple conflicting societies at any given time within The Blue Frog Society. Society is always plural and is the bodies and histories of relationships within which a relatively large group of people live. And the contemporary conditions in which institutions and relationships are formed. In this sense, society is a living form of commoning, of association, of equalities. The Blue Frog Society is public, real, and concrete. The Blue Frog Society is an informal assembly without organs, borders or limitations. All other members of The Blue Frog Society like to keep a low profile. They are in waiting. They are the agents of transformation. The Blue Frog Society is a decentred artwork as much as a site of collaboration and of value production. The Blue Frog Society is where we all go when we have nowhere else to go. The Blue Frog Society is a refuge. The Blue Frog Society has its own language, and its own speech. The Blue Frog Society is an institute for all minorities within which to constitute themselves against the dominant regimes of state repression. The Blue Frog Society is a coming together, a space of potential belonging for the future in the lived present. The Blue Frog Society is the future’s futures. The Blue Frog Society doesn’t exist, but is everywhere. The Blue Frog Society is already planning for the unplanned. The Blue Frog Society is a nation without borders. It is a belonging. There is no future, only this here now. It is a space of imagining, of longing and of lived imagination. It is a space of poetic and of real projection. Like Jarman’s Blue, it reminds us that to be alive and to live a social life is to struggle and to resist time’s inevitability. For our time is the passing of a shadow And our lives will run like Sparks through the stubble.2 The End.

2. From the closing paragraph of Derek Jarman’s script for the film Blue (1993). 61

BARBARA HOLUB

> The Postcard of The Blue Frog Society| A Habitat Without Territory, designed by Holub, CrossSections_potentials (Vienna, 2018) Photos by Başak Şenova

Khosravi-Noori, A Monument to the Invisible Citizen, 2014. Video still (Detail).

BEHZAD KHOSRAVI-NOORI Behzad Khosravi-Noori (1976, Tehran) studied Motion Pictures at Tarbiat Modaress University in Tehran, and Art in Public Realm at Konstfack Stockholm. He is currently a Ph.D candidate at Konstfack/KTH Stockholm, Sweden. Khosravi-Noori’s research-based practice includes films and installations, as well as archival studies. His works investigate histories from The Global South, labour and means of production; and histories of political relationships that have existed as a counter-narration to the east-west dichotomy during the Cold War. He investigates contemporary history to revisit memories beyond borders, exploring the entanglements and non/aligned memories. His recent exhibitions include: 2019: Art Encounter Biennale Timisoara, Romania; Malmö konstmususme, Malmö, Sweden; Kalmar konstmusume, Sweden; 12.0 Contemporary, Islamabad, Pakistan; Climbing Through the Tide, B7L9, KLF, Tunis; 2018: Marabouparken, Stockholm; 2017: Accessing Utopia, Research Pavilion at the Venice Biennale; A Short Story about A Cat, Tranzit Iash, Romania; Around About, Khalil Sakakini Cultural Centre, Ramallah; 2016: Aran Gallery, Tehran; Skånes konstförening, Lund. Khosravi-Noori lives and works in Stockholm. 64

“

CrossSections was a platform created by joint and collaborative attempts of a group of artists and a curator to re-visit the notion of research in relation to each individual artistic practice. In my view, the collaborative and dialogical characteristic of CrossSections emphasizes the necessity of long-term engagement between a group of artists to achieve collectiveness within their diverse practices.

”

BEHZAD KHOSRAVI-NOORI

A MONUMENT TO THE INVISIBLE CITIZEN Two-channel video installation, 42′00′′ and 45′00′′ 2014—ongoing presented at CrossSections_perspectives (2019), Stockholm Professor Balthazar is an inventor of sorts, hunting for devoted and deeply hilarious missions in order to solve problems. It all started with a cartoon—an impeccable representation of the golden era of the Zagreb Animation School, a studio  renowned for the children’s programme Professor Balthazar. The centrepiece of each episode is displayed in the figure of a little man, Professor Balthazar. Each time, Balthasar solves a problem for his fellow citizens with an innovative gesture that unites technology and distinctive knowledge. As the series began production in 1967, it travelled on a hy perpolitical stage of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), a multinational project that emerged in 1961 from the complex political landscape of the Cold War, aimed at achieving national sovereignty, decolonisation, antiimperialism, and a new economic world order independent of the USSR and the US. Along the way, Professor Balthasar appeared on screens across NAM countries and blossomed into a wider transnational phenomenon. Through a series of works that unearth the parallel histories between the personal and the political, Behzad Khosravi-Noori excavates beneath the surface of this character to pose questions on the future of our collective past.

Khosravi-Noori, A Monument to the Invisible Citizen. 2014. Video still 65

SYNECDOCHE, YUGOSLAVIA

BEHZAD KHOSRAVI-NOORI

SANJA HORVATINČIČ Children’s playgrounds are one of the elements of urban design that can be understood as a metaphor for the changed social conditions in post-war socialist Yugoslavia. Through the revolutionary processes that originated in the antifascist liberation struggle of the Second World War, the Yugoslav monarchist dictatorship—characterised by immense social inequalities and extreme illiteracy rates—was transformed into a socialist republic, led by the Communist Party of Yugoslavia and based on the principles of ethnic and gender equality and international solidarity. The economic growth of the country relied on collectivisation, rapid industrialisation and—following the 1948 Tito-Stalin split—on the experimental, decentralised system of workers’ self-management. Already by the mid1950s, Zagreb had over twenty children’s playgrounds—a striking contrast to the two that were built before the War.1 Public competitions and specialised conferences on children’s playgrounds were organised, while the experts advocated the need to invest more effort in the innovative design of public spaces dedicated exclusively to children. “What is most important [for a playground]”, wrote one of the experts, “is that it’s free, with no control over who arrives and when they leave, no directives as to what games, and when, the kids should play.”2 If we agree with the introductory thesis that playgrounds can be understood as a specific type of working space where labour should be measured by the amount of creativity and imagination produced and whose design and functionality needs to be reinvented in order to meet such requirements and enable better working conditions, playgrounds can be used as a metaphor for what was at stake in many other spheres of social, cultural and political life in socialist Yugoslavia. The same way the geopolitical position of Yugoslavia between the blocs enabled experimenting with an emancipatory model of workers’ self-management, and with the non-aligned alternative to the bipolar Cold War global domination, certain spheres of Yugoslav cultural production—especially those that were dissociated from the direct interests of traditional cultural institutions—were apt for experimenting with new strategies and forms that both emulated and transgressed disciplinary boundaries. Although children’s film animation and the construction of war monuments cannot be reduced to the same principle of production, they both presented fields of hybrid intersection of different aesthetic influences and fields of practice. Despite the differences in their social and political function, throughout the 1950s and 1960s, the surprising innovations in both fields emerged out of productive creative playgrounds in which various actors and specialists engaged in new forms of storytelling and reinvented the very mechanisms of creative collaboration. Almost paradoxically, storytelling as the

* This text was first published in Professor Balthazar and the Monument to the Invisible Citizen exhibition catalogue at Malmö Konstmuseum, May 2019 1. Fröhlich, Zovnimir. 1954. “Život gradskog djeteta i igralište”, Čovjek i prostor: Arhitekura, kiparstvo, slikarstvo i primjenjena umjetnost. Zagreb, I/18. p. 3. 2. Kani, Zvonimir. 1958. “Zašto dječja igrališta?”, Hortikultura: Glasilo hortikulturnog udruženja NR Hrvatske.IV/3–4. p. 9. 66

central preoccupation of Yugoslav official memory politics thus became a creative element in the experimental field of memorial production. As was the case with the Zagreb School of Animation, the system secured the necessary material preconditions for artists and architects to assimilate and play with diverse aesthetic influences, developing along the way unique methods and new functional typologies of monuments. With a literal reconstruction of Professor Balthazar’s Monument to the Invisible Citizen, a structure that appears in one of the episodes of the popular Yugoslav cartoon that was exported across the ideologically divided post-war world, Behzad Koshravi-Noori sets up a meta-narrative playground, a speculative storytelling device, a synecdochic construction. By augmenting and materialising the elements taken over from the utopian cartoonworld of Balthazargrad—the central Monument or a series of posters—he defamiliarises3 the engaged visitors in order to enhance their perception of the political, aesthetic, and narrative function of those elements. The whole environment thus becomes an amalgamation of childhood memories and various historical narratives of Yugoslav history that conditioned the production of such imaginarium in the first place, both in terms of their localised creation and global dissemination. Just as the open structure on which the Balthazar Monument is raised reveals the constructedness of the artistic process, the eerily open structure of the deteriorated antifascist monument at Petrova Gora—which, as a case study of the aforementioned experimental field of Yugoslav memorial production, appears as a motif in one of the screened documentaries—forces us to focus on the material basis on which the memorial production in Yugoslavia was based, the raw infrastructure that was supposed to secure this hybrid memory-house to function as a vehicle of perpetuating the revolutionary memory. The “children of post-communism,”4 deprived through the 1990s war and the privatisation process of the basic means of production, are forced to steal the symbols of their own emancipatory past. The decades-long neglect from the state authorities, however appalling, leaves an open question over the symbolic content this meaningful ruin should hold today. A similar question arises from the bewildering Balthazar’s Monument realised in the Swedish gallery: who are the invisible citizens at the empty pedestal on top of the monument? If the speculative (his)story of Yugoslavia—narrated through a complex and dynamic entanglement of displayed elements and actors included in Koshravi-Noori’s artistic research process, and embodied in the peculiar playground setting of the exhibition— functions as a synecdoche representing an alternative social organisation, cultural production and global politics, then these questions become universal.

3. I am referring to the artistic technique of “defamiliarisation” (rus. ostranenie), first coined by the Russian Formalist Viktor Shklovsky in 1917. 4. See: Boris Buden. 2010. “Children of Postcommunism”, Radical Philosophy. No. 159. pp. 18–25. 67

BEHZAD KHOSRAVI-NOORI

> Khosravi-Noori, Sketch for the Monument (2018) and A Monument to the Invisible Citizen, 2018. Video still. Khosravi-Noori, A Monument to the Invisible Citizen, Installation. CrossSections_perspectives (Stockholm, 2019) Photo by Başak Şenova

Boyadgian, Clogged No. 5, 2016. Watercolour and ink on paper (Detail).

BENJI BOYADGIAN Benji Boyadgian (1983, Jerusalem) studied architecture at ENSAPLV School of Architecture (L’Ecole Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture de Paris La Villette), specializing in urban sociology in post-conflict areas. Boyadgian works on research-based projects that explore themes revolving around perception, heritage, territory, architecture, and landscape. He works with multiple media, employing painting and drawing as his primary tools and site specific installations as a means of integrating into space and context. His recent exhibitions include 2019: Phantom Limbs, Jameel Arts Centre, Dubai; Shared Religious Sites, DEPO, Istanbul; Intimate Terrains, Palestinian Museum, Birzeit; Climbing Through the Tide, B7L9, KLF, Tunis, 2018: Jerusalem Show IX: Actual and possible, Al Ma’mal Foundation, Jerusalem; AQUA, Contemporary Artists and Water Issues, Isola dei Pescatori, Lago Maggiore, 2017: Sharjah Biennial 13 Offsite: Shifting Ground, Khalil Sakakini Cultural Center, Ramallah; Shared Religious Sites, Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art, Thessaloniki. Armenia Standart: Mount Anlalogue, Gyumri; Around About, Khalil Sakakini Cultural Center, Ramallah; AQUA, Contemporary Artists and Water Issues, Chateau de Penthes, Geneva and SESC Belenzinho, Sao Paolo; The Discord, Al Ma’mal Foundation and Anadeil Gallery, Jerusalem, 2016: The Jerusalem Show VIII: Before and After Origins, Al Ma’mal Foundation, Jerusalem; De lova de oss en skola, de lovade en Simhall, Skånes konstförening, Lund; Lines of Passage (in media res), the Municipal Art Gallery, Lesvos, 2015: Line, Art Rooms, Kyrenia; Stepping over the Borders, European Mediterranean Art Association (EMMA), Nicosia; Shared Religious Sites, MuCEM, Marseille, 2014: The Jerusalem Show VII: Fractures, Al Ma’mal Foundation, Jerusalem; and Curated_by: Spinning On An Axis, Mario Mauroner Contemporary Art, Vienna. He attended the Young Artists Residency Programme of Confrontation Through Art Project, organised by EMAA and Rooftop Theatre Group, Nicosia; Grant holder of Iaspis, Stockholm; and International Guest Artist, Villa Romana, Florence. Boyadgian lives and works in Jerusalem. 70

“CrossSections made me think about what it means to show

work in the research phase, to bring forth something unfinished and lacking by external standards. Putting the personal process on hold and exposing it to critique and dialogue, making it part and parcel of the process, hence part of the methodology.

”

BENJI BOYADGIAN CLOGGED Watercolours on paper, drawings on paper and video, 11′53′′ 2016—2017 presented at CrossSections_perspectives (2019), Stockholm; CrossSections_notes (2019), Helsinki

Boyadgian, Pressure Pipe N. 11, 2017. Ink on paper (Detail).

A ruin of a clogged pipe. Abandoned and devoid of projections, residues, deposits in the riddle that is archaeology. Writing a story for the second aqueduct, a collage of projected fragments collected along its path, dowsing the ghost of the water that flowed in this pipe. This water channel ceased to function about 14 centuries ago, probably due to recurrent clogging of the pressure pipe, the best-preserved trace of the higher-level aqueduct. The pipe was built by the Roman Tenth Legion at some point during the second century AD, perhaps on the ruins of a Herodian aqueduct, in order to bring water back to the upper city, re-baptised Aelia Capitolina. Its function: to climb 40 metres of topography, spanning a distance of about 2 km, permitting the water to flow the straight road to Jerusalem, a short stretch of the historic artery that was the Patriarchs’ Road. Today, this north-south vertebra is the urban highway of Hebron road. The aqueduct, spanning a distance of 13 km, connects two obsolete pools, from the south of Bethlehem to the old city of Jerusalem. In between, the continuous urban fabric forms an urban “paté” while miscellaneous infrastructures fragment the agglomeration, clogged in time and space. The genesis of Jerusalem happened around a spring at the fringe of the desert, around which a fortification was built some 5,000 years ago. Since then, the demography oscillated with the availability of water. The agglomeration as we know it today is a manifestation of the latest phase of growth that started in the 19th century. A city growing off its ancient water systems, off its ground, a fiction that is its own reflection. The spring grew into pools and aqueducts, gathering water from other sources, and ultimately into a machine pumping lakes and aquifers elsewhere to channel dreams into this insatiable city. 71

IMAGINARY JACK PERSEKIAN

BENJI BOYADGIAN

Approximately 10 y ears ago, Benji Boy adgian embarked on a journey of research and discovery of how a single point of departure, a particular interest can lead to various fields of knowledge, which mainly evolve through study and practice, as well as trial and error. His first point of departure was memory, which somehow kept on emerging as a leitmotif in most of his entire body of work. He began his journey meandering in Wad el Shami, a valley south-east of Jerusalem on the outskirts of Bethlehem. He describes his investigation as “a journey in time”, emphasizing not only the periods of history he unravels in the objects he collects and the ruins he paint—a sort of “surface archaeology” as he calls it—but the fact that the project itself and the journey is open ended, and is continuing as long as he keeps going back to that valley. He makes sure to document all he can in the valley (plants, ruins, trees, objects, light and seasons, traces of the people who have passed through and also of conflicts…) before the urban sprawl takes over the valley, erasing in its path all memory and form of life.

Boyadgian, Still Waters, 2017. Video still.

Not very far from the valley, the second (higher-level) aqueduct ran from Al Khader south of Bethlehem to Jerusalem. It ceased to carry water to Jerusalem in the 7th century AD, probably due to recurrent clogging, while parts of the stone pipe can still be seen in public and private areas. With the aid of archival maps, a number of books and academic papers, and the visible fragments of the pipe, Boyadgian was able to follow it from source to mouth, and capture its path in a video and a set of drawings that also reflect on the city of Jerusalem, as it too seems to be “clogged in time and space”. The Discord series, which is also an open-ended project, has evolved out of research and experimentation that Boyadgian conducts with colours, their materiality, and their interaction with one another. This process-based practice has informed his work on patterns 72

Boyadgian, Still Waters, 2017. Video still (Detail).

borrowed from ornamental tiles, and allowed it to develop and morph. If one notices a sort of repetition in the execution process, an allusion to mechanical reproduction, there is obviously certain mutations in the work that unravel the illusion of infinite mechanical repetition, allowing us to move between layers of time and the memory embedded in the patterned cement floor tiles that embellished homes and buildings in the latter part of the 19th century up until the mid-20th century. However, it is noticeable in this series how he has utilised chance to the benefit of the work, allowing these deviations and mishaps to lead to other relationships and patterns unforeseen in the beginning, yet bringing about new relationships and possibilities. His research-based practice opened the doors for experimentation with different substances, surfaces, forms and scales, as well as various materials such as pigments, paper, canvas, video, mirrors, lenses, steel, and concrete. Yet, what seems to drive Boyadgian is his pursuit of the image that provokes the imaginary unbound by limitations and prohibitions, not framed by ideologies and narratives, and not defined by race and creed. His work gravitates above the tired dialectics of conflict, into strata of archaeology, history, philosophy, architecture, and art. These and other areas of study inform the work as it evolves from concept to manifestation, providing along the way other ideas with leads and possibilities; an ongoing process that has defined his practice and gave meaning to his long journey of research and discovery. 73

BENJI BOYADGIAN

> Boyadgian, Clogged N. 1, 3, 5, 7, 2017. Water Colour and Ink on paper. Boyadgian, Pressure Pipe N. 4, 2017. Ink on paper (Detail). Photos by Başak Şenova and Inma Herrera

BENJI BOYADGIAN & BEHZAD KHOSRAVI-NOORI

Boyadgian & Khosravi-Noori, The Owls, The Queen, and The Maquettiste, Installation. CrossSections_notes (Vienna, 2018) Boyadgian & Khosravi-Noori, The Owls, The Queen, and The Maquettiste. Installation. CrossSections_intervals (Vienna, 2018) Boyadgian &Khosravi-Noori, The Owls, The Queen, and The Draftsman. Installation. CrossSections_intensities (Vienna, 2018) Photos by Başak Şenova and Petri Summanen

THE OWLS, THE QUEEN AND THE DRAFTSMAN Archival material and Khosravi-Noori , 12′30′′ 2017—ongoing presented at CrossSections_intensities (2018), Vienna The starting point of the project juxtaposes four clocks, built between the late 19th and early 20th century in Iran and Palestine, as subjects of comparative analysis. The research-based project attempts, by fictional methodology, to touch upon the complex subjects of colonial memory, urban myths, memoirs, and the technology of time to bring forth the multiplicity of historical and transparent fictional narratives from two geopolitical conditions. Through a dialogical collaboration, we attempt to destabilise historical narratives within the context of conflictual histories that are under the permanent shadow of hegemonic discourses.

Boyadgian & Khosravi-Noori, The Owls, The Queen, and The Maquettiste, 2019. Video stills.

THE OWLS, THE QUEEN, AND THE MAQUETTISTE Photographs, documentation material, and HD video, 22′30′′ 2018 presented at CrossSections_intervals (2018); Vienna; CrossSections_notes (2019), Helsinki A tale about time. The project attempts, by means of collage, to narrate and fictionalise the story of three clock towers in Tehran and Jerusalem in relation to colonial history, architecture, and Middle Eastern geopolitics. A video essay narrates a tale, a fictional dialogue between two Owls and a ‘Maquettiste’ (model maker) inventing new appearances for Owls. The starting point of the project juxtaposes three clock towers in their territorialities, built between the late 19th and early 20th century in Tehran and Jerusalem, as subjects of comparative analysis. A new territory is suggested where the clocks exist in the same time and space. Fictional historiography in this project originates from the role of the nonhuman in urban mythology in the Iranian context. Factual historiography stems from the archival material collected; photographs, film, texts, all revolving around the subject and its memory. The Owls serve as a signifier of mythological value, and the Maquettiste: the human condition in its banality. The non-human and human protagonists shed a light on the question of factuality of fiction as well as fictionality of fact in colonial history and its materiality. Through a dialogical collaboration, we attempt to destabilise historical narratives within the context of conflictual histories and hyperpoliticised social environment that are under the permanent shadow of hegemonic discourses. 77

BENJI BOYADGIAN & BEHZAD KHOSRAVI-NOORI REGULATING TIME: THE OWLS, THE QUEEN, AND THE MAQUETTISTE* BAŞAK ŞENOVA THE OWLS AND THE QUEEN As important as creating a movement is maintaining its momentum. In extending our movement to the past, you have intensified its forward momentum. In addition, you have shown that our forbears were both revolutionary and modern. No one can begrudge his past forever. Is history material only for critical thought? 1 Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar During one of their discussions in 2017, Boyadgian and Khosravi-Noori directed their attention to landmarks in Tehran and Jerusalem infused with significant historical meaning and resonance. They realised during this conversation that the substance of their research and collaborative methodology pivoted upon the concept of ‘time’. They decided to focus on clock towers given and destroyed by Great Britain in both cities, and to allow the histories behind each to direct the pathway for their research and the development of a new collaborative work. This project presented; A tale about time… [it] attempts by means of collage to narrate and fictionalise the story of three clock towers in Iran and Palestine in relation to colonial history, architecture and Middle Eastern geopolitics. A video essay narrates a tale, a fictional dialogue between two owls and a maquettiste. The starting point of the project juxtaposes three clock towers…built between the late nineteenth and early twentieth century in Tehran and Jerusalem, as subjects of comparative analysis. A new territory is suggested where the clocks exist in the same time and space.2 During his visit to the United Kingdom in 1873, Naser al-Din Shah Qajar of Iran was appointed a Knight of the Order of the Garter by Queen Victoria. The Queen further presented him with a large two-faced clock with the wish that the people of Tehran could ‘keep time’ accurately.3 Naser al-Din ordered the clock tower, the Edifice of the Sun (Shams-ol-Emâreh), to be built on the Golestan Palace (the official residence of the Qajar dynasty). According to some oral histories, the volume of the clock was so loud that it disturbed the harem, pregnant women miscarried and the frail suffered heart attacks. In response, the Shah ordered the sound of the clock to be lowered by covering it in felt; but it stopped working. The clock was repaired after the Shah’s assassination, but broke down again in 1925. Ninety years later, it was repaired once more, only to stop working again after ten months. In 1907, a fourteenmetre-high white limestone clock tower was built by (the 34th Sultan) Abdül Hamid II in

* This text is an excerpt from Başak Şenova’s article “Regulating Time: The Owls, The Queen, and The Maquettiste” in di’van | A Journal of Accounts. Art | Culture | Theory. (2018). No 5, pp. 82—93. 1. Tanpınar, Ahmet Hamdi. (2013). The Time Regulation Institute. Trans. Maureen Freely and Alexander Dawee. London: Penguin Modern Classics. p. 314. 2.The project text provided by Benji Boyadgian. 3. Amanat, Abbas. 2017. Iran: A Modern History. New Haven & London: Yale University Press, p. 289. 78

Jerusalem. In the Ottoman Empire, from Anatolia to Damascus, sixty-three clock towers were built and this was one of the most significant examples of an imperial symbol for mastering time, and as a meeting point for Ottoman authorities to communicate with and make announcements to the local population.4 As an indication of the Ottoman modernisation period, both Arabic and Latin numbers appeared on these clocks.5 When the British Mandate became effective in 1923, the civilian governor, Sir Ronald Storrs, claiming to maintain Jerusalem’s historical appearance, had the tower demolished, supposedly for being incompatible with the architectural style of the Old City Wall. Following violent public objections, Storrs built a small tower with the clock in Allenby Square outside the Jaffa Gate. When there were further complaints, Storrs was forced to dismantle this tower and transfer the clock to the British Museum in London.6 Boyadgian and Khosravi-Noori take these three clock towers, which were gifted and/ or demolished by the British, as a conceptual focal point for their project, accumulating various narratives, documents and architectural elements. Referencing a colonial past, personal stories, architecture and geopolitics of the Middle East, The Owls, The Queen, and The Maquettiste (2018) is a collage of collision points and associations in a fable format. The video mimics the artists’ dialogical interactions, and narrates a fictional dialogue between an owl and a maquettiste (model maker). Fictional historiography in this project originates from the role of the nonhuman in urban mythology in the Iranian context. Factual historiography stems from the archival material collected; photographs, film, texts, all revolving around the subject and its memory. The owl serves as a signifier of mythological value, and the maquettiste, the human condition in its banality. The nonhuman and human protagonists shed a light on the question of factuality of fiction as well as fictionality of fact, in colonial history its materiality. Through a dialogical collaboration, we attempt to destabilise historical narratives within the context of conflictual histories and hyperpoliticised social environments that are under the permanent shadow of hegemonic discourses.7 This magical and fictitious domain invites instinctive interpretations and new expectations that challenge perceptions of the viewer, quite removed from what one would expect with the same references and source material. Its inquest targets the importance of its endeavour to open up a new visual perspective on the accumulation of images projected onto an overpoliticised space. For example, Jerusalem is a site overwhelmed by already established images and narratives. How can the artist propose a visual representation of something that might construct its own identity; how might that be perceived with the prescriptive conventions of reading a contemporary art practice?

4. Tütüncü, Mehmet. 2016. “Filistin ve İsrail’deki Saat Kuleleri” [Clock Towers in Palestine and Turkey]. Collected Studies 1, p. 27. 5. Acun, Hakkı. 2011. “Osmanlı İmparatorluğu Saat Kuleleri” [Clock Towers of The Ottoman Empire] Ankara: Atatürk High Council of Culture, Language and History, Atatürk Culture Centre Publication: 402, p. 171. 6. Simon Goldhill. 2009. Jerusalem: City of Longing. Cambridge MA: Harvard Uni. Press: 146—147. 7. The project text provided by Benji Boyadgian. 79

THE MAQUETTISTE

BENJI BOYADGIAN & BEHZAD KHOSRAVI-NOORI

We are indeed engaged in work, and work that is vital. Work is a matter of mastering one’s time, knowing how to use it. We are paving the way for such a philosophy. We’ll give our people a consciousness of time. We’ll create a whole new collection of adages and ideas, and spread them all over the country.8 Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar Boyadgian and Khosravi-Noori consider any definition based on established geopolitical origins as a problematic approach, and accordingly, draw a parallel line to modes of categorisation that affect artistic research, production, and its reception. This methodology emerges as a strategic move to sidestep what is being dictated and encoded by central discourses of contemporary art. Classifications that define anyone as ‘other’ certainly exclude inclusiveness or any common denominators. In this context, Boyadgian and Khosravi-Noori offer a simple gesture and modest attempt to remove Jerusalem and Tehran from their respective existences as sites of individual significance, their aim being to deconstruct such a classification by shifting the position of interpretation. As KhosraviNoori notes in their project statement, an environment that is imagined by its signifiers is a “hyperpoliticised” environment.9 This criterion relates to Barthes’ notion of mythical signifiers and their formation in his 1972 book Mythologies: “When it becomes form, the meaning leaves its contingency behind; it empties itself, it becomes impoverished, history evaporates, only the letter remains. There is here a paradoxical permutation in the reading operations, an abnormal regression from meaning to form, from the linguistic sign to the mythical signifier.”10 From this perspective, their project feeds from these manifestations; these “hyperpoliticised” environments are hence built by images stripped of their content. Such an approach raises a further critical question concerning autonomy: how can the artist produce an autonomous work by using the same sources, when they already contain so much consumed and clichéd information? By apposing two cities with their complex historical, political, social, psychological and economical references, The Owl, The Queen, and The Maquettiste diverts the audience’s attention from prescribed knowledge towards a fictional narrative with new associations, constructing a unique world of reflections— through this fable, Boyadgian and Khosravi-Noori succeed in translating elements of their research in a unique and poetic way. The owls have symbolic connotations—there is significant literature and mythology over centuries in various geographic regions centred upon owls. In ancient Greece, Athena was the goddess of wisdom and owls nested on the Acropolis where she lived; they were associated with the goddess and knowledge.11 In one African culture, the owl is either a sign of evil, mostly associated with a messenger that brings sickness or even death to the

8. Tanpınar, Ahmet Hamdi. 2013. The Time Regulation Institute. Maureen Freely and Alexander Dawee trans, London: Penguin Modern Classics, p. 259. 9. Benji Boyadgian and Behzad Khosravi-Noori, “The Owls, The Queen and The Maquettiste”, CrossSections_Intervals Exhibiton Guide, Kunsthalle Exnergasse, Vienna, 2018, p. 9. 10. Barthes, Roland. 1972. Mythologies. Trans. Annette Lavers. New York: Hill and Wang, p. 116. 11. Brooks, James. 1991. ‘The Enigmatic Owl’, American Birds. Berkeley CA: UC Press, p. 382. 80

Photographic documents from the project’s research archive

observer, or involved in sorcery.12 In Shakespeare’s plays the appearance of an owl indicates the foreshadowing of death.13 In The Owls, The Queen, and The Maquettiste, the owls are appropriated from an urban myth in Tehran. Iranian writer Jafar Shahri states in Old Tehran (1978), “There are owls in the clock tower. Each time that they appear immense political change will arise. So far twice… it is rumoured that after the Naser al-Din Shah assassination they appeared for three days.” Countering both rumour and myth he continued: “I saw them myself on Sunday, 7 September 1941 for three days. Reza Shah resigned. [The] Allies occupied Tehran.”14 Throughout the film’s narrative, the maquettiste is haunted and possessed by the orders from the owls and works strenuously to regulate time for everyone, though he aspires to be the architect of his own desires. One can clearly and amusingly detect the logic and its path that Boyadgian and Khosravi-Noori have been experimenting with and creating for him.

12. Cocker, Mark and Heimo Mikkola,. 2000. “Owl beliefs in Africa”. Owls and Traditional Culture in Africa, Volume VMIV, Tyto, p. 174. 13. Rao., Yogananda. 2016. ‘What the Birds Tell: Reading Shakespeare’s Macbeth through the Bird Imagery’, International Journal of Academic Research Vol. 3, Issue 7 (1), 2016, p. 131. http://ijar.org.in/stuff/issues/v3-i7(1)/v3-i7(1)-a021.pdf 14. Shahri, Jafar. 1992. Tehran-e Qadim [The Old Tehran] vol. 3 and 4, Tehran: Moien (in Persian). 81

BRONWYN LACE Bronwyn Lace (1980, Botswana) completed her Bachelor of Arts in Fine Arts at the University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg in 2004. Site-specificity is one of the things that stirs her imagination into life. Lace focuses her practice on the relationships between art and other fields, including physics, museum practice, and philosophy. She elects to work with found, recycled, and re-purposed elements and often builds her intricate installations responsively and in situ. Lace’s exhibitions include 2019 CrossSections exhibitions and Climbing Through the Tide, a group exhibition curated by Başak Senova traveling from Tunis, Tunisia to Stockholm, Sweden to Helsinki, Finland; 2018: MIRROR | MIRROR, a solo exhibition at Everard Read, Johannesburg, South Africa; 2017: Bred in the Bone, a solo exhibition at Circa, Cape Town, South Africa; Dead Gardens, a group show curated by Olimpia Bera, Cluj Napoca, Romania; 2016: KulturKontakt, a group exhibition as part of the Austrian Federal Chancellery 2016 residency, Vienna, Austria; Bronze, Steel and Stone, group exhibition at Everard Read, London, UK; 2015: Response, a two person exhibition, Johannesburg, South Africa; Response, an exhibition presentation delivered at the National Smithsonian Museum of African Art, Washington, USA; 2014: Teeming, solo exhibition at SpekePhotographic, Johannesburg, South Africa; 2013: Resuscitate, solo exhibition at Nirox Project Space, Johannesburg, South Africa; 2012: A Tendency Towards Complexity, solo exhibition at CIRCA on Jellico, Johannesburg, RSA. In 2013, Lace co-completed a commissioned book and film related to collaborative community projects she has co-initiated in South Africa. Lace is currently the co-director of The Centre for the Less Good Idea, an interdisciplinary incubator space for the arts based in Johannesburg, South Africa. Founded by William Kentridge, the Centre creates and supports experimental, collaborative and crossdisciplinary arts projects. Lace lives and works in Vienna, Austria.

SKINNED IV Gold leafed ostrich vertebra and skull, resin cast and gold leaf human pelvis 2018 presented at CrossSections_potentials (2018), Vienna STAINED AND ENGORGED IV Calligraphy ink on Fabriano paper 2017 presented at CrossSections_potentials (2018), Vienna BREATH Ink drawings 2017 presented at CrossSections_potentials (2018), Vienna 82

“CrossSections has established both physical and immaterial

spaces for me to pursue my processes. The opportunity to manifest my impulses and ideas alongside other artists from across the world, while simultaneously being held and challenged by a deeply committed curator is rare.

”BRONWYN LACE

FEAST AND FAMINE I Digital prints and stitched gold thread, skinned barn owl and carrion beetles 2017 presented at CrossSections_potentials (2018), Vienna MIRROR MIRROR 4 Channel video installation 5′45′′ , Soundtrack by South African composers and vocalists Nhlanhla Mahlangu and Xolisile Bongwana, Cinematography by Victor Neustetter, Editing by Noah Cohen 2018 presented at CrossSections_intervals(2018), Vienna Mirror Mirror is a video installation based on a film created in the basement of the Natural History Museum in Vienna. The film is drawn from thousands of time-lapse images taken in the museum’s basement, which were captured every minute over a period of three days, of a possi of Dermestes maculatus (carrion beetle) feasting on a barn owl. The resulting video is combined with sounds of mourning composed by South African composers and vocalists Nhlanhla Mahlangu and Xolisile Bongwana. PASSAGES LOST Double Pelvis Bronze Cast On Acrylic Plinth 2018 presented at CrossSections_perspectives (2019), Stockholm; and CrossSections_notes (2019), Helsinki COLLAPSE Video, 2′00′′ 2019 presented at CrossSections_perspectives (2019), Stockholm; and CrossSections_notes (2019), Helsinki If the skull is the seat of thought, the pelvis is the seat of passion, the birthing point, a place of sensuality and sexuality. Antithesis is always a certainty—daunting as the human condition. These transient and transitional carriers of life are concerned with the theme of transition, giving form to mired and illuminated thresholds. Neither complex nor simple, a merging and union occurs in Lace’s making of Passages Lost and Collapse. Both works are stripped of flesh, intensifying the material and the void. BRED IN THE BONE Stills from 1′30′′ time-lapse film 2016—2017 presented at CrossSections_potentials (2018), Vienna Lace created Bred in the Bone, an accelerated time-lapse video, lasting a minute and thirty seconds of carrion beetles frenetically feasting on the flesh of a gasping owl in Vienna. This sequence conjures up the lunacy of hunger and entrapment, even desire. 83

ASCENSION Sculptural installation 2014—2015 presented at CrossSections_potentials (2018), Vienna

BRONWYN LACE

In 2015, in response to the death of friend and mentor Neels Coetzee, Lace created ‘Ascension’, the first work towards the exhibition ‘Response’, a posthumous meditation. Lace’s connection to Coetzee’s life and work runs deep. Although she was never taught by him, she came to know him well in the final years of his life and was present at the time of his death. Ascension was inspired by the memory of Coetzee’s hair being caressed as he was dying. This memory and the notion of spirit intertwine in the interplay of silver gut and light, gesturing toward the idea of transcendence or metamorphosis.

Lace, Mirror Mirror. Installation (Detail). CrossSections_intervals, Vienna (2019)

PASSAGES Resin cast pelvis and gold thread 2015 presented at CrossSections_potentials (2018), Vienna Lace’s portrayal of the experience of losing her friend emanates from a focus on the head, which links the work of both artists. For Coetzee, the skull is the locus of transmutation. In Lace’s response, the pelvis is the birthing point for transformation/new possibilities. The pelvis is rendered with light. Its fragility, yet steady illumination, brings comfort and release. BREATH Ink drawings 2017 presented at CrossSections_potentials (2018), Vienna When Lace begins a session in studio, she often employs a type of meditation to settle the mind and focus the body. This meditation involves creating breath drawings with calligraphy ink on cotton paper. Lace is interested in the physical manifestation of breath; the intricacy and delicacy of the line reflects a quality and complexity of the respiratory system. The sound component was composed collaboratively by Lace and South African musicians Nhlanhla Mahlangu and Xolisile Bongwana. The composition comes directly from fragmented recollections of sounds during funerals and mourning periods of loved one for all three artists. 84

Lace, Mirror Mirror, Installation. CrossSections_intervals, (Vienna, 2018) Photos by Başak Şenova and Matthias Bildstein

BRONWYN LACE

MIRROR MIRROR KOULLA XINISTERIS

Mirror Mirror is a video installation, drawn from an original 1.5-minute time-lapse video piece created in the basement of the Natural History Museum in Vienna in mid-2016. Over a period of 5 days, a photograph was taken every minute capturing the Dermestes maculatus (carrion beetle) frenetically feasting on the flesh of a gasping Tyto alba (barn owl). Manipulation of this footage has resulted in a video piece together with a sound component, created collaboratively by meditating on the sounds of humans mourning by South African composers and vocalists Nhlanhla Mahlangu and Xolisile Bongwana.

A detail from Bronwyn Lace’s studio table, 2019. Photo by Zivanai Matangi

It is Browyn Lace’s preoccupation to transform and use the darker elements of life—death and decay, abandon and neglect—as material ingredients to foster in-between spaces to portray the fragile and vulnerable. Lace uses raw material from the world of nature, bits of species, gut, light, insects, eggs, and bones—bones bled of blood—the remnants of life, the dead; she then tries to resuscitate spirit as a way to a road that leads on. Lace is interested in rendering the invisible visible, thereby grounding it—however fragile, elusive and mysterious it may be. Mirror Mirror explores relationships between body and mind, the body of the owl and its relationship to flesh eaters, a process of flesh-devouring flesh. Lace’s observations of nature continue to feed into her fascination with the processes and mysteries of life, death, destruction and seduction. This installation conjures up the lunacy of hunger and entrapment—even desire, and highlights the dank underbelly of gestation simultaneous to decomposition. Antithesis is always a certainty—as daunting as the human condition. And these transient and transitional carriers of life culminate in altars for the dead. Lace is centrally concerned with the theme of transition, giving form to mired and illuminated thresholds. Neither complex nor simple, she attempts to strip her thoughts of ‘flesh’, thereby intensifying the material and the void. 86

Bronwyn Lace, The Bred in the Bone, 2017. Photography Series. C-Print.

BRONWYN LACE

Lace, Mirror Mirror, 2017. Video stills.

Lace, Collapse, 2019, Video and Passage Lost, 2019. Double Pelvis Bronze Cast On Acrylic Plinth Installation and details. CrossSections_notes (Helsinki, 2019) Photos by Inma Herrera and Petri Summanen

Kurbak, Chronolace Studies, (Details). CrossSections_perspectives, Konstfack (Stockholm, 2019)

EBRU KURBAK Ebru Kurbak (1977, Izmir) received her Master’s degree in Architecture from Istanbul Technical University (2002). Kurbak lectured at the Departments of Visual Communication Design, and Photography & Video at Istanbul Bilgi University (2003–2006), and the Department of Space & Design Strategies at the University of Arts and Industrial Design in Linz (2007–2013). She worked at the University of Applied Arts Vienna as Project Leader (PI) of the four-year arts-based research project Stitching Worlds (2014–2018). In her work, Kurbak is driven by her interest in the hidden political nature of everyday spaces, technologies and routines, and how the design of the ordinary is involved in shaping individual and societal values, practices, and ideologies. Kurbak carried out artistic residencies at La Gaité Lyrique (Paris), LABoral (Gijon), V2_ (Rotterdam), and EYEBEAM (NY). She has shown her work at international platforms such as the Ars Electronica Festival (Linz), ZKM (Karlsruhe), Siggraph (USA), Microwave New Media Arts Festival (Hong Kong), File Festival (São Paulo), Piksel Festival (Bergen), Istanbul Design Biennial, and the MAK – Museum of Applied Arts (Vienna). Kurbak received the Erste Bank ExtraVALUE Design Award in 2015, the LACMA Art + Technology Grant in 2019, and was recently awarded a four-year Elise Richter PEEK fellowship by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF). Kurbak lives and works in Vienna. 90

“CrossSections was like a playground where I could play

“process” at all times, even whilst setting up for the exhibitions, and among some brilliant and very generous artists. EBRU KURBAK

”

LACING WAVES Mixed Media 2018 presented at CrossSections_intervals (2018), Vienna Lacing Waves is an artistic research process which unfolded through revisiting the broader theme and ideas explored in a former work entitled Data Catchers (2012). Data Catchers was conceptualised as a series of speculative archaeology objects that addressed the microelectromagnetic space around the human body—a space that had emerged with the rise of the use of mobile communication devices. Considering that this invisible space was in fact a valuable real estate which had been increasingly invaded with various intentions back then, such as commercial interests in targeted marketing and governmental interests in surveillance, the idea was to use this space alternatively as a site for critical and artistic intervention. Data Catchers are speculative subversive instruments. They are meant for capturing ambient data propagated by electromagnetic waves. The instruments are products of fine and exhausting handcraft, representing an overwhelming thirst for information. Each catcher involves a hand crocheted net made of conductive metallic threads crocheted at a particular mesh size. The different mesh sizes of the nets are engineered to capture data at particular wavelengths. Lacing Waves stems from both the material and speculative components of this former work. As material investigation, the study treats the immaterial electromagnetic waves as an artistic medium and as material, whereas handcrafted textile structures made of metallic fibres are seen as potential tools and a method to manipulate that medium. As speculative inquiry, it engages with imaginary technological histories that attribute a central role to fibre crafts and craftswomen. Imagined as an open-ended hands-on experimental process, the project opens up a space between history, ethnography, fiction, and creative material inquiry. Lacing Waves, both as process and outcome, intends to disrupt hard-coded assumptions on what constitutes technology and who rates as a technician.

CHRONOLACE STUDIES Installation with objects, handmade lace, mirror, and various apparatus 2019 CrossSections_perspectives (2019), Stockholm; and CrossSections_notes (2019), Helsinki Chronolace Studies explores the potentials of handmade lace as a medium for the early precinema devices and excavates technologies that could have been invented, but never were. The material investigation addresses the often-underestimated implications of socially constructed gendering of materials and practices, and the historical exclusion of women and women’s work from official sites of tinkering and invention. 91

INTERSECTING DIMENSIONS: CHRONOLACE STUDIES

EBRU KURBAK

BAŞAK ŞENOVA Chronolace Studies unfolds a parallel methodology between engineering and lace making by revealing the distribution of power across geographical locations, skill groups, material resources, and genders within a historical perspective. Ebru Kurbak has a long history of investigating the links between technical knowledge and traditional forms of the precarious women’s labour of needlework. Nonetheless, with Chronolace Studies, this comparative inquiry of overlapping links spins out into two directions: (1) the act of producing; and (2) presentation modes. Chronolace Studies explores handmade lace as a medium for devices that were used by the precursors of film mostly through stroboscopic principles. Not only does the act of producing—making lace through crocheting—go through the same production phases of developing a technological device originating from the techniques of (pre-)cinema, but the presentation modes for viewing are also revealed by the project. By following the footsteps of media-archaeology, which cognises emerging media through close examination of the past, Kurbak opens up a new critical discourse based on observing and practicing feminised skills in light of the technological advancements in history. The most striking outcome of this attempt is the exposure of the “lapse” in the acknowledgment and recognition of precarious women’s labour. Going a step further, Chronolace Studies manifests how women have been ignored in the big picture of technological history by being depoliticised and controlled through male-dominant traditional values, roles, and perception associated with the subordinate position of women. Kurbak enriches the content of the projects through numerous historical, social, political, cultural, and economic references from Turkey—where she was raised—along with her individual migration history of facing various geographical locations. The political dimensions of materiality and textiles have emerged in her work during her architectural studies. She explores political dimensions of seemingly mundane things by highlighting research, invention, and display of information as political processes. Chronolace Studies communicates some of these diverse references in multiple layers. The work provides cultural readings (through the crochet techniques); historical overlapping (through the components of the work, such as reference books embedded in the installation); and production-based knowledge (through the method of creating and sharing an archive by demonstrating samples of lace). She combines different types of production processes regardless of whether they are analogue or digital; traditional or innovative; old or new. In this respect, she shuffles and dislocates contexts, products, and “knowledge” by re-placing, re-framing, and re-locating the act of lace making and the conventions of using lacework in the context of technology and “image production”. Kurbak sees it as a continuous open-ended material research process that deals with implications; and furthermore, she asserts it as reinterpreting an existing spatial structure in gender politics, which suggests a potential to challenge the accredited social order at large. 92

Kurbak, Data Catchers, Installation. CrossSections_intervals (Vienna, 2018) Kurbak, Lacing Waves (Details), Installation. CrossSections_intervals (Vienna, 2018) Photos by Başak Şenova

EBRU KURBAK

> Kurbak, Chronolace Studies (Details). CrossSections_perspectives, (Stockholm, 2019) Photos by Başak Şenova and Inma Herrera

Oddo, “Repository of Actions”, “Splitter (The prototype)”, and documentary photographs of her research CrossSections_perspectives (Stockholm, 2019). Photo by Inma Herrera

EGLE ODDO Egle Oddo (1975, Palermo) received her Abitur in Classical Studies (1994), Palermo, then continued her studies in the Department of Paining, Academy of Fine Arts (1998), Palermo and the Polytechnic of Fine Arts in Valencia. She completed her MA at the Academy of Fine Arts, Palermo in 2001. Her work focuses on linear and non-linear narration as an art form. Interested in operational realism meant as the presentation of the functional sphere in an aesthetic arrangement and its inter-relations, she combines photography, moving image, installation, sculpture, environmental art, and experimental live art. In her pieces, industrial production morphs towards delicate handcraft, life forms appear and emerge out of sculptures and objects, film photography appropriate digital images, selected trash mixes with fashion, precious edible minerals and ancestral recipes are served as part of ritual meals. Her work was presented at international biennials, museums and relevant institutions, as well as independent alternative spaces and events: Venice Biennale, Baltic Biennale, Casablanca Biennale, Transmediale, MACRO Asilo, Biennial of Mediterranean Archipelago, Là-bas Biennale. In 2006, she founded the Namastic Art Collective. She is chair of Pixelache Transdisciplinary Platform for Experimental Art, Research and Activism. She is a board member of the Myymälä2 gallery. She is a member of the MUU Association of Artists and of the Maatiainen Association for the Protection of Local Species in Finland. Oddo lives and works in Helsinki. 96

“I enjoy working in close relation with other colleagues, but

nowadays most relationships are dealt with digitally with scarce direct contact. Through CrossSections, I could cultivate relations with other artists, get to know their practice directly from the source. It is very valuable to have true peer-to-peer exchange between artists—a very rare access in a contemporary art project.

”

EGLE ODDO

SPLITTER (The study prototype and the performance) Wood, canvas, hinges, sketches on paper 2018—work in progress presented at CrossSections_intensities (2018), Vienna SPLITTER (The second prototype) Wood, canvas, hinges, sketches on paper 2018—work in progress presented at CrossSections_intervals (2018), Vienna SPLITTER (The prototype) Wood, canvas, hinges, documentary photographs 2018—2019 presented at CrossSections_perspectives (2019), Stockholm; CrossSections_notes (2019), Helsinki Egle Oddo started to work on a device to split visual perception while performing. This device, besides functioning as a board-game for a single player, aims at mimicking an internal dilemma about political identity and the lack of depth and perspective of dualistic thinking. The idea for this work was born out of a conversation with artist Ricarda Denzer during the Vienna Core Meeting. Oddo saw Denzer filling the squares of her notebook pages forming patterns, and it made her think of the classic naval battle game. Oddo felt Denzer was somehow playing the game alone. Oddo started to imagine ways to distract and split the perception in order to be able to play the game between the two halves of one person’s brain. This initial intuition led her to think of individuality as the result of continuous conflicts and war between different instances. She felt that in general, political ideologies might represent an incoherent and conflictual stage for action from the point of view of a divided and pointillist individuality. REPOSITORY OF ACTIONS Performance-installation 10 jars with materials containing wood dust, human hair and skin, iron rust, clay, vegetal germplasm, a rope, and a twisted piece of metal. 2017—2019 presented at CrossSections_perspectives (2019), Stockholm; CrossSections_notes (2019), Helsinki Containers and objects are the material residuals left after different action performances. They constitute a repository and a diary of Oddo’s actions performed between 2017—2019, during the CrossSections project. For Oddo, attempting to foresee the further results of her actions is a major preoccupation. The act of collecting the residuals of her performances constitutes a method to analyse the consequences, read the traces. 97

EGLE ODDO

SPLITTER LORI ADRAGNA

Going back over the genesis of Egle Oddo’s artwork Splitter, the root of the performative machine she created immediately leaps to the eyes, like a spirited assumption. Oddo states that: “During an encounter between artists (...), I noticed that the Viennese artist Ricarda Denzer was blackening the squares on a sheet of her notebook with a pencil, as if she was playing naval battle by herself.” In the artist’s inspiration, we can see in metaphor a reference to the obsession of Duchamp for the game of chess and for the chessboard, with the inherent white-black dualism, which in psychoanalysis is present as the container— refuge of psycho-emotional drives. Here, it becomes the privileged setting of relationships, a symbolic space in which to move, monitor, and evolve conflicts.

Oddo, performing the Splitter in her studio. Photo by Jan Ahlstedt (Helsinki, 2018)

Many of the contemporary arts, starting from the historical avant-gardes, have a relational bond and make reference to the fields and structures of games, attracted by their inclinations, forms, methods, and logics. Just think of Dadaism, more an attitude towards art and life than a real style, which influenced successive artistic movements such as surrealism and the neo-dada Fluxus group, raising fundamental questions about the mechanisms underlying the aesthetic event. The Dada breaks into the century marked by the First World War as a sort of provocative and irreverent game that tends to shatter patterns, break down stereotypes, disobey rules, and cut ties with the past. These ferments have contributed to forever changing the conception of art, revolutionising its cultural bases. And today too, conditioned by powerful factors, the market, financial conjunctures, and the threats to freedom of expression, similar concepts emerge in the search for contemporary artists to 98

give them a body. The beginning of the last century presented similar conjunctures as the period we are living in, where different types of languages are melting together and the machine is influencing and mediating them. Duchamp’s useless machines, like the readymade or the language games and related performances, are devices that reveal the instrumentality of thought. They function by non-rational logics and out of the common use, breaking the causal thread between objects and events. They put the spectator in front of a time-space dimension different from what one is used to grasping with the senses in everyday life. Philosopher Thierry De Duve writes about the readymade as paradigmatic works, able to highlight some crucial problems linked to the very status of art and the artist in the contemporary age. In Oddo’s device, the game is intended as a set of rules that cannot be reversed, as a tool to expose internal conflicts­—arising from personal struggles and global problems—revealing their existence in the actions and behaviour of any individual, as well as in political and social dynamics. A necessary condition for the individual’s psychological autonomy is, in fact, disobedient behaviour, as a result of the perception of possible alternatives to the dominant context. Disobedience seen as collective action finds its decipherment in responsible and participatory choices that can change the rules or some characteristics of the status quo. “Another aspect that I have infused in the work is the idea of boycott, revolution, and disobedience as an intrinsic rule”, Oddo says. Perception reflects the active comparison between sensory input and internal predictions, and it allows us to understand a broader concept: awareness of our environment arises only when sensory inputs violate the expectations. Since in many games sight is involved as the main sense, the artist has decided to work on a device capable of dividing the visual perception during the performance. She created a series of mobile prototypes: screens of various materials, balsa, cloth, paper—depending on the stage of the work­­—to be placed on a table. Unlike the usual board placed parallel to the eyes in front of the player, the Splitter screen is placed perpendicularly and between the eyes of the player. Made up with several segments connected with tiny hinges, it is juxtaposed following the profile of the face and body, from the forehead to the chest of who is performing the action. During the game, the player can close one eye at a time, completely excluding the field of vision and the part of their own body beyond the screen. They can alternate the movements of one hand and the other to interact with the objects or write on one of the papers arranged on each side of the screen, so as to assume the role of two competing players. “As I see it”, commented Oddo, “when you start playing with this performative machine, after a while you are tempted to make fun of yourself, or to create pitfalls for yourself. An experience that summarizes the existential and historical spirit of the time.” The temporary split that the author and the active audience experience during the performance is subjected, contended, enmeshed in the logic of vision. Art becomes an instrument of awareness, a moment of playful criticism of the real world. The subjectivity of perception implies the coexistence of each one’s own measure of the world, and the communication of these various measures defines reality. Oddo’s proposal is of a perpetual confrontation; a dialectic devoted to a greater understanding and unveiling of ourselves and of what surrounds us, on the basis of a total openness to the multi-reality that in fact exists. 99

EGLE ODDO

> Oddo, Splitter (The prototype) and Repository of Actions, Interactive installation. CrossSections_notes (Helsinki, 2019) Oddo, Repository of Actions, Interactive installation. CrossSections_intensitites (Vienna, 2018) Photos by Başak Şenova

Amin, Operation Sunken Sea: Portrait of Woman as Dictator I, 2018 Archival B/W print (Detail).

HEBA Y. AMIN Heba Y. Amin (1980, Cairo) received her Master of Arts degree in New Media Art and Interactive Design at the University of Minnesota. She is a lecturer at Bard College Berlin and doctorate fellow in Art History at Freie Universitaet. Amin’s work is embedded in extensive research and a studio practice that looks at the convergence of politics, technology, and architecture. Working with various media, her work highlights and engages with narratives of national sovereignty, often in contested territories and especially questions methodological assumptions embedded within Western historiography. She is particularly interested in tactics of subversion and other techniques used to undermine systems as well as topics related to critical spatial practice. Amin has had recent exhibitions at the Böttcherstrasse Prize Exhibition, MAXXI Museum, 10th Berlin Biennale, 15th Istanbul Biennale, Karachi Biennale KB17, 11th African Biennale Photography, 12th Dak’Art Biennale, Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, and Berlin Berlinale 9th Forum Expanded Exhibition. She also has an extensive repertoire in public speaking and has published several works. Amin has received many awards, including the Anni and Heinrich Sussmann Artist Award and the Rhizome Commissions grant. She is a fellow at Field of Vision founded by Oscarwinning director Laura Poitras and a recent resident artist at the renowned Künstlerhaus Bethananien residency programme in Berlin. Furthermore, Amin is also one of the artists behind the subversive graffiti action on the set of the television series “Homeland” which received worldwide media attention. Amin lives and works in Berlin. 102

“

While many artists have the privilege of putting forward critical discourse that is, to an extent, free from the constraints of the institution, platforms like CrossSections are crucial in nurturing support systems for artists and thinkers who are interested in collective research and analysis that instigate difficult dialogues that cannot exist elsewhere.

”

HEBA Y. AMIN

AS BIRDS FLYING Video, 6′43′′ 2016 presented at CrossSections_potentials (2019), Vienna; CrossSections_perspectives (2019), Stockholm; and CrossSections_notes (2019), Helsinki In late 2013, Egyptian authorities detained a migratory stork suspected of espionage due to an electronic device attached to its leg. As Birds Flying addresses conspiracies embedded in the political landscape that shape the present. It confronts the absurdity of the media narrative that has blurred fantasy with reality and turned a bird, that migrates from Israel to Egypt, into a symbol of state paranoia. The film juxtaposes drone footage of the “spy bird” with reconstructed audio from Adel Imam’s iconic film Birds of Darkness (1995) which critiques government corruption in Egypt through the opposing perspectives of secular and Islamist parliamentary candidates. OPERATION SUNKEN SEA Photographs and Video 2018 presented at CrossSections_intervals (2018), Vienna Invested in the power of technology to generate a new future for humankind, Operation Sunken Sea initiates a large-scale infrastructural intervention unparalleled in scale: a new era of human progress will be initiated through the draining and re-routing of the Mediterranean Sea to converge Africa and Europe into one supercontinent. The operation promises to bring an end to terrorism and the migration crisis, provide employment and energy alternatives and confront the rise of fascism, all of which pose profound existential threats to our future. The project instils a fervent movement towards technocracy which takes a proactive stance towards the reparation of Africa and the Middle East by relocating the Mediterranean Sea within the African continent. Referencing and expanding upon early twentieth century techno-utopian visions, Operation Sunken Sea is an ongoing research project and intervention by Heba Y. Amin that investigates significant transformations in territorial constructs and their impact on new geopolitical alliances and global politics. By shifting the paradigm in a time of neo-fascist necropolitics, the project responds to the contemporary moment of political uncertainty in Europe, the unrest and collapse of nation-states in the Middle East and the neo-liberal failure of globalisation in Africa. The operation—mimicking languages (political, architectural and cultural) of fascist regimes—instigates a new vision for Africa and the Middle East by pinpointing what could be attained by and for those most affected by the wars waged for oil, resources and power in the last century.

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HEBA Y. AMIN

> Amin, As Birds Flying, 2016. Video still. Amin, As Birds Flying, 2016. Video. CrossSections_notes (Helsinki, 2018) Photos by Inma Herrera and Petri Summanen

OPERATION SUNKEN SEA: FLIPPING THE HISTORICAL NARRATIVE*

HEBA Y. AMIN

BAŞAK ŞENOVA Heba Y. Amin’s art practice explores issues and histories of urban infrastructural development and technological advancement through multi-layered, long-term projects that offer critical insights into subjective observations, historical accounts, sociological complexities and political satire. Her recent projects, which utilise public performance lectures, mixed media installations and video works, engage the politically acute issues of global migration, postcolonial politics, and historical and geographical narratives that address how socio-economic and political environments can be altered by contorting opposing and even parallel perspectives. Amin has conducted extensive and meticulous research into the fascist politics, dictators and colonial discourses of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, quoting the overlapping, merging and enmeshing elements and rhetoric from these periods’ histories, philosophies, politics and technologies. … The performances in Operation Sunken Sea are critical, integral elements, not only as appropriation and simulation, but also given Amin’s position as a woman re-enacting the speeches and scenarios of these particular protagonists, the majority of whom, as men, have articulated or implemented their monumental proposals through overtly masculine convictions. Amin reverses the order of this dominant power nexus by dissipating its representational codes. Her proposition thus evolves into a ‘woman’s vision’ by reconstructing and representing its masculinity metonymically, as well as metaphorically, exposing the political and social implications of the transposition of past power structures onto today’s configurations of popular narratives. … It is evident contemporary geopolitics cannot be read separately from that of a colonial past. As Edward Said proposed, like capitalism, modern empires need to constantly expand.1 While discussing both geopolitical and cultural perspectives, and examining the discourses of Orientalism, Said asserted that Western colonialism was driven by a quest for knowledge and power,2 referring also to Foucault’s ideas of power3 and the relationship between it and knowledge: We should admit rather that power produces knowledge (and not simply by encouraging it because it serves power or by applying it because it is useful); that power and knowledge directly imply one another; that there is no power relation without the correlative constitution of a file of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the same time power relations.4 * This text consists of excerpts from Başak Şenova’s article “Flipping the History: A Collection of Notes and Quote Responses on Heba Amin’s Project Operation Sunken Sea”. di’van | A Journal of Accounts. Art | Culture | Theory. 2018. No 4. pp. 54—62. 1. Said, Edward. 1977. Orientalism. London: Penguin. p. 105. 2. ibid. p. 21. 3. Foucault, Michael. 1977. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Alan Sheridan trans., New York: Pantheon Books. pp. 27—28. 4. Amin’s performance speech, performed at the St Elmo Examination Centre, Valletta, 25 May 2018 106

… Amin’s artistic methodology additionally references (Benjamin’s) theories on reproduction. Today, all media platforms (especially social media) collect and distribute images and data at immense speeds and magnitude, communication technologies infusing our lives with a constant onslaught of information. … What Amin achieves in her project is to visualise how this continual reproduction of reality draws out the essential implications of the principles of image reproduction formulated by Walter Benjamin in his seminal essay, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’.5 Amin utilises the mediating actions of reproduced images and messages by processing and examining their profound impact upon how people might perceive the world. These fragmented images and messages are pervasive, provocative and speculative. … In bringing together the findings of her research, utilising elements from cultural imagination, technology, fantasy and (science-)fiction and presenting them in an eclectic form, Amin’s methodology reminds us of Umberto Eco’s renowned reading of the film Casablanca that, “Casablanca has succeeded in becoming a cult movie because it is not one movie. It is ‘the’ movies.”6 Infamously, the script was written at the same time Casablanca was being filmed, with actors re-enacting previous dialogue and roles, creating a lasting sense of déjà vu by continual appropriation. As Eco further stated, “two clichés make us laugh, but a hundred clichés move us because we sense dimly that the clichés are talking among themselves and celebrating a reunion.”7 In the same manner, Amin’s project assembles compelling historical narratives and their components, unifying them into a powerful rhetorical tool to influence the disposition of her audience...Operation Sunken Sea thus formulates a mechanism that demands an understanding and awareness from its audience. Shifting geographies and rewriting history, however, requires collective thinking. The project seeks to create an art lab for critical and speculative thinking in order to continue in developing new methods of research, critique, and creative intervention within these colonial narratives and their contemporary residues. The project aims to build a kind of mobile institution devoted to imagining and proposing new historical constructs, and putting forth alternatives for future feminist and anticolonial worlds as ours becomes increasingly uninhabitable.8 In doing so, Heba Y. Amin performs an act of ‘flipping history’ by becoming these implausible but quite effective personas, re-presenting their speeches and proposals as influentially and provocatively, if not more so, than their originators. Amin’s aspiration is to reduce and displace their importance by transposing them into mere background material for her project’s setting, subtly eliminating them not only from history, but also the absurdity of their reasoning and discourse in endeavouring to solve global crises and conflict.

5. Walter Benjamin. 2008. The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media, Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press. 6. Umberto Eco, 1985. “Casablanca”: Cult Movies and Intertextual Collage’, SubStance Vol. 14, No. 2, Issue 47, Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. p. 10 7. ibid. p. 11. 8. Email correspondence with the artist. 107

HEBA Y. AMIN

Amin, The Master’s Tools I, 2018, B/ W Print Amin, Performance Lecture: Operation Sunken Sea: Draining the Mediterranean, Research Week, CrossSections Section, Konstfack (Stockholm, 2019) 108

Amin, Operation Sunken Sea: “Persian geographer al-Istakhri’s 10th century map of the Mediterranean Sea (Balkhi School of Geographers)”. Archival Print. CrossSections_intervals, Kunsthalle Exnergasse (Vienna, 2018)

Amin, Operation Sunken Sea (Details), Installation. CrossSections_intervals, (Vienna, 2018)

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INMA HERRERA Inma Herrera (1986, Madrid) studied Fine Arts and received her MA in Art Creation and Research at UCM, Madrid. She was trained as a print media specialist at the Spanish Royal Mint, Madrid. She holds an MFA degree from Kuvataideakatemia, Helsinki. Herrera works on practice-based projects which examine the fragility, genesis and materiality of an image, the relationship between makers and materials, the physical dimension of labour and the revival of the craftsmanship in defiance of the “relative dematerialisation” of the body in an era of virtuality. She resorts to printmaking, expanding it into installation, video-performance, and sculpture. Herrera exhibits nationally and internationally. In recent years, she has exhibited in Circuitos de Artes Plásticas at LABoral Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial (Art and Industrial Creation Centre) and Sala de Arte Joven; La Radice del Domani at RealAcademia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando; Processi 145 at Royal Academy of Spain in Rome; Impronte Romane at The Temple University; Climbing Through the Tide at B7L9, KLF, Tunisia; Playing Grounds at Gallery G, Rethinking Materialization at Exhibition Laboratory, The Eagle Has Landed at SIC Gallery, and Secum Aequalis Gravitatem at Oksasenkatu 11, Helsinki. Herrera was nominated for the Kjell Nupen Memorial Grant in 2017. She was awarded with the Postgraduate Award Europe from Obra Social La Caixa in 2014, with a grant from the Royal Academy of Spain in Rome in 2017 (RAER), and with the Pilar Juncosa & Sotheby’s Biennial Award For Artistic Creation in 2019 (together with the artist Shirin Salehi) by the Pilar and Joan Miró Foundation in Spain. She is currently one of the nominees for the Queen Sonja Print Award 2020. Herrera lives and works in Helsinki and Madrid.

TRANSITIONAL MAGNETISM Etching on paper, dry ink, video, sculpture, and 3D print 2017—2018 presented at CrossSections_intervals (2018), Vienna Charles Bell says that “the brain receives more trustworthy information from the touch of the hand than from images in the eye.” Merleau-Ponty studies the tactile phenomena and the exploratory movement as non-visual realities that connect the subject and environment. Transitional Magnetism proposes a journey through the different phases to engrave an image on copper, looking back to the work of master printers such as Jean Cousin, Abraham Bosse, and José Ribera. The project is displayed in the format of installation combining traditional means of printing with modern 3D printing techniques, and experimental ink casting methods that relate to the origins and principals of the etching technique. Exploring the ways of questioning the necessary skills to be acquired to make an imprint on a copper plate, the pieces interrogate the dialogue between the trace left by the hands and the use of tools. The sense of touch and the need of getting a grip with the hands question whether touching furnishes the brain a different kind of sensate information than the eye; hence the attraction between the maker and the outside world, between his/her hands and the materials. 110

“I had the opportunity to get close and work with a group of artists at different stages of their careers, with a varied and heterogeneous body of work. That has given me the gift of seeing with perspective the wide range of paths which one can take as a professional artist.

”

INMA HERRERA

TOWARDS SAMADHI Installation in four parts WAVE: Monotype. Kozo paper roll and ink, 2100x46cm VOID: Sculpture. Perspex tubes, 100x1,50cm FULL: Sculpture. Perspex tubes, 100x1cm FLOW: Audio piece. 1-hour loop soundtrack 2018—ongoing presented at CrossSections_intensities (2018), Vienna The term samādhi (in Sanskrit) etymologically means “complete” (sam) “absorption” (adhi). In Eastern philosophies and practices, it refers to a state of meditative consciousness. In samādhi the mind becomes still, so does the body. It is a state of being totally aware of the present moment, a one-pointedness of the mind. Paper is an organic material with the capacity of absorbing ink. Perspex is a synthetic material which repels and only holds ink on a superficial level. A roller is needed to extend the ink and transfer it to the Perspex plate. It is the medium between the ink, the matrix, and the paper. These complementary elements with opposing qualities are involved in the repetitive process of printing a blend over and over again over a 21-metre paper roll. They are presented to explore (materially and metaphorically) the intricate nature of walking towards what is called samādhi to translate what could be such a state of blend. FLAYING/VESTIGIUM OF A HUMAN PRINT Installation with objects, sculptures, etchings, dry ink and video, 1′23′′ 2018—2019 presented at CrossSections_perspectives (2019), Stockholm; and CrossSections_notes (2019), Helsinki Imprints are not always easily perceptible. A black, wrinkly material with no special appeal can contain delicate and precious information that the eye cannot see at first glance. The fragile action of ripping it off can turn into a ceremony in which a flaying is not an act of violence anymore. Instead, it becomes a means of discovery. Three symbols: baculum, hands, and eyes. Three materials: copper, ink, and cement. Three formats: sculpture, printmaking, and light print. A traced diagram of triangulations where materiality, fragmentation, and bonds are having a conversation. The installation Vestigium of a Human Imprint, together with the video Flaying, presents a series of pieces that navigate between the archaeological finding, the relic, the historical object, and the close observation of a delicate and queer process of detachment where the touch is always involved. Ink, silicone, oxide, fingerprints, copper, and cement are gathered together to experiment with the manifold possibilities that the etching technique offers to explore the nature of a trace left behind, an imprint that presents relationships between humans as makers of images, and the materials as mediums to follow the trail of its origins. 111

INMA HERRERA

> Herrera, Flaying/Vestigium Of A Human Print, 2019, Installation. CrossSections_notes (Helsinki, 2019) Herrera, Transitional Magnetism, 2017—2018. Installation. CrossSections_intervals (Vienna, 2018) Photos by Inma Herrera and Başak Şenova

DRAWING OUT NEW SOUNDS FROM ONE’S INSTRUMENT

INMA HERRERA

RUTH PELZER-MONTADA South African cellist Abel Sellaocoe’s stance provides a fitting analogy for Inma Herrera’s visual practice and process.1 But how do such new ‘soundings’ arise in a practice that has multi-facetted features and crosses material and disciplinary boundaries unlike those of a single musical medium as with Sellaocoe’s cello? The materials, tools, processes, labour that result in such novel ‘sounds’ are foregrounded and performatively enacted in Herrera’s work in different ways (sometimes in an actual performance). But listing them (paper, Perspex, ink, drawing, sculpture, video and above all, print) gives little indication of her innovative fusion of both typical and unfamiliar material combinations, processes and, indeed, disciplinary connotations. Take, for example, Towards Samadhi that was part of the CrossSections_intervals exhibition at Kunsthalle — WUK in Vienna. Wave comprises a twenty-one metre long ream of Japanese (Kozo) paper seemingly printed in passages of black ink, from deepest black to the bare coverage of the white paper. This—literally and metaphorically—‘extended’ print was suspended from a pole, unfurling—in analogy to the title—onto a long table. Its definition as a ‘monotype’—that is a singular print derived from painting or drawing on a plate, such as glass or metal, which is then printed—does not begin to describe the complexity of how Wave has come into existence and, thus, in capturing its labour and by implication its affect: Through a process unfolding over 21 days, the artist inked and subsequently printed on a printing press a Perspex plate (the ‘matrix’ in printmaking terms) with the dimensions of the width—but not the length—of the paper, over and over and over again. This durationalmaterial process resulted in the coverage of the full length of the paper roll, yielding the final spatial dimension of the piece with its divergently imprinted ‘imagery’, in effect a record of the multiple impressions of the plate/matrix. Simultaneously, the reiteration of the movement of the ink roller generated the sound piece Flow, its pulsing rhythm resembling the in and out of breathing. The apparently un-printed white areas of the paper, traditionally categorised as ‘negative’, were in fact printed in the same manner as the black or ‘positive’ areas. This was achieved in a printing process where two or more colours, here black and transparent ink, are spread over the plate by the rotation of the ink roller to which the two colours have been applied in a single layer, the two-coloured patches of ink merging gradually on the drum. By means of running the matrix with the thusapplied ink through the printing press, the resulting deposit on the substrate, whether paper or another substance such as the Perspex Herrera is also using, reveals the typical gradation or ‘blend’. The partially unfolded twenty-one metre long scroll thus becomes the time-measure of the artist’s process and labour, her method the exercising of disciplinary skill while at the same time crossing into performance, sculpture, sound—post-medium practice. The two single objects that also form part of Towards Samadhi, Full and Void, a hollow Perspex tube and a solid Perspex rod respectively, iterate—with a difference—the connotative associations of their material composition that are also characteristic of and

1. South African cellist Abel Sellaocoe in BBC Radio 3’s Inside Music, 22 June 2019, on the necessity for musicians to discover new sounds in their instruments that would not have been heard in the past. 114

enacted in this process. Printed in a similar fashion to Wave via blends of transparent and black ink, Full, diagonally positioned across the paper, both merges with as well as stands proud of the paper substrate, i.e. its transparent passage ‘blends’ into the white of Wave, its black into the black. Simultaneously, shape and material density divorce the rod from the paper. Void, suspended vertically in a balancing position within the exhibition space alongside Wave, similarly confounds spatial and material perception. Striking in their effect, both objects carry the ink ostensibly on the surface, yet challenge perceptions of depth and surface. They also call into question notions of figure and ground, air and solid matter, fullness/emptiness, presence/absence, and positive/negative. All of these can be said to be inherent to the ontology of printmaking, but are here, as indicated, opened out into other modes.2 At first glance, Wave’s impressive length might bring to mind capitalist economy’s emphasis on maximising output, yet for the artist, the rhythmically repetitive actions of inking the plate and subsequent printing of the paper enacted here not once but multiple times, are a method to create an analogy for, but also aim to inhabit the state of mental and physical concentration that in Buddhist philosophy is associated with the concept of samādhi. Popular assumptions imagine it as a state of emptiness, or not-thinking. Contrary to these, samādhi collapses binary assumptions of any kind, between body and mind, presence and absence, negative and positive, empty and full. The elements of Herrera’s installation, her scrambling of processes and materials including the variable format they may take in another location at another time, aim to do the same work. In this way, Herrera’s practice corresponds to Andrea Phillips’ definition of the term, it “strains the definition of artistic labour by distancing it from an expectation of production and remuneration, placing it rather in the flow of process, learning or procedure…” and this is, ultimately, also the affective charge of the artist’s spare, elegant installations.

2. Herrera’s piece thus brings to mind French art historian Georges Didi-Huberman’s conception of ‘l’empreinte’/the imprint. Didi-Huberman’s study originally appeared in the catalogue for his exhibition of the same title in 1997. An unaltered reprint appeared in 2008 (Editions Minuit, Paris). I am referring to the first English translation of the initial section (titled ‘Ouverture’) in PelzerMontada (2018, pp. 184—195). Didi-Huberman asks: “Is it [the imprint] ‘one of contact with an origin or one of loss of an origin? Does it demonstrate the authenticity of presence (as in the process of direct contact) or does it, on the contrary, demonstrate a loss of uniqueness inherent in the possibility of its reproduction? Does it produce uniqueness or mass production? Is it characterised by having an aura or by being one of a series? Resemblance or dissimilarity? Identity or anonymity? Is it deliberate or random? Does it signal desire or mourning? Does it possess form or is it formless? Is it the same or different? Familiar or strange? Does it entail contact or distance? ... I would say that an imprint is a ‘dialectical image’, an explosion of all the above: something that is as related to contact (a foot sinking into the sand) as it is to loss (the absence of the foot in its impression); it is as related to contact with loss as it is to loss of contact.” (1997—2008): 188. Sources: 1. Georges, Didi-Huberman. 2018. “Perspectives on contemporary print: Critical writing since 1986” in Ouverture. Ed. Ruth Pelzer-Montada. Manchester: Manchester University Press. pp. 184—195. 2. Phillips, Andrea. 2010. cited in Julia Bryan-Wilson. 2012. “Practising Trio A” in Practice. Ed. Marcus Boone and Gabriel Levine. London/Cambridge MA: Whitechapel Gallery and MIT. Press. p. 137. 115

INMA HERRERA

Herrera, Flaying/Vestigium Of A Human Print. Installation. CrossSections_perspectives (Stockholm, 2019) Photos by Inma Herrera and Başak Şenova

ISA ROSENBERGER Isa Rosenberger (1969, Salzburg) graduated from the University of Applied Arts Vienna and completed postgraduate studies at the Jan van Eyck Academy in Maastricht. Rosenberger’s approach is marked by a particular interest in the politics of memory and in social, political, and economic transformation processes. Her practice includes video, installation, photography, and site-specific projects. Her exhibitions include; 2020: Camera Austria (solo); Der Traum von einem Feentempel, Salzburger Festspiele; 2019: ...the vast land from which she comes, Kunsthalle Exnergasse, Vienna (solo), in the framework of CrossSections; 2018: Generali Foundation: 30 Years. In Dialog with 1918, 1938, 1968, Museum der Moderne Salzburg; Zones of Contacts – Architecture of Graz and Zagreb, Museum of Contemporary Art Zagreb; 2017: Specular Windows. Reflections on the Self and the Wider World, 21er Haus, Vienna; Up into the Unknown, Kunsthaus Graz; 2016: Bergen Assembly, Bergen; Anti: Modern, Museum der Moderne Salzburg; Putting Rehearsals to the Test, VOX, centre de l’image contemporaine, Montreal; Archives and Power II, Museum of Contemporary Art Vojvodina, Novi Sad; 2015: Hotel Metropole. Der Erinnerung eine Zukunft geben. Into The City I, Wiener Festwochen 2015; Creating Common Good, Kunst Haus Wien; 2014: Lenin: Icebreaker, LENTOS Kunstmuseum Linz; 2013: It’s The Political Economy, Stupid, Pori Art Museum, Pori and Gallery 400 — University of Illinois at Chicago; Lenin: Icebreaker, Murmansk (special project at the 5th Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art); 2011: Espiral, Grazer Kunstverein (solo); 2009: Nový Most, Edith Russ Site for Media Art, Oldenburg (solo); 2008: Nový Most, Secession, Vienna (solo). In 2008, she received the 28th Otto Mauer Prize, and an Outstanding Artist Award for Video and Media Arts in 2012. Since 1999, she has held several teaching positions, including at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna and at the Vienna University of Technology. Rosenberger lives and works in Vienna.

DANCE/KNOWLEDGE/POLITICS/TANZ/WISSEN/POLITIK (working title) Research Material and Video: “Espiral (A Dance of Death)”, 2011 2018 presented at CrossSections_potentials (2019), Vienna



Politics are not located directly in dance, but in the way dance manages to occupy (cultural) space.

Mark Franko

The Volksheim Ottakring (today Volkshochschule Ottakring) was founded in 1901, and was of great cultural and political importance, especially in the inter-war years. Adult education centres were an important hub of education and knowledge transfer, and played a unique role in the popularisation of art and culture beyond the bourgeois salons. The starting point of Isa Rosenberger’s research on the history and the current state of the VHS Ottakring is the performances and courses that the dancer and choreographer Rosalia Chladek offered at the VHS Ottakring in the 1930s. 118

“Participating in CrossSections was a very enriching experience

for me. I found it especially interesting to focus on the artistic process and discuss projects with colleagues while they were still in the making—and to be able to develop an artistic work over a long period of time without a directly given topic.

”

THE CITY IS WAITING (working title)1

ISA ROSENBERGER

Mixed media 2018 presented at CrossSections_intervals (2018), Vienna How can we—from a contemporary perspective—recall and update the largely forgotten social reforming history of the VHS Ottakring? And in accordance with the interdisciplinary working method of Gertrud Kraus, how can we understand dance as a specific poetic space in which art forms, times, and images can be recombined, and new relations and cross-references created? The presentation at Kunsthalle Exnergasse gives insight into a long-term project: The starting point is a performance of the dance piece The City Waits by dancer and choreographer Gertrud Kraus on the—still existing—theatre stage of the adult education centre Ottakring in Vienna in 1934. “Socio-politically aware and increasingly under pressure because of her Jewish background, Kraus developed to be one of the few exponents of expressive dance choreography who showed political commitment.”2 Her choreography The City Waits, based on a fairytale by Maxim Gorki, reflects both the fears and fascination of a boy in the big city. ...THE VAST LAND FROM WHICH SHE COMES3 Video, 12′ and photographs 2019 presented at CrossSections_perspectives (2019), Stockholm; and CrossSections_notes (2019), Helsinki In 1934, the theatre stage of the Volksheim Ottakring in Vienna presented Gertrud Kraus’ dance play Die Stadt Wartet (The City Waits) which was based on Maxim Gorky’s fairytale Musik der Großstadt (The Music of the Big City). Her choreography reflected the way of a youth into the city, and both the fear and fascination of discovering and living in a big city as a young boy—Kraus herself danced the role of the boy. However, as a historical lapse, there is no visual document capturing the performance of the dance play The City waits at Volksheim Ottakring. The project is an attempt to reflect on this lapse. Rosenberger collaborates with the artist and dancer Loulou Omer, whose mother Zipora Lerman was a student of Kraus in Tel Aviv. Rosenberger also conducted a workshop with young people at the VHS Ottakring in which she applied Kraus’ approach. Both the workshop and Rosenberger’s extensive research on Gertrud Kraus, which takes place both in Vienna and Tel Aviv, reflect an inquiry into geographical movements and a migration of thoughts that follow spiral routes across countries: for example, the migration of expressionist dance from Austria and Central Europe to Israel; or the migration routes of the students of the workshops from the Middle East to Austria. 1. Rosenberger collaborated with the artist and dancer Susanne Kompast. 2. Quoted from Everybody Dances. The Cosmos of Viennese Dance Modernism. Ed. Andrea Amort. 2019. Hatje Cantz Verlag, Berlin. p. 338. 3. Rosenberger collaborated with the artist and dancer Loulou Omer. 119

ISA ROSENBERGER

Rosenberger, Espiral (A Dance of Death), dancer: A.Piña, camera: R.Mayr, 2011—2013. Video still (Detail). Rosenberger, Dance/Knowledge/Politics/Tanz/Wissen/Politik. Installation (Details). CrossSections_potentials, (Vienna, 2018) Rosenberger, Espiral (A Dance of Death), dancer: A.Piña, camera: R.Mayr, 2011—2013. Video still. Photos by Başak Şenova

Rosenberger, ...the vast land from which she comes. Installation. CrossSections_notes (Helsinki, 2019) Rosenberger, Dance/Knowledge/ Politics/Tanz/Wissen/Politik. Installation (Details). CrossSections_potentials (Vienna, 2018) An extract from Rosenberger’s sketches for The City Is Waiting, 2018

. . .THE VAST LAND FROM WHICH SHE COMES*

ISA ROSENBERGER

BAŞAK ŞENOVA Rosenberger’s work contextualises, challenges and questions history vis-à-vis the realities of the present. Her precarious approach enables the recognition of different perspectives and possibilities by also articulating muted, suppressed, lost, and forgotten histories. Her practice—and also her artistic strength—is based on a composite net of personal narratives and historical findings, while creating discursive platforms to articulate urgent social concerns with a feminist slant. Hence, her engagement with social issues coincides with Kraus’ artistic approach. As the writer and scholar Henia Rottenberg puts it, “characterised by a search for self-expression that was associated with deep social consciousness and humanism, her works resulted from her profound personal identification with struggles for social justice.”1 During her research, Rosenberger discovered that in 1934, the theatre stage of the Volksheim Ottakring in Vienna presented Kraus’ dance play “Die Stadt wartet” (The City Waits, 1934), which was based on Maxim Gorky’s fairytale “Musik der Großstadt” (The Music of the Big City)... Kraus’ work was a groundbreaking inspiration for Rosenberger; it had a strong political standpoint while touching upon identity politics, not only through her resistance to the pressures of her Jewish identity, but also her confidence in addressing gender-based inequalities. Therefore, revisiting and exploring Kraus’ venture from different perspectives suggests a resourceful viewpoint for Rosenberger as a response. … Furthermore, Rosenberger also conducted parallel research on Volkshochschulen (adult education centres) and their shifting significance over the course of a century. The Volksheim Ottakring in Vienna (founded in 1901), where Kraus performed on stage, carried significant cultural and political importance, especially in the inter-war period. In the archives of the centre, the founding idea was described as follows: “Workers, citizens, and university lecturers founded the Volksheim association as a place of higher academic education and rich artistic enjoyment for the broad strata of the working people,”2 with the motto “teach people to think”3. … Taking Gertrud Kraus’ dance play “The City Waits” as a starting point, Rosenberger revisits and recontextualises the forgotten social reform history of the Volkshochschule Ottakring by tracing the footsteps of Kraus. The project unfolds the discipline of dance as a specific poetic space in which art forms, times, and images intermingle with both

* This text consists of excerpts from Başak Şenova’s article “Isa Rosenberger...das weite Land, woher sie kommt/...the vast land from which she comes”. Exhibition Publication, Camera Austria; Graz. 1. Henia Rottenberg, “Kraus, Gertrud (1901–1977)” The Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism. https://www.rem.routledge.com/articles/kraus-gertrud-1901-1977. 2. See Österreichisches Volkshochschularchiv, “Rundgang durch das Volksheim Ottakring”. http://archiv.vhs.at/index.php?id=vhsarchiv-volksheim_ottakring (Trans. Başak Şenova). 3. “Volkshochschule Volksheim Ottakring,” Historiografie. https://adulteducation.at/de/historiografie/institutionen/278/ 122

new and cross references. Hence, by following the interdisciplinary working methodology of Kraus, Rosenberger has organised a set of workshops with young migrants attending the Volkshochschule Ottakring today. Both the workshops and Rosenberger’s extensive research on Gertrud Kraus, conducted in Vienna and Tel Aviv, reflect an inquiry into geographical movements and a migration of thoughts that follow spiral routes across countries: for example, the migration of expressionist dance from Austria to Palestine;4 or the migration routes of the workshop participants from the Middle East and Africa to Austria. For instance, in her rehearsals and classes Kraus combined German, English, and Hebrew, which reflected her migration experience and was described as a “multilingual lexicon.”5 Accordingly, Rosenberger asked her workshop participants,6 who also mix many languages while communicating, to express themselves and their migration experiences through storytelling, dancing, singing, and drawing. Throughout these workshops, she has echoed Kraus’ interdisciplinary approach by connecting different accumulated experiences, feelings, and hopes through various artistic expressions across and beyond geographies, people, and time.7 In the closing chapter of her project, Rosenberger collaborated with Loulou Omer, whose mother Zipora Lerman had been Gertrud Kraus’ student in Tel Aviv...Her practice—similar to that of Kraus—encompasses many art forms and approaches. Yet her migration was from Tel Aviv to Europe; thus, she has brought not only memories to Vienna, but also a knowledge of her mother’s versatile artistic approaches. Hence, Omer’s collaboration with Rosenberger also reflects the relevance of the inheritance of this knowledge handed down from mother to daughter. … Grounded in Omer’s reflections on choreographing, singing, dancing, and recalling her mother and Kraus performing, the video renders Rosenberger’s elements of research. Echoing Kraus, Omer also used two languages and demonstrated various techniques and improvisations. She was portraying a strong and profound woman pursuing the complexities and contradictions of the ventures of Kraus, her mother, and herself. With each act she performed, each word she spelled, each note she played, and each memory she recalled, Omer’s world was being pictured. By responding to the heritage of Kraus as a migration journey in pursuit of search, responsiveness, and growth, Rosenberger invites the audience into this journey by entering Omer’s world. Once, Kraus wrote down a line into her sketchbook: “What’s the point of entry? . . . The point of no return. . .”8

4. Kraus moved to the Mandate Palestine before the State of Israel was established. 5. Ingber, Judith Brin. 2007. “Identity Peddlers and the Influence of Gertrud Kraus”. Congress on Research in Dance Conference Proceedings, 39(S1). p. 103. doi:10.1017/S2049125500000182. 6. Participants in the workshop: Wendpanga Marie Balbone, Karolin Kahraman, Ilie Vlah, Albin Bunjaku, Alzuabi Loai, Abib Faye, and Javed Sobhani. 7. Rosenberger brought into play some of the components of this project during her participation in the CrossSections interdisciplinary platform in 2019: photographs, videos, archival materials, workshop results, sketches, and performances. See https://CrossSections.kex.wuk.at 8. In 2007, Zvi Gotheiner talked about how he used Gertrud Kraus’ sketchbooks as a source for his play during an interview with Judith Brin Ingber. See Ingber, “Identity Peddlers and the Influence of Gertrud Kraus,”. p. 103. 123

ISA ROSENBERGER

> Rosenberger, ...the vast land from which she comes. Photographs and video stills, 2019. Rosenberger, ...the vast land from which she comes. Installation. CrossSections_notes (Helsinki, 2019) Dancer: Loulou Omer Photos of the project by Reinhard Mayr and exhibition photos by Başak Şenova

Selander, Överföringsdiagram Nr 2 [Diagram of Transfer No. 2], 2019. Video still. —with Oscar Mangione

LINA SELANDER Lina Selander (1973, Stockholm) studied photography at the Academy of Photography and Film in Gothenburg, and Fine Art at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm. She is a guest professor at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm. Selander’s works often focus on junctures in history where a system or physical place collapses and something new begins to emerge; the narrative of mechanical cinema giving way to that of digital video, or a political or economic system plummeting into a new one. Her works revolve around images as memories, imprints, and representations. Her solo exhibitions include; 2019: Diagrams of Transfer, Galleria Tiziana Di Caro; Napoli, Shadow Optics, Kunst Haus Wien; 2017: For a Time Light Must Be Called Darkness, Argos, Brussels; 2016: Repeat after me, Oslo Kunstforening, Oslo; 2015: Moment, Moderna Museet, Stockholm; A Series of Images About You, VOX — Centre de l’image contemporaine, Montréal (QC); Excavation of the Image — Imprint, shadow, spectre, thought. Representing Sweden, Arsenale, The 56th Venice Biennale, 2015; Open system — Silphium and other works, Iniva, London. Group exhibitions include; 2019: GIBCA, Gothenburg 2018: 2017 The Pleasure of Love; the 56th October Salon Belgrade, 2015; Kyiv Biennale 2015; Seoul Media City Biennale, 2014; Manifesta 2012 in Genk, Belgium; Bucharest Biennale 2010; and Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin. From 2013 to 2016, Selander took part at Magnus Bärtås’ artistic research project “Mikrohistorier” at Konstfack, Stockholm together with Andrej Slavik (Göteborg), Suzana Milevska (Skopje), Lars-Henrik Ståhl (Lund) and Mika Hannula (Berlin). Lina Selander lives and works in Stockholm. 126

“For me, CrossSections has been a generous, engaging, and

profound project.

”

LINA SELANDER

ANTECKNINGAR TILL EN FILM OM NATUREN [NOTES FOR A FILM ON NATURE] —with Oscar Mangione B/W Lambda print (90 x 70 cm), projected video, 9′51′′ 2016 presented at CrossSections_potentials (2018), Vienna Lina Selander and Oscar Mangiones’ work Anteckningar till en film om naturen is a film projected on a photograph depicting a former courtroom, now an exhibition space, where a screen has been placed on the judges’ position. Anteckningar till en film om naturen is also an overwriting film, a palimpsest. The work seeks positions and outposts on the border between nature and image. Here is the dream of the empty gaze, of death, of montage as the opposite of nature. ÖVERFÖRINGSDIAGRAM NR 1 [DIAGRAM OF TRANSFER NO. 1] —with Oscar Mangione Film, colour, and sound, 8′30′′ 2017 presented at CrossSections_intervals (2018), Vienna Artifacts from a Maoist life intersect with machines grinding books, the piecing together of destroyed DDR documents, and children undergoing education. The film is a comment on Selander’s earlier work “When the Sun Sets It’s All Red, Then It Disappears” from 2008. ÖVERFÖRINGSDIAGRAM NR 2 [DIAGRAM OF TRANSFER NO. 2] —with Oscar Mangione Film 16 mm transferred to HD-video, colour and sound, 10′35′′ 2019 presented at CrossSections_perspectives (2019), Stockholm; and CrossSections_notes (2019), Helsinki Man sees himself as nature’s interpreter and tamer. But nature does not care about meaning, and its power cannot actually be controlled. It therefore remains silent in the face of man’s increasingly reckless experiment, the catastrophic effects of which will ultimately afflict man himself. The camera follows a panda at Schönbrunn Zoo surrounded by pictures of the Great Wall of China. Silently, the panda holds a bamboo brush to paper, makes some marks with ink—pictures—and is rewarded with carrots. How shall we interpret this artistic gesture? The video proceeds to a control room at a never-used nuclear power plant that illustrates yet another despotic panorama, one with the same silence and latent violence. The images are transferred from one context to another, created and recreated in relation to one another. To question what it means is only human, but in the long run probably irrelevant. Text by Lisa Rosendahl

127

ON ÖVERFÖRINGSDIAGRAM NR 1 [DIAGRAM OF TRANSFER NO. 1] OSCAR MANGIONE

LINA SELANDER

This film is a modest, but well articulated within its capacity, attempt to make itself into a kind of recitation that formalises anamnesis. The film contains sets of images, correspondences, and movements that resemble each other: Nostalgia, Violence and History, Memory, Hope, and Technology. These sets are intersected and interrupted by their own dreams, mutations, and deformations. The destruction of books and other memory devices, and the twin practice of piecing together scrap paper fragments in search of a redeeming knowledge is a kind of soul that becomes the past turned inside out, a sun that never sets. But this never-setting soul of knowledge is exactly what the film refuses to be. Undulating like a snake on the ground, the film is that which is immediately apparent. Or, if something else, perhaps a pure outsider—the fleeting fantasies and abstractions of others. Coincident and incompatible with both itself and that which we know to be real. Whether or not the film is successful in its ambition (if success is possible at all) is less important than the ambition itself. This vision of uncertainty that opens the viewer to contemplation of each fleeting image: the bust of the king of Uruk, the dove and the parrot, the seventeenth century engraving, the two dogs (is two even accurate), the children dancing and drawing, the Ouroboros1 in the guillotine, and the warming fire at the end. Diagram of Transfer No. 1 was originally made as a comment on an earlier work, When the Sun Sets It’s All Red, Then It Disappears (2008). This work took Jean-Luc Godard’s La Chinoise (1967) as its starting point and examined the dreams, hopes, and misfortunes related to the 1968 student revolt as well as its representation and current significance for the “left”. It may not be entirely un-constructive to view “Diagram of Transfer No. 1” in relation to Gilles Deleuze’s “Postscript on the Societies of Control.” Especially, regarding the role of the images and the way they are regarded, or presented, as constituting a whole—between the systems of discipline and (advancing) control—in this film and in others. Containers, enclosures, tunnels, connectors, managers, information, modulating principles, actors or actions, services, commodities, and statistical entities perfectly adapt to the current and coming order. It’s up to us to discover what we are being made to serve. “The coils of a serpent are even more complex than the burrows of a molehill.”2

1. The Ouroboros seems to have a choice—hard to make, admittedly. It is a choice that has to be made alone (the viewer is but a bystander and witnesses), yet one that highly concerns the film and what to make of it. 2. Deleuze, Gilles. 1992. Postscript on the Societies of Control. October, Vol. 59 (Winter), Boston: The MIT Press. pp. 3—7. 128

Selander, Överföringsdiagram Nr 1 [Diagram Of Transfer No. 1]. Installation and video stills (Detail). CrossSections_intervals (Vienna, 2018) Photo by Matthias Bildstein 129

LINA SELANDER

Selander, Överföringsdiagram Nr 2 [Diagram of Transfer No. 2]. Installation (Details) and video still. CrossSections_ perspectives (Stockholm, 2019) Photo by Başak Şenova

Selander, Anteckningar Till En Film Om Naturen [Notes For A Film On Nature]. Installation and video stills. (Detail). CrossSections_potentials (Vienna, 2018) Photo by Başak Şenova

MARCUS NEUSTETTER Marcus Neustetter (1976, Johannesburg) earned his undergraduate and Masters Degree in Fine Arts (2001) from the University of the Witwatersrand. Interested in cross-disciplinary practice, site-specificity, socially engaged interventions and the intersection of art and activism, Neustetter has produced projects, performances and installations across Africa, Europe, America and Asia that search for a balance between poetic form and asking critical questions. Accolades include: World Technology Award winner for the Arts 2015, NY, USA; Artist Fellow for the Smithsonian National Museums of African Art and Air and Space, Washington DC, USA; Sweep, public performance commission, UNESCO International year of Light, Merida, Mexico; Renaming the City, commission The Trinity Session, Ars Electronica Festival, Austria; Into the Light, solo exhibition, Wits Art Museum, South Africa; Absent Collection, installation, Cairotrinca, Egypt; Sud Triennial 2014/2017 participant, Cameroon; Occupy, solo exhibition, Circa Gallery, South Africa; Vents de Rose Numerique participant, Senegal, Mali and Martinique; Temporary Museum of Art, Havana Biennial, Cuba; The Vertical Gaze, installations, Nirox Foundation, Cradle of Humankind, South Africa; artistic director of ISEA2018 Durban, South Africa; Searching Darkness, ISEA2019, South Korea; Award-winning planetarium show The Vertical Journey, South Africa. Neustetter has been the co-director of the contemporary art production collaboration The Trinity Session since 2000, and is an adjunct professor with Nelson Mandela University. He lives and works between Johannesburg and Vienna.

SYRIA Video, 6′20′′ (loop) 2016 presented at CrossSections_potentials (2019), Vienna The work reflected on Neustetter’s observations of the space and its relationship to, and dialogue with, cultures not originally from Austria. It was created by exploring collections of Syrian artifacts within the Weltmuseum in Vienna, by turning off the storage room lights and moving through the archives with a torch. He created abstracted shadow-scape films that translate artifacts into metaphors and evoke inquiries into the positions that Syrian people living in Austria occupy. SWEEP MEXICO – MONTEZUMA Stop frame animation, 1′30′′ (loop) 2016—2017 presented at CrossSections_potentials (2019), Vienna In 2018, Neustetter created engaged, experimental light performances with thousands of participants on the streets of Merida. People were encouraged to create large light drawings related to their individual and collective identities. One such light drawing was the headdress of Montezuma, an Aztec feather artifact currently held by the Weltmuseum in Vienna and a source of dispute between Mexico and Austria. 132

“Over

the course of the CrossSections project, I was undergoing the relocation of myself and my family from our birth country, South Africa to Vienna, Austria. Long before the decision to move was made, the conceptual trajectory of my work had investigated the conflict inherent in creating borders, territories, and the impact of identity segregation. CrossSections has afforded me an opportunity to witness and dialogue with others from vastly different countries and cultures.

”

MARCUS NEUSTETTER

BETWEEN BORDER LINES Video installation 2018 presented at CrossSections_potentials (2019), Vienna Neustetter traces borders of contested territories directly onto the wall. Using a microscope attached to a projector, the artist performs speculative mark making and amplifies movement and migration in response to found sound elements. ENCOUNTERS Installation with carved linoleum, ink prints, paper wood, and enamel paint 2018 presented at CrossSections_intervals (2018), Vienna; and CrossSections_notes (2019), Helsinki The title of this piece references a work Neustetter produced in Linz with Stephen Hobbs (2016), where a path was renamed as the “Weg der Begegnung” [Path of Encounters] by immigrant communities, the artist, Ars Electronica, and the city of Linz as a welcoming gesture to the arriving refugees. SEARCHING THE LINE Lino print installation and video, 8′45′′ 2019 presented at CrossSections_perspectives (2019), Stockholm; and CrossSections_notes (2019), Helsinki In a recent trip to the Demilitarised Zone in South Korea, Neustetter was struck by the curiosity of the space that defines the relationship of North and South. A line that is as much a physical manifestation of political and idealogical differences as it is a symbol of personal separations. SHIFTING TERRITORIES Installation, video, and durational performance 2019 CrossSections_notes (2019), Helsinki Shifting Territories  is a performance intervention that responds to a video loop produced on this journey, and is a reflection on Neustetter’s personal conflict in his relocation from South to North. 133

DEFINING LINES* WILHELM VAN RENSBURG

MARCUS NEUSTETTER

Lines define much more than cartographic representations of territorial boundaries, Marcus Neustetter seems to be suggesting this with his drawings and performances. They are both noun (naming) and verb (making): they define space as much as they are definitions of space. The lines expound conflicts and conquests, and they are simultaneously definitions of global and political and economic strife. In his drawing performances, Neustetter attempts to imbue the mark with the kind of real world impact that a line on a territorial map has. Abstracting and isolating the line is as much about the escape of the realities of borders of separation and zones of conflict, as it is about contemplating the line itself and the spaces it creates. Neustetter, however, pushes beyond the confines of borders, looking for a creative impulse that might be sparked when two lines run uncomfortably close to each other, giving rise to a series of graphic explosions in the in-between spaces where definition and defining appear to be equally nebulous endeavours.

ILLUMINATING THE AFRICAN ARCHIVE** MARY CORRIGALL Marcus Neustetter deals with museology politics in relation to African artefacts and art in a novel characteristically abstract and playful manner. Drawing from experiences at the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art in Washington D.C. and the Egyptian museum in Cairo, his voyage of discovery is not centred on the objects or the collections per se, but the unseen qualities surrounding them. ... Dark silhouettes become the basis for his art in this exhibition operating as metaphors for all this unseen baggage tied to these objects. They loom as the ghosts of the past that can only come into view from a position of enlightenment, or is it darkness? The interplay of light and dark runs throughout and is best given expression through a stunning series of monochromatic ink paintings that play with this juxtaposition visually and ideologically. ... The result is morphing abstract forms articulating the shifting politics—the rereadings, misreadings of the objects. Neustetter could have left it there, and in the past, when he was more concerned with enacting ideas or performances with light, he would have. Instead, he has produced the most extraordinary hauntingly beautiful paintings that map these shifting shadows, transforming them into landscapes. These artwork are like maps, charting and inviting viewers into these unseen worlds of discovery that lie beyond objects... As such these landscapes are unreal, poetic and allow us to tread dangerous territory without any risk. In other words, they invite curiosity and discovery, the qualities that drive Neustetter’s art but also our connection to it.

* This text is an excerpt from the solo exhibition catalogue Defining Lines (2015) at Gallery AOP, Johannesburg, South Africa. ** This text is an excerpt from an article titled “Illuminating the African Archive” published in The Sunday Times on 18 October 2016 in response to the solo exhibition OCCUPY at Circa Gallery, Johannesburg South Africa. 134

Neustetter, Between Border Lines. Video Installation. Sweep Mexico–Montezuma, 2016—2017; Syria, 2016 CrossSections_potentials (Vienna, 2018) Photos by Kunsthalle Exnergasse

MARCUS NEUSTETTER

Neustetter, Searching the Line 2019. Video still. Neustetter, Encounters, Installation. CrossSections_intensitites (Vienna, 2018) Photo by Başak Şenova

Neustetter, Encounters, Installation (Details). CrossSections_perspectives (Stockholm, 2018) Neustetter, Encounters, Installation CrossSections_notes (Helsinki, 2018) Photos by Inma Herrera and Petri Summanen

Gansterer, Untertagüberbau — Part 2, 2017. Video still.

NIKOLAUS GANSTERER Nikolaus Gansterer, (1974, Klosterneuburg) studied Transmedia Art at the University of Applied Arts Vienna, Austria and completed his studies at the Jan van Eyck Academy at Maastricht in The Netherlands. He currently lectures at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna where he was a guest professor between 2016 and 2018. As an artist and performer, Nikolaus Gansterer links drawing, thinking, and action through a practice of performative visualisation and diagrammatic representations. Through a transdisciplinary approach, he focuses on mapping processes of transience by developing experimental modes of notation and translation. Gansterer’s work has been shown in numerous international exhibitions, including; 2019: the 58th Venice Biennial, Research Pavilion; the 14th Sharjah Biennial; 2018: Le Bouc Divin, project space, Wiels, Brussels; Con-notations, Villa Arson, Nice; 2017: Urban Lights Ruhr, Glaskasten Museum, Marl, Germany; 2016: The Minor Gesture, Museum of Fine Arts, Ghent; Marseille Résonance, MuCEM, Marseilles; 2015: the 12th Havana Biennial; Drawing Now, Albertina Museum, Vienna; The Plague of Diagrams, ICA, London; 2013: the 4th Athens Biennial. Gansterer was awarded by the Austrian Science Fund with the PEEK artistic research grant for the project Choreo-graphic Figures (2014—2017), and for the project Contingent Agencies (2019—2022). In 2018, Gansterer received the international MAC award in Belfast. Gansterer lives and works in Vienna. 138

“CrossSections is an ongoing intensive conversation, talking

with and without words, through materials, via situations; it echoes in your mind, it stimulates you. You learn. It stays with you.

”

NIKOLAUS GANSTERER

FIGURING VITALITY Video, object, and drawing 2015—2018 presented at CrossSections_potentials (2018), Vienna Nikolaus Gansterer understands the processes of thinking and drawing as analogous. He is thus concerned with the fundamental question of how to translate processes of thought, and explores how the act of drawing can become a tool of communication. To approach the materiality of perception, Gansterer applies a unique performative grammar in which the artist’s flow of observations in relation to his environment manifests as captivating live drawings, diagrams, and arrangements. He questions how these situative constructions of meaning could be expanded towards a radical autopoiesis—where a line of thought becomes a line on paper, turns into a line in space, and then again into a line articulated with the whole body, or transforms into an object. The animation film Figuring Vitality (2015) enables experiencing a blackboard as a resonating body and site of knowledge transfer. Gansterer projects a dynamic spatial structure which is constantly formed by vitality forces that dissolve the boundaries between the inner and the outside world, unveiling the process of “figuring something out”. UNTERTAGÜBERBAU HD Video, stereo soundtrack, 16′03′′ , drawings and animation Sound by Martin Siewert 2017 presented at CrossSections_intervals (2018), Vienna; CrossSections_perspectives (2019), Stockholm; and CrossSections_notes (2019), Helsinki Untertagüberbau was created in the studio whilst the artist listened to scientific radio programmes and conjured the sense of laboratories, measurements, charts and graphs — interrupted by living creatures such as snails. More than just a disruption, such living entities make evident the fleshy material basis of the abstract systems—snails, in particular, leave trails of chemical information in their slime, interpretable by those snails that follow after them (as well as easing their progress; a physical equivalent to the easing of the cognitive load laid down by intellectual pathways). Gansterer subjects works to re-evaluation, or commissions others to reinterpret his diagrams and symbols, enabling them to take on the shifts and variegation of complex and multifaceted language systems. They are intended to provide people with a relationship to the process of meaning-making, rather than the making of specific meanings. Text by James Clegg 139

THE GESTURE* ANDREAS SPIEGL

NIKOLAUS GANSTERER

Just as thinking rushes ahead of the thought, so does drawing rush ahead of the drawing, and the process ahead of the result. In Nikolaus Gansterer’s work, the processes of thinking and drawing are conceived as analogous, developed as synonymous, and analysed in terms of their identity. As processes, the only relationship they have to the things they produce, only to leave them behind, is ambivalent. What seems to be preserved in the manifest thoughts and drawings are just traces that capture what is no longer there, figures of presence and absence at once—legacies of a process that moved ahead turning to new questions and spaces. In this sense, they testify to the relationship that thinking and drawing have to the untenable and the unstoppable. Seemingly etched into the untenable is the contradiction, the argument that turns against the argumentative and rejects, corrects, and revises itself in order to replace a fi nal solution by the next one that is possible. When Gansterer integrates objects and findings of different proveniences into his processes as well, he does so only to test them, to sound out their forms and functions: not only does this render the terminology with which they are described shaky, but it also starts to oscillate between the nominal, the metaphor, and the allegory. What is thereby half described, half designated is a design (Entwerfen) that inexorably distances itself from the throw (der Wurf) in order to hold on to the mutability, to the resistant aspect of reification on which drawing gnaws, denuding the thing and its possibility. The gesture of drawing and writing follows speech, a rhetoric of doubt that lives off the word, distorting, lengthening and changing it, only to drop it for another one, for a synonym or a homophone twin. What captures them is merely the trace of mutability: even the ground from which the cause peels off in order to produce an effect the old bond of causality—starts moving, motivates itself to ambiguity. For only a brief moment, the trace promises the ground into which it inscribes itself, sketches itself, in order to see it only as a picture: as a ground of the picture that covers the cause, as a panel behind which hides the authoritarian quality of education in order to legitimise the mimicry, as a wall that draws a line between the inside and the outside. The drawing in Gansterer’s hand and word transcends these grounds, blurring the terminological boundaries that collide with the origin in the concept of the ground. The question of the first stroke, of a basic line, leads only to the figure of carving that still echoes etymologically in the graphic arts, the sound of a wound that is added to the concept of the ground like a name: let’s call it the ground of the picture, which is not sufficient to cause a drawing. Only drawing elevates it to a picture ground, which is therefore always floating above the ground without a reason, professing its faith in the secondary, entrusting itself to the sign. Gansterer’s gesture takes off from the ground in order to keep drawing wherever the voice takes over the movement of the hand, the word turns the head in order to devote itself to the dance, to the mis-written, to the mistake as a source of reason. * This text was first published in 2015 on the occasion of the exhibition The Bottom Line, at S.M.A.K., Gent, Belgium. 140

Gansterer, Figuring Vitality. Video, object, and drawing CrossSections_potentials (Vienna, 2018)

NIKOLAUS GANSTERER

> Gansterer, Untertagüberbau. Installation. CrossSections_perspectives (Stockholm, 2019) Gansterer, Untertagüberbau – Part 2, 2017. Video still (Detail) Photos by Inma Herrera and Başak Şenova

Boukhari, Mind Wandering State. Installation (Detail). CrossSections_intervals (Vienna, 2018)

NISRINE BOUKHARI Nisrine Boukhari (1980, Damascus) studied Sculpture at the Faculty of Fine Arts at Damascus University/Syria, and completed her M.A. in Social Design at Angewandte Kunst Wien (University of Applied Arts Vienna/Austria). Since 2012, Boukhari has been working on her art-based research project on the concept of “Mind Wandering”, where she has coined the term “Wanderism” and announced it as a “State of Mind”. She exhibited her work internationally and locally, at Buildmuseet Umea, Sweden; Trapholt Museum Kolding, Denmark; The World Culture Museum Gothenburg, Sweden; The National Museum of Contemporary Art (Museu do Chiado) Lisbon, Portugal; Museet for Samtidskunst, Roskilde, Denmark; Nederlands Fotomuseum Rotterdam, Netherlands; and Casoria International Contemporary Art Museum Casoria/Italy, among others. Boukhari was a resident artist at Iaspis, Sweden; Trapholt Museum, Denmark; MAWA art residency Winnipeg, Canada; Nordic Artists’ Centre Dale (NKD), Norway; Art Omi in NYC; and at many other residencies. Boukhari is a co-founder for AllArtNow—the first independent contemporary art organisation in Damascus since 2005. Nisrine Boukhari lives and works in Vienna and Stockholm. 144

“Art-based

research is a new image of thought; a narrative and illustration of time in the creative field that processes and investigates our relationship to life, and challenges how we imagine and make sense of our world today. It facilitates in understanding the link between art and its social, political and pedagogical context, and in historising the creative moment through the artistic process as a core of the art in process of becoming. It is essential to critically analyse art in its current tendency and to understand the relationship between art and socio-political transformation. CrossSections has emphasised on the necessity of the dynamic research group, and put everything on the table for the audience to be in direct contact with the artist’s mind in his/her realm of experimentation, creating, and ability to share thoughts and emotions.

”

NISRINE BOUKHARI

HYPERGRAPHIA Installation 2018 presented at CrossSections_intervals (2018), Vienna “On my birthday in 2016, one of my friends brought me a notebook as a gift, wishing me to write a new chapter in my life on its pages because of the difficult experiences and stressful years I had spent after leaving my home country. One midnight, I took the book and wrote only one sentence: “I loved Vienna, but Vienna didn’t love me”. I felt this sentence was intensively saying it all; I was not able to stop writing it, it was like an overwhelming compulsion to write, a hypergraphic act, and it was not the first time...Hypergraphia is a behavioural condition characterised by the intense desire to write or draw...Many writers suffered from Hypergraphia like Edgar Allan Poe, Sylvia Plath, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Franz Kafka, Ezra Pound, Dante, and Moliere”. MIND WANDERING STATE Installation 2012—ongoing presented at CrossSections_intervals (2018), Vienna The installation shows a section of Boukhari’s research by including Breathing Maps drawings as expressions of a wandering mind. THE MAP IS NOT THE TERRITORY Two-channel video installation, 5′52′′ 2015 presented at CrossSections_perspectives (2019), Stockholm; and CrossSections_notes (2019), Helsinki The map is not the territory metaphorically illustrates the differences between belief and reality. The phrase was coined by Alfred Korzybski. Our perception of the world is being generated by our brain and can be considered as a ‘map’ of reality written in neural patterns. Reality exists outside our mind, but we can construct models of this ‘territory’ based on what we glimpse through our senses. 145

LANDSCAPES OF UNCERTAIN TIMES* JENNIE FAHLSTRÖM

NISRINE BOUKHARI

Until now, nature has had an unrivalled ability to renew itself, both in our real world and the one we imagine. Landscapes we had once wandered through merge with the ones we think we have visited or heard of. We have also seen many views in art, films and in our family photo albums, making up a larger common memory of our world and man’s place within it. Through art history, the landscape as a motif has been subject to all kinds of romanticising, pastiches, and embellishments. In art, the perception of a view too beautiful for words is preserved in never-ending variations. Nisrine Boukhari approaches the motif through the changes to our climate and through the traces of the war in Syria, and how we humans, on different levels and with varying degree of ability, try to cultivate and fix the boundaries for what we consider our landscape. … For the artist, the language plays an important role both as an expression of the personal, but also as a fundamental prerequisite for contact with others. The playful composition of the suite of drawings multiplies the perspectives on which story we, as observers, are given the opportunity to form in our own language, from our memories of landscapes and the relationship to others on the same earth. In the works Breathing Maps (begun in 2011), there is another relationship to the dramatic change of leaving your homeland and finding yourself in a new place not of your choosing. The artist has described a period of great anxiety, simultaneously trying to cope with the new through drawing and yoga breathing techniques in a focused union. The work began with breathing exercises and identifying the storm clouds of the mind. At every exhale, a dot was drawn on the paper, continuing until the mind had settled. Through the dots on the paper, we can follow the artist’s breathing pattern and how her state of mind could be concentrated into new drawings in a map-like pattern. Sometimes leaf gold is applied with a final breath, creating another ambiguous layer of boundary and a link between the real world and that of the mind. … An adjacent part of Boukhari’s work has, for a long time consisted of conceptual works, investigating projects and installations inspired by the theories behind the concept psychogeography: how people’s behaviour and feelings are affected by their environments. She began her investigations in her native city Damascus, but in 2012, when the war forced her to leave the country, her perspective broadened into that of the nomad, the affiliation and the mobility she has called “Wanderism”. Boukhari’s base for the works Wanderism is a State of Mind is a state of mind, a wandering of the thought on several levels. Her “Wanderism” is based in turn on the psychological aspect of “Mind Wanderings” where the thoughts are lured away onto other paths than that which is in front of you. Mind Wandering can be a kind of daydreaming on different levels, but can also arise after a trauma, a conflict, or a war. A common trait for many of Nisrine Boukhari’s works is a flexibility of the language, time, and between the place and landscapes we reside in—either as inhabitants or as viewers, as well as in boundaries, forced upon us by others or by ourselves. Getting lost in unknown places, through the wanderings of the mind, becomes a possibility to see yet another landscape. * This text was first published in Swedish for SAK yearbook 2019 in connection with the commissioned work “Landscapes of Uncertain Times”. It was translated by Anna Hesselbom. 146

Boukhari, “It is not what you see on the surface, 2018. Drawing (Details), Breathing Maps Boukhari, Mind Wandering State. Installation (Details). CrossSections_intervals (Vienna, 2018) Photos by Matthias Bildstein

NISRINE BOUKHARI

> Boukhari, The map is not the territory, 2015. Video still. Boukhari, The map is not the territory. Installation. CrossSections_perspectives (Stockholm, 2019) Boukhari, The map is not the territory, 2015. Video still (Detail). Photos by Matthias Bildstein and Inma Herrera

Karvonen, Alien Palace Birdhouse Collection. Installation (Detail). CrossSections_perspectives (Vienna, 2018)

OTTO KARVONEN Otto Karvonen (1975, Helsinki) studied Art Education and Visual Art at University of Art and Design Helsinki, and Sandberg Institute Amsterdam. Otto Karvonen specialises in temporary installations, performances, and sculptures in public spaces. His modest and humorous interventions confuse our perception of everyday reality. They often comment on pertinent political, economic, social and religious themes, though carefully avoiding obvious or forced statements. His exhibitions and projects in 2019 include: Iniziativa canto d’uccello, Fondazione Pastificio Cerere & MACRO Museum, Rome, Italy; 2018: Dedication, public artwork, Central Library Oodi, Helsinki, Finland; Belief System, solo exhibition, Gallery Heino, Helsinki, Finland; The Only Way is Up, Varbergs Konsthall, Sweden; Graffiti, HAM, Helsinki, Finland; 2017: Super Hyvä Olo, public sculpture, Espoo, Finland; 2016: Hors Pistes Festival, Centre Pompidou, Paris; 2014: Alien Palace Birdhouse Collection, CA2M Art Centre, Madrid, Spain; 2013: Roots of the City, public sculpture, Kamppi metro station, Helsinki, Finland; 2012: Reality bites, Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma, Helsinki, Finland; Copenhagen Art Festival, Nikolaj Kunsthal, Copenhagen, Denmark; 2010: Alien Palace Birdhouse Collection, de Appel, Amsterdam, the Netherlands. In 2019, Karvonen received the William Thuring art prize and a three-year working grant from the Finnish Cultural Foundation. His earlier artistic works have been supported by grants from the Arts Promotion Centre Finland and Frame Finland. Otto Karvonen lives and works in Helsinki. 150

“It has been great to get to know all the CrossSections people,

to come together at intervals, exchange ideas, and follow the unfolding of each others’ processes during the luxuriously long period of time the project has spanned.

”

OTTO KARVONEN

ALIEN PALACE BIRDHOUSE COLLECTION Photographs and documentation 2010—2018 presented at CrossSections_potentials (2019), Vienna Alien Palace Birdhouse Collection consists of birdhouses that are modelled after detention centres for immigrants in different European countries. Detention centres are places where illegal immigrants, such as paperless refugees, are held waiting for deportation or processing of their asylum application. Detention centres are essentially prisons, although only a small minority of their residents have a criminal record. Alien Palace birdhouses provide excellent nesting conditions for the occasional winged visitor. The birdhouses are made of weatherproof and durable materials such as cement fibreboard, aluminium, brick, and stainless steel. BIRDSONG INITIATIVE Mixed media 2018 presented at CrossSections_intervals (2018), Vienna Austria plans to cut benefits for immigrants, including refugees, who do not speak German. Chancellor Sebastian Kurz intends to cap refugees’ benefits at €563 a month. They will only be able to claim the amount given to Austrians—€863—if they successfully pass a German test, he said. “The fundamental rule we will introduce is that German will become the key to accessing the full minimum benefit”, Kurz said. “That means that whoever has insufficient language skills will not be able to claim the full minimum benefit.” The work seeks to establish language restrictions on migratory birds entering Austria. It aims to build special learning facilities on the national borders where various migratory birds will be required to learn the song of the Austrian national bird, barn swallow, in order to enter the country. The initiative will be delivered to the Austrian government in the form of a Citizens’ Initiative once the minimum number of 500 signatures has been gathered. An installation in the exhibition displayed some prototype details of a birdsong learning facility, with audible songs of barn swallows. The form was on display and the audience had the chance to add their signature. INIZIATIVA CANTO D’UCCELLO [BIRDSONG INITIATIVE] Video, 8′45′′ 2019 presented at CrossSections_perspectives (2019), Stockholm; and CrossSections_notes (2019), Helsinki The video, shot at Piazza del Popolo in Rome, Italy, depicts a campaign speech for a citizens’ initiative suggesting strict language restrictions for migratory birds. To receive a residence permit, each bird entering the country must learn the song of the national bird, Italian sparrow. By happily confusing migratory birds with immigrants, the work takes on language as a building block of national identity as well as a means of inclusion and exclusion.

151

JAILBIRDS JUKKA RELANDER

OTTO KARVONEN

“What do immigrants and migratory birds have in common? A great deal, in fact. Both hail from exotic lands, and neither is permanently rooted in any specific place. Immigrants and migratory birds live in between two countries. But they differ too. A bird wants to fly, but an immigrant wants to lay down roots. What is more, an immigrant whose identity or travel route is unverified or who faces expulsion can be locked up indefinitely in a prison-like detention unit. The bird at least gets a cosy birdhouse high up in a birch tree in someone’s backyard, some so lavish they look like miniature villas. In other respects, too, the bird is better off than the immigrant: it can come and go as it pleases, its home is spring-cleaned every autumn, and a plush nest awaits its return every spring. Meanwhile, the immigrant is locked up in an institution resembling a concentration camp, cut off from the outside world by barbed wire fencing and prison bars. An immigrant detention centre is like a prison, only real prison inmates are luckier: at least they know how long their sentence will be. A detained immigrant can only wait and wait. … The detention centre is a space that exists outside the domain of social order, yet it exists in a state of hermetic segregation within that very same order. People who spend days, weeks, or even months incarcerated in the waiting room of the Welfare State regard themselves neither as part of an undifferentiated mass—albeit that’s how they are treated—nor as “free”, for that matter. They exist in a ground-zero state between a past that had a definite shape and conferred a particular identity and a nebulous, as-yet shapeless future. These inbetweeners behind barbed wire fences become the blank slate upon which we project all the complicated emotions and fears we feel towards all things foreign. We can project anything without encountering any resistance, for we know nothing about who or what they really are. The truth can only come forth when our fantasy confronts friction. But an incarcerated anonymous alien reaffirms our fantasy without the least bit of friction whatsoever. … Foreigners are here to stay, because the world is a changed place. Back in the Wild West, towns and cavalry forts were islets of order amid the freedom of the prairie. In our society, the set-up is the reverse. There is order every where, except in forgotten pockets where we stash away the pariahs of the nation-state system, the stateless, the paperless, the social security code-less, the jailbirds of our controlling regime. … Otto Karvonen equalizes the status of birds and immigrants by building miniature avian detention centres. His Alien Palace Birdhouses open up surprising, unexpected perspectives on current social issues: What does migration in essence imply, how do we respond to foreigners, and what are our feelings about a hot political topic of the past decades, international mobility? They pose the question: “Why are things as they are, and couldn’t we see the whole issue from a fundamentally different viewpoint?”

*This text consists of excerpts from Jukka Relander’s essay “Jailbirds”, published in Please act like nothing happened. Otto Karvonen. 2016. Aldus Oy, Helsinki. 152

OTTO KARVONEN

> Karvonen, Alien Palace Birdhouse Collection. Installation (Details). CrossSections_potentials (Vienna, 2018) Karvonen, Iniziativa Canto D’uccello [Birdsong Initiative] Video installation. CrossSections_notes (Helsinki, 2019) Karvonen, Iniziativa Canto D’uccello [Birdsong Initiative] Video installation. (Detail) CrossSections_perspectives (Stockholm, 2019) Karvonen, Iniziativa Canto D’uccello [Birdsong Initiative], 2019. Video still.

RAMESCH DAHA Ramesch Daha (1971, Tehran, has lived in Vienna since 1978) studied with Georg Eisler (1990—1992), then studied at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna (1994) and received her master’s degree in 1998. In her multipart work complexes, the artist works with a variety of media including painting, collage, video and drawing, as well as documents from public and her personal archives. Based on extensive historical research, Daha connects biographical historical aspects, collective memories, and historical-political events in new constellations. This involves considerable travelling and study visits to, among others, Vancouver, New York, London, or Berlin. Daha has met broad international recognition with her yet uncompleted series Victims 9/11, in which she attempts to save the victims of the terrorist attack from oblivion by portraying every single one of them. Daha has been represented internationally in numerous solo and group exhibitions and publications, most recently in Creating Common Good, Kunsthaus Vienna, 2014; The Dignity of Man, Vienna, Sarajevo and Brno, 2014; Meeting Points 7: Ten thousand deceptions and one hundred thousand tricks at the Belvedere/21er Haus Vienna; Index Stockholm, 2020. Her works are represented in numerous art collections, including Albertina Vienna, Joanneum Graz, Kupferstichkabinett, and the collections of the City of Vienna and the State of Lower Austria. In 2014, she received the Gmoser Prize of the Vienna Secession and was grand holder at Iaspis Stockholm 2019. Daha lives and works in Vienna.

SIGMUND KLEIN Archival Material, Paintings, Drawings, Blue Prints, Tools, Images from the Artist Books, Audio Track “Dachau”, 30′38′′ 2018 presented at CrossSections_potentials (2019), Vienna With the Sigmund Klein project, Daha traces a personal archive and processes findings with a distinctive artistic approach. Sigmund Klein was the father of Daha’s stepgrandfather. He was deported from Vienna to the concentration camp Dachau after the Reichspogromnacht in 1938. At that time, his son, the artist’s step-grandfather, was 15 years old and survived with his mother as the son of a Czech Jew and political activist. After Dachau, Sigmund Klein was deported to the concentration camp Buchenwald, and about 2 years later to the concentration camp Ravensbrück where he was killed in 1942. Klein’s son kept photographs, letters that his father had written during his 4 years in prison, documents, and all the tools of his father who was a tinsmith. 156

“The

CrossSections project has been a game-changer through creating a strong, self-sufficient support system with mutual trust and freedom amongst the artists and the curator. Hence, it also managed to draw the institutions into its challenging adventure.

”

RAMESCH DAHA

1933 Sound collage 2018—2019 presented at CrossSections_perspectives (2019), Stockholm The sound collage is about the spelling alphabet where Jewish names were deleted. Laurenz is reading the secret paper, a spelling alphabet. The two music pieces are from Franz Lehar and Richard Strauss. The ringing is the original sound of the telephones with the alphabet on it, along with an original sound of the military from 1933. 1933 Installation with collages, 48 calendar pages circa 1933, a burnt book, glass, paper, and video 2′03′′ 2018—2019 presented at CrossSections_perspectives (2019), Stockholm With the transfer of power to the NSDAP on January 30, 1933, anti-Semitism became a state doctrine, and discrimination against Jews was aggravated. On February 22, 1933, the post office Rostock received a postcard requesting to remove Jewish names from the spelling table. The phonebook of 1933 had turned Adam into Anton, David to Dora, Maria to Martha, Nathan to Nordpol, Samuel to Siegfried, Zacharias to Zeppelin. The Nazis sy mbolically took their names and thus their identity from the Jewish people. Part of the installation 1933 is a field telephone of the Wehrmacht with a new spelling table. This was followed by the burning of books by mainly Jewish authors. The video piece is dedicated to book burning. 06.04.1945 Documentation material and installation 2018 presented at CrossSections_intervals (2018), Vienna; and CrossSections_notes (2019), Helsinki According to official records, 06.04.1945 was the date of the “Massaker von Stein” [Massacre of Stein] that took place in Krems an der Donau, Austria. The acting director of the prison “Stein an der Donau”, Franz Kodré, ordered the release of the prisoners. Following this order, the SS and Volkssturm tracked down 380 people in the vicinity of Krems an der Donau and murdered them on the spot under the pretext of quelling a revolt. Daha designed a 100-m-long and 7.5-m-high prison wall to seize this dark chapter of the detention centre. She transferred excerpts from the prisoners’ registry entries dated from 1944 and 1945 as oversized blueprints on the wall. In the 1940’s, it was common practice in Austria to cancel the names of those detained after serving their sentences. The artist copied these pages with all the original traces and crossings on them by preserving the original colour of the blueprints. The work was commissioned by Kunst im öffentlichen Raum Niederösterreich in 2018. 157

RAMESCH DAHA

> Daha, 1933. Documentation material and installation (Details). CrossSections_perspectives (Stockholm, 2019) Photos by Başak Şenova and Inma Herrera

I AM HEALTHY, I CANNOT WRITE THIS LETTER MYSELF* MARTI MANEN

RAMESCH DAHA

The title is taken from a letter, a special letter not to be forgotten. A person is writing with the aim to inform the reader about a physical condition, but with just these two short phrases, it is possible to feel a contradiction: someone healthy but unable to write the letter, someone who wants to comfort and reassure the reader, but at the same time, smuggles a reason to be concerned. Let’s zoom out. History—History with a capital letter—is also related to family and personal documents. Ramesch Daha, born in Tehran in 1971, is an artist based in Vienna. Her artistic practice is related to historical situations and political fights. At her exhibition at Index, Daha presents the result of working four years with documents connected to a member of her family; documents showing imprisonment in Nazi concentration camps (Dachau, Buchenwald, and Ravensbrück). The letter mentioned above was written by Sigmund Klein from the Dachau concentration camp in Nazi Germany on the 4th of December 1938. Sigmund Klein was the father of Daha’s stepfather. Sigmund Klein was writing to Maria Klein and their son Leopold. Mitzi (Maria Klein) answered all of the letters coming from the concentration camps, but her part of the communication is lost in history. What still remains today— Sigmund’s letters and administrative documents—exists because the fragile side of a world conflict decided that it was important not to forget. It can be devastating for a family to secretly keep the traces from a structural massacre that lead to family members dying in concentration camps, for no other reason than simply being themselves. On a societal level, it is possibly more worrying that those responsible within the State immediately decided that Mitzi’s voice wasn’t something to be kept: we can see only one side of a dialogue, the other one is burned. Prior to 1938, Sigmund and Maria met, became a couple and got married. They sent postcards to each other; Maria was working as a dressmaker and Sigmund was a tinsmith. The family—working class in Vienna—was quite poor. Sigmund had some tools from his Jewish ancestors (one of them a shoemaker), and was working for a company— Julius Meinl± that later also became the workplace for his son, Leopold. Maria worked from home. They did not live in the centre of Vienna, but in district 17. Inflation grew and the political landscape became increasingly problematic. Sigmund lost his job for being a Jew and was taken to a concentration camp. With almost no economic possibilities, Maria tried to find a way to keep him alive (sending him money so he could pay the dentist at the concentration camp, for example) and was trying to gather the money to buy a dream ticket to leave Europe. It didn’t happen. After the camp in Dachau, Sigmund Klein was sent to the concentration camp Buchenwald, and later on to the concentration camp Ravensbrück where he was killed in 1942. Daha left Iran and another difficult political situation behind when she was 8 years old to connect with the part of her family with roots in Vienna. There, she spent a lot of time with her grandparents, who had a shop in the city called Elektro Klein which sold televisions, toasters and many other things. The family Klein never talked about Sigmund and Maria, * This text was first published in the brochure of “I Am Healthy, I Cannot Write This Letter Myself” exhibiton by Ramesch Daha at Index Foundation, Stockholm in February 2020. 160

Daha, Path of Life 2019 from the Unlimited History—Sigmund Klein. Blueprint and drawing.

avoiding any possible conversations with a concluding sentence stating that Sigmund died young. Family silences, fear and protection. Leopold had a brown cardboard box with the label “mother, father” but Daha got the instructions not to open it before his death because “the dark chapters” were in there, as Leopold said. That box defines this exhibition. That box explains the silence. That box has been repeated, observed, painted and drawn by Daha; that box became a book, paintings, sound, voices. That box is here in multiple complexities, to be explained. Now come the dark chapters. 161

RAMESCH DAHA

> Daha, 06.04.1945, 2018. Video still. Daha, 06.04.1945, Installation (Detail). CrossSections_notes (Helsinki, 2019) Photos by Başak Şenova, Matthias Bildstein, and Inma Herrera

Denzer, Star, 2019. Split Screen Video stills.

RICARDA DENZER Ricarda Denzer studied architecture in Innsbruck, and fine arts at the University of Applied Arts Vienna where she was member of the TransArts directorial team (2013—2018). She is Senior Lecturer at the Department of Art and Communication Practices. Denzer was visiting artist at the Šaloun Studio Programme, Academy of Fine Arts, Prague, 2016. Ricarda Denzer addresses complex themes in a subtle fashion by using elements of her research process as recurring set pieces, as material that can be put together into changeable, ephemeral arrangements. The artist thus works with the means of analogy and assemblage, as well as with the idea of relationships and correlations, and their laws. This open narrative unfolds imagination and agency by the sound and body of the voice, by orality and from time to time, by ambiguity when telling a story. Most recently, she edited the eJournal #13 of the ZHDK Zürich (with Jo Schmeiser, 2017), curated the art project About the House, and edited the books Perplexities (Revolver 2013) and Silence Turned Into Objects — W.H. Auden in Kirchstetten (edition NÖ, 2014). Her most recent solo exhibitions were at Neue Galerie Innsbruck (2018) and Kunstraum Lakeside (2019). She participated in exhibition venues such as John Hansard Gallery, Southhampton, UK, 2019, Quartier 21, Museumsquartier, Vienna (2017), Steirischer Herbst Graz (2015), and Kunstverein am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz, Berlin/D 8 (2015). Her work is in the collections of Mumok; Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien; Kontakt Collection, The Art Collection of Erste Group, Vienna; Lentos Landesmuseum Oberösterreich, Linz; and the Collection of the City of Vienna. Denzer took up residencies in New York, Istanbul, London and Ústí nad Labem. She is currently involved in the artistic research project Communities in Movement in Belgrade (2020). She is a member of the board of the Vienna Secession since 2019. Denzer lives and works in Vienna. 164

“Working in the context of `CrossSections´ was like the flow of

water bearing iron ore which permeates its way through shale over time. RICARDA DENZER

”

REFLECTIONS ON A STAR-SHAPED MASQUE 2018—2019 “When the Byzantine basilica was converted into a mosque, the faces were covered with a starembossed brass mask in accordance with the Muslim faith. This oval object attracted my attention. The regularity of the shape, the perfection of the shiny brass structure of the star on the colourful, softlooking angel’s feathers evokes a futuristic image. The star-shaped object reproduces and fragments the imaginary opposite in the reflecting facets of the surface. I currently interpret it as an invitation to the imagination of the viewers, offering multiple perspectives. I hear and note: voice and gaze create closeness and distance, transience, and fluidity as a framework for the search for orientation. Directionless searching. By ‘listening to thinking’, I transfer my body to the paper until the colour fades away, my studio wall on blueprints, as a model, an idea or guide. Sequence and frequency. Spreading out like sound. Being here and there at the same time, like the voice. In my work, rendering traces and imprints visible, and revealing layers by engaging with the locations, with the materials, with the narrative, leading right down to the voice itself. The exploration of the nature of original materials, the recently supplemented, reconstructed material, but also the technique of leaving gaps between pieces of original finds and the interpretation of missing pieces in the restoration process serves, for me, as a conceptual basis or a figure of speech. In these chapters, several stories are told simultaneously. They share the interest in the materiality of the voice and in forms of narration.” CHAPTER 1: FREEMINER Extended mixed media assemblage: Interview with Elaine Morman 2018–work in progress presented at CrossSections_potentials (2018), Vienna CHAPTER 2: PADDLE Extended mixed media assemblage: star-shaped brass masque; helmet camera recordings of the iron and ochre mines 2018–work in progress presented at CrossSections_intensities (2018), Vienna CHAPTER 3: STAR Video installation: STAR, split screen video, loop presented at CrossSections_intervals (2019), Vienna 2018—2019 UNTITLED 2018—2019 Star-shaped bronze cast, potato prints in neon yellow pigments on A3 paper. presented at CrossSections_perspectives (2019), Stockholm; and CrossSections_notes (2019), Helsinki From the iron and ochre mines underneath the Forest of Dean on the Welsh border in Gloucestershire—it is said that the industrial age started here, in these mines—I move to the dome of Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, to the choirs of the Seraphim angels who fly around the firmament to God with their six wings, burning and singing holy, holy, holy. 165

RICARDA DENZER

Denzer, Chapter 1: Freeminer, Installation. CrossSections_potentials (Vienna, 2018) Photos by Başak Şenova

RICARDA DENZER’S AUFZEICHNUNGEN* BRANDON LABELLE

RICARDA DENZER

The notion of compositioning as an acoustic performative finds a point of reference in the work of artist Ricarda Denzer. As part of her creative process, Denzer continuously produces what she refers to as “notations” (Aufzeichnungen). These take shape as forms of notetaking that capture surrounding conversations, recording the audible events around her along with personal thoughts, meditations and references. The notations therefore come to map a given situation, figuring the voices and conversations to which she is directly involved, along with those that may suddenly occur and pull her attention, or that filter into her thoughts as so many events and impressions. The notations index the fluctuations and intensities of experience, suggesting a form of listening-thinking prompted by being in a certain time and place. The notations have to do with a type of documentary practice. The transfer of thoughts, ideas, questions, but mainly conversations, both held and found; interviews, texts, themes, including scribbles and doodles, accompany my audio-visual working process, which doesn’t follow a script. The notations are, in a way, also a type of visualisation or textualisation of spoken language and show the chronology of a process and how we arrive at our ideas.1 Throughout the series of notebooks, the notations appear as coloured or traced squares on graph paper surrounded by words, overheard phrases, artistic or theoretical references, scribbles and marks; a composite of what someone may be saying and the private thoughts that emerge comes to fill the pages. Accordingly, the notations define an (over)extended form of attention. “In the very moment when I note something down,” Denzer states, “I’m not actually entirely aware of it. Is it a nice word or does it have a particular meaning?”2 Denzer concentrates and grows distracted at the same moment, giving way to an oscillation of focus, which draws out the ways in which life moves between, through and around others. The notations come to produce an extremely suggestive visualisation and textualisation of how one is deeply affected by the voices that surround and inform our thinking. A form of acoustic mapping, the notations work to capture a multiplicity always already embedded within a single moment, marking the passing of time through a highly impressionable instant. Listening in this way not only acts to deepen relations, as a form of direct mutuality, but also poignantly broadens a relational horizon through interruptions and distractions, a modulation of sense and meaning. The project of open dialogue is therefore often complicated by the intensities of an acoustic perspective, as the ongoing figuring of spatialities and temporalities that continually impinge and support social exchange. In following Denzer’s notations, I detect the beginnings of a process of compositioning, in this case through an act of note-taking that forms into an associative, restless rendering of the sheer flux of life around. Her listening-thinking turns upon an axis tuned to the

* This text was first published in Acoustic territories: sound culture and everyday life by Brandon LaBelle New York, NY: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019. 168

Denzer’s notations on her notebook, 2019 (Detail)

dynamics of a certain situation, which comes to determine a set of marks, patterns, graphics; a vocabulary of fragments, composites, palimpsests. Reading her notebooks is to read a gesture of compositioning, where fragments begin to form relations and associative references begin to emerge as part of the life of conversation, where a distracted scribble evokes a process of attending to a greater territory of experience. Ricarda Denzer’s notebooks appear as maps of events that, by integrating the movements of voices, sounds, thoughts, memories, give way to an emergent arrangement, suggesting how one may come to participate within the temporal flow of being in a place with others. She provides us with a soundful text of a deep listening, one that is equally concrete as well as ephemeral, sharp as well as diffuse, clear as well as distracted. Such might be the lessons of an acoustic engagement of the everyday, highlighting listening and hearing as the intersection of the far and the near, the knowable and the strange, the apparent and the shadowy.

1. Denzer, Ricarda. 2013. Perplexities. Berlin: Revolver Publishing. p. 187. 2. Ibid. 169

RICARDA DENZER

> Denzer, Paddle, 2018 – work in progress, Installation. CrossSections_intensities (Vienna, 2018) Photos by Başak Şenova and Matthias Bildstein

Snow, Showroom, 2017. CGI animation. Video still.

TAMSIN SNOW Tamsin Snow studied Sculpture at the Royal College of Art, London (2010—2012), and Fine Art – Studio Practice and Contemporary Critical Studies at Goldsmiths College, London (2005—2008). Through utilising the materials, aesthetics, and principles of modernist architecture, Tamsin Snow creates CGI films, sculptures, and immersive installations that embody these values, as well as drawing from the architecture of the spaces in which she exhibits. Exhibitions include: Like, Flesh, Atelierfrankfurt, Frankfurt, 2019; Spare Face, Block 336, London, 2018; Showroom, Temple Bar Gallery + Studios, Atrium Space, Dublin, 2018; Resort, Mermaid, Wicklow, Ireland, 2017; Dead Rubber, UEL Project Space, London, 2016; Multifaith, Dazed X Confused Emerging Artist Award, Royal Academy, London, 2015; Lobby Part I & II, Oonagh Young Gallery, Dublin, 2015; Pavilion, Store, London, 2014; and All Humans Do, White Box Gallery, New York, 2012. Snow was the recipient of the KulturKontakt Residency Award, Vienna, 2018; HIAP/ TBG&S Residency Award, Helsinki Finland, 2017; Arts Council of Ireland Visual Arts Bursary Award 2017, 2020; Culture Ireland Awards, 2017, 2018 and 2019; Travel and Training Award, 2017, 2018, and 2019; Firestation Sculpture Award, 2018; and Artlink Artist Residency Award at Fort Dunree, Co. Donegal, Ireland, 2017. Snow lives and works in Dublin. 172

“CrossSections was an amazing opportunity to develop new

work for exhibitions in three cities over three years. The project afforded a group of international artists time to exchange ideas, and to develop collaborations and new perspectives. It was an incredibly exciting, dynamic and productive experience.

”

TAMSIN SNOW

SHOWROOM CGI animation, 3′5′′ 2017 presented at CrossSections_potentials (2019), Vienna Tamsin Snow’s research looks at science fiction’s relationship to real world medical innovation. The work is an enquiry into new developments in scanning technologies, forensic pathology and cryopreservation. Showroom takes the viewer on a virtual tour of a medical processing plant. It imagines futuristic architectural visions for the viewer through computer generated imaging. LIKE, FLESH CGI video animation, continuous loop 2018 presented at CrossSections_intensities (2018), Vienna Like, Flesh is a computer-generated animation of raindrops on glass; the animation is a reconstruction of a stock video purchased from an online image bank. The generic imagery, familiar through continuous commercial reuse, is here presented in a seemingly endless feedback loop. SPARE FACE CGI animation and sculpture, 6′5′′ 2018 presented at CrossSections_intervals (2018), Vienna, CrossSections_perspectives (2019), Stockholm; and CrossSections_notes (2019), Helsinki Spare Face (2018) is guided by research into such topics as modernist architecture, science fiction, and cryogenics. The video is a montage composed largely of stock footage, and juxtaposes existing free and bought architectural models with imagined and built virtual environments. The animation looks at the material structure of digital video and the technological possibilities of new media. The reality of artificial intelligence, suspended animation, and developments in synthetic biology have sparked debate across disciplines. Spare Face explores the question of morphological freedom and the possible impacts these technologies may have for our future selves. The video looks at aspects of what it is that makes us human and how we seek to alter, enhance, and escape that designation. 173

TAMSIN SNOW

SPARE FACE SUSANNA DAVIES-CROOK

Rooms are constructed to be fit for purpose: for bodies, objects, or facilities. Measures are put in place to make us aware of the use-value of these structures before we even set foot in them. They perform gravitas or humbleness, invite or forebode. Tamsin Snow draws on Modernist legacies of architectural functionalism, and the minimal aesthetics that are increasingly mimicked by technocratic industry. In an autopsy room, all is explicitly functional. By stripping everything back to structure, hard edges and angular geometrics, the complexity is present not in ornament, but in the minutiae of form and function. The space rests, suspended in time until reanimation, just like the bodies in Tamsin Snow’s current work Spare Face.

Snow, Like Skin, 2018. CGI animation. Video still.

The architectural dynamics and flow of negative space within the structure are reliant on the imagined future occupancy of a human subject. It is the liminal space, the waiting room, the suspension, that Snow repeatedly probes. The human subject in her works is notably absent, yet implied and activated in the videos through voice-over and subtitles, and InReal-Life by the presence of a human viewer. Flesh, blood, and bone standing before the work, retinas tracking Snow’s point-of-view shots through stark clinical spaces. Spare Face considers the shift in notions of mortality as technology advances. Organ processing leads to the commodification of flesh away from the united biological body. Through cryogenics death becomes a process not a terminal event, ‘an extension of consciousness’. It is this boundary, on the knife-edge of death and the keen-edge of technology, that the artist uses to blur the line between medical innovation and speculative fiction. 174

Flesh here is compromised—bodies are mechanised. The CGI medical processing plant is managed, controlled, and automated. It does not need disinfectant, it does not hold the formaldehyde stench or liquid that emits from the defrosting limb of an unruly body. The tone Snow adopts is the jangling, humming of fluorescent lights and off-kilter minor keys, designed to destabilise. Corporate vision is unveiled with sinister subtext, and we are asked to read between the lines. In Spare Face, the voice-over is the character of the medical facility, and the body of the viewer (us) is addressed as a potential client. Snow is sizing us up. In entering the 3D space of the gallery, which sensitively echoes the CGI architecture, our bodies become complicit—up for grabs—degrading, yet filled with possibility for enhancement.

Snow, Spare Face, 2019. CGI animation (Detail). 175

TAMSIN SNOW

Snow, Spare Face, Sculpture, installation, and CGI animation video still. CrossSections_perspectives (Stockholm, 2019) Photos by Başak Şenova and Inma Herrera

Snow, Spare Face, Installation. CrossSections_notes (Helsinki, 2019) Snow, Spare Face, Installation. CrossSections_intensitites (Vienna, 2018) Snow, Spare Face, Installation and CGI animation. Video still. CrossSections_potentials (Vienna, 2018)

Tuhkanen, Sonic Independence: A Living Forest. Installation (Detail). CrossSections_intervals (Vienna, 2018)

TIMO TUHKANEN Timo Tuhkanen (1983, Muscat, Oman) studied at the Oriental Music School of Jerusalem: Tabla and Indian Classical Music under Nurit Ofer (2002). He received his Bachelor of Arts (Hons) and Master of Music degree at Brunel University of West London, and his PhD from the School of Music, University of Leeds. Tuhkanen’s works intersect between contemporary art and music. He is currently working on designing and creating direct actions and political interventions as an artistic practice through collective intelligence. Timo’s subject matters often adapt themselves inside an occupied environment of urban landscapes and hydrosocial-spaces. He often describes his works in narrative fiction and mythopoetics. His works as a composer and artist have been featured in BAM ­— Biennale Arcipelago Mediterraneo, Palermo, Italy; U—Jazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art, Warsaw, Poland; Konstfack, Stockholm, Sweden; Manifesta 12, Palermo, Italy; 3éme Biennale di l’Art Contemporain Casablanca, Marocco; XX Mänttä Art Festival, Mänttä, Finland; Museo delle Trame Mediterranee, Gibellina, Italy; Harvestworks, New York, USA; European Mediterranean Art Association, Nicosia, Cyprus; Emma Museum of Modern Art, Espoo, Finland; FILE Festival, São Paulo, Brazil; Moscow Philharmonic, Moscow, Russia; Kallion New Music Days, Helsinki, Finland; Alvar Aalto Museum, Jyväskylä, Finland; Dimitria Festival, Thessaloniki, Greece; Time of Music Festival, Viitasaari, Finland; AAVE—Festival, Helsinki, Finland; Musica Nova Festival, Helsinki Finland; Canterbury Jazz Festival, Canterbury, UK; and the Royal Festival Hall, recorded live on BBC3 Hear and Now, London, UK. Tuhkanen lives and works in Helsinki. 178

“CrossSections gave me the opportunity to use lateral thinking

in art and allowed me to develop my practice in conversation with the project’s network.

”

TIMO TUHKANEN

SONIC INDEPENDENCE Book containing text, photographic documentation, drawings, and citations 2018—2099 presented at CrossSections_intensities (2018), Vienna SONIC INDEPENDENCE: A LIVING FOREST Presented by video documentation, a book containing text, photographic documentation, drawings, and citations 2018—2099 presented at CrossSections_intervals (2018), Vienna SONIC INDEPENDENCE Instruments with cotton canvas, wood, staples, and string 2018—2099 presented at CrossSections_perspectives (2019), Stockholm; and CrossSections_notes (2019), Helsinki “I want to discover a way to enable all the plants in a forest to participate in social construction and political decision making. We humans easily condition animals and plants to answer some questions about their likes and dislikes, but we have so far never seriously asked them how they think we should organise society together; how they feel that they should participate in the construction of a society and civilisation, and the creation of a legal and moral framework with us humans. In the work Sonic Independence, I am completely letting go of music and asking the plants to play the instruments as they wish. In other words, I am giving it into the hands of plants in a way that is not environmental: the music is not made by the wind, not by the rain, or by growing or other bioelectric or biochemical functions of life; not conditioned or related to affordance; and not arbitrary. I am letting go of music in order to let go of the power to make decisions. Letting go of decisions in this way opens the space for the inclusion of plants in time. In the process of teaching plants how to play music, I am constructing several different musical instruments that work on this line that reveals the transfer of decision making power between myself—a human—and the forest.” Sonic Independence is an artwork where a living forest is planted at the border of Finland and Russia with the intention of teaching the growing plants how to play music. For CrossSections, Tuhkanen presents several parts of the book where he lays out an eightyyear plan to understand and develop acoustic musical instruments for assisting the forest in ecological and national/political succession away from the grasp of humans. He envisions that the musical instruments will act to strengthen the communication between plants and humans by giving the minds of plants an aesthetic outlet that humans also can easily understand. The work combines research into the legal land rights and policy creation between nations and indigenous groups, the theoretical writings in Hannah Arendt’s Life of the Mind, and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s Cosmological Perspectivism in Amazonia and Elsewhere with an aesthetic practice of “touch-music” developed by Tuhkanen in his doctoral thesis. 179

TIMO TUHKANEN

> Tuhkanen, Sonic Independence: The Living Forest. Installation (Details). CrossSections_intervals (Vienna, 2018) Photos by Başak Şenova and Matthias Bildstein

SONIC INDEPENDENCE BJÖRN NORBERG

TIMO TUHKANEN

1. Somewhere in remote western Sweden on a mountain close to the Norwegian border, there is a tree called Old Tjikko. The exact position is secret. It has been there for 9550 years and started to grow soon after the inland ice melted. The weight from the heavy snow has pushed its branches towards the ground and they have rooted. What we see today is not the same body that grew there 9500 years ago; however, the DNA has remained the same. It is an ancient spirit, an ancient soul. An avatar or a hologram. Will Old Tjikko survive the climate changes? 2. “Any body, the human body included, is imagined as being the outer shell of a soul. This notion is to be found all over the Americas. In some native languages, the term for ‘body’ also means ‘envelope’ or ‘casing,’ and as such is applied to things like baskets, shoes, clothes, hats, houses, and so on—all these things are the ‘body-envelope’ of something else.” Eduardo Viveiros de Castro. 2012. Cosmological Perspectivism in Amazonia and Elsewhere 3. The Swedish expression “ute i det fria” means to be out in nature, outside of civilisation and houses. In the open air. Directly translated, it means “out in the free (space/land)”. Is ‘civilisation’ a prison? 4. The great forests in Canada, Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Russia are mainly farms where trees are cultivated. Together they bind more carbon than all the combined rainforests, but they look the same mile after mile. The lack of dead wood means fewer species and a less functional ecosystem. This “rational” forestry contributes to climate change on a very large scale. Is this a free forest? 5. Are the trees slaves or labourers? Does anyone listen to the trees? What can a tree like Old Tjikko tell? 6. There is the Carbon-14 method, the Dendrochronology, and the Pollen Analysis methods that will help us read information hidden in dead plants. A plant that is found far away from water that would normally live close to a lake can tell us about how the uplift has changed the landscape. Fossils are imprints, prehistoric graphics. Plants will communicate with other plants and with insects through pheromones. Are there other ways to communicate through and with plants, less scientific and not based on measurement and numbers? 7. Within the art project Sonic Independence, Timo Tuhkanen will plant a sonic forest. He uses a time scale calibrated to the clock of the trees. The project started in 2018 and will end in 2099. Trees are planted close to the border between Finland and Russia. Tuhkanen will give them musical instruments that they will learn to play. The trees will be able to use the instruments as they want to. The aim of the project is to give the trees a voice that humans might be able to understand, and a way for the plants to participate in decisions. What will the music sound like? Will the trees accept the tools, and will they use them? We don’t know. We don’t even know if we will be able to hear the music or understand the trees’ intentions and wills. 182

Tuhkanen, Sonic Independence. Detail from the project’s documentation archive (2018)

8. To cultivate is to tame the living. To foster the living. The industrial revolution and the modern project are said to be built based on rational thinking. Is a society built on consumption and production utterly rational? Sonic Independence is not suggesting a return to a previous stage, but is an attempt to find alternatives beyond what is human, beyond beliefs, perspectives, numbers, and science. It questions attitudes, motivation, and reason. 9. “Clichés, stock phrases, adherence to the conventional, standardised codes of expression and have the socially recognized function of protecting us against reality, that is, against the claim on our thinking attention that all events and facts make by virtue of their existence.” Hannah Arendt. 1971. The Life of the Mind. 10. “Wherever the relevance of speech is at stake, matters become political by definition, for speech is what makes man a political being.” Hannah Arendt. 1958. The Human Condition. 183

TIMO TUHKANEN

Tuhkanen, Sonic Independence. Installation (Details). CrossSections_notes (Helsinki, 2018) Tuhkanen, Sonic Independence. Installation (Details). CrossSections_perspectives (Stockholm, 2018) Tuhkanen, Sonic Independence. 2018. Video still (Detail). Photos by Başak Şenova and Petri Summanen

YANE CALOVSKI Yane Calovski (1973, Skopje) studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts (1996), Bennington College (1997), and was a Researcher at the CCA Kitakyushu (2000) and the Jan Van Eyck Academy (2004). Calovski has received a number of fellowships and research residencies including IASPIS (2018), ORTung Fellowship (2012), Allians Kulturstiftung Award (2004), and the Pew Fellowship in the Arts (2001). His context-oriented installations, publications, and curatorial projects combine modernist archives concerned with architecture with empirical ideas situated in the site-specificity of different cultural, social, and political geographies. Calovski has exhibited, screened and published internationally. He represented Macedonia at the 56th Venice Biennial—with Hristina Ivanoska, and has exhibited at the Helsinki Photography Biennial 2014, D-O ARK Underground 2012, Manifesta 7 (2008), and Manifesta 3 (2000). His works are part of a number of public and private collections including Van Abbenmuseum, Philadelhia Museum of Art, Deutsche Bank Collection, and the Art Telekom Collection Berlin. In 2012, the Zorlu Center Art Collection published “OBJE’CT”, a monograph on Calovski’s work. He co-founded ’Press to Exit Project Space’ in Skopje with Hristina Ivanoska as a space dedicated to artistic research and curatorial practices. Calovski lives and works in Skopje and Berlin.

FORMER CITY Archival material and drawings 2017—2018 presented at CrossSections_potentials (2019), Vienna Former City is the latest stage of an ongoing research on the Skopje Urban Plan Project that also includes the two previous works Master Plan (2007—2008) and Obsessive Setting (2009—2010). The newest project documents the unsalvageable and contaminated data pertaining to the Skopje Urban Plan Project (1963—1967) in the aftermath of the fire at the former Institute for Town Planning and Architecture Skopje (ITPA) in April 2017. All three works comprise Undisciplined: A Construction of An Archive, an editorial project on the subject that was published in 2019. AN EARLY LOST PLAY —co-authored with FOS Video, 10′35′′ 2006 presented at CrossSections_perspectives (2019), Stockholm; and CrossSections_notes (2019), Helsinki Calovski and FOS touch on the questions of the formal, procedural, European politicallycorrect requirements for forgiveness and public media negotiation. They also question the crisis in European nations and seek for an order in which the “multi-ethnic” and the “multi-cultural” would not just be abstract concepts that appear at random, but would face the community as a whole with the challenge of a real and lived mutual understanding. 186

“Looking

in retrospect, I believe that CrossSections, as a programme, was meant to be a ‘work-in-dialogue’. It had a conceptual and curtailed gravitas to go beyond the established norms of project production between a curator, a group of artists, and partner institutions. It tried to rethink the strategy of producing a series of dialogues that unfolded over time and over a hybrid landscape of educational, cultural, independent partners and venues. Over three years, it surged and succeeded in recapturing the imaginations of everyone involved in demonstrating that mutual respect and trust, camaraderie and solidarity are the most important postulates on which to build our relationships.

”

YANE CALOVSKI

FORMER CITY Archival material and drawings 2017—ongoing presented at CrossSections_intensities (2018), Vienna The main goal of the project is to reset some of the collected, unprotected, and chemically contaminated printed materials of the former Institute for Urbanism and Architecture Skopje (ZUAS) in April 2017. The project was developed in cooperation with ZUAS, the City Museum of Skopje (MGS), and the State Archives of the Republic of Macedonia (DARM). In the processes of collecting, thinking, mapping, digitising, and associative development of all available materials, Calovski created new drawings and objects, and unleashed the project in three processes: (i) Archivism: archiving, activism, and advocacy; (ii) Publishing: disclosure, reading, and filming; (iii) Exposure: visual isolation, manufacturing, and sharing. By converging notions of archiving while augmenting a method similar to the immediacy of drawing, his research was focused on designing discursive frameworks for the role of post-medium art in a wider cultural context. UNDISCIPLINED: A CONSTRUCTION OF AN ARCHIVE Archival material and drawings0 2018 presented at CrossSections_intervals (2018), Vienna “The conceptual elasticity in converging the legacy of architectural modernity, notion of performativity, usage of archives and addressing current socio-cultural, economic, and political conditions has been at the centre of my artistic practice for many years. While engaging various research and production applications, and augmenting a method similar to the immediacy of drawing and durational installations, I construct often ambiguous and unresolved visual and archival entities.” The project interconnects modernist architectural narratives that belong to the city of Skopje. Initiated in May 2017, the main goal of the project is to conceptually reset the books, maps, reports and other collected materials belonging to the former Institute for Urbanism and Architecture Skopje that suffered a devastating fire in April 2017. 187

YANE CALOVSKI

> Calovski, Former City, 2017, Installation. CrossSections_intensities (Vienna, 2018) Photos by Başak Şenova and Matthias Bildstein

Institute for Urbanism and Architecture Skopje after the fire in April 2017

OBSESSION, THINGS, AND NARRATIVES* ASTRID WEGE

YANE CALOVSKI

If one exchanges the term “artwork” with “collection”, one enters yet another field, which is equally important to Yane Calovski’s artistic thinking and closely linked to the question of identity. (Art) collections gain identity not only through the items accumulated, but also through the way knowledge and artefacts are categorised, ordered, and displayed. The form in which a collection is made accessible reflects the structure and condition of any given society. In this sense, collections are defined by their usage. What then, if the given order is altered and both the display and the forms of perceiving the exhibits are changed. … Collections of images and archives are hence both the object and the source of Calovski’s explorations and artistic interventions. “Of archive and collection” reads the inscription in one of the many drawings of Master Plan (2008—2009) and Obsessive Setting (2010), two projects which are based on intense studies in various private archives. Both works refer to the reconstruction of Calovski’s hometown Skopje in the wake of the devastating earthquake in 1963. The almost complete destruction of the city of Skopje was taken as an unparalleled opportunity to plan and envision the city from scratch, and to create an “ideal city” shaping all areas of social, economic, political, and cultural life in keeping with the optimistic spirit of the 1960s—1970s modern architecture (whose authoritarian gesture has been vastly criticised since then); simultaneously, the planned re-construction of Skopje was seen as a chance to strengthen and create an internationally acknowledged symbol of the Macedonian national identity within Tito’s multinational state of Yugoslavia. In 1965, Japanese architect Kenzo Tange and his team were invited to develop a new Master Plan for the city which, however, was never fully implemented. … It was exactly this gap between high-flying ideas and the sometimes banal results in reality, the conflict between the utopian dreams of an individual and those of a collective body, the clash between a present projected onto the future and aging during the course of its realisation and the needs and reality of a lived present, which sparked Calovski’s interest. The “mystery of how we ended up with an unremarkable result after so much international input and solidarity” stood, as he once said, at the beginning of his complex investigation which traced the various displacements and transformations of the original plans during the course of the reconstruction of the city. Calovski was not only interested in the details of production, but also in the omissions and lapses. His series of evocative drawings realised for both Master Plan and Obsessive Setting reflect his specific focus: they live from the tension between elaborate details, subtly sketched elements, and blank space. While some motifs repeat in both series, indicating, as the artist notes, the exhaustion of the archival material

* This text consists of excerpts from Astrid Wege’s essay “Obsession, Things, and Narattives”, published in Obje’ct. Yane Calovski. 2012. Ed. Başak Senova. Zorlu Center Art Collection. Istanbul, pp. 33—37. 190

Photographs of the original model for the Master Plan of Skopje from 1965 by Kenzo Tange. The model is kept at the Museum of the city of Skopje Conservation Laboratory. Photos by Calovski. Kenzo Tange Team in from of the model in the Eastern of the city centre of Skopje. Archival Material.

available, others take up elements from newly discovered documentations and records of images, pointing to new details. This returning to and reworking of found, appropriated, as well as new material while highlighting different aspects parallels the reconstructive manner of how (re)collections work: they shift, re-evaluate, and ultimately re-create what is remembered according to the conditions at the time the memory occurs. … Fragments of the past are captured from a present perspective in order to open new horizons, explore unknown territory, and allow for narratives and ramifications which are rarely linear­—a reading which is reflected by the presentation of the drawings in loose clusters. While Calovski’s drawings embody the process of recollecting, the modular structure realised for Obsessive Setting—referring to Kenzo Tange’s original architectural model which Calovski had included in Master Plan­—delivers a model for an ideal storage, archive, or museum: it is flexible, with no fixed boundaries, accessible and always changing. 191

YANE CALOVSKI

> Calovski, An Early Lost Play, 2006, co-authored with FOS, Video. CrossSections_perspectives (Stockholm, 2019) Calovski, An Early Lost Play, 2006, co-authored with FOS, Video. CrossSections_notes (Helsinki, 2019) Photos by Başak Şenova

CURATOR

BAŞAK ŞENOVA Başak Şenova is a curator and designer. She studied Literature and Graphic Design (MFA in Graphic Design and Ph.D. in Art, Design and Architecture at Bilkent University), and attended the 7th Curatorial Training Programme of Stichting De Appel, Amsterdam. As an assistant professor, she lectured in various universities in Turkey. In 2017, she received her Associate Professorship from the Higher Education Council of Turkey, and resident fellowship at the University of the Arts, Helsinki in co-operation with HIAP. Currently, she is a Visiting Professor at University of Applied Arts Vienna, and also teaches a seminar course “Case Studies” for Master students at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. Şenova has been writing on art, technology and media, initiating and developing projects and curating exhibitions since 1995. She is one of the founding members of NOMAD, as well as the organizer of “ctrl_alt_del” sound art project, and “Upgrade!Istanbul”. She was the editor of art-ist 6, Kontrol Online Magazine, Lapses book series, UNCOVERED, Aftermath, Obje’ct: Yane Calovski, The Move, The Translation, Scientific Inquiries, Cultural Massacre, Ahmet Elhan—Ground Glass, Lines of Passage (in medias res), The Discord: Benji Boyadgian, and Shodow Optics among other publications. Şenova is one of the editorial correspondents of ibraaz.org and Turkish correspondent of Flash Art International. She is a member of the editorial board of PASS, International Biennial Association’s (IBA) journal. Şenova acted as an advisory board member of the Turkish Pavilion in Venice Biennale, the Istanbul Biennial, and the Biennial of Contemporary Art, D-0 ARK Underground in Bosnia and Herzegovina. She curated the Zorlu Center Collection for two years (2011—2012) while also acting as the editor of its publications. Şenova was the curator of the Pavilion of Turkey at the 53rd Venice Biennale. She co-curated the UNCOVERED project (Cyprus, 2011—2013); and the 2nd and 5th Biennial of Contemporary Art, D-O ARK Underground (Bosnia and Herzegovina, 2013 and 2019). She acted as the Art Gallery Chair of (ACM) SIGGRAPH 2014 (Vancouver), the curator of the Helsinki Photography Biennial 2014 and the Jerusalem Show VII: Fractures (2014). In 2015, she curated the Pavilion of North Macedonia at the 56th Venice Biennale; in 2016, Lines of Passage (in medias res) Exhibition in Lesvos; and in 2019, the inaugural exhibition of B7L9, Climbing Through the Tide in Tunis. Since 2017, she has been working on this research/process-based art project CrossSections and has curated five group and three solo exhibitions in the context of the project in Vienna, Helsinki, Stockholm, and Rome in 2018 and 2019. At the moment, Şenova is running a research-based educational programme, The Octopus Programme, with Barbara Putz-Plecko at the University of Applied Arts Vienna. 195

CHAPTER 5

THE PROCEEDINGS

EXHIBITIONS MODELS SOLO EXHIBITIONS TALKS PERFORMANCES PRESENTATIONS GUIDED TOURS GUIDE BOOKLET BOOK ARTIST BOOKS SCREENING PROGRAMME

EXHIBITIONS

EXHIBITIONS AS CURATORIAL READYMADE FORMS OF ESCAPE* PAUL O’NEILL After more than 30 years of increasingly intense curatorial production and debate, one aspect within curatorial discourse is the continued and even ‘renewed’ contestation of the existence, and legitimacy, of a specifically curatorial field of praxis. In short: it seems that we are experiencing a continuous cycle of consolidation in the discursive arena around curating. In this text, I wish to account for ‘the curatorial’ as constellated forms of emergence, and as a process of ‘becoming,’ or ‘becomingness,’ and propose that the exhibition as form offers a moment of escape for art. The exhibition-form considered as constellation is a ‘bringing and becoming together,’ whereby ‘the curatorial’ is aligned with certain conceived practices of ‘research.’ This interrelation between ‘the curatorial’ and ‘research’ appears to be essential at a moment when there is such a focus on artistic over-production, and when the discursive field around curating is riddled with attempts to limit, or at least narrowly define what curating should be, or seeks to be, and to determine which bodies of knowledge shall have enduring consequence. This tendency has been particularly apparent in recent attempts to construct concepts of ‘the curatorial,’ conceived as forms of practice operating away from, alongside or supplementary to the main work of curating-as-exhibition-making. This is evident from the briefest of glances at a number of recent attempts at describing ‘the curatorial’ as somewhat distinct from its historical predecessors—from curatorship (of primarily late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century museums), to exhibition-making (in postSzeemann authored shows) and to curating (having manifested itself in co-productive and creative curatorial practices since the 1990s), in that order. For example, Jean-Paul Martinon and Irit Rogoff, in their preface for the recent edited anthology on ‘the curatorial’ state that: If ‘curating’ is a gamut of professional practices that had to do with setting up exhibitions and other modes of display, then ‘the curatorial’ operates at a very different level: it explores all that takes place on the stage set-up, both intentionally and unintentionally, by the curator, and views it as an event of knowledge. So to drive home a distinction between ‘curating’ and ‘the curatorial’ means to emphasize a shift from the staging of the event to the actual event itself: its enactment, dramatization and performance.1 In an earlier text, Rogoff articulates the event of ‘the curatorial’ as critical thought that does not rush to embody itself, instead raising questions that are to be unraveled over time.2 Whereas Maria Lind’s notion of ‘the curatorial’ is equally temporal as it involves

* This text is an excerpt from Paul O‘Neill‘s essay “Curating After the Global: Roadmaps for the Present”, published in English in Curating After the Global: Roadmaps for the Present. 2019. Eds. Paul O’Neill, Simon Sheikh, Lucy Steeds, and Mick Wilson. Cambridge, MASS., the MIT Press. 1. Jean-Paul Martinon Eds. The Curatorial: A Philosophy of Curating (London: Bloomsbury, 2013) p. ix. 2. See Irit Rogoff, “Smuggling—A Curatorial Model’, in Vanessa J. Müller and Nicolaus Schafhausen Eds. Under Construction: Perspectives on Institutional Practice. (Cologne: Walther König, 2006) pp. 132—133. 198

practicing forms of political agency that try to go beyond the already known,3 Beatrice von Bismark’s understanding of ‘the curatorial’ is that of a continuous space of negotiation, contributing to other processes of becoming.4 Emily Pethick’s proposition of ‘the curatorial,’ in turn, presupposes an unbounded framework, allowing for things, ideas and outcomes to emerge in the process of being realised.5 Illustrative of the contested territory around this

expanded field of curatorship, these definitions cannot be reduced to a set of positions that exist in opposition to exhibition-making; rather, they support forms of research-based, dialogical practice in which the processual and the serendipitous overlap with speculative actions and open-ended forms of production. Certainly, these nuanced definitions of ‘the curatorial’ can be read as forms of resistance to the primacy of the practice of curating as resulting in a fixed ‘exhibition-form,’ or to the narrative-oriented authorial model of curation, which might be defined as commissioning new or working with extant artworks for a public manifestation within an exhibitionary frame or organizing principle defined by a curator. I would argue, though, that this is not the primary objective of ‘the curatorial,’ which prioritizes a type of working with others within a temporary space of co-operation, co-production, and discursivity that allows ideas to emerge in the process of doing and speaking together. However dissensual, this time spent together can be made public, warts and all, and in doing so, the discursive aspect of curatorial work is given parity with—rather than being perceived as contingent on—the main event of staging exhibitions. Similarly, the work of exhibition-making is where processes are set in motion in relation to other activities, actions and events within ‘the curatorial.’ Certain articulations of ‘the curatorial’ have identified a strand of practice that seeks to resist categorical resolution, preferring to function in the Adornian sense; as a constellation of activities that do not wish to fully reveal themselves. Instead of conforming to the logic of inside and outside—in terms of the distribution of labour—a constellation of activities exists in which the exhibition, whichever form it takes, can be one of many component parts. Rather than forcing syntheses, this idea of a constellation—as an always-emergent praxis—brings together incommensurable social objects, ideas and subject relations in order to demonstrate the structural faults and falsities inherent in the notion of the hermetic exhibition as primary curatorial work. Rather than being either contra to or integrated in, ‘the curatorial as constellation’ of practices proposes a more juxtaposed or simultaneous field of signification, form, content, and critique. The constellation, in this sense, is an ever-shifting and dynamic cluster of elements that are always resisting reduction to a single common denominator. By preserving irreconcilable differences between things, actions, discourses at the moment of exhibition—in whatever public form this takes—such praxis retains a tension between the universal and the particular, between essentialism

3. Maria Lind, “The Curatorial,” Artforum. October, 2009, pp. 103—105. 4. Beatrice von Bismarck, “Curatorial Criticality: On the Role of Freelance Curators in the Field of Contemporary Art,” in Curating Critique, Marianne Eigenheer E, (Frankfurt am Main: Revolver, 2007) pp. 62—69. 5. Emily Pethick, “The Dog that Barked at the Elephant in the Room,” The Exhibitionist. No. 4, pp. 81—82. 199

and nominalism. With this in mind, it may be useful to explore how the ‘the curatorial’ and certain understandings of ‘research’ have become more aligned with another recently, perhaps as a means of moving beyond an understanding of exhibitions as the main outcome of curating-as-production. In relation to the possible conjunctions and divergences between the ‘the curatorial’ and ‘research,’ the exhibition-form can be conceived as a research action in itself, as much as a curatorial mode of emergent practice. In this sense, the ‘curatorial as research’ rather than primarily ‘as production,’ or ‘as authorship,’ shifts the emphasis away from the exhibition as spatio- temporal, or as a phenomenologicial encounter with art. Instead, art (as object, as concept, or thing, in whatever form it manifests itself) becomes part of an exploratory process of transformation through a process of being in motion, moving from one state of being toward another, from being art to becoming exhibition as part of ‘the curatorial’ process. Rather than perceived as static, art is itself changed by this movement, by becoming public, by ‘being exhibited.’ Additionally, the eventful experience of art as encounter moves toward a more ontological register, where art is transformed by its own moment of becoming ‘exhibition.’ Art stops being art—as it was prior to its showing—and becomes art-in-exhibition, in terms of a temporary moment of being publicly present. At that moment, or in that encounter, art is ‘becoming’ or ‘being with’: a movement and evolution, ‘changing to something or someone’ and a being ‘in motion’; the ontic- as (being) real, existence, as living-form.

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A CONSTRUCTED MODEL: THE CROSSSECTIONS EXHIBITIONS BAŞAK ŞENOVA

“In order to lead in a new direction, one needs to not be afraid of disorienting those which are used to always travelling the same old road. * ”

MICHELANGELO PISTOLETTO

The core idea behind the CrossSections exhibitions was to undertake the challenge of communicating the artistic research and the work-related process—at times with the “presence” of the work, and sometimes with its “incompleteness” or “lack of”—in the physical space of the exhibition venue. The execution of this idea unfolded through numerous questions regarding the processes and issues concerning the research, creation, presentation, and perception related to the work. With each exhibition, this curatorial model was repeated, rehearsed, altered, filtered, and experimented by the artists and the curator; hence, it eventually formed its own language. This model was collaboratively constructed in time and succeeded in the organizing of process-based and condition-based conversations between the works and the audience. The visual language of CrossSections, developed though the collective focus of the group, started to build up its grammar with a trilogy of group shows at Kunsthalle Exnergasse in Vienna. The duration of the first two exhibitions were shorter. The exhibition space of Kunsthalle Exnergasse—transformed into a studio—held talks, performances and presentations every few days, becoming a space for thoughts, uncertainty, sketches of ideas, questioning, experimenting, and making, where anything that emerged was welcomed. These multiple elements of public programming aimed to record and display the research strains, ongoing processes, and artistic methodologies of the participating artists with a particular and experimental curatorial approach. CrossSections_intervals was the last and conclusive exhibition. Its long duration by comparison to its first two iterations also designated the layered formation of CrossSections_ intervals with more input and proceedings. In this exhibition, the resulting cumulative interdisciplinary input and data of the project’s process was transformed and translated into different kinds of narration and documentation in sets of intervals. They served as sources and potentials for other future implementations and articulations of the project. The dialogues between the works were formed through both cross and parallel references and, at times, their content migrated towards each other.

* This quote was extracted from “My father, who has always been in my heart, returns through my art”: an interview with Michelangelo Pistoletto” by Ginevra Barbetti, published on the digital edition of Domus on 29th May, 2019. https://www.domusweb.it/en/art/2019/05/29/my-father-who-has-alwaysbeen-in-my-heart-returns-through-my-art-an-interview-with-michelangelo-pistoletto.html 201

The CrossSections_perspectives exhibition in Stockholm was the first international exhibition, taking place at Konstfack during the celebration of their 175th anniversary. By centring on communicating paths of artistic research, the exhibition intended to give an insight into the working methodologies of the artists and their different media. The audience were mostly students, and since the exhibition occupied the spacious main exhibition hall “Vita Havet”, located upon entry from all doors of the building, it literally crossed the path of anyone who wanted to access any location in the building. This position—along with the opening events, guided tours, and artist talks—enforced encounters between the exhibition and the users of the building. The outcomes of these encounters contributed to the project as the openness of the model absorbed that which each situation brought. In similar manner, the intervention of CrossSections to the Climbing Through the Tide exhibition in Tunis was headed for unpredictable responses and contributions by carrying part of the project to an unknown territory of encounters. It was a breathtaking endeavour filled with sets of new associations provided by this large-scale exhibition. All through these exhibitions, CrossSections discussed how to communicate the potentials of the research along with the end product, the artwork. Therefore, the audience was the most important parameter in shaping the modes of presentation of the project from the very beginning. The final exhibition, CrossSections_notes, took place at the Exhibition Laboratory of Academy of Fine Arts, Helsinki. Filled with completed works, it was the most coherent, yet most discreet exhibition in terms of curating the traces of the process among all the project’s exhibitions throughout three years. Just as Heidegger addresses technology that conceals and reveals at the same time by underlining the difference between the essence

of technology and the practice of using it,1 the more the works came to life in the form of completed pieces, the more the artists concealed the elements of their research. Respectively, the exhibition presented the research in its most refined and condensed form. Like a beautifully performed polyphonic musical piece, the process of the project, the accumulated research material of the artists, and the works decisively intertwined.

DESIGN OF THE EXHIBITIONS The entire design of the project pivoted around communicating paths of artistic research and knowledge. The exhibition design was intended to give an insight into the working methodologies of the artists who work with different media. The idea was to create a semistudio/semi-exhibition environment by dedicating working and viewing space for each project using clusters of tables to form clear visual divisions.

1. Heidegger, M. and Lovitt, W. 1977. The question concerning technology, and other essays. New York: Harper & Row. p. 3. 202

At the same time, venues were kept as open spaces without adding architectural elements or space boundaries. These venues were constantly adapted into spaces for events, performances, and talks. The element of improvisation was welcomed and taken as a creative act during the instalment phases of the exhibitions. Since improvisation simply means “without provision”,2 the unpredictability of some of the spontaneous design interventions worked in harmony with the open curatorial format of the project. This openness also allowed the artists to experiment further with the presentations of their projects and artworks in the exhibitions. In most cases, this act of improvisation has become a—sometimes individual and at other times collaborative—performative act as one of the expressive signatures of the CrossSections project. Correspondingly, the integration of research material, documentation, and the art works were critical to the performative value of the design and were supported by this specific exhibition design approach. Hence, the exhibition design allowed for diverse and overlapping experiments and perceptions to be experienced by generating a flow and connection amongst the works. Identical tables as display units were placed to form clusters, thus encouraging interactions as characterised by the content of each project. The selection of the material for these tables was functional and very basic: they provided a plain background and consistency. Moreover, the way they were placed in clusters allowed these functions to intersect. The integrated design of research material, documentation, and the art works were brought together by forming individual templates through the placement of the tables and screens. Moreover, in order to create spatial efficiency, navigation routes and views with different perspectives among these clusters were also calculated. Therefore, they were not sequential, but rather scattered. In this way, the venue was carefully choreographed to inhabit both correlated and contradictory visual languages. In a parallel line of thought, the structure of the events and the exhibition layout of the first two exhibitions at Kunsthalle Exnergasse followed the space’s architectural formation, which dictated using the same display units. Hence, during the final exhibition in Vienna, CrossSections_intervals, followed by the exhibitions in Stockholm, CrossSections_perspectives, and in Helsinki, CrossSections_notes, the same display units—the tables—were gradually transformed into props, backgrounds, and in some cases even into part of the artworks.

2. Kleidonas, Alexandros. 2012. “Lessons in architectural improvisation”. In First International Conference on Architecture and Urban Design. (ICAUD), Tirana, Albania. p. 2. 203

UTILIZING “TABLE” AS A DESIGN ELEMENT IN A RESEARCH-BASED CURATORIAL AND SCENOGRAPHIC PRACTICE FUNDA ŞENOVA TUNALI What we have witnessed with the five CrossSections exhibitions is a gradually evolving design approach which has highlighted the process of the artistic research and production. Başak Şenova, the curator of the project, is not only concerned with the output of the artists, but also with the process which is shaped by meetings, dialogues, conversations, and feedback. CrossSections has become a project where not only the question of “what?”, but the “how?” is even more significant. In all the exhibitions, one thing that has reinforced the visual coherence of the project was the usage of the tables as an exhibition element. They acted as displays, and even part of the works at times, while depicting the navigation within the exhibitions. Throughout the exhibitions, we observe the transformation of the tables from mere elements of display to powerful statements on their own. Table as an item of furniture carries with it many connotations: a horizontal flat surface whereon a study or a research is taking place; a personal space; a customised belonging; a surface on which the first ideas, sketches, and prototypes are realised; a worktop where someone concentrates on his/her thoughts; a piece of furniture around which people are gathered; a space for conversation, dialogue, and feedback. The tables at these exhibitions invite the viewer to view the exhibited works from a different perspective. Through leaning towards the table, the viewer starts to form an alternative dialogue. The works exhibited become objects not only to be contemplated, but also works to be investigated. The tables at the exhibitions are like stations that offer different experiences while they stay interconnected with each other. The usage of the tables even echoes Bauhaus principles1 through the emphasis on their functions, the untouched, visible display of their materials (MDF worktops and metal legs), and their minimalist styles. This strong visuality processes in a way to form a graphic coherence between all the CrossSections exhibitions. The selection of the materials provides the integration of a modular system where the tables can be arranged, re-arranged, and placed in a variety of ways. Space is organised and divided by the usage of the tables; hence, they also act as a way-finding system. Although a linear reading is not dictated in the exhibitions, the design and placement of the tables offer a particular reading.

1. Gropius, Walter. 1975. “Bauhaus-Dessau: Principles of Bauhaus Production” [1926] in Form and Function: A Sourcebook for the History of Architecture and Design 1890—1939. Ed. Tim Benton, Charlotte Benton, and Denis Sharp. London: Crosby Lockwood Staples, p. 148. 204

As we move from the first exhibition to the last, we start to see the transformation of the tables as alternative displays, and even as bold statements. Their orientation, placement, and interaction with the works and space start to have their own voices. Sometimes they act like silent surfaces where the exhibited work stands out, and sometimes they form a tension within the venue, and start to have a dialogue with the exhibited works and the visitors. Correspondingly, the tables play a crucial and irreplaceable role in the CrossSections exhibitions by becoming attached—even internalised—elements of the art projects on display.

CrossSections_perspectives (Stockholm, 2019) Photo by Inma Herrera 205

CROSSSECTIONS_INTERVALS: EXHIBITION WITH ENDLESS COMPLEXITIES NIA TABAKOVA I encountered the exhibition CrossSections_intervals while on my curatorial residency in Vienna with Blockfrei. After two weeks of endless gallery and museum tours, art fairs, curatorial talks, studio visits, exhibition openings and other art-related events, my cognitive apparatus was overwhelmed with an indistinguishable accumulation of visual, textual, and critical information. CrossSections_intervals was part of the programme and while I was prepared to see the next art spectacle, upon entering the exhibition space at Kunsthalle Exnergasse, the exposition struck me as a different kind of project—one that immediately stood out as sustainable in terms of concept, design, and process. The curator of CrossSections_intervals, Başak Şenova explained how the idea of the exhibition had started. It is part of a larger and much more ambitious platform, dedicated to artistic dialogue and research. The interdisciplinary three-year programme consists of meetings, residencies, workshops, book launches, and exhibitions that take place across three different cities—Vienna, Helsinki, and Stockholm. Artists, scholars, and cultural practitioners come together to present, discuss, and reflect on their artistic methodologies and possible collaborations. This empirical and non-deterministic approach to the process of exhibition- making and art production as a whole could be seen as analogous to the artistic events described in Bourriaud’s Relational Aesthetics. The exhibition’s focus on the process, rather than on the final result (highlighting the tension between the exhibition as a performance and the exhibition as a final product), leaves the viewer with the impression that s/he is entering into a space which is simultaneously a science lab, a curiosities cabinet, and an archive. Similarly to a theatrical performance, the exposition cannot be fully experienced in a short amount of time. The viewer needs hours to observe closely and dig deeply in order to discover the various artistic concepts and multiple layers behind the seemingly randomly scattered objects across the room: clusters of wooden tables with diverse and peculiar objects lying on them—seeds, documents, dice, origami, piano keys, and etching tools. Most of the artworks in the exhibition combine a variety of media, thus revealing the artistic process behind their production. For instance, Otto Karvonnen’s piece The Birdsong Initiative (2018), which deals with the problematics of the European migrant crisis, entails photography, a petition, a list of migratory birds, and a sound component—a restful chirping of a bird, which the visitor is immediately drawn to. In response to Austria’s plans to cut social benefits for immigrants who do not speak German, the artist invents a birdsong learning facility for migratory birds entering the country. Through the juxtaposition of human language and birdsongs, the work highlights the exclusive political strategies of the Austrian government, devised to minimize immigrant flow into the country. The topics of immigration, language, and identity are extensively discussed within the exhibition as other works that deal with various perspectives in relation to them are: A State 206

Snow Like Skin, 2018. CGI animation. Video still.

Visit to the Blue Frog Society by Minority Nationalities (2018) by Barbara Holub, Hypergraphia (2018) by Nisrine Boukhari, and Encounters (2018) by Marcus Neustetter. All of these projects aim at constructing a utopian future where national boarders are dismantled and synchronicity between the individual and the collective is established. One of the most fascinating works in the exhibition is Heba Amin’s Operation Sunken Sea (2018), for which she studied various maps and archives from the late 19th and early 20th centuries with propositions from geographers, scientists, and political figures to drain the Mediterranean Sea. Those proposals were directly linked to imperialism, and their primary goal was the easier exploitation of Africa’s resources by Europe through the merging of the two continents. The artist appropriates this concept into her practice by impersonating a fictive political figure’s inauguration speech, who proposes the same strategy but from a different point of view—this time the Mediterranean Sea would be drained and moved inside the continental part of Africa in order to gain control over Europe. The speech is incredibly powerful, especially due to the fact that it is delivered by a woman, and points out the skilful use of rhetorics by authoritarian political figures for their often megalomaniac and technocratic operations. Some of the most persuasive phrases used in the fictitious speech are: “poetic engineering”, “one super continent”, “the world of commerce depends on it”, “chain the sea as our own”, “canal of paradise”. Through research and role-play, Amin’s work investigates current issues such as power relations between continents, shifting of geographies, and the use of utopian language for questionable and populist political campaigns, but ultimately it explores humanity’s unfading desire to master and control nature. Identity, technology, and utopian futures are further explored in Tamsin Snow’s video Spare Face (2018). Through employing her research into science fiction and cryogenics, she imagines a utopian future where every individual will be able to choose their preferred skin 207

tone. The video consists of a futuristic conversation between Hill, Emily, and Ve. They are in a virtual chat room within the framework of a medical institution called the Facility, where they discuss the possibilities of human self-directed evolution. They talk about “skin tone inventory”, “consensual self-determination”, and “diversity of desired morphologies and lifestyles”—all glossy sci-fi concepts which point towards optimism and hope for a better post-human future through the use of genetic, prosthetic, and cognitive modifications. Although the dialogue between the individuals sounds honest and intimate, one cannot help but at the same time feel strangely seduced and alienated by the sterile environment of the visual component. Have humans already been transformed into mere avatars to the point of no return and is this our pre-determined future? The CGI video leaves this question open by ending with the three floating dots (so familiar to many of us) in place of the human/cyborg head. CrossSections_intervals is one of those exhibition projects that belongs to a new generation of exhibition-making, which is endless in its complexity. It covers themes related to politics, geographies, boundaries, language, identity, bodies, histories, memory and through them questions the credibility of future utopias. The exhibition’s focus on dialogue is a way to counteract the deterministic and alienating existence prescribed by the neoliberal capitalist system. The project is interdisciplinary, multi-layered and creates a network between past, present and future, between people working in various artistic fields and geographies, between different media and concepts, thus subverting the idea of art as a mere spectacle.

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CROSSSECTIONS VIENNA TRIOLOGY KUNSTHALLE EXNERGASSE — WUK 2018, VIENNA

CrossSections_potentials (Vienna, 2018) Photos by Başak Şenova

CrossSections_intensities (Vienna, 2018) Photos by Başak Şenova

CrossSections_intervals (Vienna, 2018) Photos by Matthias Bildstein and Başak Şenova

PERSPECTIVES ANNE KLONTZ In October 2, 2019 the CrossSections_perspectives exhibition opened at Konstfack University of Arts, Crafts and Design in Stockholm, Sweden. The exhibition was the second chapter in a trilogy of events that took place first in Vienna, and then concluded in Helsinki. CrossSection’s exploration into artistic research and education, in addition to previous collaborations with Konstfack since 2017, provided the foundation for welcoming the curator Başak Şenova and the 19 participating artists to present their projects in Konstfack’s Gallery, Vita Havet. In the days prior to the finely placed works of art on tables made from MDF board, the carefully positioned spotlights, and the films playing from screens and projectors, CrossSections was a jumbled mess of materials, suitcases and tools; yet this exhibition-inthe-making was loaded with curiosity, humour, intensity, and the required fatigue. While Konstfack guides students to explore their curiosity for different mediums and to develop their practices, CrossSections proposes new insights from already established artists. Both situations approach from different starting points, but they are united through the act of process. Through process, one questions and digs to find answers; through process, one learns to dedicate attention in order to evolve from novice to master; through process, one develops the resilience not to give up no matter how tired one is. Often times, in the context of the art world, the process of creation is negated in favour of the aesthetic or conceptual value. But CrossSections dismantled this façade and dared to present works by artists that were in different stages of development, and shared small sections from much larger bodies of artistic research, which created a desire to know more. CrossSections_perspectives was an exhibition that was not just a platform to observe a work, it also offered the possibility for witnessing how an artwork—as well as an exhibition—can be in a state of constant development. This aspect compliments the aims of the educational institution, which nurtures students to take an idea and translate it into some form of reality—and the process that a student experiences in between is highly valued together with the final work. At Konstfack, CrossSections_perspectives was a continuous narrative, always in motion and fuelled by students and other audiences questioning: “What is CrossSections about?” The exhibition required that one spend time getting to know the works on an individual level as it contained a multiplicity of themes, media and practices; yet CrossSections_perspectives is also an exhibition that thrives on a collective energy. Going back to the memories of the days just before the opening of CrossSections_perspectives, the sense of community and commitment to the production of the event made by the artists who were present was impressive. They supported each other and took into consideration the works of artists who couldn’t come to Stockholm. The artists worked in close dialogue with Şenova and embraced the unexpected challenges that emerged, and they did it together as a whole. This kind of situation and experience is unique in the real world; it’s something that can’t be taught, but rather must be learned and activated through trial and error—in other words, through process. An artwork—no matter what stage it is in—will always have a story to tell, and with this in mind, CrossSections is continuously moving forward through these narratives, but in all different directions. Moreover, this is the kind of future motion that Konstfack wishes for its students. 220

VITA HAVET, KONSTFACK 2019, STOCKHOLM

CrossSections_perspectives (Stockholm, 2019) Photos by Inma Herrera, Anne Klontz, and Başak Şenova

SUPPORT STRUCTURE: THOUGHTS AFTER AN OPENING1 ANNA-KAISA RASTENBERGER On a Saturday afternoon in October, we sat in a sauna with artists Inma Herrera and Bronwyn Lace and talked about what it means to be a contemporary artist. The CrossSections_notes exhibition had just opened in Helsinki at the Exhibition Laboratory (October 24, 2019), with related talks and events. We poured water on the hot stones, enjoyed the steam and talked about how young artists cope within the structures of the art world: Should they strive to efficiently utilize the existing structures formed by art markets and attention economy or should they look beyond these structures created by previous generations? Should they learn to survive or try to create structures to support each other? These were all topics also related to the CrossSections project, in which both Herrera and Lace had participated over the past three years. Herrera and Lace explained that the group of 19 artists and the curator, Başak Şenova, had been meeting on a regular basis over the past three years in different cities, with different combinations of artists, working at different sites and platforms. Yes, the artists had received financial support, hosting and care, however more importantly, they were able to translate the purpose stated in the website into practice and focus their attention on the artists working together—as a loose collective—through a lens of support. Support signified an environment for learning together with other artists, where the shared experiences of the artists’ processes were more important than the actual end result. Support was associated with long term collaboration with other artists, the kind of support structure which holds and where artists can meet their peers, process their work, get feedback, be challenged and re-think. While listening to the artists talking about their experience with the three-year CrossSections project, I couldn’t help but think of Celine Condorelli’s book Support Structure, particularly one specific chapter where Condorelli writes: Hence, support is not described through an external, analytical objectification, but engaged directly through the practice of supporting. In this instance, the discourse of support is encouraged and propped-up via its possible structure. This offers a discursive site for the reader and/ or practitioner, one to be worked in and added to, one to be inhabited.2 The spaces where art—its practitioners and spectators—becomes public allows for a public discussion. CrossSections’ three-years collaborative process was made visible and public through public events and exhibitions. The exhibitions and events are also a reminder of the fact that the artists engage in public work, which can be read by emphasising either the word work or public. Not only art itself, but the artists’ works and position in our society are thought provoking and create discourse. Exhibitions as an intermediary are translations and a way of relaying thoughts and matter, thus producing information and creating distractions. But can they function as inhabited support structures? After these thoughts, we take a dip in the freezing cold Baltic Sea.

1. CrossSections_notes at ExLab, Academy of Fine Arts, Helsinki, 24.10.—17.11.2019. 2. Condorelli, Céline. 2009. Support Structure. Berlin, New York: Sternberg Press. p. 30. 226

EXHIBITION LABORATORY, THE ACADEMY OF FINE ARTS 2019, HELSINKI

CrossSections_notes (Helsinki, 2019) Photos by Petri Summanen, Inma Herrera, and Başak Şenova

MODELS The first model was made for the CrossSections Room at Parallel Vienna 2018 to highlight the CrossSections_intervals exhibition and direct the audience to Kunsthalle Exnergasse, where it was simultaneously shown. It was a gesture, giving a sneak peek of the exhibition through images, shot from different angles. In 2019, the same idea was used for migrating the CrossSections_perspectives exhibition at Konstfack (Stockholm) to the CrossSections_notes exhibition at ExLab (Helsinki). The material of the model was provided and prepared by Konstfack, transported to Helsinki and assembled at ExLab. After the exhibition, the same model was then moved to the HIAP Gallery Augusta in Suomenlinna, Helsinki, and is still on view.

THE FIRST MODEL (CrossSections_intervals at Kunsthalle Exnergasse, Vienna) Exhibited in the CrossSections Room at the Project Statements Section of Parallel Vienna 2018.

232

THE TRAVELLING MODEL (CrossSections_perspectives at Konstfack, Stockholm) Exhibited in the CrossSections_notes exhibition at ExLab, Helsinki

Photos by Inma Herrera and Başak Şenova 233

THE TRAVELLING MODEL (CrossSections_perspectives at Konstfack) Exhibited at HIAP, Suomenlinna, Helsinki

Photos by Juha Huuskonen 234

SOLO EXHIBITIONS SHADOW OPTICS LINA SELANDER KUNST HAUS WIEN VIENNA, 2019 ...THE VAST LAND FROM WHICH SHE COMES ISA ROSENBERGER KUNSTHALLE EXNERGASSE — WUK VIENNA, 2019 BLUE FROG SOCIETY | A HABITAT WITHOUT TERRITORY SPEECH TO THE BLUE FROG SOCIETY IN ROMANES BY NANCY BLACK BARBARA HOLUB PUBLICS HELSINKI, 2019 THE WORLD IN COMMON EGLE ODDO MACRO MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART ROME, 2019

SHADOW OPTICS LINA SELANDER KUNST HAUS WIEN VIENNA, 2019

Kunsthaus Wien, January—March 2019. Photos by Vincent Entekhabi

The title of the exhibition referenced an extreme light, as if inverted, exposing darkness as well as light; a no less photographic event than the atomic bomb over Hiroshima, inscribing shadows on the surface of the city. Shadow Optics explored the different possibilities of the material: re-searching, re-visiting, and re-editing intersected aspects and resources of film, photography, objects, motives and ideas. The exhibition assembled a group of works and documents describing a migration between utopia and collapse, where technological and/or ideological development as generators of energy and destruction are inescapably linked. It was comprised of Lenin’s Lamp Glows in the Peasant’s Hut (2011), with a showcase consisting of radiographs and a stainless-steel text plaque; Model of Continuation (2013); along with Överföringsdiagram nr 2 [Diagram of Transfer No. 2] (2018—2019), new experimental 16 mm film transferred to HD, and contains material from Schönbrunn Zoo and AKW Zwentendorf in Austria. 236

...THE VAST LAND FROM WHICH SHE COMES ISA ROSENBERGER KUNSTHALLE EXNERGASSE — WUK VIENNA, 2019 Isa Rosenberger’s project investigated how the forgotten social reform history of the VHS Ottakring and the associated history of politically engaged expressive dance in Austria could be recalled, revisited, and contextualised with the urgencies of our present day. Following the interdisciplinary working methodology of Gertrud Kraus, the project unfolded the discipline of dance as a specific poetic space in which art forms, times, and images can be mixed with new and cross-references. The workshop, as well as Rosenberger’s extensive research on Gertrud Kraus, which takes place both in Vienna and Tel Aviv, reflect an inquiry into geographical movements and a migration of thoughts that follow spiral routes across countries: for example, the migration of expressionist dance from Austria and Central Europe to Israel; or the migration routes of the students of the workshops from the Middle East to Austria.

Kunsthalle Exnergasse — WUK, June 2019. Photos by Werner Kaligofsky 237

BLUE FROG SOCIETY | A HABITAT WITHOUT TERRITORY SPEECH TO THE BLUE FROG SOCIETY IN ROMANES BY NANCY BLACK BARBARA HOLUB PUBLICS HELSINKI, 2019 The Blue Frog Society took action for readdressing the idea of a common and expanded Europe based on humanistic values and addressing diversity as an intrinsic element of a future society. Since many small European minority nationalities—together with their manifold languages—are under threat of dying out, the Blue Frog Society invited representatives of some of these communities to pay a state visit on the non-territorial grounds of the Blue Frog Society by giving a short speech. Barbara Holub’s video-work “Blue Frog Society | A Habitat Without Territory // Speech to the Blue Frog Society in Romanes by Nancy Black” was presented at the PUBLICS within the framework of the CrossSections project. The speech adresses expectations of being part of the Blue Frog Society, potentials of mutual enrichment, hopes and aims for a common future.

Publics, Helsinki, October 2019. Photos by Publics 238

THE WORLD IN COMMON EGLE ODDO MACRO — ­ MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART ROME, 2019 The World in Common is an open and permeable multidisciplinary research; it is an art and science project that combines the expressivity of visual arts with botany, biology, and anthropology. Inside the Atelier #1, Egle Oddo built an imaginary biotope, a sensorial context merging various spheres and interconnected meanings. The artist was present in the venue for the entire duration of the exhibition and shared an experience that addressed the five senses. The exhibition was accompanied by a series of performances, talks, conversations, and the constant act of producing.

MACRO Museum of Contemporary Art, Rome. November 2019. Photos by Antti Ahonen 239

CROSSSECTIONS IN CLIMBING THROUGH THE TIDE EXHIBITION

COMMUNITY ACTIVATION: B7L9 – BAHR LAZREG, TUNIS LINA LAZAAR KAMEL LAZAAR FOUNDATION The thesis of the CrossSections intervention in Tunisia was testing whether a process-based conceptual group exhibition of the stature of Climbing Through the Tide can articulate enough inclusion in its language, and relatability in its interaction to create an environment that can foster trust, empowerment and an increased sense of belonging in a community that is otherwise composed of disadvantaged young adolescents with little if no disposable time due to the extreme pressure of unemployment, radicalisation, migration, and precarious living conditions. CrossSections joined B7L9 Art Station (KLF’s Experimental Art Space) at a time when all resources were focused on getting the building off the ground which meant that the space was getting ready to host the artworks, but not quite the artists. It also coincided with Başak Şenova’s inviting a number of CrossSections artists featured in Climbing Through the Tide to reside in the space alongside the broader local team, and assist with the installation of the show but also on the development of its public programme. It is undeniable that the presence and methodology of the CrossSections artists within the B7L9 art space has immediately injected artistic creation, and the role of the artist in society front and centre of the conversation. Although Climbing Through The Tide was expected to articulate Benji Boyadgian, Bronwyn Lace, Egle Oddo, Inma Herrera, Ramesch Daha, and Marcus Neustetter thoughts and ideas, the infrastructure was not ready for such exchange. Yet something vivid happened when that specific group of artists integrated the space into their working process. They installed le ‘Vivre ensemble’, and just about the right amount of kinship to articulate collective intelligence. They were, as a group, able to focus their energy on writing resemblance and erasing the difference whilst always maintaining a sense of intentionality. And it is that unspoken cohesion, that silent activism which underlined every aspect of their interaction with both the space, its workers but above all its community. The CrossSections artists were comfortable dissolving concept of centre versus periphery, taking on a fully integrated approach to exhibition making. They were conscious seekers of a participatory and collaborative approach that would ultimately permeate across all dimensions of staging that very exhibition. That mission naturally translated in organically engaging socially, emotionally, and cognitively with the community, whether by organizing impromptu workshops with children, engaging local farmers in the garden, trading with the artisans and commerce. But most of all, the CrossSections artists allowed its potential public to witness and seamlessly engage in all the behind the scenes of the hang which effectively turned the set-up process into a full scale performance where both artists and audience worked together towards activating the art station without ever being conscious of when the function of one began and the other ended. 241

B7L9, KAMEL LAZAAR FOUNDATION 2019, TUNIS

Climbing Through the Tide (Tunis, 2019). Photos by Yoann Cimmer and Başak Şenova

ARTIST TALKS, PERFORMANCES, PRESENTATIONS, & GUIDED TOURS DATE

TYPE

CONTENT

CITY

talk

Jonatan Habib Engqvist: “Towards the Reign of the Cat”

Vienna

2018 10 .Jan

CrossSections_potentials at Kunsthalle Exnergasse — WUK 10 .Jan

performance

Marcus Neustetter: “Between Border Lines”

Vienna

CrossSections_potentials at Kunsthalle Exnergasse — WUK 10 .Jan

performance

Bronwyn Lace: “Breath”

Vienna

CrossSections_potentials at Kunsthalle Exnergasse — WUK 12. Jan

presentation

Barbara Holub: “The Blue Frog Society | A Habitat Without Territory”

Vienna

CrossSections_potentials at Kunsthalle Exnergasse — WUK 16 .Jan

talk

Otto Karvonen: “Alien Palace Birdhouse Collection”

Vienna

CrossSectionsHub 18 .Jan

talk

Isa Rosenberger: “Dance/Knowledge/Politics”

Vienna

CrossSections_potentials at Kunsthalle Exnergasse — WUK 18 .Jan

presentation

Ricarda Denzer: “Echo, or Deviating the Original”

Vienna

CrossSections_potentials at Kunsthalle Exnergasse — WUK 07 Feb

presentation

Yane Calovski: “Undisciplined: A Construction of an Archive” at Iaspis

Stockholm

07 Feb

presentation

Ramesh Daha: “On Sigmund Klein, 1933, and 06.04.1945” at Iaspis

Stockholm

02 May

talk

transparadiso (Barbara Holub & Paul Rajakovics): “Times of Dilema” CrossSectionsHub

Vienna

08 Jun

talk

Behzad Khosravi-Noori: “The Owl, The Queen, and The Maquettiste”

Vienna

CrossSections_intensities at Kunsthalle Exnergasse — WUK 09 Jun

talk

Benji Boyadgian: “Clogged”

Vienna

CrossSectionsHub CrossSectionsHub 07 Oct

performance

Marcus Neustetter: “Encounters”

Vienna

CrossSections_intervals at Kunsthalle Exnergasse — WUK 07 Oct

performance

Egle Oddo: “Splitter”

Vienna

CrossSections_intervals at Kunsthalle Exnergasse — WUK 09 Oct

guided tour

Başak Şenova: CrossSections_intervals

Vienna

at Kunsthalle Exnergasse - WUK 09 Oct

performance

Barbara Holub: “The Blue Frog Society: Nancy Black’s speech”

Vienna

CrossSections_Potentials at Kunsthalle Exnergasse — WUK 09 Oct

presentation

Bronwyn Lace and Marcus Neustetter: “Vienna is a Museum”

Vienna

CrossSectionsHub 2019 31 Jan

performancelecture

244

Heba Y. Amin: “Operation Sunken Sea: Draining the Mediterranean” Research Week 2019, Konstfack

Stockholm

1 Feb

talk

Yane Calovski “A Construction of an Archive” Research Week 2019, Konstfack

Stockholm

21 May

presentation

Benji Boyadgian: “The Owl, The Queen, and The Maquettiste” at Birzeit University in Palestine

Birzeit

21 May

presentation

Timo Tuhkanen: “Sonic Independence” at Birzeit University in Palestine

Birzeit

07 Jun

presentation

Ramesch Daha: “Unlimited Histories” at B7L9 — KLF

Tunis

07 Jun

presentation

Nisrine Boukhari: “Mind Wandering in Practice” at B7L9 — KLF

Tunis

11 Jun

guided tour

Isa Rosenberger and Başak Şenova : “...the vast land from which she

Vienna

16 Oct

talk

Inma Herrera: “Flaying/Vestigium of a Human Print”

comes” at Kunsthalle Exnergasse — WUK Stockholm

CrossSections_notes at Exhibition Laboratory 16 Oct

talk

Timo Tuhkanen: “Sonic Independence”

Stockholm

CrossSections_perspectives at Konstfack 16 Oct

talk

Inma Herrera: “Flaying/Vestigium of a Human Print”

Stockholm

CrossSections_notes at Exhibition Laboratory 16 Oct

guided tour

Maria Lantz: CrossSections_perspectives at Konstfack

Helsinki

23 Oct

talk

Nisrine Boukhari: “I wandered far away from home that day”

Helsinki

CrossSections_notes at Exhibition Laboratory 10 .Jan

performance

Marcus Neustetter: “Shifting Territories”

Vienna

CrossSections_notes at Exhibition Laboratory 23 Oct 6 Nov

performance-

Bronwyn Lace: “In perseverance there is peace”

lecture

CrossSections_notes at Exhibition Laboratory

talk

Inma Herrera: “The Knowing Touch”

Helsinki Helsinki

CrossSections_notes at Exhibition Laboratory 05—10 Nov presentations

Egle Oddo “The World in Common”

Rome

Atelier 1, MACRO — Museum of Contemporary Art 14 Nov

talk

Otto Karvonen: “Birds with Nationalities”

Helsinki

CrossSections_notes at Exhibition Laboratory 18 Nov

talk

Benji Boyadgian: On “The Temporary Ruin”, “Refractions”, “Clogged”,

Florence

and “the Discord” at Villa Romana

Extracts from Neustetter’s performance Encounters. CrossSections_intervals at WUK. Photos by Christian Ihrybauer

GUIDE CROSSSECTIONS_INTERVALS GUIDE 2018, VIENNA A guide that accompanied the CrossSections_intervals was published by Kuntshalle Exnergasse — WUK in 2018. Edited and designed by Başak Şenova, the guide was the outcome of the process that was followed by three exhibitions (The Vienna Triology: CrossSections_ potentials, CrossSections_intensities, and finally CrossSections_intervals). It is comprised of a main text on the process and the structure of the CrossSections project, along with a text on the exhibition design and short texts on the artists’ projects.

BOOKLET SPEECHES THE BLUE FROG SOCIETY | STATE VISITS BY MINORITY CULTURES BOOKLET 2018, VIENNA Barbara Holub published a booklet which accompanied her project: A State Visit to the Blue Frog Society by Minority Nationalities Blue Frog Society. The booklet gathers the speeches in dying languages (and English/German translations) by the representatives of certain minorities who participated in this project.

246

BOOK SHADOW OPTICS. LINA SELANDER BOOK 2019, VIENNA A book, in conjunction with Lina Selander’s solo exhibition Shadow Optics at KUNST HAUS WIEN (January—March 2019), was published by KUNST HAUS WIEN GmbH, Bettina Leid. The book was designed and edited by Başak Şenova, and supported by Iaspis.

The book Shadow Optics. Lina Selander discusses the ideological, political, ecological, aesthetic, and methodological aspects of the project. It starts with a preface by Bettina Leidl and Verena Kaspar-Eisert, and includes essays by Elke Krasny, Björn Norberg, and Başak Şenova, along with an extensive interview with Selander. 247

ARTIST BOOKS Prior to the CrossSections_perspectives exhibition that took place in October 2019, these two books were produced by the artists in the Graphics Workshop of Konstfack — University of Arts, Crafts and Design, with the support of the university.

CHRONOLACE, SEQUENCE #001 EBRU KURBAK RISOGRAPH ON MUNKEN PAPER, /50 2019, STOCKHOLM

248

FRAGMENTS OF A FROZEN MOMENT INMA HERRERA RISOGRAPH ON MUNKEN PAPER, /50 2019, STOCKHOLM

249

SCREENING PROGRAMME CHAPTER 1 UNTERTAGÜBERBAU – PART 2, 16′44′′ Nikolaus Gansterer THE OWLS, THE QUEEN AND THE MAQUETTISTE, 22′47′′ Benji Boyadgian and Behzad Khosravi-Noori 06.04.1945, 4′13′′ Ramesch Daha ENCOUNTERS, 7′47′′ Marcus Neustetter

CHAPTER 2 RACISTS HALF-PRICE!, 6′37′′ Otto Karvonen THE CITY IS WAITING, 9′46′′ Isa Rosenberger SCHWEBENDES (HOVERING), 17′53′′ Ricarda Denzer RELOCATING THE MEDITERRANEAN Operation Sunken Sea, 19′15′′ Heba Y. Amin

CHAPTER 3 SONIC INDEPENDENCE A living forest. 2018—2099, 3′46′′ Timo Tuhkanen DIAGRAM OF TRANSFER NO. 1, 9′18′′ Lina Selander and Oscar Mangione TRANSITIONAL MAGNETISM, 10′41′′ Inma Herrera TIMES OF DILEMMA, 3′24′′ Barbara Holub FORMER CITY, 2′40′′ Yane Calovski SPARE FACE, 7′19′′ Tamsin Snow MIRROR MIRROR, 5′56′′ Bronwyn Lace Curated by Başak Şenova, post-production by Gizem Akgülgil

COORDINATES

Feb 2019 — Research Week, Konstfack University College of Arts, Crafts and Design, Stockholm

March 2019 — Museum of Contemporary Art, Skopje

March — June 2019 — B7L9 CrossSections Studio, Tunis June 2019 — University of Applied Arts Vienna

250

NOTES FROM THE POST-PRODUCTION PROCESS GİZEM AKGÜLGİL As the video-editor of the CrossSections screenings, there were two main obstacles that I had to overcome. One was to find a way to create a connection between the videos of the projects so that they could be understood as one project; and the other was to ensure that the result did not look like a video collage or a summary of the project. In order to work through the first obstacle, we decided to divide the works into chapters. Although each video’s mediums were different, the contexts of the videos were related. The chapters served to group the related projects and allotted equal durations. The inserted texts in the videos, which gave informative and descriptive accounts of the projects, were one of the elements that connected the various videos with the same contexts. The second objective was to give extracts from the projects that would portray the essence of CrossSections rather than to summarize the works. Grouping and dividing the videos into chapters also served this purpose. The CrossSections screenings were screened in four different cities in 2019. The screening videos consisted of performances, video installations, and speeches. The multi-layered structure of CrossSections—which was a large and versatile project consisting of meetings, talks, workshops, events and exhibitions—was preserved in the screenings. Therefore, the structure of the screenings gave the audience both a different layer of exhibition experience and a coherent storytelling which enabled the audience to perceive the screenings as another output of the CrossSections project. 251

CHAPTER 6

EDUCATIONAL AND CREATIVE CHANNELS

CO-TEACHING AND CO-PRODUCING DEPARTMENT OF DESIGN, CRAFTS AND ARTS, KONSTFACK/CROSSSECTIONS

ALTERNATIVE CHANNELS PARALLEL VIENNA 2018. KUNSTHALLE EXNERGASSE — WERKSTÄTTEN UND KULTURHAUS (WUK)/ FEDERAL CHANCELLERY [BUNDESKANZLERAMT] & KULTURKONTAKT/CROSSSECTIONS UNIVERSITY OF APPLIED ARTS VIENNA/CROSSSECTIONS B7L9, KAMEL LAZAAR FOUNDATION/CROSSSECTIONS

THE CROSSSECTIONS HUB ALIEN PALACE BIRDHOUSE COLLECTION, OTTO KARVONEN TIMES OF DILEMMA, BARBARA HOLUB, TRANSPARADISO CLOGGED, BENJI BOYADGIAN VIENNA IS A MUSEUM, BRONWYN LACE and MARCUS NEUSTETTER

CO-TEACHING AND CO-PRODUCING DEPARTMENT OF DESIGN, CRAFTS AND ARTS, KONSTFACK/CROSSSECTIONS EXPERIENCING AND EXPERIMENTING WITH THE CONDITIONS AND THE PROCESS BAŞAK ŞENOVA In October 2018, CrossSections and the Master’s programme CRAFT: Ceramics and Glass/ Textiles/Ädellab at the Department of Design, Crafts and Arts of Konstfack launched an integrated and collaborative programme consisting of teaching residencies, lectures, presentations, workshops, tutorials, and an exhibition with the students accompanied by a publication. The programme was designed together with Professor Bella Rune. Konstfack provided “teaching residencies” for four CrossSections artists: Ramesch Daha, Barbara Holub, Yane Calovski, and Egle Oddo along with the curator of the project.

From Minimax /CrossSections lectures, workshops, and presentations at Konstfack (Stockholm, 2018)

The topics addressed during the programme represented the crucial issues and urgencies affecting the global art scene and some diverse and effective artistic methodologies to process them. The Minimax/CrossSections programme aimed at communicating the effort of sharing and producing content for the CrossSections project with the students by integrating thier research and production to this process. The programme was designed to function in sections. Some of the sections were realised simultaneously: (1) Introducing and sharing the conceptual core and structural development of CrossSections by Başak Şenova; (2) Lectures by Başak Şenova, Ramesch Daha, Barbara Holub, Yane Calovski, and Egle Oddo; (3) Sharing the working methodologies (along with the research and production phases) of the artists through presentations by Ramesch Daha, Barbara Holub, Yane Calovski, and Egle Oddo; (4) Producing together through workshops by Ramesch Daha, Barbara Holub, Yane Calovski, Egle Oddo; (5) Mentoring students by giving 254

Minimax /CrossSections programmes’ exhibition, the Library at Konstfack (Stockholm, 2018)

critique to their ongoing projects with studio visits and tutorials by Başak Şenova, Ramesch Daha, Barbara Holub, Yane Calovski, and Egle Oddo; (6) Presenting/exhibiting works by Başak Şenova; and (7) Documenting the process with a publication (limited edition, produced at Konstfack) by Başak Şenova. Both the programme and the exhibition focused on artistic research, diverse methodologies, and experimenting. While the programme set its own learning/teaching conditions and processes with the contribution of each guest lecturer, the exhibition was an exercise in redefining the process of producing with various limitations of space and time. The exhibiton the Library, which I also curated, featured prototypes by a selection of master students: Klara Berge, Linnea Bergman, Caroline Bonaldi, Evelina Dovsten, Svetlana Hällsten, Sunna Hansdóttir, Hållams Linnea Henriksson, Sameeksha Mehra, Moa Larsdotter Persson, Adelina Petcan, Kajsa Samuelsson, and Anna Tedestam. By following the development pattern and presentation logic of the CrossSections project, which was based on making the artistic process and the research phase visible, the Library also exhibited works/ prototypes in progress by giving hints about their research and production phases. the Library was designed to be placed in a functioning library. Although each work/prototype had its own tacit territory, they all shared a space with shelves, books, tables, computers, and library users. They came across with their viewers at corners, in the corridors, or even in the crowded area that surrounds the info desk. In this line of thought, no architectural intervention (such as adding walls or shelves) was applied and the identity of the library was kept as it is. The works/prototypes were exhibited on identical pedestals, looming chairs, and glass cases accompanied by designed titles and info tags of the works. The looming chairs, particularly, created a unified visual language for the entire exhibition.

CRAFT/CROSSSECTIONS BELLA RUNE Every year, the master course Minimax/CRAFT collaborates with an institution, organisation or other entity outside of Konstfack. In 2018, we collaborated with CrossSections. 2018 was an election year in Sweden, a country in the far north which is part of the European Union; a project some claim as a peace project and others see as a gated community. Politics and ideology are high on the agenda in media and the social spheres, and politics affects us in our everyday activities at Konstfack as well as in our artistic practice. In what way do 255

we—in our practice—chose to relate to the political, and how does this affect our ways of discussing and disseminating our work? For many practising artists, residency programmes are vital to be able to travel and sustain a practice. To support the student’s curiosity in the residency culture, we flipped the script and for 7 weeks, master’s students became the host for a teaching residency given by Başak Şenova and four of the artists who were part of the CrossSections project: Ramesh Daha, Barbara Holub, Yane Calovski, and Egle Oddo. Questions we massaged during Minimax/CrossSections 2018 were: How can we open up the artistic processes in our practice so that we do not only engage in the end product? By mimicing other’s methods, can we find tools to understand the artistic methods we employ, and can we reconsider/ sharpen them in the process? How can sharing knowledge and opening up our processes help us form practices with strong artistic statements combined with an inclusive and empathic position? How can we find ways to make artistic production sustainable on multiple levels? The visiting artists had several wishes for their stay at the CRAFT department and negotiations were a big part of the course, sometimes frustrating for the students, but ultimately an exercise in sharing-is-caring, which is embedded in the culture of working side-by-side in specialised workshops. The meetings between artists and students during the CRAFT/CrossSections collaboration led to surprising experimentation and (heated) discussions, like Ramesch Daha’s suggestion to combine hot glass and books or Yane Calovski’s workshop on how “no material is innocent”; it all helped develop the group’s thinking on what a critical craft practice can be today. Minimax Methodology Mimicry: During the course, the students used previous works they had created and reconfigured them in a series of “prototypes” made by borrowing the methodology of the four visiting artists. At the end of the course, some of them had the opportunity to take part in the exhibition the Library, curated by Başak Şenova at Konstfack’s library and also in it’s publication. CRAFT

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CrossSections

Minimax /CrossSections programmes’ exhibition, the Library at Konstfack (Stockholm, 2018) Photos by Başak Şenova

Some details extracted from the publication of the Library Exhibiton (Konstfack, 2018). The pages of the extracted details feature the prototypes of Evelina Dovsten, Anna Tedestam, Caroline Bonaldi, Hållams Linnea Henriksson, Kajsa Samuelsson, and Svetlana Hällsten. Designed and edited by Başak Şenova

ALTERNATIVE CHANNELS KUNSTHALLE EXNERGASSE — WERKSTÄTTEN UND KULTURHAUS (WUK)/ FEDERAL CHANCELLERY [BUNDESKANZLERAMT] & KULTURKONTAKT/CROSSSECTIONS PARALLEL VIENNA 2018 (25.-30.09.2018) Project Statements: CrossSections, curated by Başak Şenova CrossSections featured Tamsin Snow’s Spare Face in collaboration with Kunsthalle Exnergasse (WUK) and KulturKontakt Austria at the Project Statements Section of Parallel Vienna 2018. Snow was the “Artist in Residence” of the Federal Chancellery [Bundeskanzleramt] and KulturKontakt Austria from July to September 2018.

Furthermore, since the dates of the fair overlapped with the ongoing the CrossSections_ intervals exhibition at Kunsthalle Exnergasse, the exhibition was presented in the same venue (EG.1, Parallel Vienna) with printed materials and a model of the Kunsthalle Exnergasse.

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UNIVERSITY OF APPLIED ARTS VIENNA/CROSSSECTIONS The connection between the Universtity of Applied Arts Vienna and CrossSections was first drawn when Nikolaus Gansterer introduced the project to the Zentrum Fokus Forschung and its director Alexander Damianisch. As the first collaboration, the Zentrum Fokus Forschung and hosted a CrossSections workshop in 2017. Throughout 2018, Barbara Putz-Plecko, Vice Rector of University of Applied Arts met with Başak Şenova several times and partook in guided exhibition tours of the CrossSections trilogy at Kunsthalle Exnergasse. Following these meetings, in 2019, Şenova was invited to the Angewandte Resident Artist Programme by Putz-Plecko, where she also developed and organised a series of CrossSections activities. Among these activities were panels, talks, and a screening programme. Finally, this book was also published as part of the Edition Angewandte book series of the University of Applied Arts Vienna and released by the publisher De Gruyter Berlin/Boston.

B7L9, KAMEL LAZAAR FOUNDATION/CROSSSECTIONS In 2019, the CrossSections project was integrated into Climbing Through the Tide, the inaugural exhibition of B7L9—an experimental art space, developed by the Kamel Lazaar Foundation (KLF). Climbing Through the Tide brought together 50 artists from 21 countries. Curated by Başak Şenova, the exhibition was designed to initiate dialogues and encounters among the works by suggesting various paths of reception through its scenography. Accordingly, the Annotations section of the exhibition presented the documentation of the CrossSections Project and the Screening Programme in a studio space dedicated to the project. Aside from the Annotations, Heba Y. Amin, Nisrine Boukhari, Benji Boyadgian, Yane Calovski, Ramesch Daha, Ricarda Denzer, Nikolaus Gansterer, Inma Herrera, Bronwyn Lace, Marcus Neustetter, Behzad Khosravi-Noori, Egle Oddo, and Lina Selander took part in the main section of the exhibition and/or public programmes of the Vernissage and the Finissage of the exhibition.

Details from the CrossSections studio space at B7L9. Climbing Through the Tide, (Tunis, 2019) 261

THE CROSSSECTIONSHUB

From January 2018 to January 2019, the project actively used a shop with a window front as the hub of CrossSections in Vienna’s 2nd district (Leopoldsgasse 2A, 1020). CrossSectionsHub functioned as a specific library that contained the publications and research documents of the artists for small meetings and talks. Moreover, a set of exhibitions were scheduled to display the works of the CrossSections artists in the window front.

EXHIBITION #1 ALIEN PALACE BIRDHOUSE COLLECTION January—March 2018 artist: Otto Karvonen curator: Başak Şenova Alien Palace Birdhouse Collection is an ongoing project that has taken place in different countries since 2010. Originally commissioned by De Appel Arts Centre, Amsterdam, it is a growing series of sculptures and photographs dealing with the questions of immigration and the measures taken to regulate and control it. Alien Palace birdhouses provide excellent nesting conditions for the occasional winged visitor. The project consists of birdhouses that are remodelled after detention centres for immigrants in different European countries. The birdhouses are made of weatherproof and durable materials such as cement fibreboard, aluminium, brick and stainless steel. A birdhouse, together with some documentary photographs, were presented at the window front of the CrossSectionsHub for three months. The exhibition was accompanied with a talk by Otto Karvonen and two guided tours/talks by Başak Şenova. 262

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EXHIBITION #2 TIMES OF DILEMMA April—May 2018 artists: Barbara Holub, transparadiso curator: Başak Şenova

In July 2017, transparadiso invited authors, Ghana-singers (Ghannejja), activists and experts from diverse backgrounds to discuss the contradictory interests between economical prosperity and regaining communal values to perform with two large megaphone-sculptures, offering a dialogical sound transfer of 320 metres between St. Michael’s Counterguard and the only public land on the mostly privatised Manoel Island. The locations related to times of leprosy where the patients were quarantined in a hospital on Manoel Island. The megaphones addressed a plague of our times, namely, uncontrolled urban development in Malta. transparadiso presented an installation with documentary photos, drawings, and artefacts of the Times of Dilemma performances at the window front of the CrossSectionsHub.

EXHIBITION #3 CLOGGED June—August 2018 artist: Benji Boyadgian curator: Başak Şenova

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Clogged is an ongoing multimedia work, hovering around memory values of an ancient Roman aqueduct. A ruin of a clogged pipe, abandoned and devoid of projections, residues, deposits in the riddle that is archaeology. The research-based work is an attempt to write a story for the second aqueduct, a collage of projected fragments collected along its path, dowsing the ghost of the water that flowed in this pipe. The “higher level aqueduct”, spanning a distance of 13 km, connects two obsolete pools, from the south of Bethlehem to the old city of Jerusalem. In between, the continuous urban fabric forms an urban “paté” fragmented by miscellaneous infrastructures. For a few centuries, this water channel supplied the course of this insatiable city, a city growing off its ancient water systems, off its ground, a fiction that is its own reflection. Clogged has been presented as a multimedia installation at the at the window front of CrossSectionsHUB and the exhibition was accompanied by Boyadgian’s talk.

EXHIBITION #4 VIENNA IS A MUSEUM September—December 2018 artists: Bronwyn Lace & Marcus Neustetter curator: Björn Norberg

Bronwyn Lace and Marcus Neustetter continued a conversation with curator Björn Norberg about the nature and meaning of museums in contemporary life and cities. Through images, drawn from a combination of outlined borders of contested areas in the world, shadows of artefacts taken in museums around the world and interpretive ink blot Rorschach drawings, the artists highlight the ambiguity of understanding within museum practice. At this moment in Europe, post the reaction to French president Emmanuel Macron’s moment of pledging the return cultural of treasures back to their homes together with a continually increasing and complex debate about borders and identities the artists and curator begin a kind of false forensic investigation which explores how museums act as façades in contemporary life, hiding what we want to forget and to what extent this practice extends beyond the walls of the museum and in to daily life lived on the streets of Vienna. The exhibition was accompanied with a brunch with the artists. 265

THE LOG

DATE

CONTENT

CITY

laying the foundation of the project with HIAP during the curator’s stay in

Helsinki

2017 Jan—Mar

Helsinki for the Resident Fellow Programme, presented by Academy of Fine Arts, Helsinki, implemented in partnership with Saastamoinen Foundation and HIAP Jul—Aug

the curatorial process of selecting the artists (studio visits and meetings)

All

Aug

meetings with the Vienna-based artists

Vienna

01—07 Sep

logistic meetings — a series of Skype meetings with the partners

online

15 Sep

PUBLIC meeting under the coverage of the 15th Istanbul Biennial Public

Istanbul

Programme, the Consulate General of Sweden 17—18 Oct

CORE meeting at KEX Studio — Werkstätten und Kulturhaus (WUK)

Vienna

18 Oct

cooking event by Ramesch Daha

Vienna

19 Oct

workshop (keywords mapping) at Zentrum Fokus Forschung, University of

Vienna

Applied Arts Vienna 16—17 Nov

CORE meeting at KEX Studio — Werkstätten und Kulturhaus (WUK)

Vienna

17 Nov

PUBLIC meeting — studio visit by cultural journalist Alexandra Matzner:

Vienna

presentation and discussion by Başak Şenova and the artists at KEX Studio, Werkstätten und Kulturhaus (WUK) under the coverage of Vienna Art Week 2017 17 Nov

cooking event by Ramesch Daha

Vienna

23 Dec

logistic meetings — a series of Skype meetings with the partners

online

CrossSections_potentials 10 days of exhibition with presentations, performances, and talks at Kunsthalle Exnergasse — WUK

Vienna

2018 10—20 Jan

16 Jan—30 Mar window front exhibition of Otto Karvoinen, CrossSectionsHub

Vienna

16 Jan

talk by Otto Karvoinen, CrossSectionsHub

Vienna

05—06 Feb

CORE meeting at the NKF Nordic Art Association

Stockholm

07 Feb

PUBLIC meeting at Iaspis

Stockholm

08 Feb

SHARE meeting at Iaspis

Stockholm

18 Apr

PERIPHERAL meeting: Higher Seminar of Nikolaus Gansterer (project presented and moderated by Başak Şenova), Konstfack

Stockholm

24 Apr—06 Jun window front exhibition of transparadiso (Barbara Holub and Paul Rajakovics), CrossSectionsHub

Vienna

19 May

PUBLIC meeting at ExLab, Academy of Fine Arts

Helsinki

20—21 May

CORE meetings at HIAP

Helsinki

02 May

talk transparadiso (Barbara Holub and Paul Rajakovics), CrossSectionsHub

Vienna

09 Jun

window front exhibition of Benji Boyadgian, CrossSectionsHub

Vienna

06—16 Jun

CrossSections_intensities 10 days of Exhibition with presentations and talks at Kunsthalle Exnergasse — WUK

Vienna

18 Sep

cooking event by Ricarda Denzer

Vienna

19 Sep—20 Oct CrossSections_intervals Exhibition at Kunsthalle Exnergasse — WUK

Vienna

28 Sep

Vienna

PERIPHERAL meeting: with curators and artists at Vienna Contemporary

19 Sep—20 Oct CrossSections_intervals Exhibition at Kunsthalle Exnergasse — WUK

Istanbul 267

25—30 Sep

CrossSections_intervals exhibition model and Tamsin Snow, presented at the Parallel Vienna Art Fair in collaboration with KulturKontakt Austria

Vienna

01 Oct —23 Dec window front exhibition of Bronwyn Lace and Marcus Neustetter, curated by Björn Norberg, CrossSectionsHub

Vienna

Sep—Nov

Minimax/CrossSections: A collaborative-integrated programme for Master’s programme CRAFT! with Ramesch Daha, Barbara Holub, Calovski, Egle Oddo, and Başak Şenova. Ceramics and Glass/Textiles/Ädellab Department of Crafts Konstfack.

Stockholm

01—08 Nov

The Library Exhibition at Konstfack Library , Minimax/CrossSections

Stockholm

14 Nov

“Thinking through CrossSections”. Başak Şenova at a panel with Olga Sooudi and Antonia Carver, moderated by Atteqa Ali, Abu Dhabi Art Talks

Abu Dhabi

05 Dec

PUBLIC meeting at MoCA, organised by Press to Exit Project Space

Skopje

06 Dec

PERIPHERAL meeting: with curators, MoCA — Museum of Contemporary Art

Skopje

2019

268

23 Jan—10 Mar solo exhibition: Shadow Optics by Lina Selander, Kunst Haus Wien

Vienna

28 Jan—01 Feb CrossSections Section with Heba Amin, Başak Şenova, and Yane Calovski along with the Screening Programme at the Research Week 2019, Konstfack

Vienna

28 Mar

Stockholm

PERIPHERAL meeting: Higher Seminar, Ricarda Denzer and Başak Şenova, Konstfack

15 Mar—09 Jun Screening Programme and CrossSections Room, Climbing Through the Tide Exhibition, B7L9 — KLF

Tunis

11 Apr

PUBLIC meeting at the University of Applied Arts Vienna with Barbara Holub, Isa Rosenberger, Başak Şenova, Andrea Löbel, and Klaus Schafler

Vienna

21 May

PUBLIC meeting at Contemporary Visual Art Programme of the Faculty of Arts, Music and Design, Birzeit University in Palestine with Timo Tuhkanen and Benji Boyadgian, moderated by Tina Sherwell

Birzeit

7 Jun

PUBLIC meeting at B7L9 — KLF during the Finissage of Climbing Through the Tide exhibition with Yane Calovski and Başak Şenova

Tunis

7 Jun

talks: Ramesch Daha and Nisrine Boukhari, moderated by Jonatan Habib Engqvist Tunis at B7L9, KLF

13 Jun

CrossSections Screening Programme at University of Applied Arts Vienna

Vienna

03—19 Jul

solo exhibition: …the vast land, from which she comes by Isa Rosenberger, Kunsthalle Exnergasse — WUK

Vienna

02—15 Oct

CrossSections_perspectives Exhibition, Konstfack

Stockholm

15 Oct

talk: Inma Herrera and Timo Tuhkanen at Konstfack

Stockholm

02 Oct

artist books launch: Ebru Kurbak and Inma Herrera at Konstfack

Stockholm

23 Oct

talk: Nisrine Boukhari at ExLab, Uni Arts Helsinki — Academy of Fine Arts

Helsinki

25 Oct—11Nov CrossSections_notes Exhibition, ExLab, Uni Arts Helsinki — Academy of Fine Arts

Helsinki

26 Oct

talk: Başak Şenova at Research Pavilion Seminar with the contribution of Anne Klontz of Konstfack, at, ExLab, Uni Arts Helsinki — Academy of Fine Arts

Helsinki

31 Oct

lecture-performance: Bronwyn Lace at ExLab, Academy of Fine Arts

Helsinki

06. Nov

talk: Inma Herrera at ExLab, Uni Arts Helsinki — Academy of Fine Arts

Helsinki

05—10 Nov

solo exhibition: The World in Common and activities of Egle Oddo Atelier accompanied with a presentation and a talk by Başak Şenova at MACRO Asilo

Rome

13. Nov

talk: Otto Karvonen at ExLab, Uni Arts Helsinki — Academy of Fine Arts

Helsinki

18 Nov

talk: Benji Boyadgian in conversation with Başak Şenova at Villa Romana

Florence

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS CrossSections was an incredibly rewarding experience. To begin with, I would like to thank all the participating artists for their incredible generosity with their time, ideas, and efforts, and for opening up their own process so willingly, which can be extremely challenging, humbling and rewarding all at the same time. My sincere gratitude goes to all project partners and institutions that allowed our experimentation to take place and to be shared with the public: Kunsthalle Exnergasse — Werkstätten und Kulturhaus (WUK) in Vienna; iaspis — the Swedish Arts Grants Committee’s International Programme for Visual and Applied Artists; Konstfack — University of Arts, Crafts and Design, and NFK — The Nordic Art Association in Stockholm; Nya Småland in different locations in Sweden; HIAP — Helsinki International Artist Programme and Academy of Fine Arts — University of the Arts Helsinki in Helsinki; Estonian Centre for Contemporary Art in Tallinn; and Press to Exit Project Space in Skopje. I would particularly like to thank Andrea Löbel, Klaus Schafler, Maria Lantz, Juha Huuskonen, Jonatan Habib Engqvist, Björn Norberg, Mike Bode, Johanna Vakkari, Yane Calovski, Johan Pousette, and Maria Arusoo without whom I would not have been able to realize this project. I would like to express my sincere gratitude and appreciation to Saastamoinen Foundation, mainly to Marja and Petteri Karttunen for their trust and support from the beginning of the project. I would like to thank to Rector Dr. Gerald Bast and the University of Applied Arts Vienna. And a special thanks goes to Barbara Putz-Plecko for all her considerate guidance, inspiration, and support. Likewise, I would like to thank Lina Lazaar and the Kamel Lazaar Foundation who opened a new horizon for the project in Tunis. Along with its partner institutions and Saastamoinen Foundation, I would like to acknowledge the support that the project received from the Austrian Cultural Forum Istanbul; Consulate General of Sweden in Istanbul; the 15th Istanbul Biennial, organised by the Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts (IKSV); TECHIZART; Federal Chancellery [Bundeskanzleramt]; the University of Applied Arts Vienna, Zentrum Fokus Forschung in Vienna; Publics, Helsinki; Pera Museum; Art Council of Ireland, and Culture Ireland. I would also thank to Magnus Bärtås, Anna-Kaisa Rastenberger, Anne Klontz, Björn Norberg, and Nuşin Odelli for all their efforts and contribution to the project. Over the past three years, many amazing names enriched the project with their contributions. I would like to thank Adam James Sinclair, Alan Cruickshank, Alexander Damianisch, Anders Kruger, Anja Seipenbusch-Farrier, Angelika Maierhofer, Angelika Stepken, Anna Airaksinen, Anton Lederer, Antti Ahonen, Asia Zak, Astrid Wege, Bella Rune, Bettina Leidl, Bige Örer, Brandon Labelle, Brigitte Burgmann, Christian Ihrybauer, Christine Bruckbauer, Davood Madadpoor, Emmy Vershuren, Erdal Kayhan, Erhan Muratoğlu, Eyal Danon, Fabian Neuhuber, Frank Müller, Funda Şenova Tunalı, Gabriele Juen, Gamze Uğur Tuncer, Gerhard Pinter, Giorgio de Finis, Gizem Akgülgil, Gözde İlkin, Heike Maria Repner, Henk Slager, Hristina Ivanoska, Imen Zarrouk, Ingar Dragset, Jack Persekian, Jan Ahlstedt, Jasminka Namiceva, Johanna Fredriksson, Jovanka Popova, Karin Zimmer, Katharina Holas, Koulla Xinisteris, Lena Malm, Loulou Omer, Lukas Frankenberger, Mako Ishizuka, Margarethe Makovec, Marietta Böning, Marti Manen, Mary Corrigall, Matthias Bildstein, Meryem Saadi, Michael Elmgreen, Mika Elo, Mira Gakina, Mirhan Kıvanç Özdemir, Moez Mrabet, Moiz Zilberman, Monika Branicka, Muli Daha, Murat Kalkıcı, Myles Byrne, Nayla Aktürk, Nia Tabakova, Nicole Marjanovic, Oscar Mangione, Özalp Birol, Paul O’Neill, Paul Rajakovics, Paul Zoller, Petra Swais, Petri Summanen, Reinhard Braun, Reinhard Mayr, Ruth Pelzer-Montada, Sabah Ennaifar, Sabine Priglinger, Samir Bahri, Sanja Horvatinčič, Sedanur Şeker, Selda Asal, Susanna Davies-Crook, Susanne Kompast, Suzi Erşahin, Ufuk Şahin, Uğur Can Önder, Uğur Salkım, Verena Kaspar-Eisert, Vincent Entekhabi, Werner Kaligofsky, Wilhelm Van Rensburg, YeLa An, Zeynep Yaprak Demirtaş, and Zeyno Pekünlü. Last but not least, I would like to dedicate my work to my daughter Maya Muratoğlu, who showed great support, inspiration, humour, friendship, and understanding all throughout this process. BŞ 269

270

IMPRINT

PROCESSING ARTISTIC AND CURATORIAL RESEARCH Assoc. Prof. Dr. Başak Şenova, Gast. Prof., University of Applied Arts Vienna, Austria crosssections.kex.wuk.at

Başak Şenova (Ed.) Contributions: Andrea Löbel, Andreas Spiegl, Anna-Kaisa Rastenberger, Anne Klontz, Astrid Wege, Barbara Holub, Barbara Putz-Plecko, Başak Şenova, Behzad Khosravi-Noori, Bella Rune, Benji Boyadgian, Björn Norberg, Brandon Labelle, Bronwyn Lace, Ebru Kurbak, Egle Oddo, Funda Şenova Tunalı, Gizem Akgülgil, Heba Y. Amin, Hristina Ivanoska, Inma Herrera, Isa Rosenberger, Jack Persekian, Jennie Fahlström, Johan Pousette, Johanna Vakkari, Jonatan Habib Engqvist, Juha Huuskonen, Jukka Relander, Klaus Schafler, Koulla Xinisteris, Lina Lazaar, Lina Selander, Lori Adragna, Mako Ishizuka, Marcus Neustetter, Maria Lantz, Marja Karttunen, Marti Manen, Mary Corrigall, Mike Bode, Nia Tabakova, Nikolaus Gansterer, Nisrine Boukhari, Oscar Mangione, Otto Karvonen, Paul O’Neill, Ramesch Daha, Ricarda Denzer, Ruth Pelzer-Montada, Sanja Horvatinčič, Susanna Davies-Crook, Tamsin Snow, Timo Tuhkanen, Wilhelm Van Rensburg, and Yane Calovski. Project Management: “Edition Angewandte” on behalf of the University of Applied Arts Vienna: Anja Seipenbusch-Hufschmied, A-Vienna Content and Production Editor on behalf of the Publisher: Katharina Holas, A-Vienna Printed with financial support of Saastamoinen Foundation, Helsinki Proofreading: Nuşin Odelli Cover image: Yane Calovski Graphic Design and Book Concept: Başak Şenova Photographs: Anne Klontz, Antti Ahonen, Başak Şenova, Christian Ihrybauer, Inma Herrera, Jan Ahlstedt, Matthias Bildstein, Petri Summanen, Reinhard Mayr, Vincent Entekhabi and Werner Kaligofsky Printing: MAS Matbaa, Istanbul Library of Congress Control Number: 2020942206 Bibliographic information published by the German National Library The German National Library lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically for the rights of translation, reprinting, re-use of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in other ways, and for storage in databases. For any kind of use, permission of the copyright owner must be obtained. ISSN 1866-248X ISBN 978-3-11-071648-1 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-071656-6 © 2020 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston www.degruyter.com 271

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