Symposia

Gestures of Emancipation

sociology English friendly public space urbanism architecture
SWETLANA HEGER: PUBLIC ART WITHIN AND OUTSIDE THE INSTITUTIONBARBARA HOLUB, PAUL RAJAKOVICS (TRANSPARADISO): SILENT ACTIVISM: CAN ART HAVE A FUNCTION?MATĚJ HÁJEK: PRESENTATION OF THE OFF FENCE PROJECT

We are today facing unprecedented environmental and social challenges, both on a global scale and in our immediate surroundings. Nationalist, sexist, and xenophobic tendencies are making their way into politics, while the environmental crisis and social inequality are presenting us with new contexts in which to reassess the role of public art in society. The city is experiencing dynamic and radical growth that is transforming its architectural, social, and environmental make-up.
The strategies used by art in public space include a broad range of artistic approaches. Art can show us more environmental and ethical ways of treating one another. It can offer an opportunity for collective participation and self-expression, for reflecting on history, and for community dialogue. It can influence our social, spatial, and political topologies by promoting new social models or designing and improving the physical infrastructure. However, it can also legitimize economic or political interests that are not beneficial to the general public. For these reasons, it is important to consider what values we legitimize through our art and our artistic or curatorial input into the shared public space, to think about what steps can and should be taken with a view to today’s dynamic transformation of the city.
With these thoughts in mind, the inter-institutional symposium Gestures of Emancipation hopes to explore alternative ways of using the diversity inherent to contemporary artistic practice to capture the complex nature of our social, urban, and natural environment, to identify the ideas that are stimulating for this environment, and to consider ways of sharing these ideas with the general public in the urban space.
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A three-day doctoral symposium Gestures of Emancipation with foreign participation was organized in cooperation of three Prague art institutions with a professional interest in art issues in public space. Its main goal was to name common areas of interest, to map the topics of doctoral theses in the field of urban artistic strategies, and to open the discussion with foreign guests with long artistic experience with work in public space. The program included various areas of artistic practice and public interest, especially in the contexts of urbanism, architecture and sociology of urban space.

The foreign guests invited to join the symposium were well-known artists and teachers from the art universities of Switzerland, Sweden and Austria: Swetlana Heger, Jonas Dahlberg, Barbara Holub and Paul Rajakovics took part with their presentations and discussion activities. Due to the C-19 pandemic, the Viennese artistic duo Nicol Six and Paul Petritch canceled their presence at the last moment, and the free space was used for the presentation of AVU doctoral student Matěj Hájek.

Dušan Zahoranský, the coordinator of AVU doctoral programs Ondřej Buddeus, the GHMP curator Jitka Hlaváčková, and Milena Bartlová of UMPRUM were the organizers of the symposium. The symposium were held on November 8-10th 2021.

SWETLANA HEGER: PUBLIC ART WITHIN AND OUTSIDE THE INSTITUTION

Commissioned art is based on negotiations between the client’s request and the artist’s ideas, within or outside the institutional frame. Through the history of art artists were commissioned to produce works for others (portraits of aristocratic family members in the Renaissance to digital take overs on social media). How can higher education include and offer alternative opportunities outside of the art market and maintain its autonomy despite of given parameters (conditions, contracts, partnerships)?

Swetlana Heger is a visual artist, born in Czech Republic (1968), grew up in the Austrian city of Bregenz. She studied in Vienna at the University of Applied Arts Wien (1990-1995) and attended the Postgraduate Program at the Musashino Art University in Tokyo (1996-1998). She has been a visiting professor at the School of Visual Arts in New York and a professor, vice-rector, and rector at Umeå University in Sweden. Currently, she is responsible for foreign relations and heads the Faculty of Fine Arts at the Zurich University of the Arts. With her artistic work, Swetlana Heger draws attention to the complex relationships between private and public space. The essential leitmotifs characterizing the work are the relationship between art and business or the redefinition of artistic strategies, particularly the background and often invisible structures of art productions and discussions.

BARBARA HOLUB, PAUL RAJAKOVICS (TRANSPARADISO): SILENT ACTIVISM: CAN ART HAVE A FUNCTION?

In their projects and artistic-urban interventions transparadiso creates performative situations in which they investigate personal, social or political borders, allowing for the participants to question their roles as active citizens, as well as the role art can play in society. Rather than proclaiming activism in a direct sense, transparadiso enhances moments of hidden poetic qualities, opening up space for things which don’t fit, questioning the quest for efficiency and functionality in our society. Through their projects „Times of Dilemma“ (Valletta18, Malta), „The Third World Congress of the Missing Things“ (NORMAL, Graz Culture Year 2020), „Harbour for Cultures“ (Trieste/ Italy, 2018), „Request for the unrequested voluntary interlinguisticality“ (Pottenhofen, Lower Austria, 2016) transparadiso will address the role of game, the production of desires and anticipatory fiction in performative situations, for „silent activism“.

transparadiso is a transdisciplinary practice founded by artist Barbara Holub and architect and urbanist Paul Rajakovics in 1999. It implements projects between art, artistic urban interventions, architecture, and urbanism. In addition, they research and develop (but also teach and publish) artistic strategies for “Direct Urbanism”, a socially engaged process-oriented urban planning. In their projects, exhibitions, and urban interventions, transparadiso deals with current social and urban issues, especially the search for shared values of living together. They create performative situations that encourage the inhabitants of the city to act, to return responsibility to the individual and to address the conflict between personal interests and common good. Barbara Holub and Paul Rajakovics received the Austrian National Art Prize in 2018, the Otto-Wagner-Urban Design Prize (2006) and other awards. Barbara Holub was President of the Secession Vienna (2006-2007) and is a member of the Innovation Fund for Culture in Public Space, Stuttgart; external examiner at The Bartlett (London) for Situated Practice and serves on international juries and boards, e.g. the advisory board of the Journal for Arts & the Public Sphere (UK). Paul Rajakovics is a member of the editorial board of derive – magazine for urban research, Vienna

MATĚJ HÁJEK: PRESENTATION OF THE OFF FENCE PROJECT

Matěj Hájek (with Tereza Kučerová, MOLO architekti) was invited to the 17th International Architecture Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia curated by Hashim Sarkis How will we live together? In the section How will we play together? he present their installation Off Fence. The installation confronts the separation phenomenon as it playfully blocks access along a path with a barrier. It transforms this obstacle into an impulse of change. The objective is to initiate transformation within a playful context as one symbolically embraces the physicality of a problem. It only takes encouragement and mutual courage to overcome that which separates people. In this installation, visitors are confronted with an obstacle on the path leading them to it. They must deal with it if they wish to continue. They may give up, or they can choose to go around it, or they could walk through the obstacle. Either way, their decision, their reaction to this impediment, becomes symbolic.

Matěj Hájek (* 1982) is a Czech artist and founding member of the group Ztohoven (2003), under the pseudonym Otto Horsi. In 2003, he began his studies at the AVU Prague in Veronika Bromová’s New Media Studio. He graduated in the Sculpture Studio of Jaroslav Róna. His artistic work is situated on the border between architecture, sculpture and landart. He has been dealing with the relationship between sculpture and game taking shape in the form of large playground projects, such as the Bororo Reservation in the Prague Zoo or the PECKA Playground Landscape in Velká Úpa. He has participated in multiple award-wining projects as for example the Grand Prix of Architects, the Wooden Building of the Year, or the Czech Grand Design. Since October 2019, he has been a doctoral student at the AVU in the studio of Tomáš Hlavina. He lives and works in Prague, where, together with the photographer Bet Orten, he founded the creative studio SKULL (2020).