Creative Futures Institute, Variant & Framework present Curating Europes’ Futures: Minna Henriksson & Sezgin Boynik

Curating Europes’ Futures is a collaboratively-organised discussion series which explores contemporary curatorial and artistic practices that have critically addressed themselves to the processes of socio-economic restructuring, identity politics, gender dynamics and cultural policies within 'post-bloc' Europe.

The series will look at curatorial practices as they have evolved within the shifting and uneven economic and socio-political relations across an expanding European Project whilst raising questions over different kinds of constructed identities.

Curators who have investigated the paradoxes of national ideology and capitalist structures, raising questions about interconnections between contemporary art and the shaping of daily social reality, have been invited to participate. The speakers will discuss their involvement in arts and publishing projects that have not only sought to critically address these areas, but also broaden the interpretive range and prospective interplay of artistic research to ongoing socio-political struggles and possibilities within 'post-bloc' Europe.

In this double session of the series, artist/curator Minna Henriksson explores the relationship between ideology and the arts in the socio-political conditions of 'post-bloc' Europe and its imagined futures, reflecting back on her own projects and curatorial practice with regard to how the treatments of national monuments and heritage effect social narrations of belonging and identity.

And sociologist Sezgin Boynik explores the connection between forms or tones of nationalism and the manifestation of nationalist impulses in contemporary art. How the productive networks of artists, curators, and institutions can form a cultural space where nationalism is manifested in relation to the real, ad hoc, ever changing phenomenon of the nation itself.

Katarzyna Kosmala's new book Sexing the Border: Gender, Art and New Media in Central and Eastern Europe (Ed) (CSP, 2014) will be launched at the event.

The discussions are free, open to the public, aimed principally at artists, researchers, curators and those with an active interest in the changing contexts of interdisciplinary, experimental and investigative curatorial and artistic practices.

Curating Europes’ Futures brings together Creative Futures Institute of the University of the West of Scotland, the Research School of The Glasgow School of Art, as well as the practitioner-research networks of Variant and Framework as hosted by CCA.

Image: Minna Henriksson, Lenin of Riga, 2013. Image, courtesy of the artist.