The Shock of Victory Symposium

With In the Shadow of the Hand, Sacha Kahir, Latitudes, Angeliki Roussou, Caleb Waldorf, and WHW (What, How and For Whom?)

Schedule

9.30am | Arrival and coffee
10am - 10.15am | Introduction by CCA Curator Remco de Blaaij and Dr Deborah Jackson
10.15am - 11am | In the Shadow of the Hand
11am - 11.45am | Angelika Roussou
11.45am - 12.30pm | Caleb Waldorf
1pm - 2pm | Lunch (provided)
2pm - 2.45pm | Sacha Kahir
3pm - 3.45pm | Sabina Sabolovic, WHW
3.45pm - 4.15pm | Break
4.15pm - 5pm | Max Andrews, Latitudes

Accompanying the exhibition The Shock of Victory, this symposium allows for a timely re-consideration of the complexities of the relations between alternative and established (art) institutions that might have been sparked by political moments such as the Scottish Independence Referendum of 2014.

The underpinning emphasis is on the ‘organisational turn’, a shift from hierarchical to self-organised models of organisation. In particular the focus is on the potency of radical (artistic) practices and ideas, which propose imaginative ways of organising – collectivism, anarchism, activism, networks, and self-organising. Can we think of a new artistic landscape that might have been formed?

We have invited international and local curators, artists and academics to think and speak with us on issues of self-determination, empowerment and participation and whether we can we learn from the Independence Referendum in which we saw these structures (re)surfacing or possibly being damaged. How do we organise ourselves in such times?

Organised in partnership with the University of Edinburgh.
Co-convened by Dr Deborah Jackson
Funded by The University of Edinburgh’s Innovation Initiative Grant.

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In the Shadow of the Hand is an ongoing collaborative project that brings into conversation the artistic practices of Sarah Forrest and Virginia Hutchison. Since the collaboration began in 2012, In the Shadow of the Hand has incorporated writing, printmaking, object making, performance and film in order to explore the relationship between an art object and the language that surrounds it.

Sarah Forrest currently lives and works in Glasgow. She graduated from Glasgow School of Art in 2010 with an MA in Fine Art and won the The Margaret Tait Residency Award in 2012. Her practice encapsulates video, text and sculpture.

Virginia Hutchison currently lives and works in Glasgow. She graduated from the Royal College of Art in 2004 with an MA in Sculpture and currently sits on the board of directors at Glasgow Sculpture Studios. Her practice negotiates civic space through the medium of text, film, performance and object making.

Sacha Kahir operates within an oppositional tradition that seeks the democratization of everything. Exploring: often with groups marginalized from controlling their own symbolic representation, hybrid / liminal forms that merge art, politics, critique, overcoming, and memory. Working within, and frequently combining, animation, film, installation, theatre, poetry, and arts research, it attempts to create a modern art from below, in the sense of modern art as the desire to transform everyday life through aesthetic experimentation.

Founded in 2005 by Max Andrews and Mariana Cánepa Luna, Latitudes is an independent curatorial office based in Barcelona, Spain, that works internationally within the field of contemporary art.

Informed by an initial focus on ecology, Latitudes is especially interested in site, process and context. Latitudes has developed self-generated research-based projects in parallel with those produced at the invitation of museums, galleries and foundations, publishers, festivals and academic contexts. Exhibitions have formed an important but irregular part of Latitudes’s practice. Other projects have deliberately taken a transdisciplinary approach to visibility and publicness while maintaining a broader bandwidth of working and thinking with art and artists.

Latitudes has curated solo exhibitions by artists including Lawrence Weiner (Fundació Suñol, Barcelona, 2008), Ignasi Aballí (Suitcase Art Projects, Today Art Museum, Beijing, 2009) and Christina Hemauer & Roman Keller (Kunsthal Aarhus, 2011); group shows and exhibition series have addressed risk (Extraordinary Rendition, NoguerasBlanchard, 2007), post-environmentalism (‘Greenwashing’, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin, 2008) and been inspired by overlooked histories (‘Amikejo’, MUSAC, León, 2011) or narratives of modern industrial design (‘Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs...’, Meessen De Clercq, Brussels, 2011).

Angeliki Roussou is a PhD researcher in the School of History of Art at The University of Edinburgh. Her thesis title is ‘Instituting as Process: an Expanded Sphere of Artistic, Organisational and Curatorial Practices’. Her research is funded by the Edinburgh College of Art and the A.G. Leventis Foundation. In Athens, she has worked as a curator independently and as part of Kunsthalle Athena. She has also worked in the editorial team of ‘South as a State of Mind’ publication. She holds an MA in Contemporary Art Theory from Goldsmiths, University of London.

Caleb Waldorf is an artist currently living in Berlin. His practice operates at the intersection of publication, pedagogy and technology with a focus on designing, developing and maintaining on-/off-line collaborative systems.

In 2007, Caleb co-founded the publication platform, Triple Canopy, of which he is currently Creative Director. Since 2008, he has served on the committee for The Public School, an open framework for self-organized learning.

What, How & for Whom/ WHW is a curatorial collective formed in 1999 and based in Zagreb and Berlin. Its members are Ivet Ćurlin, Ana Dević, Nataša Ilić and Sabina Sabolović, and designer and publicist Dejan Kršić. WHW organizes a range of production, exhibition and publishing projects and directs Gallery Nova in Zagreb.

Since its first exhibition titled What, How & for Whom, on the occasion of 152nd anniversary of the Communist Manifesto, that took place in Zagreb in 2000, WHW curated numerous international projects, among which are Collective Creativity at Kunsthalle Fridericianum in 2005, 11th Istanbul Biennial What Keeps Mankind Alive?, Istanbul, 2009 and One Needs to Live Self-Confidently...Watching, Croatian pavilion at 54th Venice Biennial, 2011. Recent projects by WHW include the festival Meeting Points 7 that took place in Zagreb, Antwerp, Cairo, Hong-Kong, Beirut, Vienna and Moscow under title Ten thousand wiles and a hundred thousand tricks in 2013 and 2014, and exhibition Really Useful Knowledge, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid in 2014.