• Politika e Artit Bashkëkohor
Politics of Contemporary Art

'Politics of Contemporary Art' will explore the power of an emancipated contemporary art scene in the context of new realities and countries and the expanded borderlines of the art production during and after political crisis.

This project aims to function in this field by acting as an emancipatory factor to the Kosova contemporary art scene, artists and thinkers form the region; and a vehicle for an open and creative collaboration of artist from South Eastern Europe.

The conceptual framework of the workshops 1 and 2 will deal with the problems on how to contextualize the working framework of artists coming form the region that today is called the Balkans.

Last few years the only way to contextualize the framework, from which the artists that will be the participants of this workshop are coming from, would be naming it as 'The Balkans'. This contextualization and giving the name to the region is a part of a complicated operation and the crisis of identifying a very complicated process through which this region has gone through and which through the attachment of this name 'Balkans' has replaced the whole region in era of the nineteenth century.

The workshops 1 and 2 will deal with the problem why has this name become the rigid signifier of the very complicated process, that has nothing to do with the nineteenth century, the analysis of the ideological mechanisms that have participated in the decision to name a contemporary process with an archaic name. The organizers of the workshops 1 and 2, through the analyses of the works created in the region during this complicated process of the restructuring of the region, will reveal that these works are the messengers of a vision of the future world, the world of a permanent emergency situation and not the messengers that will send us back in the nineteenth century.

The workshops 1 and 2 of 'Politics of Contemporary Art' are a series of workshops, based on a structure of open call participation for the artists (in Kosova) and selected artists from the countries of the region (Serbia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Albania, Greece, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Slovenia)

Workshops are designed as a site of contemporary art, with lectures, presentations and intensive work of the leaders of the workshop and their guest lecturers for/with the participants, working in a platform that will seek to find answers on how to think your own contemporarity.

Workshop3: 'Writing about Art' aims to get an insight into the strategies of catalogue texts that accompany exhibitions and to discuss what makes them different from theoretical writing about art and other textual genres. The focal point of analysis is the text in the exhibition catalogue that would be dealt with from historical, contextual (exhibition, spectator, society) and validating point of view. We will seek to find out to what extent contemporaneity is dependent on its re-definition through writing as well as what is the relation between the exhibition catalogue and the art work which thus the writer bequeaths to history. The workshop will finally try to address the significance of finding one's own voice while writing about contemporary artistic practices through a writing experiment: production of collaborative reviews or essays.

Politics of Contemporary Art is sponsored generously by European Culture Foundation, Kosova Foundation for Open Society, Goethe Institute, Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Slovenia - Division for International Cultural Relations, German Embassy in Prishtina, Grand Hotel Prishtina and Design Architecture and Advertising Agency DZG.