Lectures - 2017
Jan Zálešák: Smells Like Teen Spirit
Mgr. Jan Zálešák, Ph.D.
Department of Theoretic Studies and History of Art, Faculty of Fine Arts, Brno University of Technology
The aim of the lecture is to offer a background for Václav Magid’s seminar entitled What was the Aesthetics of Folk-Politics? It will introduce several “case studies” – examples of artistic projects that declare the intention to achieve a change in the social fabric, in the way how politics is done, or how wealth and power are distributed, ranging from the early 1990s ‘new genre public art’ (Suzanne Lacy) or ‘relational aesthetics’ (Jens Haaning) to recent efforts to re-invent political art (Jonas Staal).
Jan Zálešák (born in 1979) is a curator and, critic and an assistant professor at the Faculty of Fine Arts at the Brno University of Technology. In 2009 obtained a post-doctoral scholarship for the research on collaborative and participatory arts which resulted in a monograph entitled Umění spolupráce (Art of Cooperation, 2011) (The art of collaboration). His following book Minulá budoucnost / Past Future (2013) focused on the search for utopian potential of modernity in contemporary art. In 2008-2010 he was active as a curator at Galerie mladých (Galery of Young Artists) in Brno; and curated thematic exhibition Re-romantic (2009), Horká linka (Hotline, 2010), Vzpomínky na budoucnost II (Memories of the Future II, 2013), Apocalypse Me (2016) and Letting Go (2017). Jan Zálešák is also a member of Skutek Association and Are (are-events.org) Association.
Tomasz Rakowski: Towards an Alternative Social History: Ethnography, Art, and Experimentation in Postsocialist Poland
Dr Tomasz Rakowski
Institute of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology, Faculty of History, University of Warsaw
In my presentation I will show how the unnoticed traditions of social selforganization born in rural Poland may reveal deep conflicts embedded in Polish society during the last decades. I draw on something that could be called “the culture of shaming” – a perspective that appears where modernizing discourses on Polish society are confronted with the cultural experiences of Polish farmers and villagers. I subsequently explore several possible ways of going beyond this perspective: turning to the world of rural social subjectivity as it emerges from artistic and ethnographic projects, investigating the conditions of belonging and the possibilities of performing an ‘inward turn’, and exploring the potential to construct an alternative understanding of society – a proto-sociology. In my argument, artistic projects are linked with ethnography, and above all with the possibility of revealing an alternative social history, capable of reversing the fixed assumptions about the contemporary Polish society. The presentation will include a display of film materials.