Decolonizing Art Institutions

Issue 35 / December 2017 Notes on Curating ONCURATING www.oncurating.org Decolonizing Art Institutions Contents Decolonizing Art Institutions 02 78 Public Performance Detox Dance Chasing Colonial Ghosts: by Roma Jam Session art Kollektiv Decolonizing Art Institutions in with participants of the symposium “Post-Apartheid” South Africa Same Mdluli 04 Editorial 82 Dorothee Richter & Ronald Kolb Train to Biennale Michelle Wong 11 Still Here Somehow: Artists and Cultural 87 Activism in Singapore's Renaissance Decolonizing Art Institutes Woon Tien Wei from a Labor Point of View Binna Choi & Yolande van der Heide 24 The Israeli Center for Digital Art 93 Eyal Danon On Cultural Translation Sophie J Williamson 30 What Does the Revolt of Sediments 99 Look Like? Notes on the Archive Thoughts on Curatorial Practices Sabih Ahmed in the Decolonial Turn Ivan Muñiz-Reed 36 Sources, Itineraries, and the Making 106 of a Thicket Decolonising UK World Art Institutions, Raqs Media Collective 1945–1980 Claire Wintle 41 Three Biennials in Asia (2016) 113 Shwetal A. Patel Acknowledging the post_coloniality of Higher Art Education. Considerations 50 from the Swiss perspective On the critical decades and the role of archives Sophie Vögele and Philippe Saner Shwetal Patel in discussion with Shaheen Merali 119 56 How to Be Affected in Postcolonial Cutting and Sharing the “Global Pie”: Public Spaces? Ethnographic Remarks Why History Matters to Discussions on a Multifocal World in the Making … 1 of Contemporary “Global Art” Rohit Jain Claire Farago 129 61 Some Theoretical and Empirical Aspects on Learning from Dhaka the Decolonization of Western Collections Dorothee Richter Marie-Laure Allain Bonilla 72 140 On Blackwomen’s Creativity and the Future Imprint Imperfect: Thoughts, Propositions, Issues Nkule Mabaso 1 Issue 35 / December 2017 Detox Dance Decolonizing Art Institutions Public Performance Detox Dance by Roma Jam Session art Kollektiv with participants of the symposium Detox Dance is a public performance performed in Square Dance manner. Our easy-to-learn dancing patterns have been inspired by movements of relaxation, martial arts and fragments of Roma Dances. Every participant is part of a liquid social sculpture. By moving together and sharing a common public space we celebrate a moment of common activities into a joyful becoming “Th e Future is Roma”. Mo Diener, RJSaK 3rd of June 2017 Roma Jam Session art Kollektiv (RJSaK) is the fi rst art collective in Switzer- land dedicates its activities to creat new fresh images of the Roma minority. Based in Zurich, the group works transdisciplinary with members from the arts, acting, and design, and collaborations with guests from different fi elds. Since its fi rst intervention in 2013 at a local art space, RJSaK has performed in Zurich at Manifesta 11 Parallel Events, Kunsthaus Zurich, Shedhalle as well as in other cities. Apart from its public art performances, the collective is engaged in political activism with various NGO’s and in a working group at the federal offi ce of culture BAK, currently in the process of shaping the rights of minorities with regards to Roma, Sinti and Yenish communities in Switzerland. 2 Issue 35 / December 2017 Detox Dance Decolonizing Art Institutions 3 Issue 35 / December 2017 Editorial Decolonizing Art Institutions Editorial Dorothee Richter & Ronald Kolb Th is issue compiles the outcome of the symposium at the Kunstmuseum Basel and a summer academy at the Zurich University of the Arts, concerning one of the most urgent topics of our times. You will fi nd contributions by the guests of the symposium and additional articles by scholars and practitioners connected to this topic. We also invited artists for a related exhibition at the OnCurating Project space— which came together as a shared project curated and organised with students of the Postgraduate Programme in Curating—because our aim was to make a multiplicity of voices from the arts accessible. Th e outcome is shown in an additional publication “Decolonizing Art Institution. A shared exhibition”, with a report on the Summer Academy by Giovanna Fachini Bragagli.1 Colonial Pasts and its Present We fi nd the traces of colonialism everywhere, as Walter Mignolo pointed out in his famous publication that modernity’s “darker side” is coloniality.2 Th e achievements of the Renaissance for European countries could not have happened without the exploitation of other countries and people. In his publication, Mignolo has chosen the Louvre as an example of the museum’s function to separate ethnographic museum objects (which were basically looted from other countries) from the art museum. We would also like to call to mind the history of the fi rst public museum, the Frideri- cianum in Kassel. It was (and we quote from the website) “designed in the spirit of the Enlightenment and built by Huguenot architect Simon Louis du Ry, Fridericianum opened its doors in 1779 as the world’s very fi rst purpose-built public museum.” 3 But one has to know that the Landgrave Friedrich II sold soldiers to the British to fi nance this museum. Many of these soldiers were captured against their will and shipped over, either to the UK or directly to North America to fi ght against the rebellion for independence in the British colonies. So, from the beginning there have been class struggles, colonial ideology, and colonial battles involved in the relations between museums and their fi nancial foundation. From this perspective, issues of so-called “race,” class, and gender are always intertwined in aesthetics, in the arts, in art institutions, and their ideologies, and should therefore also be considered together in rethinking a decolonial horizon. In 2011, Andrea Fraser argued that the art market is strongest in countries with the biggest gap in income between the super rich and the very poor. (Fraser explores this matter using the GIINI Index of Income Disparity since World War II in many diff erent countries.)4 Th is is another reason why we are sceptical about relocating traditional Western paradigms and traditional Western formats of fi ne arts one-to-one in other contexts, as they might end up just as a means of distinction. To merge cultural artefacts and backgrounds, to question them, to go along with the actual needs of actual people living in the context of institutions, to follow and archive specifi c cultural artefacts and everyday cultural objects would be of keen interest for us. De-Colonizing Art Institutions What we would like to undertake here and now is to share some ideas with you, in some very specifi c contexts, about how one could think about revealing and changing patterns and power structures. Walter Mignolo mentions that colonization was a global project, so de-colonizing art institutions would as well be a global (or mondial) concept, but this means that it would be diff erent, it would react to each context, it 4 Issue 35 / December 2017 Editorial Decolonizing Art Institutions would react to a historical moment, it would react to the local specifi cities. We see this as an ongoing project, one that will need many diff erent protagonists, colleagues, cultural producers of all sorts, and political activists. Th e contributions by Woon Tien Wei, and Eyal Danon share ideas on specifi c art practices rooted in a local agenda. Woon Tien Wei (Post-Museum) explores in his contribution, Still Here Somehow: Artists and Cultural Activism in Singapore’s Renaissance, the shift of artistic practices in Singapore from community-based cultural activism to a professionalized state-driven and spectacle-seeking form of fi ne art production, with the help of artist Koh Nguang How. Th e director of the Center for Digital Art (CDA) in Holon, Israel, Eyal Danon follows the transformation of the Center from an art institution for the art community in the fi rst place to a community-based and activist-driven art center in a deeply rooted exchange with the neighbourhood of Jessy Cohen. De-colonizing is thought to be a horizon, in the way Derrida spoke about a democracy to come. De-colonizing Art Institutions can only be a shared project, with diff erent tasks in each geopolitical and social context. It will mean something diff erent in Switzerland or Germany than in India, China, or South Africa. It will mean something else if we speak about art academies, art museums, or “Off ” spaces. And, of course, we cannot provide any clear solutions. What we want to achieve is to form bonds of shared interests, to develop a platform for exchange, and there is a certain urgency behind this. As Adam Szymczyk describes the ongoing severe changes between 2013 and 2017 in Th e documenta 14 Reader: “We have witnessed—both locally and glob- ally—the implementation of debt as political measure, the gradual destruction of what remained of the welfare state, wars waged for resources and the market, and the resulting multiple and never-ending humanitarian catastrophes. Th is darkening global situation has leaned heavily upon our daily (and nightly) thinking about, and acting on and for, documenta 14.”6 Against the uncanny background of post-democratic societies, populist megalomania, and alternative truth scenarios—and with all that a strengthening of the nation state—, it is urgent once again to open vistas of new global public spheres, of fi nding new perspectives in international solidarities beyond “race,” class, gender, and social political diff erences. Nikos Papastergiadis reminds us in Cosmopolitanism and Culture that, “Th e discursive turn in artistic and curatorial practice, with its wild embrace of hybrid identities and its committed eff orts to hijack capital, was also aligned with a desire to build a new global public sphere,”7 Our eff orts are linked to this idea of a global public sphere, be that through new formats in exhibition-making or through publications.

Load more