Showing posts with label Yael Bartana. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Yael Bartana. Show all posts

Buuuuuuuuu curated by Astrid Peterle


As a curator these days I am actually at a loss how one can react to the humanitarian crisis we are currently facing. Nevertheless I still believe in the political strength and energy artistic practice can unleash not only in the field of art. I am most interested in those moments where art penetrates into other social fields, where it shakes people up from their daily routine, if only for a second, or where it works to empower people who cannot or do not want to be part of the artistic field (which in many ways often still is very elite and disconnected from those who do not posses the knowledge/education/resources to engage with it). I picked a few projects that either directly react to the current situations or which I discovered a longer time ago but fit into a reflection of the many things going wrong theses days.



'Weaponise the internet'  by One of My Kind (OOMK)
A feminist project that deals with self empowerment of young Muslim women, promoting a positive feeling of their identities in opposition to the negative definition of being Muslim which is constantly constructed by media and right wing politics in Europe and the USA.



The MigrationLab is a project that is active all across Europe to bring together migrants, refugees and host communities with means of art and non-formal education. One form of events they initiate was also established in Vienna during the last Vienna Design Week in 2015:

Welcome to The Living Room is a public living room co-created by migrants, refugees and locals in cities across Europe, where these communities share stories and reflections on migration using artistic expression.



'True Finn – Tosi suomalainen', by Yael Bartana, 2014


One artist whose work I admire a lot is Yael Bartana. For the Finnish IHMW Art Festival Bartana created a kind of utopian community of people living in Finland with different religious, ethical and political backgrounds, thus questioning what a national identity, in this case Finnishness, actually constitutes.





  'My Name Is Janez Janša' by Janez Janša, 2013

I have followed Janez Janša’s work for many years, dating back from when he worked as a choreographer and director under the name of Emil Hrvatin. Together with two fellow artists from Slovenia and Italy he created a politically very challenging project by officially renaming themselves with the name of the then ruling Slovenian prime minister Janez Janša. To this day I find it thought-provoking in regard to the issues of identity, nationality, and the relation between the individual human being and society.





The Austrian performance art collective God’s Entertainment has recently produced a project for Kampnagel in Hamburg that they had previously developed for Wiener Festwochen in 2012. The term “Intergrationsfähigkeit” (ability/skill to integrate) is now more topical as ever and all around us in the media and especially in right winged political debates. After the collective had inquired the Austrians passing by their “camp” about their will to integrate, they now asked similar questions in Hamburg. 




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