The 8th Jerusalem Art Conference

The political scene in Turkey has been utterly unpredictable and unstable during the last decade. Accordingly, the very nature of the political field has kept alive the tension between the fear of a regime change towards even more authoritarian forms and the persistent hope to turn the tide via elections or referendums. In the lack of state support for arts, almost all the major art institutions are founded and run by wealthy business dynasties which allows the establishment of contemporary art production seemingly independent from the ideological and material domination of the state. The relationship between the state, institutions, and cultural workers is uniquely tense as a result of this structure. The talk will focus on particular cases of friction and conflict amongst these different actors in the last decade, examining how the field underwent complex alliances and tried varied strategies when they were directly or indirectly targeted.

Dr. Zeyno Pekünlü is an artist based in Istanbul and currently running the Istanbul Biennial Research and Production Program and the Istanbul Cell of Fellowship for Situated Practice organized by BAK Utrecht. Together with Köken Ergun, she is co-founder of KIRIK, an initiative for people and topics in the cracks. She is part of the editorial board of the e-journal Red Thread and member of IRI (Institute of Radical Imagination).

Hungary’s “illiberalism” is frequently in the news and juxtaposed with other authoritarian regimes. However, we still know little about its global context and everyday practices. In my lecture, instead of treating cultural politics and policies as a freak show, I focus on how the nationalist reshaping of Hungarian cultural production is part of a global rise of state capitalism. Based on my ethnographic fieldwork at a Hungarian cultural flagship institution, I stress that the everyday transformation of cultural infrastructure is just as significant as the more obvious takeover of cultural institutions.

Kristóf Nagy is a Budapest-based researcher of art, culture, and society. Previously he was trained at The Courtauld Institute of Art, and now he is finishing his Ph.D. at the Central European University. His dissertation project examines the cultural politics of the Orbán regime, via an ethnography of the Hungarian Academy of Arts. He serves as an editor of the social theory journal Fordulat, and is a member of the Helyzet Working Group for Public Sociology. He is also affiliated with the Central European Research Institute for Art History and the Eötvös Loránd University.

In my presentation I will focus on postartistic practices that have emerged in Poland since 2015, in response to rising authoritarianism. I will discuss a host of activities – such as antifascist year, demonstrations of paintings, or ecofeminist groupings – as strange tools used and reused collectively in the times of crisis. Paraphrasing Jerzy Ludwiński, a Polish theoretician of conceptual art, they may not resemble art proper, but they offer us greater possibilities, combining conceptual density with political edge. I will conclude my address by reflecting upon impact of those transformations on artistic institutions and systems of cultural production at large.

Dr. Kuba Szreder is a researcher, curator, and lecturer at the Academy of Fine Art in Warsaw. He cooperates with artistic unions, consortia of postartistic practitioners, clusters of art-researchers, art collectives and artistic institutions in Poland, UK, and other European countries. Editor and author of books and texts on the political economy of global artistic circulation, art strikes, artistic self-organization in the expanded field, and the use value of art. His most recent book The ABC of the projectariat. Living and working in a precarious art world, was published by the Whitworth Museum and Manchester University Press in December 2021.

In this lecture, Irit Rogoff explores the ‘Research Turn’ within art and curating and of how research has moved from being a contextual activity that grounds production and exhibition of art, to a mode of inhabiting the art world in its own right. The claim for the shift in our understanding of research is that what previously had been a form of working from ‘inherited knowledges’, we are currently thinking about research as ‘working from conditions’. Our conditions are daily impacted by precarity, scarcity, sustainability, security and financialisation – these necessarily impact subjects, methodologies and audiences of research. The centrality of contemporary arts practices in developing new forms and expressions of research, grounded in invention and speculation rather than in proof and verification, is at the heart of this ‘turn’.

Dr. Irit Rogoff is a writer, teacher, curator, and organizer working at the intersection of contemporary art, critical theory, and emergent political manifestations. She is a professor of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London, London, where she heads the PhD in the Advanced Practice program. Her current work focuses on new practices of knowledge production and their impacts on modes of research, under the title Becoming Research.

Research where artists examine their artistic practice; research where artistic creation and thought are not separate; live, dynamic research characterized by its specificity, changing from artist to artist. A few years ago, I discovered this field of research through my own PhD studies, and since then I have been teaching a seminar on it to MA art students at the University of Haifa.

Dr. Thalia Hoffman is a film, video and performance artist and researcher. Additionally, she initiates and develops social-political artistic activities that involve local citizens. Her works have been exhibited in museums, festivals and galleries such as the Helena Rubinstein Pavilion, Petach Tikva Museum, Beit Hagefen Gallery, Jerusalem Film Festival, Mamuta Art and Research Center, the Center for Digital Art in Holon, and the Cairo Video Festival.