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A panel and Q&A exploring curatorial hospitality from a historical perspective, in writing experiments, and in collective play .
About this Event
How might we ponder curatorial hospitality? How do we begin to flesh it out? Join us to hear about three very different approaches to these urgent questions. This panel brings together curator Lisa Baldissera, art historian Bojana Videkanić, and the participants of the project/platform Living within the Play (Shannon Stratton, Kelly Lloyd, Kelly Kaczynski, and Mark Jeffery), whose texts are featured in the current issue of the journal PUBLIC: Art | Culture | Ideas. Edited by curator/critic Sylvie Fortin, this publication examines the currencies of hospitality.
Lisa Baldissera’s Weepers appropriates the short story form and the biographical voice to gather a cast of characters entwined in diverse planetary networks of belonging. The story gives primacy of place to the entanglements between humans and more-than-humans (animals, the dead, ghosts). It foregrounds the violence of neoliberal social reproduction and the hostility that always tinges hospitality (a sibling rivalry of sorts) as it enacts practices of care, sharing, learning, and curating. It also elaborates instances of refusal, strategies of resistance, and forms of somatized negation, fleshing them out in the languages of the body.
In the summer of 2019, Shannon Stratton, Kelly Lloyd, Kelly Kaczynski, and Mark Jeffery invited several people to the Poor Farm—an artist-run entity whose name archives its former use—to “live within the play” in order to produce a “sprawling keyholder agreement” that would endlessly make space for others. Their protean project for PUBLIC welcomes us into this process by weaving together presentation, poetry, story, photo essay, slide lecture, journal, and list. For hospitality is, among other things, a question of form, a question that matters in the infinitely varied a/symmetries of invitations, spaces, and protocols. Thus, to “think and live through the form” is to attend to the thickness and textures, as well as the pleasures and pains, of hospitality.
Owing much to Yugoslavia’s political theory of self-management and the solidarities born of the Non-Aligned Movement, the Ljubljana Biennial of Graphic Arts (started in 1955) is one of several international exhibitions that emerged from the ruins of the Second World War and the rising de/colonial articulation of alternative modernities. Art historian Bojana Videkanić enlists curatorial hospitality to reassess the Biennial’s commitment to excellence as well as its forms of sociality and the inclusivity it enacted through collaborative, pragmatic, and strategic curating.
PANELISTS
LISA BALDISSERA has worked as an independent curator, consultant, and writer, and in curatorial roles in public art galleries in Western Canada since 1999, including Senior Curator at Contemporary Calgary from 2014 to 2016 and Chief Curator at the Mendel Art Gallery in Saskatoon from 2012 to 2014. She was Curator of Contemporary Art at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria from 1999 to 2009, where she produced more than fifty exhibitions of local, Canadian, and international artists. She holds an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from the University of British Columbia, an M.F.A. in Art from the University of Saskatchewan, and is a Ph.D. candidate at Goldsmiths College, University of London. She is currently Director of Griffin Art Projects in North Vancouver.
LIVING WITHIN THE PLAY: MARK JEFFERY is a Chicago-based performance/ installation artist and curator, and Associate Professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. In 2012, he cofounded ATOM-r, a performance/technology company in which he is a choreographer and performer. Jeffery is the organizer of IN>TIME, a triannual performance festival presented across multiple venues in Chicago. He was a member of the internationally renowned Goat Island Performance Group from 1996 to 2009. KELLY KACZYNSKI is a Chicago-based artist working within the language of sculpture, addressing the form of the stage as a spatial object endowed with its own performativity. Kaczynski has exhibited in the USA, Mexico, and Canada. Her curatorial projects addressing the phenomenological and physiological relationships between the virtual and the physical include Virtually Speaking at Columbia College, Chicago (2014) and Mouthing (a sentient limb) at the Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago (2011). Kaczynski has been a recipient of the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award (2015) and of an Artadia grant (2008). She received an M.F.A. from Bard College and is Adjunct Associate Professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. KELLY LLOYD is a London-based visual artist, essayist, and educator who focuses on issues of representation and knowledge production, and prioritizes public-facing collaborative research. Lloyd received a dual M.F.A. in Painting and M.A. in Visual and Critical Studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2015, and a B.A. from Oberlin College in 2008. She was the Starr Fellow at the Royal Academy Schools in London during the 2018/2019 academic year, and has attended artist residencies in the United States, Switzerland, Austria, Italy, Denmark, and the United Kingdom. Her work was recently presented in solo exhibitions at the Royal Academy Schools, London; Crybaby, Berlin; Bill’s Auto, Chicago; Dirty House, London; and The Demo Room, Aarhus, Denmark. SHANNON R. STRATTON is an independent curator and writer with a background in studio art practice. She co-founded the artist-run organization Threewalls in Chicago in 2003, where she was Artistic Director and then Executive Director until her departure in 2015. She was Chief Curator at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York from 2015 to 2019. In 2020, she joined Ox-Bow School of Art and Artists’ Residency as Executive Director. Her research and work continue to explore the relationship of making and craft to the construction of events, experiences, and social relations.
BOJANA VIDEKANIC is an art historian and artist born in Bosnia and Herzegovina/former Yugoslavia. After becoming a stateless person, she came to Canada as a government-sponsored refugee in 1995. Videkanić is Assistant Professor of Contemporary Art and Visual Culture in the Department of Fine Arts at the University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. Her research focuses on twentieth-century socialist art in Yugoslavia and its contributions to the rise of global modernisms through Yugoslavia’s participation in the Non-Aligned Movement. Her book Nonaligned Modernism: Socialist Postcolonial Practices in Yugoslavia, 1945–1985 was recently published by McGill-Queens University Press. Videkanić has also written about contemporary artists from the region, most recently about Tanja Ostojić’s seven-year project Lexicon of Tanjas Ostojić, which deals with the recent cultural and socio-economic histories of the post-Yugoslav region from a feminist perspective.
EDITOR / MODERATOR: SYLVIE FORTIN is an independent curator, researcher, critic, and editor based between Montreal, New York, and Omaha, NE, where she is the Curator-in-Residence 2019-2021 at Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts. She was Executive and Artistic Director of La Biennale de Montréal (2013–2017), Executive Director/Editor of ART PAPERS in Atlanta (2004–2012), and Curator of Manif d’art 5 – the 5th Quebec City Biennial (2010). Her reviews have been published in numerous periodicals, including Artforum International, ART PAPERS, C Magazine, and Flash Art International, and her essays have appeared in many catalogues, readers, and anthologies.
ABOUT PUBLIC 61, Currencies of Hospitality
Hospitality is usually considered a philosophical concept, an ethical concern with juridical implications, a sociopolitical practice … or an industry. This publication shifts the focus to speculate on many of its other (often stealth) manifestations. It mobilizes hospitality—as concept, metaphor, performance, and dissidence—to render its pluripotent agency.
This 320-page issue of PUBLIC is also a critical curatorial endeavour that weaves together artists’ projects, fiction, scholarly research, and other indefinable forms to explore some of the unexpected valences of hospitality in modern and contemporary art, cinema, animation, and exhibition making; in architecture, infrastructure, land use, and practices of cohabitation; in kinship and care; and in justice, pedagogy, and reparation.
Issue contributors: Irina Aristarkhova, Lisa Baldissera, Denise Ferreira da Silva, Tamar Guimarães, Charlie Hailey, Kelly Kaczynski, Behzad Khosravi Noori, Mark Jeffery, Justin Langlois, Kelly Lloyd, Karen Meyer, Cynthia Nicol, Dawit L. Petros, Megan Rooney, Claudia Ruitenberg, Diego Semerene, Felipe Steinberg, Andrew Stooke, Shannon R. Stratton, Sara Swain, Bojana Videkanic; Editor: Sylvie Fortin
Order your copy of PUBLIC 61, Currencies of Hospitality.
CAPTIONS AND CREDITS: Cover + last image (list): Excerpts from Living Within the Play published in PUBLIC 61. 2nd image: Visitors socializing at the opening of the tenth Ljubljana Biennial of Graphic Arts, 1975. International Centre of Graphic Arts photo archives, Ljubljana, Slovenia. 3rd image: Excerpt from Weepers, Lisa Baldissera's contribution to PUBLIC 61.
This panel discussion is presented by PUBLIC: Art, Culture, Ideas in collaboration with Griffin Art Projects, the Department of Fine Arts at the University of Waterloo, and the Departments of Fiber and Material Studies, Sculpture, and Performance of School of the Chicago Art Institute as well as SAIC Alumni.
PUBLIC acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, the School of Arts, Media, Performance & Design at York University and private donors and supporters.