Wednesday 13.12.2017

Collisions. The contemporary in artistic research

Host: Michael Schwab, Professor, Academy of Fine Arts, Uniarts Helsinki

Historically speaking, contemporary art, following modern and – so it existed – postmodern art, is the art of today. As such, it seems that art has ceased to be a historical project with less interest in change than remaining in circulation, in particular on a global scale. For some, this is the contemporary condition of art. At the same time, as the name suggests, in the con-temporaneity of contemporary art, different times and temporalities come together able to create links across times and across spaces that would otherwise be unthinkable. Following the famous claim made by Roland Barthes, who (inspired by Nietzsche, and quoted by Agamben) said that “the contemporary is the untimely”, the contemporary might suggest artistic practices that run against their own time and epoch, or at least help problematize and re-emphasize particular relationships to time, history and historicity. However, what is the relationship of artistic research to contemporary art? Can it help to further artistic practices interested in resisting the flow of our times, or is it complicit in making art available now not only as material object but also as object of knowledge?

Venue: Exhibition Laboratory gallery, Merimiehenkatu 36, Helsinki

PROGRAM 

9:00 Coffee

9:20 Introduction Michael Schwab

9:30 Contemporaneity, Anachrony and Historical Imagination, Jacob Lund

10:30 Break

11:00 Exhibitions as Readymades, Attentiveness and Escape, Paul O’Neill

12:00 Lunch break

13:00 Towards an Ethics of Not Knowing, Elizabeth Fisher

14:00 Break

14:30 Panel discussion with Hami Bahadori, Sezgin Boynik, Minna Henriksson, Marianne Niemelä and Elina Suoyrjö; chaired by Michael Schwab

16:00 Coffee

16:30 Layers – of contemporaneity in artistic research and aesthetic theory, Knut Ebeling

17:30–18:00 Discussion