On the occasion of curated by_vienna: Tomorrow Today, the Vienna Business Agency and its creative center departure organized a symposium on 11 September 2015 at the MAK – Austrian Museum of Applied Arts / Contemporary Art, where this year’s topic – art and capital – were discussed by international experts and in presence of the curators participating in the project.         

“Cities of the Sun: Urban Revolutions and the Network Commons.” Keynote lecture at Hybrid Cities conference, University of Athens, 17.09.2015

On July 15 at 9 pm, the exhibition New Materialisms (Station 1) will be open at the gallery grey) (area – space for contemporary and media art in Korčula. The exhibition presents audiovisual installation Voyager/ non-human agent by Slovenian artistic duet Špela Petrič and Miha Turšič. At the opening the artists will perform an informance (information performance). The exhibition also presents the digitized archive of Praxis journal, which can be copied by the visitors to their USB sticks and external memory discs.

In this lecture, I contextualized New Tendencies with a discourse on Modernism, whereby NT were introduced as a Last Avantgarde. As a neo-avant-gare they reacted against a Modernism that had become prescriptive and captivated by the institutional system at the time already. NT deployed an entirely abstract language which is usually considered to be apolitical, but in their practice, abstract visual research was imbued with a strong politics of form which aimed at the emancipation and liberation of the viewer. Thus, their politics of form led straight towards participatory art.

When I started working on New Tendencies I recognised that for any theory of art, or theory of art and media, it is requisite to have a theory or at least an idea of what is history. I put this question “What is history?” over this talk, which is at the same time an Homage to Korcula Summer School. This question “What is history?” has been the theme of the second summer school in 1965, organised by philosophers and sociologists from Zagreb and Belgrade.