Internationalism After the End of Globalisation

  • Internationalism After the End of Globalisation

The Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw invites the public to the summit "Internationalism after the end of globalisation". It will play the dual role of a conference and a workshop session.

"The delegates will meet in Warsaw not only to review but also to develop theoretical and practical responses to the current crisis, which calls for new modes of connecting on an international scale to challenge the neoliberalism, the evival of the fascist tendencies and ecological disaster, seeking forms of artistic internationalism embedded in the ongoing democratic struggle for climate, economic, gender and racial justice.

The summit will start off with a conference (October 25) that will critically review neoliberal globalisation in order to move beyond it. This practical and theoretical ambition is driven by the hypothesis that the rise of the far right heralds an end of the globalist project, and consequently those forms of artistic internationalism that have been tightly integrated with global capitalism. This disruption implies the need to look beyond capitalist realism, an aesthetic, existential and social project that has supported capitalist hegemony by deflating both political and artistic imagination. The crisis engenders the evolution of old institutional forms and the emergence of new ones that facilitate civic engagement, are socially useful and align with political forces aimed at reviving democracy. During the conference, a dozen speakers, academics, artists and activists from all over Europe, will share their theoretical and practical insights to prompt public discussion and prepare the ground for later sessions.

Following the famous 11th thesis on Feuerbach, the aim of the summit is not only to reflect upon the failures of globalisation, but to revisit internationalism as an unfinished project. To facilitate this process, the second day of the summit (October 26) will be self-organized, aimed at collective strategizing on an international scale. The programme of plenary sessions and workshops will be created in situ by the gathered delegates, who will present proposals for future actions and discuss their implementation in working groups".

Text by: Jesus Carillo i Kuba Szreder 

The summit is open for all, but registration for the workshops is required, to facilitate communication and organization of sessions. Please register here: zapisy@artmuseum.pl. In case of any inquiries, please contact pawel.nowozycki@artmuseum.pl.

Participants: Marco Baravalle, Joanna Bednarek, Vasyl Cherepanyn, Angela Dimitrakaki, Charles Esche, Zuzanna Hertzberg, Keep It Complex, Tomislav Medak, Keir Milburn, Zeyno Pekunlu, Ana Teixeira Pinto, Theodoros Prodromidis, Anti-Fascist Year, Yaiza Hernandez Velazquez, Sabina Sabolović (WHW).

Facilitation of the self-organized sessions: Marsha Bradfield.

The summit is being held as part of Our Many Europes, a project of L’internationale, a confederation of European museums, and the Anti-fascist Year, a nationwide series of cultural events organized to support anti-fascist struggles by hundreds of institutions, collectives, and individuals across Poland to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the beginning of the Second World War and the 75th anniversary of the victory over Nazism. 

Friday, 25.10.2019
Conference

10:00 Jesús Carrillo, Sebastian Cichocki, Kuba Szreder, Mabel Tapia – introduction

10:30 – 12:00 Beyond Capitalist Realism

10:30 Yaiza Hernández Velázquez, "The Universal at the end of the Rainbow",
10:45 Marco Baravalle, "Beyond Capitalist Realism: project and utopia",
11:00 Keir Milburn, "Are we in an Acid Communist Moment?",
11:15 Anti-Fascist Year, "Surprising alliances. Mapping the Anti-fascist Year",
11:30 Discussion

12:00 – 12:15 Coffee break

12:15 – 13:30 Frontlines: natural and digital

12:15 Joanna Bednarek, "Fear and Curiosity: Reading H.P. Lovecraft in Times of the Anthropocene",
12:30 Tomislav Medak, "Accelerated Technocapitalism and the Politics of Non-Complicity",
12:45 Ana Teixeira Pinto, "Capitalism with a Transhuman Face: The Afterlife of Fascism and the Digital Frontier",
13:00 Discussion

13:30 – 14:30 Lunch break 

14:30 – 16:00 From Internationalism to Alter-Globality

14:30 Angela Dimitrakaki, "From Internationalism to Antinationalism: A Contested yet Necessary Step for Contemporary Antifascism",
14:45 Vasyl Cherepanyn, "Against an Anti-Communist International",
15:00 Charles Esche, "For Western Europe, decolonising must also mean demodernising",
15:15 Zeyno Pekünlü, "The Eclipse of Strategies",
15:30 Discussion

16:00 – 16:15 Coffee break

16:15 – 17:45 Forms of action/forms of connection

16:15 Keep it Complex, "Unite Against Dividers - Organise With Others – Make it Work",
16:30 Theo Prodromidis, "The realities and possibilities of action",
16:45 Zuzanna Hertzberg, "Artivism as every day antifascism",
17:00 Sabina Sabolović (WHW), "The revision and continuity of anti-fascism",
17:15 Discussion

 

Saturday, 26.10.2019, 11:00 – 18:00
Proposals for an Anti-fascist Internationale. Projects, actions, networks, institutions and ways of survival. Self-organized Assembly.

Facilitation: Marsha Bradfield 

11:00 – 11:30 Introduction: Marsha Bradfield, Kuba Szreder, Jesus Carrillo

11:30 – 13:00 Self-organized assembly with short presentations:
– proposals for projects & direct actions that respond to the current crisis of capitalism, fascist revival and climate catastrophe on both local and global scale;
– ideas for creating and enhancing networks that would be able to facilitate translocal exchange of information and coordination of activities;
– proposals for democratizing institutions in and beyond art, promoting forms of collaboration with civil society/social movements, protecting them against anti-democratic threats (f.e. authoritarian censorship, austerity, elitism or commercialization), and enabling them as catalyst of social change;
– practices aimed at sustaining radical social practice in contemporary art, academia and the cultural field as a whole, and fighting against systems of oppression that thwart radical practices.

13:00 – 14:00 Developing proposals in working groups

14:00 – 15:00 Lunch break

15:00 – 17:00 Developing proposals in working groups

17:00 – 18:00 Concluding plenary session 

The Anti-fascist Year 
A country-wide initiative promoted by a coalition of public institutions, NGOs, social movements, collectives, individual artists and activists across Poland. Its goal is to support anti-fascist struggles and facilitate anti-fascist ideas and messages.

Marco Baravalle
Marco Baravalle is a member of S.a.L.E. Docks, a collective managing an independent space for visual arts and activism in Venice. In addition to curating the diverse programming at S.a.L.E. Docks, Baravalle is also part of INCOMMON research team (IUAV University of Venice), focusing on the relationship between art, theatre and activism.

Joanna Bednarek 
Philosopher, translator and writer Author of the books „Politics Beyond Form. Ontological determinations of poststructuralist political philosophy”, „Lines of Femininity. How Sexual Difference Transformed Literature and Philosophy?”, „Life that Speaks. Modern Community and Animals”, and „Origin of the Family”. Member of the editorial board of the journal „Praktyka Teoretyczna”. She translated (among others) Rosi Braidotti, Donna Haraway and Karen Barad. Collaborator of „Krytyka Polityczna” in the years 2006-2009. Her fields of interest are: poststructuralism, feminism, autonomist marxism and literature.

Vasyl Cherepanyn
Head of the Visual Culture Research Center (VCRC, Kyiv) and works as a lecturer at the Cultural Studies Department of the University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy. He recently co-edited Guidebook of The Kyiv International (Medusa Books, 2018) and '68 NOW (Archive Books, 2019) and curated The European International (Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten, Amsterdam) and Hybrid Peace (Stroom, The Hague) projects. VCRC is the organizer of The School of Kyiv – Kyiv Biennial 2015 and The Kyiv International – Kyiv Biennial 2017.

Angela Dimitrakaki
Angela Dimitrakaki works at the University of Edinburgh. Her research engages Marxism and feminism to think about the complexities of global capitalism, mostly in relation to art and culture. She recently co-edited the special issue of Third Text on anti-fascism/art/theory (Autumn 2019).

Charles Esche
Director of Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven; professor of contemporary art and curating at Central Saint Martins, London and co-director of Afterall Journal and Books. He teaches on the Exhibition Studies MRes course at CSM, and at Jan van Eyck Academie, Maastricht. Outwith the museum, he (co) curated Le Musée Égaré, Kunsthall Oslo 2017 and Printemps de Septembre, Toulouse 2016; Jakarta Biennale 2015; 31st Sao Paulo Bienal, 2014, U3 Triennale, Ljubljana, 2011; RIWAQ Biennale, Palestine, 2007 and 2009; Istanbul Biennale, 2005; Gwangju Biennale, 2002 amongst other international exhibitions. He is chair of CASCO, Utrecht. He received the 2012 Princess Margriet Award and the 2014 CCS Bard College Prize for Curatorial Excellence.

Zuzanna Hertzberg 
Painter, author of installations, performative actions, artivist and educator. She deals with subjects of memory and body, as well as issues related to a broad sense of identity and geopolitics. She participated in a number of exhibitions in Poland and abroad. She is member of Antifascist Coalition as well as co-founder of Jewish Antifascist Block.

Keep it Complex
A collaborative and evolving organisation which confronts political issues through ideas and action. It developed out of an artist-run Remain campaign during the UK’s EU referendum in 2016. Keep It Complex is about making clear what we want and collectively devising ways to get what we want: a peaceful, caring, angry, anti-austerity, factual, DIY, transnational, struggling, messy, family-friendly, queer, inclusive, intergenerational, generous, diverse society. It’s about using art to have conversations with people you don’t usually talk to. It’s about not giving in to fear and apathy.

Tomislav Medak
Doctoral student at the Coventry University’s Centre for Postdigital Cultures. Member of the theory and publishing team of the Multimedia Institute/MAMA in Zagreb, amateur librarian for the Memory of the World/Public library project, and artist in the performing arts collective BADco. His research interests are in technology, capitalist development and post-capitalist transition, with a particular focus on environmental crisis, political economy of intellectual property and unevenness of techno-science. His writing can be found at: tom.medak.click

Keir Milburn 
Lecturer in Political Economy and Organisation at the University of Leicester. His latest book, Generation Left, published by Polity, explains why young people are moving to the left while older people are tending towards the right. He also co-hosts the #ACFM podcast on Novara Media

Zeyno Pekünlü 
Artist based in Istanbul and currently running the Work and Research Program of the Istanbul Biennial (ÇAP) for young artists and researchers.She is part of the editorial collectives of the culture and politics journals eXpress. Bir+Bir and Red Thread. She is also part of several local and international political networks such as Müştereklerimiz (Our Commons), Dünyada Mekan (A Place on Earth), Solidarity Academies Network Turkey, IRI (Institute of Radical Imagination).

Ana Teixeira Pinto
Writer and cultural theorist based in Berlin. She is a lecturer at the DAI (Dutch Art Institute) and Leuphana University, Lüneburg. Her writings have appeared in publications such as Third Text, Afterall, Springerin, Camera Austria, e-flux journal, Mousse, Frieze, Domus, Inaesthetics, Manifesta Journal, or Texte zur Kunst. She is the editor of The Reluctant Narrator (Sternberg Press, 2014) and of a forthcoming book series on the antipolitical turn, to be published by Sternberg Press

Theodoros Prodromidis
Artist and director based in Athens, Greece. Since 2017, he has been a Visiting Artist under the program Risk Change at the Department of History and Philosophy of Science of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens and a volunteer at the Open School for Immigrants of Piraeus. Ηe is a member of the Institute Of Radical Imagination and a member of Solidarity Schools Network. For 2019-2020, he is a fellow of Artworks, a Stavros Niarchos Foundation Artist Fellowship Program.

Sabina Sabolović
Member of the curatorial collective What, How & for Whom/WHW formed in 1999 and based in Zagreb and Berlin (together with Ivet Ćurlin, Ana Dević and Nataša Ilić). WHW organizes production, exhibition and publishing projects and is involved in long-term collaborative platforms and cultural politics. Since 2003 WHW has programmed Gallery Nova, a city-owned space in Zagreb. Alongside this, WHW has curated international projects including 11th Istanbul Biennial, 2009; Meeting Points 7 – “Ten thousand wiles and a hundred thousand tricks” (Zagreb, Antwerp, Cairo, Hong-Kong, Beirut, Vienna, Moscow), 2013-14 and “Really Useful Knowledge”, Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid 2014. Most recently they curated “My Sweet Little Lamb (Everything we see could also be otherwise”) in collaboration with Kathrin Rhomberg, a series of exhibitions based on the Kontakt Art Collection and taking place across Zagreb and at the Showroom, London (in collaboration with Emily Pethick) in 2016-17. Currently members of WHW are directors of Kunsthalle Wien.

Yaiza Hernández Velázquez
Lecturer in the Visual Cultures department at Goldsmiths, University of London. Previously, she worked for six years at Central Saint Martins-UAL, where she led the MRes in Exhibition Studies. Before returning to academia she worked for over a decade in art institutions, including as Head of Public Programmes at MACBA (Barcelona), director of CENDEAC (Murcia) and curator at CAAM (Las Palmas de Gran Canaria). Recent publications include "Imagining Curatorial Practice after 1972" in Curating after the Global (MIT Press, 2019), "Cortocircuitos del museo y la autonomía" in ¡Autonomización! ¡Autonomía! (TEA, 2019) and "Who Needs Exhibition Studies?" in El Museo Foro (UNAM, 2019).

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