Global Art Challenges 2016

In the context of the International Conference Challenges of Global Art: Towards an “Ecology of Knowledges” on 28 and 29 April 2016, BAK artistic director Maria Hlavajova contributes a keynote lecture to a panel on “Art-as-Intervention-in-Reality: “Ecology of Knowledges” and Institutional Practices.” She presents a talk on the question of How to be Together Otherwise.

“This panel aims to think about—and through—artistic practice in the present moment, understood by Zygmunt Bauman as the “condition in which rulers no longer can rule and the ruled no longer wish to be ruled”. Within this context, it becomes paramount to reconsider and rearticulate foundational Western epistemological categories such as progress, criticism, nature-culture relations, and the very notions of the nation-state, the museum, and the institution of art. For these reasons, the panel suggests a discussion of case studies that propose new avenues for redirecting institutional artistic activities towards practical applications of an “ecology of knowledges” on an experimental and discursive terrain. Considering that an “ecology of knowledges” conceives of knowledge as intervention-in-reality, what role can the plural integration of artistic practices as knowledge producers, as well as their corresponding political agencies, play in the reconfiguration of the institution of art today?”