VIENNA CHAPTER: Kuenstlerhaus, Vienna
May 21st, 2005
2.00 – 6.00 pm (lectures part 2: Travelling Agents)

Lecture:
Curating political art: Political Aesthetics - Aesthetics of Politics

The paper is based on the experience of working for the World Social Forum (WSF), Bombay 2004, and the attempt to integrate artists and their concerns into an overtly political platform. The brief of the curating team covered concerns such as: defining world culture as against the mono-dimension of global culture, breaking the hierarchy of spaces as political, artistic and living, staging a real face to face of so-called high and popular art, placing concerns over forms in response to issues of ideology, accessibility and plurality as one predicament, juxtaposing 'borders' in identity and art practices and creating pockets of subversions within the WSF fabric.
But in the process of negotiating those concerns, existential questions became overwhelmingly large: What is 'global' and what is 'local' in art practices, especially in an abstract/dreamy context like the WSF? What is the look of space for political art of the world which can rise beyond the socialists' model of the mid 20th century and the exotica spewing contemporary market/media/art events? Aren’t the problematics of representation intricately interwoven with the culture of curating, however radical the attempt might be? What is the methodology to differentiate between the paradigms involved in the expression of migrancy and diaspora?

Madhusree Dutta (Bombay) is a non-fiction film maker; she is executive director of Majlis, a centre for multi-cultural initiatives in India. She has been facilitator of Culture@WSF 2004 and convenor of the first National theatre festival of Women in 1990.

Respondent: Gerald Raunig is philosopher, art theoretician, co-director of eipcp

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