New Media Society in collaboration with the architecture and urbanism circle at T-Moca Present
Art and Public Space in a Liquid World.
A talk by Michel Dewilde
Jan 31, 2017, 5 pm
Cinematheque of Tehran Museum of Contemporary arts – Tehran
Since the sixties, contemporary artists have had different motivations to venture into the realm of public space and its inhabitants.The Belgian art historian and curator Michel Dewilde curated several exhibitions in the public domain since the nineties.
In his lecture Art and Public Space in a Liquid World, he addresses a range of questions such as: What can be the role of the artist and his artwork in a 21st century where the communal, open space, is getting more and more privatized? What about the interaction with the members of the public, patrons, local government and institutions? How far should public art works produce their own space and subsequently generate its own public? What is private and public?
Drawing on the writings of scientists and thinkers such as Zygmunt Bauman, Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing and others, Dewilde advocates exhibitions in the public realm which strive towards the setting up of forms of local or even personal connections. In this expanding, flattened horizontal liquid world, artists and cultural workers should strive towards the creations of vertical nodes, verticals points of entry and encounters, places where art and its curators can start to cure again. In the lecture, Dewilde will refer to a number of exhibitions which influenced him, and takes examples from exhibitions he curated such as: Side Tracks (1996) with artists such as Marina Abramovic, Chohreh Feyzdjou or Berlinde de Bruyckere, ‘Artline 5’ (Borken, Germany, 2001) with Bizhan Bassiri, Alicia Framis, Anya Gallaccio, Manfred Pernice, ‘Passages’(Brussels, 2013) with Peter Buggenhout, Emilio Lopez-Menchero and Neda Razavipour, the new ‘Triennials for art and architecture’ (2015-2018) with Song Dong, Atelier Bow Wow, Studio Mumbai, Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian.