Viennacontemporary

TALKS

All talks will take place in the Talks Area of viennacontemporary (Booth C21) and will be hybrid and accessible online.

Click here you want to attend the talks online:

 

Central and Eastern European ART: Beyond Social Utopia

After many attempts to define the geography of contemporary art – especially after the fall of communism in Eastern Europe – it seems increasingly clear that it is impossible to define the geography of art outside the global map of the neoliberal distribution of power. Many theoreticians, curators, art researchers, and producers – especially after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 – politicized the paradoxical situation of being redefined by the post-historical and post-ideological geopolitical signifiers of Central, Eastern and Southeastern Europe. Critical geographies of art became the main issue of recent art histories, particularly those which rejected nationalist canons and neoliberal attempts at transitional regionalization. Dealing with the ideology of geopolitical positioning of contemporary art within the art system, all those debates between Former West and Former East – in the meantime – have ended up as global debates between center and periphery. Shifting between local and global priorities of the present, this series of talks focuses on structural and emancipatory ways of belonging, beyond geopolitical zones of discomfort within so-called CEE.

 

ArtTech Talks

Technology is influencing how we think, act, and relate to creativity. This series of talks looks at the different ways technology and creative culture intersect. Technology is a great shifting influence on how and where audiences now discover art. 2020, in particular, has seen a huge shift of understanding and desire to access art online. Online exhibitions and viewing rooms, the prevalence of visual platforms and social media, artworks as computer games, and active engagement with how technology functions have exploded as a result of the international lockdowns. Screens have become cultural lifelines and increasingly connected to our emotional, psychological, and conceptual experience. Digital and new technologies are often embedded into artworks that function beyond the screen. These talks examine how artists, curators, and thinkers are responding to these new directions and the opportunities for our creative, digital future.