a symposium curated by Maria Lind
with artists Elin Wikstrom and Carey Young, art theorist Gerald Raunig, curator Gregor Podnar and curator/critic Tirdad Zolghadr
June 4, 2005
Rotterdam: Witte de With & TENT.

Carey Young, Win-win, documentation of a negotiations skills course for the staff of the Kunstverein München, 2002

This symposium looked at artistic and curatorial practices that question or present alternatives to the mechanisms of the global market, and at the way art practice itself is intertwined with market mechanisms.

Is there no outside anymore when we talk about art and economy? Everything we do seems entangled, if not subsumed, in the globalized capitalist economy, regardless of how much we represent dissenting ideological positions. In fact, what has come to be known as some of the foundational principles of the ”new economy”, like the creative imperative, radical flexibility and an inclination towards global perspectives and networks, made some of their first marks precisely in the art world. Therefore they are also firmly grounded there.

The knowledge and experience economies seem to blend and definitions of labour and professionalism, self-organization and amateurism get muddled up. Simultaneously the working conditions for cultural producers within the field of art are becoming precarious, as funding outside the spectacular and outspokenly commercial is diminishing rapidly. How can we as artists, curators, critics, theoreticians and policy makers deal with this situation?

Maria Lind is a curator based in Stockholm, and currently director of IASPIS. From 2002-2004 she was director of the Kunstverein München, where she explored the role of art and the position of artists in relation to the cultural economy and the global capitalist market in projects such as Exchange - Transform (2002), Atelier Europa (2004) while the group project Totally motivated: A sociocultural maneouvre looked at the relationship between ‘amateur’ and ‘professional’ art and culture.

Gregor Podnar is a curator based in Slovenia. Podnar was artistic director of Galerija Skuc in Ljubljana from 1996-2003, and is currently director of Galerija Gregor Podnar in Kranj. His exhibitions include the Triennale of Contemporary Slovene Art (2000); Information/Misinformation, Ljubljana (2001, with Hans Ulrich Obrist); and Modesty, Galerija Skuc and Mala Galerija, Ljubljana (2003), and solo exhibitions of Ingold Airlines, Raimond Chaves, CM von Hausswolff, Leif Elggren, Irwin, Yuri Leiderman, Olaf Nicolai, Roman Signer, Goran Petercol, and others. In 2004 he co-organized the conference Public vs Private: Cultural Polecies and the Art Market in Central and South-Eastern Europe.

Gerald Raunig is a philosopher based in Vienna. He is co-director of the European Institute for Progressive Cultural Policies, Vienna; lecturer on political aesthetics at the Institute for Philosophy, University of Klagenfurt and at the Department of Visual Studies, University of Luneburg; editor of the Austrian journal for radical democratic cultural politics, Kulturrisse and coordinator of the transnational research project republicart. Recent publications include Eine Aesthetik des Widerstands (2000); TRANSVERSAL. Kunst und Globalisierungskritik (2003) (ed.); Bildraume und Raumbilder. Repraesentationskritik in Aktivismus und Film (2004) (ed.); and Kunst und Revolution. Kuenstlerischer Aktivismus im langen 20. Jahrhundert (forthcoming 2005).

Elin Wikstrom is an artist based in Umea. She creates "activated situations" - projects sited within the public domain that cause a disruption in the everyday flow of events that force us to reassess our understanding of accepted codes of behaviour, value systems and social conditioning. Wikström has become increasingly interested in the transformation of the traditional, tangible market place into the less-easily grasped, global mass-market economy. Her projects include *Ãsa, Who Has Given It to Bill, Runs the Risk of Not Getting It Back, and Pal, Who Has Got It from Pia, Runs the Risk of Not Being Able to Give It Back (1995), Cool or lame? (2002-2003), RETAiliATOR (2004) and Half Being, Half Flow* (2003-2005).

Carey Young is an artist based in London. Young's work investigates the increasing incorporation of the personal and public domains into the commercial realm.

Tirdad Zolghadr, a curator and critic based in Zurich and Tehran. Zolghadr's main preoccupation has been the transfer of knowledge and ideology between Europe and Tehran, and, more recently, the marketing and mise-en-scene of internationalism in the arts. He curated the exhibition Ethnic Marketing at the Centre d'art contemporain de Geneva (with M. Anderfuhren), and is currently co-curating the Sharjah Biennial and active as a founding member of the Shahrzad art & design collective.