Seminar in exhibition Never cross a picket line Galleria Huuto, Jätkäsaari 2, Tyynenmerenkatu 6, Makasiini L3
Saturday 30.11.2013 kl. 13-17
As capitalism is ”putting into work” and making use of our whole lives, our affects, personal capacities and attitudes, sensibility and subjectivity have become central issues in social struggles. It has often been suggested that political action is assuming and should assume aesthetic characteristics: it should create new modes of perception, new relationships between people and the environment.
It often appears that artists and dominant art institutions are only trying to appropriate and neutralize political movements. For example Occupy Wall Street has become mainstream in art, but it is often presented as just another glamorous urban event – radical chic. As if the political movements that are trying to make visible certain conflicts that are central in contemporary capitalism would be just participating in the general public sphere: that becoming visible would mean something similar than the exhibitionism of reality TV shows.
How do we create social struggles within the modes of expression and sensibility, instead of reducing existing social movements to mere glamour? Could art – whatever it means – work as a field for experimenting new forms for displaying our experiences that cannot be expressed in dominant forms of the public sphere? Or is the logic of the cultural field irrevocably linked to the logic of the market place?
The event is part of the seminar Power of the Precariat, which deals with the struggles and modes of organization of precarious workers. What are central struggles today in the view of the societal change and improvement of human life? What kind of modes of organization are born in these struggles?
Speakers
Sezgin Boynik, researcher
Jon Irigoyen, artist and researcher
Ahmet Ögüt, artist
Schedule
13.00 – 13.30 Presentation of the Power of the Precariat seminar
13.30 – 14.30 Occupy Form by Sezgin Boynik
14:30 – 15.00 Break
15.00 – 15.45 Another World is Possible by Ahmet Ögüt
16.00 – 17. 00 Without Fear There Will Be Future by Jon Irigoyen
Organizers
Autonominen Opisto
Markus Himanen, Jaakko Karhunen,
Aino-Marjatta Mäki and Eetu Viren
Occupy Form by Sezgin Boynik
The initial objective of my presentation is to analyze the incorporation of political contingencies as extrinsic
material to art systems. I will discuss how contemporary art reacted to ‘Occupy!’ movement. As an alternative,
non-violent form of direct action against global economic inequality, Occupy!, with its political contingencies had a visible influence to political theory in general (Jodi
Dean, Slavoj Zizek, Naomi Klein, Barbara Epstein, etc.). My aim is to show how this political contingency transformed the conceptualisation of art.
Another World is Possible by Ahmet Ögüt
What has been the relationship between art and the Gezi Park protests in Istanbul? The “Gezi Park experience” can be seen as a unique opportunity to understand the role of arts and cultural practitioners, artworks, and art institutions, during a social movement like that. But the relationship between art institutions and movements is not without contradictions: in a protest staged on March 10th at a Istanbul Biennial-sponsored event, the organizers of the event decided to forcibly remove protestors and then pretend to continue the interrupted event as it was originally meant to be staged by ignoring their existence in the room.
Without Fear There Will Be Future by Jon Irigoyen
The situation of Spanish “anti-crisis” movements like INDIGNADOS or 15M has changed radically from the hectic summer months of the year 2011. The activity and actions of the groups have evolved, focusing in different tactics and new spaces of action. In this talk we will make an in-depth analysis of the current situation and the new tactics and dynamics that these social agents use for confronting these precarious and liquid times in which we irremediably sink.
