IMAGES Journal for Visual Studies    www.visual-studies.com/images/
 

events: Visual Studies Today – The Power of Images

Subversive Art & Theory — Schedule

Saturday, 9th November

Zagreb Youth Theatre (ZKM), Teslina st. 7

10.00

Marquard Smith, Journal for Visual Culture, chief editor
The Power of Theory: Place and Function of Scholarly Journals Today

Chief editor of one of the most influential journals for visual culture in the world will share with us his hands-on experiences in directing and editing the Journal eleven years ago after its inception. We will be able to hear what was needed to make of it inspiring and prominent voice in the discussion of the most urgent phenomena today concerning power of images in creating social and political relations in the contemporary world.

12.00

Round table: Moving Images or Moving Theory? The Role of Film Studies in Creating Social Agenda for Visual Culture

Visual studies as a discipline has evolved drawing from mostly two older and eminently visual disciplines – art history and film studies. The radical interdisciplinary nature of visual studies comes precisely from the "impossible" combination of completely different subject matters brought about by art history and film studies respectively. Making strict distinction between "high" and "low" culture, these two theoretical paradigms have been seemingly involved with different worlds altogether. The round table will therefore try to answer the dilemma whether both disciplines are naturally converging in the society of spectacle or visual studies is a new intermediary method connecting definite opposites between elite and vernacular culture.

Participants: Asbjørn Grønstad, University of Bergen; Almira Ousmanova, European Humanities University in Minsk/Vilnius, Tomislav Brlek, University of Zagreb.

13.30

Performance by contemporary Croatian artist Tajči Čekada, Post Mortem High Fashion

Europa Cinema, Varšavska st. 3

17.00

W.J.T. Mitchell, University of Chicago
The Arts of Occupation. A survey of the use of images and space in the Occupy Movement and the Arab Spring.

Drawing from his recent book, co-authored with Michael Taussig and Bernard Harcourt, Occupy: Three Inquiries in Disobedience (Chicago, 2013), W.J.T. Mitchell, one of the leading theorists of visual studies, will discuss the power of images and importance of visual culture in understanding how contemporary media enter the political arena in general, as well as what is specifically at stake (visually and politically) in the recent developments in the United States and some Arab countries.

Sunday, 10th November

Zagreb Youth Theatre (ZKM), Teslina st. 7

10.30

Presentation of the book by Bojana Kunst: Artist At Work. The Proximity of Art and Capitalism

Participants: Bojana Kunst, Goran Sergej Pristaš, Marko Kostanić

Artist At Work by Bojana Kunst turns the neoliberal perspective upside down and thus has a perfect timing, i.e. in the period of austerity measures. It draws its conclusions mainly from the argument that art no longer needs to re-affirm itself as a socially relevant and useful activity because this would lock it within immanent capitalist (and populist) production of value. Instead, art has to rediscover its material basis and 'occupy' exactly those abstractions which enable the preservation of the capitalist system and reproduction of capital. The book would like to remind art – which has constantly thermalized and practiced politics during the last decades – that it has forgotten its power to connect the abilities of the abstract (thinking) with the actual abstractions (value, capital, productivity, money, commodity, time, etc.)

12.00

Talks about the book by Suzana Marjanić, Chronotope of Croatian Performance Art: From Traveleri to Today

The book aims to present theoretical and practical coverage of performative actions in Croatia during the 20th century to the present day. Detailed analysis includes methodological approaches to the theory of contemporary art as well as other human sciences with the aim of describing and explaining the phenomenon of current artistic practice subversion of social and cultural patterns of action.

Participants: Tvrtko Zebec, Dubravka Crnojević-Carić, Damir Bralić, Višnja Rogošić, Miško Šuvaković, Jerko Denegri, Žarko Paić, Suzana Marjanić

14.00

Debate on the status and reception of new theories of contemporary art, visual culture and performance studies in magazines Život umjetnosti and TVRĐA

Participants: Leonida Kovač, Ivana Mance, Žarko Paić

15.00

Dalibor Martinis - PERFORMANCES on film

16.00

Community Art
Round table: Personal experience of social practice

Participants: Aleksandar Battista Ilić, Ivana Keser, Nives Sertić, Bojan Mucko, Vanja Babić

The interview conducted will be on the perception of social art practices, and how social perception as a gesture and as experience exchanges between generations. The importance of network experience and group experience. Gesture has the potential of perceptual tools, testimonials and responses. As such gesture extends beyond the format of visual perception and prejudice standard isolates, selected perception in social format (written standards), the format of community (customary, unwritten norms) and personal (self-censorship). When do transferring experiences become testimony, and when the construct? When do gestures attempt to become a human gesture? Groups of older and younger generations are talking about personal experiences.

17.00

Performance by contemporary Croatian artist Siniša Labrović, Fontana

17.15

Association „Domino“
Round table: Transgression of performance principles

Participants: Zvonimir Dobrović, Nicole Hewitt, Group ABS, Michael Arzt

The association „Domino“ has been active on the Croatian and international scene for the past 11 years, cooperating with the Queer Festivals, Perforations Festivals, Queer New York, and starting last year, an all-year cultural programme called the Queer Season. The association has always stood out with its approach to performance arts and the combination of what at first glance seems uncominable. The programme has always aimed at the marginal fields of performance arts, not just by the content but by the art forms as well, and those were always dealt with through transgression, erasure of the genre's starting facts. During the round-table discussion the programme artistic director Zvonimir Dobrović and guests Michael Artz, Nicole Hewitt and the Group ABS, will point out the changes occurring in everyday life of the performative practices, its importance, and what it means that the performance itself changes, i.e. that its entire position changes, in the contemporary art scenery.