Artists, curators and critics engage in an afternoon of
performances, discussions and screenings to interrogate new creative
and institutional agendas of contemporary art practices in the UK. Old
certainties around ‘cultural diversity’ are dissolving.
How do artists and practitioners operate in a new environment marked by
global sensibilities, changing socio-political landscapes
and open cultural and political affiliations?
Art Network Agency (ANA)
Launch and Roundtable discussion
1st of April, 5.30-7.15 pm
at the Goshka Macuga round table, Whitechapel Gallery
AGENDA:
I. Introductions
II. Introducing the work of ANA (Eszter Steierhoffer, ANA)
III. A word about networks (Jack Tan)
IV. Discussion
PARTICIPANTS: Marsha Bradfield (Critical Practice Group, Chelsea), Sophie Hope (tbc), Will Holder (tbc), Rita Kálmán (ACAX), Catalina Lozano (gasworks), Jonathan Miles (RCA), Deepa Naik and Trenton Oldfield (TIANG), Magda Raczynska (Polish Cultural Institute), Eszter Steierhoffer (ANA), Ildikó Takács (director, HCC), Jack Tan (Chair), Pieternel Vermoortel (FormContent), public works (tbc)
Twenty years after the fall of the iron curtain, contemporary Hungarian art still occupies an isolated position and is largely under-represented in the international landscape. ANA was established as a creative response to this situation, with the intention of promoting exchange and supporting and assisting the representation of artists from Hungary within the global network of London. Instead of occupying a fixed gallery space, ANA will take a flexible nomadic position and appear in multiple locations and contexts through a wide range of collaborative projects and events with different London-based institutions and galleries. Beyond building its own core network and tracing the contemporary art scene in London, ANA endeavors to fulfill the role of a specialised mediator operating in different micro-contexts, and providing space for discussion and reflection.
Preceding the first public event of ANA – the launch of the IMPEX book “We Are Not Ducks on a Pond, but Ships at Sea". – we invite you for an informal (non-public) salon discussion at the Goshka Macuga round table of the Whitechapel Gallery. We hope that this invitation can be the first step in the development of future partnerships and long-term collaborations as well as the start of a stimulating dialogue and discussion.
We have chosen three inter-related points for the discussion, which are key in shaping and inspiring ANA: the notion of 'network', 'translation - mediation' and 'self-organisation'. As an appetizer to the main discussion we have chosen three quotes for you to consider and as starting points for the discussion on the day.
NETWORK
"Network is a concept, not a thing out there. It is a tool to help describe something, not what is being described."
(Latour, B. (2005). Reassembling the Social. Oxford: Oxford University Press)
"A shape, an object, is stable and singular if it is configured within a stable set of links with other entities. Within a stable grammar or syntax of those links. Hull, spars, sails, stays, stores, rudder, crew, water, winds, all of these entities (and many others) have to be held in place, so to speak functionally, if we are to be able to point to an object and call it a ship (7).
Now notice this. A working ship is, yes, a continuous Cartesian object, a constant set of Cartesian co-ordinates ... On the other hand, however, it is also a constant and continuous network object, a ‘network shape’."
(Law, J.
(2000).
Objects, Spaces and Others. Available: http://www.comp.lancs.ac.uk/
TRANSLATION
“In
all language and linguistic creations there remains in addition to what
can be
conveyed something that cannot be communicated; depending on the context
in
which it appears, it is something that symbolizes or something
symbolized. It
is the former only in the finite products of language, the latter in the
evolving of the languages of themselves. And that which seeks to
represent, to
produce itself in the evolving of languages, is that very nucleus of
pure language.
… to turn the symbolizing into the symbolized, to regain pure language
fully
formed in the linguistic flux, is the tremendous and only capacity of
translation.”
(p. 80 The Task of the Translator, pp. 70-82 Illuminations, Walter
Benjamin,
Pimlico, London, 1999, translated by Harry Zorn.)
SELF-ORGANISATION
"I am beginning to think that there are two fundamental factors that help to explain the consistency of self-organized human activity. The first is the existence of a shared horizon - aesthetic, ethical, philosophical, and/or metaphysical - which is patiently and deliberately built up over time, and which gives the members of a group the capacity to recognize each other as existing within the same referential universe, even when they are dispersed and mobile. ... The second is the capacity for temporal coordination at a distance : the exchange among a dispersed group of information, but also of affect, about unique events that are continuously unfolding in specific locations. This exchange of information and affect then becomes a set of constantly changing, constantly reinterpreted clues about how to act in the shared world. The flow aspect of the exchange means that the group is constantly evolving, and it is in this sense that it is an "ecology," a set of complex and changing inter-relations ; but this dynamic ecology has consistency and durability, it becomes recognizable and distinctive within the larger environment of the earth and its populations, because of the shared horizon that links the participants together in what appears as a world (or indeed as a cosmos, when metaphysical or religious beliefs are at work)."
