THE OLD BRAND NEW - NEW SUBVERSION
The Old Brand New - New Subversion, 21 January 2009
With Marina Grzinic, Michael Uwemedimo and Joep van Lieshout
The harrowing, but nevertheless accomplished prose of writers like the Marquis de Sade and the Comte de Lautréamont acutely confronted the Western European bourgeois culture consumer with the subversive potential of art. Since then artists have incessantly, driven by anger and disgust, formed new, more fickle alliances with nihilism, revolutionary movements, and pornography and have, to the dismay of their audiences, touched upon censored, rejected and otherwise publicly ignored subjects. In the postmodern era, however, the transgression of taboos, what used to be considered offensive and an outrage, seems to have become an accepted form of contemporary entertainment. With the artist apparently departed from the scene as a radical questioner, insubordinate or revolutionary, can creative and productive subversion still thrive at the start of the 21st century?
The Old Brand New - New Subversion, 21 January 2009, with Marina Grzinic, Michael Uwemedimo and Joep van Lieshout
Dr. Marina Grzinic is a philosopher, artist and theoretician. Grzinic is Professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, Institute of Fine Arts, Post Conceptual Art Practices. She is researcher at the Institute of Philosophy at the ZRC SAZU (Scientific and Research Center of the Slovenian Academy of Science and Art) in Ljubljana. She also works as freelance media theorist, art critic and curator. Marina Grzinic has been involved with video art since 1982. In collaboration with Aina Smid, Grzinic produced more than 40 video art projects. In collaborator with Rosa Reitsamer she edtited the book 'New feminism: Worlds of Feminism, Queer and Networking Conditions' (2008.) Marina Grzinic's last monographic book is entitled 'Re-Politicizing art, Theory, Representation and New Media Technology' (2008).
Joep van Lieshout is an artist and designer. He studied at the Academy of Modern Art in Rotterdam, Ateliers '63 in Haarlem and Villa Arson in Nice. In 1995 he set up 'Atelier van Lieshout' (AVL) in Rotterdam, a multidisciplinary collective that carries out projects in the field of architecture, design and contemporary art. In recent years AVL has equally focused on developing large-scale and long-term projects such as 'AVL-Ville', an anarchistic free state in Rotterdam’s former dockland (2001-2003) and the sinister dystopian project 'SlaveCity' (2005 - ongoing). 'Slave City' is an imaginary, highly profitable concentration camp which can be read as a dark architectural vision of perfect efficiency, and sustainability-as-principle-of-oppression.
Michael Uwemedimo is a writer, curator, lecturer in Film at Roehampton University and a founding member of the filmmaking collaboration, 'Vision Machine'. His recent curatorial projects include: 'Possessing Vision: The Cinema of Jean Rouch' (ICA, 2000); 'Jean-Luc Godard: A Retrospective' (NFT/Tate Modern, 2001); and 'After the Fact' (BFI Southbank, 2007). With 'Vision Machine' he has been developing a performance-based historiography of political violence. Through a series of long-running film projects with survivors and perpetrators of state-sponsored violence, he has been exploring a working process in which the production methods and forms of fiction are combined with the techniques and engagements of documentary. His current documentary feature, 'Flow', is in preproduction in the Niger Delta.
