Paola Antonelli talk on TED

Talk: Paola Antonelli: Treating design as art

"Paola Antonelli, design curator at New York's MOMA, wants to spread an appreciation of design, in all shapes and forms -- and to remove any stigma of it being considered mere decoration. She takes the TED2007 audience on a whistlestop tour of some design exhibitions she has organized, including 'Mutant Materials,' 'Workspheres' and 'Safe.'"

Arundhati Roy at Bogazici University

Bogaziçi University, Istanbul, Department of History and Department of Political Science and International Relations present 2008 Hrant Dink Memorial Lecture on Freedom of Expression and Human Rights.

Arundhati Roy
"Listening to Grasshoppers"

January 18, 2008, 15:00, Albert Long Hall (BTS),
South Campus
The talk will be presented in English.

Old / New Routes

过去/现在 -- 通道
中亚录像展
OLD / NEW ROUTES
A selection of Video Art from Central Asia
BizArt Art Center, Shanghai
Exhibition Dates: January 12th – 20th, 2008.
Curated by Stefan Rusu. Under the auspices of Defne Ayas.

The Old/New Routes project is an exhibition and publication that explores the nomad specificity of the Islamic states after the collapse of Soviet Union. An overview of the present situation of the Central Asian context by an external viewer becomes imperative; this compiled visual material by guest curator creates a retrospective look at the internal processes of the social-political evolution and cultural background.The idea behind the project is overlapping networks and the relationship between these two traditions—the archaic-nomad one and the present-day post-industrial culture—that provides a synthetic equation and cumulates an extraordinary cultural load. In such way the practices oriented toward the re-use of tradition become the necessary tool for articulation of contemporary art discourse that establishes the nodes of resistance to inertia, apathy and historical amnesia. The project consists of an exhibition Old/New Routes to take place in Shanghai, China at BizArt Center and a publication under the same title. With these actions we intend to deepen and open the process of cultural exchange between China and Central Asia, with a special focus on video production from Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan.

Participating Artists: Abilsait Atabekov, Erbolsin Meldibekov and Alexandr Ugay from Kazakhstan, Veaceslav Ahunov, Serghei Ticina from Uzbekistan, Ulan Djaparov, Gulnara Kasmalieva & Muratbek Djumaliev from Kyrgyzstan

About the Curator:
Stefan Rusu is artist and freelance curator based in Chisinau, Moldova currently he is working as project coordinator at the Center for Contemporary Art/Chisinau. In 2005/2006 he attended the Curatorial Training Program at Shtichting De Appel from Amsterdam where he co-curated Mercury in Retrograde (www.mercuryinretrograde.com).

Exhibitions: educational?

"[...] I abhor the supposition that exhibitions should be informative or, god forbid, educational. Is the work of Godard or Hitchcock or Beckett or Lecompte or Adams or Ashbery or Kiley or Gubaidulina or Serra or Koolhaas or Starck or Westwood or Cragg or Reed or Koons educational? These works, and all of their cousins, are full of ideas--bold, provocative, shuddering ideas-but do they teach us something?

We should never confuse the fact that cultural practices affect us, change us, stimulate us to think and see and hear and feel differently with the supposition that they teach us anything. Once something teaches you something, it thinks for you. This is a point that eludes even the promising young mess specialists and punk whippersnappers à la Obrist, who, for all of their bravado, continue obediently to inscribe their work in the service of the Big Idea. Rotton once said, 'I may not know much about music, but I know it ain't got nuffin' to do with chords?' Worth remembering."*


*Jeffrey Kipnis, "Who's afraid of gift-wrapped kazoos? Dedicated to David Whitney," in What Makes a Great Exhibition, ed. Paula Marincola (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Center for Arts and Heritage, 2006), pp. 97-98.