SPQ’s Greg Sholette at 2015 Creative Time Summit: “The Curriculum NYC”

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2015 Creative Time Summit: “The Curriculum NYC”

November 14–15, 2015 | Register here

Boys and Girls High School
1700 Fulton Street
Brooklyn, NY 11213
After two years, the Creative Time Summit—the world’s largest international conference on art and social change—is headed home to New York City! Creative Time Summit: “The Curriculum NYC” will take place at the Boys and Girls High School in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn on November 14 and 15, 2015.

Building on the Summit held at the Venice Biennale in August, the New York Summit is dedicated to education and other ways knowledge is disseminated and obtained. “The Curriculum NYC” will focus on the effects of specific education policies in the United States. From within Boys and Girls High School, which has come to symbolize both the democratic ambitions and the pervasive inequalities of public education today, we will explore the relationship between knowledge and geopolitics, pedagogical art practices, omissions in contemporary curricula, and political issues such as the re-segregation of public schools and student debt.

In addition to hosting presentations by a distinguished roster of over 50 participants, the Creative Time Summit: “The Curriculum NYC” invites attendees to join in our afternoon sessions, which will comprise break-out sessions held in the school’s classrooms. Taking the form of roundtables, open dialogs, or workshops, they will provide opportunities for more intimate exchanges among attendees, special guests, Summit presenters, and students or teachers from Boys and Girls High School. While diving deeper into urgent pedagogical issues, sessions will also address topics specific to the field of socially engaged art.

Keynote addresses will be given by investigative journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones and artist/community activist Boots Riley. Participants include Bill Ayers, Luis Camnitzer, Hope Ginsburg, Gugulective (Athi Mongezeleli Joja), Hans Haacke, Tia Powell Harris, Kemi Ilesanmi, Rolling Jubilee (Laura Hanna and Astra Taylor), Stanley Kinard, Pedro Lasch, Simone Leigh, MFA NO MFA (ex-USC students), Naeem Mohaiemen, Pepón Osorio, Jolene Rickard, Andrew Ross, and Jennifer Scott.

Workshops, roundtables and panels to be led by the Center for Artistic Activism, Flux Factory, Deborah Fisher, Noah Fischer, Not an Alternative, Silvia Juliana Mantilla Ortiz, Douglas Paulson, Laundromat Project, Marinella Senatore, Visible Project, Gregory Sholette, Daniel Tucker, Caroline Woolard and Sue Bell Yank. In addition, there will be a featured special project by Chto Delat.

Get your tickets for “The Curriculum NYC” today! Pay-what-you-wish tickets available here.
Special opening event by The Visible Project
On the High Line at West 16th Street
Friday, November 13, 6pm

Creative Time Summit: The Curriculum NYC kicks off with an opening event co-presented with High Line Art. Curated by Matteo Lucchetti and Judith Wielander of the Visible Project, the event will include site-specific performances by Marinella Senatore, Nástio Mosquito, and others to be announced. Performances are free and open to the public.

Call for proposals
Are you an artist, activist or cultural producer living and/or working in the neighborhoods of Bed-Stuy or Crown Heights? Interested in organizing and leading a roundtable discussion focused on important issues in your community? Click here for more information on how to get involved.

 

For more information and summit updates, visit us at creativetime.org/summit.

 

Gulf Labor, Precarious Workers Rights, and SPQ at The CUNY Graduate Center

Gulf Labor, Precarious Workers Rights, and SPQ at The CUNY Graduate Center
Join SPQ and QCMFA’s own Gregory Sholette, Setare Arashloo, and Barrie Cline (’14) for a conversation on Nov 19, 2015, 6:30 pm at the Skylight Room 9100, CUNY Graduate Center,365 Fifth Avenue, New York.
Precarious Workers Pageant, Venice Italy 8/7/2015

What does Bertolt Brecht have to do with workers’ rights in Abu Dhabi? Although politically engaged art and theater takes many forms, the recent Precarious Workers Pageant at the Venice Biennale took a Brechtian approach as it pointed out the solidification of global capital in architecture in Abu Dhabi and the precarious state of migrant workers who are building these future cultural sites. The pageant’s street performance offered a new public commons fabricated out of the deconstructed architecture of the avant-garde museum. Join artists, scholars, and activists in conversation for an evening of discussion, debate, and for an evening of discussion, debate, and propositions as part of the Social Choreography seminar at the Center for the Humanities and in tandem with the exhibition by Zoe Beloff at the James Gallery, “A World Redrawn: Eisenstein and Brecht in Hollywood.” Following the Precarious Workers Pageant video premier will be another New York premier: a presentation of The Gulf: High Culture/Hard Labor, edited by A. Ross and published by OR Books, with contributions by Sholette and other members of Gulf Labor.

Read more about the Precarious Workers Pageant on a-n Artists Information Company, Hyperallergic, tumblr, and Gregory Sholette’s blog.

The event is co-sponsored by the Social Choreography Mellon Seminar in Public Engagement and Collaborative Research in the Humanities, Center for Place, Culture and Politics, and Committee on Globalization and Social Change.

 

– See more at: http://www.centerforthehumanities.org/program/gulf-labor-and-precarious-workers-rights#sthash.IkYj7MPT.dpuf

Gregory Sholette at UChicago | October 9th

Gregory Sholette: Precarious Workers of the (Art) World Unite!

Friday, October 9
4:00 pm – 6:00 pm

Cochrane-Woods Art Center, Room 157
5540 South Greenwood Avenue
Chicago, IL 60637

Gregory Sholette, artist, writer, activist, and professor of Sculpture and social practice at Queens College, discusses the varied tactics associated with Gulf Labor Coalition as they seek to call attention to the plight of precarious migrant workers in Abu Dhabi where a new Guggenheim Museum is in the works, followed by an examination of Marina Naprushkina’s sustainable art project in the Moabit section of Berlin where she is developing an “artificial institution” whose mission is to service the needs of her “new neighbors”: political refugees fleeing military and economic conflict in Syria, Iraq and Northern Africa. The broader issue that both of these politically engaged, artistic endeavors confronts is how we might redirect resources, as well as invent new models, for rethinking the notion of a shared commons operating in opposition to the predacious appetite of neoliberal enterprise culture. This larger agenda seems especially urgent today as we witness an ever-tightening intersection between contemporary art, global capital, and the growing multitude of migratory, precarious, and paperless laborers who are simultaneously tasked with building the fabulous architectural fantasies serving the world’s .01% ultra-rich, while also demonized as a dangerous social surplus dragging down limited economic resources. People at risk, including refugees, low-income workers, indebted students, marginalized people of color and women, as well as most artists, and even perhaps an entire nation in the case of Greece, increasingly wield a dark transformative agency with nothing to lose except their precariousness.

Presented by the Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society, Critical Inquiry, Art History, DOVA, and Art and Public Life.

Imaginary Archive: Zeppelin University Edition | Gregory Sholette with visionary architect Marcel Kalberer in Friedrichshafen, Germany

White Box, Friedrichshafen, Germany

September 12 to November 26, 2015

Tues – Thurs, 2 – 5PM

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Imagine yourself uncovering a cache of materials and documents that record a past whose future never arrived? Imaginary Archive is just such a repository: pamphlets, books, photo-albums, records, blueprints, small objects, whose assorted narratives imagine alternative histories and speculative tomorrows that nevertheless frequently shed a precise light on concrete realities. SPQ’s own Gregory Sholette has invited participants from Germany, Philadelphia, Ukraine, Ireland, New Zealand, Austria as well as others from around the globe to produce this Imaginary Archive, which is a collection of unknown, under-represented, dreaded and/or hoped-for “historical” materials that point to multiple interpretations of the past, the present, and the future. Working with Sholette, architect Marcel Kalberer designed and constructed a bamboo labyrinth within Zeppelin University’s White Box exhibition space to house this most current edition of Imaginary Archive while simultaneously inaugurating this new cultural venue for students and the public.

 

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Participating Imaginary Archivists (as of September, 2015) include: Aaron Burr Society: (Jim Costanzo), Agata Craftlove, Alan Hughes, Alexander Wolodarskij, Alien Abduction Collective: (Todd Ayoung, Heather Davis, Kim Asbury, Ulla Hvejsel, and Phoebe Bachman), Andrea Aversa, Anna Zvyagintseva, Austin Ivers, Azra Aksamija, Babis Venetopoulos & John Voyatzopoulos, Basekamp and Friends (Philadelphia), Ben Geoghegan, Brian Hand, Bryce Galloway & Students, Charlotte Schatz, Chris Esposito, Christina Lederhaas, Closed Engagement, Daniel Tucker, Dave Callen, Denis Pankratov, Doris Jauk-Hinz, Edda Strobl, Ellen Rothenberg, Eva Taxacher & Karin Ondas, Eva Ursprung, fabian dankl/johannes schrettle/christina lederhaas, Glen Goldberg, Grant Corbishley, Gerald Raunig, Gregory Sholette, Hanns Hoffmann Lederer, Helmut Kaplan, Jeffrey Skoller, Jenny Polak, Jeremy Booth, Liga für Kunst und Kultur: (Johannes Schrettle), City Life/Vida Urbana: (John Hulsey), Josef Fürpaß, Karl Lorac, Leah Oats, Lee Harrop, Lada Nakonechna, Lesya Khomenko, Malcolm Doidge, Matthew Friday, Matthew F. Greco, Maureen Connor, Markus Wetzel, Maryam Mohammadi , Miroslav Kulchitsky, Murray Hewitt, Mykola Ridnyi, Naeem Mohaiemen, Nannette Yannuzzi, Nayari Castillo, Niall Moore, Nikita Kadan, Oleksandr Burlaka & Oleksiy Radynskyi, Oliver Ressler, Eidia House: (Paul Lamarre & Melisa Wolf), Paul Maye, Patrik Aarnivaara, Pedro Lasch, REPOhistory, R.E.P. group, Reinhard Knall, Roger O’Shea, Salem Collo-Julin, Sarah Farahat, Sasha Dedos, Simon Fleming, Suchness, Tender & Endangered Cow/Horse of Dimness, TanzLaboratorium, Tiarnán McDonough, “TJ”, Theresa Rose, Thom Donovan, Trust Art, White Fungus Zine, Volodymyr Kuznetsov, Yevgeniya Belorusets, Yevgeniy Fiks, Zoe Beloff, and The Think Tank That Has Yet To Be Named: (Jeremy Beaudry, Katie Hargrave & Meredith Warner).

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With special thanks to Professor Dr. Karen van den Berg,  Curator of Fine Arts Ulrike Shepherd, Bettina Pfuderer and the ZU Facility Management, as well as IA co-collaborators Olga Kopenkina and Matt Greco for their all around support, and to the White Box installation crew including: Caroline Brendel, Jona Kalberer, Laura Niemann, Toby Eckert, Friederike Kötter, Lena Mehner, Mathilde Nadeau, Maria-Luisa Villena, Christina Buck, plus the architects Prof. Eugen Rabold und Markus Müller for researching leads, Ingrid Feustel from the Hoffmann-Lederer archive and Hilde Corbo from the Narrenzunft Seegockel for materials, und Karl Heinz Mommertz for essential research.

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Previous IA host curators and institutions include:

  • • 2015 Liz Park, Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia.
  • • 2014: Larissa Babij, Les Kurbas Center, Kyiv, Ukraine.*
  • • 2013: Margarethe Makovec & Anton Lederer <rotor> Center for Contemporary Art, Graz, Austria.
  • • 2012: Megs Morely, Tulca Art Festival/Gallery 123, Galway, Ireland.
  • • 2010: Siv B. Fjaerestad, Enjoy Public Art Gallery, Wellington, New Zealand.

* IA Kyiv was made possible with assistance from CEC Artslink and individual supporters.

http://www.gregorysholette.com/?page_id=587

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Precarious Workers Pageant & Gulf Labor

Deconstructing Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Abu Dhabi

The Gulf Labor Pageant & Procession: Aug. 7, Venice, Italy @ Sale Docs

Join members of Workers Art Coalition, Aaron Burr Society, Occupy Museums, Social Practice Queens, Sale Docs, G.U.L.F. and Gulf Labor Coalition in a collective performative experiment deconstructing Frank Gerhry’s proposed Guggenheim Museum on Saadiyat Island, Abu Dhabi, UAE. Right now we are fabricating portable, modular elements based on Gehry’s design and rehearsing a public procession whose tones will be partially somber and partially celebratory.

The Gulf Labor Pageant and Procession starts off at Sale Docs on the South side of the Dorsaduro August 7th at 6PM after which we will wind our way out and around the nearby Peggy Guggenheim Museum where various stations, enactments, testimonials, and performances will focus on the struggle for social justice amongst migrant workers in the Gulf region, as well as labor conditions and the plight of migrant workers in Europe and the USA.

Following the procession stay for a book launch for The Gulf: High Culture/Hard Labor edited by Andrew Ross from OR Books. PLUS a party! (More details to follow soon, and note: a second performance is slated for this Fall in New York City, plus a panel at the CUNY Grad Center.) JOIN US! *

* This project is possible thanks to the generous support and labor of its participants, as well as the Mellon Seminar in Collaborative Research and Public Engagement in the Humanities at the Graduate Center, CUNY

Read more

Precarious Workers Pageant in Venice!

Precarious Workers Pageant in Venice

The Precarious Workers Pageant- a collaborative project with members of Workers Art Coalition, the Aaron Burr Society, Occupy Museums, G.U.L.F., and Social Practice Queens (CUNY) staged an pageant-intervention at the Venice Biennale this summer.

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(re-blogged from: http://gregsholette.tumblr.com)

Zigzagging across the fever-hot streets of Venice a line of men and women advance. As they march a series of “liberated” geometric shapes and hand-made banners are worn or carried aloft overhead. A man in a blue cape blows a baritone trumpet. Everyone shouts, chants and sings about solidarity with migrant laborers in the Gulf State of Abu Dhabi. In fact, solidarity with precarious labor everywhere is called for. (photos by Setare Arashloo)

The group reveals dual influences. First, the Russian Futurist avant-garde of the early 20th Century, and second, the 1913 Paterson Silk Strike and Pageant, in New Jersey. After weeks of rehearsals this band of NYC based construction workers, students and artists traveled to Italy, marched past the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in the Dorsoduro on August 7th, and then come to a stop at the nearby Gallerie dell’Accademia plaza. At which point the deconstructed architectural elements of Frank Gehry’s new Guggenheim Abu Dhabi they carried with them were reassembled into a circular barricade. And there, inside this temporary public “commons,” a series of speeches, songs, poems and “mike checks” captured the attention of surprised tourists and residents.

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As it turns out Guggenheim administrators were also caught off guard. The museum’s displeasure with the Pageant was compounded by other critiques made during the Venice Biennial that were similarly focused on the Guggenheim’s Abu Dhabi project. Bitterly their ire was conveyed  to members of Gulf Labor Coalition, and among other (now familiar) counter-accusations was the assertion that the museum has not exploited any workers in Abu Dhabi because no contract for building the Guggenheim there has been awarded. No exploited workers, no evil empire.

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The counterargument is of course a dodge. Not only has the Guggenheim dotted its own colossal boardroom office map with the anticipated Abu Dhabi location, but they also prominently herald the coming new museum on their custom shopping bags. However, if you are of the opinion that the conspicuous rolling-out of one’s imminent plan of action does not truly constitute a line that has already been crossed; then consider the future museum site itself. The Guggenheim Abu Dhabi is literally being constructed on desert sands. Unlike an urban setting where builders can rely on a pre-established support grid for power and water and so forth, everything on Saadiyat Island must be built from the bottom up. That includes roads for trucks to travel on and water lines and power cables for contractors to use. So take a close look at the areal images of the site where  the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi is to be raised. Not only do we see roads, ramps and concrete supports already in place, but also the entire museum footprint is a man-made peninsula jutting into the water. Needless to say, the infrastructure for the future Guggenheim Abu Dhabi did not arise spontaneously. Instead, it required labor by migrant workers whose conditions of exploitation are well documented. (In fact, Gulf Labor has already commented on this all too obvious evasion: CLICK )

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Still, one thing especially vexed the museum. A man with a black porkpie hat, blowing a large bass horn, and wearing a hand-lettered cloak that read: Guggenheim Abu Dhabi Evil-Empire of Art. The egregious phrase was hand-lettered onto a rectangle of canvas and hung like a thespian’s cape off the shoulders of performance artist Jim Costanzo, founder of the Aaron Burr Society. The paint-stiffened cloak declaimed its scalding indictment on a breezeless torrid day -although in Abu Dhabi the heat reached 41c, another five to six degrees hotter still than Venice- and it did not go unnoticed.

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Along with the Precarious Workers Pageant, Costanzo’s theatrics belong to a long tradition of political satire whose practitioners include Honoré Daumier, Bertolt Brecht, Kurt Weil, Hanns Eisler, Lotte Leyna, Dario Fo, the San Francisco Mime Troupe, Carnival Knowledge (the 1980s feminist group), Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping, Occupy Museums and Pussy Riot. Against the extensive communicational power of mainstream media and established cultural institutions a certain DIY vernacular aesthetic has often been the preferred artistic weapon of the weak, the marginal, and the precarious.

Costanzo’s videos, performances and agitprop projects have often channeled this bottom-up energy, sometimes projecting into the public sphere a state of anger so raw it makes one flinch as in his 2003 piece “The Scream: 21st Century Edition.” Created in the lead-up to the illegal invasion of Iraq and made all the more unfathomable by the unprecedented global demonstrations against such aggression by the United States you can see his video here: CLICK

Years later, he founded  the “Aaron Burr Society,” a “mockstitution” whose nom de guerre honors the former US Vice President who railed against the establishment of a centralized banking system. This time Costanzo donned an archaic looking cape and topcoat, trained it down to Wall Street carrying a large, almost obscene sounding baritone trumpet with him (an instrument that he is still struggling to play “properly”) all in an effort to register his personal outrage over the 2008 financial meltdown and the subsequent welfare bailout for the world’s top bankers. CLICK

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And so, through the steamy streets of Venice Costanzo blew his horn, clearing the way for members of Workers Art Coalition including Barrie Cline, Stephanie Lawal, Eliza Gagnon, Marquis Jenkins, Mirana Zuger and fellow participants from Gulf Labor, G.U.L.F., S.a.L.E. Docs and Social Practice Queens, as the Precarious Workers ostentatious and communal act of institutional critique called upon the planners of the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi to reconsider branding a regime whose abuse of migrant labor is as egregious as it is flagrant. Costanzo’s accusatory cloak was rhetorically embellished, for a reason. Against the extensive reach of mainstream cultural, political and media institutions the surplus army of precarious artists gleefully turns to the carnivalesque, spitting out an often vulgar aesthetics of the street, the circus, or fiesta in order to have their voices heard above the patronizing tones of proper cultural decorousness. Such ribald insurgency has its own dark strengths, even in an age of top-down, empire culture.

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