Public lecture with Sebastian Cichocki: “This is Art and Art is Many Things" | The 6^th International Symposium Curating Exchange | Spaces, Functions, Fictions and Other Commons | organized by press to exit project space | 20 May 2017, Museum of Contemporary Art - Skopje, 19:00 - 21:00 h

In the 1970s by Jerzy Ludwiński, a Polish art theoretician and critic, announced the arrival of postartistic times. He observed the transformation of art to be the result of its assumption of a completely new form; one which the critical language of his time was not able to do justice. Ludwiński claimed that post-art had an undeniably greater potential than the activities traditionally recognised as artistic. He wrote: “All previous notions relating to art are cancelled out, even that of authorship. What matters are the tensions created by the collective effort of many individuals that contributes to the making of one system, pulsating with its own life like some gigantic work of nature. Art = reality.” 
Such postartistic times signal an era in which a high “coefficient of art” (as the theorist Stephen Wright has described the phenomenon, referring to Marcel Duchamp’s lecture “The Creative Act”, 1957) present in many areas of life; when an artist’s work does not always materialize in the form of an art piece; while the art itself is carried out in a 1:1 scale, instead of generating models for situations and things. 
How does one measure the coefficient of art in a device which collects fog and supplies water to inhabitants of a desert in Chile? How much art is there in the collaboration of a Turkish beekeeper with a beehive during the production of psychoactive honey? But another question is really perplexing: is there more art within or outside the walls of the museum? 

Public lecture by Ludwig Kittinger, Ana de Almeida and Phelim McConigly "Situational tendencies in (co)operative practices - on modes of de-regulation, agencies and their futures" | The 6^th International Symposium Curating Exchange | Spaces, Functions, Fictions and Other Commons | organized by press to exit project space | 12 May 2017, Social Center "Dunja", Skopje, 20:00 - 22:00 h

After a short introduction of <dienstag abend>, the lecture is reflecting on a work realized at the European Capital of Culture Wroclaw 2016 focusing on the social impacts of political decision making on works in public space and thereby on the role of affective information.
We will introduce a partner initiative, The Atanas Petrov Foundation and its ongoing project at the Medical Museum Pleven, Bulgaria, focusing on modes of existence of that space. The lecture will be closed by reviewing forms of the situational and its associations to site-specificity.

Public lecture with Mauro Gil-Fournier: “Bubbles, Foam and Seas" | The 6^th International Symposium Curating Exchange | Spaces, Functions, Fictions and Other Commons | organized by press to exit project space | 12 May 2017, GEM Club, Skopje, 19:00 - 21:00 h

As described by Mauro Gil-Fournier, an architect and co-founder of architectural studio SIC | VIC from Madrid: As a collective, we want to place a nonlinear history of dynamics that are currently occurring in many of our cities under 3 different states. Citizen bubbles, such as the appearance and disappearance of citizen organizations and the creation of networks between them. The foams or states of complexity that arise when the bubble ecosystem has been created. The seas, as a transition-articulation between established models. These dynamics are not progressive or evolutionary in a linear fashion; Occur simultaneously in the city. They form a system with strong interactions and feedbacks between the components of the system. The non-linear history that we want to have here, with its attractors and its bifurcations, create dynamics that in the present case have a key factor: their situated character. We will explain through our work and development with the city, what makes Madrid today a prototype of citizen innovation and urban transformation.

Presentation by Klelija Zivkovic: “Small Victories”, Dorotej Neshovski "Fictions and the Spaces I Inhabit" and meeting with Ludwig Kittinger, Ana de Almeida and Phelim McConigly(<dienstag abend> collective) | The 6^th International Symposium Curating Exchange | Spaces, Functions, Fictions and Other Commons | organized by press to exit project space | 10 May 2017, Social center Dunja, Skopje at 20:00 h

“Small Victories” by Klelija Zivkovic is a project about archiving the changes in the city of Skopje through using personal experience as an artifact. The project aims to explore the relationship of the citizens to their city and utilize their perspective as a unique document that tells a story of a history that is being replaced and re-fabricated. 

Dorotej Neshovski’s presentation: "Fictions and the spaces I inhabit" gives an insight into the research interests of the artist regarding the relationship "individual-gallery-institution" and the array of potential readings into the ephemeral versus permanent, public versus institutional, virtual versus physical gallery space while creating a so-called "invisible works."

Ludwig Kittinger, Ana de Almeida and Phelim McConigly will introduce us with the idea of their site-specific workshop titled "dienstag abend No. 86 "and the way in which interested parties will be involved in it.

As described: “dienstag abend No. 86” is a workshop about situations, interventions and interferences. We want to share the myriad of processes that have come to define how <dienstag abend> takes place through different events, exhibitions and editions. For it we invite our guests to find a situation, to intervene on it and to receive back new interventions and interferences that might take place upon their own work. In our collective practice, a situation may be a way of making our surroundings intelligible to ourselves after an individual reading of the moment. Embracing misunderstandings and errors, these readings fuel ontology of feedback loops and their contingent outcomes, enabling a situational understanding of space instead of an exclusively representative one. 

The 6^th International Symposium Curating Exchange  | Spaces, Functions, Fictions and Other Commons | organized by press to exit project space | 10 - 21 May 2017, Museum of Contemporary Art - Skopje, GEM Club and Social center Dunja, Skopje

1st segment of the program: Function and Design of Social Spaces

Curating Exchange is an annual symposium addressing local and regional need for an insightful and qualitative exchange of experience and knowledge in theoretical and artistic research, curatorial practice and education. The sixth edition of the symposium "Spaces, Functions, Fictions and Other Commons" will be divided into two major segments. 

The first segment of the program: Function and Design of Social Spaces (May 2017) welcomes Ludwig Kittinger, Ana de Almeida and Phelim McConigly artists and founders of <dienstag abend> art collective from Vienna, Austria; Mauro Gil-Fournier, architect and co-founder of SIC | VIC Studio, from Madrid, Spain; Sebastian Cichocki chief curator of the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, Poland; as well as Klelija Zivkovic, a social designer and Dorotej Neshovski, an interdisciplinary artist, both from Skopje, Macedonia. 

The invited guests will contribute in a variety of discursive presentations and projects that question changing ideas about the social and cultural dimension of the ever-evolving interdisciplinary notions between art, architecture, and theory; the role and the position of the curator as a critical instigator and educator in the processes of content-negotiation; the different perceptions about the socio-political role of public space and the idea of commons; and creativity in relation to urban space where power relations are subjected to scrutiny.