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| Monday 23 March 2015
Rael Artel, Maria Hlavajova, Iliyana Nedkova in conversation with Katarzyna Kosmala, at Word Power Books Edinburgh, relating to her edited collection 'Sexing the Border: Gender, Art and New Media in Central and Eastern Europe'
download flyer (PDF) >> here
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| Tuesday 18 November 2014
Sexing the Border book launch | 18:00 | CCA, Cinema Space
Katarzyna Kosmala
download presentation (PDF) >> here
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|  Sexing the Border
Gender, Art and New Media in Central and Eastern Europe
Editor, Katarzyna Kosmala
Publisher, Cambridge Scholars, 2014
ISBN, 1-4438-6048-4 This innovative book represents a timely intervention in both critical discourses on video and new media art, as well as examination of gender in post-Socialist contexts. The chapters explore how encounters between art and technology have been implicated in the representation and analysis of gender, critically reflecting current debates and politics across the region and Europe.
The book offers a diversity of analytical contexts, addressing interwoven histories across post-Socialist Europe, and engages the paradigms of art practice and the visual cultures such histories uphold. Contributors have given a broad interpretation to the questions of video, media and performance, as well as to mediation in relation to art and gender, reflecting on a wide range of subjects, from the curatorial role to artistic practice, cross-cultural collaboration, co-production, democracy and representation, and impasses in securing streamlined identities.
The volume brings together rigorously theoretical and visually comprehensive examinations of examples of works, featuring artists such as: Bernd and Hilla Becher; Anna Daučiková; Izabella Gustowska; Judit Kele; Komar and Melamid; Andrzej Karmasz; Marko Marković; Oleg Mavromatti; Tanja Ostojić; Nebojša Šerić Šoba; Mare Tralla; Ulay and Abramović and others.
Contributors: Inga Fonar Cocos, Mark Gisbourne, Marina Gržinić, Beata Hock, Katarzyna Kosmala, Paweł Leszkowicz, Iliyana Nedkova, Agata Rogoś, Boryana Rossa, Aneta Stojnić, Josip Zanki. Preface by Katy Deepwell. |
download flyer PDF >> here
Read the Preface, by Katy Deepwell, and the Introduction, by Katarzyna Kosmala, 'Politics of Gender, Video, New Media Arts and Post-Socialist Europe' >> here
|  Komar & Melamid, Paradise/Pantheon, 1972-1973.
(Installation detail, courtesy of Vitaly Komar.)
Installation-performance Paradise/Pantheon featured images of deities in various historical styles and movements, held at private apartment in Moscow. First postmodern work. “Samisdat”—self published underground artist book named Paradise was made out of black and white photographs of the performance. Installation visited by Nobel laureate Andrei Sakharov, dissident leader and inventor of the hydrogen bomb. Demolished on state order in 1974. | | |  Andrzej Karmasz, Celebrate, 2013.
(Video still, courtesy of the artist.)
Can a condition of being a stranger, the other be demanded? What feelings and experiences do we have when changing location, being on the move? To what extend is replacement necessary for the definition of our own identity? And how can it be defined by the lack of any allegiance and/ or belonging? What character can a celebration of conditions commonly considered negative have?
This project is based on the explosion of red fireworks forming a Chinese word of Shuitubufu. This word is composed of four ideograms, among which are the sings of water and earth. Shuitubufu is the condition of a stranger who is neither from “this” water nor “this” earth. It manifests the condition of non-acclimatisation, the celebration of inconveniences related do a change of a place, the displacement of mental location. The phenomenon of Shuitubufu, being a consequence or relocation, could be defined as an obstacle for those who want to become adjusted instantly in a new place. In this case, however, this phenomenon is a reason for celebrating, a condition considered apt and demanded.
Fulfilment and excitement are caused by a change of a place; covered distances between spaces, symbolised by unreadable territories, non-recommended places or the places of a momentary stay. This project celebrates reluctance to the demand of being adjusted to existing cultural models which, paradoxically, can become unreadable, generating static only. It is an attempt at getting rid of fossilised cultural patters in order to free new systems of behaviour while being suspended in-between, during the ritual of passage without actually passing through.
| | |  Rozhgar Mahmud Mustafa, Photographs, 2009.
(Courtesy of the artist)
The series of photographs document an action initiated by Rozghar Mahmud Mustafa in Sha’ab tea house in Sulaymaniyah, the second largest city in Iraqi Kurdistan. Tea houses are places where, through an unspoken rule, women are not rarely seen. Sha’ab is a historical political and intellectual hub in the city and it was one of the gathering points of Kurdish dissidents.
The artist went to the tea house with a group of women to drink tea and play domino, thus reclaiming visibility and space for the role of women in the political and cultural life of women in Kurdistan. | | |
