Avanessian – Postcontemporary Workshop abstract

Young Curators Workshop on the occasion of the 9th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art Organized by the Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art/KW Institute for Contemporary Art. Workshop Dates:

8 - 18.9.2016

Concept: Post-contemporary Art Given our entry into what is best described as post-democratic financial feudalism, art’s role and function in society – and of future possibilities - are increasingly in need of reconstruction. Contemporary art offers no solutions because of the strong alliance it has built with the politico-economic reality of neoliberal capitalism over the past decades. Contemporary art is now prevalently a booming decorative-cognitive art industry contributing to the new post-capitalist artistic economy by its aesthetically stylized fabrication for manufacturing, immaterial and cognitive production, the destruction of waged labor, etc. The short-term work contracts of event-based art fairs and biennials are prototypical of socially precarious neoliberal employment practices. On the other hand, there are serious attempts for a non-aesthetic, non-sensory based approach that require abstraction: a cognitive mapping of the new global infrastructures and transformations. Now that the (denunciatory) gesture of critique has itself become institutionalized and stabilizing of extant political and economical systems, a younger generation of artists and curators increasingly accepts art as first and foremost an economy, exploring the institutionally transformative potential of artworks (or indeed art itself) for being a brand. Instead of exposing or critiquing institutional mechanisms, their focus is on mobilizing these mechanisms and testing the limits of their progressive tendencies. The questions that are now emerging ask: can biennials and similar platforms also function as launch pads for less self-effacing institutions and openly strategic infrastructure-building? How can the capital flows currently overcoming older forms of sovereignty – the nation-state that was particularly relevant for the organization of the biennial format – be channeled in more politically progressive directions? Given the increasing lack of stable employment and adequate financial compensations for young emerging curators, the ten days of workshops and its various activities – seminars, studio- and exhibition-visits, meetings with established artists and curators – do not simply aim to enhance the individual professional networks of the participants. They will also and instead work towards establishing a curatorial ethos and concrete projects that provide alternatives to the limited exhibition format. The Young Curators Workshop will therefore be used as a launch pad to build new durable infrastructures. Contemporary art has been the art of its time, bound to the capitalist present in which it took place. In today’s post-contemporary condition - which is being constructed by financial capitalism as well as social media, the military, artificial intelligence, big data, etc. the present is operationalized as risk or contingency; that is, by a relation to the future. The ambition now, under these conditions, must be to regain futural traction on the present that the historical avant-gardes and modernism proposed while learning from their mistake of being completely sidelined under the reign of the (neoliberal) contemporary. The focus now is on post-contemporary institutional configurations for a future art and society. There is a future to be constructed. Armen Avanessian, conception Young Curators Workshop Post-contemporary Art For more information about the topic of the post-contemporary http://dismagazine.com/blog/81218/