Curatorial Practice: Angela Harutyunyan: ACCRETIONS

in collaboration with Joanna Sokolowska and Tevz Logar Gallery Skuc, Ljubljana, Slovenia
Artists: Roman Dziadkiewitz, Hassan Khan, Sinisa Labrovic, Shady ElNoshakaty, Honza Zamojski 4.8.10-3.9.10

Accretions refers to the idea of rhizomatic growth and build up in biological organisms, which if translated into the social world, could be used to imply expansive growth. We appropriate the word as an operational term to both question and intervene into the very construction of aesthetic communities which is a process of coming together and building up. The starting point of our inquiry is related to artistic sources and references and the ways in which singularity of experience can be shared through a particular presence in specific spatial and temporal configurations of the artistic event. And perhaps, the very indeterminacy of these configurations harbor the potentiality of bringing together an aesthetic community. Thus, the outcome as such can neither be predictable, nor obvious even for the curators.

Within the conditions of labor divisions at place in the art world, exhibition making has often proven to be a practice that entails expectations for professionally established and structured procedures of curating. This includes networking, conception of idea, selection of artists and works and organization of events, both creatively and bureaucratically. However, what happens when the process of pre-conceived and pre-designed curating itself becomes dependent upon artistic processes and marks a failure of every predetermination? In this, the final product does not come together through professionally defined considerations but through friendship, political and aesthetic kinship leaving aside politically correct considerations of representing identities and geographies. Within the temporal span of curatorial work and the exhibition as the ultimate result, there are often transformations, transmutations and transmogrifications which are not always obvious in the final presentation.

In Accretions we propose to construct a reflective space of communal engagement which is directly involved with the artists` proposition for a work of art, performance, intervention in a designated time and space. We have invited six artists from locales in which the curators practice—Roman Dziadkiewicz, Hassan Khan, Sinisa Labrović, Shady el Noshakaty and Honza Zamojski to collaborate on accretion of a series of events. We are working with artists who perceive their positions and subjectivity as part of a broader aesthetic community; who question the way in which knowledge and artistic skills emerge and are disseminated and who are able to translate through diverse registers of knowledge.

We would like to test whether these broader concerns upon which the artists were invited to reflect become a departure point for public engagement. The latter includes questions related not only to the (direct and indirect) involvement of the audience/public in the construction of aesthetic experience but also within the historical, spatial and communal locale of the Škuc Gallery in Ljubljana. Negotiating with the Gallery’s specific history and legacy but also with its evolving present, we propose to turn the gallery into a space in which situational social and artistic relationships are given a space to reflect upon the very institutional and artistic frameworks of the coming together of an aesthetic community through continuous engagement in conversations, attachments and detachments.

The structural and formal questions which the exhibition as an event addresses are questions that complicate the distinction between the process of art production and its final destination or reception. Throughout the event, each day is reserved for a single work produced or enacted by one of the invited artists. Each work is exposed or choreographed (written in time) through a given duration to a specific audience which attends an “opening” event every day. Thus what choreography and accretion share is a temporal build up and construction of experience through a process. After this exposure, the work finds a place in the gallery, awaiting other works to occupy a space after each opening. We envision the exhibition as an event through a collection and accumulation of experiences and traces; the art work becoming a trace of its own presence. Through the processual structure of the event , the ultimate result in the form of the final product is never arrived at. This way, art can potentially become a vehicle that may serve to create an aesthetic/political community which is situational and contingent. In short, we would like to curate a social space, an event or an exhibition as a living organism which evolves and transforms throughout time. The event always already takes place post-factum, hence, the exhibition as an accumulation of experiences, bodies, spaces and gazes. This exhibition marks an opening for collaborative potentialities, rather than representing results of collaboration which has already taken place. Collaboration will continue in at least one another location – Muzeum Sztuki in Lodz in 2011.

The idea of the project is inextricably related to the circumstances under which the curatorial team was formed, that is the Summer Seminars for Curators in Yerevan.