Getting ready for the Seminars!
Here's the program
and below the abstract of my presentation
See you in Yerevan, maybe?
Elisa Tosoni
Transnational Artistic Events: On Temporality and its Repercussions on the Local Context
Is it possible to imagine a biennial - the most iconic of transnational art events - as something that could possibly exceed its canonized temporality? Could an event be considered not as a momentum, but rather as an iteration of simultaneous momenta, for which power resides in a moving - evolving - mass, becoming something that stretches across a time-lapse of two years? Or would the art system then face the paradox of a continuous, eternal biennial, in which one edition fades through to the next? And, again, what are the consequences of the voracious rhythms of artistic production and consumption, often dictated by those of global institutions, on the locality? How could a host city or territory forge a biennial in becoming, adapted to the rhythms of its own social norms, its inhabitants and geographies, aiming towards sustainability and perhaps a fruitful slowness? Rethinking the temporality of such events, by shifting the attention away from the “finished” exhibition and artworks, the opening week and the art professionals’ tourism, towards a continuously accretive process, in which a variety of tangents unfold simultaneously or remain idle, appears to be a solution to connect with - rather than tower over - the local context.
The presentation will address these questions through the lens of three case studies: BB3 (Bucharest, Romania, 2008), Manifesta (with particular focus on the exhibition The Rest of Now, and its offspring Tabula Rasa, at Manifesta 7 - Bolzano, Italy, 2008) and the 6th Momentum Biennial (the exhibition Imagine Being Here Now, and its itinerant performance program - Moss, Norway, and across Scandinavia, 2011).
