Conference, Screening

Building on five successful Summits in New York City, Creative Time is collaborating with the Public Art Agency Sweden to bring this year’s Summit on art and social justice to Stockholm. The Vera List Center is serving as a local hub for screenings of the Summit and additional programming; including a special response panel crossing Summit themes with The New School conference DIGITAL LABOR: SWEATSHOPS, PICKET LINES, AND BARRICADES.

The Creative Time Summit is an annual forum for socially engaged artists and public intellectuals addressing the most pressing political, economic, environmental, and social issues of the time. Locating the conference in Stockholm focuses a regional spotlight on Europe, with panels addressing the rise of new nationalisms and shifting patterns of migration. These issues are situated in a wider discussion of public practice and art in the public sphere. What are the potentialities of creating, displaying, and performing art in the city? How can we inspire people beyond the appreciation of art to mobilize and engage communities to combat injustice? In what ways can the digital serve as an alternative to, or an extension of, the public sphere?

In addition to streaming the Summit events from Sweden, the Vera List Center provides live programming with local artists and academics that responds to the Creative Time sections. Following the Summit panel “Art in the Age of Surveillance,” a special event at the intersection of the Summit and the concurrent conference Digital Labor: Sweatshops, Picket Lines, and Barricades brings together local artists and participants to expand on the discussion in Stockholm.

Every year, the Summit recognizes the achievement of one artist with the Leonore Annenberg Prize for Art and Social Change. This year’s recipient, Amar Kanwar, discusses the intersection of crime, politics, human rights, and ecology in the context of his award-winning multimedia project The Sovereign Forest (2012- ). The presentation will summarize discussions with experts in various fields, culminating in actionable steps for achieving social justice. Following the streaming of the Prize section, local artists will convene to further discuss Kanwar’s work and how the proposed steps may be realized in other artistic practices.

Friday, November 14
Summit, Day 1
10:00 am-7:30 pm
66 W 12th Street, Room 510

10-10:30 am
Greeting + Introduction (video documentation)
Magdalena Malm, Nato Thompson, and Anne Pasternak

10:30-12:10 pm
Section 1: Nationalisms (video documentation)
Counter-movements against identification with the nation-state, particularly through lines of ethnic and racial identification, serve as a rallying cry across the international arena to combat the ever increasing presence of nationalism and xenophobia in Europe, as demonstrated by recent elections.
With Ram Manikkalingam (moderator), Jonas Hassen Khemiri, Mariam Ghani, Jonas Dahlberg, Elisa Santos of Temporary Occupations, Jonas Staal, and Matt Lucero and Tuan Andrew Nguyen of the Propeller Group

1:30-2 pm
Keynote (video documentation)
Saskia Sassen

2-3:40 pm
Section 2: Performing the City (video documentation)
Cities are active playgrounds for creatives, serving not only as a backdrop to public art, but as a source of both inspiration and opposition, as a site for artwork, and a stage for expression. The rich possibilities of the city – both physical and metaphorical – are under constant negotiation by artists. Like the city, the expressions of the artist and city relationship range from the grandiose to the quietly intimate.
With Andrea Phillips (moderator), Núria Güell, Myriam Lefkowitz, Nástio Mosquito, Poste Restante, and Jeremy Deller in conversation with Nato Thompson

3:40-4:30 pm
Discussion: LIVE
Marissa Jahn, artist, writer, activist, and founder of Studio REV-
Gianni Jetzer, Curator at Large, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden
Moderated by Carin Kuoni, VLC

5-6:25 pm
Section 3: Activating public Space (video documentation)
Public art today seeks not only to adorn, but also to move beyond aesthetics and activate civic engagement. Speakers in this section work with alternative modes of art production to redefine the role of culture in urban landscapes. Through their talks, they will tease out the ways in which underlying structures effect the possibilities of artistic production, how collaborations with state institutions change in moments of conflict, the fields in which a private foundation can act, and what role can art centers play in the development of local culture and politics beyond its own walls.
With Magdalena Malm (moderator), Nina Möntmann, Joanna Warsza, Roberta Uno, Maria Lind, Bettina Pehrsson, Miriam Andersson Blecher, and Work Group Representing Konsthall C

6:25-7:15 pm
Discussion: LIVE
Andrianna Campbell, PhD Candidate in Art History, CUNY Graduate Center
Andria Hickey, Associate Curator, Public Art Fund
Moderated by Carin Kuoni, VLC

7:15-7:30 pm
Closing Remarks (video documentation)

Saturday, November 15
Summit, Day 2
10:00 am-5:40 pm
Orozco Room, 66 West 12th Street

10:00-10:30
Keynote (video documentation)
Edi Rama

10:30-11:35
Prize Section (video documentation)
Amar Kanwar

11:35-12:25
Discussion: LIVE
Carin Kuoni, Director/Curator, Vera List Center for Art and Politics
Vyjayanthi Venuturupalli Rao, Associate Professor in Anthropology at The New School

1:15-1:30
Welcome (video documentation)
Laura Raicovich

1:30-2:50
Section 4: Art in the Age of Surveillance (video documentation)
In this section, we explore “the age of surveillance” and its impact today, particularly the recent revelations of NSA surveillance in the United States and the self-surveilling that has been woven into the global fabric of contemporary living. As private and public become deeply intertwined, their political and personal implications grow increasingly conflated.
With Birgitta Jónsdóttir (moderator), Dora Garcia, Jill Magid, Metahaven, Tomáš Rafa, and Natalya Eryomenko of the Vera Ermolaeva Foundation of Contemporary Feminist Art Initiatives

2:50-3:40
Discussion: LIVE
Carl DiSalvo, Associate Professor in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication at the Georgia Institute of Technology
Christiane Paul, Associate Professor at the School of Media Studies, The New School, and Adjunct Curator of New Media Arts at the Whitney Museum of American Art
Alessandra Renzi, Assistant Professor in Emergent Media for the Program in Media and Screen Studies and for the Department of Art + Design
Sergio Muñoz Sarmiento, artist, founder of The Art Law Office
Elliot Vredenburg, artist
Moderated by Carin Kuoni, VLC

Presented in collaboration with Trebor Scholz and Digital Labor: Sweatshops, Picketlines, and Barricades (DL#14).
The third in The New School’s Politics of Digital Culture Conference Series, #DL14 looks at the ways the arts and artists, activists and hacktivists, designers, labor organizers, theorists and workers are both challenging and implicated in current labor practices in the digital realm.

4:00-5:40
Section 5: Migrations (video documentation)
Migrants straddle the boundaries of nation states, directly under influence of the reality of international economics. These conditions paradoxically place them at both the center of global politics and on the periphery of international human rights. How are artists navigating and producing works at the heart of this paradox?
With Soroya Post (moderator), Christopher Robbins and John Ewing of Ghana Think Tank, Olga Jitlina and Andrey Yakimov of The Amanda Weil Award Lecture, Tone Olaf Nielsen, Favianna Rodriguez, Ahmet Ögüt, and Tania Bruguera

Presented by the Vera List Center for Art and Politics in partnership with Creative Time. Special thanks to Trebor Scholz for facilitating the collaboration with #DL14.

Participant Bios

Andrianna Campbell is a doctoral candidate in Art History at the CUNY Graduate Center. She is the recipient of the Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship at the Dia Art Foundation in 2014- 2015, the American Philosophical Society Library Fellowship in 2015, a Society for the Preservation of American Modernist Publication Grant in 2014, the Dean K. Harrison Fellowship in 2008-2013 and the prestigious Graduate Teaching Fellowship from 2010-2013. She specializes in American art and art of the Americas in the modern and contemporary period. Currently Andrianna is the co-editor of Shift: A Graduate Journal of Visual and Material Culture and she is a contributor to Artforum.com. She earned a BFA in Printmaking and a concentration in Art History from the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). As a student, she was awarded the Andrew Mellon Fellowship from the RISD museum. Subsequently, Andrianna was the Assistant Curator at Forbes Inc. where she handled an international art collection. For over four years, she taught art history and a seminar about collaborative practice at Parsons, The New School for Design.

Carl DiSalvo is an Associate Professor in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication at the Georgia Institute of Technology. At Georgia Tech he directs the Public Design Workshop: a design research studio exploring socially-engaged design practices and civic media. His current research is broadly concerned with forms of collectivity and the role of design in shaping and enabling collectivity. He publishes regularly in design, science and technology studies, and human-computer interaction journals and conference proceedings. His first book, Adversarial Design, was published MIT Press in 2012. DiSalvo’s experimental design work has been exhibited and supported by the ZKM, Grey Area Foundation for the Arts, Times Square Arts Alliance, Science Gallery Dublin, and the Walker Arts Center. DiSalvo holds a Ph.D. in Design from Carnegie Mellon University (2006).

Andria Hickey is the associate curator at the Public Art Fund where she has curated exhibitions in the public realm throughout New York City with artists such as Olaf Breuning, Katharina Grosse, and Oscar Tuazon, as well as group exhibitions such as Configurations: Valerie Blass, Katinka Bock, Esther Klas and Allyson Vieira; Lightness of Being, and A Promise Is a Cloud. Currently in New York, two of her exhibitions are on view — Danh Vo: We the People at Brooklyn Bridge Park and City Hall Park, and Sam Falls: Light Over Time at MetroTech Center in Downtown Brooklyn.

Prior to joining Public Art Fund, Andria was the Curator at Art in General and from 2007-10, she was the curatorial fellow in visual arts at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. While at the Walker, Hickey collaborated on exhibitions including The Quick and the Dead (2008), Haegue Yang: Integrity of the Insider (2009), and Yves Klein: With the Void, Full Powers (2010), among others. Before joining the Walker, Hickey was an independent curator and writer, working in non-profit artist-run centers in Montreal and Newfoundland. Hickey completed her MA in Art History at Concordia University in Montreal and her written work has been published in a wide variety of journals and exhibition catalogues.

Marissa Jahn is an artist, writer, and activist of Ecuadorian and Chinese descent whose work trammels the boundary between the printed word and public space. Jahn is the Founder of Studio REV- (as in to rev an engine), an art+media+social justice nonprofit that combines creativity, bold ideas, and sound research to address critical issues impacting low-wage workers, immigrants, and women. Jahn originated El Bibliobandido (or ‘story thief’), an ongoing living legend built around a masked bandit who, ravenous for stories, roves the jungles of Honduras terrorizing little kids until they offer him stories they’ve written; Video Slink Uganda, a project that transposes experimental videos by African diaspora video artists into the Ugandan black market; and— in collaboration with the National Domestic Workers Alliance- the NannyVan, a bright orange mobile design studio and sound lab that “accelerates the movement for domestic workers’ rights.” A graduate of MIT, she is currently a Research Affiliate at MIT’s Media Lab and has been a CEC cultural ambassador to Estonia, Tajikistan, Kaliningrad, and more. Jahn’s work has been presented at venues such as The White House, Studio Museum of Harlem, Museum of Modern Art, Walker Art Center; received grants and awards such as Tribeca Film Institute’s New Media Fund, Rockefeller Cultural Innovation Fund, Franklin Furnace; and garnered attention in media such as The New York Times, ArtForum, Univision, Art in America, The Wall Street Journal, BBC, Art in America, PBS Newshour, Boing Boing, Fast Company, parenting and policy blogs, and more.

Gianni Jetzer is a curator and critic based in New York and was recently appointed the Curator at Large of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. He has realized numerous exhibitions with artists in his positions as curator at Migros Museum in Zurich (1998-2001), Director of Kunsthalle St. Gallen (2001-2006), and Director of Swiss Institute in New York (2006-2013). He is currently the curator of Unlimited, Art Basel’s pioneering exhibition platform for projects that transcend the limitations of a classical art-show as well as the curator of the independent biennial La Otra in Bogota, Colombia in 2015. As a critic Jetzer has written many contributions for catalogues, art magazines, and newspapers such as Parkett, Flash Art, Spike, or Kaleidoscope and is the publisher of books on e.g. Andro Wekua, Saskia Olde Wolbers, Shirana Shahbazi, and Richard Phillips. He is a faculty member at SVA MFA Fine Arts New York and previously was a Lecturer at the Master of Arts in Fine Arts, Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK), Zurich.

Carin Kuoni is director/curator at the Vera List Center for Art and Politics. She has curated dozen of exhibitions, most recently Post-Speculation at P! (with Prem Krishnamurthy) and Theaster Gates. A Way of Working at Parsons (with Chelsea Haines). She is the editor or co-editor of books such as Energy Plan for the Western Man. Joseph Beuys in America; Words of Wisdom. A Curator’s VadeMecum; Considering Forgiveness, and Speculation, Now. She is the director of SITAC XII in Mexico, 2015.

Christiane Paul is Associate Prof. at the School of Media Studies, The New School, and Adjunct Curator of New Media Arts at the Whitney Museum of American Art. She has written extensively on new media arts and lectured internationally on art and technology. Her recent books are Context Providers – Conditions of Meaning in Media Arts (2011; Chinese edition,2012), co-edited with Margot Lovejoy and Victoria Vesna; New Media in the White Cube and Beyond (2008); and Digital Art (Thames and Hudson 2003 / 2008 / 2015). As Adjunct Curator of New Media Arts at the Whitney Museum of American Art, she curated exhibitions includingCory Arcangel: Pro Tools (2011) and Profiling (2007), and is responsible for artport, the Whitney Museum’s website devoted to Internet art. Other recent curatorial work includes The Public Private (Kellen Gallery, The New School, 2013), Eduardo Kac: Biotopes, Lagoglyphs and Transgenic Works (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 2010); Biennale Quadrilaterale (Rijeka, Croatia, 2009-10); and Feedforward – The Angel of History (co-curated with Steve Dietz; Laboral Center for Art and Industrial Creation, Gijon, Spain, Oct. 2009).

Vyjayanthi Venuturupalli Rao is an anthropologist teaching at The New School. She works on cities and globalization at the intersection of art, design, finance, and planning and on issues of memory and heritage in the context of development. She edited the forthcoming book Speculation, Now, which will be released by Duke University Press and the Vera List Center for Art and Politics in December.

Alessandra Renzi is Assistant Professor in Emergent Media for the Program in Media and Screen Studies and for the Department of Art + Design. Her interdisciplinary work explores the linkages between media, art and activism through ethnographic studies and media art projects. Alessandra’s research interests have led her to study pirate television networks in Italy and the surveillance of social movements in Canada. Her book Infrastructure Critical: Sacrifice at Toronto’s G8/G20 Summit, co-authored with Greg Elmer, was published in 2012. As part of her past research on surveillance, she co-produced the documentary Preempting Dissent: Policing the Crisis. Her current research focuses on the impact of participatory networks and social media platforms on activism.

Sergio Muñoz Sarmiento is an artist and arts lawyer with a primary focus on intellectual property, moral rights, authentication issues, free speech, contractual relationships, and nonprofit arts organizations. He received his BA in Art from the University of Texas-El Paso and an MFA in Art from the California Institute of the Arts. He was a Van Lier Fellow at the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Independent Study Program in Studio Art in 1997, and received his J.D. from Cornell Law School in 2006.

His art projects have been shown nationally and internationally, and he has lectured and performed in a wide range of institutions, including Harvard University, Cornell Law School, Yale Law School, Columbia Law School, Fundación Cisneros, UC Irvine, and Brown University. He has also published essays and projects in Law Text Culture, Unbound: Harvard Journal of the Legal Left, Canceled: Alternative Manifestations and Productive Failures, Texas A&M Law Review, The New York Times, and Art Asia Pacific.

In 2010, Sarmiento founded the Art & Law Program, a semester-long seminar series with a philosophical focus on the effects of law on cultural production and reception. He currently teaches contemporary art and law at Fordham Law School.

Elliot Vredenburg, originally from Toronto, now lives in Los Angeles and drives a 1995 Honda Civic LX (blue). His written work emerges largely as an extension of his training at the Ontario College of Art & Design University [sic], where he studied graphic design. Currently, his research investigates the human implications of technological high modernism, the political consequences and capabilities of the digital image, nature made by people, and the weird intersections of branding and marketing practices with social control and surveillance.