[NetBehaviour] Drifting Identity

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Drifting Identity | 12 October - 5 November 2011
Opening: 11 October, 19.00 pm
Project curator: Stefan Rusu

Participating artists:
Marina Naprushkina
Kristap Gulbis
Stefanos Tsivopoulos
Societe Realiste (Ferenc Gróf and Jean-Baptiste Naudy)
Tilmann Mayer-Faje

Seminars and workshops: DRIFTING IDENTITY STATION by Gülsen Bal and 
Stefan Rusu
Location: Institut für Kunst und Gestaltung, TU Wien
11 - 18 October 2011

Round table talk/discussion: De-linking, de-coloniality by Marina Gržinić
Location: Open Space, Open Systems
3 November 2011, 19.00 – 20.30 pm

The Drifting Identity Station uses a model of former Soviet Polar 
Stations, which was a trend in the 50's to explore the arctic 
environment while experiencing extreme cold. Station operates in the 
harsh climate associated with “political winter,” while researchers 
interested in the socio-political environment by deploying various 
devices and methodologies in order to collect and monitor the data that 
is relevant to the given context. While exploring the frozen landscape, 
researchers analyze old trajectories (derived
from the former USSR political construct and a new formation in European 
Union progress) to identify what characterizes the mapping of states and 
identities in an attempt to determinate the intensity and temperature of 
the political debates connected to ongoing process of EU enlargement. 
The process of formation of European Union have polarized the issue of 
the identity of the states and its inhabitants in certain contexts.
The underlying idea of National Costume of the European Union developed 
by Kristap Gulbis is a starting point for a debate concerning the 
identity within a European context and the adjustability of various EU 
directives and regulations to its historically and mentally diversified 
regions. Belarus in figures by Marina Naprushkina is part of of a larger 
initiative Office for Anti-Propaganda is focused on the critical 
examination of the contemporary Belarus state which is authoritarian 
ruled by Alexander Lukashenko; The opposition is oppressed and 
marginalized, the media are brought into line. Because of this 
circumstances Belarus is also an outstanding example of how to establish 
a modern dictatorship and how the western democracies handle this case. 
Lost Monument by Stefanos Tsivopoulos takes upon a controversial 
monument, a statue of former American president Harry S. Truman located 
in downtown Athens that appears as though it were a still unidentified 
archaeological find. The Truman Doctrine shifted American foreign policy 
toward the Soviet Union and historians often use it to mark the starting 
date of the Cold War. Societe Realiste (Ferenc Gróf and Jean-Baptiste 
Naudy) shows two maps extracted from the collection London View. One is 
a map superimposing the political frontiers that existed at the turn of 
each century between year 0 and year 2000 on the European peninsula and 
its surroundings. The other graphic is a colorimetric map of European 
segmentations, where every single portion of land divided between these 
frontiers has been associated to a specific taint, averaging their 
respective trans-historical surrounding frontiers. Dulcification Measure 
by Tilmann Mayer-Faje examines how people nowadays live in the huge 
skeleton of the industrialized urbanization that took place in the 
Soviet time and analyze how the functions of micro district could be 
transformed to the contemporary life and needs of the inhabitants. While 
reproducing the ornaments as they where stamped on the houses in order 
to indicate a local identity, he plays with the failure of this machinery.

The Drifting Identity Station is initiated as a research platform to 
monitor and preserve the data related to the evolving state of identity 
in a given context, here in the context of European Union and the 
countries of Baltic region and neighboring countries of the Eastern 
Partnership (Belarus, Ukraine, Republic of Moldova, Georgia, Armenia and 
Azerbaijan). Visual art projects and other contributions that will be on 
display in the Station comment on the evolution
of the social engineering project of European Union, as a political 
construct in progress and the political identity of the neighboring 
countries at its current state. At the same time the artists assume the 
posture of researchers that collect the samples from the field in order 
to preserve the residual traces that rearticulate the post-socialist 
condition. The area of research is extended to Mediterranean region that 
most recently become a fertile ground for the export of European democracy.

About curator:

Stefan Rusu

Stefan’s artist and curatorial agenda is closely connected to undergoing 
processes and changes occurred in the post-socialist societies after 
1989. Among his preoccupations are the aspects of mass-manipulation 
techniques, political engineering strategies (political engineering), 
forms of colonization and culturalization that culminated in some cases 
with the construction of artificial entities, as it is the case of 
Republic of Moldova. Rusu was trained as visual artist and later 
extended his practice to curating, managing and fundraising projects, 
editing TV programs, producing experimental films, TV reports and 
documentaries.

Starting from the year 2000 he is involved in the evolution of KSAK 
Center for Contemporary Art from Chisinau where he develops curatorial 
projects and art initiatives. In 2005/2006 he attended the Curatorial 
Training Program at Stichting De Appel from Amsterdam where he 
co-curated Mercury in Retrograde 
(http://mercuryinretrograde.deappel.nl/). His latest curatorial project 
(completed in 2011) is CHISINAU - Art, Research in the Public Sphere – a 
cross-disciplinary platform that investigated the connections between 
political and cultural symbols and propaganda and its impact on the 
urban environment, the interferences between personal narratives and 
imported ideologies and cultural discourses in relation to the public 
sphere. The project aim was to explore the dominant institutional and 
political discourses that have shaped the society and the urban 
landscape of the city of Chisinau in the course of its recent history. 
(http://www.art.md/2010/sfera_publica_prezentare_en.html)

Seminars and workshops: DRIFTING IDENTITY STATION
Institut für Kunst und Gestaltung, TU Wien

11 - 18 October 2011
Seminars and workshops by Dr Gülsen Bal and Stefan Rusu
Language: English

Location:
Institut für Kunst und Gestaltung, Karlsgasse 11, Hochparterre, 
Seminarraum 2, 1040 Wien

Based on collaborative project work, Dr Gülsen Bal and Stefan Rusu will 
offer a joint course in the Visual Culture programme at Vienna 
University of Technology. In the first leg of the course, Bal, the 
founding director of Open Space will introduce the current field of 
contemporary artistic engagement with changing spatial and cultural 
realities. The second leg will comprise a four-days workshop with the 
artist/curator Rusu, including lectures, discussions and conceptual 
designs. Bal's contention resides in line with Deleuzian reading by 
exploring the problem posed by an insistence on the productive nature of 
theory in an understanding in which “the concept is not given, it is 
created, or to be created; it is not formed, it posits itself in itself 
[...] The two imply each other, since what is truly created, from the 
living thing to the work of art [...] The more the concept is created, 
the more it posits itself. What depends on a free creative activity is 
also what posits itself in itself.” This introduces perhaps a call for 
an expanded notion of what art practice along side, Rusu aims to explore 
the residual traces that re-articulates the post-socialist condition of 
the societies that are EU members (Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, etc.) as 
well as very recently integrated ones (Romania, Bulgaria) to EU in which 
what happened after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the dissolution of 
Soviet Union within the given context. His approach is based on his 
recent artist and curatorial projects that explores the political 
dimension of the public space as well the use of habitat as a platform 
for democratization of the cultural discourse in the public sphere of 
post-socialist societies.

Supported by:
bm:ukk
MA 7 - Interkulturelle und internationale Aktivitäten
ERSTE Foundation
European Cultural Foundation (ECF), STEP beyond
Mondriaan Foundation
kind support provided by:
University of Vienna - Department of Meteorology and Geophysics
cyberlab - Digitale Entwicklungen GmbH
In Cooperation with Institut für Kunst und Gestaltung, TU Wien

About Open Space, Open Systems:

Open Friday, Saturday 13.00 - 18.30 and open for the rest of the week 
days by appointment only.
Admission free
Open Space, Open Systems
Zentrum für Kunstprojekte
Lassingleithnerplatz 2
A- 1020 Vienna
Austria
(+43) 699 115 286 32

for more info: office at openspace-zkp.org
http://www.openspace-zkp.org/

Open Space, Open Systems - Zentrum für Kunstprojekte aims to create the 
most vital facilities for art concerned with contributing a model 
strategy for cross-border and interregional projects on the basis of
improving improving new approach.