Another City, Another Life - of the Archives

A series of screenings and public talks: Wro 09: Expanded City, Wroclaw; Rotor, Graz; Gallery One, Yerevan, Vilnius COOP: gaps, fictions and practices at the The X Baltic Triennial of International Art, Vilnius

The programme consisting of photo and video works and documentation of artistic actions is conceived as a modified and extended version of an archive accompanying the project Another City, Another Life (www.ancity.blogspot.com), which took place in Warsaw in 2008.
The aim of the archive is to map, how do contemporary artists represent and engage in spatial, esthetical, social and political regimes that have been developed in various cities of East Europe since the decisive changes at the end of the 1980s, early 1990s began.
The archive is constructed loosely around several thematic questions. What are contemporary consequences and potential of the abandoned ideas of the revolution, communism and of socialist modernity, that were implemented in urban planning and collective identities? What kind of new collective bodies, or shared experiences can emerge now in this context? Are there any new possibilities for the “lived”, subjective experiences of inhabiting the cities? How is the dialectic of destruction and building inscribed in diverse material layers of cities related to the memory work and to the processes of constant (re)writing/actualization of history? What is omitted, excluded in historical narrations and current images of the post-socialist cities, what kind of strategies do the artist use to render visibility to these phenomena? How do the artists position themselves within the ambivalent field of cultural production, what role can they play in the economy (symbolical capital), public and political spaces of cities undergoing transformation? Finally can the economical “grey zone”, in which - despite the rhetoric of cultural capitalism - many artists in the post-socialist countries still function, be transformed into an experimental fieldwork offering possibilities to break away from using art for the economic productivity?
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The selection includes works by Vahram Aghasyan, Chto Delat?, Škart, Zbyněk Baladrán, Mona Vătămanu & Florin Tudor, Khinkali Juice, Miklós Erhardt, R.E.P., Voina, Angelika Fojtuch, Karol Radziszewski,Grigor Khatchatryan, Lusine Talalyan amongst others