Enough is enough!

http://art-leaks.org/2013/05/12/enough-is-enough-ludwig-museum-budapest-hungary/

Ludwig Museum, Budapest, Hungary

MAY 12, 2013

More than 30 artists occupied the Ludwig Museum on Thursday, May 9th 2013, to demand complete transparency in the selection process for a new director and the institution’s autonomy from right-wing ruling party Fidesz. The Ludwig’s current director, Barnabás Bencsik, endorsed by the Ludwig Foundation for his outstanding work, is competing against Fidesz-backed Júlia Fabényi for the position. Read more here.

via Összefogás a kortárs művészetért

PRESS RELEASE

Enough is enough!

Ludwig Museum Budapest, 10 May 2013, 1 pm

From this day on, United for Contemporary Art keeps the building of the Ludwig Museum open 24 hours a day. We are present, and we will work here, hold forums here, and sleep here, until our demands have been granted.

We have come to this decision as the State Secretariat for Culture of the Ministry of Human Resources has ceased to operate as a competent maintainer and resource manager. For months, it has not been capable of appointing a professionally competent and responsible new leadership to the museum. To this day, it has not made available the withheld part of the bursary granted to independent performing art groups in 2012, despite repeated promises.

The examples of the Ludwig and the independents are symptomatic of the system’s malfunctioning. The functioning of Hungarian public administration lacks transparency and, for this reason, does not serve the needs of its citizens.

[…]

Enough is enough!

Events leading to today’s press conference:
We awaited Mr Zoltán Balog, Minister of Human Resources, until 11 am on 10 May 2013, to negotiate our professional demands and to call for transparency in cultural decisions. Minister Balog did not attend the forum, nor did he react to our invitation in any way.

We consider the practice of cultural decision-makers overriding the professional scene and refusing dialogue to be unacceptable.
United for Contemporary Art continues to await the Minister’s appearance at the Ludwig Museum, and for his worthy reaction to our demands!

What do we demand?
- Transparency in cultural governance!
- Institutional and professional autonomy!
- Cessation of resource withdrawal, compensation for abstract resources, and consideration for public interest and public benefit with respect to the distribution of support!
- Undertaking responsibility, and consideration for professionality in cultural decisions!
- Dialogue between Hungarian culture and the decision-makers of cultural policy!
- The dissolution of concealment with respect to the tender for director of the Ludwig Museum, and a new, transparent tender, facilitating social and professional control, dialogue, and debate!

Whom do we await?
All those, who are unsatisfied with processes that are not transparent on the cultural scene, and who take a stand behind cultural autonomy with their presence, and all those, who, as citizens, are unsatisfied with state autocracy, and demand an open relationship based on dialogue with the current leaders of the state!

Those who have already joined and continue their work here during the coming days:

- This afternoon Humán Platform will hold their current plenary assembly
- Saturday morning, the Association of the Independent Performing Arts (FESZ) will hold its regular general assembly before the Ludwig
- Monday morning: Art and Activism seminar
- Tuesday morning: tranzit. hu working discussion
- Wednesday: Fotokontakt – Photography and Activism workshop

Further programmes are currently under planning stages.

When and where?

At the Ludwig Museum, from today, 24 hours a day, until our demands have been granted.
Let’s be present together!

Enough is enough!

United for Contemporary Art (FB)

[…]

Lost in Translation, MMOMA

Collateral Event of the 55th International Art Exhibition — la Biennale di Venezia
Curated by Antonio Geusa

http://www.mmoma.ru/en/exhibitions/special/venicebiennale2013_lost_in_translation/

[…]

Opening: May 29 at 5 p. m.
Press-preview: May 29 at 11 a. m.

Opening hours: daily, except Tuesdays, 10 a. m. to 6 p.m.

In Russia a poet is more than a poet
Yevgeny Yevtushenko

As part of the Collateral Events of the 55th International Art Exhibition — La Biennale di Venezia — Moscow Museum of Modern Art presents «Lost in Translation», a large-scale exhibition of contemporary Russian art exploring the inherent untranslatability of culture-and context-dependent works in times of globalization. The exhibition brings together over one hundred works made in the past forty years from the collection of MMOMA and other public and private collections.

Since its formulation about half a century ago, the concept of global village has evolved from theoretical potentiality into practical reality. Technological development has made international communication simpler and faster. The wide web the world has become today has strongly curtailed the power of geographic, political, and economic borders to isolate. Although the village is global, it is clearly not homogeneous. Communicating has become easier, but its effectiveness is still dependent upon clear understanding between communicators. To achieve clarity, the main factor is the accuracy of translation from one language into another. Art is not immune to the need of being translated. A process of transfer is in act each time a work of art is exhibited to the audience which is not familiar with the context it comes from. Historical and political differences, cultural diversities, the language barrier, or even dissimilar approaches in theoretical analysis are some of the causes that can induce lack of intelligibility and the need of further explanation.

Contemporary history proves that, despite the fall of the Iron Curtain in December 1991 and the consequent end of the isolation and immediate entrance of Russia into the global village, translation is still a fundamental element to trigger proper understanding of individual artworks and the layers of meaning they carry. In many cases, this is a complex procedure requiring, besides the plain translation of the verbal meaning of a message, the addition of an explanatory account shedding light upon the given historical, cultural, political, social, and economical environment the work is motivated by and refers to. Artist Oleg Kulik gained worldwide popularity after doing a series of his «man-dog» performance in the 1990s. It would be easier to grasp his outrageous artistic disguise should one interpret it in the context of the radical economic reforms launched by Russia’s first president Boris Yeltsin; the reforms described as «shock therapy,» which was aimed at converting the whole country from socialism to capitalism. Likewise, the context would make it easier to understand why the popular Soviet TV series The Seventeen Moments of Spring (1973) was a source of inspiration for several Russian modern artists while meaning virtually nothing to the Western viewer.

Lost in Translation draws together works executed in various media — paintings, drawings, photographs, sculptures, videos, installations, performances — by established Russian artists with international acclaim as well as emerging young artists. Carefully selected by the curator on the basis of their resistance to translatability, these artworks are particularly difficult to decipher without the basic knowledge of the «Russian context» they were born in. They will be displayed together with their «expanded translation» — a concise verbal account with essential references, a thesaurus article of sorts, which facilitates readability and help the viewers grasp the meaning of the work and relate it to international contemporary art discourse. The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue with entries on each exhibit, and is complemented with film screenings, talks, performances, and a multidisciplinary conference.

The exhibition is held at Ca’ Foscari University, an established center for Slavic Studies in Italy, and the home of the CSAR Centre for Studies on the Arts of Russia aimed at researching the historical and cultural heritage of Russia and promoting exchanges with major Russian cultural institutions.

PARTICIPATING ARTISTS

Yuri Albert | Nikita Alekseev | Sergey Anufriev | Bluesoup |Sergey Bratkov | Alexander Brodsky | Erik Bulatov | Vladimir Dubossarsky and Alexander Vinogradov | Elena Elagina | Semen Faybisovich | Andrey Filippov | Rimma and Valery Gerlovin | Lyudmila Gorlova | Iced Architects | Dmitry Gutov | Anna Jermolaewa | Alisa Joffe | Ilya Kabakov | Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid | Irina Korina | Valery Koshlyakov | Alexander Kosolapov | Oleg Kulik | Sergey Leontiev | Anton Litvin | Vladimir Logutov | Igor Makarevich | Vladislav Mamyshev-Monroe | Andrei Monastyrsky | Semen Motolyanets | Vladimir Nemukhin | Timur Novikov | Boris Orlov | Peppers | Pavel Peppershtein | Viktor Pivovarov | Alexander Ponomarev | Gia Rigvava | Mikhail Roginsky | Yuri Shabelnikov | Sergey Shutov | Leonid Sokov | Alena Tereshko | Avdey Ter-Oganyan | Vadim Zakharov | Konstantin Zvezdochetov | and others

ANTONIO GEUSA
CURATOR

Dr. Antonio Geusa is an independent curator, art critic, and lecturer; he is an expert in new media art and a key researcher of Russian video art. He holds an MA in philology (University of Bari, Italy), and a PhD in media arts (London University, U. K.). Dr. Geusa is the author of numerous publications, including «The History of Russian Video Art. Volumes 3-2-1» published on the occasion of a three-part exhibition under the same name organized by MMOMA in 2007-2010. He lives and works in Moscow, Russia.

[…]

Being-towards-death as a new kind of ETHICAL authenticity

Franz Fanon, violence as liberation

Žižek – “The Event: Politics, Art, Ontology”

http://backdoorbroadcasting.net/2013/05/slavoj-zizek-the-event-politics-art-ontology/

Event Date: 9 May 2013
Room B34
Birkbeck Main Building
Birkbeck, University of London
Malet Street
London WC1E 7HX

The Department of Psychosocial Studies presents:

Professor  Slavoj Žižek – “The Event: Politics, Art, Ontology”

‘The Debris Field’ by Simon Barraclough, Isobel Dixon and Chris McCabe

In Pamphlets, Play of Voices 

Reviewed by David Clarke

http://sabotagereviews.com/tag/slavoj-zizek/

The Atlantic liner Titanic, which sank on its maiden voyage in April 1912 with the loss of more than 1,500 people, has achieved a remarkable status in western culture. It has become a persistent moral metaphor, serving to illustrate everything from the hubris of humanity (as in Thomas Hardy’s ‘The Convergence of the Twain’), to the failings of the class system (as in Roy Baker’s still harrowing 1958 film A Night to Remember) and the dangers of a misplaced confidence in progress (as in Hans Magnus Enzenberger’s poem sequence The Sinking of the Titanic of 1978). In the Second World War, the story even served Joseph Goebbels as a symbol of the evils of British capitalism, the theme of a 1943 film drama he commissioned on the disaster (see The Titanic in Myth and Memory: Representations in Visual and Literary Culture for more on this). Slavoj Žižek has aptly described the Titanic as a symptom of modern culture in the psychoanalytic sense, a ‘knot of meanings’ occupying a space in our collective imagination that somehow pre-existed the actual disaster itself: as Žižek points out, one popular novel from 1898 had already described the sinking of a ship called Titan in uncannily similar circumstances.

It is this ‘knot of meanings’ that The Debris Field sets out to explore. Here the Titanic is described as a ‘double ship’, ghosted by its own myth. The pamphlet results from a multimedia project to mark the centenary of the Titanic that poets Simon Barraclough, Isobel Dixon and Chris McCabe developed in collaboration with filmmaker Jack Wake-Walker and composer Oli Barrett. The complete film is scheduled for release on DVD, but the publication of the pamphlet stakes a claim for the words to have an independent existence beyond the original project.

[…]

Chris Hedges interviews Julian Assange

http://www.truthdig.com/dig/item/the_death_of_truth_20130505/

[…]

Britain has rejected an Ecuadorean request that Assange be granted safe passage to an airport. He is in limbo. It is, he said, like living in a “space station.”

“The status quo, for them, is a loss,” Assange said of the U.S.-led campaign against him as we sat in his small workroom, cluttered with cables and computer equipment. He had a full head of gray hair and gray stubble on his face and was wearing a traditional white embroidered Ecuadorean shirt. “The Pentagon threatened WikiLeaks and me personally, threatened us before the whole world, demanded that we destroy everything we had published, demanded we cease ‘soliciting’ new information from U.S. government whistle-blowers, demanded, in other words, the total annihilation of a publisher. It stated that if we did not self-destruct in this way that we would be ‘compelled’ to do so.”

“But they have failed,” he went on. “They set the rules about what a win was. They lost in every battle they defined. Their loss is total. We’ve won the big stuff. The loss of face is hard to overstate. The Pentagon reissued its threats on Sept. 28 last year. This time we laughed. Threats inflate quickly. Now the Pentagon, the White House and the State Department intend to show the world what vindictive losers they are through the persecution of Bradley Manning, myself and the organization more generally.”

Assange, Manning and WikiLeaks, by making public in 2010 half a million internal documents from the Pentagon and the State Department, along with the 2007 video of U.S. helicopter pilots nonchalantly gunning down Iraqi civilians, including children, and two Reuters journalists, effectively exposed the empire’s hypocrisy, indiscriminate violence and its use of torture, lies, bribery and crude tactics of intimidation. WikiLeaks shone a spotlight into the inner workings of empire—the most important role of a press—and for this it has become empire’s prey. Those around the globe with the computer skills to search out the secrets of empire are now those whom empire fears most. If we lose this battle, if these rebels are defeated, it means the dark night of corporate totalitarianism. If we win, if the corporate state is unmasked, it can be destroyed. 

U.S. government officials quoted in Australian diplomatic cables obtained by The Saturday Age described the campaign against Assange and WikiLeaks as “unprecedented both in its scale and nature.” The scope of the operation has also been gleaned from statements made during Manning’s pretrial hearing. The U.S. Department of Justice will apparently pay the contractor ManTech of Fairfax, Va., more than $2 million this year alone for a computer system that, from the tender, appears designed to handle the prosecution documents. The government line item refers only to “WikiLeaks Software and Hardware Maintenance.”

The lead government prosecutor in the Manning case, Maj. Ashden Fein, has told the court that the FBI file that deals with the leak of government documents through WikiLeaks has “42,135 pages or 3,475 documents.” This does not include a huge volume of material accumulated by a grand jury investigation. Manning, Fein has said, represents only 8,741 pages or 636 different documents in that classified FBI file.

There are no divisions among government departments or the two major political parties over what should be Assange’s fate. “I think we should be clear here. WikiLeaks and people that disseminate information to people like this are criminals, first and foremost. And I think that needs to be clear,” then-press secretary Robert Gibbs, speaking for the Obama administration, said during a 2010 press briefing.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein, a Democrat, and then-Sen. Christopher S. Bond, a Republican, said in a joint letter to the U.S. attorney general calling for Assange’s prosecution: “If Mr. Assange and his possible accomplices cannot be charged under the Espionage Act (or any other applicable statute), please know that we stand ready and willing to support your efforts to ‘close those gaps’ in the law, as you also mentioned. …”

Republican Candice S. Miller, a U.S. representative from Michigan, said in the House: “It is time that the Obama administration treats WikiLeaks for what it is—a terrorist organization, whose continued operation threatens our security. Shut it down. Shut it down. It is time to shut down this terrorist, this terrorist Web site, WikiLeaks. Shut it down, Attorney General [Eric] Holder.”

At least a dozen American governmental agencies, including the Pentagon, the FBI, the Army’s Criminal Investigative Department, the Department of Justice, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and the Diplomatic Security Service, are assigned to the WikiLeaks case, while the CIA and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence are assigned to track down WikiLeaks’ supposed breaches of security. The global assault—which saw Australia threaten to revoke Assange’s passport—is part of the terrifying metamorphosis of the “war on terror” into a wider war on civil liberties. It has become a hunt not for actual terrorists but a hunt for all those with the ability to expose the mounting crimes of the power elite. 

[…]