Following the opening of the Mobile Archive at WYSPA, Galit Eilat, Founding Director of the Israeli Center for Digital Art, will be participating in a panel discussion on “The Impossible Collection.”
See below for more details.
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“The Impossible Collection” is a project taking place within the framework of a larger group of events under the leading title “Translate. Beyond Culture: The Politics of Translation”, initiated and theorized by the European Institute for Progressive Cultural Policies [eipcp] www.translate.eipcp.net .
The project is aimed at reframing the collection of the Wyspa Progress Foundation through innovative curatorial practices. The team of curators consists only of International guests in order to approach the artworks from the perspective from outside and to achieve the form of display that targets beyond just a representation of artists and subjects.
Curator as Translator: Where Have all the Workers Gone? When Will We Ever Learn?
Workshop with Boris Buden and Stefan Nowotny
Participants: Dorothee Bienert, Galit Eilat, Livia Paldi, Els Roeland, Alina Serban, Simon Sheikh, Aneta Szylak, Antje Weitzel, Louisa Ziaja
Date and venue: 22-23 November, WYSPA Institute of Art, Gdansk
There is always trouble with a historic place. Even if we can easily identify with its auratic quality, we might be deeply disappointed by its narrative one: yes, it is great to be here, but why actually? Why is the shipyard in Gdansk so important? Communism ended here. Yes, but what started here then? The workers won their freedom here. But where did they disappear thereafter? History happened here. Only never to happen again?
Every answer is automatically followed by another question. The reason is obvious: there is no master narrative to forever fix the meaning of a historical event. Neither is there a subject of history to make experience of it. What we have instead is cultural memory. It never recalls the event in its alleged original meaning, but rather through different forms of its cultural articulation, in short, through its cultural translations: the culture of everyday life, cultural effects on gender formation, literary and visual culture etc. This is where this atmosphere of uncanniness evoked by historical places comes from. They are familiar yet strange because we always perceive them in a (cultural) translation of what imbues them with the current meaning, namely the original event. The workshop will deal with this problem in the form of short presentations and a discussion.
