ODD is happy to announce its first curatorial program for 2018, Who Cares, an artistic and cultural exchange between two cities of the South-East, Bucharest and Yogyakarta (Jogja), co-funded by AFCN.
Both cities are important regional artistic centers with a cultural and political impact at a regional and international level. East Europe and Southeast Asia are cultural and political constructs which along the years have shown a capacity to coagulate and become significant. Now is a proper moment for the cultural agents active in these regions to create an exchange of knowledge, instruments and values, as well circuits where the West ceases to be a point of reference or a mediator. The project is the first step in building a network of inter-regional collaboration, on one hand rooted in solid personal and professional relationships between the agents involved, and on the other hand on the desire to collaboratively develop tools, strategies and novel artistic theories that can respond to the specific cultural needs of the two regions involved.
For the conception of this project we start from the need of an original and different evaluation of curatorial practices, no just from the perspective of originality and creativity – criteria that are very contestable as artwork evaluations – but from the perspective of the nature of the artists needs. Following Yeung Yang’s essay for Who Cares? 16 Essays on Curating in Asia published by ParaSite in 2010, this exchange residency departs from a rhetoric question. Who Cares? tests bottom-up curatorial processes (curating understood as a gesture of taking care of) and alternatively pointing to the lack of artistic exchange between the two regions for which this project comes in as a novel initiative.
Uncommon constellations, unmediated territories, common oddities. From Bucharest to Jogja and back again, the exchange residency connects grassroots artistic organizations – ODD in Bucharest with KUNCI Cultural Center, MES 56 and Lifepatch in Yogyakarta – in order to trace new real and imagined lines of decolonization.
The first part is a one month intervention between 15 March – 15 April 2018 of four Romanian artists in Yogyakarta. Titled Cosmic Languages, it is centered around the building of a Stargate and the non-verbal communication it entails. The second part is a residency of 2 Indonesian artists and a Jogja-based Romanian curator, who come in June 2018 to Romania to question After all, what is left?
Initiated by Cristina Bogdan and Adelina Luft. With Wimo Ambala Bayang, Irina Gheorghe, V. Leac, Elia Nurvista and Ștefan Tiron.
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