The 10th CEI Venice Forum for Contemporary Art Curators from Central Eastern Europe organised by the Trieste Contemporanea Committee under the auspices of the Central European Initiative will be held on 22 April 2022 at the Academy of Fine Arts of Venice, from 11 am to 3 pm.

The Forum is a CEI Feature Event and a Continental Breakfast project. | It is conceived and organised by the Trieste Contemporanea Committee in cooperation with the CEI–Central European Initiative and in collaboration with the Academy of Fine Arts in Venice. | The event is being held under the patronage of the CEI–Central European Initiative, the Regione del Veneto, the Città di Venezia, the Comune di Trieste and the Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. | It is supported by the CEI, theRegione autonoma Friuli Venezia Giulia and the BEBA Foundation of Venice.

TRIESTE CONTEMPORANEA | Dialogues with the Art of Central Eastern Europe Via del Monte 2/1

34122 Trieste ITALY
www.triestecontemporanea.it

info@triestecontemporanea.it +39 040 639187

 

My contribution to the forum

IMPACT OF CRISIS AND HOW TO KEEP THE SPARK ALIVE

 

Under this title, I would like to be positive and optimistic; but at the same time I have to be realistic and must stick to truth.

 

I was born in 1942. My generation have witnessed and experienced all kinds of wars, crisis, I am sorry to say various massacres. Frankly, I did not expect the complex and dark developments of today.

 

Living in Turkey, in East Mediterranean and Middle-East, the most intricate historical region of the world, means to live on the edge of perpetual crisis. In this perpetual crisis-stricken region, we continuously tried  and still try to adapt to the severe political-economic-cultural transformations that are shaking up our lives. 

 

At first we experienced Globalization as a new utopia, which has immediately polluted itself with the current Neo-capitalist and Post-Truth regime. 

 

The socio-political order we are going through has been named as Post-Truth. We are witnessing that political and economic powers intervene in every angle of individual and social life and particularly to our basic belief in so-called Truth. 

 

We are also experiencing the evolution of neo-capitalism towards a new rigidity, which is called Zombie-capitalism. It is not accurate to speculate; but we are watching an unprecedented scenario. 

 

All this is combined with conditions of pandemic since two years.

 

For the last two years, we experienced how the pandemic forced upon the humanity the naked truth of survival: To die or to live!  

 

As if it was not enough, since February we unexpectedly entered into a new era of war; now a different and unpredictable order must be adopted; and this will probably be experienced into an unforeseeable future. Global political and economic activity is also being structured according to this big impasse. Artist from Ukraine as well as Russia are now migrants or refugees.

 

In fact there are frightening truths: Growth paradigm of late capitalism is on an ecocidal collision course with planetary limits. After pandemic now war is a naked  and absolute truth under the dark hegemony of post-truth.

 

Another truth, one that is highly relevant to the dilemmas inherent to global art and culture industry,  is formulated by the world-renowned Greek economist, author, and politician Yanis Varoufakis, the founder of DiEM25, a progressive democratic movement  in EU.

This is how capitalism ends: not with a revolutionary bang, but with an evolutionary whimper. Just as it displaced feudalism gradually, surreptitiously, until one day the bulk of human relations were market-based and feudalism was swept away, so capitalism today is being toppled by a new economic mode: techno-feudalism.

 

We witness now that this techno-feudalism pushes the boundaries of art production and digitizes it from production processes to the process of reaching the society. A new challenge for artists art experts as well as the art market.

 

After repeating these well-known problems the question is: what is the function and vision of global art and culture within these conditions? 

 

First of all, artists with their works and activities have created and continued

 creating awareness, knowledge and resisting strategies about all these problems during the lockdown days.  This is also the age of visual language, knowledge, culture and information which can affect much wider audiences than ever before. Digital technologies have provided a collective-verse for the verbal and visual critical thinking. 

 

With its creative, independent, free character the most effective tool of communication, collaboration and participation is provided with contemporary art works and contemporary art making, which is at the same time the major promotion component of global culture industry and Neo-capitalism. 

 

The culture industry and Neo-capitalism has to reconcile with contemporary art. The relational aesthetics of this contemporary production empowers the theoretical and practical communication and collaboration between all sciences, humanities and academic divisions as well as between all the realities of human life in this planet. New rules and securities should be established for the benefit of artists.

 

Effective reading of art works, which includes making predictions based on prior knowledge, checking understanding, asking questions, is first of all an essential parameter for an intellectual achievement. But also an ability to overcome the confusions created by politically and economically manipulated information, visual pollution and excess of tragedy, which is called post-truth. Art production should have new priorities, new institutional infrastructures to overcome the effect of crisis.

 

For example, the biennale, generated for the society of spectacle and the culture industry provides a system for dissemination of global art production, facility for large public to evaluate art works. Through the relational aesthetics and critical content of the artworks people are invited to follow up important concepts, ideas, statements, and interpret and get involved in the debates of contemporary art subjects. 

 

During these two years online activities provided a wide range of information and criticism. The art and culture NGO's have fulfilled their responsibility with various conferences, seminars and presentation of exhibitions. These NGO's should be empowered in financial and logistic issues.

 

However, even if the consciousness about the effect of cultural policies on the development of democracies is widened and emphasized the progress, in many societies it is too slow and shallow. 

 

In non-democratic regions obstacles stand in the way of contemporary art productions and its usefulness is limited. Throughout half a century cultural sectors of EU and these countries have been meeting at the forums and discussing these themes from different angles and perspectives. These meeting platforms for private official cultural sectors as well as NGO’s of politically or geographically opponent or allied countries have created an opportunity for cultural and artistic exchange, even if it is on more individual level and they pushed the participants of different or dissonant cultural backgrounds and echelon to take on more tasks and responsibilities to equalize their positions in global art scenes. 

 

In fact much wanted reciprocity between cultures take place in these platforms as a spark; to keep this spark alive is a very pressing issue.

 

BERAL MADRA, APRIL 2022