Just who do you think you are?
Location and date: Cinema Zuid, Antwerp, 14 June 2014, 10:00 – 18:00
Free entrance
Language: English
Just who do you think you are? is a one-day programme of performances, keynotes and panels with artists participating in the exhibition Don’t You Know Who I Am? Art After Identity and invited speakers acting as agent provocateurs.
It will explore important shifts that seem to be taking place in culture today, as led by artists and observed by intellectuals. Divided into three sections, the contributions will consider notions from ‘universality’ and ‘populism’, to ‘selfhood’, ‘normality’ and ‘difference’, all in relation to the ‘I-word’ of the exhibition subtitle.
Programme
| 10:00 | Coffee & Introduction |
ACT 1
In the first act, we question where art and culture are heading now. Perhaps complexity is the fundamental condition of today’s world, certainly for artists who are seeking to identify themselves and their practice within it. Can there be a return, of sorts, to the idealism of modernity, or can we only think of new, more relativistic paradigms for cultural progress?
| 10:30 | Lecture performance: Donna Kukama |
| 10:00 | Keynote: Timotheus Vermeulen, Who could I be(come)? Historicising the post-historical subject |
| 11:30 | Panel: Donna Kukama and Timotheus Vermeulen in conversation with Nav Haq (curator M HKA), followed by a Q&A |
| 12:45 | Lunch at M HKA and visit to the exhibition (with activated works by Patrizio Di Massimo, Liesbeth Doms and Oscar Murillo running throughout the day) |
ACT 2
In the second act, we consider notions of subjectivity and selfhood in relation to practice. To what extent could (and should) biography be a factor in the production of art? What role can objects, including artworks, play in the formation of the self? Should artworks also be considered as subjects with their own biographies?
| 14:00 | Performance: Hedwig Houben, The Hand, The Eye and It, 2013 |
| 14:30 | Paper/statement: Travis Jeppesen, I – An Object |
| 15:00 | Screening: Pedro Barateiro, We Belong to Other People When We're Outside, 2013 |
| 15:30 | Q&A moderated by Anders Kreuger (curator, M HKA), followed by a coffee break |
ACT 3
The third and last act brings perspectives on the question of identity and national politics. How do ideas of ‘normal’ and ‘different’ get legitimated in different contexts? What is the relation of place and politics towards the formation of identities? Who gets to decide?
| 16:00 | Keynote: Merijn Oudenampsen, The Politics of Cultural Identity |
| 16:30 | Performance: Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Contra-Diction: Speech against Itself |
| 17:00 | Panel: Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Merijn Oudenampsen and Iman Issa in conversation with Victor Wang (researcher-in-residence, CAHF) |
Finale
| 17:30 | Performance: Nástio Mosquito |
PRACTICALITIES
The programme will be in English and is free of charge. Reservations are highly recommended and can be done via this link. Reservation closes on Friday 13 June at 17:00. Without a reservation, seats are subject to availability.
Everyone is asked to register at the reception desk in Cinema Zuid in between 10:00 and 10:30. From 10:30 on all reserved seats will be released again so make sure to be there on time.
Cinema Zuid is located at the Lakenstraat 14 in Antwerp, a 2 min walk from the M HKA museum. From the train station Antwerpen Zuid Cinema Zuid is a 15 min walk. From the Central Station, you can take the tram, line 12, to the stop ‘Pacificatie’. From Antwerp Berchem Station, Bus 30 takes you to the stop ‘Waterpoort’. More directions (In Dutch) can be found here.
There will be coffee, tea and water free of charge during the breaks; sandwiches will be sold for lunch at the M HKAfe.
For more information please contact M HKA at info@muhka.be or CAHF at info@cahf.be
CAHF
Just Who Do You Think You Are? is co-organised by M HKA and CAHF and is the first of two collaborative events to take place in 2014, exploring formats and scenarios for engaging with a new generation of emerging artists in the institutional framework of museums and their collections.
Just Who Do You Think You Are? takes the form of a public conversation between artists and intellectuals, while Emerging The Museum, the second event to take place, serves as a workshop for curators and conservators of the museums that form the CAHF partnership. How can museums collect and/or program artists whose practice is still in the making? How can the contradiction between the museum’s position in the contemporary (whatever this really means) and its role as a collector of heritage be made productive?
Contemporary Art Heritage Flanders (CAHF) is a collaborative knowledge platform initiated by and built around the collections of four leading contemporary art museums in Flanders, Belgium: S.M.A.K. (Ghent), Mu.ZEE (Ostend), M HKA (Antwerp) and Middelheimmuseum (Antwerp).
Through a series of projects and actions CAHF both strengthens and questions the institutional practice of collecting, by accommodating dialogue and collaboration between its four partner museums and an international community of art professionals.