Tate Britain, 22 March 2024

Lina Dzuverovic presented the And Others project as part of the ‘Other ecologies: collective work and the politics of space’ panel at the Women in Revolt – Radical Acts, Contemporary Resonances conference at Tate Britain.

The talk focused on methodologies developed by the And Others network so far, to explore performance, moving image and sound networks in Central Eastern Europe  in 1970s and 1980s. The talk focused on Slovenia-based collectives such as  OHO/The Sempas Family (1970s) and the multifaceted sound, video and performance outputs by FV112/15, a multimedia platform for the production of alternative forms of culture which embraced the DIY ethos of punk.

Carla Cruz, Helena Reckitt and Karolina Majewska-Guede, on behalf of the And Others Network, will hold a workshop at the Lost and Found Symposium, Lisbon, Portugal, 6th and 7th December 2023

This is the first of a three-part workshop (Lisbon, Warsaw, Riga) that focus on a series of exercises in historicizing collective artistic work. The Lisbon workshop focuses on recognizing and transforming visual patterns and  we will work with a selection of existing images of artistic collectives, analyze them together with the participants and develop new possibilities and performative paths of collective visibility.

The workshop will invite participants to talk, write, draw, perform and think together, as a way of creating a dossier of experiences which will help us understand the wide range of exclusions, omissions and othering involved in historization of collaborative and collective work. Our quest will be centred on exploring and inspiring others to think through the question: Can we imagine collective structures in art, which do not exclude, belittle or ignore affective and reproductive labour?

Building on two months of asynchronous collective writing, involving Ximena Alarcón-Díaz, Felicity Allen, Carla Cruz, Fabiola Fiocco, Karolina Majewska Guede, Lily Hall, Manual Labours, Kuda.org/Zoran Pantelić, Kirsten Lloyd, Chris McCormack, Gerrie van Noord, Helena Reckitt, Irene Revell, Marina Rosenfeld, Katja Praznik, Abhijan Toto and Jelena Vesić, we are excited to announce that the online public panels are now open for booking, starting with Panel One: Collectivity, Labour, Value and Social Reproduction on Monday 31 October 2022. The panellists in this and three panels to follow consider how we might write, think, read and practice together through other means.

‘And Others’ conversations started in late August 2022, with eighteen participants on board. The discussions are developing into rich, fascinating and somewhat unwieldy texts, across four separate panels. We are discussing four topics emerging from processes and practices of collective work and will soon be announcing the dates for public discussions in association with Art Monthly magazine.

BIRMAC in association with Artpool, is delighted to celebrate the launch of ‘What Will Be Already Exists’ – Temporalities of Cold War Archives in East-Central Europe and Beyond’ an edited volume emerging from a conference organised around Artpool’s 40th anniversary, published by Transcript Verlag in 2021. The book includes texts by Emese Kürti / Zsuzsa László (eds.) with essays by Zdenka Badovinac, Judit Bodor-Roddy Hunter, David Crowley, Lina Džuverović, Daniel Grún, Emese Kürti, Karolina Majewska-Güde, Kristine Stiles, Sven Spieker and Tomasz Zaluski.

Invited respondents, art scholar, critic, and curator Ieva Astahovska (Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art, Riga, Latvia) and art historian and curator, Cristian Nae (George Enescu National University of Arts, Iasi, Romania), will offer their responses to the publication, which will be followed by a panel discussion with the editors and a number of contributors. Chaired by Dr Sophie Hope (Department of Film Media and Cultural Studies, Birkbeck College).

How do artist archives survive and stay authentic in radically changed contexts? The volume addresses the challenge of continuity, sustainability, and institutionalization of archives established by Eastern European artists. At its center stands the 40th anniversary of the Artpool Art Research Center founded in 1979 in Budapest as an underground institution based on György Galántai’s ‘Active Archive’ concept. Ten internationally renowned scholars propose contemporary interpretations of this concept and frame artist archives not as mere sources of art history but as models of self-historicization. The contributions give knowledgeable insights into the transition of Cold War art networks and institutional landscapes.

*Please note that this event will be recorded and made available to the public after the event

Versions of my essay ‘Collaborative Actions, Continued Omissions: Notes Towards a Feminist Revisiting of Yugoslav Collectives in the 1960s and 1970s – the Case of the OHO Group‘ have been published in  ‘Fragments for Studies on Art Organisations‘, Kuda.org, 2020, Novi Sad (Serbian and English); in ‘What Will Be Already Exists – Temporalities of Cold War Archives in East-Central Europe and Beyond’, transcript Verlag, 2021 (English) and Enigma Journal, Budapest, 2021 (Hungarian).

Interviews with several cultural workers in Ljubljana and Belgrade have been completed. They were held in English and Serbian (whatever felt most comfortable for the interviewees) and now comes the time for transcription and translation.