GUEST LECTURE BY BILJANA CIRIC
CURATING AS ‘WALKING WITH’
— ON CREATING CITATION FROM THE MARGINS AS POLITICAL GESTURE
Time:
15:00 | Saturday 25.11.2023
Location:
Center for Art Patronage and Development (APD)
Creative Square, No. 1 Luong Yen Str., Bach Dang, Hai Ba Trung, Hanoi.
“My own practice into exhibition histories has been very much related to understanding my own curatorial position of being a precarious woman, curator on the margins, and furthermore what Boaventura De Sousa Santos calls ‘sub-human.’ Having this in mind, I am often drawn towards invisible histories, untold histories, and histories that queer the way mainstream histories are told by creating citations from the margins. Here I understand margins as an active position shaped by historical entanglements of places that informed me, and how these places and their contexts—humans and non-humans who inhabit these places, and the worlds they produce—affect my own position and practice within the world.”
Through public moment, curator Biljana from Belgrade (Serbia) will share her working methodology of long-term research inquiry “As you go…roads under your feet, towards the new future” that started in 2020 and recently organized Bor Encounter as part of same inquiry.
“As you go… roads under your feet, towards the new future” is a long-term project and research inquiry that reflects on the Belt and Road Initiative and how it will alter the aesthetics and practices of everyday life in different local contexts of Ethiopia, Serbia, Slovenia, Uzbekistan, China, Kazakhstan.
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Biljana Ciric is an interdependent curator. Ciric is curator of the Pavilion of Republic of Serbia at 59th Venice Biennale in 2022 presenting with Walking with Water Solo exhibition of Vladimir Nikolic.
She is conceiving inquiry for first Trans-Southeast Asian Triennial in Guang Zhou Repetition as a Gesture Towards Deep Listening (2021/2022)
She was the co-curator of the 3rd Ural Industrial Biennale for Contemporary Art (Yekaterinburg, 2015), curator in residency at Kadist Art Foundation (Paris, 2015), and a research fellow at Henie Onstad Kunstsenter (Høvikodden, 2016). Her recent exhibitions include An Inquiry: Modes of Encounter presented by Times Museum, Guang Zhou (2019); When the Other Meets the Other Other presented by Cultural Center Belgrade (2017); Proposals for Surrender presented by McAM in Shanghai (2016/2017); and This exhibition Will Tell You Everything About FY Art Foundations in FY Art Foundation space in Shen Zhen (2017).
In 2013, Ciric initiated the seminar platform From a History of Exhibitions Towards a Future of Exhibition Making with focus on China and Southeast Asia. The assembly platform was hosted by St Paul St Gallery, AUT, New Zealand (2013), Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai (2018), Times Museum, Guang Zhou (2019). The book with the same name was published by Sternberg Press in 2019 and was awarded best art publication in China in 2020.
Her research on artists organized exhibitions in Shanghai was published in the book History in Making; Shanghai: 1979-2006 published by CFCCA; and Life and Deaths of Institutional Critique, co-edited by Nikita Yingqian Cai and published by Black Dog Publishing, among others.
In 2018 she established the educational platform What Could/Should Curating Do? She was nominated for the ICI Independent Vision Curatorial Award (2012).
Currently she is developing a long-term project reflecting on China’s Belt and Road Initiative titled As you go . . . the roads under your feet, towards a new future. She is undertaking practice based PhD in Curatorial Practice at Monash University, Melbourne.
Since 2021 she has been teaching courses at China Academy of Art, International Master of Fine Arts Program.