Made in Mirrors

Curating New Centralities

| 27 28 29 | September 2010 | Recife

Fundação Joaquim Nabuco and Made in Mirrors organize a symposium entitled Curating New Centralities due to take place in Recife in the autumn of 2010. The aim of the symposium is to reunite curators from all parts of the globe (with a special emphasis on the countries represented in the MIM project) with a desire to stage a follow-up of critical ideas, critical of modernity and pragmatically anti-utopian of Gerardo Mosquera’s 1994 anthology: Beyond the Fantastic Contemporary Art Criticism from Latin America. According to a statement of Mosquera, „The global world is also, paradoxically, the world of differences“, a fact that Made in Mirrors wants to trigger in our minds and raise awareness for elements that bring us together and elements that turn us apart.

The reason why we chose to stage the symposium in a region that is rarely visited by international curators, is already a statement about the changes in the contemporary art scene. Recife is a very vibrant environment in the poorest region of Brazil. However, the city has been established as one of the most important cities for contemporary art. The next general curator of Sao Paulo Biennial, Moacir dos Anjos, is from Recife. In this context, the issues raised in the symposium find a real context of analysis, a live case study.

Some of the questions and issues by the symposium will be:

How to deal with local necessities and international premises?

Are curators from emerging countries contributing to a new history of art and parameters?

What kind of new cultural geography can we expect?

Is there a common, global ground in a curatorial approach?

Are Western institutes dead; are they dinosaurs?

How does cultural or contextual diversity influence the curating practice?

Should we talk about a program, an agenda or a space instead of an institution?

What is the new curatorial model?

Duan Jianyu is preparing a residency in Recife

Chinese artist Duan Jianyu is preparing to go to Recife for a residency program. During this period she will make a serie of "notes" with observer eyes, a combination of tourist and spy at the same time.

Duan is one of the most appreciated chinese painters, caused by her shift in the perception of reality. Her works points to the philosophical nature of her art. Purposely avoiding the painterly sublime, she strives for the most generic subject matter and she delves into banal expression and style. The chickens, which appears in many of her photographs, multi-media installations and paintings, are a metaphor for this interest in the ordinary.

MiM related project in Cairo

Between 28th and 30th of October 2010, the Townhouse Gallery in Cairo will host an international symposium under the title Rethinking the archive.

The objective of this symposium is to debate upon contemporary challenges associated with the documentation process and the educational, curatorial and artistic potential of archival material. The urgency of the project comes as a result of the last 10 years when the Middle East has been experiencing a renaissance in the field of contemporary art production. In the same time, galleries and independent organizations working in the region are dealing with a lack of documentation of artists’ work. The symposium will be structured around public presentations open to the general public and closed working sessions and roundtable discussions for cultural practitioners directly involved in regional archival and documentation initiatives and research projects.

The program constitutes a MiM related event, as guests and thoughts will represent the MiM network and its perspective of reflection.

Residency Project: TO DIVE STRAIGHT IN…

Like other forms of culture, gastronomic culture is changeable in all its facets and thus expresses a constantly changing cultural identity.

MiM makes one step further in enlarging horizons and perspectives, entering the world of taste and reaching for the mental satisfaction.

SCHUNCK*’s food curator Jeffrey Kuckelkorn is invited to immerses himself in the Egyptian gastronomic culture as a culinary anthropologist applying the Made of Mirrors framework during his residency in Cairo.