Split, Croatia / August 3, 2008

Organized by:

• The International Alternative Culture Center (IACC) www.alternativeculture.org
  The International Alternative Culture Center (IACC) is a non-profit organization which aims to facilitate research and generate new practices in alternative forms of culture. Based in Budapest, Hungary, it has a global compass.
• Perpetuum Mobile – www.perpetualmobile.org
  As a network vehicle, Perpetuum Mobile brings together multiple fields of practice and enquiry that exist in disparate institutional frames, acting as a conduit and motor for new forms of knowledge and organization.
• Alternative Culture Beyond Borders – www.alternativeculture.org
  Alternative Culture Beyond Borders is a three-year (2007-2010) international research project which explores the continued relevance and significance of the concept of alternative culture in the era of globalization. It involves more than 40 participants from sixteen countries.
• With the participation of OSA Archivum (Budapest) and McMaster University (Canada)

The role played by art in the world has never been more various, uncertain and unclear than at the present moment. On the one hand, a global system of art exhibitions, fairs and biennials (however theoretically inclined and subversively imagined) has rendered much contemporary art into blunt commodities which function as little more than symbolic capital for dominant classes to adorn themselves with. This is part of a larger shift in our global symbolic economies. All sorts of activities are being commodified, with sign values and brands being created for popular cultures, cities and even entire states. Public institutions such as museums and festivals that determine people's everyday life-world are increasingly being pressed into the service of marketing. One of the important side-effects of this is that an otherwise waning nationalism, its flames fanned by the systemic competitive pressures of the symbolic economy, is again on the rise.

Though art as a practice has been sidelined politically, it is now seen as a resource in shaping the ‘creativity’ understood to be essential to economic growth in the ‘new (creative) economy’. The very need for capital to invent a new narrative – ‘globalization’ – with which it hopes to secure its future, opens up a precarious space for art to articulate its own visions of the present and the future.

But there are other developments as well. Innumerable forms of do-it-yourself, alter-political art have attempted to take on this “society as spectacle” as directly as possible. At this end of the spectrum, there are practising artists openly oriented towards political activism. Some question the relevance and necessity of the aesthetic context, while some work with the art-institutional framing of their activity. For others, the aesthetic counters the reductiveness of contemporary social relations through more opaque, veiled or indirect approaches. If in the 90s the so-called ‘social turn’ brought with it a new approach to institutional critique, strategies of intervention, post-studio art, site-specific art, contextual art, community art, public, shared and collective art – i.e. project art in a generic sense – then the beginning of the twenty-first century has witnessed a rekindled interest in aesthetics. Whereas art employed philosophy, politics, political science, sociology biology, etc. as paradigms – sometimes even reducing itself to a poor illustration of theory – today, alongside theory, art practitioners seem to be striving for new configurations of thinking and doing aesthetic work.

Art, it seems clear, cannot compensate for the lack of political action. Yet aside from the role it may take in unmasking, reducing, un-making the “spectacle”, what is its positive potential? Are we not at a juncture at which “everybody knows” anyway? How do we get past the all-too-many “posts”? (“post-postism” not being a meaningful option). What role can art play in constituting, rather than just mixing or mediating between individuals, collectives, fields and traditions? At this stage, when the economy has learned to market “imagined communities” for sale, how can the imagination regain its autonomy while learning to think materially: that is, how can art feel, construct, move?

• 9:30 – 10:00
  Welcoming Words and Introduction by the Organizers
  Imre Szeman, Olga Zaslavskaya, Ivor Stodolsky, Marita Muukkonen
• 10:00 – 11:30
  Art, Memory and Politics
  Moderator: Konstantin Akinsha (Washington-Budapest)

  Jonathan Flatley (Detroit, USA), Collecting and Collectivity in the Work of Andy Warhol
  The so-called "Factory" where Andy Warhol and others made art, held parties, did drugs, and engaged in sex acts of various sorts defines one popular notion (at least in the U.S.) of what an 'alternative' cultural space is. This paper explores the model of alternative collectivity or community that Warhol articulates and performs in the "screen tests" he made of the residents of and visitors to the Factory. The several hundred screen tests comprise one of Warhol's many obsessive collecting projects. Collecting, as Walter Benjamin noted, always brings objects together in order that they can mingle with others that are like them in one way or another. Thus, in assembling his collection of screen tests, Warhol not only indexically marks the persons who came through the Factory, but in so doing translates their presence out of the everyday realm of identity into a specific cinematic space where they all dwell together in a field of likeness. I argue that this process of translating objects of perception and emotion into fields of similarity is a more general principle in Warhol's work, and is indeed the condition of possibility for Warhol of emotional attachment more generally. Without likeness there is no liking. And Pop Art, as Warhol said, is "liking things." By producing and proliferating likenesses, as he does in the screen tests, Warhol offers an escape from the binary opposition between the same and the different and thereby not only displaces the primary organizing logic of capitalism (in which everything must be at once universally exchangeable - the same - and qualitatively specific – the different) but also opens a space for a conception of desire that would not fall into the hetero-homo binary that dominates the modern discourses of sexuality. Thus, I argue, the screen tests model a queer mode of affiliation or collectivity based not on "identity" but on likeness, one which draws upon, democratizes and perverts mainstream mass media techniques, marking the space thus created as 'alternative,' but not for that reason closed or difficult to enter.

  Petra Rethmann (Hamilton, Canada), Spectacular Histories: A Note on Gerhard Richter's "October 18, 1977"
  The group of paintings entitled "October 18, 1977" that Gerhard Richter completed in the late fall of 1988 immediately confronts viewers with the question of the very possibility of representing history, both in contemporary painting and in modernism in general. Despite their apparent continuity with Richter's earlier photopaintings (for example, "eight student nurses" and "48 portraits"), "October 18, 1977" in fact constitutes the first attempt in Richter's oeuvre to address historically specific political and public experiences. In its photographic realism, it also violates the restriction against representing historical subjects in modern painting and breaks the "ban" against remembering a particular episode of recent German history - the activities of the Red Army Faction (RAF) and the deaths of some of its best-known members (Ulrike Meinhof, Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin, and Jan-Carl Raspe) in the high-security prison of Stuttgart-Stammheim. In looking at "October 18, 1977," I am no so much interested in the iconography of death - a diagnostic strategy frequently deployed in analyses of the paintings - as in the (im)possibility of en-visioning particular political strategies, including their conditions and commemorations.

  Ben Halligan (London, UK), Dying in State: the British Royal Family as a Thesis of History
  This paper will consider the nature and functions of the death of a monarch in, of and for our contemporary, “mediatised” society. This contemporary act of “state art” – the pageantry, the construction and public performance of “history”, the field of ideology as it presents itself in such a discourse – will be examined in relation to television coverage of the funeral of a Royal. What are the coordinates of the imaginings, to then be suggested by, channeled through, and institutionalised by, the 24/7 news media, of the life and reign, and its meanings, of the members of the British Royal family? This will not be an exercise in the counterfactual, but an attempt to extend postmodern critiques of the media so as to contextualise a deconstructionist response to the Royal figure in the mediasphere. Taking Turnock’s study of the responses to media coverage to the death of Princess Diana as a starting point, I will further the postmodern paradigm that Turnock found to be in operation: the “news”-factual death as ever-tempered by fictionalisations of the life of Diana – with this “feminised”, “soap opera” mode as, in the final analysis, both the confirmation of otherwise unbelievable news and the most acceptable vehicle for its dissemination. What kind of Regal act will the death of the current monarch, Queen Elizabeth II, represent: a transfiguration of the late Head of State, with a concomitant absorption of questions of democratic representation into a collective, metaphysical unconscious? a radical rereading of the history of post-war Britain, a live grafting of the “people’s history” onto reactionary, monarchical models of history? or the beginnings of a spiritual, meta-reign of the monarch, as articulated within immaterialist postmodern discourses in which a “spiritual” sensibility finds uneasy accommodation? And what, finally, can be progressively salvaged from this inevitable media spectacle? Does the event offer the possibility of extracting challenges to this contemporary manifestation of political art?

  Jessie Labov (Columbus, USA), Literary Gentrification, or, Are there any bohemians left in Bohemia
  My discussion of the gentrification of particular neighborhoods of cities travels through an inherently literary concept of "Bohemia" and "bohemianness," and I try to account for the role artists and writers play in re-narrating urban spaces. Additionally, I am interested in the way that literary or cultural space (and not solely urban space) can be "gentrified," and the attendant changes in value and flows of symbolic capital. In particular, I focus on the gentrification of East European literatures in "world literary space," and how the subsequent amassing of symbolic capital has spilled over into the real --into specific urban spaces after 1989. I use Prague as my main example, as it unites the two concepts of "Bohemian" and "bohemian," demonstrating how this specific neighborhood of Europe was transformed through both a living and writing practice of Westerners inhabiting the city in the 1990s.

• 11:30 - 11:45 Coffee break
• 11:45 - 13:00
  Art “and” Revolution
  Moderator: Jonathan Flatley (Detroit, USA)

  Zlatko Kopljar (Zagreb, Croatia), The Political Possibilities of Art Today
  I will be speaking about three of my works that deal directly with the issues raised in this colloquium. I will discuss the following works: (a) K4: which deals with resistance on the local level, reasons for action and the effects of action; (b) K9 compassion: which deals with relations towards the dominant world institutions of power, the position of the individual, his/hers possibilities towards institutions, and the need to (re)question the positions of resistance; and (c) K9 compassion +: which deals with the relationship of the individual towards institutions of total and real political world power, and on the powerlessness of individual to produce change. My works, with descriptions, can be seen at: http://www.kopljar.net/works.asp

  Gerald Raunig (Vienna, Austria), Art and Revolution
  This presentation will discuss some aspects from my book Art and Revolution, the mechanic and transversal aspects of the AND in "art and resistance", and perhaps add some critical remarks about Jacques Ranciere's very fashionable writings (at least in the art field) on aesthetics and the political.

  Dmitry Vilensky (St. Petersburg, Russia), On the Possibility of Avant-garde Composition in Contemporary Art
  Over the last few years, a number of artists have succeeded in both finding and realizing a theoretical grounding for a variety of works which allows us to speak of a new situation in art. These projects have found points of connection between art, new technologies, and the global movement against neo-liberal capitalism, and has subsequently been manifested through a variety of cultural projects whose critical stance towards the process of capitalist globalisation and emphasis on the principles of self-organisation, self-publishing and collectivity has evoked the idea of a return to “the political” in art. There is evidence that what we are actually talking about is the emergence of an artistic movement: its participants are concerned with developing a common terminology based on the political understanding of aesthetics. From history we know that the traits of this kind of movement were once one of the characteristic of the avant-garde. However, many people today see the avant-garde as something discredited by the Soviet experience - a totalitarian situation the anti-capitalist movement has explicitly sought to reject. But despite the anti-vanguardist principles of the “movement of movements” – I try to argue that some of the essential content of the avant-garde is crucial for an understanding of contemporary art.

  Ana Peraica (Split, Croatia-Amsterdam, The Netherlands), Crveni Peristil (“Red Peristyle”): Disintergration of the Revolution (1968 - 2008)
  Revolution has been surpassed, to paraphrase both El Lissitzky and Lenin. 40 years from the "revolutionary" date of 1968 it is only on cosmetic products that we find the word "revolution": anti-aging (or even reactionary) technology, working against "free radicals." Instead, terms such as "silent protest," "demonstrations" and less often, "riots," take place only in the political speeches of the formerly left part of the world (post-communist). Crveni Peristil (Red Peristyle, 1968, Split) and its followers (Black Peristyle, Green Peristyle...) show more than anything the fall of the political will and the decline of the revolutionary (wo)man. Moreover, the myth of Crveni Peristil has been institutionalised in the art and museum context in the form of the authorial work – works assigned to the never-existing group under which even the accidental photographer was subsumed for the reason of "possessing the object" of an event that lasted only for a couple of hours. The lecture follows the parallels between the decline of political will and the introduction of the Western art market into the mythical territory of socialism.

• 13:00 - 14:00 Lunch Break
• 14:00 - 15:30
  Political Art Today
  Moderator: Ivor Stodolsky (Helsinki, Finland–St. Petersburg, Russia)

  Helen Petrovsky (Moscow, Russia), The Utopian in Mass Culture
  In this presentation I will introduce a distinction between utopia and the utopian. The latter will be linked to what Ernst Bloch has called "residue", referring to the very condition of utopia's fulfillment. I will further speak of the utopian in mass culture as that which is grounded in the stereotypical or the banal. Special attention will be given to the place and forms of the utopian in current post-Soviet cultural production (Victor Pelevin, Alexei Balabanov, etc.).

  Suzana Milevska (Skopje, Macedonia), Art and Passive Resistance
  The usual assumption that art is impotent for hands-on political action needs to be re-thought and reformulated. I want to argue that the complex reciprocal relation between passive resistance and political activism in art may call into question some stereotypical notions about the limits of activist art. While trying to deconstruct the dichotomy between passive and active political impact on society, both art activism and passive resistance have been redefined through concrete projects. We may locate some intrinsic potentialities for political action of contemporary art production by comparing and exploring the points of conjunctions and disjunctions between various models and traditions of art activism and passive resistance.

  Alexei Penzin (Moscow, Russia), Capitalism as Religion? Experience of an interdisciplinary project in Moscow
  This recent project, which I initiated and co-organized in Moscow with theorists and artists in the form of a series of conferences and workshops, started with a discussion of Walter Benjamin's dense and interesting fragment called "Capitalism as Religion" (1921). A special panel of the project dedicated to "Strategies of resistance" will be reported and discussed in my presentation for the colloquium.

  Konstantin Akinsha (Washington, USA-Budapest, Hungary), Who is Afraid of Political Art Today?
  What is political art? Is it possible today? The 20th century became the period of the triumph of art produced for political purposes. Through revolutions and wars (including the cold one) artists became not only politically engaged, but also found the last “grand patron” in ideological states and political parties. However by the end of the 20th Century, after the collapse of ideological models the patrons withdrew their support for “political art.” Contemporary art proved to be an inefficient medium unable to transmit political/ideological message in the epoch of overproduction of images, created by much more “economic means,” than devices employed by contemporary art. It seems that today contemporary art has the same function as anti-modernist art had in the totalitarian societies of the first half of the 20th century. It became no more than ritual practice. The dream of Russian Marxist theoreticians of the end of the 1920s about an artist as “the manipulator of mass consciousness” proved to be an illusion.

  Maria Whiteman (Hamilton, Canada), Why Photography Now?
  My talk will discuss artists such as Bernd and Hilla Becher, Andreas Gursky, Thomas Ruff and Thomas Struth—all of whom were all enrolled at the Dusseldorf Art Academy at different times. Tracking this particular space of emergence, I will discuss the emergence of photography as a dominant artistic genre in the last twenty years and what impact this has had on contemporary art world more generally.

• 16:45 - 18:00
  Roundtable: Many Arts, Many Resistances
  Moderator: Imre Szeman (Hamilton, Canada)

  Alain Badiou has suggested recently that the question “what is the function of art?” was one of the obsessive themes of the twentieth century. In the nineteenth century, the artist was placed in the position of “the avant-garde in the strict sense – the one who marches in front – a figure tied to the awakenings of peoples, to progress, to liberation, to an upsurge of energies.” The avant-garde of the twentieth century – the century we normally associate with this category – assumed a different role: the artist as “secrete, active exception, as the custodian of lost thought” who “stands guard against perdition.” Looming in the background here are the ruins of Enlightenment thinking: the artist as heroic champion of the new and advanced figure in the march of progress and human ‘maturity’ gives way to a sense of the artist as the keeper of a flame always in danger of going out, which she must learn to somehow to fan into flames of social, cultural and political revolution.
  So go the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. What can we say about the position of the artist at the beginning of this new century? What new answers can we provide to the question “what is the function of art?” – or is this even the right question to ask anymore?

Roundtable participants include:

Suzana Milevska (Skopje)
Viktor Misiano (Moscow)
Ivor Stodolsky (Helsinki–St. Petersburg)
Marita Muukkonen (Helsinki)
Alisa Prudnikova (Yekaterinburg)
Petar Milat (Zagreb)

Presenter Profiles

• Marita Muukkonen (The Finnish Fund for Art Exchange, Helsinki, Finland) is a curator and a writer. She is an Editor of FRAMEWORK - Finnish Art Review. Previously, she worked as a project adviser and coordinator at the Nordic Institute for Contemporary Art (NIFCA). She has been working extensively in the field of international art exchange and in positions at several Nordic arts organisations. She is piloting a multidisciplinary motion vehicle Perpetuum Mobile with Ivor Stodolsky. Past projects include THE RAW, THE COOKED AND THE PACKAGED - Archives of Perestroika Art exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art KIASMA, Helsinki November 07 - January 08.

• Dr. Imre Szeman is Senator William McMaster Chair of Globalization and Cultural Studies at McMaster University, where he has taught since 1999. He is the recipient of the John Polanyi Prize in Literature (2000), Petro-Canada Young Innovator Award (2003), the Scotiabank-AUCC Award for Excellence in Internationalization (2004, for the Institute on Globalization), an Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship (2005-7) and the David Douglas Duncan Fellowship (2006-7). He is a co-founder of the Canadian Association of Cultural Studies and a founding member of the Cultural Studies Association (US). Szeman is editor (with Richard Cavell) of Cultural Spaces, a book series published by University of Toronto Press, as well as co-editor of Review of Education, Pedagogy and Cultural Studies and associate editor of Politics and Culture. He is the recipient of three Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Standard Research Grants. Szeman has been a visiting professor at Universidade de São Paulo (2004), Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (2005-2006) and Central European University in Budapest (2006, 2007).
Dr. Szeman's main areas of research are in postcolonial studies, globalization, contemporary culture, and social and cultural theory. He is author of Zones of Instability: Literature, Postcolonialism and the Nation (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003) and co-author of Popular Culture: A User's Guide (Nelson, 2004; 2nd edition forthcoming). He is also co-editor of Pierre Bourdieu: Fieldwork in Culture (Rowman and Littlefield, 2000), the Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005, 2nd edition, chosen as one the outstanding academic books of 2005 by Kirkus Review and Choice), Global-Local Consumption (Sage, forthcoming) and Canadian Cultural Studies: A Reader (Duke University Press, forthcoming). He has published more than fifty articles and book chapters on globalization, cultural studies, and cultural theory, and has edited special issues of Essays on Canadian Writing (1999), Review of Education, Pedagogy and Cultural Studies (2002, 2007) and South Atlantic Quarterly­ (2001). Current projects include a second edition of Popular Culture: A User's Guide, an edited volume, Cultural Theory: An Anthology, and a book on the cultural politics of contemporary anti-Americanisms around the world.

• Ivor Stodolsky (Helsinki, Finland – St. Petersburg, Russia) is Researcher of Russian culture and theory at the Aleksanteri Institute, University of Helsinki, a writer and independent curator. He is a co-founder of Perpetuum Mobile, and has co-curated exhibitions such as The Raw, The Cooked and The Packaged - The Archive of Perestroika Art at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Kiasma, organised conferences and worked as Associate Editor of a global op-ed syndicate. He holds a BA in Philosophy and Mathematics (University of Bristol) and a Masters of Research in Humanities and Cultural Studies from the London Consortium (BBK, University of London). As a doctoral candidate at the Department of Slavonic Languages and Literatures he is working on recent Russian intellectual and artistic currents, socio-cultural theory and cultural geopolitics.

• Olga Zaslavskaya joined the OSA as an archivist for Slavic languages and Samizdat archives curator in 1996. From 1987-1993 she taught courses in philosophy, the social sciences and aesthetics in universities of the Altai region. She has taken an active part in organizing several exhibitions, including Forced Labour Camps (GULAG), Prague 1968 and The TypeWriter Exhibition on samizdat, and has participated in the organization of the Curriculum Resource Center sessions in cooperation with the CEU History Department. She has been an essential contributor to the establishment of the IS[R]A network, and since September 2005 has been involved in strengthening the focus of OSA on the promotion of alternative culture. Her current research interests include problems of creativity and cognition, problems of alternative culture and the samizdat phenomenon.

• Dr. Konstantin Akinsha (Washington, USA) is an independent scholar and contributing editor to ARTnews magazine. Born in Kiev in 1960, he obtained his PhD in Art History. In the 1990s he worked as a Moscow correspondent and contributing editor of ARTnews magazine in New York. His work has focused on the confiscation of cultural property during World War II. He was a research fellow of Kunstverein Bremen, Research Center for East European Studies, University of Bremen and Germanisches Nationalmuseum. In 1999–2000 Akinsha was the deputy research director of the Art and Cultural Property of the Presidential Advisory Commission on Holocaust Assets in the United States. He has curated exhibitions of modern and contemporary art and given numerous public lectures in Europe, Asia, and North America. He publishes in leading international newspapers and magazines and has received journalism awards. Akinsha is co-author of The AAM Guide to Provenance Research (2001), and co-author of Beautiful Loot: The Soviet Plunder of Europe's Art Treasures (1995).His most recent co-authored work is The Holy Place: Architecture, Ideology, and History in Russia (2007).

• Dr. Jonathan Flatley (Wayne State University, USA) is Assistant Professor of English at Wayne State University in Detroit. He was previously a faculty member at the University of Virginia, where he was director of the Modern Studies Program. He is author of Affective Mapping: Melancholia and the Politics of Modernism, co-editor of Pop Out: Queen Warhol and editor of the forthcoming Warhol in Moscow: Essays on Art and Mass Culture.

• Dr. Petra Rethmann (McMaster University, Hamilton, Canada) is Associate Professor of Anthropology, a faculty member in the Cultural Studies Critical Theory program, and a member of the Institute on Globalization and the Human Condition. She is the author of Tundra Passages (2001), co-editor of Globality, Autonomy and Culture (forthcoming), and the author of numerous articles that have appeared in edited volumes and in journals such as American Anthropologist, American Ethnologist, Cultural Critique, Anthropologie et Société, History and Memory, and Journal of Historical Sociology (in press).Petra Rethmann is currently working on two book-length projects. The first one examines the afterlife of left-wing radical movements in former West Germany, including their political and aesthetic representations. The second project involves an urban ethnography of Moscow.

• Dr. Benjamin Halligan (University of Salford, UK) teaches Applied Performance Practice, Performance Analysis and Contemporary British Theatre at The School of Media, Music and Performance. Halligan's research has highlighted the ways in which artistic form was radicalised in tandem with militant activism in Europe in the 1960s. His PhD research focused on the European New Waves. He is currently working on a study of contemporary film and anti-globalisation, Against the Complex: Film in the Era of Globalisation, and an edited volume Prep: the British Public School on Screen as well as articles on Derek Jarman and The Smiths, media representations of the British Royal family, the Living Theatre and Viennese Actionism. Halligan is the author of Michael Reeves (2003) and is a regular contributor to the journal Senses of Cinema (http://www.sensesofcinema.com).

• Dr. Jessie Labov (Ohio State University, USA) is an Assistant Professor of Slavic Literature at the Ohio State University. Her work focuses on underground and alternative culture during the Cold War, particularly as it circulated between East and West through samizdat and tamizdat. She specializes in the intellectual & literary history of Central Europe, and has written on film, new media, and material culture from the region. Recent publications include “Listening In: Foreign radio broadcasting as distortion and expression of the cultural sphere” in From Samizdat to Tamizdat, ed. Kind-Kovács and Labov (forthcoming); “Tamizdat: independent media crossing borders from l’Ancien régime to today’s Europe” (with Friederike Kind-Kovács) in Underground Publishing and the Public Sphere: Comparative and Transnational Perspectives, ed. Franz Mauelshagen, Jan C. Behrends, Thomas Lindenberger (forthcoming), and “Leksikon Yu Mitologije: Reading Yugoslavia from Abramović to žmurke,” Mythistory and narratives of the nation in the Balkans, ed. Tatjana Aleksić, (Cambridge Scholars, 2007).

• Zlatko Kopljar is a visual artist. He has exhibited at the Sao Paulo Biennale, the Museum of Contemporary Art (Zagreb), the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (Rijeka), The Kitchen (New York) and Gallery Manes (Prague). His works are included in collections of the Museum of Contemporary Art, the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, the Museum of Modern Art (Zagreb), and the Filip Trade collection. He graduated from painting in 1991 with professor Carmelo Zotti of the Academy of Fine Arts in Venice, Italy. Kopljar currently lives and works in Zagreb, Croatia (http://www.kopljar.net).

• Gerald Raunig (European Institute for Progressive Cultural Policies, Vienna, Austria). Rauning is a philosopher and co-ordinator of the transnational research projects “republicart” (http://republicart.net) and “transform” (http://transform.eipcp.net), university lecturer at the Institute for Philosophy, University of Klagenfurt, co-editor of two series of books at Turia & Kant, Vienna: republicart: Kunst und Öffentlichkeit and es kommt darauf an: Texte zur Theorie der politischen Praxis, founder and member of the editorial board of the multilingual webjournal transversal (http://transversal.eipcp.net/) and the Austrian journal for radical democratic cultural politics, Kulturrisse (http://www.igkultur.at/kulturrisse). Recent books: Art and Revolution: Transversal Activism in the Long Twentieth Century, Los Angeles/New York: Semiotext(e)/MIT Press 2007, Kritik der Kreativität, Wien: Turia & Kant, 2007 (ed. by Gerald Raunig and Ulf Wuggenig), and Tausend Maschinen: Eine kleine Philosophie der Maschine als sozialer Bewegung, Wien: Turia & Kant, 2008.

• Dmitry Vilensky (St. Petersburg, Russia) works as an artist and cultural activist. In 2003 he initiated the platform "Chto delat?/What is to be done?" and continues to work as managing editor of the newspaper of the same name (http://www.chtodelat.org). Vilensky works mostly within a framework of interdisciplinary collective practices through video, photography, text and installations. He participates in many international and Russian exhibitions. He has published numerous essays in art catalogues, journals and newspapers both in Russia and internationally. He has taught at institutions both in Russia and abroad, including the Staedel Schuele (Frankfurt am Main), the Critical Studies Program (Malmo), FRAME Finnish Fund for Art Exchange in collaboration with the Art Academy (Helsinki), and the Copenhagen Royal Art Academy. Some of his most recent exhibitions include U-turn quadriennalle for Contemporary art (Copenhagen, [upcoming]), the Taipei Biennial (2008), “SOCIÉTÉ ANONYME”, Le Plato (Paris, 2007), Black Square, “Space for Actualization” (Hamburg), the workshops Art Moscow (Moscow, 2007), "Interrupted Histories” (2007), “Cities from Below”, Teseco Foundations (Pisa, 2006), “Strategies for Self-education”, Center for Contemporary Art (Moscow, 2006), Moderna galerija (Ljubljana, 2006), “La Normalidad/Ex-Argentina”, Palacio Nacional de las Artes (Buenos Aires, 2006), “Capital (It Fails Us Now)”, Kunstihoone (Tallinn, Estonia, 2006). He has also authored “Rethinking Marxism” (2008), Documenta 12 Magazine, Kassel (2007), “Ante 5,” Russian Art in Translation, USA (2007), “Maska” Performing Arts Journal (Winter 2007), “A Conversation on Education as a Radical Social (and Aesthetic) Practice” with Marta Gregorčič, Bojana Piškur and Marjetica Potrč, Springerin (02.06), Phase2 (22/2006).

• Ana Peraica (Split, Croatia) completed her post-academic research on art theory and new media at the Jan Van Eyck Akademie, Maastricht. She has been involved in programming for Histories of the New, ISEA, 2004 (Stockholm, Helsinki and Tallinn), and the Split Film Festival (1998 and 2007). She has recently curated an online project entitled “Victims' Symptom – PTSD and Culture” (Lab for Culture, 2008) which addresses exploitation and the political and cultural production of victims. Her essays in the domains of visual studies, media theory and political analysis have been published in journals such as Springerin (Austria), Issues in Contemporary Arts and Culture (The Netherlands) and Pavilion (Romania). She has also contributed two chapters to East Art Map (eds. Irwin, Afterall Publishing/MIT Press, London, 2005), and Worlds of Feminism and Queer and Networking Conditions (eds. Grzinic and Reitshamer, Loecker Verlaag, Vienna, 2007). She is the managing editor of the reader Zena na raskrizju ideologija (Split, HULU/Governmental Office for the Equality of Rights, Split, 2007) which was part of the project “Woman at the Crossroad of Ideologies”. A selection of her essays entitled Sub/verzije is published by Školska Knjiga (Zagreb). She teaches visual culture, media arts and propaganda systems in the arts in the department of Cultural Studies of the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Rijeka. She is a member of IKT (International Curators of Contemporary Art), Leonardo Journal (MIT Press) and also a member of the working group Artists and Scientists in Times of War.

• Dr. Viktor Misiano (Moscow, Russia) is an art critic, art historian and renowned curator of many international exhibitions. He was the chief curator of the Russian Pavilion in 1995 and 2003, and of the Central Asia Pavilion in 2005 at the Venice Biennale. He has authored numerous publications on contemporary art, and is the editor of Moscow Art Magazine (AM), the only Russian publication dedicated to the theory of contemporary art. He is also a founder of the curatorial practice review Manifesta Journal. He writes for various international art journals, focusing on contemporary Russian art, photography and art theory. In 2007 he was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Art and Design in Helsinki.

• Dr. Helen Petrovsky (Institute of Philosophy, Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow, Russia) is a member of the Russian Anthropological School (Russian State University for the Humanities) and the Russian Institute for Cultural Studies. Her major fields of interest are contemporary philosophy, visual studies, North American literature and culture. She is author of Part of the World (1995), Eye's Delight (1997), The Unapparent: Essays on the Philosophy of Photography (2002), Anti-photography (2003), and Theory of the Image: Lectures (forthcoming). She has edited a number of volumes, including Jacques Derrida in Moscow: The Deconstruction of a Travel (1993) and Bachelors by Rosalind Krauss (2004). She is the compiler, editor and co-translator of Jean-Luc Nancy's Corpus (1999) and Gertrude Stein's selected writings (2001). Since 2002 she is the editor-in-chief of the biannual theoretical journal Sinij Divan.

• Suzana Milevska, Ph.D., is a theorist and curator based in Skopje, Macedonia. She holds degrees in Art History from St. Cyril and Methodius University in Skopje and in Philosophy and History of Art and Architecture from Central European University in Prague. She received her PhD from the Department of Visual Cultures of Goldsmiths College – London where she was teaching from 2003-2005. In 2004 she was a Fulbright Senior Research Scholar at the Library of Congress, Washington D.C., and in 2001 she won the P. Getty Curatorial Research Grant. Her research and curatorial interests include socially and politically engaged art, postcolonial institutional critique of power structures, and the representation of gender difference. She curated over 70 exhibitions, international projects and conferences in Istanbul, Skopje, Stockholm, Berlin, Bonne, Stuttgart, Leipzig, Prague, London and Ljubljana. She was the curator of the Open Graphic Art Studio at the Museum of the City of Skopje and the Director of the Visual and Cultural Research Centre - Skopje. She is a member of the International Association of Curators (IKT) and of the International Association of Art Critics (A.I.C.A.). As an international correspondent, she writes for Feminist Review, Contemporary and Springerin and her texts have been included in many other art and theoretical magazines, books and publications.

• Alexei Penzin (Moscow, Russia), PhD, is a research associate in the Sector of Analytical Anthropology at the Institute of Philosophy, Russian Academy of Sciences. His major fields of interest are the critical re-evaluation of philosophical anthropology, contemporary interpretations of Marxist thought, and the interconnections of art and political praxis. His current project is a book on cultural representations of sleep in the context of the biopolitical regulations of life under late capitalism. He is also a member of the interdisciplinary group "Chto Delat/What is to be done?," which works in the spaces between theory, art and political activism.

• Dr. Maria Whiteman is an artist, photographer and writer based in Hamilton, Ontario. She has taught Multimedia and Studio Art at McMaster University, where she currently teaches Visual and Cultural Studies in the English Department. Whiteman has exhibited at McMaster University Museum of Art, Art Gallery of Hamilton, and Kiasma Contemporary Art Museum (Helsinki), Urbanscape Gallery (Toronto), among other places. In addition to writing several catalogue essays, she has published in Resources for Feminist Research and contributed the entry on “Visual Culture to the Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism (2005). Current projects include Critical Peripateticism, a multimedia project she began in 2007 -8 during a two-month residency at the Banff Centre for the Arts. She is also working on "Indeterminate Landscapes" in Contemporary Canadian photography.

• Peter Milat (Zagreb, Croatia) is a philosopher and co-founder of the Multimedia Institute in Zagreb. He is the editor of several philosophical, social and media theory book-series and especially interested in the interrelations between contemporary social theory and aesthetics, with an accent on French and Italian philosophical contexts. In recent years he was researching on socialist Yugoslavia's history, outlining the biopolitical-normative conditions of the break-up of the Yugoslav state.

• Alisa Prudnikova (Yekaterinburg, Russia) is an art theorist, curator and critic. She is a member of the Art Critics and Art Historians Association (AIS) and Editor-in-Chief of ZAART, a magazine for the creators and consumers of art which is dedicated to the analysis of the cultural situation in the Ural region. As an independent and conceptual magazine ZAART serves as a forum for contemporary discourses. Prudnikova also works as an assistant lecturer at the Ural State Gorky University, Department of Art History and Cultural Studies. Courses taught: Introduction to Contemporary Art, History of 20th-Century Art, Project Management in Cultural Organizations. She is currently working on her PhD dissertation entitled “Representation and Technological Mediation of the Body in Art”. She is a curator of numerous local and international art projects, and an organizer of and participant in more than 10 international conferences. Her academic interests include new technologies in art, the artist’s body, media, performance, bioart, new aesthetics, tolerance, problems of national and local identity, public art strategies, creative industries, and the missions, objectives and strategies of the development of contemporary art institutions. Since 2005 has been the director of the Yekaterinburg Branch of the National Centre for Contemporary Arts (Russia).