Index 19: Giorgio Giusti

Index 19 presents a talk by Stockholm-based artist Giorgio Giusti. The presentation will revisit Giusti’s solo exhibition The Standpoint of The Proletariat (2011) to discuss the role of protest and criticality in art, and to emphasize, in times of inflated MFA and proliferating artistic-practice research programs, the question: Where do artist go after ‘death’ (graduation)?

“2011 was the year in which Time Magazine awarded the person of the year title to ‘the protester’. It was the year of global popular uprisings and civil unrest, such as the live broadcasted Arab Spring, massive student revolts in Chile, and the emergence of the Occupy movement in the US, to name the events that were frequently mentioned and which resounded epistemically within the networks of contemporary art. A couple of years after 2011, what could be said about the ideas, images and collective experiences that were expressed during the year that made 1968 look ‘ancient’? What is the ontological status of contemporary art after 2011, in the age of Trump … and Sverigedemokraterna? What sorts of material enunciations and formal tendencies are surfacing in a European horizon of restoration and reaction today? What is the role of criticality and socially engaged ‘decommodified’ artistic counter-institutional practices in these times?”

Giorgio Giusti (born 1981) is an artist based in Stockholm. He graduated from the Städelschule, Frankfurt am Main and the Royal Institute of Art, Stockholm, and has collaborated and exhibited internationally (and in Sweden) with artists and writers such as Nikolaus Hirsch, Marie-Louise Ekman, Tamara Henderson, Juan Castillo, Shahira Issa and Ursula Biemann, amongst others. He curated the lecture program for the project Prosthesis, Metaphor and the Obsolete Body (2014-2016) at the Royal Institute of Art and is the founder of Circulo de Estudios Visuales (2017), and currently runs the collaborative platform MAIN together with Tomas Endresen.

Index 19 is a series in Index’ front space. Presenting single works, films, readings and discursive events, Index 19 is a space for dialogue with surrounding communities and visitors.

Please rsvp to rsvp@indexfoundation.se