Letting the Days Go By: SUNDAY PROGRAM

Lizzie Lloyd: CREATIVELY CRITICAL, CRITICALLY CREATIVE
Sun 17 June, 13:00-16:00

Creative writers, writers of fiction, are forever being instructed: ‘Show, don’t tell’! But writers on art spend most of their time telling not showing; they worry about what they are saying rather than how they are saying it.

This workshop looks at instances in which the creative and the critical merge. We will discuss examples of texts that are animated by the overlaps between creativity and criticality and which harness these two modes of writing in productive ways.

Together the workshop looks at various exercises and techniques to help expand our approaches to thinking and writing about art. We’ll be thinking about the way that critical writing can perform ideas through a creative approach to structure, form, tone and characterisation. What happens when what you perceive in an artwork starts to infiltrate the way that we write our texts? Can our texts write the artwork and write about the artwork simultaneously? Creatively Critical, Critically Creative attends to showing and telling, to the what and the how of encountering artworks in words.

RSVP required, limited spaces. Contact bronwyn@indexfoundation.se.

Lloyd’s workshops specialise in writing in relation to art, though she is particularly interested in a broad understanding of that relationship. Her workshop will be of interest to artists, writers, art historians and anyone who is interested in exploring the difficulties and creative potential of writing around art.

Lizzie Lloyd is a writer, translator, and lecturer in Fine Art and Art and Visual Culture at University of the West of England. Her writing for artists, galleries and publishers includes reviews, essays and experimental pieces. She contributes to a range of magazines and journals including Art Monthly, Art Review, artnet, HONORE, Journal of Contemporary Painting, among others. Her writing is included in multiple exhibition catalogues and has appeared alongside shows, most recently part of the Cubitt Residency Programme but also at Foreground, Peter Von Kant, Exeter Phoenix, Hestercombe Gallery, UH Gallery, KARST, and Bridport Museum among others. Lloyd’s work has been exhibited and/or performed as part of Plymouth Art Weekender, Autocatalytic Future Games (No Format gallery, London), HOUSEWORK (Safehouse1, London), Arnolfini Gallery and Spike Island. She was writer-in-residence at Arnolfini Gallery in 2016 and in Plymouth, through the Art Writers Group, in 2017. Her doctoral thesis on Art Writing and Subjectivity at University of Bristol is due to be completed in 2018.

Kasia Wolińska & Frida Sandström: THE FUTURE BODY AT WORK
Sun 17 June, 16:00-17:30

In this scored lecture and workshop, Kasia Wolińska & Frida Sandström continue their investigation of the political potentialities of dancing bodies.
As an ongoing research on the dual dependence of moving, talking and writing, the body-mind dichotomy is rejected and a study of what exists between bodies and words is proposed. RSVP required, limited places.

Through the history of revolution that occured in the dance field at the beginning of the XXth century, Kasia Wolinská and Frida Sandström work through a practice-based reflection on the legacy of dance taking into consideration the “unseen’ or which was ‘weaponized’ for the sake of cultural and political transformation. This is the dance work and the framework, reactivating moments in dance history referring to us, the future bodies. Through the responsibility for these gestures, the autonomy of the body at work is investigated. As an ongoing research on the dual dependence of moving, talking and writing, Wolinská and Sandström rejects the body-mind-dichotomy and proposes a study in-between bodies and words. In a scored lecture, participants of every background knowledge are invited to listen, feel and act.

The body’s history is a network of stories about shaping, constitution and subjugation it to and through regimes and ideologies. The body the site of ideology unfolding into aesthetics, body norms, gendering and racialization of the flesh. The body remains at work throughout the development of civilization: mediated, extended and organized by multiple technologies and philosophies. It was born out of its sociality, like Aphrodite out of foam. The dancer is born out of the hell of contemporaneity, chased by the past, the ancient body. What is within us, bursts out into the space and we need strategies to manage this archive, to mobilize it whenever the time is right. What are the political potentialities of dancing bodies? According to literary scholar André Hewitt, a dancer ”comes to represent the possibility of a self-sustaining energy, exciting itself through a reading and reiteration of its own rhythm (Hewitt, Social Choreography, 2005, p. 45).

Kasia Wolińska is a choreographer and dancer based in Berlin. In her practice she explores the political potentialities of choreography that mobilize images, stories, bodies and affects. She is a graduate of HZT Berlin. Dancewebber 2015. She is a part of Global Practice Sharing (Movement Research New York, Art Station Foundation, Poznan). She runs a blog about dance and politics.

Frida Sandström’s practice takes place in the intersection of art criticism and the pedagogical, with writing and performance as its core. She is one of the editors of Paletten Art Journal and a frequent writer in Swedish cultural journals and magazines. Frida currently studies a masters program in aesthetics at Södertörn University.

The Future Body at Work image by Ashiq Khondker with festival vectorisation

Sanna Marander & Niklas Tafra: YOU SAY IT BEST WHEN YOU SAY NOTHING AT ALL
Sun 17 June, 18:00-18:30

You say it best when you say nothing at all is a spatial play, a dialogue between the Artist and the Art Critic, or between any couple for that matter. The performance stems from a conflict that took place in the 1880’s between art critic Félix Fénéon and artist George Seurat, where the art critic was accused by the artist of using an over-explanatory language. Appropriating words by Félix Fénéon, George Seurat, Charles Baudelaire, Yayoi Kusama and others, the work revolves around the dot as a painterly method and punctuation mark, and the triangle as a model for dialogue.

Sanna Marander and Niklas Tafra work both separately and collaboratively with performance, installation and writing. Returning motifs are bodily and artistic processes, as well as subjective and political aspects of art history. Their collaborative works have recently been presented at Conceptual Poetics Day, Berlin (2017), Market Art Fair, Stockholm (2016), Overgaden Institut for Samtidskunst Copenhagen (2015) and Kunstverein Milano (2014).

Publication launch: WAKE UP!
Sun 17 June, 18:30-20:00

In our impossibility of common being, can we become beings in common? How do we begin again? I feel lucid, but my body refuses to move, leaving me to drift suspended in cognitive dissonance. Acknowledging my incompleteness, I keep trying to shake myself awake, searching for ways to be for and with others.

Continuing with ideas around the potential of texts, words, and dialogue, the latest issue of Wake Up! will be launched at the festival. The evening will feature a curated mixtape for a relaxed listening session and reading space, an invitation to be and become together.

Wake Up! is a general knowledge public service notice, a collection of publications that materializes dialogue in an attempt to realize critical consciousness in the everyday. Distributed as fragments which drift in and out of public and private spheres, the publication attempts to encounter as codifications, as reflections, as an open invitation to engage in dialogue. Distributed with stealth, the publication is a free-floating agent, made by designer Johnny Chang.

Johnny Chang is a Taiwanese-American, California-born graphic designer and visual artist. He studied graphic design at Art Center College of Design, worked between San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York, and is currently a Masters student at Konstfack in Stockholm, Sweden. Occasionally working under the name 啪啦待死 (Pa La Dai Si, or Paradise), he runs an independent design practice, publishes Wake Up!, and through his Masters studies, is exploring the distances and dissonances of diasporic visual cultures in the wake of globalization.