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SSW PUBLIC TALKS
During the months of June, August and September, SSW are hosting a series of open talks to accompany our Summer AiR programme. Each month an invited artist/ curator, based in Scotland, will visit SSW to share their practice with us and the wider community. This is an opportunity to share this space and to meet our artists in residents.
These talks are free of charge.
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JON BLACKWOOD
7pm – 8pm, Thursday 18th August, 2016.
Positive Geography : Contemporary Art in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Macedonia
Jon Blackwood is a lecturer at Gray’s School of Art, Robert Gordon University, Aberdeen, and an independent curator and writer on contemporary art.
From 2011-14, Jon worked as a freelancer in Bosnia Herzegovina, and in Macedonia. He has curated shows in Sarajevo, Zagreb, Cetinje and Skopje, in addition to publishing An Introduction to Contemporary Art in Bosnia-Herzegovina (duplex 100m2, Sarajevo, 2015) and more recently Critical Art in Contemporary Macedonia (mala galerija, Skopje, 2016).
In this talk Jon will outline the idea of contemporary art as an ecosystem; a delicate series of interactions between artist, marketplace, gallerists, funders, cultural institutions and shifting audiences. In cultural ecosystems such as those in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Macedonia, the non-functioning of “official” art worlds forces artists and cultural workers to construct and maintain their own parallel networks of exchange.
In such conditions of precarity, where the artist forms part of a vast, underemployed reserve army of labour, what does contemporary art look like? This talk will introduce some examples, such as the practices of Adela Jušić and Lana Čmajcanin (Bosnia-Herzegovina), Igor Toševski and Obsessive Possessive Aggression (Macedonia), and open out for discussion the parallels that can be drawn between these cultural contexts, and our own in Scotland.
http://www.jonblackwood.net/
For further information, please contact:
arts@ssw.org.uk/ 01464 861372
