Krakow Festival Office
ArtBoom Festival 2011
ArtBoom Festival 2011
Martha Rosler - WUR: If You Lived Here… Revisited
Lecture in English
The If You Lived Here… project implemented by the artist together with Dia Art Foundation in New York from 1989-1991, whose summary is a book entitled If You Lived Here: The City in Art, Theory, and Social Activism: A Project by Martha Rosler, is a very important comment in a discussion on the role of artists in art institutions, as well as the possibility of their participation in and real influence on political and social reality. A three-part exhibition and a project dealt with such matters as housing, homelessness, gentrification and ongoing privatisation of the public sector, as observed in New York.
Return to the project created 20 years ago in a seemingly completely different cultural and historic context, in the USA of the decline of the conservative rule of Ronald Reagan, seems now particularly justified. As part of the festival of art in the public space and current discussions concerning participation and actions outside the framework of the artistic system, return to already historic practices and tested strategies – as well as their results, in the long run – is a necessary point of reference and a chance of critical revision of the current status of the art engage. What is more, the project structure suggested by Martha Rosler – based on multithreaded, processual work, participation of architects, urban planners, researchers and other specialists, involvement of non-artistic audience, inclusion of publication as another platform of communication, development of the projects and departure from the role of an artist as a creator only (today we would call it the artist – curator) – seems, from the current perspective, a prototypical model for activity of artists, curators and progressive institutions of contemporary art.
Photography: Weronika Szmuc
ArtBoom Festival 2011
ArtBoom Festival 2011
Martha Rosler - WUR: If You Lived Here… Revisited
Lecture in English
The If You Lived Here… project implemented by the artist together with Dia Art Foundation in New York from 1989-1991, whose summary is a book entitled If You Lived Here: The City in Art, Theory, and Social Activism: A Project by Martha Rosler, is a very important comment in a discussion on the role of artists in art institutions, as well as the possibility of their participation in and real influence on political and social reality. A three-part exhibition and a project dealt with such matters as housing, homelessness, gentrification and ongoing privatisation of the public sector, as observed in New York.
Return to the project created 20 years ago in a seemingly completely different cultural and historic context, in the USA of the decline of the conservative rule of Ronald Reagan, seems now particularly justified. As part of the festival of art in the public space and current discussions concerning participation and actions outside the framework of the artistic system, return to already historic practices and tested strategies – as well as their results, in the long run – is a necessary point of reference and a chance of critical revision of the current status of the art engage. What is more, the project structure suggested by Martha Rosler – based on multithreaded, processual work, participation of architects, urban planners, researchers and other specialists, involvement of non-artistic audience, inclusion of publication as another platform of communication, development of the projects and departure from the role of an artist as a creator only (today we would call it the artist – curator) – seems, from the current perspective, a prototypical model for activity of artists, curators and progressive institutions of contemporary art.
Photography: Weronika Szmuc