Conferences and Publications
KEYNOTE LECTURE – Landscapes of Abstraction, Between Violence and Reciprocity, or The Work of Art in the Age of the Planetary Mine
Rose-Anne Gush
Riga
December 2024
Keynote lecture, ‘Landscapes of Abstraction, Between Violence and Reciprocity, or The Work of Art in the Age of the Planetary Mine’, for the conference, ‘Landscapes and Identities’, University of Latvia, 5 December 2024 – no images
Trembling Worlds: Labour and Concentration Camp Aflenz an der Sulm, composition of aerial photography of the Royal Air Force (RAF) and the South African Air Force (SAAF) from April and August 1944.
INTERVIEW – Politics of the territory
Philipp Sattler
November 2024
CONFERENCE – Surrealism as Social Critique and Theory of Emancipation at ISSS Surréalismes Paris 2024
Rose-Anne Gush
Paris, France
October 2024
Surrealism as Social Critique and Theory of Emancipation
This panel, with Dr. Jackqueline Frost, Frida Sandström, William Spendlove and Rose-Anne Gush, explored the dual character of Surrealism’s politics as at once conducting a social critique of the present and at the same time producing a theorization of political emancipation in the future. To interrogate this double aspect, panelists surveyed moments in the European reception of Surrealism, as well as its late, extra-European instantiations within global political movements of the 20th century. In making contiguous the condemnation of the present and the proposal of new horizons for future social transformation, Surrealism offers a robust experimental programme for human ethics devised through the primacy of the aesthetic. The panel touched upon Surrealism’s links to Marxism, feminism, anti-imperialism and ecology while centering the movement’s construction of an anthropological vision of human culture (or de-culture) which necessarily connects aesthetic creation to collective forms of political existence.
INVITED LECTURE – Instability of Form. Untimely Landscapes. Notes on the Body Space
Rose-Anne Gush
Riga
October 2024
This talk explored temporal non-synchronicity in global contemporary art through its appearance in art’s use of the body and landscape, thus providing a background to the exhibition, Utopic Cells. The talk will unfold how the definition of the body (and human) has transformed historically, emphasizing art’s role in indexing this shifting meaning. Locating the body in its relation to technology and the earth, I will explore these notions in relation to Bolivia’s colonial history of mining and extraction, and its afterlives in the present.
PANEL CONTRIBUTION – Family: Notes on the Abolition of a Relation of Hierarchy, Privatised Care, Securitisation and Property
Rose-Anne Gush
September 2024
MODERATION – Burnout: The Emotional Experience of Political Defeat
Rose-Anne Gush
Graz
July 2024
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DISCUSSION – Burnout: The Emotional Experience of Political Defeat
Rose-Anne Gush
Vienna
July 2024
Der große Streitkunstpreis – Ausstellungsansichten Forum Hauptraum, 12.-13.4.24 © Silvia Hödl
PANEL/JURY – The Grand Artfight Prize
Rose-Anne Gush
April 2024
Visual art is characterised by a culture of avoiding conflict. What is normal in other fields – think, for example, of the annual debates around the Bachmann Prize – is often unthinkable in the visual arts. Exhibition openings and artists talks may address a wide range of topics, but rarely do they openly tackle controversies or discuss the question of what constitutes good and bad art.
At The Grand Artfight Prize, three artists display their works. In an artistic and entirely ironic setting, a jury and the public are invited to assess the works. To be awarded are – what else? – prizes! With one difference: in this art show, all of the invited artists will receive a different award.
But which award? And to whom?
Text by Forum Stadtpark
RESIDENCY – Critical Raw Cartography
Rose-Anne Gush and Philipp Sattler
Luxembourg
March 2024
Artistic research residency at Casino Luxembourg
Exhibition view Echos der Bruderländer. Photo: Hannes Wiedemann/HKW
PUBLICATION – Brothers in Arms
Rose-Anne Gush
March 2024
PUBLICATION – Architectures of Social Crisis in Melanie Gilligan’s Films Against Capitalism
Rose-Anne Gush
January 2024
This article takes as its principle subject the work of artist Melanie Gilligan, in particular two serial-films that comprise part of her recent project, Films Against Capitalism. These films address capitalism’s polycrisis – its economic, social, and health crises – through its manifestations in the present. Gilligan’s films investigate how housing, infrastructure, care, and community – areas of reproduction, and their representations – are inscribed socially, economically, and politically in a system mediated by capitalist social relations that evades its real function. In this article I suggest that Crowds and Home Together allegorize architectural representation and its concomitant social ordering. As well as reading these works in their social and historical context, this article investigates allegory as a tool to illuminate capitalist social relations and its relevance for (militant) artistic research, which is the context in which this body of Gilligan’s work was produced. Specifically, these works, along with an accompanying book, formed the qualifying materials for Gilligan’s art-practice PhD. In her PhD book, Gilligan lays out “provisional directions for filmmakers interested in reflecting on capital as a social form, using film as part of the struggle to fight against it”. The article addresses this context of artistic research as a framework governing much artistic production today, within which Films Against Capitalism makes a critical intervention.
Illiberal Lives, installation view, Ludwig Forum Aachen, 2023. Photo: Mareike Tocha
PUBLICATION – Autonomy’s Double Bind
Rose-Anne Gush
December 2023
Installation photo from the exhibition Charging Myths (2023) at Framer Framed, Amsterdam. © Maarten Nauw / Framer Framed
PUBLICATION – Sacrificial Energy
Rose-Anne Gush
June 2023
Exhibition view “The Other”, photo: Kunsthaus Graz / J.J. Kucek
PUBLICATION – The Other: Reimagine the Future
Rose-Anne Gush
November 2023
CONFERENCE – 19th Annual Conference of Historical Materialism
November 10-13 2022
Rose-Anne Gush presented research at the 19th annual conference of Historical Materialism, titled Facing the Abyss, an epoch of permanent war and counter revolution.
Shane Boyle: The Rule of Unnecessary Men: On Art and Supply Chain Automation
Rose-Anne Gush: Instability of Form after the Global Turn
Jennifer Warren: New Institutions? Legacies of the “Progressive” Art Institutions of the 2000s
Chair: Roberto Mozzachiodi
CONFERENCE – 5 Year Anniversary of the VALIE EXPORT Centre
November 10 2022
Rose-Anne Gush was invited to speak at the 5 year anniversary of the VALIE EXPORT Centre
Her talk was titled QUESTIONS. It addressed VALIE EXPORT’s Fragebogen, or “artists’ inquiry” from 1975, that was sent to some of the participants in preparation for her exhibition, MAGNA, Feminismus und Kunst, answered by at least 20 figures including but not limited to, authors, Elfriede Jelinek, Friedericke Mayröcker, Elfriede Gerstl, filmmaker Anna Ambrose, artists, Birgit Jürgenssen, Maria Lassnig and Charlotte Wolff. This was addressed in relation to a wider history and contextualisation of the method of the “worker’s inquiry” – Marx’s from 1880, and its legacy in Italy in the 1960s and 70s, institutional critique, and feminism’s encounter with the canon.
CONFERENCE – Curatorial Design
Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA) in Montréal, Canada
September 24 2022
The one-day public conference brought together critical provocations cultivated and expanded upon during the project through activating Curatorial Design as practice and establishing the Public School for Architecture [Öffentliche Bauschule]. The public conference took place at the CCA, a partner institution. The program reflected the three overlapping areas of research in the project with a panel dedicated to each – practice, publics, and pedagogy – to share the research outcomes and implications in these areas while opening them to responses from invited guests and the audience.
Wilfried Kuehn welcomed the presenters and audience and Dubravka Sekulić introduced the activities of Curatorial Design. Panel one-practice– brought into discussion Mark Lee and Wilfried Kuehn. Panel two – publics – took place as a conversation between Talia Dorsey and Francesco Garutti moderated by Anousheh Kehar. Panel three – pedagogy – opened space for Ivonne Santoyo-Orozco and Ross Exo Adams to share their practice and was moderated by Dubravka Sekulić. The panels were followed by a plenary discussion moderated by Gili Merin.
Curatorial Design Project/IZK
Participants: Wilfried Kuehn and Anousheh Kehar.
Authors: Wilfried Kuehn, Gili Merin, Dubravka Sekulić, and Anousheh Kehar.
PUBLICATION – What is the Spatial Form of the Future?
Rachele Alborghetti
What is the relationship between space and memory? Is it something subjective, does it depend on emotions, on sensations, on images…? Is there a way to find a spatial feature that might represent collectively and not, our idea of the future?
This is explored in the work “What is the spatial form of the future?” through a process that is led in three different steps and takes into account different sources and opinions. In the first part, “conversations with strangers”, the main aim is to see if there is a relation in between space and emotions, by earring and sharing stories and feelings. The second one explores the idea of memory and space, getting closer to the notion of time though “a collection of works” of different types. Finally the conclusion aims to understand what all this work led to, without giving a real answer but helping in some way to realise how the space around us is important and strongly linked with the idea of collective memory.
This is explored in the work “What is the spatial form of the future?” through a process that is led in three different steps and takes into account different sources and opinions. In the first part, “conversations with strangers”, the main aim is to see if there is a relation in between space and emotions, by earring and sharing stories and feelings. The second one explores the idea of memory and space, getting closer to the notion of time though “a collection of works” of different types. Finally the conclusion aims to understand what all this work led to, without giving a real answer but helping in some way to realise how the space around us is important and strongly linked with the idea of collective memory.
PUBLICATION – The European Dream
A collaboratively written script and performance produced within the IZK MA seminar: Through the Looking Glass, the Realities We Found There, led by Rose-Anne Gush:
Arzu Alioğlu, Nicole Antunovic, Gagandeep Bhatti, Rose-Anne Gush, Elsa Karvanen, Budour Khalil, Alena Viola Köstl, Anastasiia Kutsova, Abdelrahman Elbashir, Farnoosh Namaziyan, Sali Ren, Ana Patrícia Silva Varão Moreira
With help from Christina Chalmers and Federico Campagna
CONFERENCE – Life of Crops. Towards an Investigative Memorialization
CONFERENCE IN THE FRAMEWORK OF ‘AFLENZ MEMORIAL IN BECOMING’ CONCEIVED BY ARTIST MILICA TOMIĆ
8–9 November 2019, Universalmuseum Joanneum, Graz, Austria
Seeing World War II and National Socialism as the moment in which colonial practices return to the European continent enables an understanding of how this moment continues to inform realities that define current everyday practices. Evolving from the vibrant and manifold agency of soil, the conference “Life of Crops” seeks to unfold the memory of war and labor within the earth, starting from the repressed history of the labor camp Aflenz in the south of Austria, established between 1944 and 1945. The cross-analysis of soil reveals its performative agency for building ideological hierarchies of class and race through the relations of labor and property ownership. The colonial condition of the soil turns it into a living archive, a landscape bearing all layers of ambivalence, shifting between life and genocide.
The conference “Life of Crops: Towards an Investigative Memorialization” will take place at the Universalmuseum Joanneum in Graz, Austria on 8th and 9th November 2019. It is a foundational component of a collaborative, cross-disciplinary project established by artist Milica Tomić that considers memorialization as a living investigative process of reassembling, actualizing, and activating knowledge in the present.
To create such a setting we would like to bring established thinkers and practitioners working on key topics of the conference together with an inspiring younger generation of researchers.
Aspiring to engender an environment of unexpected alliances, the main pillars of this conference will be Soil, Labor, Property, Science/Technology, and Archaeology. “Life of Crops” strives to provide a setting for this marginally considered constellation of research across time and geographical contexts while fostering theoretical, scientific, and artistic thought and analytical practices.
PUBLICATION – GAM 14: Exhibiting Matters
The fields of art and architecture are currently witnessing an expansion of the exhibitionary complex: permanent and temporary exhibition spaces proliferate, blending with sites of consumption. Responding to this development, GAM.14 focusses on the act of exhibiting, which reconfigures the spatial limitations of the exhibition, thus creating dynamic sites of contestation and political confrontation. GAM.14 is a collection of current positions from the disciplines of art and architecture assembled around the conceptual effort to distinguish the act of exhibiting from exhibition, opening the potential of exhibiting as an exploratory space to address urgent social and political challenges of our time.
With contributions by: Bart De Baere, Ivana Bago, Ana Bezić, Nicolas Bourriaud, Maria Bremer, Ekaterina Degot, Ana Dević, Anselm Franke, Andrew Herscher, Christian Inderbitzin, Branislav Jakovljević, Sami Khatib, Wilfried Kuehn, Nicole Lai Yi-Hsin, Bruno Latour, Ana María León, Armin Linke, Antonia Majača, Doreen Mende, Ana Miljački, Museum of American Art in Berlin, Vincent Normand, Christoph Walter Pirker, Dubravka Sekulić, Antje Senarclens de Grancy, Katharina Sommer, Anna-Sophie Springer, Barbara Steiner, Kate Strain, Žiga Testen, Milica Tomić, Etienne Turpin, What, How & for Whom/WHW