East2009

EASTinternational 2009
selectors Raster Gallery and Art & Language
Exhibition preview Saturday 11 July 5-8pm

EASTpanel
2.30 to 4.30pm admission free.
NUCA Duke Street Lecture Theatre
Speakers Lukasz Gorczyca & Michal Kaczynski Raster, Michael Baldwin & Mel Ramsden Art & Language, John Roberts Reader in Fine Art Wolverhampton University,  John Russell and Barbara Walker EAST09 artists. Chair Lynda Morris EAST Curator.

Monday 13 July – Saturday 22 August
Open Monday to Saturday 10-5pm

2009 marks 20 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall and it seemed time for EAST to look further east. Raster gallery was asked to select EAST 09 as it was felt that the Warsaw Gallery had become a focus for knowledge of Polish artists in the west through their collaborations and appearance at art fairs
Art & Language, the collective of theory-based artists, founded the conceptual magazine Art Language in 1969. Art & Language showed at Foksal Gallery in Warsaw in 1975 and have continued to work with galleries and museums worldwide.
The selection was therefore across generations and across political cultures in Europe and the resulting dialogues and debates between the four selectors (Lukasz Gorczyca, Michal Kaczynski, Michael Baldwin and Mel Ramsden) touched the differences and common ground between artists in the new Europe.
The themes represented by the artists include social documentary touching on histories of Socialism and Capitalism in art, anarchism, race, industrial decline and climate change, connecting ways in which conceptualism had touched documentary traditions of the 1930’s. Works also develop ideas around minimalism, personal mythologies and the body, an examination of the individual and stories between the visual and the theoretical. Artists also express thoughts about language and the narration of presences in histories as varied as modernism, terrorism and progressive education.

Materiality of Theory

Symposium exploring the use and abuse of theory and philosophy in contemporary art practice. Discussions will encompass theory as art, what ‘materiality’ is if theory can count as just another material, the non-pictorial ‘writeability’ at the heart of the pictorial. Speakers include: John Mullarkey, philosopher at the University of Dundee and author of Post-Continental Philosophy; Marcus Steinweg philosopher/theorist at Hochschule für Bildende Künste in Braunschweig, editor of Inästhetik: Theses on Contemporary Art and author, with Thomas Hirschhorn, of Bataille Maschine; Stephen Zepke, theorist, Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Vienna and author of Art as Abstract Machine: Ontology and Aesthetics in Deleuze and Guattari. Organised and chaired by Jonathan Dronsfield, reader in theory and philosophy of art, University of Reading. Sponsored by Birmingham City University Art and Writing Network.

Institute of Contemporary Art, London, May 2009