Red Thread, 1-6 (2009-) [English/Turkish]

“The project Red Thread is envisioned as an active network and platform for exchange of knowledge and collaboration of artists, curators, social scientists, theorists and cultural operators from the Balkans, the Middle East, the Caucasus, North Africa, and beyond. It aims to create and widely disseminate new knowledge about paradigmatic socially engaged art practices in a wide geopolitical context, thus challenging the predominance of Western narratives in official art histories and exhibition making. Through initiating research, meetings, panel discussions and an active online site for exploring both historical and contemporary approaches that deepen and challenge broader relations of art and society, Red Thread intends to reopen the issues of joint modernist legacies and histories between various so-called “marginal” regions, and attempts to create new approaches to deal with questions of auto-histories, self-positioning and reinterpretation of art history.

The title of the project indicates a critical cultural and artistic engagement that has been present in the peripheral zones of the European modernistic project in different conceptual manifestations since the 1960s, when the crisis of the project of Western monolith high modernism in its relation to ideas of social progress became apparent. Metaphorical meaning of the expression ‘red thread’ suggests not only way out of labyrinth, but also a fragile, elastic link between different intellectual, social and artistic experimentations that share a desire for social change and the active role of culture and art in this process.

Red Thread is conceived as a possibility for starting a long-term communication and establishing new international platforms for artists and cultural workers from the regions considered to be part of supposedly shrinking but still corporeally very real geographical margins. Even if today one feels that there is no region excluded from the international art circuit, there still remains the issue of control, the unresolved and continuing play of inclusion and exclusion. In that respect, focusing primarily on regions of the Balkans, the Middle East, the Caucasus and North Africa, the project is conceived as an active site for rethinking the questions of production, definition, and presentation of the artwork and the artists’ identity in the globalized (art)world. It will explore the rules of conduct established in the Western art system, and question how the circulation and reception of information is regulated and how we can (and can we really) challenge it.”

Red Thread is initiated by WHW (what, how and for whom) and Osman Kavala in 2009 as part of 11th Istanbul Biennial.

Issue 1: HTML, PDF (2009)
Issue 2: “Sweet 60s”: HTML, PDF (2010)
Issue 3: HTML, PDF (2011)
Issue 4: Disposessions, Solidarities, Deintegrations, HTML, PDF (2017)
Issue 5: Alt-Truths and Insta-Realities: The Psychopolitics of Contemporary Right, HTML, PDF (2020)
Issue 6: Remembering in Circles, HTML, PDF (2023, added on 2024-1-18)

Oleksiy Radynski: Optical Unconscious in Visual Culture (2008) [Ukrainian]

Study of the interaction of Marxist and psychoanalytic projects in theory and practice of documentary films in 1920s and 1930s.

В роботі досліджується взаємодія марксистського та психоаналітичного проектів в теорії та практиці неігрового кіно 1920-30-х років.

Master thesis
National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy
Supervisor: Michael Sobutskiy

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Tiqqun: Premiers matériaux pour une Théorie de la Jeune-Fille (1999/2001) [French]

Ceux qui ont réussi à s’aveugler sur le fait pourtant massif de la Jeune-Fille n’en sont pas à une cécité près : ouvrez n’importe quel magazine féminin, vous le verrez bien, la Jeune-Fille n’est pas toujours jeune, n’est pas toujours fille. Elle n’est que la figure de l’intégration totale à une totalité en désintégration. Elle « n’est bonne qu’à consommer ; du loisir ou du travail, qu’importe ».On ne la côtoie pas que sur papier glacé ; elle est le vecteur le plus abouti de la nouvelle organisation sociale et la forme la plus sophistiquée de la mutation anthropotechnique, car elle est la nouvelle physionomie du Capital. Le formatage jeune-filliste se généralise. Ainsi, quand d’aucuns protestent contre l’évidence que le monde n’est pas une marchandise, et d’ailleurs, eux non plus, ils feignent une virginité qui ne justifie que leur impuissance. Tiqqun ne veut ni de cette virginité ni de cette impuissance. Il ouvre dans ces Premiers matériaux la voie à une autre éducation sentimentale.

Originally published in Tiqqun 1, 1999
Revised edition
Publisher Éditions Mille et une nuits, September 2001
La Petite Collection series
ISBN 9782842055905
144 pages

publisher

PDF (no OCR)
English edition (2010)
German edition (2009)