Radical Education Collective (eds.): New Public Spaces: Dissensual Political and Artistic Practices in the Post-Yugoslav Context (2009)

New public spaces: dissensual political and aesthetical practices in the post-Yugoslav context is a reader edited by a Radical Education Collective from Ljubljana (Gal Kirn, Gasper Kralj and Bojana Piskur). It drew its inspiration from encounters and conversations with activists, artists, critical thinkers, curators, militant researchers and writers from Belgrade, Helsinki, Istanbul, Ljubljana, London, Pristina and Prizren in April and May 2008 at the social centre ROG and the AKC Metelkova mesto in Ljubljana. Those encounters challenged not only the distinction between ‘serious’ discussions and ‘informal’ debates – that instantly reproduce linear time and hierarchical space – but also our mutual ability to listen, talk and share experiences (instead of consume information). Contributions were subsequently elaborated into the reader, which consists of two parts. In the first part, engaged collectives reflect on the organisation of different political issues: from anti-capitalist and student struggles, to immigrant workers and the re-appropriation of public spaces in the region. The second part focuses on specific art collectives from Kosovo and Ljubljana, which are occupied with the question of space: why was space so important when rethinking the relation between art and politics, and also what can one do with the space? Here, a set of political practices enabled art collective to undermine the presupposed liberal border between public and private. The reader concludes with a presentation of some art projects that intervened and articulated spatial and visual transformations in the post-Yugoslav context.

Authors and contributors: Barbara Beznec, Sezgin Boynik, Ibrahim Ćurić, Cornelia Durka, Janna Graham, Minna Henriksson, Gal Kirn, Gašper Kralj, Andreja Kulunčić, Andrej Kurnik, Polona Mozetič, Said Mujić, Osman Pezić, Bojana Piškur, Marjetica Potrč, Tjaša Pureber, Radical Education Collective, TEMP, Darij Zadnikar, Antonios Vradis

Edited and compiled by: Gal Kirn, Gašper Kralj, Bojana Piškur
Published by Jan van Eyck Academie, Maastricht (NL), Modern Galerija, Ljubljana / Museum of Modern Art, July 2009
ISBN 978–90–72076–87–8

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Brian Holmes: Escape the Overcode: Activist Art in the Control Society (2009)

“This publication contains a selection of texts and essays by the writer Brian Holmes that engage with the possibilities and problematics of geopolitics and geopoetics. Holmes is a crucial contemporary writer and thinker whose insight into current social and political developments and how they relate to artistic processes opens up a new field of “geocritique”.

The examples he cites extend across Latin America, Europe and Asia, where he looks at networks, artworks, films, institutions and protest movements for signs of how future progressive strategies might be shaped. The texts here are connected in part with the long-term collaborative research project Continental Drift.”

Publisher Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, and Zagreb: WHW, 2009
Research Series, 2
ISBN: 9789070149987
414 pages

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Brian Holmes: Hieroglyphs of the Future: Art & Politics in a Networked Era (2003)

“Networks redefine urban and social borders and can be interpreted in many ways according to the chosen perspective, a limited territory or the entire globe, revealing at the same time the potential and the limits of their actions. This collection of essays, which features a solid political approach intertwined with art, pushes the limits of the critique of the mobility as defined by human beings and the reconfiguration of urban space, analyzing the powers and desired contained in it. A hyperlinking of transnational forces of opposition are invited to play a strategic game coordinating their efforts for imagining future alternative and sustainable realities, through a media struggle which uses the same propaganda tools of capitalism. The collaboration with the art collective Bureau D’Etudes and the resulting maps of power produced by them are nodal, but the core of these essays are the instruments of analysis offered, which elaborate new expressions to effectively decode our contemporary world.”

Publisher Arkzin Communications / What, How and for Whom, Paris/Zagreb, 2003
Broadcasting series, 3
ISBN 9536542838, 9789536542833
294 pages

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