Shadowboxing, 1-5 (2011)

Shadowboxing brings together projects by four artists, Mariana Castillo Deball, Sean Dockray, Marysia Lewandowska and Wendelien van Oldenborgh, in an exhibition developed in collaboration with the graduating students of the Royal College of Art’s Curating Contemporary Art MA. Using different strategies – from tinkering to direct confrontation – each of these artists considers how the media and institutions that control our behaviour and ideology can be disrupted. The ideas behind the project are further explored in a five-part publication and a series of events.

The publication makes visible the processes of discussion, collaboration and production between artists and curators at different moments between February and June 2011. Contributions take the form of artists’ commissions, interviews and conversations with relevant people from the cultural and political field, as well as essays by the curators.

Issue 1, February 2011

The dialogue prompted by Giorgio Agamben’s text ‘What is an Apparatus?’ has been central to the development of SHADOWBOXING. Issue 1 reproduces this text including questions posed to the four artists as part of the invitation to collaborate with the CCA students and Marysia Lewandowska’s annotations, which reflect her reading of the text in response to the invitation.

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Issue 2, March 2011

SHADOWBOXING has developed as conversations have unfolded between the artists and curators. What has transpired from this approach over the past months is an exploration of the different ways in which artists enact critique within certain parameters, and an awareness of the paradox: how can one challenge forces that have become so internalised that they are indistinguishable from one’s own shadow? Issue 2 reflects through images and texts the research and the production process of SHADOWBOXING. It also includes the exhibition guide and the programme of events and film screenings.

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Issue 3, May 2011

The act of publication, as defined by the writer Matthew Stadler, constitutes a deliberate political strategy, which enables the formation of a public space through an ongoing circulation of ideas, texts and conversations. Much in line with his thinking, Publication is conceived as a snapshot of the unfolding dialogues that have shaped and continue to inform SHADOWBOXING. The contributions in this issue reflect upon the boundaries between private and public spaces, and how these can be tested or made contingent.

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Issue 4/5, July 2011

A Structure that Wants and To be Another Structure has been conceived as a double issue, where the content of the publications run in parallel. As a whole it both reflects, and confronts the terms used throughout SHADOWBOXING. It includes a text by Wendelien van Oldenborgh and interviews with Lis Rhodes and Rainer Ganahl.
Issue Four/Five is edited by the graduating students on the MA Curating Contemporary Art at the Royal College of Art, 2011 and is designed by James Langdon.

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Edited by the graduating students on the MA Curating Contemporary Art at the Royal College of Art
Published by the Royal College of Art, London, 2011
Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution

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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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Robert Freedman: Noise Wars: Compulsory Media and Our Loss of Autonomy (2009)

“Let me place on your radar screen an issue that for most people goes by unnoticed. Every day it is there for all of us to see and hear— — but it’s drowned out by the noise, so to speak. This is the rising use of media, the use of media in abusive, penetrating ways. Our freedom to choose whether or not we consume that media is taken away from us.”
In this book Robert Freedman shows how media companies, with their business model coming under pressure from shrinking audiences, seek to regain their footing by forcing people to consume TV and other digital content outside the home by turning public and private settings into captive-audience platforms. He looks at how consumers are putting up resistance to being held captive to TV on buses, trains, elevators, taxis, subways, office lobbies, schools, stores, and street corners.

Freedman looks at the role of media in society in a unique way— by focusing exclusively on the emerging trend of audience captivity: the relocation of TV and other intrusive electronic media from our home, where we have personal control over it, to all the settings outside the home in which we don’t have control: buses, subways, taxis, elevators, retail stores, hotel and office lobbies, street corners, street furniture, and gas station pumps, among others.
Although the book comes down squarely against audience captivity as a media business model, it takes a conversational, even-handed approach that lets the facts speak for themselves. It does this by showing on the one hand the growth of captive-audience platforms and on the other the rise in people’s resentment—even anger—at being made captive to electronic media they haven’t asked for and from which they can’t escape without personal cost.
By approaching the topic in this way, the book makes a compelling case that the media industry’s growing reliance on audience captivity as a business model is setting up a values war not unlike the war between smokers and opponents of second-hand smoke. As the first systematic look at audience captivity from a social perspective, the book makes a crucial and timely contribution to research on and discussions about media and society.

Perfect Paperback: 220 pages
Publisher: Algora Publishing (August 3, 2009)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0875867146
ISBN-13: 978-0875867144

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