Victoria Ivanova | London South Bank University (original) (raw)
Papers by Victoria Ivanova
Our relationship to water as both existential necessity and a resource to be managed and operatio... more Our relationship to water as both existential necessity and a resource to be managed and operationalized reflects the dynamic entanglement of nature and the systems that run societies.[1] Through codified values, policies, models, protocols, technologies, governance structures, and institutional networks, a mutating web of organizational artifice subjugates nature to its determinations while simultaneously negotiating processes outside of human control. Human survival—and the distribution and quality of that survival—rely on the logics of this negotiation and the ideological vectors that shape them.
Over the last seven hundred years, the ideological formation of capitalism has not only expanded its geographic reach, but also mutated in relation to the socio-natural fabric it was organizing.[2] And while the advent of industrial capitalism heralded the most technologically intrusive phase of expansion and mutation through scalability and standardization, it was primarily with the rise of financial capitalism in the late twentieth century that capital began responding to and managing future risks generated by its own reorderings. By the same token, financial capitalism opened up a vista for accumulation that did not require ownership of capital as a precondition.
In the broadest sense, financialization signals capitalism’s detachment from the interests of local or regional industrial production in favor of transnational financial circulation as the prime source of accumulation.[3] This shift in turn impacts how resources necessary for human and societal survival are managed locally. And while neoliberal lubrication has played a grave role in these processes, financialization as an ordering model may contain certain emancipatory facets that can be harnessed with a nuanced and ethico-politically non-binary approach to its workings. With that in mind, this brief account considers how the resource of water has been woven into the financial regime, particularly in the context of the so-called “developing world.”
Disclaimer: What follows is an attempt to think through a praxis that is directed towards transfo... more Disclaimer: What follows is an attempt to think through a praxis that is directed towards transformative impact on the basis of existing potentialities. The choice of fields that are woven into this strategy brief — finance, human rights and contemporary art — is a product of this author’s direct or tangential involvement in these spheres as a practitioner and researcher. The aim of this strategy brief is to use the mechanics of DIY-theory to engineer an actionable framework.
I’d like to put forward the argument that there exist important, and under-acknowledged, confluen... more I’d like to put forward the argument that there exist important, and under-acknowledged, confluences between human rights and contemporary art as regimes of mediation, and that since the advent of neoliberalism’s global hegemony, contemporary art had effectively taken over from human rights (HR) the function of mediating the liberal subject and cosmopolitan globality. At the surface, this is evident in the notion of a timeless contemporary (or the forever now) manifest in contemporary art and so central to “the end of history” moment of the 1990s. As a regime of mediation, contemporary art (CA) proposes a perpetual semantic reorganization of the present via the subject’s immediate experience in a gesture to open up a multitude of symbolic futures that never deliver in actuality, thus de facto allowing for the re-entrenchment of existing power configurations. The splitting of the value of (critical) reflection from infrastructural ecology serves to ring-fence transformation into a closed-loop realm of experience and fancy. In turn, this shortchanges the act of enabling transformations for the consumption of symbolic potentialities — through sentimentality, lament and mystification—thereby taking us further and further away from understanding how to strategically operationalize actuality for concrete aims.
One of the main motivations for articulating this argument is to frame CA as a system of mediation that is imbricated in a larger project of global ordering rather than seeing it as a genre of art. In this sense, tracing the transition from HR to CA offers an opportunity to highlight some crucial defining confluences between the two systems at the level of their originating ontologies and universal ambitions. The “transition” vicariously tells the story of conflicting liberal agendas complementing each other and competing for primacy: legalistic liberalism (or legalism) may have provided the necessary institutional-aspirational backdrop to the expansion of the global market, yet neoliberalism (or market liberalism) ultimately proved itself as a much stronger contender for lead status due to its relentless flexibility and relative immunity to internal contradictions.
dismagazine.com
I’d like to put forward the argument that there exist important, and under-acknowledged, confluen... more I’d like to put forward the argument that there exist important, and under-acknowledged, confluences between human rights and contemporary art as regimes of mediation, and that since the advent of neoliberalism’s global hegemony, contemporary art had effectively taken over from human rights (HR) the function of mediating the liberal subject and cosmopolitan globality. At the surface, this is evident in the notion of a timeless contemporary (or the forever now) manifest in contemporary art and so central to “the end of history” moment of the 1990s. As a regime of mediation, contemporary art (CA) proposes a perpetual semantic reorganization of the present via the subject’s immediate experience in a gesture to open up a multitude of symbolic futures that never deliver in actuality, thus de facto allowing for the re-entrenchment of existing power configurations. The splitting of the value of (critical) reflection from infrastructural ecology serves to ring-fence transformation into a closed-loop realm of experience and fancy. In turn, this shortchanges the act of enabling transformations for the consumption of symbolic potentialities — through sentimentality, lament and mystification—thereby taking us further and further away from understanding how to strategically operationalize actuality for concrete aims.
One of the main motivations for articulating this argument is to frame CA as a system of mediation that is imbricated in a larger project of global ordering rather than seeing it as a genre of art. In this sense, tracing the transition from HR to CA offers an opportunity to highlight some crucial defining confluences between the two systems at the level of their originating ontologies and universal ambitions. The “transition” vicariously tells the story of conflicting liberal agendas complementing each other and competing for primacy: legalistic liberalism (or legalism) may have provided the necessary institutional-aspirational backdrop to the expansion of the global market, yet neoliberalism (or market liberalism) ultimately proved itself as a much stronger contender for lead status due to its relentless flexibility and relative immunity to internal contradictions.
This essay identifies two approaches to theorizing the relationship between financialization and ... more This essay identifies two approaches to theorizing the relationship between financialization and contemporary art. The first departs from an analysis of how market logics in non-financial spheres are being transformed to facilitate financial circulation; the other considers valuation practices in financial markets (and those related to derivative instruments in particular) from a socio-cultural perspective. According to the first approach, the contemporary art market is in theory a hostile environment for financialization, although new practices are emerging that are increasing its integration with the financial sphere. The second approach identifies socio-cultural similarities between the logics by which value is extracted, amplified, and distributed through derivative instruments and contemporary art. The two approaches present a discrepancy: on the one hand, contemporary art functions as an impediment to outright financialization because of market opacity; on the other, contemporary art represents a socio-cultural analog to derivative instruments. The essay concludes by setting out the terms for a more holistic understanding of contemporary art's relationship to financialization, which would enable an integration of its economic and socio-cultural dimensions.
The essay sets the scene by sketching out how the evolution behind contemporary art has been pred... more The essay sets the scene by sketching out how the evolution behind contemporary art has been predicated on the project of perpetually redefining the art object, pausing on conceptualism and the post-structuralist turn as the inaugural moments of critique’s supremacy in defining art’s value within a semantic configuration. While allowing for greater integration of art’s socio-institutional ecology within art’s ontology, the emphasis on semantic singularities continued to obstruct their seeping into art’s operationality. The attempts to affect a transformation aimed at systematicity at that specific historical juncture offer important case-studies for speculating on the reasons of their failures and the possibilities for repurposing their logic in the present moment. Approaching the contemporary moment from this side of “now”,
a discussion is launched on the more recent methodological formations in art that have taken shape with the infrastructural innovations brought about by the internet and the concomitant resurrection of artistic interest in systemic intervention and enactment as the necessary means of moving art beyond critique’s deflation.
Books by Victoria Ivanova
The current state of accelerationist philosophy increasingly appears to serve as a point of coale... more The current state of accelerationist philosophy increasingly appears to serve as a point of coalescence for various attempts at redefining diverse potentialities, estranged objectivities and inhumanisms which circulate the contemporary discourse. The following questions need to be addressed: what can we do within the confines of present conditions, while facing these challenges, agencies and vast spaces beyond? How can we unbind the shackles of the present? What are the possibilities and conditions of accelerationism itself, and what are the investments and aspirations for such a language and for such an endeavor?
That is what we mean by Reinventing Horizons.
This book arises from a peculiar set of motifs and circumstances. It aims at accompanying the conference which is held on the 18th and 19th of March 2016 of the same name and an exhibi- tion Artificial Cinema, held at Tranzitdisplay, Prague. It also serves a purpose of its own. As such, the book takes its point of depar- ture in the accelerationist discourse, which we take to be a broad and heterogeneous strand of thought attempting a redefinition, or even a repurposing, of current means, be it within the context of academia, the arts, technology or media, in order to address unresolved contemporary socio-political problems. It has been our objective to bring together a broad variety of contributors in order to accommodate various themes coalescing around the debates of contemporary thought.
Talks by Victoria Ivanova
….Sessions is an open forum for discussions, talks and speculations that calls for active engagem... more ….Sessions is an open forum for discussions, talks and speculations that calls for active engagement vs disempowered critique with today’s most pressing issues, such as living under the regime of real subsumption of capitalism, Anthropocene and neoliberal cultural policy. …Sessions invites thinkers, writers, artists, curators and other practitioners to share their visions of other possible scenarios for working within and with the current conditions.
The first meeting named Liquidity Sessions invited London-based curator and writer Victoria Ivanova to introduce a project Real Flow that she has initiated together with Suhail Malik, Christopher Kulendran Thomas and Diann Bauer and to speak about contemporary art market ecology. Real Flow reveals how barriers between art’s markets, markets in general, and art’s flexible and porous semantics are artificially-maintained and thus can and should be crossed.
The integration of art and capital opens up new channels for action and change that was not available before. New levels of reality can be reached that are more global, rapid and expanding than the art world could have imagined.
Victoria Ivanova is a curator and writer living in London. Having previously worked in the human rights field, in 2010, she co-founded a multidisciplinary cultural platform in Donetsk, Ukraine, which critically explored the intersection between activism, education and artistic research. Ivanova's recent publications include ‘Art’s Values: A Détente, a Grand Plié' in Parse 2: The Value of Contemporary Art (2015), ‘Novelty Intermediation and the Future of Accelerationist Politics’ in Reinventing Horizons (2016), ‘Fractured Mediations’ in Der Zeitkomplex. Postcontemporary (2016).
The event took place during the International Contemporary Art Fair ArtVilnius'2016, Vilnius, June 11th 2016.
9th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art, Panel discussion “Post-contemporary Art” with Victoria ... more 9th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art, Panel discussion “Post-contemporary Art” with Victoria Ivanova, Suhail Malik, and Tirdad Zolghadr, moderated by Armen Avanessian, in English
KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin.
10 September 2016
In conjunction with the Young Curators Workshop “Post-contemporary Art”
Drafts by Victoria Ivanova
devising strategic tool-kits for cultural institutions — fostering new alignments and agencies — ... more devising strategic tool-kits for cultural institutions — fostering new alignments and agencies — enabling actionable claims on the future
devising strategic tool-kits for cultural institutions — fostering new alignments and agencies — ... more devising strategic tool-kits for cultural institutions — fostering new alignments and agencies — enabling actionable claims on the future
Statement of Purpose devising strategic tool-kits for cultural institutions — fostering new align... more Statement of Purpose devising strategic tool-kits for cultural institutions — fostering new alignments and agencies — enabling actionable claims on the future
Our relationship to water as both existential necessity and a resource to be managed and operatio... more Our relationship to water as both existential necessity and a resource to be managed and operationalized reflects the dynamic entanglement of nature and the systems that run societies.[1] Through codified values, policies, models, protocols, technologies, governance structures, and institutional networks, a mutating web of organizational artifice subjugates nature to its determinations while simultaneously negotiating processes outside of human control. Human survival—and the distribution and quality of that survival—rely on the logics of this negotiation and the ideological vectors that shape them.
Over the last seven hundred years, the ideological formation of capitalism has not only expanded its geographic reach, but also mutated in relation to the socio-natural fabric it was organizing.[2] And while the advent of industrial capitalism heralded the most technologically intrusive phase of expansion and mutation through scalability and standardization, it was primarily with the rise of financial capitalism in the late twentieth century that capital began responding to and managing future risks generated by its own reorderings. By the same token, financial capitalism opened up a vista for accumulation that did not require ownership of capital as a precondition.
In the broadest sense, financialization signals capitalism’s detachment from the interests of local or regional industrial production in favor of transnational financial circulation as the prime source of accumulation.[3] This shift in turn impacts how resources necessary for human and societal survival are managed locally. And while neoliberal lubrication has played a grave role in these processes, financialization as an ordering model may contain certain emancipatory facets that can be harnessed with a nuanced and ethico-politically non-binary approach to its workings. With that in mind, this brief account considers how the resource of water has been woven into the financial regime, particularly in the context of the so-called “developing world.”
Disclaimer: What follows is an attempt to think through a praxis that is directed towards transfo... more Disclaimer: What follows is an attempt to think through a praxis that is directed towards transformative impact on the basis of existing potentialities. The choice of fields that are woven into this strategy brief — finance, human rights and contemporary art — is a product of this author’s direct or tangential involvement in these spheres as a practitioner and researcher. The aim of this strategy brief is to use the mechanics of DIY-theory to engineer an actionable framework.
I’d like to put forward the argument that there exist important, and under-acknowledged, confluen... more I’d like to put forward the argument that there exist important, and under-acknowledged, confluences between human rights and contemporary art as regimes of mediation, and that since the advent of neoliberalism’s global hegemony, contemporary art had effectively taken over from human rights (HR) the function of mediating the liberal subject and cosmopolitan globality. At the surface, this is evident in the notion of a timeless contemporary (or the forever now) manifest in contemporary art and so central to “the end of history” moment of the 1990s. As a regime of mediation, contemporary art (CA) proposes a perpetual semantic reorganization of the present via the subject’s immediate experience in a gesture to open up a multitude of symbolic futures that never deliver in actuality, thus de facto allowing for the re-entrenchment of existing power configurations. The splitting of the value of (critical) reflection from infrastructural ecology serves to ring-fence transformation into a closed-loop realm of experience and fancy. In turn, this shortchanges the act of enabling transformations for the consumption of symbolic potentialities — through sentimentality, lament and mystification—thereby taking us further and further away from understanding how to strategically operationalize actuality for concrete aims.
One of the main motivations for articulating this argument is to frame CA as a system of mediation that is imbricated in a larger project of global ordering rather than seeing it as a genre of art. In this sense, tracing the transition from HR to CA offers an opportunity to highlight some crucial defining confluences between the two systems at the level of their originating ontologies and universal ambitions. The “transition” vicariously tells the story of conflicting liberal agendas complementing each other and competing for primacy: legalistic liberalism (or legalism) may have provided the necessary institutional-aspirational backdrop to the expansion of the global market, yet neoliberalism (or market liberalism) ultimately proved itself as a much stronger contender for lead status due to its relentless flexibility and relative immunity to internal contradictions.
dismagazine.com
I’d like to put forward the argument that there exist important, and under-acknowledged, confluen... more I’d like to put forward the argument that there exist important, and under-acknowledged, confluences between human rights and contemporary art as regimes of mediation, and that since the advent of neoliberalism’s global hegemony, contemporary art had effectively taken over from human rights (HR) the function of mediating the liberal subject and cosmopolitan globality. At the surface, this is evident in the notion of a timeless contemporary (or the forever now) manifest in contemporary art and so central to “the end of history” moment of the 1990s. As a regime of mediation, contemporary art (CA) proposes a perpetual semantic reorganization of the present via the subject’s immediate experience in a gesture to open up a multitude of symbolic futures that never deliver in actuality, thus de facto allowing for the re-entrenchment of existing power configurations. The splitting of the value of (critical) reflection from infrastructural ecology serves to ring-fence transformation into a closed-loop realm of experience and fancy. In turn, this shortchanges the act of enabling transformations for the consumption of symbolic potentialities — through sentimentality, lament and mystification—thereby taking us further and further away from understanding how to strategically operationalize actuality for concrete aims.
One of the main motivations for articulating this argument is to frame CA as a system of mediation that is imbricated in a larger project of global ordering rather than seeing it as a genre of art. In this sense, tracing the transition from HR to CA offers an opportunity to highlight some crucial defining confluences between the two systems at the level of their originating ontologies and universal ambitions. The “transition” vicariously tells the story of conflicting liberal agendas complementing each other and competing for primacy: legalistic liberalism (or legalism) may have provided the necessary institutional-aspirational backdrop to the expansion of the global market, yet neoliberalism (or market liberalism) ultimately proved itself as a much stronger contender for lead status due to its relentless flexibility and relative immunity to internal contradictions.
This essay identifies two approaches to theorizing the relationship between financialization and ... more This essay identifies two approaches to theorizing the relationship between financialization and contemporary art. The first departs from an analysis of how market logics in non-financial spheres are being transformed to facilitate financial circulation; the other considers valuation practices in financial markets (and those related to derivative instruments in particular) from a socio-cultural perspective. According to the first approach, the contemporary art market is in theory a hostile environment for financialization, although new practices are emerging that are increasing its integration with the financial sphere. The second approach identifies socio-cultural similarities between the logics by which value is extracted, amplified, and distributed through derivative instruments and contemporary art. The two approaches present a discrepancy: on the one hand, contemporary art functions as an impediment to outright financialization because of market opacity; on the other, contemporary art represents a socio-cultural analog to derivative instruments. The essay concludes by setting out the terms for a more holistic understanding of contemporary art's relationship to financialization, which would enable an integration of its economic and socio-cultural dimensions.
The essay sets the scene by sketching out how the evolution behind contemporary art has been pred... more The essay sets the scene by sketching out how the evolution behind contemporary art has been predicated on the project of perpetually redefining the art object, pausing on conceptualism and the post-structuralist turn as the inaugural moments of critique’s supremacy in defining art’s value within a semantic configuration. While allowing for greater integration of art’s socio-institutional ecology within art’s ontology, the emphasis on semantic singularities continued to obstruct their seeping into art’s operationality. The attempts to affect a transformation aimed at systematicity at that specific historical juncture offer important case-studies for speculating on the reasons of their failures and the possibilities for repurposing their logic in the present moment. Approaching the contemporary moment from this side of “now”,
a discussion is launched on the more recent methodological formations in art that have taken shape with the infrastructural innovations brought about by the internet and the concomitant resurrection of artistic interest in systemic intervention and enactment as the necessary means of moving art beyond critique’s deflation.
The current state of accelerationist philosophy increasingly appears to serve as a point of coale... more The current state of accelerationist philosophy increasingly appears to serve as a point of coalescence for various attempts at redefining diverse potentialities, estranged objectivities and inhumanisms which circulate the contemporary discourse. The following questions need to be addressed: what can we do within the confines of present conditions, while facing these challenges, agencies and vast spaces beyond? How can we unbind the shackles of the present? What are the possibilities and conditions of accelerationism itself, and what are the investments and aspirations for such a language and for such an endeavor?
That is what we mean by Reinventing Horizons.
This book arises from a peculiar set of motifs and circumstances. It aims at accompanying the conference which is held on the 18th and 19th of March 2016 of the same name and an exhibi- tion Artificial Cinema, held at Tranzitdisplay, Prague. It also serves a purpose of its own. As such, the book takes its point of depar- ture in the accelerationist discourse, which we take to be a broad and heterogeneous strand of thought attempting a redefinition, or even a repurposing, of current means, be it within the context of academia, the arts, technology or media, in order to address unresolved contemporary socio-political problems. It has been our objective to bring together a broad variety of contributors in order to accommodate various themes coalescing around the debates of contemporary thought.
….Sessions is an open forum for discussions, talks and speculations that calls for active engagem... more ….Sessions is an open forum for discussions, talks and speculations that calls for active engagement vs disempowered critique with today’s most pressing issues, such as living under the regime of real subsumption of capitalism, Anthropocene and neoliberal cultural policy. …Sessions invites thinkers, writers, artists, curators and other practitioners to share their visions of other possible scenarios for working within and with the current conditions.
The first meeting named Liquidity Sessions invited London-based curator and writer Victoria Ivanova to introduce a project Real Flow that she has initiated together with Suhail Malik, Christopher Kulendran Thomas and Diann Bauer and to speak about contemporary art market ecology. Real Flow reveals how barriers between art’s markets, markets in general, and art’s flexible and porous semantics are artificially-maintained and thus can and should be crossed.
The integration of art and capital opens up new channels for action and change that was not available before. New levels of reality can be reached that are more global, rapid and expanding than the art world could have imagined.
Victoria Ivanova is a curator and writer living in London. Having previously worked in the human rights field, in 2010, she co-founded a multidisciplinary cultural platform in Donetsk, Ukraine, which critically explored the intersection between activism, education and artistic research. Ivanova's recent publications include ‘Art’s Values: A Détente, a Grand Plié' in Parse 2: The Value of Contemporary Art (2015), ‘Novelty Intermediation and the Future of Accelerationist Politics’ in Reinventing Horizons (2016), ‘Fractured Mediations’ in Der Zeitkomplex. Postcontemporary (2016).
The event took place during the International Contemporary Art Fair ArtVilnius'2016, Vilnius, June 11th 2016.
9th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art, Panel discussion “Post-contemporary Art” with Victoria ... more 9th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art, Panel discussion “Post-contemporary Art” with Victoria Ivanova, Suhail Malik, and Tirdad Zolghadr, moderated by Armen Avanessian, in English
KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin.
10 September 2016
In conjunction with the Young Curators Workshop “Post-contemporary Art”
devising strategic tool-kits for cultural institutions — fostering new alignments and agencies — ... more devising strategic tool-kits for cultural institutions — fostering new alignments and agencies — enabling actionable claims on the future
devising strategic tool-kits for cultural institutions — fostering new alignments and agencies — ... more devising strategic tool-kits for cultural institutions — fostering new alignments and agencies — enabling actionable claims on the future
Statement of Purpose devising strategic tool-kits for cultural institutions — fostering new align... more Statement of Purpose devising strategic tool-kits for cultural institutions — fostering new alignments and agencies — enabling actionable claims on the future