Transnational Art and the Multicultural City (original) (raw)
Related papers
OSLO PILOT — a project investigating the role of art in and for public space.pdf
OSLO PILOT — a project investigating the role of art in and for public space — laying the groundwork for OSLO BIENNIAL FIRST EDITION, 2018
OSLO PILOT — a project investigating the role of art in and for public space — laying the groundwork for OSLO BIENNIAL FIRST EDITION To make art in and for the public domain today is to engage with the precariousness that both defines and threatens our experience of it. OSLO PILOT (2015–17)—a project investigating the role of art in and for the public space—laying the groundwork for Oslo Biennial First Edition brings together 38 previously published texts spanning the past 80 years and 19 commissioned texts exploring art in public spaces and spheres. It also includes an edited transcript of the symposium, organized by OSLO PILOT in the fall of 2016, “The Giver, the Guest, and Ghost: The Presence of Art in Public Realms.” The publication embodies the idea of the city as a prerequisite and basis for work, and focuses on the conditions of public space as a field where many agencies, identities, and interests meet and are made visible.
Cosmopolitan Civil Societies: An Interdisciplinary Journal
In this special issue on urban art and cosmopolitanism, we explore emergent inquiry and explorations into the role of arts, artists and the reception of arts in the urban public space as cosmopolitan articulations, interventions and methodologies. Based on case studies we demonstrate how the hybrid city can be re-imagined by art interventions. However given the unprecendented pace of changes in cities across the globle more empirical investigations and theoretical reflections are needed to address the multi-faceted role of artists, arts and the reception of arts in the urban space.
The role of Public Art in the promotion of Interculturality and Hyper-diversity
COST Action Writing Urban Places, 2020
This presentation is published in Meaningfulness, Appropriation and Integration of/in City Narratives, 2020, booklet of the conference Writing Urban Places, pp. 44-45. The intervention starts from the idea that integration in the XXI century city should be meant as interculturality and hyper-diversity - both terms are borrowed from the “Vademecum - 77 Minor Terms for Writing Urban Places” edited by some of our colleagues. For hyper-diversity we mean “a complexity as well as a fluidity of social positions, senses of belonging, and identities in cities”. The match of narratives from the past and from the future creates the so-called interculturality, in “a synergy of plurality combined with traditional narratives”.
CFP 4th Conference ART AND THE CITY (23-25 June 2022 Aarhus University, Online and In-person)
Art and the City: Urban Space, Art, and Social Change conferences bring together a team of international scholars with an interest in art and the right to the city, urban creativity, aesthetics and politics, cultural and artistic rebellion, aesthetics of urban social movements, and rebellious art in the urban space. The central goal of this conference series is to critically engage in a multifaceted, multidisciplinary , and multi-geographic perspective to articulate and promote a richer and more integrated understanding of the ideologies, relationships, meanings, and practices that arise from the diverse interactions among the three social spheres: urban space, art, and society. Art's role in the urban space involves a multitude of spatial and temporal dynamics and constitutes emotional, dialogical, and aesthetic interactions. On the one hand, art assists in the improvement of urban development, tourism, public health, race relations, and even welfare. On the other hand, we observe that art lends its competencies to urban activism and social change from the 'right to the city' and antigentrification movements with their spatial, ideological, and ecological agenda to the struggles of civil rights, individual and collective freedoms. Art has also an essential part in urban social movements, which are also referred to as 'square movements' during the Egyptian and Tunisian revolutions (Abaza 2016, Le Vine 2015), the Greek Aganaktismenoi movement (Tsilimpoudini 2016), and the Gezi Uprising (Tunali 2018). It is even argued that the civil war in Syria is triggered by graffiti work in Dara'a (Asher-Shapiro 2016). Recently, the Black Lives Matter movement leaves its mark in the urban space with street murals in over 550 places across the US (Lawrence, Todd et al., 2020). The politico-aesthetic character of these movements has been explored extensively from the point of plural resistance against the authoritative government, the struggle over the appropriation and use of public space, structural and social inequalities, and human rights issues. However, these
Atmospheres of Designed Diversity? The Spatial Politics of Superkilen in Copenhagen
Entangled Histories of Art and Migration. Theories, Sites and Research Methods (peer-reviewed), 2024
Praised as a “spatial expression to the inherently heterogeneous community” (Petersen 2020), the public space Superkilen (2013) was planned as a „park for migrants“ (unpublished interview with TOPOTEK1 2019). To represent the sociographic plurality of Copenhagen's Nørrebro district, more than 100 objects from the over 50 origin contexts of the residents were distributed in the park. The design team comprised of the architects of Copenhagen’s Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG), the Berlin landscape architecture firm TOPOTEK1 and the Danish artists’ collective SUPERFLEX has been highly awarded by the international art scene. In contrast, local urbanists have criticized the city-funded project as mere "place marketing" (Hermansen/Schuff 2016). Taking this controversial nature of the project as an occasion, this essay analyses Superkilen’s claim as a interethnic space of encounter. In my analysis I deploy an atmosphere concept that I specified methodologically for urban art and space. For atmospheres in the sense of affective “surround-realities” (Schwarz 2019) offer access to the creative-phenomenological as well as socio-political impact. Drawing on qualitative and quantitative data from 2019, this essay explores the conceptual, design, processual, and use-oriented conditions of Superkilen’s atmospheres. In its visualisation of migration as a city-constituting quality, Superkilen’s concept convinces. The diverse objects produce the image of a plural society that comes together in one place despite multiple contexts of origin and meaning. Notwithstanding, the national representation within a place designed according to Western-Scandinavian stylistic principles seems essentialist. Furthermore, the predominantly non-migrant, white design team and the speaking about "poor migrants" shows little inclusion of "migrant situated knowledge" (Ayse Güleç 2018). Even the artists involved urged to frame the search for objects at eye level. The field research nevertheless revealed intercultural encounters .Residents identified their favorite objects and told personal stories in and around Superkilen, which testifies positive place attachment. All this manifests in an atmospheric duality of commoning and difference.
Cosmopolitan Civil Societies: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 2022
This article explores how social artistic interventions provide forms of everyday aesthetic cosmopolitanism-an intellectual and aesthetic openness towards objects, places, experiences, activities that relates to the everyday life of people regardless of identity, occupation, social class, cultural/racial background, and lifestyle-in transforming urban voids into inclusive urban public spaces. Through socially engaged art, artists and artistic institutions do not play a leading role but act as facilitators to provide space and context for events to emerge. Through participant observations and interviews for the period 2015-2018 and using concepts of everyday aesthetic cosmopolitanism, we demonstrate how the art center Recyclart, through socially informed artistic interventions, practices, and performances, contributed to transforming urban voids into inclusive urban public spaces. Our results indicate that local life, enacted by so-called marginalized residents and their everyday practices in urban central neighborhoods, is critical in city-making and contributes to everyday aesthetic cosmopolitanism.
Cities, Mobilities, Contemporary Art (2013)
The images, ideas and socio-political contexts surrounding the theme of migration are central to the new landscape for contemporary art that has emerged in the first two decades of the twentyfirst century. These migration rubrics figure in a myriad of ways in contemporary art produced around the world, and open vertiginously onto a relay of topics -immigration, mobility, diaspora, exile, nation, globalization, transnationalism -that are being urgently discussed in the humanities and social sciences. The thematic of migration has also helped to shape in significant ways a distinctive "curatorial geography," based in a renewed critical consciousness about the interconnectedness of our world, which seems increasingly to define the art world at present. As art historian and theorist, Terry Smith, has recently argued, contemporary art is -perhaps for the first time in history -truly an art of the world. "It comes from the whole world, and frequently tries to imagine the world as a differentiated yet inevitably connected whole." 1 His comment undoubtedly speaks to the powerful sense of internationalism that also defines contemporary art today. With this in mind, the exhibition, INDIA : ART NOW, at ARKEN Museum of Modern Art in 2012, and this issue of the ARKEN Bulletin, which focuses on the equation between art and migration, stand as exemplary instances of, and serious engagements with, these broader intellectual currents and contexts.
The article deals with the change of paradigms in European urban thinking through time. The principles of Modern City Planning conceived in the first half of the 20th century, which despised the classical ideals of the European city and of historical urban environments, as well as the subsequent advent of their counterplot, i.e. the approach of integrated conservation and preservation planning, are seen as the two main opposing tendencies of city development in the last 100 years. They have preceded and, in a sense, prepared the way for a new urban consciousness which puts emphasis on the principles of sustainable development in both global and local terms. While the pressing demands for sustainability have been taken into consideration and even recorded in the law on a certain level in most European countries at the turn of this century, there are still many other new-type urban phenomena which express the present-day tendencies of change in our city-life. The breaking of the traditional space-time relationship due to the arrival of the Internet and the multicultural post-modern urban nomadism, which both go together with a tremendous worldwide economic, social, and environmental restructuration, are among them. As a result, the concept of place has lost its former meaning as an explicitly physical scene. At the same time, mentally, socially and culturally processed issues, such as the identity of a place, have become more and more important putting emphasis on the type of interaction between different people and the places of their lives. Thus the question of dwelling (in Heideggerian terms) and the expression of multi-cultural identities in our post-modern “collage cities” have become fundamental urban issues, which concern not only the very essence of the city, but also the actual paradigms of urbanism. In the old continent today, city planning is most often less concerned with building new environments than with transforming extant environments, which happens in interaction with old and new and in a new kind of synergy. Multicultural and tolerant living environments with different historical, social and cultural layers function as magnets for creative people and for inspiring city-life. Key words: conception of the city, sustainability, identity of place, mosaic identity, urban interaction