The three-day Paths Crossing workshop will take place on the island of Suomenlinna, Helsinki December 15–17, 2011. Participants will present and discuss their ongoing practice in a variety of formats, including one-to-one consultations, presentations and round-tables. Some keynotes and debates will also be open to the wider public. The workshop will introduce the themes and theoretical framework of the forthcoming seminar, A New Non-Aligned Art, which will take place in the Museum of Contemporary Art, Kiasma, September 20–21, 2012.

Keynote addresses will be held by Ivor Stodolsky on A New Non-Aligned Art, Anders Härm on a independent initiative EKKM (Estonian Museum for Contemporary Art); and Livia Paldi on Rethinking Art and Engagement.

The workshop will include presentations and discussions of Paths Crossing participants’ projects and work-in-progress. HIAP will facilitate this by inviting international and local curators, art professionals and other “peers” in the field, including the keynotes: Anders Härm, who is a curator at Tallinn Art Hall and director of EKKM; Kati Kivinen, who is a curator at Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, Marita Muukkonen, curator of HIAP; Ivor Stodolsky, an independent curator and philosopher; and Livia Paldi, the former chief curator of Budapest’s Műcsarnok / Kunsthalle, who in December of this year will take up the position of director at the Baltic Art Centre, a Paths Crossing partner-institution in Visby, Sweden. Her keynote will double as a HIAP TALK, which usually draws from 40–80 members of the wider public.

A New Non-Aligned Art is the title of the Paths Crossing conference, which will take place at the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma on September 20–21, 2012. Ivor Stodolsky and Marita Muukkonen will present the preliminary concept below, applying and developing the discussion throughout the workshop in dialogue with participants’ ongoing projects.

Workshop participants from the Paths Crossing project: Meta Grgurevič (Slovenia), Marko Tadić (Croatia), Krišs Salmanis (Latvia), Zsolt Tibor (Hungary), Katrīna Neiburga (Latvia), Gábor Döme (Hungary), Vesna Vuković (Croatia), Maija Rudovska (Latvia), Tereza Papamichali (Poland), Martin Kohout (Czech Republic), Peles Empire (Barbara Wolff & Katharina Stöver), Małgorzata Markiewicz (Poland), Katarina Šević (Hungary).

The Paths Crossing workshop is lead by HIAP - Helsinki International Artist Programme, in partnership with the Baltic Art Center (BAC), Visby (SE), Fabrikken for Kunst og Design, Copenhagen (DK), Temple Bar Gallery + Studios, Dublin (IE) and Nordisk Kunstnarsenter Dalsåsen (NO).

Paths Crossing has been funded with the support of the Culture Programme of the European Union.

A NEW NON-ALIGNED ART
(Early concept text – short version)

The NEW NON-ALIGNED ART conference looks into a condition which is presently provoking a re-alignment of thought, politics and art across, and crucially within, borders. The current predicament of art and intellectual consciousness is one of – sometimes unwitting – cultural hybridity. One is tempted to call this post-colonial hybridity, although it is of a different kind to what was understood by that term in London, Lagos or New York during the Cold War. The history of the last two decades – the cross-over, erasure and palimpsest of two formerly implacable systems, two épistémès – the Soviet and the West – is being superseded by altogether new ‘multilectic’ currents. These are flourishing within a state of multiple perils and imperatives, and demonstrate structural parallels with altogether different conditions well beyond the region and its particular genealogies. These fresh currents, like others globally, refuse domination from any point on the geographical or ideological compass. This gives this seminar one of its core concepts: the notion of a non-aligned positionality.

It is clear that although these issues are by no means exclusive to eastern Europe or the EU accession countries, which are the core concern of the current workshop. One may see them in the surprising configurations taken by the Arab Spring of 2011, for example, where the demonstrators aligned their rebellions neither with Muslim fundamentalism nor pro-US ideologies. These uprisings are currently seen as an inspiration of the “Occupy” movement – which is equally wary of absolutes, including simplistic revolutionary slogans of the past. Each of these instances is structured by a particular history, genealogy and balance of forces in each locality.

In eastern Europe, the radical experience of choice (either/or) of the communist and early post-communist condition has been transformed into a stance of non-aligned independence (neither this/nor that/nor that) by some of its most insightful minds. This refusal of pre-packaged solutions derives from an aversion to ideological dogmas, combined with two decades of high hopes gone unsatisfied, and the increasingly visible proliferation of global alternatives of all kinds. In fact, it seems there is a proliferation of alternatives becoming global.

Which of these, or even which its pluralities, might become the épistèmè, the horizon of future thought? Contemporary art is a bellwether, an early-warning signal-field of such changes.