XLVI. AICA Congress: White Places - Black Holes

XLVI. AICA - International Association of Art Critics, International Congress, Košice, Slovakia, 24.-27.9.2013

White Places - Black Holes
The first and second day of the congress focused on the return to history, with analyses and criticisms of the ways in which regions have been preceived in the dominant history of art in past decades. To the present date the question has not been addressed: in the context of this history, how can the specific value and originality of the art of local scenes be defined, without applying a colonial or other distorted perspective?

In this section Igor Španjol, editor of the book Igor Zabel: Contemporary Art Theory, made a talk Eastern Boys and Western Girls in which he presented Igor Zabel's curatorial work, which "emerged from his critical view towards the systems of differentiation and exclusion, new divisions and strategies of the strong Western countries in preserving their dominant position in the global culture, and especially towards the growing role of multinational global capital, new structures of nobility and their exploitation of critical art."

The same day Piotr Piotrowski (recipeint of the Igor Zabel Award 2010) also held a lecture Peripheries of the World Unite in which he prepresented the differences of peripheral experience in art after 1945 around the world, as the common ground to challenge the mainstream art history, and at the same time to ask whether such a diversity, as well as critique coming from the peripheries, is able to create a political project, as sort of Peripheral International.

Third day of the congress devoted to the Perspectives of the Future. In this section also Maja and Reuben Fowkes (recipeints of the Igor Zabel working grant 2010) took part with the lecture Sidelined, Under-represented and Snubbed: The New Unofficial in East European Art.
This paper looked at the ‘unofficials’ of the art field of today, considering the underrepresentation of ‘old minorities’, such as the Roma, whose absence from the new national canons of Eastern Europe necessitated the establishment of a transnational Roma Pavilion at the Venice Biennial, as well as the fate of ‘new minorities’, such as the many non-native artists, recent immigrants living in the region, who have found it hard to gain acceptance within nationally-oriented art scenes.

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