Breaking the Bank

Artists have always been pushed in many roles: from chroniclers of history, romantic geniuses, agents provocateurs, to increasingly individuals who are tasked to solve the ills of society. Have the progressive politics of artists become ensnared in a neo-liberal trap? If so, how and by what means? What kind of art does it produce, how is it valued and where do we find productive refusal? - Public Event 16 October 2014, at 20.00 in TENT Rotterdam, Witte de Withstraat 50.

Writer of This is Not Art: Activism and Other Not Art (2013) and artist Alana Jelinek's keynote lecture addresses value and artistic responsibility. Klaas van Gorkum + Iratxe Jaio respond to Alana Jelinek and discuss the notion of artistic production through their work in the exhibition "Producing time in between other things" (2011). Artist Anna Moreno gives a lecture performance 'Deface the Currency' about value and Joost de Bloois, Professor in Cultural Analysis and Comparative Literature at the University of Amsterdam shares his thoughts on the themes of the evening. Curator and writer Nat Muller moderates the event.

Alana Jelinek is currently Arts and Humanities Research Council Fellow in Performing and Creative Arts 2009 – 2014 at Cambridge University. Trained in the late 1980s as a painter, her art practice includes traditional art skills like painting as well as novel writing, performance and site-specific interventions. She recently published ‘This is Not Art: Activism and Other Not-Art’ which poses the question, what is art and what is its function? She suggests that art has become clichéd and that artists have very naive ideas about the way power works in modern society. Jelinek lives and works in London.

The work of the Spanish artist Anna Moreno is based on how ideology shapes our behaviour. Her recent work includes projects on the aesthetics of radicalism and alternativity in the arts. She exhibited in SF MOMA (San Fransisco), W139 (Amsterdam), SASG (Seoul), Sala d’Arcs (Valencia),  NauEstruch (Barcelona) and bb15 (Linz). She lives and works in Barcelona and the Hague.

Joost de Bloois is assistant professor at the University of Amsterdam, departments of Cultural Analysis and Comparative Literature. He has published extensively on the nexus between art and politics in a.o. OPEN, Volume, Historical Materialism and Metropolis M. He has recently published a volume on the political aesthetics of Alain Badiou (Octavo, 2012), as well as an introduction into the latter’s philosophy (Boom, 2014), and a volume on post-autonomia (Routledge 2014). He is currently working on two book-length projects: Art under Austerity: Art and Precarity in Contemporary Europe and Political Art in the Netherlands.

Iratxe Jaio & Klaas van Gorkum have worked together since 2001 producing performances, videos, publications and installations. Using documentation as their work methodology, they analyse and question social and political issues concerning the everyday. They exhibited amongst others in MUSAC (León, Spain), FRAC Aquitaine (Bordeaux), S.M.A.K (Ghent) en De Appel (Amsterdam). They live and work in Rotterdam.

Nat Muller is an independent curator and critic. Her main interests include: the intersections of aesthetics, media and politics; media art and contemporary art in and from the Middle East. She is a regular contributor to Springerin, MetropolisM. Her writing has been published amongst others in Bidoun, ArtAsiaPacific, Art Papers, Canvas, X-tra, The Majalla, Art Margins and Harper’s Bazaar Arabia.

TENT Rotterdam, Witte de Withstraat 50
Date: 16 October 2014
Time: 20.00
Price: €3,-