Events

Project: THE NEW SUBJECT

29. September 2023 - 16:00, Exhibition
KUNSTHAL NORD, KJELLERUPS TORV 5, 2, 9000, AALBORG, DENMARK

The second exhibition of the propject The New Subject focuses on various aspects of public health and the stigmatization of bodies and minds considered unconventional by the society and social institutions.  The exhibition confronts structural disinvestment in public health policy, the history of past medical experiments and the emergence of new diseases due to post-capitalist working and environmental conditions. Presented works will address the nature of violence, the impact of technological surveillance on personal autonomy and bodily integrity, as well as the exploitation of vulnerable bodies by the pharmaceutical industry.  Participating artists focus on bodies and individuals that exist on the fringes of societal and legal "norms" by transgressing the conventional boundaries of gender and human anatomy.

2. June 2023 - 18:00, Выставка
Konsthall C, Cigarrvägen 14, 123 57 Farsta, Stockholm, Sweden

The first exhibition of the project The New Subject“Mutating Rights and Conditions of Living Bodies”, at Konsthall C responds to the notion of a sovereign body treated as disposable by corporations and governments. Through various artistic mediums the exhibition explores the ways in which power structures and state apparatuses impact the body, employing legislation as a tool for control, often leading to the violation of  rights and freedoms. By highlighting instances of violence and suppression carried out under the guise of legal frameworks, the exhibition challenges viewers to question the ethical and moral dimensions of such practices.  

Project: Самостоятельное событие

18. February 2022 - 16:00, Выставка
Sevcable Port, Kozhevenna line, 40, St Petersburg

Project "Echoes of The Sea" by British artist Nabil Ali consists of a big scale outdoor sculptural installation, multidisciplinary international seminar and a booklet. The project draws attention to the changing conditions of nature by addressing attention to coastline erosion, which happens due to the constant rise of water temperature and sea level as a result of industrialization, urbanization and consequences of climate change. The project also demonstrates how natural sciences, ethnographical knowledge and material culture of indigenous people can stimulate ecological imagination and raise public awareness about the planetary decay.
 

15. October 2021 - 15:00, Symposium
Kai Art Center, Peetri 12, 10415 Tallinn and online

The Symposium "Decoding the Habitual" concentrates on strategies and tactics of decoding and disclosing the policing mechanisms incorporated into the social system, including education, architecture, design and urban planning, digital etiquette and communication, environmental policies and more. Drawing from the concept of intensive places and analysing various spaces that represent the ‘society of control’ the Symposium speakers look more closely into how our minds and bodies are governed by invisible suppressive structures - to develop analytical spatial, digital and infrastructural literacy and awareness to work towards a more sustainable, happier and meaningful future. The Symposium is a part of the 6th Tallinn Photomonth biennial.  

1. October 2021 - 18:00, Дискуссия
Online

The discussion "Voicing the archive" is inspired by the archival and activist work of the Haifa Feminist Institute, which is based in Haifa, Israel. The HFI is a non-governmental feminist establishment of the activist group Isha Le’Isha ('woman to woman' in Hebrew) and home to the first and only queer-feminist archive in Israel. Sociologist and activist Jessica Nevo will speak about the HFI program ‘Tribunal’ and the work that the Institute conducts in order to make visible and decrease gender-based and intersectional violence in Israel/Palestine. Artist Ofri Lapid will present her recent reflections about working with the HFI documents of court observations from the 1990's, and excerpts from Maggie Nelson's book "The Red Parts". The event is held in conjunction with the "Voicing the Silence" apexart exhibition. 

3. September 2021 - 19:00, Exhibition
EKKM, Põhja pst. 35 / Rumbi 3, Tallinn, 10415

The main imperative of the exhibition "Intensive Plces" is to look for multifocal answers to the question: "How can we prepare for a future based on the principles of interdependency and interspecies cohabitation?" The exhibition is a network of intensive places connected through 13 projects by Estonian and international artists that hold historical, emotional, contextual and architectural significance for the city’s residents. The show is the main exhibition of the 6th Tallinn Photmonth biennial. 

17. July 2021 - 19:00, Выставка
ЦТИ Фабрика, Переведеновский пер.,18, Москва

"Voicing the Silence" amplifies the positions of Russian and international artists, who contribute to the global feminist agenda through art. The exhibition, along with accompanying public programs, showcases ways of challenging social and gender norms, unveils state mechanisms that control women’s rights and reproductive decisions, and addresses feminist movements across different countries and historical contexts. The exhibition is an apexart internation Open Call winner 2020-2021. 

 
17. April 2021 - 18:00, Exhibition
POST, Van Oldenbarneveltstraat 63-A 6512 AT, Nijmegen

, The Netherlands

Exhibition Nucleus of Capital by artist Nina Støttrup Larsen (DK) is unfolding the shielded connections between France/EU and the monetary union called the CFA Franc. The CFA Franc (in 1945 incorporated as Franc of the French Colonies in Africa) - the official currency issued in 14 states of West and Central Africa, the former colonies of France. While other European countries ended their monetary control when the colonies were granted  independence in the 1950s and early 1960s, France has continued to manage and govern monetary processes in the region until today. Visually, linguistically and historically, this colonial continuum remains obscured in Europe since the 1960s, which results in the fact that this current major sub-currency of the Euro is little known about, at least in Europe. The exhibition brings to light and bolsters public discourse around these camouflaged processes by which the French and EU economy undermined the sovereignty of the 14 states in the CFA zone.

 

16. October 2020 - 12:00, Дискуссия
Online

The international curatorial symposium organized, initiated and curated by TOK will serve as a knowledge-production component of the IV Arctic Art Forum by addressing regional issues in relation to the global context through the lens of contemporary curating, artistic production and research, and the potentiality of forms they may take. Landing the symposium on the context of Arkhangelsk and the Arctic region, TOK continues a series of public events about radical democratic structures and projects of contemporary curators, artists and academic researchers that analyze and articulate the conditions of contemporary realities.

22. February 2020 - 20:00, Выставка
4 Ha'Amoraim Street, P.O Box 317, Holon 5810202, Israel

Off to Space: Countenarrating the Cosmos is a group exhibition bringing together works by 6 international artists and collectives dealing with contested narratives, public history and turbulent contemporary political contexts by analyzing and revisiting space exploration strategies that started in the 20th century as attempts to widen geopolitical influence, accumulate power and make utopian  futures possible. Presenting space exploration from positions of ethnic minorities, women, animals, small communities, dependent economies and displaying how affected space representations have always been by current dominant ideologies and political visions, the exhibition is a platform for discovering a variety of counterfuturisms and temporalities and offers artistic ways of reclaiming displaced stories and representations of the past and future.

 
5. October 2019 - 19:30, Лекция
New Holland, Pavillion, Admiralteyskiy channel emb., 2

In her presentation curator Mirjam Westen at the Museum Arnhem (The Netherlands) will focus on expanding formats of contemporary curating that require new contexts of collaborations and interactions. Relying on her experience of connecting female artists of different generations throughout her practice, she will highlight historical and current projects by feminist artists and curators who have redefined curatorship and will elucidate how these new visions have influenced her practice as a curator.  

 

3. October 2019 - 11:00, Выставка
Новая Голландия, Павильон, наб. Адмиралтейского канала, 2

Feeling the need to analyze the current conditions of the curatorial profession, which have been shaped over the past ten years by political, economic, and environmental degradation, TOK  is organizing a retrospective exhibition «How To Work Together» about the duo’s practice and the role of a curator in the contemporary society. TOK curators will showcase archival materials, video interviews, and objects commissioned from artists reflecting the global and local transformations of the past ten years These chronological markers, that have defined the current political agenda, will be mapped alongside the stages of TOK’s development, and will allow us to reflect upon the change in society and within all of us.

3. October 2019 - 11:00, Семинар
New Holland Island, The Pavillion, Admiralteyskiy channel emb., 2

As a part of the 1st Curatorial Forum, organized by the North-Western branch of National Centre for Contemporary Arts (NCCA) ROSIZO, TOK will curate an internaitonal symposium that will focus on extending territories of curatorial and artistic practices as well as changing conditions of curatorial profession. Together with the local art community we will analyze the role and impact of curatorship in rethinking historical discourses and reshaping understanding about publicness, sharing, and solidarity in the artistic domain.

9. June 2019 - 17:00, Дискуссия
Katri Valan Puisto, Sörnäinen, Helsinki

The discussion between curator Maria Veits, artists Andréa Stanislav (USA) and Axel Straschnoy (FI) and President of the Finnish Astronautical Society Mika Javala (FI) is instigated by the returning space race and the impact it has had on the environmental, political, economic, and social climate in historical perspective and contemporary context. We will discuss alternative, non-official and silenced narratives connected to the topic of the space and will explore various artistic formats of presenting counternarratives about the cosmos from female, ethnic, racial and ecological perspectives. The discussion is a part of the Shelter Festival in Helsinki. 

 
16. May 2019 - 19:00, Выставка
CCI Fabrica, Perevedenovskiy per., 18, Moscow

In 'Yiddish Cosmos'  artist Yevgeniy Fiks offers an alternative view on the Soviet history - by looking at it from the position of the Soviet space conquest and Soviet Jewry, it creates a futuristic narrative where the ideas of technological development merge with the principles of Yiddish culture and reinterpretation of the figure of a Soviet refusenik and his struggle for liberty of movement. The exhibition addresses the history of antisemitism in the USSR, connection between the Jewish and dissident movements, and attempts of the Soviet Jews to preserve the Yiddish culture despite governmental persecutions.

Project: Get Real! Online discussions series

27. May 2021 - 19:00, Online discussion
online

Using the casino as an allegory of housing urbanization in accelerated capitalism, architect Merve Bedir will speak about the negative consequences of the global financial regime on the housing question, which resulted in humanless cities, vacant mega projects at the periphery of the urban sphere that do not respond to people's demands. Speculation on public housing has become gambling, not only gambling by global investment but also through national guarantee schemes, which are funded with public tax budgets.  The presentation will bring forward these aspects in a transnational and global context with building or investment cases from Turkey, Qatar, and Hong Kong. The event is a part of "Get Real!" online discussions series. 

22. April 2021 - 19:00, Online discussion
Online

Artist Matīss Groskaufmanis will discuss the architecture of an individual apartment in context political shifts in the 20th century East Europe, and today. Several case studies in Rīga will illustrate how one of the most ubiquitous forms of modern urban dwelling has been instrumentalized both by state and extra-state power structures as means of social, economic, and ideological reform. The talk will trace the recent history of the individual apartment, and its function as an object of a social contract, a unit of economic exchange, and most recently—as an immunological bubble. The event is a part of "Get Real!" online discussions series. 

8. April 2021 - 18:00, Online discussion
Online

The talk will provide a brief overview of housing policies and architecture in Estonia during the Soviet and Post-Soviet periods with an additional aspect on gendered use of residential spaces. Similarly to the other Soviet socialist republics, industrial methods in mass housing construction were introduced in Estonia with the Khruchchev thaw in the end of the 1950s, and modernist free planning based on the model of microrayons continued well into the 1980s, resulting in big homogenous residential areas with a scarcity of public amenities to support housing. Re-establishment of independence in 1991 culturally and socially meant a strong desire to return to the pre-war values, including a living standard and a family model embodied in a private house, generating a remarkable wave of suburbanization from the end of the 1990s till today. In the talk Ingrid Ruudi will outline some possibilities for an intersectional feminist analysis of those changes in residential patterns over the past half a century. The event is a part of "Get Real!" online discussions series. 

 
25. March 2021 - 17:00, Online discussion
Online

The conversation with documentary filmmaker Chad Freidrichs will focus on the tragic story of The Pruitt-Igoe public housing development in St. Louis, Missouri, USA. Completed in 1954, the government-sponsored 33 11-story buildings became homes for many underprivileged families and people with lower income. Twenty years later the whole housing project was declared unfit for habitation and demolished. In his famous film ‘The Pruitt-Igoe Myth’ (2011) Chad Freidrichs conducts an investigation on the Pruitt-Igoe story and reconstructs a complex picture of city politics and urban policy behind the American modernist architecture. The film also serves as a platform for the voices of St Louis residents who were discriminated against based on their race and social status. The event is a part of "Get Real!" online discussions series. 

11. March 2021 - 17:00, Online discussion
Online

Architect and architectural historian Dr Zvi Efrat will discuss the Israeli horizontal housing block project of the 1950s and its aftermath as a political symptom of a regime of centralist control over lands, infrastructure, planning, production, and population mobilization. He will argue that only an authoritative state apparatus (or a proto-state monopolistic organization such as the Labor Federation) has the territorial drive and the administrative capability to seize and nationalize lands; to annul existing parcelizations; to disperse ad hoc  “facts on the ground”; to lay wasteful infrastructure across the landscape;  to devise random urban and architectural compositions; to dictate and regulate zoning and building standards; to duplicate, replicate, and mutate at  every scale; and to charge baseline generic architecture with patriotism (“ingathering of the exiles”) and welfare-state (“melting pot”) rhetoric. The event is a part of "Get Real!" online discussion series. 

11. February 2021 - 17:00, Discussion
Online

Consumer credit and mortgages have emerged as pivot institutions affecting lives of vast majority of Russians. For many of them consumer loan appears to be the only available strategy for upward mobility and therefore considerably impacts individual and family strategies. This makes credit the foundation of political power and dependence in Russia. Credit limits and structures collective action and radically reshapes the nexus of relationship between individual and community. Drawing on the findings of an ethnographic study, sociologist Greg Yudin will point out three political premises and effects of the current spread of consumer credit in Russia. The talk is a part of TOK online discussion series 'Get Real!'.

28. January 2021 - 19:00, Дискуссия
Online

Artist Wilf Speller will critically examine the contemporary forms and motifs of luxury real estate marketing as reflections of the modes of production typical to the commodity landscape from which they emerge. In particular they will focus on the CGI videos used for the sale of off-plan property that, Wilf argue, do not only project a particular image of the world, but that the very mode of imaging used in their production reflects the technoaesthetics of the neoliberal ideology. In his argument Speller engage with form through a Marxist analysis of the commodity form as well as a politico-aesthetic understanding of ideology. The talk is a part of TOK online discussion series 'Get Real!'

 
14. January 2021 - 19:00, Discussion
Online

Artist Ola Hassanain will deliver a compilation of spatial analyses that explore the dynamics between state and people in the context of Khartoum (Sudan) and will  discuss how architecture, the physical environment and/ or the Urban-scape are implicated in manifesting terror. The analyses draws from experiential narratives from different positionalities of women as critical spatial practice that evokes a notion of "the Outdoors" as a possibilty to collectively exist outside of state spatial dominance and terror. The talk is a part of TOK online discussion series 'Get Real!'

 

17. December 2020 - 19:00, Дискуссия
On-line event

As a part of the series of online discussions about housing policy "Get Real!" a sociologist of urban studies Anna Zhelnina will talk about housing activism that was instigated around the housing renovation program in Moscow. She will touch upon the socio-political processes that were revealed and the mechanisms were launched by the Moscow's "Renovation".

Project: States of Control

3. November 2020 - 20:00, Дискуссия
Online

On November 3, TOK curates an online debate about elections as a platform for representation of the people's collective will. The international group of speakers, while observing the U.S. elections live, will discuss the very mechanisms and procedures in different contexts and potential alternatives to them. The conversation will also reflect on the manipulation and suppression of voters and election processes in different countries. Central to the discussion will be the theme of political imaginary and the role of art and social science (academia) in articulating both current and visionary political horizons.

Project: Critical Mass. Season 5

12. October 2019 - 16:00, Дискуссия
New Holland, Pavillion, Admiralteyskiy channel emb., 2

On October 12, the 5th season of the “Critical Mass” will launch with an open discussion with the artists participating in the new season. Entitled ‘Get Real!’, it is  devoted to the emerging and complex issues of housing, real estate and contemporary and historical housing conditions in post-socialist and neoliberal contexts. All the speakers will talk about their projects and initiatives dealing with the issues of real estate and its ownership, diverse housing programs and projects, social urban landscapes and participation of citizens in decision making on city level. TOK curators will speak about their research in the framework of the 5th season of ‘Critical Mass’, which will take place in the South-West of Russia. 

Project: Fast Forward to the Future: Empowerment of Young People Through Arts

26. April 2019 - 16:00, Выставка
Lunagallerian, Storgatan 15, 151 27 Södertälje

The two-festival in Södertälje (Sweden) grows out of an intense week of workshops that aims to decode the host city of Södertälje by bringing young people's stories and images back into the streets with the help of artists from Russia and Sweden. Utilizing activist methods through city parade, text/poetry, mental maps, news production and urban sound exploration as well as co-creating the realities of tomorrow through formulating utopian scenarios via performance and collective printing. The festival, which is a part of the 'Fast forward to the Future' project revolts around three main themes: "Youthopia", "Recode the city" and "Youth and urban-related identity: that's what matters".

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