THE CONTEMPORARY, DISTRIBUTED. On the mobility of a temporal concept.
Time: 18.10.2023
Address: Polygon Musik
THE CONTEMPORARY, DISTRIBUTED. On the mobility of a temporal concept.
A Lecture of Guest Curator Burkhard Meltzer
15:00 – 17:00 (Hanoi time) | Wednesday, 18.10.2023
ZOOM | Complex 01 – Polygon Musik
Free entry, English only.
Maximum number of participants: 30 people (CA Library), 100 people (ZOOM)
We aim to reduce plastic waste and carbon emissions in our culture and art events, so please bring personal bottles and avoid bringing drinks in disposable cups to the event.
A part of Month of Art Practice – MAP 2023 with the theme ‘Alternative Mobility’.
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To be mobile is often articulated as imperative for people, commodities, and infrastructure today. We carry mobile phones, work from different places, and buy things that have travelled a long way. At the same time, mobility is discussed controversially in the light of its costs – for climate change, working conditions or local culture, for instance. But how about immaterial notions, concepts, or cultural tokens, dispersed around the globe?
Though often overlooked or taken for granted, time and timing does play an important role not just in daily routines of living and working, but also as concept to indicate cultural relations. The “contemporary” is such a concept that appears to be connected very much to mobility in globalization. At many places around the globe, one could meet the temporal category as demand (to be contemporary!), in respectively labelled culture spaces, or spread throughout press releases. While at the same widely distributed, the contemporary has been controversially discussed recently. For many, it seems to have become too much a hallmark of globalism, and closely tied to the colonial heritage of humanist universalism.
Criticism has been predominantly targeting its inherent normative demand, either to be contemporary or not to be part of a present cultural economy at all. Nevertheless, the contemporary still seems to be distributed as some standard token in a largely synchronized world. Thinking of recursive AI technologies on the one hand and a growing presence of artists that have been explicitly producing outside the normative framework of the globalist contemporary, the temporal notion of the category might undergo a significant change. And perhaps, the contemporary has become outdated itself?
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ABOUT GUEST CURATOR
BURKHARD MELTZER is a Zurich-based writer, researcher, and curator.
Meltzer has co-edited books and magazines on contemporary art and design. He has been contributing to publications such as artforum.com, form, and frieze magazine. From 2003 to 2007, Burkhard Meltzer worked in the curatorial team of the Kunsthalle St. Gallen, as a curatorial assistant until 2006, and as a curator and director until 2007. He has been an associate lecturer at the Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK) since 2006 and a researcher at ZHdK`s Institute for Critical Theory from 2008–2015.
