Communism’s Afterlives

Organized by Elena Sorokina and Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez
Proposed by the Parisien com­mittee of the Public School

SESSION 1 April 24th 2010 15:00 Pietro Bianchi, Renata Poljak, Société Réaliste, Oxana Timofeeva, Elena Sorokina and Natasa Petresin Bachelez
SESSION 2 September 26th 2010 14:00 Guillaume Désanges, Martha Kirszenbaum, Keti Chukhrov, Elena Sorokina and Natasa Petresin Bachelez

After the col­lapse of the Soviet block, com­mu­nism as idea, image or problem has been regarded as "out­moded, absurd, deplorable or crim­inal, depending on the case". Today, it is often pre­sented by the main­stream media as a paren­thesis of his­tory, an aber­ra­tion of the 20th cen­tury, as "a com­pletely for­gotten word, only to be iden­ti­fied with a lost expe­ri­ence". Although the com­mu­nist hypotheses of pre­vious eras may no longer be valid, their his­to­ries, nar­ra­tives and key notions have never ceased to spark atten­tion and inform recent dis­cus­sions such as the com­munal versus the common, and mate­rial versus imma­te­rial prop­erty, to name just a few. Perceived from a greater dis­tance today, com­mu­nism has re-emerged as a topic for inves­ti­ga­tion in artistic and exhi­bi­tion pro­duc­tion, that reflects it in diverse ways, addressing the rel­e­vance of the term today or inviting provoca­tive com­par­isons with the pre­sent.

This sem­inar aims to pre­sent var­ious works that recast ideas related to com­mu­nism and revisit it as a com­plex and diverse arena of polit­ical and aes­thetic atti­tudes, which varied between nations, com­mu­ni­ties and his­tor­ical periods. By no means does the sem­inar intends to take a nos­talgic tour through the past decades, but rather seeks to address the topic through con­crete art and exhi­bi­tion pro­jects real­ized recently. All of them are trying to decon­struct the idea of mono­lith, still very pre­sent in today’s recep­tion, and to recu­perate var­ious episodes, sto­ries and notably, the "com­mu­nist apoc­rypha" - texts, music, visual pro­duc­tion - which have never been part of the estab­lished ide­o­log­ical canon, and whose intel­lec­tual pat­terns shed new light on what the con­tem­po­rary uses of the notion of com­mu­nism might be. Instead of treating com­mu­nism as pure polit­ical abstrac­tion, the pro­jects pre­sented by the sem­inar deal with con­cepts, events and/or par­tic­ular per­son­al­i­ties related to com­mu­nism and its his­tory which have sur­vived the Bildersturm of the recent past and can be artis­ti­cally reac­ti­vated.
The sem­inar will take place in Brussels and Paris, in both cases at The Public School.

Brussels: April 23rd, 3-6pm
Participants: Agency, Dessislava Dimova, Albert Heta, Olga Kisseleva
for more infor­ma­tion please follow the link: http://brus­sels.thep­ublic­school.org/class/2336

Paris: April 24th, 3-6pm
Participants: Pietro Bianchi, Renata Poljak, Société Réaliste, Oxana Timofeeva
for more infor­ma­tion, please follow the link: http://paris.thep­ublic­school.org/class/1773

Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez is an inde­pen­dent curator and critic who is based in Paris and Ljubljana. She is a Ph.D. can­di­date at the EHESS in Paris where she also runs a sem­inar on con­tem­po­rary artistic prac­tices with Patricia Falguieres, Elisabeth Lebovici, and Hans Ulrich Obrist. She is cur­rently working as an asso­ciate curator at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. She is a member of the edi­to­rial board of ARTMargins and Maska.

Elena Sorokina is Paris/Brussels based curator and critic. She was a Whitney Museum of American Art ISP fellow in New York in 2004. Her recent pro­jects include "Petroliana" at the Moscow Biennial 2007; "Laws of Relativity" at the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin, Italy; "On Traders’ Dilemmas" at YBCA, San Francisco, 2008; and “Scènes Centrales" at Tri Postal, Lille, France, 2009. She has been writing for Artforum, Moscow Art Magazine, Die Zeit and other pub­li­ca­tions.