Poverty jet set – a conversation about living, working and moving in a precarious art world

Discussion: Thursday February 9, 2023 | 6:30-8:00pm
Works by Žarko Aleksić on view: Friday February 10, 2023 | 12:00-6:00pm

Location: Residency Unlimited 
360 Court Street (main green church doors), Brooklyn NY 11231 (map)

Click here to view the online brochure

The starting point for this discussion is Kuba Szreder‘s recent publication The ABC of the Projectariat: Living and working in a precarious art world (Manchester University Press, 2021). Szreder, a scholar and activist from Warsaw will enter into discussion with Žarko Aleksić, a Belgrade-based artist currently in residency at RU. The ABC of the Projectariat: Living and working in a precarious art world addresses the precarious artistic labor in the field of contemporary art and condition of the “projectariat,” whose work is dependent on intermittent opportunities and takes the form of projects, commissions and assignments. Based on their research and multi-disciplinary practices, Szreder and Aleksić will discuss artists’ networking, freelancing and mobility demanded by the ever-increasing global circulation of art; and social and political urgencies cultural workers are facing in the post-pandemic world. This discussion will be moderated by the New York based curator OIga Kopenkina.

New work realized by Žarko Aleksić over the course of his residency will be featured on the occasion of this event and will also be on view on Friday, February 10 at RU from 12-6pm.

Click below to see images from the program

About

Žarko Aleksić works across several mediums integrating experience, photography, video, installation and performativity . His post disciplinary artistic practice is based on the examination of consciousness, mental processing and AI: in relation to socio-political issues of cognitive capitalism and the acquisition of knowledge, education, dematerialized labor, and surveillance capitalism , as well as elaborating data processing such are biomarkers and correlational data gathered from scientific measuring devices and social media harvesting. By taking into account neurobiological and endeavors within cognitive neurosciences, Aleksić’s practice addresses personalized phenomenology through the examination of his own states of mind where he is both subject and object resulting in fast shifts through the first and third person. Full bio here.

Olga Kopenkina is a Belarus-born independent curator and art critic, living in New York City. In 1994-1998, she was a curator of the 6 th Line gallery, the first independent art center in Minsk, Belarus. In 2001, she graduated from the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, NY. As a curator, she organized exhibitions and programs for Pratt Manhattan Gallery, Austrian Cultural Forum in NYC, UnionDocs, EFA Project Space, 1 st Moscow Biennale, among the others. Kopenkina is a contributor to publications such as Art Journal, Field Journal, Artforum, ArtMargins, Moscow Art Journal, Hyperallergic, Brooklyn Rail, and others. She is an adjunct professor at New York University and Fordham University.

Kuba Szreder is a researcher, curator, and a lecturer at the Academy of Fine Art in Warsaw. He cooperates with artistic unions, consortia of postartistic practitioners, clusters of art-researchers, art collectives and artistic institutions in Poland, UK, and other European countries. Editor and author of books and texts on the political economy of global artistic circulation, art strikes, artistic self-organization in the expanded field, and the use value of art. His most recent book The ABC of the Projectariat: Living and working in a precarious art world, was published by the Whitworth Museum and Manchester University Press in the December 2021.

This program benefits from the support of The Trust for Mutual Understanding and the Polish Cultural Institute New York.

This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.