Övül Ö. Durmușoğlu & Joanna Warsza:
Life has never been totally integrated into the techniques that govern and administer it. It constantly escapes them. Now, more than ever, we are confronted with the overarching topic of survival and the conditions of old age. Many questions arise from the metaphor of a ‘survival kit’: How to live in a maturing society, which is at the same time shaped by discrimination based on age, the structural changes in labour and care conditions, and now the virus?
How to deal with intergenerational dependence and debt on a planetary scale? How to come to terms with our own extinction as the human species? How to face digital ageism and fenced off elderly houses? How to cope with the fear of death and dependence? How to age as a woman, as a child, as a partner, or as an artist? The pyramid is reversing; a much older European population is coming, composed of, well – actually also ‘us’ – the current middle-age art makers and viewers.
Therefore, it is a critical time to develop a strong collective logic and vocabulary of care from our everyday life in order to transgress capitalism’s ill logic that defines who can stay alive. The exhibition spreads through a net of apartment museums in Riga, where collective and personal memory prevails. These flats are particular sites of remembrance, characteristic of Eastern Europe, where the domestic and the private merges with the public memory. These places which can tell us a lot about how to narrate both micro and macro histories; where personal memory can rewrite the collective one. One wonders what is life and what is not life in those places?
As Covid-19 made everyone part of the same interconnected texture, Roberto Esposito’s analysis of the links between the political notion of ‘community’ and the epidemiological notion of ‘immunity’ has gained another current vitality. In such a moment, can art become an act of survival? And what would be another kind of societal immune system, which starts at the tip of a collective skin woven by artists? As poet Mary Oliver asks: and have you changed your life?
Övül Ö. Durmușoğlu and Joanna Warsza are curators, educators and writers. They co-curated Die Balkone. Life, Art, Pandemic and Proximity, a public art initiative in the windows and balconies of Prenzlauer Berg in Berlin in 2020 and 2021, and the Autostrada Biennale in Kosovo in the summer of 2021.
Övül Ö. Durmușoğlu is a mentor and co-developer of the Graduate School of the University of the Arts in Berlin’s study programme and a visiting professor for Art and Discourse at the University of the Arts Braunschweig (Hochschule für Bildende Künste Braunschweig, HBK). In her multi-faceted practice as a curator, writer and educator, she researches intersectional forms and narratives of contemporary political subjectivities. Övül was one of the curators for the Steirischer Herbst Festival in Graz; Curator/Director for the YAMA public screen in Istanbul and Artistic Director of the Sofia Contemporary Near, Closer, Together: Exercises for a Common Ground Festival in 2013. She also curated different programmes for the 10th, 13th and 14th Istanbul Biennials; coordinated and organized different programs and events at Maybe Education and the public program for dOCUMENTA (13). Originally, from Ankara, she now lives in Berlin.
Joanna Warsza is the Programme Director of CuratorLab at the Konstfack University of the Arts in Stockholm, and an independent curator interested in how art functions politically and socially outside the white cubes. She was the Artistic Director of Public Art Munich 2018, curator of the Georgian Pavilion at the 55th Venice Biennale, head of public programs for Manifesta 10 in St. Petersburg and an associate curator of the 7th Berlin Biennale among others. She is an editor of more than ten publications in the areas of public art, politics, performativity and feminist theory. Lately she co-edited, Red Love. A Reader on Alexandra Kollontai (Konstfack Collection and Sternberg Press, 2020) with Michele Masucci and Maria Lind. Originally from Warsaw, she now lives in Berlin.