Petja Dimitrova & Can Gülcü

Cultural Work and Activism – Potentials and Contradictions

Wednesday, 16th April 2014, 19:00

Galerija Nova Showroom, Teslina 7

WIENWOCHE was launched in Vienna in 2012 as a new cultural project at the intersection of art, cultural work and political activism. Migrant mainstreaming, the marginal groups’ access to the cultural field, emancipatory socio-political cultural practices, interventions into the elite machinery of high culture, the openness of institutions to migrants, criticism of paradigms such as creativity, the working conditions of cultural workers… These and similar issues are at the centre of debates on the critical cultural scenes in Vienna and elsewhere. There are two weeks of activist cultural projects as part of WIENWOCHE every year, and they serve to introduce these and other debates into the public sphere. Based on their experiences, Petja Dimitrova and Can Gülcü, artistic directors of the project, will open the discussion on how the social-critical facilities and requirements of social movements, autonomous initiatives and/or the artist within cultural projects can become visible and effective without being co-opted and aestheticised.

Petja Dimitrova lives in Vienna, where she works as an artist on the intersection of visual art and political and participative cultural work. She teaches at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna and is a board member of IG Bildende Kunst and a member of the Critical Migration and Border Regime Research network. She is the co-editor of Sketches of Migration: Postcolonial Enmeshments, Antiracist Construction Work and Regimes: The Organisation of Dominance and the Formalisation of Expression. She is a member of the initiative 1st March – transnational migrants’ strike.

Can Gülcü lives in Vienna. He has taught at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna and Karl-Franzens-Universität in Graz. His artistic practice exists at the intersection of visual art and political and participative cultural work, and is focused on the examination of societal, political and social power relations. He is the co-author of Belgrade Gazelle – A Guide to the Slums and is a member of the initiative 1st March – transnational migrants’ strike.

editor: Vesna Vuković