FAQ NET: Part VIII

FAQ NET: It is the name of the new column that we started as Media Partners on a regular basis of Platforms Project-Independent Art Fair, asking a common question to participating artists – representatives of artistic groups and collectives, resulting from the needs of conteporary reality and the changes that have already occurred after the Covid 19 Pandemic and the Global Lockdown; with Platforms Project-Independent Art Fair to pioneer in the European Art Fair space and to transfer the entire fair online at Platforms Project Net 2020 (14-31/5/2020).

By Efi Michalarou & Dimitris Lempesis

How do you feel participating in an online Art Fair like Platforms Project 2020? A new experience that emerged through the needs of Covid 19 World Pandemic fighting. What are the new challenges and what do you expect from this participation?

Jasmin Glaab (founding curator of kunsthallekleinbasel artist run initiative Basel): Participating in an online fair feels unusual but exciting. Within an online exhibition, the collective experience that we (artists, curators, educators and visitors) have within a show, art fair or festival hardly takes place. From building the exhibition together, to toasting each other during the opening, to exchanging contacts until shortly before departure, the collective experience on the spot is missing. To tell the truth – I am incredibly sad that I will not meet all my colleagues in person. Nevertheless, I am curious about the new curatorial strategies of staging an exhibition exclusively online and I expect also lots of advantages from it. The Online Art Fair is available for a larger public then only visitors of the fair, the show is documented in an extensive manner and I expect that the new format will highlight aspects that are usually rather in the background and create opportunities we might can’t think of now.

Kelvin Atmadibrata (Sepersepuluh): Sepersepuluh is an initiative a small group of young artists based in Jakarta set up a couple of years ago with the intention to experiment and investigate performance and live art practices, hence participating in not just an online art fair, but infiltrating the online realm in general, has been met with negotiations as we explore unfamiliar terrains. Live art is after all, often structured on real-time-real-space ideology hence there is such emphasis towards the importance of being present. However, despite our current lack of access to physical spaces and direct spectators and tactile audience, I personally feel that ‘presence’ is not always restricted to the corporeal. In Indonesian, we have ‘jiwa’ and ‘raga’ which can be translated into ‘soul’ and ‘body’ respectively but I like the primal undertone of two vocabularies in Indonesian. It reminds me of the borderless of ephemerality, that ‘jiwa’ and ‘raga’ could surpass the compartmentalized space and body that more than often strictly surround live art and performance presentations. They however, despite their lingusitic formality, are quite visionary. The body and soul are after all remain in existence not only in the present, but also past and most importantly in responding to today’s state, the future.
So I guess with this encouragement in mind, we remain excited and positively driven towards what may have seemed to be a less desirable alternative to present not only live art, but art in general. It took us some time to be ready to navigate the online platform but I think it is also about solidarity and a communal step that we take. New platforms will of course reward us with challenges as well, which I supposed, something we can look forward to.
One of the concerns however, and this is also echoed by my current state as a final term MA student is that the shift was too sudden, and I feel a lot of us are still recovering from the shock. It took me a month since the lockdown here in the UK to start to be productive again. Hence I feel the works that we have prepared to be presented in Platforms Project for instance, are not designed and devised for online presentation. They have become documentative and speculative in nature and of course this limits the intended discourse the works aim to achieve. I think it is important to be aware of this limitation, both as artists, organizers as well as audience but having said that, it does not need to limit the experience of the works. I don’t think I could give a critical judgment just yet, but I feel the limitation of today’s condition can be a preliminary into what seems to be the direction we are slowly morphing towards as a community of art workers and creative practitioners.
I keep having questioning myself and my fellow peers in Sepersepuluh as we participate in online exhibitions. Is it merely for survival sake or an honest and genuine interest towards the platform. Either direction is personally fine for me and it is desirable in fact to keep shifting as well, but I think we need to gage or measure ourselves within the potentially conflicting ends, just so that our priorities do not further complicate this relatively new form of normal. I think as an artist, a student as well as an organizer, my expectation with Platforms Project’s online presentation is for me to exercise the digital. We will be contributing an artist conversation that was done via zoom for example, and it was definitely not a program that we have had thought before, hence it was a learning experience for us, not just to deal with the technicality of navigating the unusual but also challenging our notion of understanding liveness in general.

Rose Camastro Pritchett (Chicago Artists Platforms): I am swept with sadness at not going to Athens and to participate in Platforms Projects 2020. My first time to exhibit at Platforms was in 2014 with Art on Armitage Gallery, Chicago, USA then in 2016 and 2017 with HMS Gallery, Nottingham, England. For each exhibition I created new art work which later developed into larger bodies of work that I exhibited in solo exhibitions in the United States. Platforms provided international feedback and discussion from visitors and exhibiting artists alike. It enriched me and my work. I will miss spending time with my Platform friends and Artemis Potamianou whose art and directorship has been an inspiration. I will miss Athens. Participating in Platforms on line is not a substitute but it is next best thing, for which I am grateful. Our group, Chicago Artists Platforms, is used to working on line so preparing the materials was not difficult. We work collaboratively, but due to Covid 19 we get together on Zoom. We are restricted because Chicago is a Covid 19 hotspot and we will continue to be sheltering-in-place until June. One of our members is now in Washington DC to help her family there. Our group has developed an online marketing plan to use on FaceBook and Instagram about Platforms and our booth. While one of my performances will be on-line, I am disappointed that I will not be able to do the one planned with students from Athens Art College. I have performed variations of this performance at the Waldkirch Performance Art Festival in Germany, Jiujiang University in China and at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago.
The enclosed photos are of me and the Cocoons that I was going to exhibit at platforms. The cocoons start as a performance art piece whereby a person is wrapped in transparent cloth, sewn into it and the cut out. The shell is reworked with layers of hand stitching forming a cocoon. Cocoon is a story about change which references my experiences living in different countries; Wales, China, Saudi Arabia. The performance art photo is of my performance art piece at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago.