Preserving art and heritage: a question of ownership?
Reading room and discussion proposed by Jubilee within the framework of the Fair Arts Almanac session for State of the Arts (SOTA) at Kunsthal Gent
10/12/2021, 14-17h
Kunsthal Gent, Ghent
For SOTA’s almanac sessions Jubilee proposes a moment of reading and collective reflection (14 – 17h):
- Reading room: Boris Groys, Art in the age of biopolitics, from artwork to art documentation, 2008
- Collective reflection and writing: ‘How shall we preserve contemporary art practices?’
This gathering takes place at Kunsthal Gent, an experimental intersection for the presentation and development of contemporary art, located in a monumental fourteenth-century Carmelite monastery in the centre of Ghent since 2018 and one of the institutional partners in Emptor.
It is no coincidence we propose to meet here as the monastry embodies the question of how we’ve been dealing with questions of heritage preservation and property up until today.
Yet the ongoing discussions on the sale of the site and trajectory of Grace Ndiritu at Kunsthal challenge us to re-think and open up possible new ways of living and working together, in the arts and beyond.
Participants can also sign up for the public evening debate: Commoning, Property Law and Indigenous Land Rights in the Belgian Context in the framework of Grace Ndiritu’s development trajectory at Kunsthal.
State Of The Arts (SOTA) is an open platform reimagining the art world today. SOTA believes the transition of an art world towards a fairer one can also serve as a catalyst for genuine change in society at large.
Since 2014 SOTA has discussed Fair Practice in the Arts along five different axes: solidarity, diversity, transparency, ecology and ‘relationality’ (trust). It is clear that these different aspects of fairness are deeply intertwined. Fairness deserves a constant, situated and societal debate. That is why SOTA developed the Fair Arts Almanac as a common tool at the heart of its activities.
The almanac 2022 will be created during a series of preparatory events. Throughout 2021, these events will take place on a monthly basis, always at different locations, about different topics and prepared by different groups – and are open to questions that live among practitioners these days, taking the sensibilities of the various seasons into account.