Laznia Centre for Contemporary Art

A joint initiative of seven partner organizations will be an attempt to summarize the activities that took place as part of the four-year international “Artecitya” project (http://artecitya.eu/). The meeting will be an opportunity to reflect on the diversity of urban space changes and related social, cultural and economic transformations. During the symposium, we will take a look at the works and issues related to activities in the public space, current strategies of engaging the new audience by institutions and artists. What challenges do residents of districts have to face, which have been included in revitalization programs? What are the risks of improving the quality of public spaces?

On behalf of LAZNIA CCA Jakub Grzegorczyk, Monika Popow and Joshua Schwebel were invited to participate in the symposium.

The event is part of the "Artecitya" project, financed from the Creative Europe 2014-2020 program.

Monika Popow

A video-lecture by Monika Popow is an analysis of artistic projects by the residents of the LAZNIA CCA, in frames of an international project "Artecitya": an artist-curator duo Simone Basani&Alice Ciresola, collective CALDODECULTIVO and Joshua Schwebel. Each of these long-term projects was an attempt to respond to the local context, in order to create projects based on cooperation with local artists, experts, inhabitants of the district and the city, other institutions and organizations, often taking place in the public space of the Tri-City.

Monika Popow – received her Ph.D. in philosophy of education at the Faculty of Social Studies at the University of Gdańsk and M.A. in history of literature in Institute of Eastern Slavonic Studies of the same university. She works as academic, publicist and curator and cooperates with academic and art institutions. Her scientificc interests include cultural studies, postcolonial theory and posthumanism. She is a co-author of a book The Ideal Woman. From a guide to a dialogue (together with Iwona Zając, Gdansk City Gallery 2012) and „The category of nation in educational discourse (Adam Mickiewicz University Press 2015).

Jakub Grzegorczyk

Jakub Grzegorczyk is a sociologist at Institute for Public Space Research (IBPP) in Warsaw, Poland, he took part in research in the perception of contemporary art in public space which was realized in 4 European cities in the frames of “Artecitya” project.

He will speak about the results of the research realized by IBPP in 2017 that was conducted in Paris, Berlin, Thessaloniki and Gdansk. The main goal of the research was to study and analyze new strategies used both by institutions and individual actors (artists) to attract new public and encourage it to participate in creative processes and social responses to those strategies. Case-studies from Paris, Berlin, Thessaloniki and Gdansk, together with the methodological assumptions of the research will be presented as an introduction to the debate on the category of "new-audience" as well as on the different forms of interaction between an artists and audience in the current European socio-economic context.

Joshua Schwebel

Joshua Schwebel is an artist in residency at LAZNIA CCA.

He will speak about the work he is preparing within the context of the “Artecitya” residency program, that brought himself along with other international artists to produce work intended to engage with the urban public local to the district in which the art institution is sited. The work he is producing questions the various institutional investments in the program (LAZNIA CCA, City of Gdansk and the EU cultural funders), who expect for art as social practice to generate changes in the urban context. Through his work he asks which changes are expected by these artistic initiatives, and who are these changes expected to benefit. He is interested in problematizing the proximity of contemporary art to revitalization initiatives and gentrification of the district.

BIP

Municipal Institution of Culture