Symposium | The 5^th International Symposium Curating Exchange  | The Institutional as Public | organized by press to exit project space | 22 September – 01 October, 2016

Curating Exchange is an annual symposium addressing local and regional need for an insightful and qualitative exchange of experience and knowledge in theoretical and artistic research, curatorial practice and education. The fifth edition is titled "The Institutional as Public" and welcomes Slovenian art historian and art theorist Beti Žerovc, Austrian curator, cultural theorist, urban researcher and writer Elke Krasny, and Macedonian Berlin-based visual artist and urban researcher Ivana Sidzimovska, who contribute a variaty of discoursive presentations and projects that question to what extent the institution, the public, and the artistic activity correspond to the ever-evolving concept of critical curating. The role and the increasing influence of the curator in context of cultural production in general, as well as the conditionality within and outside the institutional frame in particular, will be subjected to critical rethinking and analysis with each presentation and workshop session. The symposium will thus try to addresses the variety of methodologies and conditions that define the curatorial practice as a channel for social and political criticism and a practice expressed as a logical continuum in the processes of instigating cultural as well as socio-political change in contemporary society. 

The symposium is curated, organized and managed by art historian and curator Jovanka Popova, and artists and co-founders of press to exit project space, Hristina Ivanoska and Yane Calovski. 

Wolfgang Obermair: Artist talk and conversation | organized by press to exit project space | GEM Klub, Skopje | 14 September, 2016., 19.00 – 21.00h

press to exit project space is pleased to invite you to the presentation and open talk of Wolfgang Obermair, artist in residency at press to exit project space as part of the exchange program WEST BALKAN CALLING.

Visual artist Wolfgang Obermair will give an insight into a field of activities he was engaged in the recent years. The focus will be on collaborative projects and other art related activities, that he sees as a way to develop a subjective practise towards a discursive situation between artists and the public. Obermair is interested in independent structures especially, if they enforce an alternative for the art itself. Part of the talk will be a performative exercise he developed in a collaboration with the Czech artist Jakub Vrba within the residency.

External activity | exhibition Always Ready by Neda Firfova, associate researcher at press to exit project space | curated by Ivana Vaseva | Gallery MC, New York City | 24 – 30.08.2016

After holding the Always Ready exhibition in the YCC, Skopje in 2014, Neda Firfova with curator Ivana Vaseva have the pleasure to welcome you to the exhibition Always Ready in Gallery MC in New York City.

The project Always Ready was initiated by Neda Firfova in 2012 and it researched the disappearance of the thousands of cardboard books imported from China, and used for the creation of the ideological image backdrop in the mass games in communist Albania. The project focused on the reproduction of singled-out book objects and performances with them, while growing into a complex study of powerstyles. To the artist, these books have become meta-symbols of lost Eastern modernist knowledge and she uses them as reference symbols when critiquing the re-dress of the metabolist and brutalist architecture from the 1960s and 70s in her hometown of Skopje and its labelling as “Baroque”.

The exhibition will feature original book objects, video works and a printed archive from the project spanning from 2012 to 2016.

West Balkan Calling | Artist-in-Residence Exchange Programme | organized by < rotor > center for contemporary art Graz and press to exit project space | artist Wolfgang Obermair | press to exit project space | 22 August – 22 September, 2016.

press to exit project space is pleased to announce that the artist Wolfgang Obermair during the months of August and September realizes residential stay in Skopje, Macedonia, as part of the art residency project WEST BALKAN CALLING. His residencial stay in 2016. will be organized by press to exit project space in collaboration with < rotor > center for contemporary art Graz.

Wolfgang Obermair (born in Germany) is an artist and curator in the field of art and architecture based in Vienna, Austria. He studied geography, painting and media art in Dresden, Nuremberg and Karlsruhe and worked as lecturer and assistant professor at the Academy of Fine Arts Nuremberg and the Viennese Art School. Currently he teaches at the University of Applied Arts Vienna in the department for Transmedial Art. Obermair´s work was shown in various cities including Moscow, Beijing, Porto, Zagreb, Vienna. Moreover he has been curating exhibitions for the Nuremberg art association kunstbunker – forum für zeitgenössische kunst (http://www.kunstbunker-nuernberg.org). Since 2012 he is member and coordinator of the Viennese non-profit art space Schneiderei (http://seeyounextthursday.com). Obermair is co-editor (with E. Shaipiro-Obermair) of “Das Große Moskau, das es niemals gab” (The Big Moscow that has never existed. 2008, Vienna: Schlebrügge), which examines the position of constructivist architecture in today´s Moscow.

External activity | Yane Calovski | exhibition “Passion: Fan Behavior and art”  | Kunstlerhaus Bethanien Berlin | curated by Christoph Tannert | the exhibition travels to the Kunsthaus im KunstKulturQuartier, Nuremberg, the Mùzeum Ludwig, Budapest, Hungaryand the Stadtgalerie, Kiel | 9.08.2015 – 9. 09. 2016

The exhibition “Passion: Fan Behaviour and Art” focuses on the realm of rock music. It explores fan behaviour bearing in mind that before the advent of the Internet and social media music fans communicated among each other by writing letters, exchanging pictures, designing posters, publishing magazines, taping concerts and radio broadcasts or decorating cassette covers, often interweaving rumours and fictional accounts with poems and declarations of love in an effort to keep the distance between artists and fans as small as possible.

Youth culture is known to manifest itself in a variety of ways. One of its most appealing forms of commonality is fandom: young people feeling aligned with any of the subcultures whose cohesion relies primarily on a fixation with a sports team or popular entertainment (music, film, TV, Internet, digital gaming culture, fashion, literature, comics) and is nurtured by body art, raves, moves or theatrical performances as experimental spaces. Fantum should not be equated with the interest of the “normal” public in pop culture; rather, it takes the shape of a heightened form of popular culture and seeks to differentiate itself. Incidentally, very few visual artists would unequivocally describe themselves as fans of a given band or style of pop music.