Public lecture and talk with Elke Krasny: “Involved: Urban Curatorial Practice” | The 5^th International Symposium Curating Exchange  | The Institutional as Public | organized by press to exit project space | 30 September - 1 October, 2016, GEM Club and Social center Dunja, Skopje,19.00 - 21.00 h. 

“What does it mean to become involved? Against the backdrop of the histories and theories of urban interventions, temporary experimental architectures, socially engaged art practices, and critical spatial practices, I introduce here the idea of involvement. Urban curating is necessarily involved. Involvement means both sharing and being entangled. What are the implications and the complications of such sharing and such entanglements, in short such involvement? Urban curating is involved in the material, social, cultural, political, and economic urban conditions. Urban curating is part of urban transformation dynamics. Therefore, urban curating is implicated in and complicated by the real world conditions of globalized neoliberalism, postcoloniality, international migration, accelerating uneven development, and urban crises. Involved practice therefore requires critical research, materialist analysis, and transversal collaboration. Involved practice relies on many different situated urban knowledge, in plural. This lecture is based on examples from my own curatorial practice such as Mapping the Everyday.Neighbourhood Claims for the Future and Hands-On Urbanism. The Right to Green.” 

Audio-tour: “Recounting Skopje. Skopje 2014: Hegemonic and Speculative Narratives”, artistic part of the PhD Project by Ivana Sidzimovska | The 5^th International Symposium Curating Exchange  | The Institutional as Public | organized by press to exit project space | 30 September, 2016, Starting point: the plateau in front of the Museum of City of Skopje

Presentation by Beti Žerovc: “When Attitudes Become the Norm: the contemporary curator and institutional art”  | The 5^th International Symposium Curating Exchange  | The Institutional as Public | organized by press to exit project space | 22 - 23 September, 2016, GEM Club, Skopje, 19.00 - 21.00 h. 

The book “When Attitudes Become the Norm” (published by Archive Books and Igor Zabel Association for Culture and Theory, 2016) is a collection of essays and interviews by art historian and theorist Beti Žerovc on the topic of curatorship in contemporary art. Žerovc examines curatorship in its broader social, political and economic contexts, as well as in relation to the profound changes that have taken place in the art field over the last century. She analyses the curator as a figure who appears, evolves, and participates in the institutionalisation of contemporary art and argues that with the curator institutional art – art designed to fit the art institution’s space and needs – achieves its fullest expression. 

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.