“Statements 2020” — Open call for performative events

“Statements 2020” — Open call for performative events

Kunstraum Lakeside invites artists and cultural practitioners to participate in the 2020 program by submitting their own “Statement.” We are looking for performative pieces that relate to the annual topic while experimenting with modes of representation in the visual arts in the context of an institution at the interface between art, science, and technology. These performative pieces will take the form of one-day events. The goal for the contributions is to open up Kunstraum Lakeside more than ever before to participation by local and international artists. A total of four “statements” will be presented in 2020.

Kunstraum Lakeside
Kunstraum Lakeside devotes itself each year to a specific theme derived from its special standing as an institution for exhibition, performance, and discourse. The Kunstraum’s integration into a Science and Technology Park, and the linking of its events to the semester program at the University of Klagenfurt, raise questions about how artists today interact with the fundamentals, possibilities, and limits of current knowledge production. Under the curatorial guidance of Franz Thalmair, the planned program will focus on areas of endeavor that can be subsumed under the term “artistic research.” Artistic research, like art in general, allows us to gain aesthetic experience. In addition, however, it also offers artists an opportunity within their respective art practice—i.e., using their own media, formats, and modes of representation—to contemplate the framework conditions that govern their activities. Embedded in social, historical, and cultural interpretation contexts, artistic research therefore enables us to respond to the constantly changing realities of our society.

Annual topic
The 2020 year of programs at Kunstraum Lakeside is devoted to the concept of “format.” While the fields of inquiry for the previous two years, artistic research and the artistic process, had the potential to emancipate themselves from the artwork and become an independent form, and in turn a work of art in their own right, format as a working hypothesis is marshalled against the notion of fixed content. “Formats are nodal connections and differential fields; they channel an unpredictable array of ephemeral currents and charges. They are configurations of force rather than discrete objects. In short, formats establish a pattern of links or connections. […] what now matters most is not the production of new content but its retrieval in intelligible patterns through acts of reframing, capturing, reiterating, and documenting.”* The 2020 program year will hence examine format as an artistic and curatorial method as well as a nodal configuration. Format in this sense is a structure within which artistic fields of action, research processes, investigations, media, and not least works of art enter into a spatial relationship with one another. The concept of “format” involves fabrics and webs, entanglements and configurations, as well as the network as a horizon and carrier of meaning.
*Joselit, David. After Art. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013, 55f.