Statements — Open Call 2021

Statements — Open Call 2021

Kunstraum Lakeside invites artists and cultural practitioners to participate in its 2021 program with their own “Statement”. We are in search of performative formats that relate to the Kunstraum’s annual topic and experiment with modes of representation in the visual arts, in the context of an institution at the interface between art, science, and technology.

Kunstraum Lakeside

Kunstraum Lakeside focuses on one topic each year, which evolves from the local and institutional particulars of the exhibition, performance, and discourse space itself. Its association with a science and technology park and the correlations between the exhibition contents and the semester program at the University of Klagenfurt prompt questions about the role of artists in current knowledge production. Curated by Franz Thalmair and Gudrun Ratzinger, the program concentrates on fields of action encompassed under the term “artistic research”. Artistic research is conceived as a field that, in addition to just an aesthetic experience, enables one to reflect upon the conditions of his/her activities within artistic practice, while representing something in the artistic knowledge production process with the specific means of art. In essence, the Kunstraum Lakeside exhibition program tests whether the model of artistic research can be employed productively in a discussion process, which tackles fundamental issues in contemporary society.

Annual topic: “Future Perfect”

“I think the real winner in this transaction will have been women, on both sides. Let this remain a conjecture for the future anterior, to be opened up, again and again.”
(Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak)

Archeology of the future or a prospective past? Future II, or, as this tense is also called: future perfect is a paradoxical grammatical construction. Those who use this tense to make a statement about the world create facts that do not exist yet. They describe the completion of an action in the future from a past perspective. This “will have done” downright runs past itself. However, future perfect is always highly uncertain. The linear progression of current conditions is one of the driving forces behind economic and technological developments. At the same time, there is a lack of visions for a better tomorrow, overshadowed by the desire to return to a better yesterday, which in fact never really existed.

With its annual program Future Perfect, Kunstraum Lakeside draws upon the program of Future I, which was conceived exactly 10 years ago. The curators at the time stated that “grand concepts of the future command little political or media prominence, while engagement with utopias and radical social blueprints do however constitute an important theme for contemporary art and theory”. Little has changed a decade later. In light of the tangible implications of global warming and the erosion of familiar (geo)political orders, the situation has become even more critical: The future itself—as a horizon for actions and decisions—seems to have gone lost.

Hence, the annual program 2021 at Kunstraum Lakeside will be centered around artistic explorations into what will perhaps have been. It is about how future can be created with artistic means—very concretely in the here and now. Parallel to future solutions, which are being elaborated at Lakeside Science and Technology Park on a daily basis and a variety of levels, the artists speculatively intervene in a future that leaves behind everything taken as a given.

Dates

Three production days are available for the realization of each “Statement”. These three days include both setup and dismantling at Kunstraum Lakeside. The Kunstraum will be open to the public on one of the three days. Please choose the best two dates for you from those available as listed below:

– Statement #13: May 6, 2021 (production dates, May 5 – 7 2021)
– Statement #14: July 1, 2021 (production dates, June 30 – July 2, 2021)
– Statement #15: January 13, 2022 (production dates, January 12 – 14, 2022)
– Statement #16: January 20, 2022 (production dates, January 19 – 21, 2022)