//cnf: ON COLLABORATION A series of events and talks on collaborative art practices

[http://www.wkv-stuttgart.de/uploads/media/trafo_01.pdf]

event held in 2006, Budapest

"On Collaboration is an international series of events investigating the phenomenon of collaborative artistic practice through lectures, art projects and panel discussions.
Collaboration is not a new phenomenon in visual art. Ever since artists have worked together in a
common workshop or in colonies, through the avant-garde movements when artists with a similar view and goals have joined forces to clarify and promote the artistic ideas they stood for we find numerous examples. The idea of sharing authorship and of the participation of communities in the creative process has been for long introduced, too.
However, the radical change in the notion of the artwork and of the role of artistic individuality
from the sixties on, moreover, the extensive development of communication technology throughout the last two decades, opened new dimensions for collaborative work. Civil rights movements, social problems and political context has also challenged artists to express themselves in new ways.
It is not just about working at the same place or in a similar style, not just about a common
discourse based on a conviction alike; the project On Collaboration focuses on the phenomenon
when it is the creative process that becomes a common act and experience so that the work born
out of these efforts can be only attributed to a collective of creators and not to a single person.
What possibilities can collaborative work offer for extending individual creativity, what kind of new energies arise when working together? What could be the strengths and the weaknesses of such methods?
In which ways can a group organize itself, how can a certain autonomy be created as a basis for
critique and resistance? How can a micro-society formed this way occupy alternative spaces of
creation and action?
What are the motivations behind forming a collective at different parts of the world – like in Central Europe or in the United States – and what are the answers to the challenges by various economic and institutional models possibly provided this way?
Does the appearance and the spread of the Internet offer new models of collaboration, how can the experience gained by using the Internet be incorporated into the artistic creation?
It seems that the claim to re-write art history, in respect to socially and politically engaged group
work, that traditionally has largely focused on artifacts and marketable tendencies is being
acknowledged and promoted by a growing number of artists and cultural workers. How can a line be drawn from early twentieth-century avant-garde movements and thoughts on collaboration, participation and social act on through the collaborative projects of the sixties and seventies to present tendencies? How can these activities be archived and presented, what are the possible strategies that curators and institutions could apply when dealing with process based collective projects – and what were and are the forms and results of such an incorporation of independent activities into the institutional and canonization system? Where would a discourse about the respective notions of art and activism lead us? How are these boundaries being dissolved in some of these projects?"

info:
ON COLLABORATION - A series of events and talks on collaborative art practices
Trafó Gallery, Trafó – House of Contemporary Arts Budapest
23 March – 01 April 2006