Conversation Project with Victor Valqui Vidal. E-mail #3

As a student of Visual Culture my aim is to decode visual phenomena (of any kind) relevant to today’s society, sociality and the subject’s self-understanding. But as my major interest is contemporary art I also use the field of Visual Culture to expand common art historical and aesthetic concepts.
I'm not an art historian and before I was accepted into the master program of Visual Culture I studied literature. What I know about contemporary art I have taught myself. It started as a new way of seeing. I want to be able to gain or rather maintain the sensitivity and curiosity of a child, but at the same time navigate like an old adult. Within the last 3 years I have met with and worked for different artists and gone to exhibitions in all the cities I have visited around the world. Latest I have initiated and organized my own artistic projects, but actually and to be honest, what I know about contemporary art, I have learned through my writings. To me writing is also a way of using my eyes, it's really essential to me.

I wanted to become a part of Flux Factory not only to test and develop my professional competences and improve my English, but also because I want to get a deep understanding of an artist collective by observing it from the inside. At Flux Factory I will assist with organizing exhibitions and events and I will develope (new) strategies for marketing the exhibition program. But besides this opportunity which I'm really honored and excited to have been given, most importantly I'm at Flux Factory to do research and collect material for my future master thesis. Flux Factory is a non-profit art organization that supports and promotes emerging artists through exhibitions, commissions, residencies, and collaborative opportunities. Flux Factory produces four major and dozens of smaller exhibitions per year, runs a residency program, and presents monthly events. I find Flux Factory interesting because it divides from traditional art institutions by taking form of an experimental laboratory and a dynamic and ever changing collective.

My interest in this field started in the winter of 2009, when I became a part of Party and Lost, a social and aesthetic experiment, a group of groups, founded by 8 women from 4 different artists group. As Party and Lost Bank & Rau, Hesselholdt & Mejlvang, Randi & Katrine and Ingen Frygt ('No Fear') made an exhibition, also titled Party and Lost, which were presented at Den Frie Centre of Contemporary Art, Copenhagen, in the summer of 2010. For 5 months I was their assitant and I helped with fundraising, promoting their thoughts and writing texts, I took part in some of their discussions and I assisted in the art production proces and with installing the final exhibition. We all (artists as well as assistents) gave our hearts, minds and bodies to this project. Party and Lost worked around these question:

”Does the relation between the individual artist and the strivings of a collective mirror the challenges of any group? Is the collectively executed artwork closer to life? Or does the single group member’s renunciation of self just result in a self-sufficient social-ego? Is any artist group, intentionally or otherwise, an artwork in itself – a laboratory for social relations?”

 

 

 

Party and Lost truly changed my life and my perspectives – mostly for the better. I don't think it's too much to say that thanks to Party and Lost I am where I am today. For my master thesis, I'm interested in contuining the investigations of Party and Lost and trying to get closer to answer these questions.

 

I will elaborate on this next Sunday. To be continued...