Artist Organisations International

about the participating organisations

Artists of Rojava

Representative to be announced

The struggle for self-governance in Rojava (Syrian-Kurdistan) against the Assad regime and the self-proclaimed Islamic State is the result of decades of political and cultural struggle by the Kurdish people. This struggle resulted in the model of “democratic autonomy”: a practice of democracy that rejects the framework of the state. With the artists of Rojava we will explore the role of art in establishing new models of political representation and democratic practice.

Artist Association of Azawad

Represented by Mazou Ibrahim Touré & Moussa Ag Assarid

The Artist Association of Azawad is the cultural wing of the National Liberation Movement of Azawad (MNLA), a multi-ethnic coalition of peoples from the Sahara and Sahel that struggles for a new independent state of Azawad, situated north of Mali. The Association brings together members from different artistic fields including music, literature, theatre and storytelling.

Büro für Antipropaganda

Represented by Marina Naprushkina

The Büro für Antipropaganda [Office for Anti-Propaganda] was founded in 2007 and investigates how modern political ideologies work and how they influence society. Using artistic methods, the Office for Anti-Propaganda attempts to break open these patterns. At AOI, the Office for Anti-Propaganda is presenting the “Refugees’ Library” which features mainly drawn court notebooks of the asylum process as a source of information for refugees for better preparing their own cases.

Chto Delat

Represented by Dmitry Vilensky

Chto Delat [What is to be done?] was founded in 2003 in Saint Petersburg by a working group of artists, critics, philosophers, and writers with the goal of merging political theory, art, and activism. Chto Delat is active in many fields - producing a newspaper, plays, video films, total installations and community work. In 2012 Chto Delat founded the School of Engaged Art as a modular art school based on experimentation with the possibilities of engaged art practices in a time dominated by reactionary discourse.

Concerned Artists of the Philippines (CAP)

Represented by Lisa Ito

The Concerned Artists of the Philippines is an organisation of writers, artists and cultural workers committed to the principles of freedom, justice and democracy. It was founded in 1983 to unite Filipino artists against the dictatorial regime of then President Marcos. Since then it has continued to countervail the onslaught of globalisation and remnants of feudalism and to struggle for the people’s political and economic liberation.

Forensic Architecture

Represented by Lorenzo Pezzani

Forensic Architecture is a research project based at Goldsmiths, University of London, assembling a team of architects, artists, filmmakers, activists and theorists to undertake research that gathers and presents spatial analysis in legal and political forums, providing evidence for political organisations, NGOs and the United Nations. Additionally, the project undertakes critical examinations of the history and present status of forensic practices in articulating notions of public truth.

Grupo Etcétera

Represented by Federico Zukerfeld & Loreto Garín

Formed in 1997 in Buenos Aires, Grupo Etcétera is composed of visual artists, poets, puppeteers and actors who share the intention of bringing art to the site of immediate social conflict and of bringing this conflict into arenas of cultural production, including the media and art institutions. In 2005 Grupo Etcétera co-founded the movement International Errorist, which considers the notion of error as a fundamental human condition of the capitalist world that eschews mistakes and failures.

Gulf Labor

Represented by Natascha Sadr Haghighian

Gulf Labor is a coalition of artists and activists who have been working together since 2011 to highlight the coercive recruitment, and deplorable living and working conditions of migrant labourers in Abu Dhabi’s Saadiyat Island [Island of Happiness]. The Gulf Labor campaign focuses on the workers who are building the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, Louvre Abu Dhabi, and the Sheikh Zayed National Museum (in collaboration with the British Museum) on Saadiyat Island.

Haben und Brauchen

Represented by Sonja Augart, Tatjana Fell, Alice Münch, Ina Wudtke & Inga Zimprich

Haben und Brauchen [To Have and To Need] is an informal platform for discussion and action founded in 2011. It advocates the recognition and preservation of a self-organised artistic practice that has grown out of the specific historical conditions in Berlin. Haben und Brauchen’s manifesto goes beyond individual artists' interests and makes connections to debates around the commons, precarious economy, urban development and housing policy as well as the shifting notions of labour in contemporary society.

HudRada & ISTM

Represented by Lada Nakonechna

HudRada [Artistic Committee] and ISTM [Art Workers' Self-defence Initiative] are interdisciplinary artist, curatorial and activist groups established in Kiev in 2008 and in 2013. Both aim to impact the formation of new cultural policy principles. HudRada works mostly within the realm of exhibitions, while ISTM’s main objective is to defend artists and their practices in relation to the institutions that solicit and present their work as well as to act in solidarity with other workers’ associations.

Immigrant Movement International (IM)

Represented by Tania Bruguera

Tania Bruguera’s Immigrant Movement International is a long-term art project in the form of an artist-initiated socio-political movement. Engaging both local and international communities, as well as working with social service organisations, elected officials, and artists focused on immigration reform, IM examines growing concerns about the political representation facing immigrants. IM also delves into the implementation of art in society, examining what it means to create “Useful Art”.

Institute for Human Activities (IHA)

Represented by Renzo Martens

In 2012, the Institute for Human Activities began “A Gentrification Program” on a former Unilever plantation in Congo. The IHA asserts that even when art critically engages with global inequalities, it most often brings beauty, jobs and opportunity to the places where such art is exhibited, discussed and sold, creating a gap with the zone of intervention of critical art. The IHA turns art’s potential for gentrification into a progressive and effective tool.

International Institute of Political
Murder (IIPM)

Represented by Milo Rau

The International Institute of Political Murder was founded by writer Milo Rau in 2007. The IIPM’s past productions (“The Last Days of the Ceausescus,” “Breivik’s Statement,” “The Moscow Trials,” “The Civil Wars”) have enjoyed great international success and stand for a new, documentary and aesthetically compacted form of political art – with a special focus on multimedia adaptation of historical or social conflicts.

Jewish Renaissance Movement in Poland (JRMiP)

Represented by Yael Bartana, Susanne Sachsse & Walter Solon

The Jewish Renaissance Movement in Poland calls for the return of 3.300.000 Jews to Poland to symbolize the possibility of our collective imagination – to right the wrongs history has imposed and to reclaim the promise of an utopian future. Members of the movement recognise that Europe needs to be re-thought, that Israel must change to be part of the Middle East and that as citizens we have the responsibility to imagine the world differently. The JRMiP was initiated by Israeli-born artist Yael Bartana in 2007.

The Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination (labofii)

Represented by John Jordan

At the heart of labofii’s experiments lie new ways of organising ourselves: working without hierarchy, taking direct action against capitalism and living ecologically sensitive lives. The laboratory treats insurrection as an art and art as a means for the coming insurrections. This has included transforming bikes into tools of disobedience during the UN Climate Summit, a pirate armada to shut down a coal fired power station, sabotaging banks with ants and covering the Tate Gallery in molasses.

Performing Arts Forum (PAF)

Represented by Jan Ritsema

Performing Arts Forum is a place for the professionals and not-yet-professionals in the field of performance arts, visual art, music, film, literature, new media, theory and cultural production, who seek to research and determine their own conditions of work. Initiated and run by artists, theoreticians, practitioners and activists themselves, PAF is a user-created informal institution. PAF is located in a former convent school in the village of St. Erme, France.

Schoon Genoeg!

Represented by Matthijs de Bruijne

Schoon Genoeg! [(Clean) Enough!] is the campaign of cleaners in the Netherlands that started in 2009 for better wages, working conditions, and social recognition. As part of this campaign the union organised the cleaners’ strike of 2010, which was the longest strike in the Netherlands since 1933 as well as the recent strikes in 2012 and in 2014. Other elements of the Cleaners Union’s actions included a temporary Afvalmuseum (Trash Museum) in Utrecht's Central Station as well the campaign to improve domestic workers rights and the ratification of ILO Convention 189 in the Netherlands.

The Silent University

Represented by Emily Fahlén & Ahmet Öğüt

The Silent University is an autonomous knowledge exchange platform by refugees, asylum seekers and migrants. It aims to address and reactivate the knowledge of the participants and make the exchange process mutually beneficial by inventing alternative currencies in place of money or free voluntary service. These explorations attempt to make apparent the systemic failure and the loss of skills and knowledge experienced through the silencing process of people seeking asylum.

WochenKlausur

Represented by Hannah Rosa Öllinger & Manfred Rainer

Since 1993 the artist group WochenKlausur develops concrete proposals aimed at small, but nevertheless effective improvements to socio-political deficiencies. Proceeding even further and invariably translating these proposals into action, artistic creativity is no longer seen as a formal act but as an intervention into society. So far, 38 projects have been realised all around the world – from Alaska to Japan.

Zentrum für Politische Schönheit (ZPS)

Represented by Fabian Eggers, John Kurtz & André Leipold

Zentrum für Politische Schönheit [Centre for Political Beauty] is an assault team exploring moral beauty and human greatness in politics. The basic belief is that the legacy of the Holocaust is rendered void by political apathy, the rejection of refugees and political cowardice. In 2014, the ZPS helped Syrian refugees enter the European Union by adapting the 1938/39 British Kindertransport to the present. In 2014 the ZPS also linked the victims of the Berlin Wall to those at the outer EU borders in a highly debated action.

About

Artist organisations are founded by artists

Artist organisations choose the form of the organisation

Artist organisations seek for structural engagement

Artist organisations propose social/political agendas

Program

Propaganda & Counter-Propaganda

Learning & Unlearning

State & Statelessness

Violence & Non-Violence

Solidarity & Unionising

Final Debate

Participants

Organisations

Initiators

Chairs