TOK (The Creative Association of Curators)
TOK (The Creative Association of Curators) is a female curatorial duo from St. Petersburg founded by Anna Bitkina and Maria Veits in 2010 as a platform for conducting interdisciplinary projects in the fields of contemporary art and social sciences. TOK’s research-based art and educational projects have a strong social component and deal with current issues that are widely discussed both in Russia and internationally, such as public space and citizens, the development of education, the deprivation of social resources, collective memory, the growing role of the media in global society, changing political climates, migration policies among many others.
http://tok-spb.org/Performing Words, Uttering Performance
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Curated by
- Inga Lāce ,
- Anna Bitkina ,
- Maria Veits ,
- TOK (The Creative Association of Curators)
The changing role and function of language before and after the “transition” cannot be discussed without considering the dimension of authoritarian speech acts in the last phase of socialism. Anthropologist Alexei Yurchak shares the observation that during the authoritarian speech act, sign and reference, language and gesture, word and action merge into each other. This thesis is the foundation for an understanding of the variety of linguistic and performative experiments in post-socialist video art. The curators will focus on video works that reflect upon shifts in language and meaning and employ diverse silent, verbal, performative, activist, and other strategies to discuss collective and personal memory, identity, power relations, gender roles, and socio-political change.
→ See the screening dates in the Program