Lectureseries Fine Arts – Paz Guevara
Paz Guevara - Unsettling Exhibition Histories Lectureseries / 02.02.2022 Within the lectureseries Fine Arts Paz Guevara presents herself and her work. Unsettling Exhibition Histories Parapolitics How do artistic practices confront intrumentalization and hegemonic agendas? In what ways do critical artistic and curatorial strategies show the ideological contradictions and continuities of the postwar western “freedom offensive.”? What are the legacies of postwar modernism- its limits, asymmetries, bias, colonial structures- that still haunt contemporary art? In this talk, Paz Guevara will discuss the main questions addressed by Parapolitics exhibition, drawing a space to reconstruct and disrupt the ‘western’ cultural narrative that expanded along the politics of capitalism in the postwar period, and its pervasive structures to this today.After the Second World War, the battle of the systems also embroiled the arts and culture in a symbolic arms race. One example of this was the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF), an organization founded in West Berlin in June 1950 by a group of writers driven to consolidate an “anti-totalitarian” intellectual community. From its headquarters in Paris, the CCF subsidized countless cultural programs from Latin America to Africa and Southeast Asia, developing a network of journals, conferences, and exhibitions that advanced a “universal” language of modernism in literature, art, and music. By 1967, it was revealed that the CCF was secretly bankrolled by America’s espionage arm, the Central Intelligence Agency. The CIA scandal confirmed that the CCF had been enlisted in shoring up an anti-Communist consensus in the service of U.S. hegemony during the cultural Cold War. The disclosure destroyed the CCF’s reputation, exposing the ideological contradictions and moral ambiguities of advocating freedom and transparency by means that were themselves outside of democratic accountability. Parapolitics: Cultural Freedom and the Cold War is devoted to the global dimension of cultural politics in the Cold War and to the changing meanings and aims assigned to modernism. Departing from an examination of the interdependencies between the political and aesthetic struggles of the era, Parapolitics exhibition further reflected on the ideological foundations of the conflict lines of today’s global contemporary art. Book Parapolitics: Cultural Freedom and the Cold War s has been curated by Anselm Franke, Nida Ghouse, Paz Guevara, and Antonia Majaca at HKW in 2017-2018. The publication has recently been published by Stenberg Press. 02.02.2022, 6 pmOnline via MS Teams: https://tinyurl.com/3ppnkx8s (Be aware of that the lecture could be recorded and published later.) --- Internal access to Teams:Click Link - Like it is known via Hfk-Teamsaccount. External access to Teams (just via Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge/Internet Explorer):Click Link - Click Option "Join via web/Stattdessen im Web teilnehmen" - set a name - mute microphone (right switcher/shifter in the window) - Click "Join Now/Jetzt teilnehmen" - Maybe: Waiting till moderation let you in
