Conversation with Anna Bitkina and Maria Veits
ALT(ering) + SHIFT(ing) + COMM(uning): TOK
Tuesday, November 17, 2020
ALT + SHIFT + COMM hosts Anna Bitkina and Maria Veits, founders of TOK (Творческое объединение кураторов/Creative Association of Curators), to discuss how nomadic curatorial projects can address Post-Soviet social and political entanglements through long-term multidisciplinary research.
The Creative Association of Curators/TOK is the first officially registered curatorial organization in Russia. It was founded in 2010 in St. Petersburg as a platform for research projects at the intersection of contemporary art, social sciences, and socially oriented design.
As a nomadic collective working between Russia and Europe, Middle East and the USA, TOK places its practice between historical analysis and political imagination. The resulting durational and cross-disciplinary projects generate new knowledge about the causes and consequences of changing political realities. Often working outside of traditional art spaces, TOK infiltrates into social structures, bringing their strains and corrupt functions into the public discourse in order to revisit the roles and powers of social institutions and redraft their potential future.
Local governance, public space and modern cities, collective memory and amnesia, the transformation of social institutions, media and strategies for managing the public opinion: these are the issues that TOK explores through its work with artists, performers, historians, playwrights, sociologists, and journalists.
LINKS
apexart open call: Voicing the Silence, 2021
https://apexart.org/TOK.php
2020 Artic Art Forum
http://arcticartforum.arcticartinstitute.com/symposium/
2019 Curatorial Symposium, in collaboration with the National Center of Contemporary Art, St Petersburg
http://eng.curatorialforum.art/eng_2019#rec206871844
Performing Words, Uttering Performance:
https://www.d-est.com/category/screening-2
States of Control:
https://www.statesofcontrol.art
TOK YouTube Channel:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCCy6ypzn6Yv4M_rwOoPtfVw/videos
Publications:
https://issuu.com/tokcurators
