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“Who does the festival belong to?” Public conversation and book launch, in collaboration with DAS Theatre

Marta Keil

The book ‚Reclaiming the Obvious. On the Institution of the Festival’ sketches a map of contexts conducive to thinking about the contemporary festival as one of the crucial contemporary art institutions. It contains materials drawn from a variety of sources: manifestos, scripts, programme materials, interviews. All the texts were conceived by outstanding practitioners, curators, artists, and researchers analysing and critiquing the mechanisms of art production and reception from diverse points of view. Their proposals not only make us rethink what seemed obvious, but, hopefully, they will let us ask a question how – in the face of social and economic complicities – we can reclaim festivals as a space of critical undertakings; how, to evoke McKenzie Wark, to hack them with a view to creating a space for new solutions: in particular, for ones that seem inconceivable for now. What if we think of a festival as a public art institution? What task and what responsibility (to artists as well as audiences) does it imply? And what does the notion of the ‚public’ may mean at this context — the audience, the artists, the decision makers? Who is framing the festival actually and who is being framed?

24 September 2018

20:00

Marta Keil – performing arts curator, researcher and dramaturg, based in Warsaw, Poland. She created and curates the East European Performing Arts Platform (EEPAP).  Between 2012 and 2017 she curated together with Grzegorz Reske Konfrontacje Teatralne — international performing arts festival in Lublin. Worked as curator and dramaturg with i.e. Agnieszka Jakimiak, Rabih Mroué, She She Pop, Agata Siniarska, Ana Vujanović. Between 2014 and 2016 she worked as curator at Teatr Polski in Bydgoszcz and co-curated the first edition of the Festival of New Dramaturgies. One of the initiators and curators of the Identity.Move! project. Curated the Dramaturgical Forum at the Zbigniew Raszewski Theater Institute in Warsaw. Editor of the books: „Reclaiming the Obvious: on the Institution of Festival” (2017) and “Dance, Process, Artistic Research. Contemporary Dance in the Political, Economic and Social Context of “Former East” of Europe”(2015). PhD candidate at the Polish Academy of Science’s Art Institute.

Book launch by:
Marta Keil

Public Moderation by:
Lara Staal

In Collaboration with:
Das Theatre