Arte Util
by Tania Bruguera

[WORKSHOP]

Description:

Whether through self-organised groups, individual initiatives, or the rise of user-generated content, people are developing new methods and social formations to deal with issues that were once the domain of the state. These initiatives are not isolated incidents, but also part of an art history that has been neglected, yet shapes our contemporary world.
photos: Aggelos Tsompanidis

​This workshop will introduce the concept of Arte Útil, which roughly translates into English as “useful art” while also suggesting that art can be a tool or device. 
Studying the shifting roles of contemporary art, the workshop will consider factors of the practice of Arte Útil such as institutional self-criticism, active hyperrealism, a-legality, reforming capital, beneficial outcomes, sustainability, intersection with other disciplines, and modes of creative collaboration. 
​The workshop will include case study presentations drawn from the Arte Útil archive  and lexicon, and fieldwork to connect with relevant projects and sites in the area.
photos: Aggelos Tsompanidis

Tania Bruguera

For over 25 years, Tania Bruguera has created socially-engaged performances and installations that examine the nature of political power structures and their effect on the lives of its constituency. Her research focuses on ways in which art can be applied to everyday political life; on the transformation of social affect into political effectiveness. Her long-term projects are intensive interventions on the institutional structure of collective memory, education and politics. Her works often expose the social effects of political forces and present global issues of power, migration, censorship and repression through participatory works that turn “viewers” into “citizens.”
By creating proposals and aesthetic models for others to use and adapt, she defines herself as an initiator rather than an author, and often collaborates with multiple institutions as well as many individuals so that the full realization of her artwork occurs when others adopt and perpetuate it.
Awarded an Honoris Causa by The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, selected one of the 100 Leading Global Thinkers by Foreign Policy magazine, shortlisted for the #Index100 Freedom of Expression Award, a Herb Alpert Award winner, a Guggenheim, Radcliffe and Yale World Fellow, a Robert Rauschenberg Award Recipient, and the first artist-in-residence in the New York City Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Affairs.
She participated in the documenta 11 exhibition and also established the Arte de Conducta (Behavior Art) program at Instituto Superior de Arte in Havana. Her work has been shown in the 2015 Venice Biennale, at Tate Modern, London, Guggenheim and MoMA, New York, among others.
Bruguera has recently funded the Hannah Arendt International Institute for Artivism, in Havana, which consists of a school, an exhibition space and a think thank for activists, artists from Cuba and abroad.
Old municipal slaughterhouse.
​Thessaloniki
2 - 6 September 2019

Moderator: ​Tania Bruguera

Video Documentation: ​
George Kogias (Media LAB)
Photo Documentation:
Aggelos Tsompanidis (Media LAB)
photo: George Kogias