About FORUM European Cultural ExchangesOngoing platform for the development and promotion of European cultural exchanges –with emphasis on Southeastern Europe– aiming towards the support and diffusion of contemporary artistic creation. Founded in 2000 in Thessaloniki by Apollonia european art exchanges (Strasbourg) and ArtBOX, and coordinated by ArtBOX, Forum includes annual events, conferences, meetings, exhibitions and networking activities, as well as the Forum Artists-in-Residence program (F.A.R., 2005-2008).
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2000 - 2010
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Artistic Exchanges in the Balkans
[founding conference]
FORUM's founding conference aims to draw up an inventory of the current situation, propose new directions for art exchanges and create genuine prospects and projects for partnerships among the various Balkan countries, not only between them, but also with other European institutions. This multilateral meeting brings together more than a hundred professionals – artists, art critics, curators, representatives of public and private cultural institutions and initiatives, museums, as well as representatives of the States and the European institutions. The central role of Thessaloniki towards the encouragement and cultivation of cultural exchanges in the area, creating the proper conditions for the advancement of co-operations and co-productions, as well as of all kinds of artistic expression, was among the main proposals that emerged during the discussions. Therefore, the annual organization of the Forum is assigned to Thessaloniki, for at least the next four years (2000-20004), in co-operation with a different city of Southeast Europe each time. The results, resolutions and, more importantly, the common acceptance of the continuation and organisation of Forum and its parallel events, at least until 2001, by the State Museum of Contemporary Art and the Contemporary Art Centre of Thessaloniki, under the aegis of the Hellenic Ministry of Culture, in co-operation with Apollonia and the Council of Europe, were drafted in a special charter. This included the proposal to immediately establish a Centre for the recording, documentation and promotion of data concerning modern art in Southeast Europe. The conference and parallel events were widely covered by the local and national media. |
Macedonia Palace Hotel |
EXHIBITIONS
The Other Side of History
[group exhibition]
As part of its desire to make the present-day artistic expression of peripheral Europe better known to the general public in France and the rest of Europe, Apollonia, the Centre for Contemporary Art in Rethymnon and the Contemporary Art Centre in Thessaloniki present an exhibition of works by six artists from Georgia.
The exhibition brings together six artists from Georgia; for more than ten years they have been strengthening their language in both formal and theoretical terms in an analysis of their own identity at a time when, in order to exist, their national culture has to cope with a difficult economic and social environment. Using tools common to a whole generation, they broach the codification of the installation - photo / text / object / video - in the style of episodes of awareness which sometimes appear to blur the generally accepted distinctions between private and social space.
Most of the artists gathered here worked together in the eighties under the name of the "10th Floor Group", which referred to the location of the studio they shared in 1987. Since then they have travelled, mainly in Germany, the Netherlands and Denmark, taking advantage of the period of perestroika. This frequently modified their mode of expression and increased their need to communicate. Thus we are able to understand that the words which often play an essential role in their works correspond to a survival strategy, a need for a type of con- frontation allowing the use of speech, which had long been stifled. Whatever the themes dealt with - the eternal sleep of a virtual Ophelia (Oleg Timchenko), everyday ordinariness both precisely detailed and symbolically reactivated by the power of dreams (Iliko Zautashvili), the difficulty of communication between beings in collective spaces where noise replaces speech (Shalva Khakhanashvili and Niko Tsetskhladze), the perversity of language in a world left to the power of the planetary economy (Koka Ramishvili), the disappearance of the picture as mirror of the subject (Manana Dwali) - the works state the position of our relationship with the real, our way of apprehending the world at the end of the century. They do so with the patent intervention of subjectivity: that of the artist who takes on the role of expressing a vital response to the environment shaped by man. A response in which the conceptual reflection is curiously allied to a lyricism demanding an input of emotionalism. In such a way that in the end this alliance constitutes the extreme singularity of the propositions, giving them the rare power to resemble an existential project by conferring on the most familiar images, objects and signs the power of necessity. Anne Tronche Curator |
Cultural Foundation of the National Bank |
Contemporary Photography from Ukraine
[group exhibition] [photography]
The exhibition presents works by twelve Ukrainian photographers, who best represent their country's artistic creation, thereby offering a panorama of Ukrainian photography of the '90s.
Contemporary photography in Ukraine has developed in two streams, as those individuals traditionally referring to the medium during the Soviet period were left behind by artists trained at the various Art Academies. The tradition of photography and its relevance outside reportage is not found among artists normally cited as those who consituted the dissident art movement in Ukraine. Photography almost explicitly and sporadically developed in the country's eastern city of Kharkiv where it grew steadily as an underground movement initiated in the late 1960s, unlike painting which did not share in a consequential non-formalist movement during the Soviet period. Kharkiv's movement in photography, as constituted by the group Vremya of which the well known photographer and artist Boris Mihailov was a member, began as a type of grass-roots organization, not unlike other organizations attempting a type of covert discourse and exhibition beyond what was officially accepted. This was not simply a counter-culture movement but an attempt to refer to photography as a means to convey what lies beyond objective reality in an effort to "innervate" amid a social construct seemingly anaesthetized. As photography in the Soviet Union was restricted to those designated to employ the camera for official or state purposes, Kharkiv's photographers often resorted to standard images of condoned scenes reflecting the industrial and economic infrastructure - factory employees, transportation systems, and buildings, often manipulating the images by color alterations and demarcations.
The photography which came out after Glasnost in a starkly regionalized Ukraine had been the result of the initial meeting of two camps, the engineers turned artists in Kharkiv and the painters turned installation artists in cities such as Kyiv and Odessa. The former photography enclave in Kharkiv developed into a much more antagonistic movement attempting to provide a forum for photography as an art form with the efforts of such cooperatives as The Fast Reaction Group (introducing the work of Serhiy Bratkov and Serhiy Solonskiy) . In other cities, recent graduates from the Art Institute translated their interest in film into " situations " first rendered on canvas, and then later by photographic means. Artists such as Kyivan Iliya Chichkan began to render noir subjects within large format photograph that the artist subsequently painted with sepia and other washes. In contrast to Kharkiv, photography became another avenue for artists seeking out another dimension for the realization of their work. To provide a comprehensive portrait of what may be constituted as that specific to the photographic tradition and development in Ukraine, is to understand the continued importance both historically and currently in staged photography in relation to what had been the prevalence for the documentary image. That is to say that to despite the manipulation of the image or staging of a scene, the photography remains bracketed within social reality and commentary. Marta Kuzma Curator |
Cultural Foundation of the National Bank   |
Personal Cinema
[group exhibition] [moving image]
The exhibition is presented at 127 Tsimiski St. in Thessaloniki, on the ground- and 6th floor of the building. The two selected spaces are the offices of an architects’ firm (Giannis Epaminondas) and a TV and cinema production company (Prosengisi), respectively.
If one were to go back to the infancy of cinema, in the 19th century, one would observe that the new medium satisfied a series of requirements, among which was the need for a massive (and controlled) viewing of artworks. The ‘primitive’ cinema had no qualms about distinguishing among the many ways of manipulating images or their usually deficient qualities of the sequence. Its importance lay in the manual, painterly processing of images and the spontaneous manipulation, which gave to the end product its poetic aspect even if today this sounds somewhat naive. On the other hand, viewers, for all the awe and wonder the new medium generated, were given the opportunity to take time between consecutive frames and thus actively participate in the unfolding of the story. The subsequent industrialization of cinematography imposed new rules that demanded ‘structured stories’ at 24 f/sec, and a closely controlled editing which minimized the risk of the hyper-reality of the images collapsing. What gave to 20th-century cinema its exclusivity, as a medium for “realistic recording” was mainly the technical difficulty of modifying images once they had been shot. Although directly descended from animation, the cinema marginalized it throughout the century; now, in its digital form, cinema is just one of its versions. Seen in this light, the frame-by-frame construction of images in digital cinematography constitutes a return to the 19th-century, when animation and image processing were manual work. As cinema goes into the digital era, these techniques make a comeback as the norm in film making. Such PC programs as Quick Time and Real Video seem like modern versions of the early cinematic devices, exactly one century later but more widely accessible and, of course, mass produced. Similarly, desktop programs for editing and producing PC movies provide arguably equivalent opportunities for painterly poetics and audience intervention that were presented to the 19th century cinematographer. “The cinema, now indistinguishable from animation and no longer a leading technological medium, becomes again a sub-genre of painting.” (Lev Manovich) Personal Cinema group |
Tsimiski 127 str., Thessaloniki, Greece |
Networking - SEECAN
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SOFIA, Bulgaria
Meeting of the FORUM Advisory Committee that was established as a result of Forum's founding conference in Thessaloniki. By joint resolution, and as a continuation of Forum 2000, a new network, SEECAN (South-Eastern European Art Network), is established, with the following objectives:
1. To enhance the image of artistic creation in Southeast Europe. 2. To introduce it to the international art scene by means of multi-dimensional provision of information, education, distribution and creation of special projects, thus actively supporting new artists. SEECAN is made up of an Advisory Committee of 21 representatives from 20 countries, a Coordinating Committee, 5 Working Groups, and of the administrative sector, governed, at least in the initial stage, by FORUM's co-founder, Apollonia european cultural exchanges. |
French Istitute |
