Removed From the Crowd is an on-going research and publishing project developed by Ivana Bago and Antonia Majača at the Institute for Duration, Location and Variables (DeLVe) that had its differently shaped presentations in Belgrade, Ljubljana and Prague.
Based on the initial reading of selected phenomena and concepts that informed the artistic, curatorial and intellectual practices in Yugoslavia during the 1960s and the 1970s, the project opens itself to an open process of reshifting and reshaping its scope and methodology, introducing new elements and fragments with each new iteration.
The project’s main preoccupations, revolving around the ideas of temporary communities, delayed audience, exodus, and Dionysian socialism, are offered as entry points for new chapters and ‘unexpected encounters’; testing their resonance in different geographies, through new collaborations and research contributions.
The series of seminars Removed from the Crowd: Unexpected Encounters gathers research contributions relating to artistic and intellectual practices of the 1960s and 1970s by bringing together a variety of recent research methodologies referring to different socio-political contexts, particularly exploring ‘peripheral’ geographies. The aim is not to merely \’fill in\’ the existing art historical narratives with what has been left out, rather the seminar series attempts to work towards an intervention into the very order of discourses that shape the dominant histories of contemporary art.
Unexpected Encounters I seminar held in 2010 presented several on-going researches featuring practices that were themselves in search of new methodologies, exploring the interstices between the collective and individual, private and public, action and escapism, art and non-art, artist and curator, nature and urban space, the visible and the invisible.
The upcoming seminar Unexpected Encounters II edited by Klara Kemp-Welch brings together a selection of comparative methodologies for approaching international Conceptualism: mobilising affect theory to understand Hungarian and Polish artists’ responses to the Warsaw Pact Troops’ invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968; bringing to bear parallel materials to challenge Moscow Conceptualism’s exclusivity and myths of origins; ‘reassembling the social’ in East European art in the decades preceding 1989.
This open seminar is imagined as a meeting point of researchers, research notes and material, inviting the seminar contributors and the audience to participate in open reflection on and questioning of methodologies.
