Glossary of Common Knowledge: Subjectivization

Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova (+MSUM)
13 and 14 December 2014

The Glossary of Common Knowledge is a five-year research project run by Moderna galerija (MG+MSUM) within the framework of the broader European project Uses of Art - the Legacy of 1848 and 1989 by the European confederation L'Internationale. The curators of the Glossary of Common Knowledge project are Zdenka Badovinac and Bojana Piškur (MG+MSUM) and Jesús Carrillo (Museo nacional centro de arte Reina Sofía, Madrid).

The goal of the project is twofold: to compile a glossary of art terminology that differs substantially from what is found in the existing literature on art, and to do so in collaboration with institutions and individuals from Europe and other parts of the world who will propose terms relating to their own practices and contexts, and subsequently compare them. These so-called narrators will be involved in the process of editing the glossary throughout the project, producing new knowledge through comparisons. This will make the Glossary of Common Knowledge an alternative to comparable projects that conform to the dominant epistemological models. The terms will be discussed and defined at seminars dealing with five referential fields (historicizing, subjectivization, geopolitics, other institutionality, commons), and then compared to produce new ones through associative connections. At the seminars, curators will work with narrators from the institutions of the confederation L'Internationale and with narrators from other parts of the world. The Glossary will be accessible already in its intermediate stages at the Glossary of Common Knowledge website (to be launched in the first half of 2015), and also available at the Moderna galerija website. In 2017, the Glossary of Common Knowledge will be published in book form.

At the second seminar, 17 internationally renowned narrators will present 15 terms associated with subjectivization, such as unrest, self-determination, interest, evidence, over-identification, fragility, loser, transvestite, radical imagination, etc. The terms are specific to their local contexts of utterance, which brings to the surface the inexpressibility of universal ideas and the distinctive aspects of the phenomena in the context of place and time. The narrators describe the consequences of the discursive and practical realizations of subjectivization, which happen outside the models of representation or categories, in the interstices or spaces of transition, constantly "in becoming", in the formation of a subject in relation to another. They speak of subjectivization not only as a process in which an individual affirms or chooses his/her role in society as an autonomous entity, but also as the impossibility of choice or affirmation under neocapitalist production conditions and as the highly regulated pursuit of the realization of one's aspirations or potential, which manifest as tension, or exhaustion, or non-stop production. Similar processes of transformation affect the status of art or an artwork, in the form of ever-changing installations, interventions, performances, collages, and as readymades, immaterial or time-based art, rejecting the criteria of quality for those of subjectivization, determining what a work is or produces in relation to other works, rather than what it is in and of itself.

Narrators for the Subjectivization referential field:
Curators of the Glossary of Common Knowledge:
Zdenka Badovinac (MG+MSUM, Ljubljana, Slovenia)
Bojana Piškur (MG+MSUM, Ljubljana, Slovenia)
Jesús Carrillo (Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, Spain)

L?Internationale Narrators:
Nick Aickens (Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, Netherlands)
Rebecca Close and Anyely Marín Cisneros (MACBA, Diásporas Críticas, Barcelona, Spain)
Marko Jenko (MG+MSUM, Ljubljana, Slovenia)
Anders Krueger (M HKA, Antwerp, Belgium)

Narrators from the global family:
Zoe Butt (Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam)
Jabulani Chen Pereira (Iranti, Johannesburg, South Africa)
Ekaterina Degot (Moscow, Russia)
Lisette Lagnado (Sao Paulo, Brazil)
Miguel A. López (Lima, Peru)
Marta Malo de Molina (Madrid, Spain)
Suely Rolnik (Sao Paulo, Brazil)
Rasha Salti (Beirut, Lebanon)