Seminar of Accidental Wisdom #6 Rado Ištok: Strangers in the Village. Traces of Colonial History in Slovakia
1. 12. 2021, 19.00 | Online
Zoom Stream https://bit.ly/3xJpEhZ
Facebook Live https://fb.me/e/1vD0aeSa0
On Wednesday, December 1, 2021, the Slovak curator Rado Ištok will be the guest speaker for the 6th edition of the Seminar of Accidental Wisdom lecture series. The event will take place from 19.00 in Auditorium 1 in the FAMU building in Prague. Online streams will be available via Zoom and Facebook Live.
The talk will depart from the solo exhibition of Jacqueline Hoàng Nguyễn Black Atlas (2019) at Július Koller Society in Bratislava, Slovakia, and the accompanying publication Crating the World (2019). Based on photographs found in the archives of the Museum of Ethnography in Stockholm, Sweden, Black Atlas reflected upon the administration of racialized labour for transporting material culture from foreign countries to the museum’s storage. Hosting the exhibition in Slovakia also became an occasion to investigate similar histories locally. While there is no Museum of Ethnography in Bratislava, there is a number of non-European collections scattered across Slovakia and a handful of historical photographs which allow us to reflect on how colonial practices and imageries found their way to Slovakia. The talk will hence focus on historical photography and collections and what they might be able to tell us about our relation to the world in the past as well as today.
Rado Ištok is a curator, writer and editor. He is the co-curator of the upcoming second edition of the Biennale Matter of Art in Prague, Czech Republic (2022). Recent curated exhibitions include Ala Younis: High Dam: Modern Pyramid (2020) at VI PER Gallery in Prague, Czech Republic; The Spectral Forest (2020) at Nida Art Colony, Lithuania; Jacqueline Hoàng Nguyễn: Black Atlas (2019) at Július Koller Society in Bratislava, Slovakia; and Liquid Horizons (2019) at tranzit.sk in Bratislava, Slovakia. His editorial work includes Decolonising Museums – a thematic issue of the Slovak magazine Kapitál (2021), the exhibition catalogue The Spectral Forest (2021) and the e-publication Dwelling on the Threshold (Nida Art Colony, 2020). Together with Jacqueline Hoàng Nguyễn he co-edited the book Crating the World (Athénée Press, 2019), and with L’Internationale he co-edited the e-publication Decolonising Archives (L’Internationale Online, 2016). He contributes to Artforum, Artalk, ART ANTIQUES, and Flash Art Czech and Slovak Edition.
Seminar of Accidental Wisdom (SAW) is an interdisciplinary series of lectures by curators, artists, and theoreticians who will enter a dialogue with viewers about the theoretical interpretation of contemporary audiovisual forms, photography, and exhibition theory. SAW is a joint project of the Film and TV School of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague and Kunsthalle Bratislava. The Seminar of Accidental Wisdom has been kindly supported by the Ministry of Culture Czech Republic Arts Grant.
Photo: Jacqueline Hoàng Nguyễn: Black Atlas, The Július Koller Society, Bratislava. Photo: Leontína Berková.