Other Possible Worlds – Dictionary in Space
Other Possible Worlds aims at opening a space for multiple projects suggesting and testing other realities of life and other “Weltvorstellungen” (world visions) from small-scale artistic tryouts to larger social experiments.
It questions the role of art projects, art spaces and self-organised academies and labs in imagining a world beyond a purely economic globalisation. The globe is the common denominator, an international shared communal space of reference. Cultural differences, economic and ecological changes, processes of levelling are urgent global issues the workshop will deal with.
The subject of the Art Workshop 2011 refers to the potentialities of art as described by Sarat Maharaj. He points out that art does not only mean transmitting knowledge pre-established by the institutional discourse of systematic disciplines, but that art produces knowledge normal reasoning has difficulties to deal with.
Sarat Maharaj distinguishes further on: “What we call art activity is expanding, extending, transmogrifying in the global contemporary setting. Hence also my dogged interest in Duchamp's question ‘How to make a work of art that isn't a work of art?’ For me, it's a marker for ways we might be able to engage with works, events, spasms, ructions that don't look like art and don't count as art, but are somehow electric, energy nodes, attractors, transmitters, conductors of new thinking, new subjectivity and action that visual artwork in the traditional sense is not able to articulate“.1
1Sarat Maharaj, In Other's Words (interview by Daniel Birnbaum), artforum, February 2002.