📆 Thursday, 28 November,
18:30–20:00
Free admission with prior registration.
The conversation will be held in English.
Zuzeum is very pleased to invite you to a lecture by artist, curator, and editor Katie Zazenski (Warsaw, Poland). This lecture is part of a series of meetings with global art professionals, initiated by Zuzeum in collaboration with MA POST. The lecture series aims to bring exceptional art professionals to Riga for an exchange of experiences and important ideas to foster new thinking and cultural dialogue.
In her lecture at Zuzeum, Katie Zazenski focuses on her life and work in the capital Poland over the last decade. She plans to share her perspective as an artist, editor, curator, and director of an independent art space Stroboskop, and outline how these professional lenses combine to inform her responses to the world around her. Outlining the implications of conservative politics for the artistic ecosystem, Katie will describe a wider context of contemporary art in Poland, now marked by the right-wing governmental stronghold on the established institutions. Her position as co-editor-in-chief of BLOK Magazine and the intricacies of working as an unpaid, non-hierarchical editorial team will also be discussed. Katie will also touch on the Shadow Archive / Shelley Odradek project as a starting point for the journal with MA POST featuring artists Leann Hérlihy and Tonatuh López.
Katie Zazenski (she/her) is an artist, curator, writer, editor, and lecturer based in Warsaw. Since 2018 Katie is the director of Stroboskop, the independent artist-run space where she has produced over 30 exhibitions, featuring artists from Poland and the world at large. In 2020, Katie became the co-editor-in-chief, together with Ewa Borysiewicz and Vera Zalutskaya, of BLOK Magazine, an English-language journal on art, culture, and politics in the region known as Central and East Europe. She is also an initiator of FRINGE Warszawa, an annual (since 2022) four-day event highlighting the independent/grassroots art and cultural projects in the city. Zazenski received her MFA from the Cranbrook Academy of Art and is a two-time Fulbright fellow to Poland.
BLOK is an online, English-language contemporary art journal that focuses on the region that is known as Central and Eastern Europe. Floating between the arbitrarily defined “West” and “East”, the magazine is interested in tracing artistic and cultural practices, mapping different local identities, and searching for common experiences – in the past and for the future. BLOK aims to be a resource for a regional and international audience and presents art writing, exhibitions, and projects from historically underrepresented communities and peoples. In recognition of the patriarchal and colonialist history that shapes our use of the English language, BLOK also intervenes minimally in editing of the published texts.
Stroboskop is an independent, artist-run space that has been established in a garage beneath a PRL-style bloc building in 2016 by a group of five artists and cultural workers. Since then it had a few different configurations of organizers and collaborators, with the space currently being run solely by artist/curator/writer/editor, Katie Zazenski. From the start, Stroboskop seeks to platform both Polish and international artists who are working in ways that are underrepresented in the local contemporary art scene; to support artists and cultural workers in creating experimental and challenging projects; and to initiate cooperation with other experimental spaces and projects internationally. We tend to host solo exhibitions on-site, and lean towards performance and site-specific installations.
More information can be found here:
https://blokmagazine.com
https://stroboskopartspace.com
This talk is a part of a collaboration between MA POST and Zuzeum Art Centre.
POST is an interdisciplinary visual studies MA at the Art Academy of Latvia.
Creative Public Spaces initiative within project No. 1.1.1.3/21/A/005 ‘RTU Student
Innovation Grants’.