Public debate dedicated to Leonardo Kovačević (1975-2023) CANVAS AND FRAME – What the Artist (Doesn’t) Know: On Art as Knowledge, Amateur Knowledge, and Scientific Experiments
Within the 86th Autumn Exhibition of the Association of Fine Artists of Serbia (ULUS), a public conversation will take place on Friday, November 17, starting at 6 pm at the Library of the Art Pavilion „Cvijeta Zuzorić.“ (For online participation, please follow zoom link).
The conversation is an integral part of the ULUS ongoing protest (more information on protest development and demands is available on the website). Dedicated to Leonardo Kovačević, a philosopher and philoamateur from Zagreb who unexpectedly left us on November 14, 2023, the conversation will further delve into the themes of the exhibition TAJNĀ ZNÁNJA ( Secret (of) Knowledge) Film ⇆ Photography ⇆ Painting.
The interconnectedness of different indisciplines (Jacques Rancière) with art as a form of interdisciplinary or undisciplined knowledge constitutes a tool for emancipation. This is also the condition for what Rancière calls the „poetics of knowledge“, which refers to the practices of a way of thinking that rejects the specialisation of fields, objects, and methods (expertise), including the separation between types of intelligence, assuming equality.
„The poetics of knowledge affirms that there is a faculty of thought that does not belong to any particular group, a faculty that can be attributed to any speaking, thinking being.“ (Jacques Rancière, Method of equality – poetics and politics, 2015). This approach to knowledge favours doing the things we love, doing it out of love (amato), and thus revives the view of amateur experimentation with technique (and not only), departing from the strict framework of expertise as a prerequisite for emancipation. This amateur’s position revaluates subjective access to knowledge and allows the liberation of man from the constraints of the dominant discourse, as well as the conditions arising from it.
The conversation will attempt to examine whether indisciplinary migrations that connect seemingly distant territories of knowledge and practices, by linking and turning them upside down, can advance the existing value system in the common world—shifting established places of speech and thought, contributing to micro reconfigurations and micro transformations of the dominant system. Above all, it challenges the dominant concept of professionalization, expert knowledge, and narrow hyper-specializations that always start from the axiom of separation.
The conversation will involve artists who explore the theme of amateurism through their work and practice or who have transitioned from professional to amateur artists:
- Kaya Erdinç (Netherlands)
- Sarah Vanagt (Belgium)
- Elisabetta Cuccaro (Italy)
- Petra Belc (Croatia)
- Bata Petrović (Serbia)
Moderation: Ivana Momčilović, PhD In One Night (Belgium)
PhD In One Night is an international platform for aesthetic education and experimentation based between Belgium, Finland, France, and the island of Vis. The collective of collaborators has been working with Jacques Rancière and his ideas of equality, emancipation, and the poetics of knowledge through aesthetics and indisciplinarity for more than 15 years. Starting from the hypothesis that art is knowledge, the collective engages in aesthetic education in various contexts (self-organized groups, elementary and high schools, art academies, and universities) by creating different methods of knowledge sharing as a collective artistic creation: literacy (learning another language) for refugees (Belgium, Serbia) through artistic practices (contemporary dance, collages, sound interventions, short films).
Recent courses for students from various Art Academies and Universities in Europe (selection): Course on the inexplicable; Undisciplined symphony; Useless knowledge and the method of equality; Guerrilla University.
Recent project: Laboratory of Radical Peace and Collective Garden of Knowledge as part of Guerrilla University at Les Orangeries de Bierbais, Belgium.