Curator Talk # 3

Susanna Gyulamiryan
ACSL-Art and Cultural Studies Laboratory, Armenia

"The Function and Functionality of the Participatory Art"

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(c) Edgar Amroyan

The Function and Functionality of the Participatory Art

Talk by Susanna Gyulamiryan

The talk will evolve on the artistic orientation towards the social in contemporary art practices that has been sharing the set of artists’ attempts and desires to overturn the traditional relationship between the art object, the artist and the audience. The talk will be based to a largee extent on theoretical passages of Clair Bishop on the notion of ‘participatory art” which testifies that artists is conceived less as an individual producer of discrete objects than as a producer of situations and communal co-operation even with non-artistic communities, when the work of art as a finite, commoditiable product is re- conceived in its temporal sense as processual. In this kind of processes the audience, which usually conceived as a viewer, spectator is often repositioned as a collaborator and co-participant who is congenial with the artist’s desire to make the social life better. May be this kind of collaborative intentions are more powerful as ideals than as actualized realities, but the participatory art aims not only subvert conventional modes of artistic production, but it is “perceived to channel symbolic capital of art towards constructive social change: artists devising social situations as a dematerialized, politically and socially engaged project to carry on the call to make art a more vital part of life.”

Susanna Gyulamiryan
art critic and curator

ACSL - Art and Cultural Studies Laboratory

Susanna Gyulamiryan (born in Yerevan, Armenia) is an art critic and curator, who has been working in Armenia and internationally. In 2007, she collaboratively founded the “Art and Cultural Studies Laboratory” (ACSL), where she was the appointed president until nowadays. In 2008, she was an initiator of founding the “Art Commune” International Artist-in-Residence program in Armenia. Since 2006, she is a board member of AICA – Armenia (International Association of Art Critics).

More than ten years, Susanna Gyulamiryan has held courses in Cultural Studies at the Armenian Open University, Department of Fine Arts (International Academy of Education).

Recent Curatorial projects include: Dependency Culture as a State of Mind” (visual statement to BB7 Call (Biennale in Berlin), Interrior DAseign in Wedding, Berlin, Germany, 2012; Imaginative Geographies – Atlantis 11, HEICO (Heritage, Identities and Communication in European Contemporary Art Practices), 54th Biennale, Venice, Italy, 2011;
Gender Trouble. Pltaforms –Annual Symposium and Exhibitions, Yerevan, Armenia, 2008-2011; Possibility of the Angel, 10th Biennale of Contemporary Art, Sharjah, UA, 2011; Subjects-Objects of History and their histories, Proekt FABRIKA, Moscow, RF,2010; Interdiagnosis – Forum of Contemporary Art, Yerevan, Armenia, 2008.
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