Szine #2:
Cultural Diplomacy: Reflecting on Present Institutional Mechanisms and Speculating on Alternative Cultural Practice
Szine #2 came together around our hope to critically evaluate how art institutions in times of conflict can be spaces or tools for cultural exchange and diplomacy, as sanctuaries and sites to imagine transformative political horizons.
Left: Umbrellas left behind after tear-gas firing during protests in Hong Kong, September 29, 2019, photograph by Eric Tsang, “White Terror” series.
Right: Long-exposure photograph of protestors at Hong Kong Space Museum using laser pointers following the arrest of a student for possessing several of these devices, which the police called an “offensive weapon” in Hong Kong, August 7, 2019, photograph by Eric Tsang, “Language of the Unheard” series.
For Szine #2, during two roundtables Stedelijk Studies invited artists, cultural workers, and academics from different backgrounds to speculate on the past of institutions and their futures under statist frameworks. Adam Szymczyk, documenta 14 artistic director and the Stedelijk’s curator-at-large, led the first of these in which art history academic Lisa Ito, architect and visual artist Yazan Khalili and head of Kiev’s Visual Culture Research Center Vasyl Cherepanyn discussed the paradox of the “neutral institution” given the reactive response artistic practices have to national cultural policies. On-the-ground perspectives from the Philippines, Palestine, and Ukraine provided insight into the agency of solidarity movements in the museum context.
Left: Poster of “Allied—Kyiv Biennial 2021” in a chair, 2021, photograph by Oleksandr Kovalenko. Courtesy of Vasyl Cherepanyn.
Center: Poster of “Strategic Plan 2020—2018”, 2018, prepared by Yara Abdel Hamid and illustrated by Basel Nasr. © Khalil Sakakini Cultural Center, Ramallah.
Right: University students and other visitors look inside Museo Lumad: Land, Culture, Life, a museum that showcases the history, land, and culture of the Lumad indigenous people from southern Philippines, 2016, photograph by Karlo Mongaya.
The second roundtable also had a plurality of voices, this time from Russia, Turkey, and the Netherlands. Cultural studies professor Keti Chukhrov, architect Merve Bedir, and artist and propaganda researcher Jonas Staal engaged in a conversation supported by stateless and transterritorial theory that involved consideration of alternative structures for cultural production.
Left: The New World Embassy: Rojava was a temporary embassy built in the Oslo City Hall that represented the principles of “stateless democracy” practiced in northern Syria by the Democratic Self-Administration of Rojava. The embassy is a collaborative project between the Democratic Self-Administration of Rojava and Studio Jonas Staal commissioned by the 2016 Oslo Architecture Triennale After Belonging and co-produced by KORO (Public Art Norway/URO), photograph by Istvan Virag.
Right: Cosmology map of the “Kitchen Workshop”, a hospitality collective of women from Turkey and Syria that want to live together, illustrated by Merve Bedir.
To learn about our contributors’ experiences, we invite you to download a free digital copy of the second issue. As always, it is available in English and Dutch:
