Ian Wilson, Chalk Circle on the Floor, 1968. Courtesy of Herbert Foundation.
| Date: | 21 May 2014 |
| Time: | 19:00 |
| Venue: | Delfina Foundation |
Övül Ö. Durmusoglu, Dave Beech and Melanie Jordan of Freee Art Collective, Jochen Volz and Simon Sheikh and his students from Goldsmiths College.
For some years, collective agencies in different parts of the world have started to reformulate public spaces they gather in, from squares to parks to traffic roundabouts. Mutually, these actions also transform their being. How do such transformations of the public domain relate to contemporary art and feed the institutional imagination of major art events like biennales? The 13th Istanbul Biennial, for example, experienced a heated discussion on the notion – and reality – of being public in the aftermath of the Gezi Park uprisings that spread from Istanbul to different cities in Turkey.
How and where to draw the circle? is titled after the 1968 conceptual piece by Ian Wilson, Chalk Circle on the Floor, a circle with an erasable politics of inclusion and exclusion. Moving from post-biennial discussions in Istanbul, this roundtable will attempt to speculate further on the shift of publics and the directions towards which it can move and unsettle our preconceptions of the public domain.
Simon Sheikh who has been following the Istanbul Biennial for many editions, Melanie Jordan and Dave Beech of Freee collective who participated the Biennial, and Jochen Volz, recently Head of Programmes in Serpentine Gallery and who has been working on major site commissions and public events in Instituto Inhotim of Brazil will gather together to discuss different theoretical and practical threads with resident curator Övül Ö. Durmusoglu.