The right thing at the wrong time is the wrong thing. In alignment with every other late-capitalist producer, artists and curators are expected to deliver the new and the radically unpredictable with impeccable timing. Biennials and museums set out to distill the contemporary – a term largely exchangeable with the future – inherent in the art presented, while past connections live on disconnected as retro-archives without much attachment, but ever available, to the post-everything now. But what disappears in the theatricality of art’s high performance? How can we address temporal aspects of yearly repeated studio visits, the intensity of a collective process up to the opening of an exhibition, or the social and material relationship forged by and forging the negotiation of space and works in the studio, the exhibition, the institution? How to institute an expansive concept of temporality to allow intimacy of discovery and collective investigations, responsive formats and on-the-spot realizations? In this talk, Kristine Siegel introduces PRAXES and the development of institutional experiments of hosting, collectivity, and modular agency.

The event is conducted in Danish.

PRAXES Center for Contemporary Art started as a not-for-profit venue for international contemporary art and research in Berlin. Founded in 2013 by Rhea Dall and Kristine Siegel, PRAXES investigated the objects, processes, and interactions that combined constitute an artistic practice, through modular half-year cycles centered on two unassociated artists. Dall and Siegel co-curated the Bergen Assembly 2016, a large-scale triennial for art and research in Norway.

Based in New York for a decade before relocating to Berlin, Siegel held positions at MoMA, International Studio & Curatorial Program (ISCP), and Dennis Oppenheim Studio & Archive. As an independent curator, she has initiated a number of exhibitions and live programs, many of them collaborative projects, and she frequently contributes to publications, including PRAXES’ series of writings, which can be downloaded for free. Siegel is the curator of the 2017 MFA exhibition at DJK, hosted by Aarhus Kunsthal.

Supported by the research program Contemporary Aesthetics and Technology at Aarhus Universitet.