How does war, political violence and displacement shape artistic practice?

Ethnographic Laboratory Association in Warsaw and the INSPIRE project at Peace Research Institute in Oslo invite you all to:

How does war, political violence and displacement shape artistic practice? – a roundtable discussion with artists and researchers

Wednesday, the 11th of October, 2023, 18:00-20:00

Duży Pokój, ul. Warecka 4/6, 00-040 Warszawa (entrance from ul. Kubusia Puchatka)

A roundtable discussion with international artists and researchers participating in the INSPIRE Open Space exploring inspiration, motivation and artistic creation of artists engaged with themes of war, conflict, displacement and social (in)justice. How do such contexts shape creative and artistic practice? How do artists coming from such experiences negotiate their own public and private engagements and responses? How do such experiences open up but also constrain artistic practice? How is art narrating, documenting, responding and transforming such contexts and experiences?

Event will be held in English.

INSPIRE Open Space for new encounters, reflections, and co-creation: exploring inspiration, motivation and artistic creation of artists engaged with themes of war, conflict, displacement and social (in)justice. This is part of an Open Space of the INSPIRE project examining artistic inspiration, creative practice and imagination in the context of war, conflict, exile and oppression carried out by Kasia Grabska at the Peace Research Institute in Oslo. The first Open Space took place in Geneva in September 2022. Visual artist Anna Konik and researcher Kasia Grabska co- organize the second Open Space in Warsaw, at Duzy Pokoj and Teatr Komuna (8-12 October 2023) with artists who have lived experiences of exile, displacement, violent conflict or political persecution and whose creative practice relates to these themes. Through their personal experiences and methodologies invited artists will create a hybrid, multi-layered perspective on the creative space of exile and political oppression.

Join us to meet and learn more about these fascinating artists and their guests, their personal and creative trajectories and debating their personal and public commitments during an event at Duzy Pokoj on Wednesday, the 11th of October 2023.

INSPIRE Open Space artists and researchers:

Chuu Wai - a free-spirited and committed artist whose work centers around the role of women in Burma. Her artistic practice includes painting and performance art.

Pablo Gershanik - an artist, actor, director and theater pedagogue from Argentina and France. By animating inanimate objects in live and mediated performance, he interrogates the precarities of history, memory and the everyday to explore resilience and healing from personal and collective trauma.

Anna Konik - visual artist and lecturer at UAP, working with video installation and art films. Her transgressive and interdisciplinary artworks combines photography, drawing, art objects, works in-situ. Her art results from encounters with other people and their realities. Since 2020 the INSPIRE advisory board member.

Luis Carlos Tovar - visual artist who circulates between France and Colombia, producing work that explores the topics of discontinuous geographies and the role of post-memory in the present.

Marisa Cornejo - research artist in the fields of memory, identity and migration, produces work that centers around drawing her dreams to give voice to and interrogate her body as an archive of forced migration.

Katarzyna Grabska - feminist anthropologist researching and teaching in the fields of forced migration, war, political conflict. She collaborates often with artists in her research and engages in research-creation projects exploring issues of belonging, displacement, identities, and social transformations.

INSPIRE Open Space Guests:

Larisa Venediktova - lives in Kyiv, engineer and choreographer. She is a performer and a group member of Tanzlaboratoriu. She teaches at the Kyiv Circus and Performing Arts Academy. She has written several essays about the responsibility for the past. She is an initiator and lecturer at the Microuniversity (philosophy, mathematics and dance) and volunteer in the Armed Forces of Ukraine.

Anna Łazar - curator of an international collaboration program Free Word in the context of Gdansk the City of Literature, initiator and creator of contemporary art projects, translator. Lecturer at the Institute of Art, the Polish Academy of Sciences and of Gender Studies at the IBL PAN (2020-2023).

Doctor Oy - visual artist, born in Pinsk, Belarus. His work is a protest to the regime, in defiance of which he raises the theme of restrictions and prohibitions, through which irony and hidden meanings delicately seep into his works. Acer the 2020 presidential elections in Belarus, ongoing repression and imprisonment, he moved to Poland and currently lives and works in Warsaw.

Mila Kotka - artist, art curator and producer. Born in Belarus, began her art activity in 2014 having created an international urban art festival Vulica Brasil in Minsk and was informally proclaimed as “godmother of Belarusian street art”. In 2021 became one of the founders of the Institute of Art and Sustainability.

The venue where the event takes place is located on the ground floor, with entrance from the street, you have to climb 3 steps to enter. It is possible to come with a guide dog. If you have any needs or questions related to participation in the event, please send an email to pracawnia@etnograficzna.pl and we will try to find a solution.

Co-financed by the state budget under the program of the Minister of Education and Science called Social Responsibility of Science, project no. SONP/SN/550982/2022. The project is co-financed by the capital city of Warsaw.