To catalyze change, we need to question and
alter normativities produced within and outside the art field. An
artistic action is a form opening up space to experimentation with
social norms that can give rise to new ways of collective and individual
subjectivization and transforming our and other people’s habits.
Through displays, we exercise how we enter and experience space, and its
overarching architecture, reclaim public and private space and make
claims on spaces that belong to us and from which we have been deprived.
It is a performance of activism.
Leaning upon intersectional practices, we
must talk, again and again, with the voices left in the dark. We must
speak the unspoken: what and who remains unacknowledged by keeping
silent. We must find agency for the powerless and give a voice to
adversity. We must practice assertion, providing images for the past to
write a different future.
The course will focus on structuring
community-building claims and imagining appearance structures through
practical examples and exercises: gestures, actions, performances,
displays, and collaborations attempting to break free from given
infrastructures.
A writer and curator, Antonio Cataldo holds
a PhD in Curatorial Studies. Since August 2018, Cataldo has served as
the Artistic Director of Fotogalleriet Oslo, an independent and
publicly-funded institution, the oldest kunsthalle for photography in
the Nordic region. Through exhibitions, discourse, and research for
several internationally reputed organizations, Cataldo has actively
challenged institutional models, their governing structures, and the
representational social role of images. Cataldo studied with philosopher
Giorgio Agamben in Venice, Italy, obtaining his MA in 2006. Over the
last two decades, Cataldo held curatorial and other positions at OCA –
Office for Contemporary Art Norway, La Biennale di Venezia, and IUAV,
University of Venice. Cataldo sits on the boards of Kunsthalles in
Norway and the Sandefjord Kunstforening Art Award jury.