This September, Unfinished Art Space welcomes audiences to take part in a symposium and round table, with many European artists, curators and artist-led organisations travelling to Malta to present their artistic practices and research.
The symposium and exhibition, Figure it out, highlights practices and phenomena of coping, making-do and circumventing exclusions that are developed by marginalised and vulnerable communities. These communities are often forced to develop tools and strategies in order to simply exercise rights or to secure access to basic services; in short, the project is about the ingenuity of common people in surviving in a world that is often skewed against them.
The symposium will welcome a cohort of artists and academics who will present ideas around subjects as varied as olfactory experimentation, self-hosted servers, tech folklore, feminist labs, and deliberately inefficient infrastructures.
The accompanying round table, convened by Valeria Graziano of Justus-Liebig University (Giessen) and Davor Misković of Drugo More, Rijeka, explores the diverse narratives and experiences of those engaged in various forms of cleaning labour. The round table invites curator Bettina Knaup, as well as Janna Graham and Louis Moreno, both of Goldsmiths University among others, to present their ideas.
The parallel exhibition will explore similar themes of coping and making-do; Keit Bonnici and Rakel Vella will join Azahara Cerezo (Girona), Kiosk (Belgrade), !Mediengruppe Bitnik (Berlin), RYBN.ORG (Paris) and ŠKART (Belgrade) to show new and existing work within the show.
Unfinished Art Space is committed to fostering dialogue and critical thinking around contemporary art practices. Figure it out promises to be a stimulating and thought-provoking event for artists, curators and anyone interested in the power of resilience and resourcefulness.
The symposium will take place on 19 and 20 September at the Malta Society of Arts, while the exhibition will run from 19 September until 5 October at the Society's Basement Vaults.
Figure it out is co-funded by the European Union's Creative Europe programme. In Malta it is supported by the NGO co-financing scheme of the Malta Council for the Voluntary Sector, under the Ministry for Inclusion, Voluntary Organisations and Consumer Rights, as well as the Conference Scheme of the Ministry for Finance and Employment.
The round table is organised as part of the activities of the Working Group Analysis, Theory & Politics Of Care, part of the COST funded project: Toolkit of Care (TOC), CA21102. (https://www.cost.eu/actions/ CA21102/).
For more information and to register for the symposium visit www.unfinishedartspace.org/projects/figureitout