Artalk debate: Art, Unions and Self-organizing

Free entry, register here

Language accessibility: English

Precarity is not specific to the field of art, and experiences from other fields can help us look at our own problems from a different perspective. Kuba Szreder has coined the term “projectariat” to describe the working conditions in the art world. What forms of self-organizing can help us solve our problems? What are the deeper structural issues, and what are the easily solvable problems? Is individualism to blame for everything, and will unions save us? And how do we organize effectively to avoid burnout? The online magazine Artalk, in collaboration with the Czech branch of tranzit, invites you to a discussion that aims to open up possibilities and answer the questions that come with working in the cultural sphere, many of which are reflected in this year’s edition of the Biennale Matter of Art 2024.

Anežka Bartlová (*1988) is the editor-in-chief of the online art magazine Artalk.info (since 2022) and a lecturer at the Film and Television Faculty of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague (FAMU). She earned her master’s degree at Charles University (Dept. of Art History) and the Academy of Art, Architecture & Design in Prague (Dept. of Theory and History of Art) and her PhD at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague. Bartlová is an art critic, and she worked as a staff writer for the Czech art magazine Art Antiques (2016–2019) and the peer-reviewed journal Notebook for Art, Theory and Related Zones (2018–2019). She is a member of the solidary artistic platform for communication Spolek Skutek, Feminist (Art) Institution, and the initiative Nadšením nájem nezaplatíš.

Aleksei Borisionok (*1992, Belarus) is a curator, writer, and organizer who currently lives and works in Vienna. He is a member of the artistic-research group Problem Collective and the Work Hard! Play Hard! working group. He writes about art and politics for various magazines, catalogs, and online platforms such as e-flux Journal, L’Internationale Online, Partisan, Springerin, and Paletten, among many others. He is currently a fellow at the Vera List Center in New York.

Eliška Mazalánová is an art historian and curator. She is also the co-founder and current vice-president of the Slovak cultural union Kulturné odbory, which was founded in May 2024. She works on topics such as socially and environmentally engaged art and collaborative practice as well as the inner workings of the art world and artistic operations, especially with regard to working conditions, precarity, and equal opportunities and the associated forms of collective organizing and unionization of cultural workers. She collaborates with tranzit.sk.

Jiří (Jirka) Skála (*1976, Sušice) is a visual artist, writer, and university lecturer who has long lived and worked in Prague. His artistic practice focuses mainly on the media of photography, performance, and video. He also writes essays and short stories. Most of his efforts are directed toward themes related to the perception and transformation of paid work and unpaid work under Eastern European conditions. He focuses on their interpenetration and how they become a source of new forms of exploitation, domination, and humiliation. In his artistic output he strives to find adequate methods of resistance or strong metaphorical representations.

Kuba Szreder is a researcher, curator, and lecturer at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. He cooperates with artistic unions, consortia of post-artistic practitioners, clusters of art researchers, art collectives, and artistic institutions in Poland, the United Kingdom, and other European countries. He is an editor and author of several catalogs, books, readers, book chapters, articles, and manifestos, in which he scrutinizes the social, economic, and theoretical aspects of the expanded field of art. His current research interests include the conditions of artistic labor, new models of artistic institutions, artistic self-organization, artistic research, and post-artistic theory and practice. His book The ABC of the Projectariat: Living and Working in a Precarious Art World was published in 2021 by the Manchester University Press and Whitworth.