Alice Scope
In 2021, 50 contemporary art curators, researchers, and museum professionals from 32 different countries were awarded support to attend the CIMAM 2021 Annual Conference, in-person and online.
For the first time, and thanks to the generous support of The Getty Foundation who sponsored the virtual platform, 27 grantees attended the conference online, while 23 attended onsite.
Launched in 2005, CIMAM’s Travel Grant Program is designed to foster cooperation and cultural exchange between contemporary art curators and museum directors in emerging and developing economies and their counterparts in other regions of the world.
This grant was generously funded by Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow.
Alice Scope's Conference Report
I would love to review the speech by artist and choreographer Alex Baczynki-Jenkins, "On intimacy and emergence".
In the speech, Alex shared his experience
co-founding Kem School, a Warsaw-based queer feminist collective focused on choreography, performance, and sound at the interface with social practice.
Alex explained that 'choreography' is not only related to dance. Social choreography can blur the boundaries between art, curating, education, activism, clubbing, and community-making practices.
"How to touch the movement?" is also the title of a 6-week long educational program with the idea of Queer feminism as world-making. How can we create the world we all would love to live in? What tools do we need to develop? And who does "WE" refer to?
One week before the CIMAM Annual Conference, I got a chance to see Alex's performance "The tremble" in person during Disappearing Berlin. "The tremble" is the first episode of the four-part work The tremble, the symptom, the swell and the hole together (2017), a choreographic mediation on the relationships between touch, intimacy, loss, and collectivity.
The dancers' (four artists of different ages, races, and gender) fragmented yet interconnected movements open up a dialogue across queer politics of desire and intimacy and across the space they temporarily occupy.
Why is it important to develop collective working modes through experiments and reflections on social choreography and queer feminist methodologies? Simply because we need radical demands through art. The artworld is still listening to the hierarchized social narrative. Many institutions adhere to the lowest ethical standards; they continue to ignore systematic racism and plan exhibitions two years in advance instead of responding to current political events. To make a shift, we need a radical systematic approach. And as digital citizens, we can expand in any direction.
How can we build a culture that loves us? I think we can start with an experimental approach rooted in collective responsibility. We must try to push things forward and be open to adjustments to see what can work. Let's strengthen anti-racist artistic practices and discourses. Who better to support artists than artists themselves?