Dichotomies are the underlying schemes of our culture, which have significantly shaped how we perceive and make sense of reality. However, with a growing recognition of voices emerging from the Others inhabiting political, socioeconomic, and cultural peripheries, dichotomous schemes have started to be questioned. Breaking from the dichotomous framework in favour of recognising the in-betweenness is the prevalent theme connecting works at the ‘Other Edges of the World’ exhibition. The curators—Piotr Sikora, Lucia Kvočáková, and Flóra Gadó from the Czech MeetFactory located in Prague—have invited international artists, including those from Ukraine, to tell their stories of alienation, exile, and otherness in a world torn by war, climate change, and economic instabilities.
Katarzyna Boch: Your project, ‘Other Edges of the World,’ focuses on the dichotomy between the central and the peripheral. What was the idea behind choosing it as the main subject?
Flóra Gadó: We started to work on the exhibition several years ago, and both the concept and the format changed quite a lot. Since our first project together, ‘The New Dictionary of Old Ideas,’ we were interested in how to approach and rethink notions such as the centre and the periphery from our East-Central European perspective. When we conceived the ‘Other Edges…’ exhibition, we did not consider emphasising dichotomies but rather to show a framework that needs constant questioning and reevaluation. The war in Ukraine also clearly changed our focus; we wanted to provide opportunities for Ukrainian artists, not only discussing solidarity and collaboration but actively doing something to initiate support structures. The fact that Piotr and Lucia worked at MeetFactory was a huge help.
KB: What guided your selection of residents for the programme?
Lucia Kvočáková: The entire project underwent significant changes. Originally, there were plans for two distinct types of residencies. The first involved more experimental travelling residencies, where selected artists were meant to journey through the country for several weeks and share their experiences afterward. The second round of residencies was intended to be more classical, involving an exchange of artists with partner institutions. However, following the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, the initial concept of the residencies and other planned outcomes no longer made sense.
Together with project partners, including the Visual Culture Research Center from Ukraine (VCRC), we started immediate discussions on how to adapt the project and provide support to Ukrainian artists. These conversations led to the creation of Emergency residencies. We initiated a call for Ukrainian artists, allowing them to choose from our partner organisations (MeetFactory in Prague, K.A.I.R. in Košice, or hablarenarte in Madrid) where they would like to apply. Additionally, the VCRC organised three domestic residencies in Ukraine to support artists who either could not or chose not to leave Ukraine.
KB: What is the significance of exchanging experiences with Ukrainian artists and curators?
LK: As the whole project has been designed to build a connection between four European countries after the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, we put extra effort into supporting the Ukrainian art scene. Our experimental travelling residences—the original idea for the project—have been switched to twelve emergency residency opportunities in Ukraine and beyond. The Visual Culture Research Centre collaborated with Sorry No Rooms Available in Uzhhorod and Asortymentna Kimnata in Ivano-Frankivsk to provide support for artists who cannot or do not want to leave the country. In one year, over ten people came to Prague for a residency—two of them decided to stay in the Czech Republic for a longer time. I find it sad that the war made us discover the Ukrainian art scene, but the good thing is that from now on, we can build bridges for further collaborations.
KB: The exhibition that you organised is concerned with exile, displacement, and alienation. How do the displayed works correspond with these themes?
FG: The displayed works correspond with the themes on both more abstract and more concrete levels. It was important for us that the artists are not only interested in the theme as a research question but also consider it in the context of their own experiences, for example, if they live in a country other than the one in which they were born. This motif is prevalent in many of their works, but often they are adding a layer that is more metaphorical.
PS: It was also interesting to notice how the works in the exhibition can be connected by the theme of verticality—we start underground, move up to the problems experienced on Earth, and then literally reach the sky. The underground appears in Kateryna Aliinyk’s works, representing the destruction of the soil. Some fictional elements and speculative storytelling methods are crucial when it comes to geopolitical questions in Mina Nasr’s and Jura Shust’s pieces. Then, the capitalist system is criticised in Eva Ďurovec’s and Ghazaleh Avarzamani’s works. Finally, we end up in the sky, with extraterrestrial territories and beings examined in Darja Lukjanenko’s work, which alludes to a general notion of displacement in the world. There is an exciting trajectory in the exhibition, showing different states and transitions related to the questions of exile, displacement, and home.
KB: How can art shape the ways we think about what is considered central and what is peripheral?
Lukjanenko As we mentioned before, art can create ambivalent situations and provoke through various strategies to make us think beyond the dichotomy of the centre and the periphery. Instead of reinforcing this binary opposition, we were interested in the in-betweenness, expressing things that are often challenging to articulate verbally. However, this ‘in-between’ does not mean that the artists are neutral on geopolitical issues. In my understanding, in-betweenness is about focusing on the transition from one state to another and highlighting the notion of multi-temporalities rather than the linear development of history.
PS: For me, it is very important to acknowledge how the central and the peripheral are grounded in the geopolitical system in which we function on a daily basis. When one peripheral culture wants to establish a connection with another, the only route to do so goes via the centre. To gain knowledge about the Middle East, for instance, Eastern Europeans will most commonly learn the history written by Western empires. We are still living in a world divided by global powers, similar to the pre-1989 world. You either sympathise with Palestine or Israel, you are for Ukraine or against the Western World. While experiencing the rise of divisions, I would like to ask how to build bridges between different peripheries, cultivating the heritage of the Non-Aligned movement and the so-called Third Path.
KB: The war in Ukraine, climate change, and the crisis of democracies are mentioned among the most pressing problems of the contemporary world. Is the vision of the future conveyed by the artists more pessimistic or hopeful?
LK: In fact, neither. I think that most of the works are quite ambivalent. We can follow the dramatic story of a tribe that went lost while migrating to Europe from Africa in Mina Nasr’s works – this idea appears quite fatalistic, but it also comes from the artist’s experience as an Egyptian observing the whole situation from the disadvantaged side of the barricade. Still, we can find in his story a sense of community that makes the whole piece somehow positive. Right next to Mina’s group portrait of the missing tribe, we can sit under the Crop Circle by Darja Lukjanenko who proposes to reframe and reevaluate our urge to explore cosmic space. Her piece brings a positive proposal on how to invert the Cosmos from external exploration into an internal search; and how to make rockets disappear and travel into space using techniques such as lucid dreaming, meditation, or hypnosis.
KB: What role does art play in raising a conversation about the problems of the contemporary world?
FG: I believe that the role of art is specifically to raise attention, highlight certain problems, initiate conversations, and help us rethink our positions and investigate ourselves and our mindsets critically. I do not think art alone can change anything, but it certainly has the power to become a platform to examine certain issues and to initiate collaborations that can lead to small, local changes. As Piotr mentioned, it is about building bridges between different peripheries.
KB: The programme is coordinated by numerous art institutions from the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Spain, and Ukraine. What are the benefits and challenges of international cooperation in discussing the image of post-pandemic Europe?
LK: There are only four organisations in this programme under the coordination of MeetFactory from the Czech Republic, but, of course, even such small-scale collaborations pose many challenges. These include coordination issues, different priorities, or cultural sensitivities, especially when we need to re-work the concept on the go. The necessity of adapting our perspectives, even though stressful during the process, allowed us to allocate the project resources where they were much needed, giving the project another meaningful dimension.
PS: This is the second project we are leading where artists from the Western part of Europe collaborate with Eastern Europeans. Still, I must highlight that these terms are not homogenous. We are very much interested in sharing our experiences and seeing how different they are when it comes to combining, for example, Ukraine and Spain, but also how we can track the nuances when juxtaposing the Czech reality with the Slovak one. One of the themes that came up in our discussions is decolonization. It is interesting how the meaning of this word changes depending on whether we speak of the decolonization of South America seen from a Spanish perspective or the emancipation from Russian influences in Ukrainian culture. We are preparing a publication dealing with this subject, which is to be launched in spring 2024.
