INTERVIEW: AHMET ÖĞÜT & BURAK ARIKAN

To make visible the ongoing call-for-action for equal rights and fair payment in the arts, the researchers and artists Ahmet Öğüt and Burak Arıkan founded the outstanding online platform Code of Acquisitions. The website allows users to submit experiences and cases they had with an arts organisation and from the collected data it visualises complex mappings showcasing the institutions's or gallery's practices. These personal and disquieting experiences between artists, art practitioners and institutions are usually discussed in small, closed networks and they are often considered as unprecedented local system malfunctions. The platform, however, shows how these unspoken issues are embedded in the core of the global art system and how we can have alternative possibilities of collective discourses and support methodologies. 

INTERVIEW: LATITUDES

Mariana Cánepa Luna & Max Andrews from Latitudes. Photo © Eunice Adorno (2012)

I met the curator Mariana Cánepa Luna during her talk with the Spanish artist Lara Almarcegui at her current exhibition “Agras Volcano. Mining Rights” at the IVAM in Valencia. Afterwards we had such a lively discussion on the discourse of the Anthropocene and environmentally-engaged art that I felt the need to deepen our conversation even further. Together with the curator Max Andrews, in 2005 Mariana founded the curatorial office Latitudes, based in Barcelona. As they write, their current research focuses on “material narratives, biographies of objects, and a world-ecological perspective on art histories”. An interview with two pioneers on their curatorial practice and writing about the urgency of a geological understanding of the world, how to “think with” and from a perspective of different objects and the challenges of curating…