01 Apr 2013

vessel announces 2013 curatorial program - call for applications

vessel launches two curatorial opportunities for a series of Curatorial Residencies and vessel's International Curatorial Workshop.

The three-week Residency Program for curators will provide the opportunity to investigate social practices. Specifically, curators will interact with artists, curators and cultural operators based in the Apulia Region and explore process-driven, multidisciplinary-focused methodology. The curators selected for the Residency Program will be directly involved in some of the regional projects that vessel already regularly contributes to. Contribution to these projects will be a central part of the residency in order to experience methods of cultural operation in the territory, but also to inspire a fruitful exchange of methods and strategies.

The International Curatorial Workshop, this year in its 3rd edition, will offer fifteen young curators the opportunity to work for three days (3rd - 5th, June 2013) with curators and art practitioners of international reputation who have participated in projects focusing on the various forms, analysis and creation of socially engaged art practices. vessel's International Curatorial Workshop has always been strongly practice-oriented; it was conceived as an organic structure aiming to articulate a consistent collective reflection on the contemporary role of the socially engaged art practices in the current economic, cultural and political climate. Additional goals of ICW are to set up working platforms to enable participants to develop further curatorial projects and to encourage networking in order to promote international circulation of cultural projects.
ICW 2013 will be tutored by Consonni, Leone Contini, Curandi Katz, Marco Degaetano - XScape, Fernando Garcia Dory (TBC), Carolina Rito, Wochen Klausur, Viviana Checchia, Anna Santomauro, Francesco Scasciamacchia, Charles Esche, Ilaria Gianni and Marco Petroni together with other members of vessel's committee.

This year, both programs will focus on vessel's 2013 agenda, which consists of participating in the two-year Materiality project through the creation of a web-based radio relating to interdisciplinary cultural practitioners coming from the Apulia and the surrounding Mediterranean area. The two programs will allow international curators to explore their practice through the lens of the local territory. Specifically, the Residency Program will allow curators to convene in Bari and use the territory as a frame for curatorial issues, innovations and discussions. The goal of this program is to utilize a participative approach in order to create connections that inform context-specific social practice.

The call for applications for both vessel's Residency Program and vessel's International Curatorial Workshop will remain open until 21 April, 2013, with confirmations given before the end of April 2013.

For more information on the application guidelines please visit www.vesselartproject.org


About vessel
vessel is a non-profit platform for the development of a critical discourse related to the current cultural, social, economic and political issues through the lens of contemporary art. We are interested in exploring socially engaged practices in relation to their context of emergence, to their geographies and psychogeographies and to their imbrication into fixed political ideologies, specifically in relation to Apulia and its surrounding areas such as the Mediterranean, Central Europe and Eastern Europe. Additionally, we are eager to investigate the social imagination: how its concrete products can articulate strategies of critical resistance against the current dominant neo-liberal order. Our methodology strives to incorporate a broad range of disciplines, such as geography, political science, anthropology and sociology. Through this strategy, we aim to facilitate interaction and exchange between different subjects and create a multi-centered body of knowledge that can emphasize the limits and criticality of working unilaterally.