Sunday 31 July 2016


Ariana Pradal invited for Experimenter Curator's Hub
After Giovanni Carmine, Adam Szymczyk, Oliver Kielmayer, Patrick Gosatti and Nadia Schneider Willen, it's Swiss curator Ariana Pradal next at the 6th edition of the Experimenter Curators' Hub 2016 in Kolkata. More

Pro Helvetia New Delhi is pleased to partner with Experimenter to present the 6th edition of the Experimenter Curators’ Hub 2016, on Thursday, 28th, Friday, 29th & Saturday, 30th July 2016 which will take place at Experimenter, 2/1 Hindustan Road, Kolkata 700029, India.

Swiss design curator Ariana Pradal will be representing Switzerland.

About Ariana Pradal
Ariana Pradal Ariana Pradal, trained as an industrial designer, works as a journalist and curator. She writes and works regularly for various magazines and museums in the field of design and architecture. Her articles, books and exhibitions have been printed and presented in Switzerland and abroad. 

The Experimenter Curators’ Hub is a crucial platform in developing and sustaining discourse on curatorial practice and exhibition making. Each year the hub invites curators to present and discuss their practice in depth with reference to recent exhibitions curated by them. The 6th edition of the Experimenter Curators’ Hub will bring together some of the foremost minds in curatorship from all over the world. 

The participating curators at ECH 2016 are: Ariana Pradal, Cosmin Costinas, Dayanita Singh, Giorgio Galleani, Marta Smolinska, Maud Page, Naman Ahuja, Natasha Ginwala, Rahaab Allana Susie Lingham and Hans-Ulrich Obrist (via video conference)

The 3-day event will see a coming together of Indian and international curators and the visual arts community, critics, writers, thinkers, artists, collectors, theorists and people interested in contemporary visual art practice. This year the curators’ hub broadens its scope by including curators of architecture and design as well as curators of visual art. The Experimenter Curators’ Hub, like every year attempts to further the discussion on curatorial practices and discourse.

Experimenter Curators’ Hub 2016 is presented in association with Pro Helvetia - The Swiss Arts Council and is supported by the Australia Council for the Arts, Italian Cultural Embassy, Polish Institute & The Park Hotels. Take on Art Magazine is a media partner for the Hub.

Sunday 24 July 2016

DRAFT | The Zurich Conference
An initiative by Khanabadosh (Mumbai) and Institute for Contemporary Art Research (IFCAR), Zurich University of the Arts

The Zurich Conference
July 28-30, 2016
Limmat Hall, Hardturmstr. 122a8005 Zurich West, Switzerland

Draft explores contemporary art that produces, contributes to or provokes public debate. It involves nine interdisciplinary collaboratives from nine cities: Beijing, Cairo, Cape Town, Hamburg, Hong Kong, Mexico City, Mumbai, St. Petersburg and Zurich. The conference is focused on the projects developed and carried out by the collaboratives over the past 12 months in their local contexts. The projects intervene in contexts of action, production and discourse, by exploring the imaginary, rendering the latent visible or critiquing concrete circumstances. 

Media censorship, state authoritarianism, social injustice, xenophobia, nationalism, various forms of violence, migration, the effects of frantic urbanisation, real estate speculation, commodities trading and repatriation are some of the pressing issues highlighted by these year-long investigations. Artists respond to these circumstances through critique and fiction, by establishing infrastructures, educational programmes and counter publics, and by employing re-enactments and mnemonic techniques. They reveal the consequences of such phenomena and processes on our affective and intellectual life-in short, they draft a different history and a different present. The conference will address the notion of debate: debate as a device for managing conflicts, negotiating standpoints, making things public and defining the space we live in. It will be focused in particular on the debate around the crises of belonging-i.e. who can belong, to what and how much-a subterranean reverb that runs through each of the projects. 

Draft was launched in June 2015 with a conference in Mumbai where the positions and working methodologies of the collaboratives and their members were presented. The 2016 conference in Zürich will provide insights into art activities undertaken as part of Draft, and discuss them in terms of their sources and research materials, approaches adopted and their consequences for life-worlds. How do these projects change their context, our worldview or concrete action? How do they maintain dissent and promote complexity? What do they appeal for?

The upcoming conference is also imagined as a research and pedagogical environment; it will be attended by approximately 40 students visiting from universities across Alexandria, Hangzhou, Hong Kong, Johannesburg, Mexico City, New Delhi, Palermo, St. Petersburg, and Zurich. The students will be in town forNegotiating Space: Art and Dissent, the International ZHdK Summer School 2016, convened in cooperation with Manifesta 11.

Contributors: Giorgio Biancorosso, CAMP (Shaina Anand, Ashok Sukumaran, Simpreet Singh), Helena Chávez Mac Gregor, Chto Delat (Tsaplya Olga Egorova, Nikolay Oleynikov, Dmitry Vilensky), Cosmin Costinas (Para Site), CTC. Curating the City (Sophie Goltz, Alice Peragine), Gitanjali Dang, Anila Daulatzai, Gareth Evans, Gabrielle Goliath, Rupali Gupte and Prasad Shetty, Rohit Jain, Ju Anqi, knowbotiq (Christian Hübler, Yvonne Wilhelm with Nina Bandi), Qinyi Lim, Jens Maier-Rothe, Cuauhtémoc Medina, Jasmina Metwaly and Philip Rizk, Alia Mossallam, Riason Naidoo, Ambimbola Odubegsan, Richard Pithouse, Sarah Rifky, Uzma Rizvi, Nils Röller, Christoph Schenker, Teatro Ojo (Héctor Bourges Valles, Laura Furlan Magaril, Karla Rodríguez Lira, Patricio Villarreal Ávila), Xu Peili (Mianbu), Samson Young and Zheng Bo

The conference is open to the public. Admission is free.
For more information and details of the programme please visit our website.

Artistic directors: Gitanjali Dang/Khanabadosh and Christoph Schenker/IFCAR

Partners: Pro Helvetia - Swiss Arts Council, and Connecting Spaces Hong Kong - Zurich
Supported by: artEDU Foundation, Stanley Thomas Johnson Foundation

Saturday 23 July 2016

Meet Swiss curator Ariana Pradal
Ariana Pradal, industrial designer, journalist and curator will be in India for the Experimenter Curator's Hub in Kolkata and will also deliver a talk in Delhi.

Meet Swiss curator Ariana Pradal
at

KOLKATA
at the 6th edition of the Experimenter Curator's Hub in Kolkata
on 28, 29 & 30 July 2016
Entry by registration
Partner: Experimenter Kolkata

and 

DELHI
on Tuesday 2 August 2016 
Venue: 125 MCM, Meher Chand Market, New Delhi at 7:00 pm
Gujral Foundation's new venue at Meherchand Market  
Topic: Functional Beauty - Design from Switzerland
Entry open to all.
Partner: Gujral Foundation

About Ariana Pradal
Ariana Pradal, trained as an industrial designer, works as a journalist and curator. She writes and works regularly for various magazines and museums in the field of design and architecture. Her articles, books and exhibitions have been printed and presented in Switzerland and abroad. www.pradal.ch

Ariana Pradal studied industrial design at the Zurich School of Art and Design, (now the Zurich University of the Arts, Zhdk). Having gained experience by working in various design offices she decided to switch to a new role within the creative sector: instead of designing objects herself, she started to write about them. She completed a two-year traineeship with Hochparterre, a Swiss journal of design and architecture, while at the same time taking courses at the Swiss School of Journalism in Lucerne. During her time at Hochparterre she wrote articles, designed exhibitions, worked on books and gave lectures - setting the course for her future career. The time was then ripe for a change of direction, working in another country and in another field: Ariana Pradal spent six months in New York with Location.Switzerland, the Swiss economic promotion body, gathering experience and awareness of the worlds of business and diplomacy.

After returning to Switzerland she spent three years working part time for the architectural journal Werk, Bauen und Wohnen, (wbw.ch). At the same time she wrote for other journals, and was commissioned by the Industrial Design section of the Zhdk to work on a project with the Pro Pueblo foundation in Ecuador. She also taught at various universities of applied sciences and sat on juries awarding diplomas. After her engagement at the architectural journal Werk, Bauen und Wohnen she worked two years as architecture critic for the newspaper Sonntag. Today she works as an independent journalist and curator in the areas of design, architecture and related disciplines. Her articles, books and exhibitions have been printed and presented in Switzerland and abroad. In addition she acts as a technical expert advising various cultural and political institutions.In 2010 she was appointed by the Swiss Federal Office of Culture for the "Mediation in Art and Architecture award 2010
"www.pradal.ch

Friday 22 July 2016

Reportagen
Swiss author David Collin collaborates with Indian writer Samrat Choudhury and illustrator Anindya Roy

Reportagen - Swiss author David Collin collaborates with Indian writer Samrat Choudhury and illustrator Anindya Roy 
Literature /  collaborative project 2016

Reportagen has carried an essay by Swiss writer David Collin and Indian writer Samrat Choudhury. 

As part of Phase I, David Collin was in India to carry out a combined research with Samrat Choudhury and Anindya Roy. The trio travelled to Shillong in Meghalaya, a state in East India to explore and research.

In the second phase of the project, Samrat and Anindya will travel to Geneva to work on a story to be published in a future issue of Reportagen.

Reportagen, is an independent magazine which commissions writers to report on social issues which are researched on site and in person by the protagonists, often off the beaten track. 

Hello Switzerland / Reportagen 32
By Samrat Choudhury

reportagen.com/magazin

Friday 15 July 2016

The DRAFT Project
DRAFT, anchored in nine cross-disciplinary collaboratives across nine countries is jointly presented by Khanabadosh (Mumbai) and Institute for Contemporary Art Research (IFCAR), Zurich University of the Arts.

Draft June 2015-July 2016 
Beijing, Cairo, Cape Town, Hamburg, Hong Kong, Mexico City, Mumbai, St. Petersburg and Zurich

Initiated by Khanabadosh (Mumbai) and Institute for Contemporary Art Research (IFCAR), Zurich University of the Arts, Draft considers contemporary art that produces, provokes and contributes to public debates. The undertaking is anchored in nine cross-disciplinary collaboratives in Beijing, Cairo, Cape Town, Hamburg, Hong Kong, Mumbai, Mexico City, St. Petersburg and Zurich.

Draft started in June 2015 with a three-day conference in Mumbai. The Zurich conference will take place in July 2016. In the critical year-long interim, a range of engagements, including research and workshops, have been realised in each city. These convergences have set the pace for site-sensitive artworks that are currently taking shape.

Zurich: IFCAR (Christoph Schenker), Rohit Jain and knowbotiq (Christian Huebler and Yvonne Wilhelm) Rohstoffwechsel-Postcolonial Swiss Metabolism, May-July 2016 Switzerland's commodity business is caught up in colonial and neoliberal economies, but public debate on such involvement is absent. With knowbotiq's performative intervention, the project seeks to understand and reveal aesthetic and affective processes bound up with commodity trade and the public culture accompanying those processes.

Draft Zurich conference / July 28-30, 2016
ZHdK, Zurich University of the Arts Pfingstweidstrasse 96, 8005 Zurich, Switzerland