Art and Common Space - Lecture. Cristina Ricupero

Social and participatory art practices in contemporary art.

Cristina Ricupero will give an introduction to social and participatory art practices in contemporary art, focusing on the 90s. Nicolas Bourriaud’s term and book ‘Relational Aesthetics’ as well as Claire Bishop’s publication ‘Artificial Hells’ will be discussed. Timely exhibitions such as ‘Traffic’ and ‘Utopia Station’ as well as many artistic projects together with visual material will be presented. These include, Adrian Piper, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Jeremy Deller, Superflex, Thomas Hirschhorn amongst others. These presentations will be followed by discussions on the main topics raised during the session.

Cristina Ricupero is an independent curator based in Paris. Many of her exhibition projects have dealt with social-political topics, some of them taking up timely controversial themes such as “Fundamentalisms of the New Order” or “Populism”. These projects aimed at establishing unexpected links between contemporary art and the ‘humanities’ or ‘social sciences’. In 2011-12 she curated “Secret Societies”, which was presented at the Schirn Kunsthalle and then at CAPC de Bordeaux. More recently, in 2014, she curated “The Crime Was Almost Perfect” at Witte de With in Rotterdam and PAC-Milan as well as “New Ways of Doing Nothing” at Kunsthalle Vienna.