During the round table discussion with artists Cornelia Herfurtner, Olia Sosnovskaya, and curators Joanna Warsza and Aleksei Borisionok we will look closely at ways of coming together using strange tools of art, queer geographies and unstable points of reference in order to stay in conversation despite differences.
Joanna Warsza’s latest project ‘Radical Playgrounds: From Competition to Collaboration’ at the Martin Gropius Bau in Berlin, uses play as a method of distancing oneself from one’s own ego and resentments, and finding ways of coming together again. Cornelia Herfurtner draws on her experience of participating in demonstrations and public gatherings to explore how, in Germany, everyday objects used to care for each other can be legally defined as weapons. She also explores the strategies people in social movements develop to protect themselves. Olia Sosnovskaya will present her artistic research on protest choreographies during the 2020 uprising in Belarus and try to define what makes protest feminist. Aleksei Borisionok, on the other hand, will present the curatorial methodology of grafting as a curatorial practice, which he recently used while co-curating the Biennale Matter of Art in Prague with Katalin Erdődi.
The talk is part of the two-month residency project Geographies of Collectivity. Artistic Infrastructures in Times of Crisis: Berlin-Vienna-Graz-Minsk-Kharkiv-Pristina, providing a platform for exchange between art collectives and individuals working within post-socialist and/or queer-feminist framework.
Aleksei Borisionok is a curator, writer, and organizer who currently lives and works in Vienna. He is a member of the artistic-research group Problem Collective and the Work Hard! Play Hard! working group. He writes about art and politics for various magazines, catalogs, and online platforms such as e-flux Journal, L’Internationale Online, Partisan, Springerin, and Paletten, among many others. Together with Katalin Erdödi, he is co-curating the Matter of Art Biennale 2024 in Prague. He is a fellow at the Vera List Center in New York (2022-2024).
Cornelia Herfurtner is a visual artist living in Berlin. From 2020 to 2024, she has been working on the subject of “passive Bewaffnung” [passive armament]. This is a valid legal construct in the Federal Republic of Germany that allows the wearing or carrying everyday and other protective objects at demonstrations to be criminalized. Recent exhibitions include „Forms of disobedience“ (Kunstpavillon, Innsbruck, 2024), „Turn illness into a weapon“ (Kunstraum Kreuzberg / Bethanien, Berlin, 2024) and „All in“ (Bundeskunsthalle, Bonn, 2024). Politically, the artist is organized in the alliance Rheinmetall Entwaffnen, which campaigns to stop arms production and export from the Federal Republic of Germany.
Zofia nierodzińska, PhD: curator, visual artist, lecturer; deputy director of the Arsenal Municipal Gallery in Poznań between the years: 2017-22. She researches the art of post-socialist countries, with a particular focus on migration. Zofia nierodzińska studied at the University of Arts in Poznan (PhD) and at the Universität der Künste in Berlin (MA). She is co-editor of the platform on art and activism RTV Magazine. She lives and works in Berlin.
Olia Sosnovskaya is an artist, writer and cultural organiser (born 1988 in Minsk) based in Vienna (Austria). Her artistic and research practice intertwines performance, text-based and visual arts, addressing forms of political organizing, protest choreographies, movement scores and intersections of festivity and the political within the post-socialist contexts and beyond. She is a member of Work Hard! Play Hard!, a self-organized platform and working group which interweaves work and leisure, as well as of the artistic-research group Problem Collective, focused on strikes, archives, reading practices and tools for engagement with overseen histories and social struggles. Currently a Phd-in-Practice candidate at the Academy of Fine arts Vienna.
