WORK LABOUR CREATIVITY

Seminarium i Uddevalla
Konsthallen–Bohusläns museum
Söndag 23 oktober kl 13–16.30

Welcome to an open seminar with the artists Asma Arshad Mahmood, Yvonne Singer, Liam Gillick and the sociologist Karl Palmås being held at Bohusläns Museum, Uddevalla on Sunday 23rd October.

Göteborg International Biennial for Contemporary Art, 2011, is titled Pandemonium – Art in a Time of Creativity Fever. It touches on issues such as creativity, fictions, utopias and the rapidly changing conditions of today’s politics and economy. The seminar aims at indepth discussion on today’s labour market and the wide use of the term ”creativity”.

For a brief spell, 1989–1994, at the Volvo Uddevalla plant, workers set about organizing factory work along radically different lines. It became a renowned attempt to find fresh, more fulfilling, ”humane” ways of working. The experiment was short lived. Why? What was it all about?
Why is it still referred to in discussions and debates on new approaches to how we relate work, time, leisure and free time to one another? Was the experiment as significant as it is sometimes cracked up to be? Today the aim is to explore positive elements of Uddevalla Volvo – especially in a time of economic turbulence, high unemployment, shut-down of industrial production, political upheaval and the like – in search for new ways of work, living and creative time. What does this ”critical somewhat independent” attempt at rethinking factory work routines and production suggest for wider areas – for forms of art, culture and knowledge production and creativity? What lessons can we draw from Uddevalla?
Sarat Maharaj
Curator of Göteborg International Biennial for Contemporary Art, 2011.

Liam Gillick, British artist based in New York, will perform a reading from his manuscript Construction of One. Included in the manuscript are reflections on the revised working practices deployed by Volvo in the early 1970′s. Liam Gillick has worked on the manuscript since 2005 and is participating in the biennial exhibition with a sound-piece inspired by the early factory radio programs. The reading will be followed by a discussion lead by Fredrik Svensk, Critic, Editor of Paletten Art Journal and Lecturer in Art & Culture Theory at Valand School of Fine Arts.

Karl Palmås, Sociologist at Chalmers Tekniska högskola, will talk about his research into the impact of Volvo-values of production and manufacture in Sweden as well as issues of the globalization of Swedish models of making such as Volvo, Saab, IKEA etc. He will also present some of the interviews he carried out with Volvo workers of the time – that he filmed earlier on this summer together with Dorothee Albrecht, co-curator of Göteborg International Biennial for Contemporary Art, 2011.

Linking Pandemonium: Remembering, Forgetting, Learning
Asma Arshad Mahmood, artist and curator from Toronto, Canada and Yvonne Singer, artist and Professor of Visual Art at York University, Canada, will present their works. Through her practice, Asma Arshad Mahmood has engaged as an activist in several areas of thought and action in Canada and in terms of immigrant and diaspora voices – especially in relation to the Indian subcontinent. Yvonne Singer is interested in the intersection of public and private histories, and her installation works employ multimedia techniques, often with cryptic texts to articulate cultural issues of disjuncture and perception. Their presentations are followed by a discussion with Professor Gertrud Sandqvist, co-curator of Göteborg International Biennial for Contemporary Art, 2011.

Moderator is Fredrik Svensk, Critic, Editor of Paletten Art Journal and Lecturer in Art & Culture Theory at Valand School of Fine Arts.

The seminar is supported by Uddevalla Municipality. We would also like to express thanks to the Faculty of Fine, Applied and Performing Arts at the University of Gothenburg;  Canada Council for the Arts;  the Faculty of Fine Arts, York University, Toronto; Ontario Arts Council and all those who have contributed to this seminar. Göteborg International Biennial for Contemporary Art is organised by Röda Sten Art Centre and financed mainly by the City of Göteborg’s Cultural Affairs committee, Region Västra Götaland and The Swedish Arts Council.