Drawing inspiration from The Role of a Lifetime (2003), a work by artist and filmmaker Deimantas Narkevičius WE ARE THE TIME will explore the role of lifetime and life experience as a crucial source of ideas and inspirations, as a force that shapes ones’ art practice. Life experience is always generated as the intersection between the personal rhythm of one’s life and the larger societal perspective. How do we position ourselves in time?  What are the decisive moments in our personal lives? What is our relation to the historical moment or context? How do we weave them into our life-narratives? The reflection on historical moments and situations together with one’s personal experience converge into a generative force that searches form in a work of art, an image, a gesture or informs one’s entire practice. The work of art becomes thinking history out loud.

From Tahrir Square to Occupy Wall Street – we are witnessing a desire for transition, but its direction is still open. This momentum belongs to the youngest generation of artists who will contribute to it with their work and shape it with the way they form fleeting communities. Can we imagine our lives and our work after twenty years?

With the advent of digital technologies and new regimes of representation, the rapid changes in our media-environment suggest very different ways of relating to the materiality of images and to their veracity. The network condition we live in, offers unprecedented possibilities to have simultaneous and multiple perspectives on events with social and historical significance. This implies a very different mode of historicizing, of writing down our memories. It is in this vortex of eventfulness we have to find ourselves again.

Lectures on Wednesdays
with Deimantas Narkevičius – Alena Alexandrova – Foundland (Lauren Alexander & Ghalia Elsrakbi) – Stefan Majakowski – Ruth Noack – Sylvia Mieszkowski – IRWIN (Borut Vogelnik) – Bojan Fajfrić – Ernst van den Hemel – Libia Castro & Ólafur Ólafsson – Rosa Barba – Rana Hamadeh – Tony Chakar – Martha Colburn – James Beckett – Brandon Labelle – Derek Jarman – Tao G. Vrhovec Sambolec – Artists in Occupy Amsterdam – Wendelien van Oldenborgh – Rossella Biscotti – Kathrin Rhomberg – Jeffrey Babcock – Christoph Schlingensief – Flora Lysen – Jonathan Lahey Dronsfield – Francis Alÿs – Charles Esche – Gabriëlle Schleijpen – on