Vienna Art Week: Mohammad Salemy - Global Art as a Cloud-based World System

In English
Talk starts at 8.00pm / Gespräch um 20.00Uhr
Im Rahmen der / In the frame of Vienna Art Week

In 1994, Mladen Stilinovi?, the late Croatian artist proposed that, ?An artist who cannot speak english is no artist.? Two decades later we can update this proposition and confidently claim that an artist who doesn?t constantly travel the world is no artist. While artists have always traveled distances to spread images and infest minds with new ideas, in no period in history have they spent so much time in corridors of international travel to make a living and build their careers. The precarious easyJet setters of today?s art world unpack what they carry for a few days, then pack again and leave for the next destination. The traveling global art world is very much akin to the political economy of free ports, where masses of art is kept safe these days as long-term investment. Global art functions today like bitcoin, a self-aggregating system which, by taking a clear account of its own activity, generates new and non-existing value and then re-injects this new wealth into general economy.

Mohammad Salemy is a Canadian artist, critic, and curator who holds an MA in critical curatorial studies from the University of British Columbia. He has shown his works in Ashkal Alwan?s Home Works 7 (Beirut) and Witte de With (Rotterdam). His writings have been published in e-flux, Flash Art, Third Rail, and Brooklyn Rail, and he has curated exhibitions at the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, Access Gallery, and Satellite Gallery in Vancouver as well as Transit Display in Prague. In 2014, he organized the Incredible Machines conference. Salemy?s curatorial experiment ?For Machine Use Only? was included in the 11th edition of Gwangju Biennale (2016). He currently co-organizes the education programs of The New Centre for Research & Practice.