Art Leaks

I  co-organized a public talk and workshop by the group Art Leaks. It will take place on Monday, October 28, at 19:00, in Aarhus at rum46. It is a part of year-long series of lectures and workshops called Making Social Realities With Books.

Making Social Realities With Books is a series, of lectures and workshops, that explores the idea of how books—libraries, archives, publishing, and distribution—are used to create distinct social realities, whether it is in small communities, or entire movements within art practices and related activities.

About Art Leaks:

ArtLeaking is an international collective platform that exposes common-currency practices of slander, intimidation and blackmail, instances of mistreatment related to cultural labor, repression channeled through dishonest management or blatant censorship. ArtLeaks aims to create a strong network of art system whistleblowers—through which we support and protect each other in critical moments as much as possible.

 In this workshop, we will look at selected case studies that cultural producers have organized in order to improve not only their living conditions, but the conditions of the community around them, and society as a whole. Moreover, we will problematize the classification of cultural activity as labor, test the viability of “cultural producer” or “cultural worker” as a collective marker of subjectivity, and look at culture as a field of, but not limited to, labor practices that effect the public sphere.

Focusing on the historical relationship between art, organized labor and social movements in the age of capitalist globalization, we will decipher these structures and the connections between them from the point of view of culture, politics, economics, and history, while examining concrete examples of local struggles, alternative models and international networks.

Moreover, participants will be encouraged throughout the workshops to imagine their own alternative models, list of demands, manifestos, ways of collectivizing artistic labor, new institutional and educational models.

More about Art Leaks

Corina L Apostol is Ph.D candidate in the Department of Art History at Rutgers University – New Brunswick. She is also a curatorial research fellow of the Norton and Nancy Dodge Collection of Nonconformist Art from the Soviet Union at the Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum. She is the co-founder of Art Leaks, an organization that fights for artists’ rights in the workforce, and co-editor of the ArtLeaks Gazette.

This series was co-organized with Det Jyske Kunstakademi/The Jutland Art Academy and rum46. Together we have helped organize a loose network of artist book publishers and supporters in Aarhus called RoPoPu (Room for Potential Publishing) that can be found here: www.ropopu.dk.