Join us for our fifth event as part of Constellations ° Assemblies, a series of free online events curated and delivered by UP Projects in partnership with Flat Time House and Liverpool Biennial. The events are open to all artists, curators and practitioners active and/or interested in the expanded field of public art.
Memorials are intrinsically linked to a vision of the past and our relationship to the history of a particular territory. Can we find a more imaginative, nuanced way of making memorials? What if memorials were used as opportunities to speculate on future alternatives and scenarios rather than symbolising and reinforcing past memories? How can public art play a role in shifting people’s perspectives towards structural change and new configurations?
How can we rethink the memorial? is moderated by Neysa Page-Lieberman and Jane M. Saks, Co-Founders and Co-Artistic Directors of Monuments to Movements. Speakers include artist duo, Elmgreen & Dragset and artist group, Raqs Media Collective.
All Constellations ° Assemblies will take place in The Hall, UP Projects’ digital participation space.
The Constellations ° Assemblies series is one of two strands of activities as part of Constellations, a free learning and development programme for artists, curators, producers, and practitioners active and/or interested in the expanded field of public art. The other strand, the Constellations ° Cohort, supports a group of ten practitioners to develop their practice, collaborate with others, access new networks, and contribute to critical debate surrounding the future of public practice.
Constellations is generously supported by Art Fund, Arts Council England, The Barrington Hibbert Associates Access Fund, and the Constellations Patrons and UP Supporters. To find out more please visit our Support Us page. Constellations is curated and delivered by UP Projects, working in partnership with Flat Time House and Liverpool Biennial.
Accessibility
Live captioning and British Sign Language interpretation will be available at this event. Should you require access to British Sign Language interpretation, please email info@upprojects.com in advance of the event so we can provide you with dedicated access links to the event.
Donations
All donations raised through individual giving go directly towards our free nine-month learning and development programme, Constellations for artists, curators, producers, and practitioners active and/or interested in the expanded field of public art. You can donate via our support us page or directly via Eventbrite upon booking a ticket. UP Projects believes in keeping events accessible to everyone and commits to turning nobody away for lack of funds. If you are unable to donate please select a free ticket and join us on the day! We recognise how injustice and personal circumstances impact people’s income and their ability to donate. We believe that there is enough for everyone when it is shared and therefore ask our attendees to give when you can, if you can!
About Monuments to Movements
Monuments to Movements - In the House of Radical Feminist Practices (M2M) is an international organization that envisions, develops and commissions public art work that monumentalizes movement-making and collective action. We offer a new vision and an evolving process that is not just inclusive of the world’s diversity, but also paradigm-shifting, feminist and centered in restorative justice. We believe monuments should elevate collective action, not "hero worship” and we do this work through an intersectional feminist framework. To learn more visit monumentstomovements.org and attend a SpeakEasy, M2M’s monthly public conversation series where we discuss our current initiatives and ideas with extraordinary collaborators.
About Neysa Page-Lieberman
Neysa Page-Lieberman is a curator, lecturer, writer and educator with a focus on feminism, African diaspora, social practice and public art. Based in Kansas City since 2020, she curates, produces, consults and lectures on public art, street art and monuments at the intersection of social justice. Before co-founding M2M, she was executive director of Exhibitions and Performance Spaces at Columbia College Chicago and director & chief curator of the Wabash Arts Corridor. Neysa has produced over 300 exhibitions and public art projects nationally and internationally, including: Inequality in Bronze: Monumental Plantation Legacies, a monument to Dinah, a formerly enslaved woman in Philadelphia; international mural exchanges with Sister Cities International including Casablanca, Morocco link to Sam Street Level: Wabash Arts Corridor Public Arts Festival; Revolution at Point Zero: Feminist Social Practice; Vacancy: Urban Interruption and (Re)generation, with the Chicago Architecture Biennial; Not Ready to Make Nice: Guerrilla Girls in the Artworld and Beyond touring for 7 years to 9 museums; Vodou Riche: Contemporary Haitian Art and a recently launched mural and monument project to Illinois Womens Suffrage. Neysa has lectured, given interviews and written extensively on public art & monuments with recent features including: Women Artists Are Speaking in New City; Building Monuments to Resemble and Represent Us interview on Know, Be, Raise podcast; M2M presentation at Charlotte Street Foundation, Time for a Reckoning, New City, Feminist Social Practice Manifesto, co-authored with Melissa Potter (John Hopkins University Press) and Feminism in Your Face: Public Art Resistance in Where the Future Came From (Soberscove Press).
About Jane M. Saks
Jane M. Saks is a writer, curator, activist, artist, educator, arts advocate, creative collaborator and cultural producer. Her work challenges and champions issues of gender, sexuality, human rights, race and power within the worlds of arts and culture, politics and civil rights, academia, and philanthropy. She is Founding President and Artistic Director of Project&, and Founding Executive Director of Institute for the Study of Women and Gender in the Arts and Media. She has been a visiting critic, artist, professor and lecturer including at Yale University, MIT, Harvard University, Orleans Parish Prison, The United Nations, Holocaust Museum, Art Institute of Chicago, Field Museum, Aspen Institute, and Center on Race and Equity. She has received awards and honors including Leadership Greater Chicago Fellow; Business and Professionals in the Public Interest “40 Who Have Made a Difference;” Arts Leaders Who Work for Equity, Racial Justice and Human Rights (United Nations High Commissioner Award) Inductee, City of Chicago’s LGBT Hall of Fame; Leadership Award, About Face Theatre; Impact Award, Chicago Foundation for Women; Visionary Award: Rape Victim Advocates; BeyondMedia Justice Award; Pride Index Leadership Award; Fellow, International Leadership Program, National Arts Strategies; and the LGBT Human First Award, Center on Halsted. She is a published poet and writer, publishing with Phaidon Press, Northwestern Press and Haymarket Press; has collaborated with artists including Kerry James Marshall, Inigo Manglano-Ovalle, Eve L. Ewing, Jim Hodges, invincible, Cheryl Pope, and Hon. Albie Sachs, and has co-created with Claire Chase, E Patrick Johnson, Lynsey Addario, Jeanne Gang, Daniel Alexander Jones, Tony Gerber and Lynn Nottage.
Elmgreen & Dragset
Michael Elmgreen (born 1961 in Copenhagen, Denmark) and Ingar Dragset (born 1969 in Trondheim, Norway) are based in Berlin and have worked together as an artist duo since 1995. They have held numerous solo exhibitions at art institutions worldwide, including Fondazione Prada, Milan (2022); EMMA – Espoo Museum of Modern Art, Finland (2020); The Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas (2019-20); The Whitechapel Gallery, London (2018–19); Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Tel Aviv (2016); UCCA, Beijing (2016); PLATEAU, Samsung Museum of Art, Seoul (2015); Astrup Fearnley Museet, Oslo (2014); Victoria and Albert Museum, London (2013–14); Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam (2011); ZKM Museum of Modern Art, Karlsruhe (2010); Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León (2009); Serpentine Gallery, London (2006); Tate Modern, London (2004); and Kunsthalle Zürich (2001). In November 2022, they will present a solo exhibition at By Art Matters in Hangzhou, China.
Their work has been included in the Bangkok biennial (2018), Istanbul biennial (2013, 2011, 2001), Liverpool biennial (2012), Singapore biennial (2011), Moscow biennial (2011, 2007), Venice biennial (2009, 2003), Gwangju biennial (2006, 2002), São Paulo biennial (2002), and the Berlin biennial (1998). In 2009 they received a special mention for their exhibition “The Collectors” in the Nordic and Danish Pavilions at the 53rd Venice Biennale. Elmgreen & Dragset curated the 15th Istanbul Biennial in 2017.
Amongst their most well known works are “Prada Marfa” (2005)—a full scale replica of a Prada boutique in the middle of the Texan desert—and “Short Cut” (2003)—a car and a caravan breaking through the ground, first exhibited in the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele, Milan, and now in the collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. In 2012 Elmgreen & Dragset were selected for London’s Fourth Plinth Commission in Trafalgar Square and the duo have since realized numerous celebrated public sculptures. “Van Gogh’s Ear” was presented first by Public Art Fund at the Rockefeller Center in 2016 and has since exhibited with K11 Musea in Hong Kong and Wuhan. Their permanent public sculptures include: “Bent Pool” (2019), Pride Park, Miami Beach; “The Hive” (2020), welcoming visitors to Moynihan Train Hall in Penn Station, New York; and most recently, “Life Rings” at Royal Djurgården, Stockholm (2021). In Berlin, the artists won the German Government's competition for a “Memorial to the Homosexuals Persecuted under the National Socialist Regime”, which has been permanently installed in Tiergarten park since 2008 and their outdoor sculpture “Statue of Liberty” (2018) is permanently installed at the Hamburger Bahnhof - Museum für Gegenwart.
The artists were shortlisted for the Hugo Boss Prize, Guggenheim Museum, New York (2000) and won the Preis der Nationalgalerie, Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin (2002). In 2015 the artists received honorary doctorates at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology and in 2020 they were awarded the B.Z.-Kulturpreis in Berlin. In 2021 Elmgreen & Dragset were awarded the 14th Robert Jacobsen Prize of the Würth Foundation, Künzelsau, Germany. This Spring they received the Ny Carlsberg Fondet prize for 2022.
Raqs Media Collective
Raqs Media Collective (* 1992, by Monica Narula, Jeebesh Bagchi and Shuddhabrata Sengupta). The word “raqs” in several languages denotes an intensification of awareness and presence attained by whirling, turning, being in a state of revolution. Raqs take this sense to mean ‘kinetic contemplation’ and a restless and energetic entanglement with the world, and with time. Raqs practices across several media; making installation, sculpture, video, performance, text, lexica, and curation. Their work finds them at the intersection of contemporary art, philosophical speculation and historical enquiry. Most recently, they were the artistic directors of the Yokohama Triennale 2020, “Afterglow” and invited the public to participate in epistemic disobedience with them at "Hungry for Time" at the Academy of Art, Vienna (2021). Their most recent solo exhibition was “The Laughter of Tears” at the Kunstverein Braunschweig (2021).
Raqs has exhibited widely, including at Documenta, the Venice, Istanbul, Taipei, Liverpool, Shanghai, Sydney and Sao Paulo Biennales. Recent solo exhibitions include “Pamphilos”, Fast Forward Festival 6, Athens (2019); “Still More World”, Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha (2019); “Twilight Language”, Manchester Art Gallery (2017-2018); “Everything Else is Ordinary”, K21 Museum for 21st Century Art, Dusseldorf (2018); “If It’s Possible, It’s Possible”, MUAC, Mexico City (2015) and “Untimely Calendar”, the National Gallery of Modern Art, Delhi (2014-2015). Recent exhibitions curated by Raqs include “In The Open or in Stealth” (MACBA, Barcelona 2018 – 2019); “Why Not Ask Again” (Shanghai Biennale 2016-2017); “INSERT2014” (New Delhi, 2014) and “The Rest of Now” & “Scenarios” (Manifesta 7, Bolzano, 2008). Raqs continue to be anchored in Delhi, persistently welding a sharp, edgily contemporary sense of what it means to lay claim to the world from the streets of that city. At the same time, Raqs articulates an intimately lived relationship with myths and histories of diverse provenances. Raqs sees its work as opening out the possibility of a conversation that embodies a deep ambivalence towards modernity and a quiet but consistent critique of the operations of power and property.
