Lectures

Andrew Blauvelt
The Museum as a Design Platform
Andrew Blauvelt will discuss the various design practices with which the Walker's design department is engaged, from urban design initiatives and external projects and commissions to new experiments in online publishing and the organization of exhibitions and public programmes in addition to the design of all of the museum's publications, promotions, and communications. These diverse projects represent a multitude of practices, including the roles of curating, editing, designing, and publishing.


Karel Haloun
GIFT (Husák Didn´t Smoke Dope)
The Czech music poster, from the 1970's to the present, or, normalization, McDonaldization and attempts at normality. The project explores all that defies fossilised social systems, past and present, and that upsets the establishment.


Experimental Jetset
Two or Three Things I Know about Provo (The Brno Edition)
Two or Three Things I Know about Provo (The Brno Edition) is a reworked version of an exhibition that originally took place in Amsterdam during the first months of 2011. Curated by Experimental Jetset, the exhibition consisted mainly of documentary material related to Provo, an Amsterdam anarchist movement that existed between 1965 and 1967. This material was collected, archived, categorized, and photographed by Experimental Jetset, and then transformed into a collage-like installation. This installation should be seen as a very personal and subjective perspective on Provo - after all, Marieke Stolk (one-third of Experimental Jetset) happens to be the oldest daughter of Rob Stolk, who was one of the main founders of Provo. After the liquidation of Provo, Rob Stolk remained an important figure in various post-Provo groups, and later became one of the most prolific cultural printers in Amsterdam, until his untimely passing in 2001.
For the Brno edition of this exhibition, the installation will be extended with extra texts, new translations and original material. In addition to this, freelance curator Femke Dekker undertook a brief research project exploring possible links between Provo and similar Czechoslovakian groups in the '60s.

Christoph Keller
Modes of Multiplication: Climax and Crisis
Before becoming a distiller of finest fruit brandies (palinka) and gin, I have worked in the field of art publishing for many years - as a publisher, designer, editor and curator. When I started out the publishing house "Revolver" in the end of the 90s, art publishing was - after the very strict years of institutional critique and contextual art - down to a few traditional art publishers with quite conventional profiles and, at the same time, the world wide web was taking off in a big way. While you could assume that - considering this digital competition - it wasn't the best time to start a publishing project, especially when targeting young, contemporary art, the first decade of the 21st century has proven to be the "golden years" for printed matters within the art world. We have witnessed a literal "inflation" of art publications and have reached the very climax of art publishing - in quantity! - in the last years. Never before, so many books, catalogues, magazines etc. have been produced as within the last years, despite (or exactly because of) those enormous, almost endless, cheap, and universal possibilities of the web. Never before has printed paper been so important and valuable within the international art scene as it is today.
But this means measuring in numbers, in quantity only - not in quality. While the meaning of exhibited art is actually decreasing and the amount and importance of art fairs increasing, the production of intellectual and theoretical content, the production of ideas and discourse is losing weight dramatically - just see how miserably writers, thinkers and academics are paid within the global art world. Those who think and talk are ranked on the lowest end of the art industry's ladder of income, while those who sell and promote are ranked on the top end. Following this logic, all those inflationary art publications do actually serve those who pay for them. They serve as advertising, annual reports and business papers, while we, who produce, edit and design them, act as the junior art directors for a global art market, which thankfully accepts our poor positions within the realm of an "economy of projects". That's how they keep us away from the streets, from business and politics, where we eventually could do some harm. And that's how - instead of becoming an editing publisher - I became the advertising guy, which I never wanted to be. So, I chose to step out and started to make alcohol…

Na Kim
International Competition of the 25th Brno Biennial 2012
Na Kim will speak about her experience as a member of the Board of the International Competition. She will reflect on the selection process, introduce the concept of the resulting exhibition and describe the current position of the International Competition within the larger context of the Brno Biennial and its history.

Milan Knížák
Aktual
The origin of Aktual and its reasons, the role of  Jindřich Chalupecký, international contacts (Fluxus, Provo, etc.), stay in the USA, Aktual music band.

(Fluxus, Provo, etc.), stay in the USA, Aktual music band  Kasia Korczak
Khhhhhhh - Slavs and Tatars
For the Moravian Gallery and the Brno Biennial 2012, Slavs and Tatars is proud to present, Khhhhhhh, a reconsideration of pedagogy, progress, and modernity via the perspective of a single phoneme. Difficult, if not impossible, to pronounce for most of the Western hemisphere, the phoneme kh offers a particularly rich insight into language not only as an evolutionary threshold but also as a metaphysical one.  Through this particularly pesky guttural sound, Slavs and Tatars attempts to resuscitate the sacred character of language, from the devotional act of reading to the ritual of the printed word. Equal parts affective and analytical, research and original work, Khhhhhhh explores the thorny issues of knowledge versus wisdom, the immediacy of the oral versus the remoteness of the written word, and doctrine versus pedagogy at the heart of the collective's practice and research. A multi-platform exhibition, Khhhhhhh balances the needs of the legs, that is the body, as well as the mind, consisting of a publication The Fallen K, a lecture, and PrayWay, an installation halfway between the rahlé, a traditional stand for holy books, and the takht, a seating platform found in tea-houses across Central Asia.

Zak Kyes
Working With
"Working With" will take the current exhibition "Zak Kyes Working With…" (Graham Foundation, 2012) as a point of departure to address the conceptual, visual, and economic intersections that link Kyes with his collaborators, revealing and further unfolding the designer's multivalent practice.

James Langdon
Eastside Projects: An Accumulating Identity
Eastside Projects is an exhibition space in Birmingham, UK, organized by a founding collective comprising a curator, three artists, an architect and a graphic designer. Eastside Projects' programme is built around an idea of accumulation, in which elements of each exhibition in the space are preserved and layered over time. This talk will present the approaches to visual identity that have been used to reflect this particular curatorial strategy.

Linked by Air
"ONLY": Making open spaces and things that change
Probably the essential thesis of our practice is that things evolve over time. There is the process of developing a design, but also the life of a design after the project "launches". When we design a website or an exhibition, we want it to go places we didn't imagine after we "release" it, and this, more than the supposed wisdom of crowds, is the reason for our interest in distributed authorship. Even though change is the most natural and ubiquitous condition in the universe, we're fascinated by it, and we try to embed an acknowledgement of this condition into our working process, and into the software and designs we develop.

Karl Nawrot
Record
Karl Nawrot will speak about his work using the term 'record' and its multiple definitions. In his work 'record' provides a link between different projects from the past two years covering diverse media; from drawings and illustrations to type design, tools and model making.

Jon Sueda
Wide Open Spaces: Graphic Design and Exhibition Making
Jon Sueda's presentation will explore his evolving relationship with the exhibition making as it intersects with the work of artists, graphic designers and curators. Historically, galleries and museums have been fertile arenas for graphic designers to practice, whether via exhibition catalogues, exhibition design and signage, promotional materials, or interactive media. Wide Open Spaces will look at how graphic designers are expanding the boundaries of traditional practice by actively participating within the broader context of the art world, by taking a trans-disciplinary approach, and by investigating curatorial practice as another critical mode of graphic design.

Sulki & Min
We May Not Be Making Sense
In Brno, we think we're going to talk about our fascination with the accidental, the uncertain, the absurd, the questionable, and the uncanny, and show some examples of our commissioned graphic design work, autonomous work, and publications we made as Specter Press. In doing so, we will probably mention such ideas as cryptographic imagination, duplication, and mistaken hauntology. We will certainly be jet-lagged, nervous, and confused. We may be speaking a broken English if not in tongues.


Adéla Svobodová, Tereza Hejmová a Pauline Kerleroux
Visual identity for 25th Brno Biennial 2012
An introduction the inception of the graphic identity of the 25h biennial of graphic design Brno. How did the design evolve from first sketches to the final form? Timeline and key moments. Does the story work? And what will be next?


Kateřina Šedá
Your name is Josef Šedý
Kateřina Šedá will introduce one of her latest projects called 'Lisen Profile' that takes a place in Lisen, one of the suburbs of Brno. "I can not understand she does not find this embarrassing ... Pepek, aren't you ashamed? Perhaps you took too many, right? Why don't they build new containers in Líše instead? I would be quite curious, who gives money to this."


Jan van Toorn
Strategies, Methods and Means of Critical Practice
Communication design is related to modes of production, gives shape to forms of sociality. In spite of the forces that determine the world the given conventional order should be worked through, should be related to reality, to everyday life. Which is a question of method, that is to say political.