BELL invites: Global Performance

On the occasion of the exhibition BELL Invites (Jan. 29 – Mar. 19, 2016) at the Stedelijk Museum Bureau Amsterdam and the Stedelijk Museum, together with guest curator Vivian Ziherl and co-curator Aruna Vermeulen (HipHopHuis) organizes the one-day symposium Global Performance. The program will feature lectures, performance and debate held as a Socratic dialogue within a specially designed forum architecture by Julie Peeters.

Ziherl will co-host the event with Richard Bell, one of Australia’s most accomplished artists—renowned for his challenging, provocative and humorous public persona. Bell’s Aboriginal Tent Embassy was featured in Performa 15, the 2015 Jakarta Biennale and the 8^th Asia Pacific Triennale. It will be at the SMBA before continuing to the 2016 Biennale of Sydney and the Jerusalem Show 2016.

With a dynamic dialogue, ‘Global Performance’ will investigate what is meant by the notion of the ‘global museum’ or the ‘global art institution’. While the discussion of global art has been spurred by the emergence of new art markets in regions such as the Middle East, East Asia and South Asia—what if this is just one example of the global in art?

GLOBAL ART: THE ARTISTS AND THE DIRECTORS

The symposium will be held in two sessions: ‘The Directors’ and ‘The Artists’. It will draw from real experiences of what ‘the global’ can mean for art practice and for cultural agendas, what it can mean to the economies of art, and what role audiences and communities have in relation to these questions.

The Artists:

• Akwasi
• Emory Douglas (former Minister of Culture of the Black Panther Party) 
• Hosselaer (Farida Sedoc)
• Rana Hamadeh
• Patricia Kaersenhout & Mercedes Zandwijken

The Directors:

• Charles Esche (Van Abbemuseum)
• Ernestine Comvalius (Bijlmer Parktheater)
• Aruna Vermeulen (HipHopHuis)
• Jack Persekian (Al Ma’mal Foundation)
• Catherine de Zegher (Museum of Fine Arts Ghent)

Performance:

• Alida Dors (Backbone)
• Quinsy Gario

Moderators:

• Richard Bell 
• Vivian Ziherl

Translation:

• Imara Limon

Multiple histories will be considered; for example the 1920s wave of trans-national black cultural politics led by Marcus Garvey and its legacy in 1970s Black Power movements, or the histories behind the diasporic communities that make a city such as Amsterdam already a ‘global’ location.

Organised with the support of the Australia Council for the Arts, the Amsterdams Fonds voor de Kunst and Milani Gallery, and in collaboration with the Hip Hop Huis Rotterdam and the University of Colour Amsterdam.