E-mail form Cracow 5/1/2010

Dear artists of the HISK

After the emails that we have been receiving from you we would like to explain the concept once more to make it clearer and we hope that it will solve most of the current concerns.

The idea is to make the show’s situation as open as possible. That is why we invited all of you and did not select any particular artists. It is you who make the decision whether you want to participate or not.

Another thing: the presentations that we asked of you. Perhaps we did not choose the right words, but we did not mean power point presentetions. You are open to present yourselves and the institution in any way you like. So you can really do whatever you feel like doing. It can be a presentation, but you can organize a demonstration against the project, show a video or sing a song or any other activity or action you like to undertake in a group or individually. Our sessions are divided into HISK presentations, curatorial course presentations and panel discussions which are aimed at gathering us together, lending the opportunity to talk about topics which we think can be of interest to all of us in context of the cooperation between our institutions and the different reallity that we have here in Cracow and that you have in Ghent.

We decide not to make a visual show for various reasons. First of all, it would be an artificial situation to chose only some of you and to put some topic to this kind of show somehow pretending that you represent one idea or you are interested in some specific issues, that in our opinion is not really true. All of you are very different and in the end we decided to show this diversity instead of creating some fake impression. The other thing is the bulding that really is not a place for contemporary art presentations (you can ask Joris if you have any doubts). Contrary it is more an information point with a nice conference room. So we decided rather to use the good sides of the building and opportunity that it gives instead of formating your projects to this difficult exhibition space. But most of all we would like to support you with as much public attention as possible and after a few projects that some of us did for example with Staedelschule from Frankfurt am Main or HGK from Zurich we know how Krakow‘s public is not willing to attend these kind of events if they do not undertake topics that address their local concerns. It is of course a pitty but it is the context that we all need to be concious of. What we want to say is that you will benefit from the project with much more attention than from the regular show.

The other issue concerns your question about the purpose of grouping you into three teams of four artists. This is something that came from the HISK side and is dependent upon the budget and logistic. But from our side we would also like to leave it as open as possible. So if you have any other suggestions let us know. The problem is only, that if you all come in one weekend you will not be able to present yourselves only in light of time.

We would like to ask you to rethink our proposal and to get your proposals concerning who will come, when and which topics of panel discussions are interesting for whom. We need to make some reservations for you and it is really important for us to know it as soon as possible.

All the best,
Cracow team