HEKLER ASSEMBLY: Infrastructures of Care
See full program here.

Session #6: Hosting Conflict, Building Solidarity

When: Sat. November 6, 2021 12-3pm ET
Where: Zoom

In this workshop we will intersect our experiences of conflict born out of fear and confrontation with the various internal and external forces that shape our social sphere and capacity to collectivize. Tensions between capitalism’s emphasis on individuality and atomization of interpersonal and social relationships can only be countered by creation of productive collective bonds towards strengthening friendships and solidarity on the bases of our differences. Using critical and poetic devices we will discuss and activate transformative, mobilizing power of art with fear and conflict as its mediums. 

Hosts: Bojana Videkanić, Jelena Prljević, Nataša Prljević

SESSION MATERIALS

- Each person will bring with them an object, image, text or any other material that they have at home which for them embodies the meaning of conflict and holds tension that they are comfortable sharing in a group setting. The significance of the material does not have to be apparent to others. 

- We will reference the following texts in the workshop. Please familiarize yourself with them if your time allows.

1. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, Donna Haraway (Introduction), 2016. Publisher: Duke University Press 

2. Joyful Militancy, Building Thriving Resistance in Toxic Times, Nick Montgomery and carla bergman, 2017. Publisher: AK Press / Institute for Anarchist Studies 

HOSTS

Jelena Prljević is an artist from Serbia whose practice explores the field of drawing, animation and installation. Her work suggests an understanding of fear and the healing process necessary to overcome both internal and external unrest. She is a co-founder of the HEKLER platform and collective. She lives in her village Ljubanje, Serbia.

Nataša Prljević is an artist and cultural worker whose collaborative and collective practice focus on displacement, conflict, and transnational feminist ecologies. Starting from collages and assemblages as conceptual frameworks, Prljević focuses on the healing potential of polyvocality and diasporic intimacy that arise in the collision of media, dialogue and community. Initiator of the HEKLER platform and collective.

Bojana Videkanic is an artist and an art historian. She is an Associate Professor of contemporary art and visual culture in the Department of Fine Arts at the University of Waterloo. Her research focuses on the 20th-century socialist art in Yugoslavia and its contributions to the rise of global modernisms, socialist art, and anti-imperialist cultural work in the 20th century. Her book Nonaligned Modernism: Socialist Postcolonial Aesthetics in Yugoslavia, 1945-1985 was published in 2020 by McGill-Queens University Press. Bojana is also a practicing multidisciplinary artist.