Preparatory Workshop SWEET 60s

26 – 29 June 2009

A preparatory workshop with curators and academics from various disciplines, coming from the Southern Caucasus, Turkey, the Middle East as well as from other countries is organized at DEPO. The participants of this workshop (15 people) are the co-curators, key mentors and leaders of the upcoming workshops and projects that will be organized in different countries with different groups of students and artists. The main goal of the workshop is to define the principal directions, subjects as well as the methods of investigations; to develop the methodological platform, program of future activities, establish the working connections between different participants and institutions and, define the working groups on specific parts of the project.

Participants of the preparatory workshop:
Ali Akay (curator, sociologist, Mimar Sinan University, Istanbul), Emin Alper (historian, Ataturk Institute for Modern Turkish History, Boğaziçi University, Istanbul), Keti Choukhrov (philosopher, Lomonosov University, Moscow), Daho Djerbal (professor of history, University of Algiers, director of NAQD magazine), Charles Esche (curator, writer, director of the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven), Beral Madra (art critic, curator, director of BM SUMA contemporary art center, Istanbul), Sohrab Mahdavi (cofounder and English editor of Tehran Avenue magazine, Tehran), Erden Kosova (art critic, editor of RED THREAD e-journal, Istanbul), Osman Kavala (Chair of the Board of Anadolu Kultur, Istanbul), Christine Tohme (curator, founder and director of Ashkal Alwan, the Lebanese Association for the Plastic Arts).

Sweet 60s – Project Objectives:
The experimental educational project SWEET 60s is a long term research project that explores the revolutionary period of 1960s and the development of parallel modernities in the countries of Middle East and Southern Caucasus and subsequent effects of that period on the contemporary socio-political and cultural situations. It will include universities and institutions in different countries of aforementioned regions, in order to discuss the knowledge production about the important period of history that till today is being generally associated with the “Western world” despite its direct effects on global social, political and cultural developments.
The project will explore the differences and similarities of that turbulent period in the comparative analysis of the important (from the contemporary artistic or critical points of view) symbols, expressions, developments in the social, cultural, political and economical fields (like social/political movements, contraposition of political developments, main works and trends in architecture, literature, visual arts, cinema, pop culture, mass culture, subcultures, etc…) in the aforementioned countries. The creation of long-term international cooperations and networking beyond the scope of the project itself should provide inspiration and ideas. This is of high relevance for especially the Caucasus and Middle East where there is still a lack of institutionalized structures that provide opportunities for an open and experimental discourse.

Sweet 60s – Project Phases:
The project will start with a preparatory workshop in Istanbul. After that, a series of workshops, symposiums and lectures will be organized in different countries of both regions on various subjects developed by the curatorial team of the project. The materials collected or produced during these workshops will be presented in small scale presentations, exhibitions etc. The final product of the project will be a publication that will present the researches realized by participants of the workshops, the students and their professors. The publication could be divided according to certain sub-subjects in a form of separate books or catalogs. The publication will include an on print exhibition which then will be developed in a real exhibition and presented in the aforementioned countries (including the presentation of the publication and the materials of conferences).

Organized by: Ruben Arevshatyan/Armenia and Georg Schöllhammer/Austria