Sweet Sixties
Specters and Spirits of a Parallel Avant-Garde
Vienna book launch
Georg Schöllhammer will give an introduction to the book and the Sweet Sixties project
Wednesday, February 26, 2014, 7pm
Secession
Friedrichstraße 12
A-1010 Vienna
www.sweetsixties.org
www.sternberg-press.com
With texts by Nancy Adajania, Ali Akay, Emin Alper, Ruben Arevshatyan, Vardan Azatyan, Hrach Bayadyan, Derya Bengi, Boris Chukhovich, Keti Chukhrov, Yasmina Dekkar, Daho Djerbal, Catherine Dossin, Bassam El Baroni, Tarek Elhaik, Mohamed Elshahed, Ali Essafi, Vigen Galstyan, Ahmet Gürata, Vardan Jaloyan, Ana Longoni, Sohrab Mahdavi, Toni Maraini, Matko Meštrović, Viktor Misiano, Iva Nenić, Fatih Özgüven, Lívia Páldi, Ozren Pupovac, Speranţa Rădulescu, Oleksiy Radynski, Yehuda E. Safran, Rasha Salti, Georg Schöllhammer, Catrin Seefranz, Dubravka Sekulić, Jaime Vindel, Mohanad Yaqubi, Ala Younis, and artists’ inserts by Graciela Carnevale, Andreas Fogarasi, Porter McCray, and Rayyane Tabet.
Sweet Sixties is a long-term trans-regional research initiative working between art, research, media, and educational contexts in Europe, the Middle East, western and central Asia, Latin America, and northern Africa. Involving a particular group of experimentally oriented arts and research groups as well as individual artists, researchers, and media, Sweet Sixties investigates hidden histories or underexposed cultural junctions and exchange channels in the revolutionary period of the 1960s.
In the 1960s, the landscapes and cities of protectorates and former colonies from India to the Maghreb, from the Soviet Republics to the new states in the southern hemisphere were replete with the spirit and forms of modernity, forms that transmogrify and then dissolve into the thin air of the vernacular. The star maps that are used to survey these artificial worlds often serve to navigate the boundaries between private and public domains. The world full of eerie displacements, gestures of the uncanny, and the constellation of the real exists in a plethora of doubled forms. Question marks and meanderings are all part of this picture. Instruments of communication emerge and are locked away before they have a chance to become immaterial, disappear, and corrode in postmodernity.
The air of the 1960s echoes a spirit of emancipation. And the newly arising art-scapes are interspersed with double agents: diasporas bring their academies; the streams between Soviet, North and South American, Western European, Non-Aligned, etc., are full of interlocutions, hidden pathways, and narratives of trade routes beyond the seemingly stable hegemonies of the blocs.
The stories and spirits of a parallel avant-garde whose silhouettes have yet to be found on the walls of the Western canon are the theme of this publication.
Sweet Sixties
Specters and Spirits of a Parallel Avant-Garde
Edited by Georg Schöllhammer and Ruben Arevshatyan
Executive editor: Melanie Ohnemus
Published by Sternberg Press and tranzit, 2014
English, 17 x 24.5 cm, 528 pages, 350 b/w ills., artists’ inserts in color, hardcover
ISBN 978-3-95679-039-3
For orders, please contact order [at] sternberg-press.com.
Sweet Sixties was initiated by tranzit.at
Sweet Sixties curators: Ruben Arevshatyan, Georg Schöllhammer
Project partners: What, How and for Whom / WHW, Zagreb, Croatia, www.whw.hr
Anadolu Kültür, Istanbul, Turkey, www.anadolukultur.org
DEPO, Istanbul, Turkey, depoistanbul.net
Architekturzentrum Wien (AZW), Vienna, Austria, www.azw.at
Graphic design: Atelier Liska Wesle, Vienna/Berlin, www.atelierliskawesle.com
