WRO Art Center Fungible Contents

26. Videomedeja

Saturday, Oct 08th 2022, Svilara, Novi Sad

18:45 – 19:45

Piotr Krajewski – the chief curator of WRO Art Center and the artistic director of WRO Media Art Biennale, is going to introduce the concept behind the Biennale and its upcoming, 20th edition – Fungible Contents.

The WRO Media Art Biennale is the major forum for new media art in Poland, and one of the leading international art events in Central Europe. Since its inception in 1989, WRO has been presenting art forms created using new media for artistic expression and communication, exploring current creative territories, and building a critical perspective toward emerging issues in art, technology, and society.

In art expressed using communication technology, derived from the mediatization of tools, does there occur a qualitative moment that stabilizes communicable but damaged, movable (politically too mobile) meanings, freely used, transformed into a propaganda slogan words, and signs, that seem universal?

If we manage to look at the transformation of meanings in the creative process directed at another person, at other people, which is not about subordination, but about co-creation, we’ll maybe discover the mechanism of the violent impulse resulting from the interchangeability of content.

The mechanism of communication and negotiation of contents and their fungibility, seemingly safe in art, as its security created only a non-exchangeable token for the artifact and the appearance of its value. By wandering around the periphery of the economy, highlighting the attractiveness of the exclusive, it is unable, however, to grasp the value of sharing and negotiating content – so meaningful in media art and proper to it.

The Biennale, in its 20th edition, will act as a mediator, presenting works selected in the process of WRO’s curatorial cooperation with many partners, including those created during artistic residencies, where the starting point for a creative act is always to establish grammar and lexis in a new situation.

picture credit:
Persijn Broersen and Margit Lukács ALL OR NOTHING AT ALL,
exhibition view Biennale WRO 2021: REVERSO
photo by Jerzy Wypych