TOK’s Residency Circle at Kai: Building Curatorial Kinship in The Time of New Expectations and Intensifying Reality
Kai Residency invites you to the residency circle of The Creative Association of Curators TOK, taking place on Wednesday, June 9th between 6pm and 7.30pm at Kai Art Center. In their conversation at Kai, curators of TOK (Anna Bitkina and Maria Veits) will focus on their recent projects that they have been shaping up and conducting during the COVID 19 pandemic. They will share how the changing reality has affected their curatorial vision, interpersonal relations and methods of production. In their presentation curators will build continuity between current projects which are based on TOK’s previous research and practice. The curators will focus on two current projects that respectively address the themes of housing in global megacities and changing women’s rights in historical perspectives and contemporary context. They will first speak about the 5th season of TOK’s ongoing project “Critical Mass” entitled “Get Real!” which studies and tests strategies of collective rethinking of architectural typologies, living spaces and new practices of coexisting using the optics of gender studies, racial and ethnic justice and social inclusion. Another upcoming project of TOK is the exhibition “Voicing the Silence” that concentrates on transformation and development of female legislative rights with a specific interest on legacy and representation of women in the arts. During the talk curators will also dive deeper into the conversation about the concept they have developed for the 6th Tallinn Photomonth’s exhibition, which is based on the notion of “intensive places”.
TOK is a female curatorial collective co-founded in 2010 by Anna Bitkina and Maria Veits in St. Petersburg as a platform for challenging the borders of the territory of art. TOK’s multilayered, durational and cross-disciplinary projects generate new knowledge about the causes and consequences of changing political realities. Often working outside of usual art spaces, TOK infiltrates into social structures, bringing their strains and corrupt functions into the public discourse in order to revisit the roles and powers of social institutions and redraft their potential future. Existing at the intersection of historical analysis and the political imaginary, TOK investigates mechanisms of local governance, public space, educational systems and others. TOK is the winner of the apexart international open call 2020-2021 (the exhibition “Voicing the Silence” will be presented in Moscow in the summer of 2021) and the winner of Russian Innovation Art Prize – 2020 for the project 1 Curatorial Forum (together with the team of the NCCA St. Petersburg). In September 2021 TOK will curate the main exhibition at the 6th edition of the Photomonth Biennale in Tallinn
The event is held at Kai Art Center’s auditorium. It is in English and the entrance is free of charge.