With Jelena Vesić and Vladimir Jerić Vlidi, at Florida, Lothringer13 space, Munich on December 3, 2016.
Introduction
‘We are small and we have politics’
Re-claiming neutrality as a politics of de-colonisation, independence, peace and non-alignment with the powerful world empires, the lecture performance On Neutrality draws upon the active positioning of non-aligned and ‚third world countries‘ gaining independence during the Cold War era. In contrast to the moral minimalist concept of neutrality as it is mobilized in liberal governmentalities, across art and politics, the project considers the rich variegated recent history of situated, politicised forms of neutrality concepts. This politicised history of neutrality concepts will be juxtaposed with the waves of depoliticising neutrality, including curatorial neutralisations of politics, which, aided and abetted by the humanitarian rhetorics of contemporary art, persist in attenuating institutional anxiety and agonistic possibilities of production in contexts of re-colonisation by multinational corporations.
On Neutrality was initially a part of Travelling Communiqué research and exhibition project (Museum of History of Yugoslavia, Belgrade, 2014) and became a Non Aligned Modernity book edition (Museum of Contemporary Art Belgrade, Serbian/English). The lecture performance was presented at Savvy Contemporary Berlin as part of the exhibition From Bandung to Berlin: If all of the moons aligned.
Rachel O'Reilly 