Art criticism meetings in Vilnius: Chenoa Baker and Katarzyna Cytlak – MadeinVilnius.lt

Saturday, May 4, 5 p.m. Meetings with 2023 will be held in the auditorium of the LNDM National Art Gallery (Konstitucijos pr. 22, Vilnius). Chenoa Baker and Katarzyna Cytlak are the two first place winners of the Young Art Critic Competition of the International Association of Art Critics (AICA). These meetings are part of the program accompanying the Art Criticism Awards held for the second time. The main awards event is coming soon – on June 1.

This year, the series of events organized in the context of the Art Criticism Awards begins with a meeting with two art critics – Chenoa Baker (Boston, USA) and Katarzyna Cytlak (Poznan, Poland), who write in very different styles, for different audiences, conduct research in very different ways and pose different questions to themselves. , both in terms of works of art. However, it is precisely the differences that call attention to the diversity of the tasks of criticism in today’s context. Art criticism is a mediator of content and context, among other things, it also responds to tensions within the field of art. And this one deals with issues of history, politics, and the perception of art.

Curator, writer and cultural strategist Chenoa Baker In the AICA competition, he won first prize for the text “Travelling in the Mind to Where It’s Warm: A Review of the Exhibition Being on Pause: Insideness and Its Radical Immanence.” Her presentation “Relational aesthetics in criticism” will invite you to get acquainted with the background behind the writing of this text. Despite the author’s skepticism towards exhibitions of figurative painting, the text reviews exactly such an exhibition. Baker will also review his other writing projects, the psychological concepts behind persuasive words, and some examples of how personal encounter with a work is an important, if often overlooked, factor in writing criticism. The speaker hopes that her presentation will provoke new thoughts, questions, laughter and inspire other writers.

Baker teaches at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design and is a co-editor of the Sixty Inches From Center platform, and was most recently the curator of the ShowUp art space in Boston. As a consultant, she contributed to the exhibitions Gio Swaby: Fresh Up at the Peabody Essex Museum and Touching Roots: Black Ancestral Legacies in the Americas at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Baker has published articles in Hyperallergic, Public Parking, Material Intelligence and Studio Potter.

Art historian Katarzyna Cytlak AICA won second place in the competition for the article “Condensing what remains of past futures in former peripheries. Art and Postcolonial and Postauthoritarian Contexts’. In the lecture of the same name, she will delve into the dynamics of the archival and historiographical turn in contemporary art. According to her, this turn was determined by the realities of the post-authoritarian, post-communist and post-crisis contexts. Cytlak talks about artists of Uruguayan, Polish, Hungarian, Angolan, Iraqi and American origin, whose works reflect the traumas, crises and ideological confusions experienced by the regions between the great centers of power. She is particularly interested in how these artists use images from popular culture to create historical metanarratives of power and resistance. In her research, she draws on the insights of German philosopher Reinhart Koselleck, Cameroonian philosopher Achille Mbembe, and Argentinian and Mexican sociologist Néstor García Canclini.

Cytlak mainly studies the art of Central and Latin America, often juxtaposing these regions with Eastern Europe. She teaches art criticism at the University of Toruń in Poland. She received her PhD from the Sorbonne, and interned at the Argentine National Council for Scientific and Technical Research (CONICET) and the University of San Martin. Her articles have appeared in Umění/Art, Eadem Utraque Europa, Telón de Fondo, Third Text, RIHA Journal and many other journals.