Basak Senova: CrossSections

CrossSections is designed as an interdisciplinary platform for explorations into artistic research, dialogue, and production. The project employs an open format to reflect upon “process” with the intent to articulate critical reactions to the political, economic, and social disturbances facing us today. Over the course of three years (2017–2019), with the participation of 19 artists, diverse scholars and cultural workers, various meetings, workshops, exhibitions, performances, talks and book launches are being held in three cities: Vienna, Helsinki, and Stockholm.

Developed and curated by Basak Senova, CrossSections aims at discussing and sharing diverse realities, conditions, and strategies in different geographies. By placing the artistic production at the center of its research and plot, it is being shaped by the cumulative interdisciplinary input and data through meetings, residencies, performative presentations, and publications in the course of three year. Its research process involves different focus groups, institutions and educational bodies engaging with re-positioning perspectives by giving priority to the production. CrossSections provides various types and lengths of research and production based residencies for project participants, which are affiliated with the partner institutions.

The partners of the project are Kunsthalle Exnergasse – WUK in Vienna; iaspis – the Swedish Arts Grants Committee’s International Programme for Visual and Applied Artists, Konstfack University College of Arts, Crafts and Design, and NFK – The Nordic Art Association in Stockholm; Nya Småland in different locations in Sweden; HIAP – Helsinki International Artist Programme and Academy of Fine Arts – University of the Arts Helsinki in Helsinki; Center for Contemporary Arts, Estonia in Tallinn; and Press to Exit Project Space in Skopje. CrossSections is primarily supported by its partners. The project and associated book are generously supported by the Saastamoinen Foundation.

Up to this point, the project has been a discursive act by accommodating the range of activities that support the on-going researches of artists with the aim to observe and record their methodologies. Furthermore, CrossSections goes one step further in to rendering these researches by discussing and exhibiting how these wide-range of methodologies are come to surface.

The project is not overarching any debates about the validity or reception of artistic research. By taking all possible approaches –with their similarities and divergences of the artists’ working processes, the artists of the CrossSections Project will talk about how the project communicated the potentials of the research along with the end product as the artwork. In this talk, the role of the audience in shaping the modes of presentations of the project will also be discussed.