Island Tides Initiative
Interdisciplinary Philippine Research Program
at the Department of Artistic Strategies
Department of Artistic Strategies
We are excited to announce the inaugural event of the Island Tides Initiative on Thursday, March 14th 2024, 6-8pm, at FLUX
2 (1st Floor) on Vordere Zollamstrasse 7, 1030 Vienna (VZA7 Angewandte).
The Island Tides Initiative
is an interdisciplinary research program launched by the Department of Artistic Strategies at the University of Applied Arts
Vienna and supported by the Embassy of the Philippines in Austria. The program’s aim is to survey artistic strategies from
South East Asia and the Pacific, with an emphasis on the Philippines. Exploring variations of possible futures, the research
program will investigate how artistic strategies informed by archipelagic imaginaries can evoke and construct subjectivities
and identities, positionalities and knowledge producing methodologies that reflect a potential ‘All-World’. Inspired by French-Caribbean
poet and philosopher Édouard Glissant, this poetics of relation is also at stake in the contemporary artistic production of
the region and use the term ‘imaginary’ here in the sense of ‘the collective unconscious, the way we see and feel the world’[1].
For our inaugural panel our invited guests are Renan Laru-an, the Artistic Director of Savvy Contemporary
in Berlin, Annie Jael Kwan, who leads Asia-Art-Activism (AAA) an interdisciplinary and intergenerational network of artists,
curators and academics investigating ‘Asia’, and Mai Ling, a Vienna-based artist collective and platform dedicated to furthering
dialogues on the Asian diasporic experience in German-speaking countries. Our panelists will discuss artistic and curatorial
practices in the context of Asia and the Asian diaspora.
Welcome remarks will be given by the Rector of the University
of Applied Arts Dr. Petra Schaper Rinkel, H.E. Ambassador Evangeline Lourdes A. Bernas of the Embassy of the Philippines in
Austria, and Univ-Prof. Bouchra Khalili, Head of the Department of Artistic Strategies.
Follow the Island Tides
Initiative on Instagram @islandtides.initiative to stay up-to-date on events.
[1] Glissant,
Édouard (2010). One World in Relation. Directed by Manthia Diawara. K'a Yéléma Productions. [DVD]. New York: Third World Newsreel.
