Aleppo

The black market is not the illegal; it is simply that which did not enter the label of the official. Black Market appears during ArtBrussels as a space to display the use of black market strategies in artistic creation and to investigate the topic of circulation beneath the realm of the visible.

By emerging in the specific context of an art market, Black Market raises a question on the blurred limit between black and white, and it echoes around in the nuances of gray.

More than displaying traces of a research – through four artists project involved in the booth –, Black Market performs a research during five days, through the appearance of announced and spontaneous lectures and workshops, moments of discussion and performances.

Through its changing space and living activities Black Market is first and foremost a space for bargaining knowledge and living desires; that is why if it would have a secret word to access, it would probably steal the opening sentence of a play of Bernard–Marie Koltès: "If you walk at this hour, in this place, it's because you desire something you do not have, and this thing, me, I can provide it for you".

With Maurizio Lazzarato, Dora García, Charles Filch and Jessica, Stephen Wright, Natasha Ginwala, Sam Hardy, Andrew Norman Wilson, Marisa Morán Jahn and Paul Falzone, Sarah Vanagt, The Presidential Candidacy . In collaboration with The Public School for Architecture Brussels and Argos.

A project by Daniel Blanga Gubbay, Simon Asencio and Teresa Gentile.

april 21st-24th

andrew norman wilson,

~~Black Market~~

The Black Market presents for the four days SONE of Andrew Norman Wilson, the project Video Slink Uganda, the video Money Exchange by Sarah Vanagt and a residency of Romanian collective The Presidential Candidacy .

SONE is a content producer that helps businesses, producers, and consumers reimagine our current economic situation. SONE is directed by Andrew Norman Wilson and operates on a contract-to-contract basis with a team of freelance artists and thinkers. His core function is to serve global markets of communicators in advertising, business, art, and journalism with high quality, pre-trend stock video clips - about economic uncertainty and discontent - that circulate on both the art/film market and the stock media market through sites like Getty Images.

The Presidential Candidacy presents a workshop on the 22nd; Marisa Morán Jahn and Paul Falzone presents Video Slink Uganda on the 23rd; Sarah Vanagt presents Money Exchange on the 24th: scroll down for more information on the projects.

For the Black Market the public school for architecture brussels is organising a series of classes taking place during the assembly of Art Brussels at Tour&Taxis. What does it mean for Architecture if formal protocols are transgressed and space is produced under the conditions of an informal economy? This series of classes will ask how architecture can operate within an alternative economy and what that implies for its users. Made possible in part with kind support from KU Leuven Faculty of Architecture Campus Sint-Lucas.

The public school for architecture brussels is an alternative educational platform and a framework that supports autodidactic activity.

A furniture system for the booth is developed by common room. Adapting to the improvised nature of an alternative economy, the system can be quickly assembled (and disassembled) to accommodate the various needs of the informal market place: a table, a platform, seating, storage, display.

Common room is an architectural practice with a publishing imprint, an exhibition space and a collaborative platform based in New York City and Brussels.

In the frame of the Black Market Maurizio Lazzarato shares a reflection on the spaces for the unofficial and the risk of defining them. "In the street, I withdraw money from a cash machine where an electric, computational, telematic device, emitting only point-signs without signification, satisfies my request by giving me access to monetary signs which I then put in my pocket. These signs represent a flow of purchasing power that, as we know, has no power in reality other than that of being exchanged for other goods-signs, which are openly displayed in the passage in the subway that I have to take".

Maurizio Lazzarato is a freelance Italian sociologist and philosopher based in Paris. His research interests include immaterial labour, the collapse of the salaried class, the ontology of labour and cognitive capitalism. He is a member of the International College of Philosophy in Paris and was among the founding members of Multitudes.

Postspectacle (represented by Florin Flueras and Ion Dumitrescu) proposes for the Black Market a workshop on esthetic entities and Postspectacle operations, and an auction of selling itself and other esthetic entities. In the last 10 years entities with a complex esthetic operativity emerged in the zones of dance and visual arts of Bucharest. The names of the entities are often the symptom of a problem or a question: they may function as a reaction, as almost empty concepts in the beginning, triggering practices afterwards. They are esthetic compositions of people, processes, capacities, frames, concepts, behaviours, attitudes, affects. They are conceptual operations that function as platforms, as ecosystems, as wholes, that precede the details, as esthetic artificial organisms. They are art worlds. Aesthetic Entities as Presidential Candidate, Unsorcery, The Bureau of Melodramatic Research, Black Hyperbox, Romanian Dance History, Postspectacle, are for sale in an auction at Art Brussels and through other sell strategies that will happen unscheduled.

In Postspectacle, a constant practice is to introduce strange feedback loops, altering, expanding or breaking some of the implicit conditions at work in the respective situations. Postspectacle strategies and an overview on operations of other esthetic entities will be approached during the workshop

sat, april 23rd

12pm

sam hardy

black market

in illegal

antiquities

Sam Hardy gives a lecture tracing the route of the ISIS-destruction and the illegal trading of Syrian and Iraqi antiquities in Palmyra and Mossoul. The white market is at least a light grey. As a dealer in London confessed to criminologists Simon Mackenzie and Penny Green, "stolen goods, yes, they must be here. Possibly over the course of time 10% of my stock has probably been stolen at one time or another… I don’t know." And, since they don’t know, it may be much more than ten per cent.

Sam Hardy is an archaeologist and cultural heritage worker, specialising in the illicit trade in antiquities, the destruction of cultural heritage, and the politics and ethics of archaeological work in conflict zones and divided societies. He is experienced in archaeological, ethnographic and historical research in challenging environments; lives in London and teaches at the American University of Rome.

Starting from his Lexicon of Usership, Stephen Wright discloses a reflection on hacking, hijacking and slinking. The lecture is followed by a conversation with artist Marisa Morán Jahn and media ethnographer Paul Falzone on the strategies used in their project Video Slink Uganda. Initiated in 2013, the project involves translating, pirating and burning — "slinking"— seven experimental videos by contemporary African diasporan artists onto bootleg DVDs and circulated to millions of viewers via Kampala's black market cinema.

Born in Vancuver, Stephen Wright is a Paris-based art writer and teaches the practice of theory at the European School of Visual Arts. His writing has focused primarily on the politics of usership, particularly in contexts of collaborative, extradisciplinary practices with variable coefficients of art. He curated the project Withdrawal: The Performative Document (New York) as part of a series of exhibitions examining art practices with low coefficients of artistic visibility, which raise the prospect of art without artworks, authorship or spectatorship.

Marisa Morán Jahn is a New York-based artist and the founder of the public art non-profit organization,Studio REV-. A graduate of MIT and Creative Capital grantee, her work has been seen in public spaces, museums (The New Museum, Walker Art Center, Museum of Modern Art), and media (The New York Times, BBC, ArtForum).

Paul Falzone is a scholar and award-winning media producer whose short and feature length documentaries, television programming, viral videos, and films have been featured in festivals, galleries and other venues. After receiving his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania, he founded Peripheral Vision International, a human rights and advocacy media nonprofit organization in East Africa.

A late matinée of videos disclosing different reflections on the notion of black market. A selection of short videos made by Andrea Cinel and in collaboration with Argos: with Claudio Pazienza's L'argent raconté aux enfants et à leurs parents, Roy Villevoye's Voice-Over and Sarah Vanagt's Money Exchange, in which children are playing, performing a money transaction which stays at the edge of white and black, showing their contiguity. Followed by a conversation with Sarah Vanagt.

Sarah Vanagt makes documentaries, video installations and photos, in which she combines her interest for history with her interest for (the origins of) cinema. Her work is shown at film festivals (FidMarseille, Viennale, Doclisboa, Idfa, Rencontres Internationales Paris/Madrid/Berlin, EMAF Osnabruck), museums (Frankfurter Kunstverein, Fact Liverpool, NGBK Berlin, Shedhalle Zürich).

sun, april 24th

3pm

Where do characters go when the story

is over?

a performance

by Dora Garcia.

Where Do Characters Go When the Story Is Over : Charles Filch meets Jessica

Charles Filch is a secondary character in the world-famous Brecht-Weil "The Threepenny Opera", a veteran of war who loses all grips on life and needs to resort to beggary, only to discover that Capitalism is credo as well among the dispossessed. Charles Filch appeared as social sculpture in Munster Sculpture Projects 2007 as a project by Dora García. Since then he has made some guests appearances, always unpredictable.

As an extra in real life Jessica is literally a body of works and its very existence is brought about by participating in works and contexts created by others. Since 2014 Jessica has appeared as a theatre technician with chest tattoos, the guest list manager at a nightclub, the assistant of a curator, a voice mail, a passer-by, the lady in the toilets, a spectator, a guest at a dinner a.o. Jessica is a project by Simon Asencio.

Where do characters go when the story is over? is a series of performances by Dora García since 2009

Image: Charles Filch in Münster Sculpture Projects 2007

photograph: Charles Filch

Corruption accesses the State body as both a natural and mystical corpus, eventually producing a third phantom body—corrosive and self-extending—emitting from an inside as techniques of social performance, bureaucratic desire and conversion in the very terms of ethical life. A glistening mirror of false potential in a climate of communal ventriloquism. We are strategically held by this spirit without an image, which thrives in parasitic acts of emergence via disappearance.

Natasha Ginwala is a curator, researcher, and writer. She is curatorial advisor for documenta 14 as well as curator of Contour Biennale 8 (2017). Her recent curatorial projects include My East is Your West featuring Shilpa Gupta and Rashid Rana at the 56th Venice Biennale; Mind Moves Matter at L' appartement 22, Rabat; Still Against the Sky at KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin, and Corruption...Everybody Knows at e-flux, New York.

Black Market appears in the middle of ArtBrussels 2016, taking place this year in Tour&Taxi, Avenue du Port 86C, 1000 Brussels.

All encounters, workshops, screenings and conversations of Black Market are free and open. Text the number 0466237205 or write an email to hello@aleppo.eu to get access, join the program and slink into the rest of the fair.

and The Presidential Candidacy

video slink uganda, sarah vanagt