Participate in the digital program of the Young Curators Academy! Starting on August 10th, a great variety of lectures, videos and discussions will find their way into your homes via the screen.

The digital Young Curators Academy is an artistic and activist platform to discover alliances, research affinities, and consolidate solidarities. Intersectional makers—artists, thinkers, writers, curators—take part in the Academy’s workshops and develop personal strategies to activate their communities. The focus will fall on care and repair, planetary consciousness, and the search for new forms of international cooperation and joint artistic practice. The program is aimed at those who enable new lines of flight across patriarchal and geopolitical boundaries. In 2021, the digital YCA will also respond to the world after the intervention by the pandemic. How does the absence of presence change resistance, activism, art, and communication? And how can we be together if we are not?

Read the full program here.

August 10 & 11, 7am EDT
The New (Old) World in 10 Acts
Arts and activism begin from gatherings of humans coming together to celebrate, to grieve, to discuss. These fundamental human acts communicate in different ways but most of all, they are small actions of personal agency contributing to a desired or needed transformation in the world of the living. Since we crashed into the iceberg of the pandemic, our worlds have been incessantly talking about the new normal. How will this new normal affect arts and activism in particular?  In the face of restrictions to physical international travel, how does this affect curation as well as activation of communities during gatherings in arts and activism? How can there be shifts to local curation, to open it up as a comparative study of other local contexts? Can digitalization and some of its processes enrich this interweaving discourse between the new international and the new local?

With Soukaina Aboulaoula, Mona Benyamin, Martha Luisa Hernández Cadenas, Helia Hamedani, Adela Jusic, Vinhay Keo, Rola Khayyat, Olivia Hyunsin Kim, Donna Miranda, Amila Puzić, Promona Sengupta, Aziz Sohail, Claudia Zini

August 12, 9am EDT
The Super Intense Marathon
In the tradition of the Young Curators Academy (YCA), we gather for the kickoff marathon presented by all the participants of the D-YCA 2021. Rigorously selected from an open call conducted in April–June, these participants will share their practices with translocal audiences around the world, on the new digital platform specially created this year. For the first time, the YCA marathon will be digitized, resulting in different publics in different time zones around the world accessing different knowledges, reflecting and deepening their own practices from parallel experiences. Without privileging a physical site in one city, the digital realm of D-YCA 2021 hopes to nurture translocal public debates, focus “situated” artistic conversations, and act as an amplifier for intensities of resistance.

With Anajara Amarante, Tara Al-Dughaither, Aouefa Amoussouvi, Kat Benedict, Karon Sabrina Corrales, Niyati Dave, Flupsi, Blerta Hocia, Giuliana Kiersz, Yu-Chin Ku, Sumac Space, Davood Madadpoor, Darya Aloufy, Shaunak Mahbubani, James Notin (Richard Kayode O), Ozhopé Collective, Pingkan Polla, Bea Rubio-Gabriel, Nirlyn Seijas, Kira Smyreva, June Yuen Ting, Andrei Zavalei

September 9, 10, 16, 17
The Digital Agora
If one understands the creation of commons as a social practice for the formulation of alternative forms of knowledge production and knowledge exchange, in order to challenge accessibility and ownership, we are inside the heart of The Digital Agora.

The Digital Agora is based on the ancient Greek Agora. It is a digital public space which is a gathering place for politics, open studios online and workshops, a market of competing ideas, a place of assembly to hear statements of scientists and artists, different perspectives of activists negotiating different publics, a recharge zone for the body and the spirit, essentially a digital site to hang out.

Directed by Ong Keng Sen
Hosted by Silke Bake, Erden Kosova and Ong Keng Sen
Digital production: Rabelle Ramez Erian
Curatorial support: Anne Diestelkamp
Production management: Lucia Leyser

As part of 5. Berliner Herbstsalon. Funded by the State of Berlin, Senate Department for Culture and Europe. In collaboration and with the support of T:>Works International Curators Academy.

youngcuratorsacademy.com