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TOK Hosts a Conversation on Russian-American Media and Ideology

Wednesday, December 9th
7-9 pm

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To commence a three month residency at Flux Factory, TOK curators Maria Veits and Anna Bitkina will host a roundtable discussion in Flux Factory’s kitchen.  All are invited to see presentations, and join in on an informal discussion.  This series of discussions will culminate in a February 2016 exhibition in Flux’s gallery.

The conversation will focus on the role of the media in forming and broadcasting ideologically charged discourses in the global political and informational context. During TOK’s research at Flux, they will take a close look at the strategies of constructing information that were designed in the era of mass television development and reflection of the Cold War in the media and will see whether some of them are still used today.

We’ll start the conversation with presentations from artist Emily Newman and Yengeniy Fiks, and will be joined by several who work on related subjects, including Eli Dvorkin and Meesha Chang.

U.S. artist Emily Newman recently lived in St. Petersburg to conduct several projects locally including the one about Soviet heroism and heroic events of Soviet history.  Emily’s show in connection to this project will open at Klaus gallery in NYC on Dec 11.

Yengeniy Fiks is a Russian artist currently based in NYC.  His work is inspired by the collapse of the Soviet bloc, which led him to the realization of the necessity to reexamine the Soviet experience in the context of the history of the Left, including that of the international Communist movement.  His work is a reaction to the collective amnesia within the post-Soviet space over the last decade, on the one hand, and the repression of the histories of the American Left in the US, on the other.

Eli Dvorkin is a staff editor for an international relations think tank and a co-director of the Silent Barn arts collective in Bushwick, Brooklyn. He worked as an editor at Kickstarter (NYC), Flavorpill (NYC), and the Hürriyet Daily News (Istanbul), cooked at Mile End (Brooklyn), and took the Sketchbook Project on two nationwide tours. He was born in Toronto and has lived in NYC since 2004.

Meesha Chang is finishing her role as the global galleries director managing the network of Erarta Global Galleries in New York, Zürich, Hong Kong and London from 2012-2015. Erarta is the largest project of its kind with museum headquarters in St Petersburg it also includes Design, a Fund and international art galleries showing only contemporary Russian artists. Meesha represented Erarta for Art Paris 2013 and also the Venice Biennale 2013.

Creative Association of Curators TOK is a curatorial duo founded by Anna Bitkina and Maria Veits in 2010 as a platform for conducting interdisciplinary projects in the fields of contemporary art and design and social sciences. Today TOK is an interactive intellectual platform for collaborations of curators, artists, researchers, designers, sociologists, anthropologists and other professionals in the sphere of art and culture from Russia and other countries. The main goal of TOK is to elaborate and realize projects that are based on the research of cultural processes in contemporary society. One of our main principles is the combination of theory and practice and a cross-disciplinary approach.

A special thank you to the Trust for Mutual Understanding for making these conversations, residencies and exhibitions possible!  Banner photograph taken from The Crocodile, a Soviet satirical publication.

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