Art Today Association
Center for Contemporary Art - Plovdiv
The Ancient Bath


FLUID GROUND
A symposium on board of a cargo ship across the Black Sea

July 21 - 23, 2011
Public presentation: Wednesday, July 20 - 6 PM, Graffit Gallery, Blvd. Knyaz Boris 65, Varna

On Thursday, July 21, a group of 16 artists, curators, theoreticians and cultural activists from 8 different countries will go on board of a ship, connecting the two Black Sea ports of Varna (Bulgaria) and Batumi (Georgia). The program includes lectures, presentations and discussions, real-time interventions and documentation.
FLUID GROUND is part of the ATLANTIS network. This initiative fosters crossborder cultural exchange between art professionals through collaborative exhibition projects, residencies for artists and curators, panel discussions, workshops and conferences.
The symposium across the Black Sea is based on the idea of inter-disciplinary collaboration, cross-linking artistic practice, knowledge production, research and reflection in this remote and mobile location. The freighter will temporarily be transformed into a thinktank, confronting relevant cultural, artistic, economical, social and political discourses and practices, and blending them together. Thus a journey across the Black Sea will offer an adequate platform to examine questions pertaining to Europe’s identity and integrity.

Participants: Inka Thunecke / director Heinrich-B?ll-Foundation (Berlin), Karoline Weber / media philosopher (Stuttgart), Ulrike Grelck / art historian (Berlin), Livia Pancu / curator Vector Association (Iasi), Simonetta Ferfoglia, Heinrich Pichler / artist collective "gangart" (Vienna), Nadja Abt / artist (Berlin), Sebastian Bodirsky / filmmaker (Berlin), Anna Soucek / curator (Vienna), Susanna Gyulamiryan / director Arts and Cultural Studies Laboratory (Yerevan), Nino Palavandishvili / curator GeoAIR (Tbilisi), Anastasia Zhivkova / curator (Kiev), Jakob Racek / curator (Plovdiv)
This project is kindly supported by Goethe-Institute Bulgaria and the Austrian Embassy in Sofia.
This project has been funded with support from the European Commission.This press release reflects the views only of the author, and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein.

Art Today Association
Center for Contemporary Art - Plovdiv
The Ancient Bath


Margherita Moscardini
A project for the Ancient Bath

opening: Friday, June 24 - 5 PM
exhibition: June 25 - July 16, 2011

The project has its roots in the same place where it is hosted, a place of reference and lived by the artist in residency: the Ancient Bath, with its original hamam structure, nowadays is the base of Plovdiv Contemporary Art Center Art Today. In this building the artist could read the history of the city, not only as the civilization but also as time going across it. As the water of a river carries debris along its course – sometimes leaving them and some other time depositing them – this town apparently doesn’t have a conformity and embellishment planning strategy, but is openly subjected to the flow and the stratification of events and their necessities.
The Ancient Bath plan is superimposed to the Bulgaria hydrography, where rivers wildly outline the territory, constantly changing it, ignoring political boundaries and without tracing definitive dividing lines. The empty baths drops – almost like an upside-down pedestal – are considered a big table of study, of information collection and cartographical planning, where information is catalogued into drawers and then unnoticeably lost because of its impossibility to be kept. This represents some local rivers water which floods the environment again drop by drop, challenging its current role and any effort to define a destination.
Margherita Moscartini’s residency is part of the exchange program organized these last two years between Nosadella.due and Bulgaria, as part of PASS – Produce Art (as) Social Strategy, created by Giusy Checola in collaboration with Elisa Del Prete. The project is dedicated to Italy exploration as a Mediterranean country and to the dialog with those Eastern European countries which consider Italy as the “promised” or “transit” land, in order to investigate transformation processes through artists practice and point of view.

Margherita Moscardini attended the Advanced Course in Visual Arts, Fondazione Ratti, Como, held by Yona Friedman and the workshop by Peter Friedl in Fondazione Spinola Banna per l’arte, Torino. In 2010 she was invited to take part of the residency program of CCA Andratx, Mallorca, Spain. In 2007 she won the first edition of Premio Pinacoteca Giovanni e Marella Agnelli, building a permanent intervention inside the Vallette prison, in Turin.
Her main solo shows: Una Stanza/Fuori Luogo, galleria SpazioA, Pistoia, IT, Studio per un'erosione, Fondazione LaQuadriennale, Roma, IT.
Her main group shows: Mastermind, neon>campobase, Bologna, IT, Ada, Musei civici of Imola, Bologna IT, Public Improvisation, careof, fabbrica del vapore, Milano, IT, In Full Bloom, Galleria Raffaella Cortese, Kaleidoscope project space, Milano, IT; Collecci? Art Foundation Mallorca, Andratx, Mallorca, SP; EmergingTalents 2011, CCCStrozzina, Palazzo Strozzi, Firenze, IT; Premio Ariane de Rothschild, Palazzo Reale, Milano, IT.

This project is kindly supported by DE.MO./MOVIN'UP - Ministero per i Beni e le Attivit? Culturali, Direzione Generale per il Paesaggio, le belle arti, l’architettura e l’arte contemporanee and GAI - Associazione per il Circuito dei Giovani Artisti Italiani.

Art Today Association
Center for Contemporary Art - Plovdiv
The Ancient Bath


SITES + SUBJECTS
Performance Art Festival

June 16 - 19, 2011

After a successfull launch in 2010 this year?s edition of SITES + SUBJECTS brings together artists from various disciplines in the Center for Contemporary Art - The Ancient Bath as well as in particular venues and in the public space of Plovdiv. Artists from Bulgaria, Serbia, Great Britain, Austria and Germany come together to create a unique atmosphere of creative expression on the crossings of contemporary dance, minimal and electronic music, public interventions and new media arts. The conceptual framework of the festival is characterized by it?s productive openess, with singular performance projects that carry the potential to merge one into another. Simultaneously the distinction of producer and audience is widely trascended through the inclusive approach of most of the artistic projects. Thus SITES + SUBJECTS creates a temporary space of communion through social interaction.
For the first time this year the festival offers a series of collateral events, inviting professionals, curators and art historians to talk about the genre of performance art from different angles.


Program

Thursday, June 16
7 PM opening of the festival
7.15 PM performance / Petit Buffet (Berlin): "Reality Cheque"
8 PM performance / Ansgar Wilken (Berlin): "Pasolini for Chello and Pedal"
9 PM performance / Zabuna (Beograd): "Bring your Noise!"
performance / Krasimir Dobrev (Sliven): "The Big Melancholy"
All events take place in the Center for Contemporary Art Plovdiv - The Ancient Bath.

Friday, June 17
5 PM performance / The Great Learning: Paragraph 1 & 3 & 4
Evangelic church Plovdiv, Lady Strangford Str. 21, Plovdiv
8.30 PM lecture / Ruen Ruenov (Sofia): A Hisory of Performance Art in Bulgaria. The 1990?s
artnewscaf?, Otec Paisy Str. 38, Plovdiv
9 PM exhibition opening / "Revelation": Mariola Groener, Ben Cottrell
Sariev gallery, Otec Paisy Str. 40, Plovdiv

Saturday, June 18
2 PM lecture / Eirini Papakonstantinou (Thessaloniki): "Curating Performance"
artnewscaf?, Otec Paisy Str. 38, Plovdiv
4 PM workshop & concert / Sebastian Lexer (London): "piano+"
Academy of Music, Dance and Arts Plovdiv, Concert hall
7 PM performance / WILHELM GROENER (Berlin, Vienna): "Politics of Imagination: Preparation Oracle"
Center for Contemporary Art Plovdiv - The Ancient Bath

Sunday, June 19
2 PM lecture / Peter Stamer (Vienna): "The Village. On collaboration"
Public space, tba.
4 PM performance / The Great Learning, Paragraph 2 & 6 & 7
Center for Contemporary Art Plovdiv - The Ancient Bath

The project is kindly supported by Goethe-Institute Bulgaria; Robert Bosch Foundation; Foundation America for Bulgaria; Austrian Embassy Sofia.

ATLANTIS '11
Art Today Association at the Venice Biennale 2011

Exhibition: 1 – 5 June 2011, 10 am – 6 pm
Panel discussions: 2 – 3 June 2011, 7 pm
Opening: 1 June 2011, 7 pm
Palazzo Zenobio, Collegio Armeno Moorat-Raphael, Dorsoduro 2596, Venezia

The ATLANTIS network connects seven European cities from Berlin to Yerevan through cultural exchange and cooperation between seven institutions working in the field of contemporary art.
During the preview days of the 54th Venice Biennial the ATLANTIS network will be presented through the exhibition ATLANTIS '11 and a series of panel discussions all focusing on the theme of “Power and contemporary art”.
The ATLANTIS '11 event is organized as part of the HEICO project - Heritage, Identity and Communication in European Contemporary Art Practices, which aims to promote the cultural reflection of the identity in the countries involved in the partnership. The further development of the of the Atlantis project is planed as series of workshops and conferences hosted by the participating countries as well as through artists exchange residency programs in Plovdiv (Bulgaria), Yerevan (Armenia), Tbilisi (Georgia), Bratislava (Slovak Republic) and Chisinau (Moldova).
From 1 to 5 June, the ATLANTIS '11 exhibition at the Collegio Armeno Moorat-Raphael, Palazzo Zenobio, will work as a platform for presentation and discussion of projects originating in these countries. As partners in the ATLANTIS network, the guest curators Emil Mirazchiev and Jakob Racek invited the artists collective R.E.P. (Kiev) to produce a work especially for this occasion. The artists will show the video documentation of their performance "A place, where we won?t be again (Tresene)". The performance recreates the story of the Bulgarian (non)presence at the Venice Biennial as folklore, sang by the traditional Bulgarian folk singer Sonya Georgieva.
Art Today Association, Plovdiv, Bulgaria, invited The Bulgarian Pavilion (www.bulgarianpavilion.org) initiative to be presented in Venice. It proposes an alternative for Bulgaria’s sporadical presence in The Venice Biennial by creating a critical platform for diverse artistic activities. The project envisages the pavilion as a symbolic, ephemeral or movable structure and questions the historical relationship between art and power, national representation and international art.
Please join the panel discussion "Good Governance? Bad Curating!" on 2 June with the initiators of The Bulgarian Pavilion - Dessislava Dimova, Svetlana Kuyumdzhieva, Vera Mlechevska and Vessela Nozharova.
Art Today Association is a non-governmental organization founded in 1997. The association is running the Center for Contemporary Art Plovdiv, situated in an Ancient Turkish Bath - a unique monument of culture from the 16th century with a specific interior. Its mission is to present, promote and document alternative and experimental forms of contemporary art; to host artists and curators in residence; to prepare periodical and unique print materials; to implement training programs, workshops and seminars for students and young art professionals; to build an informational multimedia data base presenting contemporary authors.
This project has been funded with support from the European Commission.This press release reflects the views only of the author, and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein.

Art Today Association
Center for Contemporary Art – Plovdiv, Ancient Bath

ART POSITIVE 2011
ELASTICITY

13.05 - 10.06.2011
working hour: Tuesday - Sunday, 11 a.m. - 6 p.m.

Participants
Ana Salasar, Antonia Kostova, Desislava Dimcheva, Emil Mirazchiev, Konstantin Banderov, Tsonka Valcheva - Michel, Adriana Genadieva, Kolio Karamfilov, Krasimir Dobrev, Lora Parmakova, Martina Vacheva, Nadia Genova, Petar Kochevski, Ramgel Gidikov, Roumen Zekov, Sevdalina Kochevska, Velizar Dimchev,
Viktoria Filipova, Yavor Petrushianev.

Idea: Mariya Andreeva

May 13 - 6.15 PM - performance Ana Salasar
6.30 PM - performance Javor Petrushianev and Break Art

supported by