23 May 2013

CEI Venice Forum

under the patronage of Mrs Androulla Vassiliou, Member of the European Commission
a CEI Feature Event
a Continental Breakfast project


The CEI Venice Forum for Contemporary Art Curators is a biennial event to be held in close connection with the opening of the Venice Biennale. It deals with the topics of cultural promotion and the exchange of curatorial experiences. The initiative is opened to Central Eastern European experts and curators and to the commissioners of the Venice Biennale responsible for the national pavilions of CEE countries. The audience registers online and attends the Forum free.

The event is carried out by the Trieste Contemporanea Committee under the auspices of the CEI-Central European Initiative, which in 2003 adopted the Venice Forum as one of its Feature Cultural Events, and in cooperation with the UNESCO Regional Bureau for Science and Culture in Europe, Venice (Italy).
The event is held under the patronage of the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Regione del Veneto, the Provincia di Venezia, the Provincia di Trieste, the Comune di Venezia, the Comune di Trieste and the University of Trieste. It is supported by the CEI, the Regione Autonoma Friuli Venezia Giulia and the BEBA Foundation of Venice.
The Forum is an activity of the international network Continental Breakfast that fosters the creation of partnership projects and multidimensional capacity building exchange programmes in the field of contemporary art in CEE.



2013 Topics /
Our Evo Veloce runs and constantly changes its reference points; its interpreting tools; its predisposition for cultural archiving in line with meanings from contextual positions which can be multiple, hybrid or even unsystematic. Similarly, in terms of current cultural products, the concepts of the art exhibitions proposed by the curators are very diverse and based on a lot of personal investigation.
The 2013 Venice Forum – which commemorates 10 years of activity together with friends from the Continental Breakfast network – wants to stimulate a reflection on the wealth of observational working tools by discussing and comparing examples/main criteria of subjective decisions taken by curators with regards to the greater or lesser importance of a contemporary work/artistic action.
In practical terms, the meeting this year wants to discuss a number of curatorial choices – from the protagonists directly – from a short time segment immediately contiguous to the present, namely the last ten years.
The changing relational priorities and the speed conditions informed by the context – especially overwhelmingly in the last decade – affect, in the cultural domain, the possibilities of pinpointing the problematic framework within which the characteristics of relevance and interest for a specific artistic action are perceived. Defining a problematic framework currently (which is, as it were in 'constant flux' due to external factors) is a complex matter which also entails the difficulty of grasping clearly the essential – and not accidental – interconnection within its framework which can in turn take into account the generative fertility of a good artistic action, with regards to the ability of the current widespread visual environment to assimilate it (the 'running time', so to speak, of the action itself).
The 2013 CEI Venice Forum wishes to add to the debate underway by aiming to directly invite the participants – ranging in education, age and countries of origin – to share with colleagues the evaluation practices personally adopted over the last ten years for selecting episodes of importance/excellence from the international artistic output of the time and/or comment on defining important/excellent curatorial episodes from the last decade, in their opinion.

The working language will be English.
There is no fee for participation and you have to register online.

Find on www.triestecontemporanea.it the programme of the Forum, the list of speakers and the registration form.