Stance Takes: Forces of Art in Colombia, Syria, Kyrgyzstan, Uganda and Kenya

Made in collaboration with The European Cultural Foundation, The Prince Claus Fund, Hivos and Valiz, Forces Of Art: Perspectives from a Changing World, platforms arts organisations operating in some of the most difficult spaces on earth. It’s an international research initiative examining the ways in which artistic and cultural activities shape societies.

Our first stop is the Colombian rainforest, our guides Goran Tomka and Visnja Kisic, two Serbian academics fascinated by the way culture and art functions in spaces away from the centre and away from the metropolitan mindset that decides value. They travelled to Choco to work with Más Arte más Acción, an arts organisation based in the region for over two decades, challenging orthodox notions of artistic value and the role of the artist.

Más Arte más Acción - Postales del Futuro (Postcards from the Future)

Sociologist Diana T. Kudaibergenova in a gallery

Next we visit the galleries and virtual artistic spaces of Central Asia where Sociologist Diana T. Kudaibergenova explore the evolving contemporary art scene in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan where an older generation of artists who see the institutionalization of contemporary art as vital, find themselves at odds with a younger generation of artists for whom ‘space’ is seen more conceptually in the form of autonomy and independence from the post-soviet state.

The next space we travel to is one of absence. Here, the researcher Fatin Farhat-Zaqtan examines the fate of Syrian artists over the last bloody decade of revolution and war. Through the stories of three artistic organisations she tells us how artists fight for space against forces beyond their control. She looks at the fate of street theatre among Syrian Refugees in Lebanon, an international art exhibition featuring Syrian artists and the pioneering Syrian bookshop Pages in Istanbul forced to relocate to The Netherlands.

Finally we are amongst Queer Poets in East Africa where Rocca Holly-Nambi an artist and cultural producer has been living for the last decade. Her work looks at queer creatives in Kampala and Nairobi. As part of the project she commissioned two poets: Gloria Kiconco from Uganda, and Kins of Spade from Kenya, to write some new work, in each other’s cities, exploring the nuances of Queer expression. We hear some of their poetry and how the experience emboldened their artistic identities.