Application deadline for the new MigAA laboratory is 20 February 2015. For statements, please use an online application form. Invited emerging artists will be granted travel costs and accommodation.

March 27 – April 4, 2015. Kaunas, Lithuania

Within the context of social anguish created by late political and economical conditions we are intending to organize Migrating Art Academies laboratory in Kaunas focusing on collection of evidences. Emerging artists in collaboration with curators, scientists and established artists will explore the theme of breaking law/rule/believe/routine from different vantage points including not only social activism and civil participation, which became a new norm in contemporary art practices but also revising individualistic surrealist revolt against institutionalized reality and also radical situationist practices of questioning established communicative acts.

The planed array of activities will primarily focus on parameters of group dynamic in relationship to existing administrative, aesthetic, urban and the other larger formative structures. As a location Kaunas is marked with disobedience ranging from revolt—a political criminality as resistance to the imposed order to organized crime as a radical compliance with the mythos of gain. On a broader scale, if one would fancy to browse through the late news one couldn’t but notice abundance of the mirroring misère-en-scènes of the slowly spinning political kaleidoscope: Greece convulsive under the suffocating burden of numeric obligations relentlessly preached by troika and fed by symmetric aesthetics of justice enshrined in the neo-calvinist psycho of its Nordic neighbours; Ukraine ravaged by strangely drawn territorial desires fed by supremacy of idealized aesthetics of the “old” space; rabid builders of the Caliphate energized by the fountain of truth which in turn is being filled by the aesthetics of pious austerity of an ancient regime. Supremacy of reason—an opus magnum of Enlightenment—formalized into tenets of elective democracy and human rights is being challenged not just by already classical post-modernist project but also by variety of new fringe systems.

Led by Žilvinas Lilas and Mindaugas Gapševičius (LT/DE) the laboratory will last one week including public lectures, expeditions and collaborative intensive work focusing on theoretical and practical production with interdisciplinary and critical approach. Expected outcome of the FF will be collection of (audio-visual or verbatim) ideas dealing with non-sanctioned ruptures. At the end of the laboratory exhibition with leading discussions will be scheduled.