Keynote for the first week of CERN LIVIANA

The first keynote for the CERN LIVIANA conference will be delivered by Professor Kathrin Böhm (Alanus University of Arts and Social Sciences) and Dr Kuba Szreder (Academy of Fine Art in Warsaw) who will introduce research and methodologies used by the Centre for Plausible Economies (which they co-established in 2018) to identify and foster interdependent ways of making and sustaining artistic practice.

LIVIANA is the annual online conference of the Community Economies Research Network (CERN) and in 2024 it will be held from 4 to 16 November. The first keynote will be on Thursday 7 November (time to be confirmed).

In their keynote, Böhm and Szreder will draw parallels with the programme of community economies, and will discuss commons-based alternatives to the capitalocentric logic of contemporary art, that typically revolves around the axis between art market, blue chip galleries, large institutions and flashy biennales. 

Böhm and Szreder use visual methods of "redrawing the economy", to conduct action research with both individual practitioners, collectives and established institutions (such as the Whitworth in Manchester) to unearth and foster art as an economic practice, that can and should be organised for benefit of larger communities. 

Image: The double sided coin of museums. Courtesy of Kathrin Böhm. 

In their Compass of Interdependent Art Worlds, Szreder and Böhm champion more vivid exchange between artistic experimentation, economic alternatives, community organising and politicised entrepreneurship, that aims at making art accessible and artists' livelihood sustainable. 

Their "heads up and hands on" attitude combines upbeat pragmatism with critical reflection, to navigate the perilous waters of competitive art worlds, setting the direction towards aesthetical plurality, cultural democracy, social change and equitable economies.

KATHRIN BÖHM works across interdependent realms of cultural production, including the art world. Her research, writing, organising and constructing supports collective forms of (re-)producing public space, taking back the economy for more-than-capitalist futures, and enabling a new trans-localism that acknowledges the rural. Kathrin is a co-founder of the trans-local arts organisation Myvillages and has initiated cultural enterprise Company Drinks. As a researcher she contributes to the wider topics of New Economy, Usership of Art and the Production of Public Space, and currently holds an art professorship at the Economics Department at Alanus University. In 2020 Kathrin stopped initiating new projects and engaged in a process of 'composting' of her work to date, in order to make 'fertiliser' for evolving long-term infrastructures such as The Centre for Plausible Economies c/o Company Drinks and Myvillages' Rural School of Economics. Recent contributions to art events and exhibitions include Municipal Kitchens at nGbK, Berlin (2024), Artists and Peasants, Les Abbaotoirs (2023), Toulouse, Kassels' Rural Undercurrents for Lumbung documenta fifteen (2022), and Compost at the Showrom (2022), London. Co-edited publications include Icebergian Economies of Contemporary Art (2020), The Rural (2019), Learn to Act (2017) and The International Village Show (2015). For more on Kathrin's contribution to Lumbung documenta fifteen, click here. 

KUBA SZREDER is a researcher, curator, and lecturer at the Academy of Fine Art in Warsaw. He cooperates with artistic unions, consortia of postartistic practitioners, clusters of art-researchers, art collectives and artistic institutions in Poland, UK, and other European countries. He is an editor and author of several catalogues, books, readers, book chapters, articles and manifestos, in which he scrutinizes the social, economic, and theoretical aspects of the expanded field of art. Current research interests include conditions of artistic labor, new models of artistic institutions, artistic self-organization, artistic research, postartistic theory and practice. His book "The ABC of the projectariat: living and working in a precarious art world" was published in 2021 by the Manchester University Press and the Whitworth.