MEDIA COOPERATION WITH CAMERA AUSTRIA INTERNATIONAL

Artur Żmijewski and Joanna Warsza are guest editors of the current issue of Camera Austria International Nr. 117. Speaking with parties involved with Occupy Wall Street in New York as well as with artists from Occupy Amsterdam about their political goals and image-political strategies Żmijewski and Warsza offer an initial insight into the main topic of the 7th Berlin Biennale. This first impression is supplemented by the project Self#governing by artist Marina Naprushkina: she distributes political cartoons as a contribution to social change in Belarus.

"Where is politics today? Is it where people are collectively manifesting their disenchantment with the structures of authority and the political class? And where they are beginning to create a politics of their very own? ... Can art really function and can it substantially change reality? What is its actual effect?"

Artur Żmijewski and Joanna Warsza, as guest editors of the March issue of Camera Austria International, preface their editorial with these questions. But how does this political approach mesh with the interests and objectives of a magazine project devoted to discourse on photography’s role between art and mass medium, between aesthetics and social practice, between document and discourse, politics and imagery?

Perhaps by means of the concept of the political, which signifies interest in a debate (articulated from different sides) about what politics may actually mean or about which conditions might even foster opportunities for the political to evolve. Thus a joint discursive territory manifests, one that is steadily permeated by competing and mutually excluding regimes of visibility or by politics of space and corpora, one that is thus characterized by a conflict revolving around the configurations of togetherness. So the political is not to be sought only in specific topics but rather in the controversy itself, which in end effect puts up for renegotiation the conceptual and creative latitude and the boundaries (or potentials?) presented by the actual operating system of art.

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