Sylvia is a blind girl. Participating artists from the 10th Kaunas Biennial were given a task of describing their art works to her. Here's what happened...
About the exhibition "From Agora to Syntagma" in [post]factory "Drobe" (Kaunas, Lithuania)
According to network theory, in marketing, information science or politics, weak ties enable access to populations and audiences that are not accessible via strong ties. The concept originates from Mark Granovetter’s paper “Network Theory Revisited – The Strength of Weak Ties”, written in 1969. He argues that not only will the individuals with few weak ties be deprived of information from distant parts of the social system, confined to the provincial news and views of their close friends, but any momentum created without weak ties, does not spread beyond the clique.
AGORA is the space where the strength of the ties is explored within the artistic collaboration process. What is enabling and what is disabling their creation? Is it an attempt to build a new product together or to reconstruct already existing individual works into elements which may be negotiated without pressure to ensure the safety of anyone’s existing position? Are the outcomes influenced by rational “economic” exchanges, or by the pre-existing social ties? Are these relations between individuals and collectives embedded in actual social networks or can they exist as idealized abstracts?
Artworks by Bojan Gagić, Miodrag Gladović, Zdravko Krasić, Barbara Radeljak, Elisabeth Schimana.