Art on Film: The Camera as a Tool of Intervention

As part of Boston’s inaugural Public Art Triennial The Exchange, the Goethe-Institut Boston presents a special screening program curated by artists Nomeda and Gediminas Urbonas, featuring selection of films from The Disobedience Archive, a seminal, ongoing video project that explores the evolving relationship between contemporary art and political activism. Initiated by curator Marco Scotini, The Disobedience Archive explores a shared space where artistic practice and civic engagement come together. Rather than drawing boundaries between art and activism, the project highlights a zone of collective struggle and symbolic imagination - a fluid commons shaped through media, affect, and social movement. Urbonas collaborated with Scotini to develop the Disobedience: Boston chapter in 2011, which focused on civil rights movements and acts of disobedience at MIT and Harvard. The archive brings attention to moments where gestures, images, and occupations reshape both political structures and the language of art. In dialogue with the Triennial’s call to “meet art where we are: together, outside, in public,” this screening considers the camera as a tool of intervention, exposing global struggles and reclaiming visibility in contested environments. The selected films by artists such as Hito Steyerl, Park Fiction, Etcètera, Critical Art Ensemble, Harun Farocki and Andrei Ujica, offer more than documentation. They open spaces of action, giving form to ways of seeing and being together in contested environments. A post-screening conversation will invite the audience to reflect, listen, and reimagine art’s civic role within a shifting political landscape. The program welcomes students, cultural workers, and the wider public to imagine how disobedience might appear as a practice of attention, relation, and collective agency - a new aesthetic of the real. Nomeda &amp; Gediminas Urbonas are artists, educators, and co-founder of the Urbonas Studio an interdisciplinary research practice that facilitates exchange amongst diverse nodes of knowledge production and artistic practice in pursuit of projects that transform civic spaces and collective imaginaries. Urbonas have exhibited internationally including the São Paulo (twice), Berlin, Moscow (twice), Lyon, Gwangju, Busan, Taipei, Kaunas and Helsinki Biennales, Folkestone Triennial – and Manifesta and Documenta exhibitions – among numerous other international shows, including a solo show at the Venice Biennale, MACBA in Barcelona and National Gallery of Art in Vilnius. Their writing on artistic research as form of intervention into social and political crisis was published in the books Devices for Action (2008) by MACBA Press, Barcelona and Villa Lituania (2008) by Sternberg Press. Urbonas co-edited Public Space? Lost and Found (MIT Press, 2017) that brings together artists, planners, theorists and art historians in an examination of the complex inter-relations between the creation and uses of public space and the roles that public art plays therein.  Gediminas Urbonas is Associate Professor in Visual Arts at MIT‘s Program in Art, Culture, and Technology, and Nomeda Urbonas is research affiliate at MIT. They both are Visiting Professors at VDU - Vytautas Magnus University in Kaunas, and at NABA - Nuova Accademia di Belle Arte in Milano. Presented in cooperation with Goethe-Institut Boston and Boston Public Art Triennial

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Art on Film: The Camera as a Tool of Intervention

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