 Hello everyone, I'm Laurel Patak, the Director and Curator of Art in General here in New York City. Hi, I'm Michele Novotny and I'm the Director of Center for Contemporary Art in Prague. I want to say a quick thanks to CEC ArtsLink, to Simon and Maxime especially for organizing us here today, and for also allowing Art in General to host an amazing fellow this year. Thank you for that. And I'm here speaking with a former CEC ArtsLink fellow, Michele, who I have had the pleasure of working with for the last five years, in different ways to bring artists from across Eastern and Central Europe to New York. And I had the pleasure of just opening an exhibition last night at Art in General that was guest curated by Michele, called School of Pain. The show is up until January 26th. I encourage you to come by and have a look. In brief, the show looks at different ways to think about economies of desire and relationship to the work of some very interesting artists. And Michele, maybe you could say a few more words about the exhibition. Maybe I could just invite you on Saturday for a screening and performance that will be between four and six in the afternoon. Markter, who is a Czech artist, will screen a selection of his movies from the last 15 years. They deal with two very different but somewhat connected topics of his queer identity and the stories of the Sudeten German, where the Czech German that well expelled from the country in 1945. Because before the Second World War, 50% of the citizens of Czech Republic were actually Germans, and it's still a very tabooist topic. And there will be also Aditya Mandiam doing a kind of singing performance that also deals with his complicated cosmopolitan identity, as he's half Sri Lankan, half Indian, but grew up in the UK, in the United States, and now lives in Warsaw, in Poland. So this will be till six. So I couldn't help but want to ask some impossible unanswerable questions in eight minutes. And knowing Mikal to also be a complex thinker, I thought he would be up for the task. But really, I guess the very subject of global citizenship really and the work that we do institutionally at art in general in an international context has me thinking a lot about the kind of climate of the world in which we're working right now. And in a cultural moment when we're seeing such a disturbing rise and nationalism here and in many other parts of the world, I'm thinking a lot about what is art's role, how can art work to counter or undo such extremism. And I thought Mikal would be an excellent person to talk about this with because actually in your broader career and also in the kind of grouping of artists and even some of the themes of the works in the show that's up now at art in general, I think you've done a really exemplary job of working together with local, regional and international contexts and scales in your curatorial work over the last many years. And I was wondering how you think about this and how can we maybe think about the local, the regional or the international as ways to kind of counter ideas of nationalism. So of course it's a difficult question. But I somehow wish that the global kind of citizenship would work, that we could all be humans. This is a big topic in the philosophy that I studied where the people somehow never accepted the post-colonial and post-human studies. The idea that unfortunately we cannot be all humans because there have been so much bad done that we need to first undo somehow that. So the question is how to deal with it. I mean I think that maybe the answer is always to kind of try to conceive the full scale. So when I'm for example doing the program Futura Center for Contemporary Art in Prague, when I arrived there it was mainly an international art center. So in the context of the first decade of the millennium it was very important to bring international artists to Prague. But when I arrived I also understood and at that time still many directors of art institutions were publicly claiming that they are conceiving their program like if it would be anywhere else in the world. Like that they would do the program whatever they would be, which is impossible in a way. You are always in a certain place in the world and this place has a meaning. So I try to add of course many local artists that I think would need some help to be exhibited there. But I think at least art institutions should work as a certain bridge. So they should bring people there and also help other people to live on this bridge. And they should somehow work with this from a certain point that needs to be built. So they also need the international acclaim but they also need a local acclaim. And what is mainly my technique is that I'm trying to smuggle people somewhere. I'm trying to smuggle people in the local discourse. I'm trying to smuggle people in the international discourse. I'm trying to hide them in some trendy waves that they could be helping them to go up or the same to come to Prague. And the same I'm trying to play maybe with the public that comes. In the Garden of Futura we have those two public sculptures that I do not find very extraordinary. What comes to their artistic quality but they bring a lot of white public. And then we kind of testing this white public in exposing them to maybe something what Inga show here. To some problems that they didn't really come to deal with because they just came to take a selfie with those sculptures. But I think that this exposure in a way works. And maybe this is more a deep question that I would love to continue to think together with many people in the room and who are presenting later today about but I think for me thinking about this question how can contemporary art negotiate identity when on the one hand it's something that is extremely tied to cultural belonging and geographical context in really meaningful ways. But also to think about maybe what are the ideological structures that underpin much arts funding because we see those structures as often legally politically and economically being quite bound to the logic of the nation state. So how can we kind of maneuver and work between those poles and terrain to think about what does it mean to undo or counter nationalism. There is usually two approaches in the public funding and I'm running a situation that only runs on very different kind of public funding. At the beginning it was made a passport right. The foundations usually support only the artists who hold the right passport. Over the years and also by pushing of me and other directors we more came to the agreement that it's more the place of residency. So for example now Czech artists can be supported or let's say artists can be supported by the Czech culture institution even though they do not have the right passport if they reside and work there. But I mean this in a way is also complicated right. This is just another way of exclusion. So what I'm also very often questioning in my practice and maybe coming back to the kind of upheaval of nationalism in also the region where I come from the central East Europe is experiencing a big wave of nationalism. And I think that this grows from the fact that we have all kind of big inferiority complex that in some ways we need a sense of belonging and maybe also the art has pushed it away a lot from the discourse that it has. So one of the things that I'm also questioning how art could create this sense of belonging and therefore I think that institutions that receive public funding should maybe be in concert not so much of course with who they're doing but if it's really meaningful because also often they kind of the cultural imperialist policy that for example residencies have been so much time used can be used well also despite the original fact that it is supposed to promote a certain nation culture and Europe this is omnipresent and of course the developed countries have much more money for the cultural policy. The institute is a very strong funder pro-Helvetia other funders but it doesn't mean that what the result is it's actually bad. So we are somehow still of course bound in the national state which kind of collapse with the global world but we don't really know and I do not have the answer how to really overcome that except in some kind of positive sense of belonging some kind of positive sense of patriotism because we do need also this patriotism otherwise it may strike back as the kind of hardcore edge nationalism. I guess we have one minute maybe then I would ask you the same question how do you conceive your program being one of the few non-profit institutions in such a difficult space like New York is also concerning to the question that you ask me? Yeah I guess art in general has had a really long-standing relationship to working with international artists and it's an institution that was founded in the early 1980s founded by artists and I think was very early to think a lot about what would it mean to bring artists from all different parts of the world to a place like New York and to do that with a very interesting like paying attention to geopolitics so I think for me maybe in brief listening to the noise that is going to drown me out in any minute now I just think one has to be really careful in thinking complexly about these things and to realize that we are you know we are bound inside a much larger system thank you so much