Portrait Melanie Gilligan,
Photo: Alessandra Chila

Polly Staple, director of Chisenhale Gallery in London, talks with Melanie Gilligan about the background of her new film production Popular Unrest and her approach to work. It will be discussed what are the reasons for individuals to get together and to be involved in groups nowadays and how the relation between such groups and the entire society looks like.

Poster, Last Chance to See, 2010,
Design: lange+durach

Last Chance to See – Kunstverein. The dinosaur of the art world/ Die Letzten ihrer Art
For the first time the art associations in Bonn, Düsseldorf and Cologne are working together on a joint project, in which the institutional challenges for art associations in the 21^st century shall be discussed. Art associations are basically bourgeois institutions which have developed in the beginning of the 19^th century (Vormärz) as an active answer to the aristocratic parlors. But what happens, if we realise that in our post-bourgeois society the culture of unions, civic commitment and federal logics are losing their significance? How does this affect art associations?

The way Melanie Gilligan is dissecting the relation between subject and society and is drawing imaginative visions of the future, art associations as institution shall be investigated on its sore points and potentials. In allusion to Douglas Adams famous book Last Chance to See we introduce art associations as a species which is threatened, but also particular and especially worth to be rescued. Colleagues and sociologists will examine this species carefully during various events in Bonn, Düsseldorf and Cologne.