Arch.Uth Postgraduate Course Postgraduate Course Postgraduate Course Postgraduate Course Arch.Uth UTH.gr Ελληνικά
Lecture by Robert Jelinek and Katarina Soskic: Der Konterfrei
11/12/2017

Talk and Presentation
ROBERT JELINEK (Vienna) and Katarina Soskic

with MARIA PAPADIMITRIOU and ARISTIDE ANTONAS
Book presentation of the SoS Journal DER KONTERFEI, SoS ACADEMY and the STATE OF SABOTAGE.
11/12/2017, 15:00, Amphitheatre

www.stateofsabotage.com
www.derkonterfei.com


State of Sabotage

On 30 August 2013, exactly ten years after its foundation, the State of Sabotage (SoS) was dissolved. The state had five provinces, 15 embassies and consulates, over 14,000 citizens, its own constitution, passports, currency and over 20 versions of its anthem. SoS was committed to civil values in the best sense, such as education, culture, and fundamental human rights. It crossed the lines between state sovereignty and went beyond them using artistic means. Four years have passed since then and despite the temporal distance, enquiries and requests haven’t ceased pouring in. The world is in transformation and poses new challenges which continue to render the brief existence of the State of Sabotage utterly relevant to the present, whether because of its migration policies, its approach to physical territory and legal gray areas, or its critique of the claims to perpetuity of state forms.

Robert Jelinek was born in 1970 in Pilsen, Czechoslovakia. Since 1990, his trans-disciplinary artistic works have been effective and progressive means toward realizing and mediating contemporary art impulses beyond the traditional art scene and industry. As a visual artist, Jelinek operates at the intersections between temporal media, electronic music, olfactory design, publishing, and statecraft, and is constantly in search of new artistic strategies, real and imaginary locations, and the active integration of a wider public. An essential element of his working method is expanded artistic positioning and contextualization to continually further the sense of immediacy between work and audience. This method has been developed and refined over the past 25 years through his various brands and manifested in cooperation with several other artists. Whether with his internationally-renowned record label, Sabotage Recordings (1994-1999), the hit perfume, CASH - The Scent of Money (1998), or the micro-state, State of Sabotage (SoS) (2003-2013), Jelinek’s body of work has consistently offered a bold alternative to the established practices and solutions of the conventional culture industry. In 2014, Jelinek founded the publication series, DER KONTERFEI, an extended artistic production in which epistemological interests and the drive for depiction are reduced to language and text, which also provides a growing curricular basis for a future SoS Academy. Jelinek lives and works in Vienna and Athens.