Open Space - Zentrum für Kunstprojekte aims to create the most vital facilities for contemporary art in the city of Vienna on non-profit base, concerned with bringing the current developments of the enlargement of Europe to the fore through generating interconnected routes.

The initiation intends to bring diverse creative practice together as well as creating real and/or virtual collaborative forum and opening spaces to encourage joint projects. Among its main activities and productions we hope to develop an online publication; contemporary art exhibitions; film and video screening; artist talks and panel discussions.

Creative practice at Open Space - Zentrum für Kunstprojekte with its visual arts programme therefore will take an active role in securing a prominent place in the future culture of Europe towards inventing cultural specific conditions within the realm of underpinning the current structure.

Specific objectives are:

• Building and facilitating new forms of dialogue and cooperation;

• Creating network of networks, database and exchanges, a zone of communicative transfer;

• Highlighting the importance of cultural diversity and bringing the questions of cultural complexity into light;

• Promoting mobility through exchanges of people, expertise and best practices;

• Enforcing events combining different media of artistic expression within contemporary creative practice.

History:

By confronting geographical, political, social and cultural standpoint within a single “cultural specific conditions” the response and/or challenges inevitably involve in bringing forward issues of identification of territory and “imaginary geographies” to reflect cultural specific realities. As a result we look at both the “flows and the spaces of encounters” in order to find what inhabit the possible from which to look at Europe in different ways with the intention of thinking “otherwise” in regard to questions about precarious state of cultural complexity within an inter-disciplinary creative practice.

Strategy:

Open Space - Zentrum für Kunstprojekte would like to introduce an experiential framework derived from contemporary creative practice to the issue of intercultural dialogue to a new audience as a connecting link within the frame of new circulation in its multi layered stance that produces new crosses. This establishes itself by means of contributing a model strategy for cross-border and interregional projects on the basis of improving new approach.

Structure/co-ordination:

The following list shows who are who in the coordination team within its management structure:

Gülsen Bal

Director, Head of Development of Projects and Programmes

Gülsen Bal is the Director, Head of Development of Projects and Programmes at Open Space - Zentrum für Kunst Projekte in Vienna. Bal, the founder of Open Space, aims to create a facilities for contemporary creative practice concerned with contributing a model strategy for cross-border and interregional projects on the basis of improving new approach with its visual arts and educational program. She has also recently developed a new program Critical and Curatorial Investigations for Masters Degree at TU Wien.

Statement

Bal is a visual artist, theoretician and works as an intellectual worker discussing the differential structures within the ethico-aesthetic paradigm conceived in representational boundaries. Her practice/research hence has focused upon exploring the notions of the "difference of identity" and "difference," minority and exilic discourse and border phenomena in trans-local and/or trans-national location within cultural geography.

She has exhibited, curated, published articles and participated in talks in various places and venues in the U.K. as well as in Eu and Turkey.

Recently curated and co-participated

Try, Live, Paton Gallery, Ljubljana 2008 | I MYSELF AM WAR!, Open Space - Zentrum für Kunst Projekte, Vienna 2008 | FOLDED-IN, Open Space - Zentrum für Kunst Projekte, Vienna 2008 | Stay here, Contemporary Art Festival: „product", Varna 2008 | Gone City, MAGAZINE4, Bregenz | The Temporary Zones, Open Space - Zentrum für Kunst Projekte, Vienna 2008 | Nobodies Story, :/ Seconds, Leeds 2007 | Semionauti II -produced by Border Crossing, Neon Gallery, Bologna 2007 | territories of Duration, Karsi Sanat, Istanbul 2006 | Semionauti I - produced by Border Crossing, Care/of, Fabrica del Vapore, Milan 2006 | Plateaux - out there / aus dort" Künstlerhaus MOUSONTURM(Archive), Frankfurt/Main 2005 | where It was, shall I be - wo es war, soll ich werden... , Diyarbakir 2005 | Border Crossing- Tur reTur… , Künsöffering, Oslo 2004 | Different/ciation, MiArt, Milan 2003 | Short & Sharp, Gallery 291, London 2003 | Border Crossing- Here and Somewhere else…, Gallery X, Istanbul 2003

and at the same time has taken part in numerous group exhibitions

Xenophobia Redux, Open Space - Zentrum für Kunst Projekte, Vienna 2008|Transmission, The Arts Gallery, London 2007 | Dialogues Méditerranéens, Saint Tropez 2007 | Looking to the Left, Contemporary Incheon Art Museum, Korea 2006 | Include me in/out, International Biennial Arts Festival, San Francisco 2005 | Blueprints, Berliner Kunstsalon, Berlin 2005 | einfache Gleichheit mit sich, prog:ME, 1st Festival of Electronic Media, Rio de Janeiro 2005 | where the streets have no names, MoNA, Third International Video Festival, Detroit 2005 | Balkan Malls, REX Cultural Center, Belgrade, 2004 and Casa Tranzit, Bucharest, 2004 | Screened Out, Liverpool Biennial 2004 - Independents section, Liverpool 2004 | The Self on the Screen, Art Beat: Battiti D'arte Sull'adriatico, Biennale Adriatica di Arti Nuove, San Benedetto del Tronto 2004 | disembodied Voice, Istanbul 2003

Recently published

a publication of an essay Mapping the Shifting Borders: Beyond "Point Zero" in New Media Technology, Science and Politics edited by Marina Grzinic and Tanja Velagic, a Loecker Verlag publication, Vienna | Insight: The Disputed Urge to Surge, Third Text, London 2008 | Settled in Mobility?, Toplumbilim, Istanbul 2007 | When Unavoidable Knocks on the Door, ARTMargins, NY 2007 | Strangers with Angelic Faces, Third Text, London 2007 | What I See in the Mirror, Hillsider, Istanbul 2007 | Uncompromising Hostility, Afterimage, NY 2006|A Piece of Sky Is Missing!, Mute, London 2006 | Global Doubt, /seconds, Leeds 2006 | Mapping the Shifting Borders, Mute, London 2006 | Subjects in space… , ISEA (the inter-Society for the Electronic Arts) Amsterdam 2006 | Imaginary Year - Turkish Cinema: Aesthetics, Culture, History, Chicago 2006 | Open Systems, Sanat Dünyam¦z, Istanbul 2005 | Interactive Integrated Media, Sanat Dünyam¦z, Istanbul 2005 | Revival of Essential Values, Rh+ Sanat, Istanbul 2005 | Rethinking of Everyday Life: Martha Rosler, Rh+ Sanat, Istanbul 2005 | Developing the Negative?, Sanat Dünyam¦z, Istanbul 2005 | I U She together, Sanat Dünyam¦z, Istanbul 2005

and numerous Conference & Seminars

September 2008 Focus on: I MYSELF AM WAR!, Depot, Vienna 2008 |The Creative Moment of Encounters - Curatorial Projects, the O.K Center for Contemporary Art, Transart Institute, Linz 2008 | The Bregenz Dialogues, Galerie Lisi Hämmerle, Bregenz 2008 | Spaces of Production: Open Space, Depot, Vienna 2008 | The Space of Min(d)field, Santral, Istanbul 2008 | Open Space, Open Systems…, Labfactory, Vienna 2008| The Philosophy of the Overlooked, ICA, London 2006 |The work of Gilles Deleuze, Greenwich University, London 2006 | Modus Operandi, Accademia Brera di Belle Arti, Milan 2006 | A Long Journey Eastward, ICA, London 2005 | Engaging Im-Possible, Central Saint Martins College of Art &Design, London 2005 | Dialogue: a journey towards Space/Place…, Diyarbakir 2005 | Performing 'Self' Reflexive Discourse, 1st International Visual Studies Conference - IFEMA, Madrid 2004 | Questioning The Effect of Inversion In The Subject/Object Relations In Art Practice, YKKM, Istanbul 2003| Eyeing the Other, The London Institute, London 2003

Edited

a special issue on Turkey, The Space of Min(d)field', Third Text Magazine - a Routledge publication, London 2008| Türkiye'de "Dün-Bugün" Dönüsümleri, a Taylor & Francis Inc. publication, Istanbul 2008| Gone City: re-reading "cultural turn" in mobility, a Bucher Verlag publication, Bregenz 2008

Lisa Bolyos

Managerial/Administrative Assistant

Lisa Bolyos lives in Vienna and works in transnational contexts of the antiracist movement. She is part of the political art collective Annegang and works together with Carolina Frank as Sabine&Lore. In her art practice she focuses on queer-feminist intervention and antiracist positioning. She is active in Ladyfest and NoBorder networks.

Coelestine Engels

Duty Managing: exhibition display, installation

born in Salzburg
lives in Vienna and Berlin since 1998
is artist of different fields/disciplines
2001-2006 she studied at akademie der bildenden künste wien,
operates fine arts in the fields of painting, graphics, photography, video, aside from set-up of exhibitions, event technique, outfitting, film equiping and stagemanaging.

Dörte Eliass

Translator/Editor

Dörte Eliass, born in Hannover, lives and works as translator and editor in Vienna. She is specialised on the translation of art- and cultural scientific texts and has been awarded several translation prizes by the BMUKK.
Info: www.eliassuebersetzungen.at

tresdelinquentes

Design & Programming

Robert Schwieger and Alexander Stern are tresdelinquentes, a studio for visual communication based in Vienna & Hamburg.

Previous engagement

Can Gülcü - Managerial/Administrative Assistant, December 2008 – September 2009

Okşan Svastics - Exhibition Assistant, January 2009 – April 2009

Fatih Aydogdu -Visual Media Development, January 2008 – March 2009

Mira Turba - Management/Co-ordination, April 2008 – December 2008