Quarantine and segregation
Discussion with Andrej Belák and Stano Daniel, moderated by Zuzana Jakalová
February 19, 2023
6 p.m. Exhibition guided tour with curator Hana Janečková
6:30 p.m. Discussion
The event will be held in Slovak.
Quarantine as a tool for restricting movement or the compulsory physical separation of populations or groups of healthy people who have been exposed to a contagious disease has been known on the European continent since the High Middle Ages. However, the pragmatic framing of quarantine as a protective mechanism against the spread of infectious diseases is an exemplary materialization of the so-called antibiotic regime of modernity, with its ideas and practices of purity, stratification, and segregation. In the course of the discussion, these ideas will be approached from artistic, scientific, and embodied positions. Quarantine as a mechanism will be positioned within contemporary anthropological discourses and activist approaches.
The discussion is part of the accompanying programme for the Nature Red in Tooth and Claw exhibition, curated by Hana Janečková.
Andrej Belák is a researcher at the Institute of Ethnology and Social Anthropology of the Slovak Academy of Sciences. He received his master’s degree from Charles University in Prague (Department of Anthropology and Human Genetics) and PhD from the University of Groningen (Faculty of Medicine). As a medical anthropologist with a transdisciplinary background, he has focused primarily on the causes of and remedies for health inequalities between the excluded Roma population and the general population in Slovakia. Long-term experiments featuring the application of his findings at the national level piqued his interest in the influence of power structures on the nature of the current global ecological and social crisis. Pursuing this interest and his two life-long hobbies, he has retuned himself toward an (auto)ethnography of radical environmentalism and romantic love.
Stano Daniel is an expert in social inclusion and is currently primarily involved in inclusive education and early childhood support. He works for a global philanthropic company where he focuses specifically on education in Central Europe. His previous international experience includes networking NGOs working with disadvantaged children at European level, research on human rights in education, migration, health or housing, as well as international diplomacy. In addition to his current work, he is also a member of the Board of Trustees of the University of Trnava and the Board of the Roma Education Fund Network.
Zuzana Jakalová is a curator, researcher and writer. She currently works as the Assistant Professor at the Department of Art History and Theory. She was an Assistant Professor at UMPRUM – Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague in the Fine Arts Studio 1. She worked as a curator, researcher and organiser at Display – Association for Research and Collective Practice and as a curator of public programs at the City Gallery Bratislava. She worked as artists-in-residence program curator at the Center for Contemporary Art MeetFactory in Prague. She was the curator-in-chief of Prádelna Bohnice, a gallery and multigenre artspace in the psychiatric hospital on the outskirts of Prague. She is the author and curator of a long-term discursive project Multilogues on the Now examining intersections of feminism, disability, notions of health and coalitions of care in contemporary art and society (with Hana Janečková). She is the author and editor of a thematic czecho-slovak bookseries .txt, consisting of essays on socially and politically urgent yet publicly underrepresented topics (e.g. Bez súhlasu.txt on rape culture, Iné telá.txt on disability and impairment). Along with Zbyněk Baladrán, she is the co-author of Display’s hybrid collaborative publishing house focusing on texts between art theory and contemporary emancipatory thought.
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ERSTE Foundation is main partner of tranzit.
Supported using public funding by the Slovak Arts Council.
We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts.
Media partners:
Artalk.info, Flash Art CZ & SK, Kapitál, GoOut.net
