Peter Sit: Art in Times of Anxieties and Depressions

April 13th, 2022 at 5 p. m.
UMPRUM, nám. Jana Palacha 80, Praha 1, lecture room. 115

“How do you throw a brick through the window of a bank if you can’t get out of bed?”
Johanna Hedva, Sick Woman Theory

In his lecture, Peter Sit will present some points from his doctoral research on the topic of Art in the Times of Anxieties and Depressions. From personal experiences of depression, anxiety and burnout, through examples from pop culture, rap, to inspirational examples of people's practices such as Johanna Hedva, Jakob Jakobsen, Kader Attia, Mark Fisher, Anne Boyer, David Wojnarowicz and others.

Peter Sit will speak about how our bed can become a revolutionary tool, but first we have to own one. About injustice, and that not all of us have the same conditions for taking care of our mental health. How it relates to what geographical part of the world we are living in and what the social, economic and political conditions in which we live have to do with our mental health.

Peter Sit studied photography and intermedia in Bratislava and Prague. In 2012, he co-founded the APART collective, within which they founded the APART LABEL publishing house, where he co-edited more than 20 publications. He is the editor of Climate Crisis.txt (APART, Display, Capital, 2019). Together with Apart, he exhibited at the Kunsthalle Bratislava, Karlin Studios in Prague, Easttopics in Budapest, Plusminusnula in Žilina, the Biennial of Graphic Design in Brno, CCA Kronika in Bytom. In 2022 he curated the exhibition of Harun Farocki: Shaping of our Present in A Promise of Kneropy in Bratislava. In 2018 he co-curated the 9th Futurological Congress in Bratislava with Juliet Aranda. In 2018 and 2019 he participated in the Work Hard! Play Hard! in Minsk. He organized and participated in several lectures and discussions on conceptual art in the context of (artistic) education. In 2018 and 2019 he co-organized the Bratislava BAK Summer School. In 2020, together with the Working Group for Research on Extrasensory Aesthetics, he was a laureate of the Jindřich Chalupecký Award and a laureate of the scholarship program of the NOVUM Foundation. In 2019 he received a fellowship at the Salzburg Summer Academy and a three-month residency at the Art in General in New York. Since 2017, he has been a member of the team for research into the history of Czechoslovak psychotronics, its institutional and ideological context, as well as its potential transitions into contemporary art.

 Peter Sit focuses on collectivity and its potential in the current world order, the issue of work, within the artistic operation he is interested in the extended field of activity of the artist in the whole range of artistic production. Moving between the positions of artist, organizer, publisher, curator and editor is part of the artist's practice. He is currently working as a doctoral student at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bratislava with the topic of Art in Times of Anxieties and Depressions.