Post-Industralia Annex: Eastern Sugar. A meeting with Ilona Nemeth

The EASTERN SUGAR project that will be presented by its author, Ilona Nemeth, investigates into the production of sugar in Central Europe. The commodity in question can be seen as a metaphor of Europe and the world which experience continuous transformations.

The artist starts from the history of sugar industry in Slovakia to then put it into a wider context of a global history of food processing industry. She encourages critical reflection on the impact of communist and neo-liberal economics on the countries of Central Europe.

Using the language of contemporary art, EASTERN SUGAR is intended to throw light on social effects of historical decisions made by politicians and business circles. Nemeth diagnoses the root causes of the present crisis and asks questions about responsibility. However, above all, the project aims to work out tools for better understanding of analogous processes that we witness today and their future consequences.

EASTERN SUGAR is an international, interdisciplinary project which reflects the latest aspects of the history of Central Europe using sugar industry as an example. It embraces artistic and curatorial activities, including creating new works of art, organisation of five international group exhibitions, and an exhaustive publication. Installations, public and educational programmes that engage the audience are also components of EASTERN SUGAR.

Website easternsugar.eu

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Ilona Nemeth – an artist, professor, organizer, and a curator, lives in Slovakia. Her artistic practice is seeking to strike a balance between personal experience of growing up in a country tormented by political turmoil and a universal history of the Eastern Block countries in the transition period from 1990 until now. She was a professor and the head of Studio IN which ran an international education programme “Open Studio” at the Faculty of Intermedia of the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Bratislava between 2014 and 2019. Her solo project EASTERN SUGAR was presented at Kunsthalle Bratislava in 2018.

Her works have been exhibited at many solo and group shows, e.g., in Bratislava, Prague, Budapest, Vienna, Helsinki, and Rome. She represented Slovakia (together with J. Suruvka) at the 49th Venice Biennale in 2001. She also co-organised a series of exhibitions titled “Private Nationalism” in 6 countries (2014-2015); Universal Hospitality 1., 2016, Vienna, Austria and Prague, the Czech Republic, 2017. Currently, the artist is working on an international exhibition and research project EASTERN SUGAR co-funded by the EU Creative Europe Programme.

Dr. Magdalena Rek-Woźniak - a sociologist and cultural expert, she works at the Institute of Sociology of the University of Łódź. Academically, Rek-Woźniak deals with the social structure, media discourse, pop culture and urban policy. She wrote several dozen articles dedicated to this subject and a book on the social mobility of young adults from the Łódź region. Currently, Rek-Woźniak is realizing a research project comparing urban policies in Łódź and Tampere. She is a member of Polish Sociological Association, the Japan Sociological Society and the British Sociological Association. In her free time, Rek-Woźniak reads reportages and listens to music nonstop.

We also encourage to look into materials from previous editions of the series of meetings titled “Post-Industralia - transformations” drafted by Marta Madejska at the turn of 2019 and 2020.

• Post-Industralia: "PGR. Obrazy" [PGR-State Agricultural Farms. Images] – screening and discussion with the participation of Joanna Warecha and Monika Borys
• Post-Industralia: Kiedy przemysł był kobietą [When Industry Was a Woman]
• Post-Industralia: Symfonia Fabryki Ursus. [Ursus Factory Symphony] A live conversation with  Jaśmina Wójcik and Igor Stokfiszewski
• Post-Industralia: Łódź/Tampere. Wspólna przeszłość, różna pamięć [Łódź/Tampere. Common Future, Different Memory]

The project is co-financed by International Visegrad Fund and the Creative Europe Programme: