January 15th 2008, 6pm to 9pm, Sala Rekalde, Alameda de Recalde 30, Bilbao (Spain), Within the framework of the exhibition “1,2,3…Avant-Gardes”, the first session of the symposium entitled “Art as Contextual Art” divided in two sessions will take place at sala rekalde. The invited speakers to this first session are Carles Guerra, Jan Świdziński and Jan Verwoert. An introduction will be given by the curators of the show, Lukasz Ronduda, Leire Vergara and Florian Zeyfang. Contextualism, unlike Conceptualism, aimed to re-evaluate the definition of art as a practice that related not just to the context of art but also to other cultural and political spheres as a way of stressing out its own relationships with the everyday life. In the same way, Contextualism tried to break down the already fixed hierarchies in the 1970s between the centre and the peripheries of the existing art world. The speakers invited to this session of the symposium will depart from the contextual thesis of Jan Świdziński in order to evaluate the relevance of the context in the contemporary art production. Info: tel +34 94 4068755 fax +34 94 4068754 e-mail: salarekalde@bizkaia.net; www.salarekalde.bizkaia.net