[artinfo] UMELEC Magazine

[e-Flux]

UMELEC Magazine
<http://www.divus.cz>http://www.divus.cz

Since its inception Umelec International has remained the only 
international art magazine in English about contemporary visual 
culture in Central Europe and beyond. The magazine is published in 
the Czech Republic and every issue comes out in a separate Czech and 
English language version. Our contributors and readers extend from 
the heart of Europe through the region and into the rest of the 
world. In the future Umelec will use this as its starting point. 
Domestic art happenings are coming into more and more contact with 
what is happening elsewhere, and the sharpened awareness of these 
happenings will surely come into confrontation with what is going on 
outside our borders.

The focus of the magazine will expand into territories that world 
magazines typically relegate to the periphery. New columns will be 
more contentious, but at the same time they will bravely infiltrate 
our environment: Umelec is to refute the lingering dominance of 
apolitical approaches to art.

Umelec will follow trends, but expose their limitations and create 
trends of its own. It will leave proper consideration of the 
appearances of the world to others and with simple calm open itself 
up to this era of chaos and adversity. This is the only way that the 
myriad branches of the delta that is visual culture today can come 
into being.

Umelec will come to you. That's why the magazine supported and 
visited the Biennial in Tirana and didn't support the Biennial in 
Prague. That's why in January we explored the art community in Kosovo 
- look for the write-up in the latest issue. That's why Umelec spent 
so much time in and around Germany, so as to put out an issue in 2004 
about the German art reality from a different point of view. That's 
why Umelec is strengthening its relationship with Slovakia and 
Central Europe, to become a magazine of cosmopolitan activities in 
all of their local forms, even if some of the branches of the delta 
trickle off into nothing.

An issue of Umelec is dedicated to more focused regional or national 
issues, and always tries to bring to life the current social-cultural 
situation, including its more marginal aspects. We do not consider 
culture as a decoration of the state body, but as one of the most 
important inspiring values of life, even if it is radical or strange. 
To us, art is not only the world of galleries and curators, but also 
what is hidden in the ghetto, streets and other apparently abandoned 
cultural corners. Contemporary art and culture can be a piercing 
insight from the critical, magical mirror of the world and its 
future. We are convinced that the contemporary artist is capable of 
seeing, feeling and hearing things that are normally obscured. It is 
also a fact that anyone can be an artist, anyone who is willing to 
overcome every possible obstacle.

The same social processes that cause the stable person in a mature 
society to lose his sense of reality, force the world of contemporary 
art to try and discover it once again. The same social processes that 
cause the moral and political elite to abandon culture, force 
contemporary culture to politicize and moralize.

And as long as we are able to put it out, you can read about this and 
more in Umelec International.

<http://www.divus.cz>http://www.divus.cz
order: shop at mail.divus.cz
contact: umelec at mail.divus.cz