Summit 2015

Creative Time Summit
Founded in New York City, USA , in 1974.
Based in New York City.

The Creative Time Summit is an annual conference dedicated to addressing the world’s most challenging social and political issues. Since its inception in 2009, the Summit has gathered artists, activists, curators, scholars, policymakers, and theorists to present their work to a global audience. In addition to its thousands of live attendees, more than seventy international “screening sites” host complimentary programming while individuals tune in to the Summit via livestream from around the world. Past Summits have explored urban cultural production (Art, Place, and Dislocation in the 21st Century City, 2013), income disparity and civic engagement (Confronting Inequity and Revolutions in Public Practice, 2012), and the relationships between migration, nationalism, surveillance, and xenophobia (Creative Time Summit: Stockholm, 2014). Presented annually at the Creative Time Summit, the Leonore Annenberg Prize for Art and Social Change is given to artists who engage with the critical issues of our time and work to advance the causes of equity and justice.
For the 56th Biennale di Venezia, the 2015 Creative Time Summit: The Curriculum explores the relationships between knowledge production and social contracts that exist inside and outside of formal education. What learning practices reinforce colonialist views, leave out essential narratives of history, or support dominant power structures? How do new technologies affect the way information is controlled and disseminated? These expanded questions of curricula interrogate the systems that govern, administrate, teach, and ultimately produce knowledge within individuals and the social body. Through interdisciplinary presentations, keynote speakers, performances, screenings, panel discussions, artist projects, and workshops, the Summit addresses topics such as information technology, education policy, the geography of learning, school economics, decolonialized pedagogy, and knowledge preservation.
Past Summit presenters include performer Laurie Anderson, Harvard professor Neil Brenner, executive director of the Stanford University Institute for Diversity in the Arts Jeff Chang, National Endowment for the Arts fellow Mel Chin, Documenta curator Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, Turner prizewinning artist Jeremy Deller, 56th Biennale di Venezia curator Okwui Enwezor, NYC cultural affairs commissioner Tom Finkelpearl, artist Theaster Gates, MoMA Director of Education Pablo Helguera, artist Thomas Hirschhorn, MacArthur and Guggenheim award winner Alfredo Jaar, Icelandic parliamentarian Birgitta Jonsdottir, MacArthur fellow Rick Lowe, Bogota mayor Antanas Mockus Šivickas, Academy Award-nominated filmmaker Laura Poitras, EU parliamentarian Soraya Post, The Wire actor Wendell Pierce, prime minister of Albania Edi Rama, Principe de Asturias award-winning sociologist Dr. Saskia Sassen, and Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek.