Wednesday, January 28, 2009

A performance of Lykke Li and Bon Iver doing Lykke's track 'Dance Dance Dance' in L.A.


Lykke Li & Bon Iver doing 'Dance Dance Dance' in L.A from Lykke Li on Vimeo.

A performance of Lykke Li and Bon Iver doing Lykke's track 'Dance Dance Dance' in L.A.

Lykke Li


Lykke Li - Tonight from Lykke Li on Vimeo.

Lykke Li - Tonight

Tuesday, January 27, 2009

PULSE New York



Following a strong showing in Miami, PULSE New York returns to Pier 40 in Greenwich Village for its fourth and most diverse New York edition. The 95 galleries represent 26 countries throughout the Americas, Europe, and Asia with 11 galleries from six Asian nations. PULSE New York expands its presentation of large-scale sculptures and installations, and includes the return of the PULSE PLAY video lounge curated by Marina Fokidis. A complete list of all cultural programming will be available in February. 

"With the Armory Show now featuring modern art exhibitors this year, PULSE now holds the role of New York's premier art fair dedicated solely to contemporary art" said Helen Allen, Executive Director of PULSE Contemporary Art Fair. "Despite the economic climate, PULSE has continued to grow both in Miami and New York without sacrificing quality. While adjustments remain, art fairs have proven themselves an essential component of the art community, and PULSE appears to be among its most resilient."

PULSE NEW YORK 09 EXHIBITORS
55 (Shanghai), 2x2projects (Amsterdam), Aicon Gallery (London/New York/Palo Alto), Angell Gallery (Toronto), Artrepco Gallery (Zurich), ASPN (Leipzig), Baer Ridgway Exhibitions (San Francisco), Galerie Anita Beckers (Frankfurt), Birch Libralato (Toronto), Bitforms Gallery (New York), Black & White Gallery (New York), Monika Bobinska (London), Rena Bransten Gallery (San Francisco), BravinLee Programs (New York), Chi-Wen Gallery (Taipei), ChinaSquare Gallery (New York), Catharine Clark Gallery (San Francisco), ColletPark (Paris), Conner Contemporary Art (Washington D.C.), Copro/Nason Gallery (Santa Monica), Curator's Office (Washington, D.C.), Davidson Contemporary (New York), DNA (Berlin), Faurschou (Copenhagen/Beijing), Lukas Feichtner Gallery (Vienna), Rosamund Felsen Gallery (Santa Monica), FTC. (Berlin), Finesilver Gallery (San Antonio), Freight + Volume (New York), Gaain Gallery (Seoul), GalerieKleindienst (Leipzig), Caren Golden Fine Art (New York), Habana (Habana City), Patrick Heide Contemporary Art (London), Richard Heller Gallery (Santa Monica), Galerie Ernst Hilger/Hilger Contemporary (Vienna), Horrach Moya (Palma de Mallorca), Jousse Enterprise (Paris), Anna Klinkhammer Galerie (Düsseldorf), Knapp Gallery (Philadelphia), Kopeikin Gallery (Los Angeles), Kusseneers Gallery (Antwerp), Léna & Roselli Gallery (Budapest), Richard Levy Gallery (Albuquerque), Light & Sie (Dallas), Diana Lowenstein Fine Arts (Miami), Lyons Wier Ortt Gallery (New York), Madder139 (London), Magnan Projects (New York), Marx & Zavattero (San Francisco), Nina Menocal (Mexico City), Nicholas Metivier Gallery (Toronto), Mixed Greens (New York), Mark Moore Gallery (Santa Monica), Nettie Horn (London), One And J. Gallery (Seoul), P.P.O.W. Gallery (New York), Pepper's Gallery (Tokyo), Perugi Artecontemporanea (Padua), Praxis International Art (New York), Lora Reynolds Gallery (Austin), Yancey Richardson Gallery (New York), Stefan Roepke (Cologne/Madrid), Galerie Römerapotheke (Zurich), Ruarts Gallery (Moscow), Carrie Secrist Gallery (Chicago), Galeria Senda (Barcelona), Shoshana Wayne Gallery (Santa Monica), Silverlens Gallery (Manila), Singapore Tyler Print Institute (Singapore), Slewe (Amsterdam), Space (Bratislava), Margaret Thatcher Projects (New York), Tokyo Gallery + BTAP (Tokyo), Vanessa Art Link (Jakarta), Vernon Gallery (Praque), Virgil de Voldere Gallery (New York), Winkleman Gallery (New York), Bryce Wolkowitz Gallery (New York), Galerie Nordine Zidoun (Luxembourg), Zürcher (Paris/New York)

IMPULSE NEW YORK 09 EXHIBITORS
Jen Bekman Gallery (New York), Collette Blanchard Gallery (New York), Bonelli Arte Contemporanea (Mantua), Galerie [SAS] (Montreal), Daneyal Mahmood Gallery (New York), Morgan Lehman (New York), Megumi Ogita Gallery (Tokyo), Pierre-François Ouellette Art Contemporain (Montreal), Randall Scott Gallery (Washington, D.C.), Charlie Smith London (London), Sollertis (Toulouse), Patricia Sweetow Gallery (San Francisco), AMT | Alberto Matteo Torri (Milan), Witzenhausen Gallery (Amsterdam/New York)

For more information about PULSE Contemporary Art Fair, please visit 
http://www.pulse-art.com 

Nam June Paik Art Center



The Nam June Paik Art Center proudly announces the launch of its lecture and discussions series withThe Gift of Nam June Paik 1, a seminar commemorating the closing of its inaugural festival NOWJUMP

The 
Gift of Nam June Paik 1 gathers specialists from various fields of research to celebrate Nam June Paik's creativity and expand discussions on his work. As a concluding journey of the NOW JUMPFestival, the seminar ambitions to sketch a landscape where neglected aspects of Paik's practice can be considered and supported. Reactivating and actualizing the nomadic characteristics of Paik's life, the different speakers' presentations and areas of expertise echo the boundless terrain of Paik's work suggesting that being a pioneer of video art was only a single station within a much larger journey. What topics and perspectives can be imagined within contemporary social and political contexts when considering Paik's role from these extended perspectives?

The first two sessions of the seminar are intended to promote shifts in presumptions and activate discourses on Paik that extend beyond established presuppositions. In the morning of February 4, Bazon Brock addresses the socio-political contexts of post war Germany in relation to artistic practice, situating the historical meeting of Paik and television within a larger framework. Midori Yamamura follows these arguments with a presentation on the new ontology that threaded through Japan, the United States and Europe in the period following World War II in relation to Paik and the formative Fluxus movement. 

In the afternoon, Kim Suki examines the cultural context of Korea under Japanese colonization during the 1930s and 1940s and Mary Bauermeister offers testimonial of her close relationship with Paik during his stay in Germany. Further enhancing this focus on Paik's early years and the transgressions in his way of thinking that place him in between East and West, Kim Jin Sok's delves into the philosophical frameworks of the communities and societies influential to Paik.
 

Württembergischer Kunstverein Stuttgart



"No Room to Answer – Projections" by the Swiss/U.S. artist duo based in Austin, Texas, Teresa Hubbard and Alexander Birchler. With seven video installations, the exhibition presents central aspects of Hubbard and Birchler's work, which expands the narrative forms of theater and cinema in an unparalleled way.

In their elaborately produced video works—both filmically and architecturally—Hubbard and Birchler bring into play the shifts between the conscious and the subconscious, presence and absence, inwardness and outwardness. They fathom conflicts involving desire and repression, gender positions, remembering and forgetting. The house, or the dwelling, as an unstable space between home and haunting, frequently comes to the fore in their work as well. Through their open narratives, which interweave agency and its spaces in a complex manner, Hubbard and Birchler unhinge the spatiotemporal order. Involved scenes include both real locations and mise-en-scènes appropriated by the artists based on personal experiences, historical research, and literary or filmic sources.

The 
European premiere of the video installation "Grand Paris Texas" from 2008 is being hosted by the Württembergischer Kunstverein in Stuttgart. The protagonist of the work is "The Grand," a long-abandoned cinema in Paris, Texas—the same small town made famous by Wim Wenders through his 1984 film of the same name, without the actual town even having made an appearance. "Grand Paris Texas" interweaves various narratives and metanarratives: about an obsolete site of filmic illusions, about a small town and its entanglements with Wim Wenders's film as well as with the French capital, and about the techniques and production methods of filmmaking itself. In "Grand Paris Texas", Hubbard and Birchler for the first time take up formats of the documentary so as to equally approach both real and imaginary spaces and situations.

Teresa Hubbard, born 1965 in Dublin, Ireland, and Alexander Birchler, born 1962 in Baden, Switzerland, have been working together since 1990. Their works have been shown in numerous biennials, including the Venice Biennale (1999), the Busan Biennale (2008), or the Liverpool Biennial (2008) and in exhibition venues like the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington D.C., the Museum of Contemporary Art at the Kunstmuseum Basel, the Hamburger Bahnhof–Museum for Contemporary Art in Berlin, the Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich, the Whitney Museum in New York, the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo, and the Reina Sofía in Madrid.

Monday, January 26, 2009

Jockum Nordstrom






Jockum Nordström (b. 1963) has earned an international reputation with his drawings and collages - playful, dreamy and sometimes erotically charged. Now Moderna Museet is showing some 50 of Jockum Nordström's works from 2000-2005. A Stick in the Wood is his largest solo exhibition to date. 

 

Jockum Nordström is a story-teller; his sensuous drawings and collages stretch from secret fantasies to the intrusive reality of everyday life, moving through time and space, from high to low. He alludes to the imagery of naivism and surrealism, and to popular culture. For the exhibition at Moderna Museet Jockum Nordström has created two new works, one of which consists of A Stick in the Wood, The Pedigree Composer, The Drawling Song and Good Riddance to Bad Rubbish, four connected collage works that are intended to develop over time; the other is a deck of cards which has been produced in a limited edition to be sold in the Modera Museet shop. The exhibition also features some 30 drawings and 20 collages, borrowed from private collectors and institutions mainly in the USA and Sweden.


Jockum Nordström's work has aroused a massive response in the contemporary art world. Earlier this year, he was elected Artist of the Year at the prestigious Armory Show in New York, which commissioned him to produce the catalogue and featured his works in all its publicity material. He participated in the Istanbul Biennial in 2003 and in the group exhibition Drawing Now - Eight Propositions, at the MoMA, New York. Jockum Nordström is represented in several collections, including those of the MoMA and Moderna Museet. 

In addition to the drawings and collages now being shown at Moderna Museet, Jockum Nordström has also made animated films, the children's books about Sailor and Pekka, carpets, embellishments, record sleeves and illustrations for books, newspapers and magazines.

Anselm Reyle





AR085.jpg

Anselm Reyle was born in Tübingen, Germany in 1970. He currently lives and works in Berlin.

Reyle's stripe paintings are instantly recognizable as responses to the formalist vocabulary of Clement Greenberg that defined the art of the 1950s and 1960s. Reyle references iconic abstractionists ranging from Kenneth Noland to Otto Freundlich. Reyle's "objets trouvés," a reference to his multi-media installations that include sculpture and found neon lights, are in constant dialogue about the role of modernism today. 

Reyle's critique of painting extends to his exploration of the constantly shifting criteria required for a work to be considered complete. He is one of few contemporary German painters examining the lessons of abstraction and their place in contemporary painting at a moment when figurative painting has gained critical momentum. 

The artist's past solo exhibitions include shows at the Modern Institute in Glasgow (2007) and Galerie Almine Rech, Paris; one of new sculptures and paintings at Kunsthalle Zurich (2006); Galerie Giti Nourbakhsch, Berlin and Gavin Brown's Enterprise, New York. He has also participated in numerous international group exhibitions including ones at Tate Modern, London and the Palazzo Grassi, Venice, Italy.

REDCAT, Los Angeles



Atelier Bow-Wow (Yoshiharu Tsukamoto and Momoyo Kaijima) explores the use and function of space within urban environments. As working architects in Tokyo, Bow-Wow developed the term "pet architecture"—a style of small, ad hoc, multi-functional structures that make the most of limited space, a phenomenon in densely developed cities like Tokyo that integrate need, improvisation and ingenuity. For over 10 years they have also created "micro public spaces," using the framework of art galleries and museum spaces to experiment with structure, movement and function. 

Bow-Wow's newly commissioned project for REDCAT titled 
Small Case Study House is the culmination of an extended residency period in Los Angeles researching the Case Study House program and using this post-war project initiated by John Entenza and the Arts & Architecture magazine as a point of departure in thinking about domestic dwellings. Now infamous, the Case Study House program was a fertile period of experimentation in Southern California that enlisted architects to design (and build) low cost housing using pre-fabricated materials from the war industry. Informed by the principles of the program as well as the rich urban fabric of Los Angeles, Bow-Wow's installation will respond to contemporary forms of the house as it relates to economic and ecological conditions, ideas of customization and what Bow-Wow calls "architectural behaviorology." 

Small Case Study House consists of three microstructures—BBQ coliseum, sunset house and hammock house—as models whose form is dictated by specificity of use, environmental context and human engagement. All structures are built with salvaged wood from deconstructed homes in the Los Angeles area supplied by the non-profit organization ReUse People. In a rampant consumer-based contemporary society, Bow-Wow's project quietly calls into question an ecological problem of excess and waste while reactivating architecture to the rudimentary functions of shelter, sustenance and play. This is Bow-Wow's first solo exhibition in the U.S. 

Atelier Bow-Wow was established by Yoshiharu Tsukamoto and Momoyo Kaijima in 1992. Tsukamoto (b.1965, Kanagawa, Japan) and Kaijima (b.1969, Tokyo) have participated most recently in the 2008 Liverpool Biennial, 
Psycho Buildings at The Hayward Gallery in London and the 2008 Venice Architecture Biennale.

Temporäre Kunsthalle Berlin



imon Starling's works deal with natural and cultural transformation processes. Composed in a series of conceptual and practical steps that appear as an experimental set-up, they at the same time tell a story of change. At the centre of Starling's show at the Temporäre Kunsthalle Berlin two installations revolve around the climate as a necessary precondition for the existence of natural and consequently also artificial systems. A cactus is brought to the Berlin winter and a motor vehicle is converted to provide heating; in the second installation, a natural system generates the adequate conditions for presenting sensitive artefacts such as historical photographs. With the third site-specific installation, created specifically for the Kunsthalle, Starling addresses the notion of a cycle alternating between nature and technology, by reconfiguring a chainsaw to a new use.

As comprehensible as Starling's conceptual and material constructions may be, they remain fragile poetic allusions that are as idiosyncratic as they are aesthetically captivating. His works are based not least on the Romantic insight that, upon closer examination, "everything is connected with everything".

The installation 
Kakteenhaus (Cactus House) (2002) simulates a greenhouse environment for a cactus which Starling took out of its original ecosystem in Spain and brought to Northern Europe by car. The car is parked outside the Kunsthalle, with its engine removed and set up inside. Extended conduits and cables connect the two elements in such a way that the heat produced by the running engine provides an adequate climate for the cactus. While the inherent contradiction of presenting exotic plants in unsuitable climates is thus made obvious in a grotesquely exaggerated way, the interweaving of material objects and the stories related to their origin create the constructions situated between documentation and fiction.

With 
Plant Room (2008) Starling produces the ideal conservational conditions for a selection of sensitive original photos of Karl Blossfeldt (1865-1932). Blossfeldt is considered one of the most significant photographers of New Objectivity. His interest in the detailed depiction of plants was directed towards their composition and structure as well as the manner in which they could be transferred to a formal vocabulary of architecture and ornamentation. Starling presents Blossfeldt's photographs in an archaic clay brick house. A special quality of clay brick architecture lies in the fact that it provides an optimal climatic balance. The integrated heating system draws the water it needs from the adjacent Spreekanal and brings it to the desired temperature by means of a fuel cell.

Frac Bourgogne



Tere Recarens' exhibition at the Frac Bourgogne results of two recent visits to Mali. The artist (born in 1967, Spain), set out to discover the meaning of her first name for the Bamanan, the country's majority ethnic group. In Mali, the word tere refers to a particular part of the personality, a kind of "karma". 

Tere Recarens started exhibiting her work in the early 1990s. Art for her, is above all a precise way of living today. A residency in New York or a show in Tokyo are occasions for opening up a new gap in reality.

Tere Recarens apparently displays superfluity and amusement as primary values. Her drawings, her photographs and videos, illustrate acts imagined through the mere pleasure of experiencing them as felt by her, simple gestures to a point where they become absurd. While concepts of efficiency and profitability dominate the world, Tere Recarens's freedom bursts forth like an unlikely reality. Self-portraiture takes on a deeper collective scope. 

Maa Tere Manalen ("someone with a fiery tere") was devised during Tere Recarens's second stay in Mali. After she learnt in Estonia that "tere" meant "good day" (ETC, 2002), she plunged into a similar investigation around "tere" meanings in the animist culture. Willing not to be a common tourist, she constructed the conditions for other possible encounters. Consequently, she had a fabric printed which traced all the motifs linked with the "tere", and exchanged it for photos of all people who helped her.

Through this barter she set up a shared interest, another economy in which quality of the shared experience dominates.

In the exhibition, the film of these encounters is marked by the raw state of the present and by the permanent availability of Tere Recarens. She has elected to show the film in a room made of found and exchanged fabrics with motifs printed symbolizing private or public goings-on, recounting the lives of families and states. Tere Recarens creates a colourful space, a collage of all these reports, somewhere between function and aesthetics, in which she incorporates her own images.

She has also elected to put three pieces together: 
Fucking Damned Glory, Fucking Glory and Glory — scarves of supporters brought together, a bed cover, and a wall hanging. The title expresses the artist's distance with regard to these objects. They are, like African fabrics, a symbolic form. The scarves ofFucking Damned Glory, produced during her stay in China last year, were also, for her, sources to learn The Chinese language.

Language is a way of meeting people, even when it is not shared. Tere Recarens speaks a free language in different tongues, eliminating all the boundaries. She declares again her sense of freedom. The collage of exchanges in the film, confused by the differing accents, encompasses the essential value represented by the word for her, within the time of the encounter.

Thursday, January 22, 2009

Pipilotti Rist: Pour Your Body Out

Pipilotti Rist's lush multimedia installations playfully and provocatively merge fantasy and reality. MoMA commissioned the Swiss artist to create a monumental site-specific installation that immerses the Museum's Marron Atrium in twenty-five-foot-high moving images. Visitors will be able to experience the work while walking through the space or sitting upon a sculptural seating island designed by the artist.

Behind the Scenes with Pipilotti Rist:



Shadi Ghadirian, Like Everyday


Shadi Ghadirian, Like Every Day


Ghadirian’s Ghajar series describes the paradox of contemporary life in Iran, portraying women in anachronistic settings, out of place in both history and modern day. In creating her photos Ghadirian has to strictly adhere to the moral codes of Iranian culture: women must be represented in an appropriately modest way, bodies and hair covered, and never in contact with men; the artist herself is not permitted to work alone in many public places. Rather than seeing this as restrictive, Ghadirian uses these guidelines to celebrate the sense of community these regulations encourage. Inspired by 19th century photographs from the Qajar period - the first portraits to be permitted by religious law - Ghadirian carefully reconstructed the opulent style of these images with the help of many friends: borrowing antique furnishings and costumes, commissioning the painted backdrops, inviting them to pose in the images. Picturing each woman in a bygone era, each scene is jarringly interrupted by the presence of contemporary products - a phone, boom-box, hoover - pointing to a culture clash of tradition and progress. The women stare out from the photos with an unnerving directness, detached from their environment, and confident within themselves.

Diana Al-Hadid

Diana Al-Hadid, Self Melt


Diana Al-Hadid, Self Melt

Diana Al-Hadid is a Syrian-American artist who lives and works in New York. Her sculptures take 'towers' as their central theme, drawing together a wide variety of associations: power, wealth, technological and urban development, ideas of progress and globalism. They are also – both in legends such as the Tower of Babel, and reality, such as the horrors of the World Trade Centre attacks – symbols of the problems of cultural difference and conflict. Al-Hadid’s Tower of Infinite Problemsposes as a toppled skyscraper. Made from crude materials such as plaster, Styrofoam, wax, and cardboard, her structure is a monument to human fallibility. Sprawling on the floor like an imaginary archaeological find, the sculpture places the viewer in a fictional role as futuristic observer, mourning the tragic follies of a past (our current) civilization. If viewed from the end, the two parts of the structure converge in an optical illusion, creating a spiral vortex suggesting a cyclical repetition of history.

Wednesday, January 21, 2009

Franz Ferdinand


Franz Ferdinand - Ulysses

The Bird and The Bee


The Bird and the Bee - Polite Dance Song

Tuesday, January 20, 2009

Kunstverein München



Kunstverein München is pleased to present the first comprehensive institutional exhibition of Irish artist Duncan Campbell. 

Duncan Campbell`s film and videoworks assess the rethorics of youth and liberation movements as well as those of documentary aesthetics. Loosely combined resource material from film- and photo archives as well as on-screen animations, fusing documentary with fictive moments, build the backdrop for portraits of people and social milieus. 

Kunstverein München will for the first time present all of Duncan Campbells recent films "Bernadette" (2008), "Sigmar" (2008) as well as "Falls Burns Malone Fiddles" (2003) in one exhibition. 

"Falls Burn Malone Fiddles", a film about 1970s and 80s youth culture in Belfast, portraits a hopeless life between council estates, clubs, alcohol and the street. The film is constructed from images of archives such as "Belfast Exposed" or "Community Visual Image" with a voiceover by actor Ewan Bremner who monologues about the relationship between photography, reality, the individual and society: "Language being the only attribute proper to me. The only property I'm certain of, but would it not be just as proper to say that I am the property of language." Animated diagrams, geometrical shapes or protest symbols pretend to explain the presented as much as they penetrate as an alien body the pictures content. 

"Bernadette" tells the story of the Northern Ireland Republican and Liberation activist Bernadette Devlin who in 1969, aged 21, became the youngest member of the Houses of Parliament. Campbell depicts contemporary history and its actors as well as the methods of their representation within the media. While critically analyzing documentary strategies, Campbell develops a very sensitive and subjective portrait of Bernadette Devlin. 

"Documentary is a peculiar form of fiction. It has the appearance of verity grounded in many of the same formal conventions as fiction – narrative drive, linear plot, and closure. Yet, the relationship between author/subject/audience is rarely investigated in the same way as it is in meta-fiction."

In his work Campbell not only questions documentary aspects of the genre documentary, but also in how far "real life" characters such as Bernadette Devlin are in our post-political and post-historical present fictitious characters themselves. 

Kunsthalle Zürich



At the Kunsthalle Zürich, Annette Kelm (born in Stuttgart in 1975, lives and works in Berlin) combines a group of over 40 photographs from highly diverse worlds of motifs. The works were created from 2001 and also include new works specially developed for this exhibition.

The photographs – which also will be shown in a solo exhibition at Kunst-Werke Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin, this spring as well as in the Hamburger Bahnhof in the context of the "Preis der Nationalgalerie für junge Kunst 2009" for which Kelm has been short listed – appear to perpetuate traditional forms of photographic representation in an unspectacular way: i.e. they comprise still lifes, portraits, object photographs, architectural and landscape photographs in moderate formats, which tend to be based on conventional studio or landscape practices. Annette Kelm works traditionally, her photographs are taken with an analogue large-format camera and are individual handmade prints. The photographs of the artist appear to follow conceptual and critical strategies in that her motifs refer to historically significant correlations. However she undermines the promise of objectivity in her works by adding props that seem surreal or appear to belong to a subjective myth ology. In doing that her motifs transmit into a highly complex network of relationships, which are both visual and substantive in nature, in which constructive conflicts arise between what is shown and what is intended; thus seeing becomes more important than knowing.

Together with Annette Kelm we are pleased to present in Kunsthalle Zürich Parallel the exhibition "Audio, video, disco", an international group exhibition featuring artists Nina Beier and Marie Lund, Claire Fontaine, Luca Frei, Sharon Hayes, Sturtevant, and Cerith Wyn Evans, curated by David Bussel. By looking at various formations of revolutionary dissent – social movements, identity politics – the artists in the exhibition reflect on the grammar of history as a series of soft configurations of acts, events, and correspondences in counterpoint to today. This act of negotiation, the analysis of revolutionary history as an unending process, freighted with a sense of mistrust and doubt, is the thematic departure of the exhibition.

With a special contribution by Rosemarie Trockel.
For additional information: 
http://www.kunsthallezurich.ch

Kunsthalle Zürich thanks: Präsidialdepartement der Stadt Zürich, Luma Stiftung, Point d'ironie, agnès b.

Events:
The exhibition also features a concurrent film and video programme including 
Project for a Revolution(2000) by Johanna Billing, Mao-Hope March (1966) von Öyvind Fahlström, Videogrames of a Revolution(1992) by Harun Farocki and Andrei Ujica, A Brief History of Jimmie Johnson's Legacy (2006) by Mario Garcia Torres, Once in the XX Century (2004) by Deimantas Narkevicius, November (2004) by Hito Steyerl and others.

Please consult our website 
www.kunsthallezurich.ch for programme schedule.

Saturday, January 17, 2009

The distance between you and me


Gonzalo Lebrija - The distance between you and me new project for art-la 2009 with I-20 gallery

Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art



The Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art houses an exceptional collection of international contemporary art. The collection is vast and expanding, and it can best be described as a carefully selected cluster of major works by leading international contemporary artists.

Over the next two years, visitors are offered a chance to see works from the collection in a new light. This long-term engagement presents a potpourri of artists, stylistic genres and complex social, political and aesthetic themes. 

The concept of rotation enables us to work with the collection as a whole but not at the same time. It presents a way to create constellations of works 'on the move', and facilitates surprising and unique assemblages of art across a large, diverse conceptual and thematic spectrum. 

Rotating the works introduces the notion of a broken linearity, as works from several decades and different political and cultural contexts are shown together. It also allows for an atypical geographical order as 'Western' artists share the space with 'Eastern' artists. Rotation, in this way, highlights the 'alphabetical', artist-based nature of the Astrup Fearnley Collection, emphasising individual artists rather than an abstract chronological or historical framework.

Rotation allows for a multitude of possibilities, and it generates new readings and experiences of particular objects and creates 'inter-work' relationships, which may even reveal hidden and mysterious coalitions and affiliations.

Artists included in the exhibition are: Allora &Calzadilla, Matthew Barney, Frank Benson, Cao Fei, Paul Chan, Chu Yun, Gardar Eide Einarsson, Olafur Eliasson, Gilbert & George, Douglas Gordon, Shilpa Gupta, Guyton \Walker, Damien Hirst, Anselm Kiefer, Liu Wei, Bjarne Melgaard, Shintaro Miyake, Adam Putnam, Yang Fudong.

Education and public contact is important at the Astrup Fearnley Museum, and we seek to further develop ourselves in this field. The museum has offered free admission since 2004, and we are now in a process of strengthening the contact with our audience. We introduce a new Museum Lounge and Art Club, where personal membership includes free catalogues for current exhibitions, newsletters, reduced prices on earlier publications and invitations to openings as well as other events. 

One Day Sculpture



One Day Sculpture is not an exhibition. It is a cumulative series of one-day public artworks commissioned across New Zealand over one year. Featuring new work by 27 artists from 18 countries, the series includes Thomas Hirschhorn, Roman Ondák, Javier Tellez, Michael Parekowhai, Lara Almárcegui, Paola Pivi and Rirkrit Tiravanija. 

Led by the Litmus Research Initiative at Massey University and UK-based curator Claire Doherty, One Day Sculpture is realised in partnership with 12 leading arts organisations across New Zealand. The series runs through June 2009. 

One Day Sculpture was developed within a contemporary art landscape dominated by large-scale international biennial exhibitions. Responding to the increasingly performative, event-based and dispersed forms of contemporary art, One Day Sculpture seeks to harness the energies of the one-off event or festival, but within a longer-term cumulative and collaborative project. 

"One Day Sculpture sets out to challenge conventional curatorial formats," Doherty suggests, "which tend to set newly commissioned works within the framework of a six-week thematic exhibition bound to a specific location. This series asks a range of visiting and resident artists to each produce a project for a single day in the public realm in one of five regions in New Zealand. 

Whilst One Day Sculpture seeks to inspire new definitions of public sculpture, it does so as a series of fleeting interventions which, one after the other, then circulate beyond New Zealand entering the social imagination as documents, fictions and rumors."
 

The ambitious series commenced in August 2008. 7 projects have been realised to date, with another 14 projects planned for 2009 by artists including Lara Almárcegui, Billy Apple, Bik Van Der Pol, Bekah Carran, Thomas Hirschhorn, James Luna, Roman Ondák, Michael Parekowhai, Paola Pivi, Santiago Sierra, Superflex, Javier Tellez, Rirkrit Tiravanija and Bedwyr Williams.

For commissioned responses to each of the projects, the audio archive of talks, an online reader and information on forthcoming projects, please visit 
http://www.onedaysculpture.org.nz

Lithuanian Pavilion


The Lithuanian Pavilion is organized by the Vartai Gallery, which is the largest private gallery in Lithuania and the first private institution to represent Lithuania at the Venice Biennale. 

Commissioner Laura Rutkutė, curator Laima Kreivytė.

New York-based Lithuanian artist Žilvinas Kempinas employs videotape as a sculptural material rather than visual data carrier. In his installations invisible forces of gravity and air circulation animate architectural space reshaping it into a totally new environment. His latest work, a large-scale installationTUBE was created in Atelier Calder (Saché, France) and will be set up for the Lithuanian pavilion in Venice to resonate with the environment of the city. TUBE addresses physical and the optical experience of the viewer, passage of time, perception of the body and architecture.

Kempinas has been using magnetic tape since the beginning of this decade to construct monumental yet fragile spaces of experience. Playful gestures and geometric clarity are equally important. His artistic practice is based on recycling the principles of minimal, abstract, op art and kinetic art in the post-medium condition. 

"I am attracted to things that are capable of transcending their own banality and materiality to become something else, something more. I like the way that videotape is simultaneously delicate and durable, since it's meant to last. I can rip it easily with my hands because it's so thin, but I can also stretch it. Videotape is made to present the world in color, but it appears purely black. It's supposed to be this safe container of the past, but it is destined to vanish like a dinosaur, to become obsolete, pushed away by new technologies. It's a familiar mass-produced commodity, but it can be surprisingly sensual and can look almost alive if set in motion. It can be seen as a solid, thick, black line, but it can also disappear right in front of your eyes if it's turned on its side" (Žilvinas Kempinas in conversation with Veronica Roberts, Museo Magazine). 

Žilvinas Kempinas was born in 1969 in Plunge, Lithuania. He lives and works in New York. Solo exhibitions: Kunsthalle Wien, Austria (through January 25, 2009); Grand Café, Saint Nazare, France (2008); Contemporary Art Centre, Vilnius, Lithuania (2007); Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2006); P.S.1, New York (2003); Spencer Brownstone Gallery, New York (2004, 2006, 2007). Selected group shows: The Immediate Future, Lund Konsthall, Sweden (January 31 – March 29, 2009), Now Jump, Nam June Paik Art Center, Yongin/Seoul, Korea (through February 5, 2009), Manifesta 7, Bolzano (2008); New Work: Zilvinas Kempinas, Alyson Shotz, Mary Temple, SFMOMA (2008); Go East, Museum of Modern Art, Luxembourg (2008). In 2007, Kempinas was awarded the Calder Prize and Atelier Calder residency. 

Laura Rutkutė (1974) is a co-founder of Vartai Gallery, coordinator of an international contemporary art project ARTscape in collaboration with "Vilnius – European Capital of Culture 2009".

Laima Kreivytė (1972) is an art critic and curator based in Vilnius. In 2007, she was part of the curatorial team of Prague Biennale 3. Since June 2007, she has been working as a visual arts projects manager at "Vilnius – European Capital of Culture 2009".

Lithuanian Pavilion at the 53rd Venice Biennale is principally funded by the Lithuanian Ministry of Culture. 

Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt



THE SCHIRN KUNSTHALLE FRANKFURT SHOWS THE STILL LITTLE KNOWN LATE WORK OF THE ABSTRACT PAINTER ERNST WILHELM NAY

Ernst Wilhelm Nay is one of the most renowned German postwar artists. His abstract paintings are to be found in nearly all important public and private collections with works from that era. Nay's late work of the 1960s, dating mainly from the years after the artist's participation in the documenta III in 1964 to his death in 1968, is, however, less known and, therefore, still largely underrated. Presenting approximately 30 large-size paintings and 86 works on paper, the exhibition in the Schirn will focus on this late work for the first time, introducing an artist who, with his dynamically two-dimensional forms and clear colors transcending the pictorial space, makes an impression that is not historical at all but surprisingly up-to-date. The exhibition will also include a reconstruction of the spectacular Nay room at the documenta III of 1964, where three large-format works of the artist were hung from the ceiling, as an environment.

Ernst Wilhelm Nay (1902 Berlin – 1968 Cologne) has ranked among the most acclaimed representatives of abstract painting in Germany since the mid-fifties at the latest. When Nay began to dedicate himself to painting he did so without formal tuition. After having presented himself to Karl Hofer with three paintings, he was accepted to his painting class at the Berlin Academy of Fine Arts, where he completed his studies as Hofer's master-class student in 1928. In the course of the initiative "Degenerate Art," the Nazis confiscated ten of Nay's works in public collections in 1937. The artist was forbidden to show his works in exhibitions in Germany. From 1940 to 1946, Nay was put into action in World War II, but again and again found the opportunity to paint in utmost secrecy. After the war, Nay lived in Hofheim am Taunus until 1951. In 1951, Nay took up residence in Cologne with his second wife Elisabeth; the city was to remain the center of his life until his death. One of hi s most powerful work phases began with the 
Disc Pictures in 1954, which not only brought his breakthrough in Europe, where he participated in the first three documenta exhibitions and in the Venice Biennial, but also in the USA. In his Disc PicturesNay left behind all angular forms. Relying on crystal-clear, bright colors, he composed large and small discs and their intermediate forms into an exciting choreography of colors. The work group Eye Picturesdating from 1963 and after, which culminating in the pieces for the documenta III of 1964, was followed by the last phase of the Elementary Pictures in 1965, which ended with Nay's death in 1968.

The exhibition in the Schirn centers exclusively on Nay's little-known late work mainly created in the years from the documenta III to his death. One of the reasons for the insufficient awareness of his late work is its history of reception. Nay's participation in the documenta III caused a debate that was triggered by the painter and art critic Hans Platschek who attacked Nay in a polemic article in the weekly 
Die Zeit on 4 September 1964. One key reproach focused on Nay's prominent position at the documenta III, where the artist's three large-size Eye Pictures were not only presented in a separate room, but also hanging from the ceiling in a spectacular manner. The outcome of this debate was definitely not only a strain for Nay personally, but also influenced the public perception of the Elementary Pictures he painted after the documenta. Some important and influential friends and supporters of Nay's work reacted positively to the works of this last phase and regarded them as an interesting further development of the artist's lifelong approach. Other critics and especially private collectors, however, could not follow Nay on his new way. This explains why – compared to Nay's considerably better known work groups from the 1950s and early 1960s – there are far fewer works of this phase to be found in museums and private collections. The Eye Pictures are characterized by the addition of horizontal elements and by the "crossing out" of discs respectively, which made the viewer think of eyes, though Nay had completely dedicated himself to pure abstraction since the beginnings of the 1950s.

Tuesday, January 13, 2009

Kunstmuseum Basel Museum für Gegenwartskunst



The sculptures, gouaches, embroideries, photographs and installations by Enrico David (*1966 in Ancona, lives and works in London) feature a broad spectrum of cultural reference systems. Among others, these include Arte Povera, assemblage, set design and graphic art motifs from the 1920s and 30s, as well as numerous literary sources and elements from craft tradition. The works are characterised by enigmatic representations of the body, which are distorted or broken down into fragments, expressing the impossibility of a bodily unity. Different elements coalesce into a remnant—a head, limb, or indeterminate swelling.

The current exhibition circles around just a few elements. At the beginning and end are two photographs that, if considered as two halves, can only unravel with some difficulty. The first shows two small boys occupied with a piano. The facial expression of one of them seems discontented, his gesture forced. It is the artist himself, who at the age of three posed as a model for toy instrument advertisements. The second photograph, a strangely ingratiating portrait of a man, stands in stark contrast to the corporeal children pictures. The grotesque display of masculinity, with the unambiguous function of seduction, is repeated with a slightly altered facial expression in another photograph. They come from a mail-order catalogue for sex implements and stand for a certain artificially exaggerated type that can be exchanged at whim.

These two pictures provide the overlay for two larger-than-life balancing figures in wood, wire and paper, whose form is borrowed from a toy design by Koloman Moser for the Wiener Werkstätte from the 1910s. The knobby egg shapes—torso, head and arms merge into a single form—stand on two thin wooden bowlegs and runners. They comprise the center of the exhibition, surrounded by freestanding partition walls, on which the man's faces appear again as large-format mounted pictures. The motifs in the publication that accompanies the exhibition are treated the same way, allowing the pages of the book to be read in parallel to the three-dimensional installation in space.

A second installation presents itself as a kind of diorama, a playhouse that exploits the effect of trompe-l'oeil. We are spectators at a scene based on the Surrealist photo collage 
vielle femme et enfant (ca. 1935) by Dora Maar. The original picture shows a panelled room, the floor covered with mud, and a boy rubbing up against a woman. David reconstructs the space in its main features, but combines these with very personal materials, based on the bedroom that his father designed for him in the 1970s. The figures in the background have been exchanged for depictions of a wooden doll and the artist himself.

Enrico David moved to London in the late 1980s, where he studied at St. Martin's School of Art. Last year, a comprehensive individual exhibition was presented at the ICA London. Along with the exhibition
How Do You Love Dzzzzt by Mammy? a museum brochure is to be published with texts by Manfred Hermes and Darian Leader (German / English).

Contemporary Art Centre (CAC), Vilnius




CODE SHARE takes its name from the commercial airline practice of sharing passengers, services, landing rights, and technical resources – based upon partnership agreements. Often travellers book a flight upon one airline and arrive at the gate to find that the plane and its staff is wearing the livery of a different partner airline – and serving food and drink associated with another national culture when we were looking forward to a specific set of flavours or the taste of 'home'! This might come as a pleasant surprise for the adventurous traveller but disappoint that flyer wanting to relax to familiar sounds and flavours two hours ahead of touching down. 

This strategy, and reference, is especially prevalent at this moment when national carriers all over the world are facing bankruptcy or take-over. And it keys into the sense in which code sharing has evolved as a model of post-Fordist efficiency. Airlines were in the advance-guard of global corporatization and conglomeration; as companies merged, resource-sharing contracts were struck, and airport and landing licenses were purchased, so that major carriers consolidated the supply chain. Similar patterns have emerged within the circuits of contemporary art exhibition culture in which large-scale festival events – especially biennales – dominate international press coverage, and consume corporate and governmental sponsorship. A definite hierarchy of exhibitions, and exhibiting institutions, has formed in concert with these processes (in colonial and capitalist order) that are lionized by art professionals. 

CODE SHARE is attempting a double-agency. It is a model of the festival exhibition: produced in dialogue with curators and artistic directors of ten biennales; and part of the national program of the "Vilnius – European Capital of Culture 2009". Yet, artists, and artworks have been selected that reflect upon the conditions of their production and processes of cultural and socio-political displacement and alienation (in the place they were made) – in denial of representativeness. The exhibition also ironizes the fact that from its position at [the] capital of culture in Europe art from Istanbul, New York, Sydney, and Taipei is presented as being peripheral. 

Participating artists: 
Edgar Arceneaux, Alfredo & Isabel Aquilizan, Nadiah Bamadhaj, Matthew Brannon, Matthew Buckingham, Yu Cheng, Harry Dodge & Stanya Kahn, Annika Eriksson, Shaun Gladwell, Wong Hoy-Cheong, Emre Huner, Jesper Just, Jane Lee, Scott Lyall, Darius Miksys, Grace Ndiritu, Sherman Ong, Kate Rohde, Raeda Saadeh, Bright Ugochukwu Eke 
curated by Simon Rees

The artists were selected from: Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art, Dak'Art Biennale, Istanbul Biennial, Liverpool Biennial, Sharjah Biennial, Singapore Biennale, SITE Santa Fe Biennial, Biennale of Sydney, Taipei Biennial, and the Whitney Biennial of American Art

Monday, January 12, 2009

ArtSway



Plan 9 is pleased to present Plans For The Past and The Future and The Container Studio, two exhibitions of new commissioned work by Irish artist Eamon O'Kane that form part of the international touring project CASE HISTORIES.

O'Kane's installation at Plan 9 will consist of a furniture workshop/studio in the gallery space where authentic replicas of chairs and tables from the 1600s will be constructed gradually during the course of the exhibition. This furniture will resemble the type of chairs and tables used during a meal for King James II in 1689 under a Sycamore tree at what is now O'Kane's parents' house in Ireland. The furniture will be made out of the tree itself, which was hit by lightning in 1999. A large-scale wall drawing of the tree, and text works relating to the history of the house will also be included in the installation.

The Container Studio is a development of the 'Mobile Studio' work for which O' Kane received an EV+A open award from Dan Cameron in 2005. This work, which will be situated off-site in Bristol city centre, consists of a shipping container converted into a studio space where O'Kane will investigate the architecture and urban planning of Bristol over the years using Le Corbusier's plans for Paris as a blueprint.

Plans For The Past and The Future is part of the project CASE HISTORIES, a series of international exhibitions of new commissioned work by Rugby Art Gallery and Museum; Contemporary Art Society and Economist Plaza, London; RARE Gallery, New York; Galerie Schuster, Berlin; Plan 9, Bristol, and ArtSway, New Forest. The exhibition is funded by Arts Council England and Bristol City Council, and is supported by Culture Ireland.

CASE HISTORIES will travel to ArtSway in the New Forest in summer 2009. Re-enactment, the title of the exhibition at ArtSway and the sixth and final leg of the touring project, will feature new commissioned installation and video works. Using the 17th Century style furniture produced in Bristol, O' Kane will stage in the New Forest a re-enactment of the meal James II had under the Sycamore tree in Ireland. This will take place on the 20th of April 2009, 420 years after the original meal. The furniture will be installed in the gallery space with two video installations documenting the re-enactment. 

Eamon O'Kane (b. 1974) has studied in Dublin, Belfast and New York. He has exhibited widely and is the recipient of many awards and scholarships including the Taylor Art Award, The Tony O'Malley Award and a Fulbright Award. He has shown in exhibitions curated by Dan Cameron, Lynne Cooke, Klaus Ottman, Salah M. Hassan, Jeremy Millar, Mike Fitzpatrick, Sarah Pierce, Jeanne Greenberg-Rohatyn and Apinan Poshyananda. In 2006 he was short-listed for the AIB Prize and received a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant. He was short-listed for the Jerwood Drawing Prize in London in 2007. His artwork is in numerous public and private collections worldwide including Deutsche Bank; Burda Museum, Baden Baden, Germany; Sammlung Südhausbau, Munich and Limerick City Gallery. Eamon completed a three-month residency at Centre Culturel Irlandais in Paris in 2008. 

Eamon O'Kane will be in conversation with Paul Hobson, Director, Contemporary Art Society, at Plan 9 on Thursday 29 January 2009 at 6pm.

A publication documenting the 
CASE HISTORIES project will launch at ArtSway in 2009.

New Museum



The Pupil Dilates in Darkness
Raqs Media Collective at Night School in the New Museum

Eyes hunger for light in the darkness, but make do with morsels. The night is a time of alterity and an arena for the unfolding of the things that can happen after the day's work is done. It brings blurs in its wake, lengthens shadows, thickens the illegibility of the world. Circadian rhythms trick the brain to take odd turns. Grey matter comes alive; dreams, desires and the body's fatigue conspire to create new worlds, and recycle a few old ones. The night is the time for the telling of stories, the playground of doubts and fears, a gymnasium for incomniacs and a school for auto-didacts. What can pupils learn while they dilate at night? What does it mean to be 'an artist by night'?

Raqs Media Collective trawls through their reading, archive of notes, art work and extended conversations with friends and allies to ask a few questions about blurs, shadows, illegibility and the darkness of neural processes to tell a few stories about darkness, power cuts and nested dreams.

Muzeum Sztuki



The exhibition Katarzyna Kobro/Lygia Clark is a project comparing and contrasting artistic output of two great figures of the 20th century culture – artists whose achievements have constituted the canon of world art. Katarzyna Kobro (1898 – 1951), a sculptor, painter and art theoretician is considered as one of the most outstanding representatives of Polish and international constructivist avant-garde. Lygia Clark (1920 – 1988) is, perhaps, the most world-famous South American artist connected with the international neo-avant-garde movement. The exhibition in Muzeum Sztuki in Lodz initiates a kind of a dialogue between two strong and independent artistic personalities, a virtual conversation held by their works despite thousands of kilometres and decades apart.

Both Kobro and Clark's artistic activities meet on several planes. The most obvious one is constructivism, which Kobro co-created, and which was basically a starting point for Clark. What both artists have in common is also the fact that their outputs crossed the boundaries set by rationalism and mechanicism of constructivist thought. Their attention was drawn by the relation between body and space, and the way in which they define each other. These interests led the Polish artist to 
Spatial compositions created in relation to the body movement in space. The artist from Brazil, in turn, was brought to the activities involving a spectator's body in the process of artistic creation, and eventually to therapeutic practices targeted exclusively at corporality, or, strictly speaking, a psychosomatic phenomenon a human constitutes.

Juxtaposing artists' works provokes reflections upon the hidden potential of constructivism. That is why the exhibition puts together 
Compositions, Spatial sculptures, and Abstract sculptures – which were the core of Kobro's output – on the one hand; while on the other hand – works representing almost whole Clark's output from 1954 including public actions and therapeutic sessions.

The starting point for this confrontation is an intriguing interaction between artists' visions of the world and human relations with it. On theoretical grounds the dialogue is complemented with parallels at the level of a constructivist visual language. This is what the first part of the exhibition is dedicated to. The next one, dedicated exclusively to Lygia Clark's achievements, draws our attention to the less obvious options of developing constructivism than the ones that are usually credited to post-constructivism of the '60s and '70s. Photographs and film recordings presented in the second part of the exhibition show a shift of focus in Clark's art from object-creation to action. Interactive replicas of her works (e.g. from the 
Bichos series) let us realize what role the Brazilian artist attributed to the objects in terms of shaping a special sensual, corporeal experience.

The exhibition in 
ms² is an attempt at re-interpreting the relationships between avant-garde and neo-avant-garde ideas. It's also a pretext to ask about the direction in which Kobro could have gone if she had not passed away so prematurely.

Curator: Jaroslaw Suchan
Curatorial cooperation: Alessandra Clark
Scientific consultation: Paolo Herkenhoff

ART LA 2009



Fair Dates & Times 
Friday, January 23, 11 - 7pm 
Saturday, January 24, 11 - 7pm 
Sunday, January 25, 11 - 6pm 

Opening Night Benefit Reception 
Thursday, January 23 6:30-10:30pm (Press preview 4:30-6:30) 

The ART LA 2009 opening night reception benefits the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA). For additional Opening Night Reception information call 213.633.5361, email
mwilson@moca.org, or visit http://www.moca.org/artla 

General Info 
323.937.4659 
http://www.art-la.com 
info@artfairsinc.com 

ART LA, the New Los Angeles International Contemporary Art Fair, takes place at the Barker Hangar at the Santa Monica Airport, January 23 - 25 2009. The fair presents a select roster of 60 top international and Los Angeles based galleries representing an informed cross-section of today's contemporary art trends and directions. 

The exhibiting galleries at 
ART LA are an even balance of established blue chip and emerging galleries, all presenting the most progressive, international art work being produced today. Half of the exhibitors hail from the immediate Los Angeles area, and half are from the United States and abroad. 

The fair is designed to spotlight the Los Angeles art scene and its prominence within current international artistic trends. The fair brings influential international galleries and their artists work for the interested art patron and collector alike to enjoy. The finest examples of contemporary artwork will be available for view and sale. The weekend of 
ART LA 2009 has been expanded to include a full auxiliary programming series. Special exhibitions, performances, conversations and premiere film screenings will be staged at the Barker Hangar and throughout the city during the run of the fair.