BAIBAKOV art projects presents Luc Tuymans at Red October Chocolate Factory, Moscow

http://www.baibakovartprojects.com 

BAIBAKOV art projects is proud to announce the first major exhibition of Luc Tuymans in Russia, where the artist will also be a special guest of the Third Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art. 'Against the Day' will open at the Red October Chocolate Factory in Moscow on September 25th, coinciding with the artist's first US retrospective which opens at the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio from September 17th.

Luc Tuymans is recognised as one of the most significant and influential contemporary painters working today. 'Against the Day' is the last of four international exhibitions held from 2006 to 2009, which form part of what the artist describes as "a triptych." Each constitutes a critique of, in his own words, "utopic ideals in society" with 'Restoration' (2006) and 'Les Revenants' (2007) looking at the power structures of the Jesuit religious order, while 'Forever: The Magic of Management' (2008) addresses the impact of the fantasy world of Walt Disney.

'Against the Day' explores aspects of virtual reality and its effects on our perception of reality. Tuymans takes the exhibition's title and inspiration from the recent work of the American novelist Thomas Pynchon, whom he describes as "the man who introduced paranoia in American literature," observing that, "the idea of tearing down utopia is present in all his work." Of his own show, Tuymans has said that 'Against the Day' "presents the idea of an end, showing things as raw material, dispersed and disjointed, simultaneously offering more and more propositions, but basically going nowhere. It is the world as we know it."

Included in this exhibition are the seminal paintings Against the Day I and Against the Day II (2008), images which capture the effect of pressing the pause button on a video screen. Against the Day I is a staged image which shows a man in the corner of a garden, shovelling the ground. Against the Day IIportrays the same scene as if after an interval of time, an advance of several frames, during which the figure has stopped digging and stares straight ahead, frozen.

Other paintings draw their subject matter from sources as diverse as video games, television shows and cell phone photography. In Big Brother (2008), Tuymans recreates a still from the surveillance video of the popular UK reality show. In the resulting image, the stage set bedroom appears almost unrecognisable as a strange barracks. In the diptych, Neck Hair (2009), the artist uses an incomplete virtual rendering of a 3D model's head to suggest a man's advancing baldness "caught on film" by a security camera. 

'Against the Day' is organized by Dirk Snauwaert, Director at Wiels Center for contemporary art in Brussels, and Curator of the Belgian pavilion at the current Venice Biennale, and is presented in conjunction with BAIBAKOV art projects' Maria Baibakova and Kate Sutton. The 20 new works were launched at the new Wiels Center for contemporary art in Brussels in February this year, where they marked the artist's long overdue first solo exhibition in the capital of his home country. 

Luc Tuymans is represented by David Zwirner, New York, and Zeno X Gallery, Antwerp.

Interactive Lecture Series at The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA)

moca.org/party

For the final event of their three-month Engagement Party residency, OJO, along with special guests as well as members of the audience, will create an abnormal lecture experience. Interactive Lecture Series will take place at MOCA Grand Avenue in the Ahmanson Auditorium on Thursday, August 6, 2009, from 7 to 10pm. This performance will consist of a series of lectures, each of which will act as a musical score, with the speaker, audience, space, and environment functioning as compositional elements. As talks are presented on various topics, members of OJO will take up position beside the lectern as the house band, using audio trickery to affect the audience's reception of live speech. Focusing on specific words and phrases in order to induce listeners to react in all sorts of ways, their interventions should lead to chaotic and memorable lectures. Cash bar. This event is FREE and open to the public. No reservations are required.

OJO
Founded in 2005 by visual artists Joshua Aster, Justin Cole, Eamon Ore-Giron, Chris Avitabile, Moises Medina, and Brenna Youngblood, OJO is formed around a mutual interest in experimenting with acoustic guitars, electronics, musical spontaneity, freeform improvisation, and the boundaries between audience and performer. The group uses a wide range of instruments—drum machines, basses, guitars, synthesizers, salt, cars—as well as their own bodies and those of their audience, clapping, chanting, stomping, and singing to generate sprawling improvisations. OJO has created projects for Queen's Nails Annex in San Francisco, Esthetics as a Second Language (available as a CD produced by James Welling), LAXART (available as an LP from http://laxart.org ), BANK, Lizabeth Oliveria Gallery, and A+D Museum in Los Angeles. The group has also performed at the Hammer Museum, TRUDI, and Track 16, Los Angeles, and on KXLU 88.9FM.

Engagement Party
MOCA's Engagement Party presents new artworks in the form of dynamic social events and performances by LA–based artist collectives. Engagement Party is made possible by a grant from The James Irvine Foundation. 

Parking for MOCA Grand Avenue
Parking is recommended at the Walt Disney Concert Hall garage; flat rate after 4pm. Parking is also available in surrounding lots.

Kunsthalle Bern presents The Conspiracy

http://www.kunsthalle-bern.ch

Featured Artists: Giro Annen, Nino Baumgartner, John Divola, Chris Evans, Dora García, Gerard Hemsworth, Raphaël Julliard, Annina Matter, Corey McCorkle, Martin Möll, Camille Norment, Annaïk Lou Pitteloud & Steve van den Bosch, Bradley Pitts, David Renggli, Ana Roldán & Falke Pisano, Narcisse Tordoir, Alan Uglow, Xu Zhen

The Conspiracy brings together work from an extensive group of artists whose participative, confrontational or more hermetic artistic practice is motivated by a discerning, sophisticated, and sometimes perverse play of interpretation and meaning/significance. Together they span different generations, so that various strategies for public (non-)interaction engage one another. The exhibition comes at a moment in time when public art institutions increasingly have to resolve the contradiction between an 'art-focused' and a 'spectator-focused' approach, and testifies of the ways in which artists construct various understandings or refusals regarding the public.

The popular criticism that in the sphere of contemporary art the spectator is fooled by the works proposed and that 'the meaning of art' is somehow conspiratorial in nature, more and more fuelled demands of legitimisation over the last years. The 'suspicion' is as old as the advent of the avant-garde, but it was Jean Baudrillard who in 1996 infuriated the art world with his text Le Complot de l'Art, published in the French newspaper Libération. In the article, Baudrillard claimed that art exists everywhere but in art, and that it has become a case of insider trading. The French philosopher also expressed concern that art has become tainted with the close and oppressive relationship between artist and consumer, with the obscenity of visibility because of the inexorable transparency of everything, and with the lack of formal difference between art and reality.

Baudrillard's ideas were en vogue twenty years ago. Today it is exactly this difference between the language of art and common communication that is criticised by populist politicians and some cultural brokers, as some of the main characteristics of a conspiracy of art. Practicing a language resisting conventional ways of making sense, art might seem to place the spectator on the opposite side of illumination. Communicative ambiguity, irreducible opacity and thickness are considered highly suspicious today, in a context where art manifestations are more and more expected to bring into publicly discussable form that which is being ignored, left unattended, or relegated to the 'outside' by the 'political' process.

But rather than dispute about the veracity of conspiracy theories in the domain of the arts, we might, as controversial anarchist essayist Hakim Bey proposes, try to construct a poetics of conspiracy: "A conspiracy would be treated like an aesthetic construct, or a language-construct, and could be analyzed like a text." As fictional conspiracy, with a paradoxical combination of preciseness and ambiguity, art could exactly expose the conspiracy of the mass media with its manipulative 'publicness' and forge a 'counter-publicness'. Maybe in relation to the mass media, exhibitions then function as 'Pirate Utopias', secret islands once used for supply purposes by pirates existing beyond the realm and reach of governments, from where a mental and emotional signifying space is opened, outside the usual conditioning of meaning. As a performance of stubborn autonomy versus the evidence of understanding, and as a momentum for a critical locus versus instrumental (practical, functional, economic) reason, an exhibition, then, creates a new territory of the moment, possibly in complicit disguise, on the boundary line of established regions.

The Conspiracy inscribes itself in a series of group-shows held at Kunsthalle Bern over the last years (Off Key (2005), Pre-Emptive (2006), A Fantasy for the Moment (2007) and You Don't Have to Understand Everything We do to Profit From It at Liste in Basel this year) that eschew to account for their existence towards the practical demands of the contemporary economical and socio-political realm, and resolutely invest in what Bertrand Russel called 'useless knowledge'. 

The Conspiracy is curated by Philippe Pirotte

The National Museum of Contemporary Art, Korea

http://www.moca.go.kr 

The National Museum of Contemporary Art, Korea is pleased to present Doors Open, an exhibition of 11 cutting edge Korean artists, from August 13 through September 23, 2009 at the Korean Cultural Service NY located on 460 Park Ave. 6th Fl, NYC and Sylvia Wald & Po Kim Art Gallery located on 417 Lafayette St. 4th Fl. NYC. Doors Open is the first exhibition in New York City featuring the artists, who are alumni resident artists of the National Art Studio since 2002. The participating artists are Kira Kim, Hee-seon Kim, Se-jin Kim, So-yeon Kim, Tae-eun Kim, Mioon, Kiwoun Shin, Kang-hyun Ahn, Doo-jin Ahn, Jung-ju An, and Biho Ryu. The opening reception is held on Thursday, August 13, 2009, 6-8 pm at Sylvia Wald and Po Kim Art Gallery with the presence of the artist Kira Kim, Mioon, Kiwoun Shin, Kang-hyun Ahn, Doo-jin Ahn, and Biho Ryu.

Koreans have not only suffered from anxiety such as wars, illnesses and poverty in the rapid modernization but also witnessed mammonism of consumer society or anonymity of mass culture that seems peaceful and affluent but impossible to be controlled by hands of individual. This exhibition looks for the root of relation between Korean contemporary art and society in the sense of panic or uneasiness that many Koreans may feel in common or private. As members of the society, Korean artists participating in this show make their own expression in visual arts being responsive to those kinds of senses hidden behind daily life. 

The National Art Studio, Korea is an international artist-in-residence program in Korea. The Art Studio, Changdong and Goyang, run by the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Korea, encourage and support artistic creativity and make contemporary Korean art known in the world as well as works for the exchange with local and foreign artists-in-residence programs. It has supported resident artists with not only convenient working conditions but various programs i.e. Asian Pacific Artists Fellowship Residency Program, International Studio Exchange Program, workshop, artist talk, exhibition, open studio, outreach programs and public art project. The Changdong Art Studio, established in 2002, is composed of 14 studios, one exhibition hall and an outdoor work area along with other necessities that are required by artists. Likewise, the Art Studio that opened in Goyang city in 2004, has 22 studios, one exhibition hall, and an outdoor work area.


National Museum of Contemporary Art, Korea is the only national museum that houses and exhibits great works of Korean and foreign modern and contemporary art. The museum first opened in 1969 at Kyungbok Palace and in 1973 relocated to Deoksu Palace. It made one last move to its present location at Gwacheon in 1986 where new modern facilities, but according to international standards, along with an outdoor sculpture garden, were opened to the public, beginning a new chapter in the history of this museum. In 1998, the National Museum of Art, Deoksugung was reopened as an institution which specializes in modern art and since then, it has developed into a cultural institution which has continually received the love and support of its citizens. Also we are planning to open our new museum, the National Museum of Art, Seoul, located middle of Seoul, Korea.

Ullens Center for Contemporary Art (UCCA) presents Yan Lei, Feng Mengbo and Shi Zhiying

http://www.ucca.org.cn

New exhibitions opening at the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art ----Presenting the artistic track of artists, and the story of their pursuits

July 25, 2009, Beijing — This summer, the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art (UCCA) will present three solo exhibitions, Yan Lei: Sparkling (Upgraded), Feng Mengbo: Restart and Shi Zhiying: From the Pacific Ocean to the High Seas. The exhibits will be open to the public starting July 26. In addition to these exhibitions, the Yan Pei-Ming: Landscape of Childhood, which opened in June, will continue to be on display during this period.

The keywords to describe the three upcoming exhibitions are "restart", "upgrade" and "repetition" respectively. In this sense, the individual exhibitions are connected to each other as the artists pursue their own self exploration, through the development of artistic themes and language. The exhibition space is laid out as an immersive environment, where the floors and ceilings of the halls are filled as part of the exhibit, as well as the space beside the walls. As you walk through the exhibition, it is just as if you are walking through the artists mind. Accompanied to Restart is an audio guide powered by an Apple iPod touch, which is the first time this has been done in China before. The audio guide is intended to improve the communication between the artist and audience to provide a more intimate understanding. "Devoted to be the dialogue platform for China and international Contemporary art, the new summer exhibitions continue the independent, original curatorial spirit of UCCA, and show our long-term determination and mission in promoting Chinese Contemporary art" says Jérôme Sans, UCCA director.

Yan Lei: Sparkling (Upgraded) continues Yan's ongoing exploration of representation, power, and the medium of painting. The artist displays the theme "upgrade" through multi-dimensional elements. Walking atop a glittering floor, visitors will find the exhibition hall transformed, its walls covered with artist-designed wallpaper. Pictures hang throughout the space, documenting the luminaries of the Chinese art scene, inspired in part by Jérôme Sans' Polaroid photographs. The show addresses issues of art, value, and celebrity status from a playful and knowing perspective, amongst a dazzling environment. 

Feng Menbo: Restart is an exhibition that realizes one of the artists' dreams. Feng stated that a previous set of paintings, which was finished in 1994, Game Over: Long March, was a draft of his future video game software. Constrained by the technology of that time, the draft is now complete. Players will move up and down the darkened space of the UCCA, and engage in various battles and challenges through a complex system of sensors and digital projections. The culmination of 15 years of Feng Mengbo's practice, this customized video game speaks to China's recent history as well as its contemporary conditions. 

Shi Zhiying: From the Pacific Ocean to the High Seas is the first solo exhibition of this young artist, recommended by Yan Pei-Ming for UCCA's Curated by… project. Yan is also the curator for this show, which includes paintings and videos created in an expressionist style, presenting the audience with a vivid and moving image of the ocean, as well as the artists own perspective of observing and experiencing the world. 

PORTIKUS presents Att Poomtangon

http://www.portikus.de

With the site specific installation On the Way to the Alps I See Sand, Thai artist Att Poomtangon (born 1973 in Bangkok) deals directly with the geographical location of Portikus, taking the Main river surrounding Portikus-island as a point of departure for a wide-ranging investigation of how society deals with natural resources and the economical forces produced as a result. As is often the case with Poomtangon, his work first began by collecting research material from digital and print media: on the meaning of water as resource, on fisheries, society's relationship to fishing relative to the food pyramid, a reduction in biodiversity, and on the river, the Main in Frankfurt, generally as well as from an historical overview. As all of us are already aware, the diversity of fish stocks is being constantly reduced and the ecological equilibrium of our rivers is changing as a result.

These considerations range far beyond the local focus and associate the situation of fish stocks in this country with conditions in Poomtangon's home country of Thailand, where people live traditionally with and from fishing even today. Still widespread, fishing in Thailand is done with very direct means: with oversize, simple car tire inner tubes and large plastic bowls fishermen move around on the water. They catch fish while standing over the water, as if from a small island. The plastic bowls serve simultaneously as a boat and also hold the catch. But in a different way, in Thailand considerable value is also placed on honoring the animal kingdom, which also involves societal rituals. People gather together in temples in order to give fish sustenance, and to observe the goings-on. And, not least, these moments also function as a distinct form of social communication. Now a large – approx. 90 sqm. – tub of water is situated inside Portikus's exhibition space. Moving about on the water's surface are small, improvised inner tube boats, which can be reached from a wooden bridge. Whoever is brave enough can navigate around the almost 60-70cm deep water on plastic bowls and rubber tires, and paddle through the exhibition space in order to also view the research materials mounted on the walls. The room has been darkened and only minor, selective sources of light in the form of suspended, fish-shaped luminous objects provide orientation within the exhibition.

With this installation Att Poomtangon is interested in communicating to society that the changes in our environment shouldn't go unobserved. The situation that he in fact sets up is not directly political, rather he seeks to create the ritual-intoned atmosphere of a Thai temple in which the senses are sharpened and the raising of awareness is achieved by personally engaging the space physically. This convergence of fundamental themes of social engagement and the questioning of technological achievements that profoundly influence the ecosystem have been features of Att Poomtangon's art work for a number of years. In a rather poetic way he has succeeded in tracing, by means of a cultural translation, that which gets lost in an automated cultural process. The work The Devil Finds Work for Idle Hands to Do (2007), for instance, makes use of cultural metaphor in reflecting upon moral parameters. The installation of nearly 200 pieces of reworked, but essentially useless driftwood, culled from the banks of the Main over several months time, pursues the notion of personal conflict, which Goethe may have experienced when he wrote his famous tragedy Faust and, for the sake of success, allowed his protagonists to enter a pact with the devil. The Devil Finds Work for Idle Hands to Do follows the same course and applies it to the idea of progressive absorption. The chisels and saws that are also displayed, and ironically also imprinted with the (company's) name "Faust", serve as "proof" that the artist personally, slowly, and carefully carved the details of the devil's hoof from individual branches and tree trunks. With Nouvelle Cuisine Fast Food (2008) he addresses the everyday necessity of consuming food and fuses, in a rather consciously nutritious way, raw Asian foods and spices into a frozen hamburger format, akin to a futuristic vision of a perfectly controlled form of existence.


This exhibition is generously supported by Stiftung Polytechnische Gesellschaft and Deutsche Bank Foundation. 


PORTIKUS

Director: Daniel Birnbaum
Curator: Melanie Ohnemus

Museum Het Domein presents Brazilian Summer. Art & the City

http://www.hetdomein.nl 

Participating artists:
Artur Barrio, Marcelo Cidade, Lourival Cuquinha, Ronald Duarte, artist collective GIA, Jarbas Lopes, Cildo Meireles, Joao Modé, Thiago Rocha Pitta and Bárbara Wagner.

The Brazilian Summer in Museum Het Domein highlights the special focus of the Made in Mirrors exchange project: Brazil. Museum Het Domein, Vitamin Creative Space in Guangzhou (China) and the Museu de Arte Moderna Aloísio Magelhães (MAMAM) in Recife (Brazil) have been working in conjunction for the last two years. A number of artists and curators from Recife spent time in Sittard, and Dutch artists and museum staff visited Brazil. 

The project in Het Domein highlights a group of primarily young Brazilian artists who explore socio-political issues through interventions in public (urban) space and in social structures. Their slightly anarchical work questions the functioning of economic systems, reflects on the position of the individual within society and subverts canonical art works. In many cases, this is the first time their work has been shown in the Netherlands, and many artists have created new pieces especially for the exhibition.

To place them in context, the exhibition also includes work by two seminal artistic figures of an older generation, Cildo Meireles (1948) and Artur Barrio (1945) who continue to have a formative influence on the younger group of Brazilian artists. Both are internationally renowned as pioneering installation artists and key exponents of conceptual and political art. Meireles is represented by various works, including objects from his series Insertions into Ideological Circuits, which date from the nineteen-seventies. He printed politically critical messages onto coca cola bottles and banknotes, putting the objects back into circulation. Barrio is predominantly known for installations that invite the viewer’s participation and which blur the boundaries between life and art, the street and the museum. For the exhibition in Het Domein, Barrio will produce a new site-specific installation that will create an all-round sensory experience for the viewer. 


The exhibition extends beyond the walls of the museum. At various sites throughout the city, the young photographer Bárbara Wagner, who previously worked in Sittard during an exchange project, will be presenting billboards of photos from her series Brasilia Teimosa. This urban beach in Recife attracts the loners and more eccentric inhabitants of the city – it’s the only place they have a sense of freedom. Artist collective GIA (Grupo de Interferencia Ambiental) from Bahia will rouse Sittard with unexpected interventions in the public space. Registrations of similar interventions will be presented in the museum.

The exhibition is curated by Domein curator Roel Arkesteijn in collaboration with Cristiana Tejo, the MiM manager in Recife.


To mark the occasion of Bárbara Wagner’s billboard project, Het Domein and Made in Mirrors are co-publishing a monograph on Wagner’s work to date. A small selection of the photos Wagner took in Guangzhou and Sittard during the exchange project will also be on display at the DSM Offices on Poststraat in Sittard from 4 July to 13 September.

Hayward Gallery Project Space presents Deceitful Moon

www.hayward.org.uk/

"Permit me," he continued, "to recount to you briefly how certain ardent spirits, starting on imaginary journeys, have penetrated the secrets of our satellite."
- Jules Verne, From the Earth to the Moon (1865) 

Coinciding with the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 lunar landing, Deceitful Moon is an exhibition in the Hayward Gallery Project Space that explores the moon as a site for misinformation, misrepresentation and mistrust. Touching on a long-standing tradition of hoaxes and conspiracy theories that found its first modern expression in the 'Great Moon Hoax' played by The New York Sun in 1835 (in which a series of newspaper articles detailed life on the moon as observed through a powerful telescope) the show, like the tarot card that bears its name, turns on obfuscation and doubt. 

Deceitful Moon is, in part, a response to the current vogue for exhibitions marking the anniversary of major events in world history. But rather than commemorating Neil Armstrong's famous 'one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind', it pays tribute to a lingering uncertainty somewhere on the dark side of our cultural imagination as to whether human feet have ever touched the moon's grey, inhospitable surface. 

While the Apollo 11 mission was concerned with scientific verification and the glory of a nation and of a species, the works in Deceitful Moon propose speculative 'lunar landings' of a different sort. Satires of social and political control share space with meditations on technological absurdity, perception and misperception, and a very earthbound form of moon-gazing romanticism. 


Deceitful Moon is curated by Tom Morton, Curator at the Hayward Gallery.

Vuk Cosic

http://www.horsecross.co.uk


Horsecross is delighted to present Out of Character – the first solo exhibition in Scotland by internationally recognised artist Vuk Cosic described as 'an archaeologist of the future'. The exhibition features new commissions and acquisitions, which echo Cosic's earlier signature works. They are showing alongside the artist's own favourites from the permanent Horsecross collection of contemporary art. Out of Character reflects Cosic's interest in media archaeology and his belief that the role of the artist is to move away from the blind adoption of engineering defaults and instead to suggest 'constructive abuse' of technology. The exhibition includes:

Game Flags (2009) -- a site-specific outdoors installation satirising the intersection of vintage computer games, colour field aesthetics and national symbolism. Commissioned as part of Players – an ongoing strand in the Horsecross collection exploring the relationship of contemporary art and gaming culture. 

Horsecross first commission of contemporary art for the city centre. It is sited on banner posts in the urban environment around the oval-shaped, glazed building, which houses the Threshold artspace. 

ASCII Wave (2009) – a multi-channel video installation as part of Cosic's ongoing project to translate culture from one obsolete format to another. Scenes from twenty classic films ranging from Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory (1895) to The Matrix (1999) are converted into retro-futuristic moving images using ASCII code. Cosic creates visual havoc by exposing 'the ones and zeros' of which popular cinema icons are made of.

Horsecross latest commission for Threshold Wave – an area of 22 flat, 40-inch screens all in a row dominating the artspace. 

ASCII Unreal (2009) -- a large-scale installation of Cosic's reworking of the seminal video game Unreal Tournament through streaming ASCII. Foregrounding text as the primary ingredient in the artist's visual grammar, this work features extruded Cyrillic characters set adrift in darkened skies and unrecognizable letterforms shipwrecked in a sea of squiggly tildes. 

Acquired as part of Players for the Horsecross collection of contemporary art and showing at Threshold Stage as a large-scale wall projection. 

History of Art for Airports and Toilets (2009) – an 8-channel video installation of Cosic's public signage poetics work. Compressing art history from Michelangelo's La Pietà (1499) to Heath Bunting'sBorderxing Guide (2001--2011) the artist creates a new desktop iconography resonating with Brian Eno's Ambient 1: Music for Airports (1978).

Acquired as part of Horsecross collection of contemporary art and showing at Threshold Flush – a distributed area of flat screens with one in each of the eight public toilets.

The exhibition Out of Character is accompanied by a new issue of Read More – Horsecross journal of critical writing (ISSN 1755-0866 Online) to be published later in 2009. A newly commissioned essay by Neil Mulholland will explore Cosic's new works in relation to his oeuvre to date. A limited edition artist's print is to be released as part of Collect + Support – Horsecross new initiative for collectable contemporary art. Threshold artspace YouTube Channelhttp://www.youtube.com/Thresholdartspace is home to the tribute documentary Vuk Cosic and ASCII net.art by GenaxC. 

Out of Character is produced by the artist and Horsecross for Threshold artspace in partnership with 55degrees and ARC Projects. Supported by Henry Moore Foundation and the Scottish Arts Council New Work Fund. 

Launched in September 2005, Threshold artspace is about positioning Perth and Scotland within the contemporary art world at large through curating, commissioning, producing, exhibiting, publishing and collecting. 

Horsecross is an independent agency delivering cultural activities at Threshold artspace, Perth Concert Hall and Perth Theatre. Threshold artspace and Perth Concert Hall sit on the site of the original Horsecross – Perth's 17th century horse market. The name is synonymous with bustling regeneration activity in the heart of the city.

Fundación Telefónica

FUNDACIÓN TELEFÓNICA CALLS FOR AWARDS VIDA 12.0

Fundación Telefónica opens the call for Life International Awards VIDA, in its twelfth edition. 

VIDA 12.0 rewards works of art developed with artificial life technologies and their associated disciplines, such as robotics and artificial intelligence works and projects that have emergent behaviour that evolve over time, react to their surroundings and seem to have own life. A total of 80,000 euros will be given as price; 40,000 in the category of the 3 best works completed, and another 40,000 as an incentive to production for undone projects. Winners will be selected by an international jury composed by Daniel Canogar, José Carlos Mariátegui, Monica Bello, Sally Jane Norman, Simon Penny and Karin Olenschläger. 

All materials must be submitted before October 1st, 2009, in any of the offices of Fundación Telefónica in Spain (Madrid) or Latin America (Mexico City, São Paulo, Buenos Aires, Santiago de Chile and Lima). 

In previous years the awards have been given to art projects made with robots, electronic avatars, chaotic algorithms, knowbots, cellular automata, computer viruses, virtual ecologies that evolve with the interaction of the participant, interactive architecture, augmented reality works and works that delve into social issues of artificial life.

For more information:
http://www.telefonica.es/vida

Jan van Eyck Academie: CALL FOR ARTISTS' APPLICATIONS

http://www.janvaneyck.nl

The Jan van Eyck Academie invites fine artists to submit research and production proposals for a research period in the Fine Art department. The application deadline is 15 September 2009.

The Jan van Eyck Academie is an institute for research and production where artists, designers and theoreticians work alongside each other and establish cross-disciplinary exchange. 

The Fine Art department offers a unique space for experimentation, production, reflection and debate. The researchers in the department conduct their research in an environment that encourages questioning of the assumptions, forms, meanings and contexts that are tied to the practice of making art today. We welcome artists, individuals and groups, without stipulating conditions regarding form, content and media. 

Artists are invited to apply for a research period in the Fine Art department of up to two years, starting in January 2010. The central element of the application is your project proposal, in which you set out the form and content of your research and production plans. The application deadline is 15 September 2009 (post stamp date).

Programme

The Fine Art department is headed by advising researchers Orla Barry, Hans-Christian Dany, Hinrich Sachs, Imogen Stidworthy and Nasrin Tabatabai & Babak Afrassiabi. Their principal task is to advise the Fine Art researchers in the development of their work.

The artistic practice is supported by a programme of events and sustained conversations that are organised by the researchers and advising researchers according to their interests. Throughout the year professionals from different fields are invited to set up discursive events, on a formal and informal level, such as presentations, lectures, studio visits, performances and other forms of intervention. The programme is open to researchers from all three departments.

For more information about the programme, please visit the academy website (http://www.janvaneyck.nl), which includes an extensive list of current and past research projects, activities, events and publications, as well as biographical information and links of current researchers and advising researchers. Prospective candidates are also welcome to visit the academy in person.

Support 

All researchers in the Fine Art department are given an individual studio and a stipend (currently 9,360 Euro paid in 13 installments). Funding for individual projects can be applied for on a project-by-project basis. 

The academy offers expertise in all media and production areas, in-house or in cooperation with partner organisations. These areas include photography, digital and silk-screen printing, video and audio production, computer applications and other digital technologies, and materials including wood, metal, ceramics, glass and bronze. The academy encourages publishing through the Jan van Eyck publication series of artists' books, monographs, theoretical and other writings or forms of publishing. Everybody at the Jan van Eyck Academie can make use of its extensive library.

Applications

Your application is expected to be posted no later than 15 September 2009. Interviews will take place soon thereafter.

Your application must include your project proposal, documentation material and an application form. A downloadable application form and more information about the application procedure can be found athttp://www.janvaneyck.nl (click applications).

The application fee is 65 euro, both for individuals and teams.

For questions and/or more information on the application procedure, please contact 
Leon Westenberg at leon.westenberg@janvaneyck.nl or +31 (0)43 350 3724.

For questions and/or more information on the Jan van Eyck in general, please contact 
Ankie Bosch at ankie.bosch@janvaneyck.nl or +31 (0)43 350 3721.

Dali Dali featuring Francesco Vezzoli at Moderna Museet, Stockholm

http://www.modernamuseet.se

"I am a supreme swine. The symbol of perfection is a pig. Charles V himself adopted it to replace all other symbols of perfection. The pig makes his way with Jesuit cunning, but never balks in the middle of the crap in our era. I feed my crap to the Daliists. Everybody's satisfied. And everything is just hunky-dory."

Salvador Dalí, 1969

"Fashion is unashamedly part of the entertainment industry, unlike art, which is embarrassed by it. I can't stand that – there are all these people that belong to the art world who are embarrassed by their ambitions for visibility. It makes their intellectual attitude so crippled, and in the end their work suffers."

Francesco Vezzoli, 2008


In his desire to merge art with the person, Salvador Dalí was a forerunner for today's close connection between artists and the media industry; a prototype for the celebrity artist. In Francesco Vezzoli's work – a unique blend of hype and melancholy, queer culture and politics, glamour and tears – the presence of dalinian influences is a matter of course. 

Dalí Dalí featuring Francesco Vezzoli – on view at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm autumn 2009 – examines the role of the artist in today's celebrity-obsessed society, and of these two artists' disingenuous relationship with mass media and power.

Salvador Dalí – the missing link between Andy Warhol and Marcel Duchamp – exploited his artistic persona, adopting every commercial tool in this endeavour, from designing jewellery to working the mass media as a stage for performance. Francesco Vezzoli not only appropriates the device, but takes it to its 21st century extreme, modelling his work on full blown mass cultural formats such as the Hollywood biopic. Vezzoli is the ideal and palpable co-star in an exhibition which views Dalí's oeuvre from a contemporary angle, and challenges the concept of a historical exhibition.

Dalí Dalí featuring Francesco Vezzoli pays tribute to art but questions the system in which it operates. 

Antony Gormley

http://www.kunsthaus-bregenz.at

Antony Gormley is one of Britain’s leading contemporary sculptors focusing on the human body as site. The exhibition at KUB brings together four major work series from Gormley’s oeuvre: the Expansionworks, Allotment, Critical Mass, and Clearing. Embedded in the context of Peter Zumthor’s architecture, the works challenge the fine line in the human psyche that marks the mental balance between asserting oneself as an individual and being contextualized by architectural space. 

Over the last 25 years Antony Gormley has revitalized the human image in sculpture through a radical investigation of the body as a place of memory and transformation, using his own body as subject, tool, and material. Since 1990 he has expanded his concern with the human condition to explore the collective body and the relationship between self and other in large-scale installations like Allotment IIand Critical Mass II, both of which are presented at KUB this summer. Gormley’s recent work increasingly engages with energy systems, fields, and vectors, rather than mass and defined volume. This is evident in the dynamic work Clearing V, which pushes against the gallery walls, ceiling and floor, and fills the second floor of KUB. 

Gormley’s work has been exhibited extensively, with solo shows throughout the UK in venues such as the Whitechapel, Tate and Hayward galleries, and internationally at museums including the Louisiana Museum in Humlebæk, the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington DC and the Kölnischer Kunstverein in Germany. Blind Light, a major solo exhibition of his work, was held at the Hayward Gallery, London, in 2007. He has participated in major group shows such as the Venice Biennale and documenta 8 in Kassel. Angel of the North and, more recently, Quantum Cloud on the Thames in Greenwich, London, are amongst the most celebrated examples of contemporary British sculpture. Gormley was awarded the Turner Prize in 1994, the South Bank Prize for Visual Art in 1999 and the Bernhard Heiliger Award for Sculpture 
2007. 

KUB Arena: 
Body (Cast iron, 1991/93, 6t.), Fruit (Cast iron, 1991/93, 1.25t.) 

Gormley’s Expansion works began with the obsession with renegotiating the skin: questioning where things and events begin and end. All forms become egg-shaped if their skin is repeated, achieving an equilibrium between stasis and potential. The Expansion works apply this process to the body in dynamic motion, moving bodies either in self-locomotion or in positions where the body is the subject of movement. Body and Fruit are derived from a body-mold in a clasped diving position. To quote Gormley: 

“I discovered that it was possible to extend the form through the application of a consistent measure by using wooden spars radiating from nodal points at the extremities of the body. They were linked together at their outer ends to form a continuous surface where the feet, hands, buttocks, and head become the foci of a number of domed forms that coalesce.” 

1st Floor: 
Allotment II (1996, reinforced concrete, 300 life-size elements derived from 
the dimensions of local inhabitants of Malmö aged 1 1/2 - 80 years)

The measurements of 300 local people of Malmö, Sweden, were used to construct 300 five-centimeter-thick rectangular concrete body cases, with integrated rectangular head cases, and apertures at the mouth, ears, anus and genitals. The “rooms” of Allotment are the minimum space necessary to accommodate a particular living individual, which substitute the second body (that of architecture) for the first. They are vertical meditation cells for the absent bodies of a real community. With the pieces laid on a grid path system the composite work evokes a surrogate cityscape. Some are closely packed next to each other, some less so. The viewer, having apprehended the work initially as a whole, is able to make his/her way through the composition, engaging with pieces intimately. 

2nd Floor: 
Clearing V (2009, aluminum rod) 

Clearing V consists of up to 12 kilometers of raw metal rod that arc from floor to ceiling and wall to wall, creating a three-dimensional drawing in space. The installation acts as a vector field, encouraging the viewer to move through its structure disrupts the authority of a single-point perspective, necessitating instead a constant renegotiation of the visual field: “I was trying to destroy the fixed coordinates of a room and make a space/time continuum (a line without end) that was both a thing and a drawing,” says Gormley. 

3rd Floor: 
Critical Mass II (1995, cast iron) 

Critical Mass II is made up of 5 casts of 12 positions: ground-hugging, crouching, fetal, squatting, sitting, kneeling, standing, mourning – an ascent of man ranging through the complex syntax of the body. The bodyforms were cast from the outside of a plaster mold and all the imperfections of the mold surface are reproduced on the finished work, as are the signs of the loose pieces in the sand mold, the flash lines that exist between them, and the out- runners of the metal-pouring which are integrated into the surface, declaring their industrial birth. The work is an anti-monument evoking the victims of the twentieth century. It also communicates the useless status of sculpture itself. Critical Mass II was made in direct response to a specific building, the Remise, an old tram storage station in Vienna. The work continues to activate and destabilize the architectural contexts in which it is presented. 

KUB-Publications 

Antony Gormley 

In conjunction with its exhibition of the work of the British sculptor Antony Gormley the Kunsthaus Bregenz is publishing a catalogue that presents a comprehensive look at the pieces on display. One of Gormley’s central themes is the human body, which he uses in ever new constellations of large sculptural ensembles or as individual figures to investigate and call into question issues of space and perception. 

The essays are written by the philosopher Marcus Steinweg, who examines the sculptures from an epistemological standpoint, Antonio Damasio and Yilmaz Dziewior, who explores Gormley’s work from an art historical point of view. 

Call for Projects for Site-Specific Interventions in Lima

http://www.centroabierto.org 

In recent years a number of initiatives have been undertaken to renovate downtown Lima, historical center to a growing metropolis of over 8 million inhabitants. Within this framework, the city center has become a site with great potential for the development of contemporary art projects. 

Alta Tecnología Andina – ATA, Fundación Telefónica and Museo de Arte de Lima – MALI invite artists living in Latin America to present site-specific projects for eight possible locations at Plaza San Martín and nearby areas in Lima's historic downtown center.

Proposals by individual artists or collectives will be accepted. All projects must be original (not previously produced) and may include drawing, painting, printing, photography, sculpture, installation, performace, video, sound, electronic, digital art, and other related media. 

Four proposals will be selected each receiving 6,500 USD for production, installation and dismantling of the work, as well as a 1,000 USD fee for the artist or collective. Additionally, selected projects by artists not living in Lima will also receive support for travel and accommodation for up to three weeks during the production and installation of the work.

The four projects will be presented at the end of October during "La Gran Semana de Lima". This annual event, organized by the City of Lima, is directed at a broad and diverse audience and consists of musical, artistic, and other cultural activities. 

Documentation materials of the conception and production process of each project will be exhibited at Centro Fundación Telefónica from October 29 to December 13, 2009.

Centro Abierto 09 is possible thanks to the support of Telefónica del Perú and the City of Lima, as well as through the collaboration of ArteExpress.

Nedko Solakov

http://www.mathildenhoehe.eu

After Kunstmuseum Bonn and Kunstmuseum St.Gallen, Mathildenhöhe Darmstadt should have been the third venue of the extensive solo show "Emotions". But it all turned out very different. Below you will find the new story by the artist:

"I have done so many exhibitions, so many solo shows. I keep trying to make them different, at least for the cliché reason of amusing myself first and then amusing the viewers. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. For the "Emotions" project I have been working very hard for more than two years, especially devoting myself to its core - the rather large and complex interactive installation "Some Nice Things to Enjoy While You Are Not Making a Living". The first two venues were okay - the visitors in Bonn and St Gallen seemed to have some fun, and so did the curators and even myself. Then came Darmstadt. I had visited Mathildenhoehe several times and the plans for how the show will look in its last venue were almost entirely fixed by the curator (one of his assistants even made a wonderful 1:50 scale model of the space with all of the works constituting "Emotions" - plus some additional ones - placed in their curator-selected spaces). But then the last time I was here (to approve the final display plans) I popped in to see the installation of the exhibition before mine: the much acclaimed "Masks - Metamorphoses of the Face from Rodin to Picasso", first exhibited at the Musée d'Orsay in Paris and traveling from Mathildenhoehe to the NY Carlsberg Glyptotek in Copenhagen.

I just loved the layout and the way the masks glowed in the darkness. I wished I could have had one of those masks to hide my own emotions better – especially to disguise my fatigue from having done so many exhibitions, so many solo shows. But I had hesitated until just the right time and here is the result - all of my precious, with-so-much-labor-and-time-produced various-emotions-related art works are still in the crates (and they will remain there for the entire show). The masks have gone to Copenhagen but I have kept their original plinths and showcases; and hooks and strange devices to keep them looking beautiful and straight; and covers and spotlights; and the entire atmosphere too. And I have the feeling that there might be many emotions-related tiny stories that didn't make it to the big, spectacular "Emotions" show in Bonn and St Gallen and which - it seems - are willing to accommodate the vacant spot-lit places in these rooms. I'm sure all the art works locked away in their crates are angry but I believe I can make peace with them later, I am used to it.

Unfortunately, two of the crated pieces will enjoy being (so-so) properly exhibited at the end of the succession of rooms, in the largest space, which was last used for the big "Russland" exhibition a year ago. Due to the firm demands of the lenders (an Italian collector and a Dutch museum director), the works had to be displayed by the curator and because my original and very strong a show-without-the-show's-works idea was spoiled anyhow by the Italian-Dutch ultimatum, I gave up and the mirror which is on the cover of the "Emotions" catalogue was hanged by the curator too - along with three of his sisters and brothers."

Kunsthal Charlottenborg works that work

http://www.kunsthalcharlottenborg.dk

What do a boat cruise, an airship, a room full of taut-stretched strings, a very long bench and 8 cloakroom hooks surrounded by sounds, a set of wooden building blocks, a cartoon, a sand sculpture and an oversize bed have in common?

All of them are part of the exhibition works that work which runs at Kunsthal Charlottenborg this summer. The exhibition takes up the whole first floor, then spreads into the yard and right out to Nyhavn canal. It starts from the premise that if art is to make itself visible in the summer it needs to reach people where they are: in holiday mood, open to the pleasures of life and at leisure to play. 

Works that work is an exhibition that focuses on the process and the experiment, on works that don't stop with the artist's finishing touch, but continue to change due to the visitors contributions and interactions during the exhibition period. For example, you can spend a night at the exhibition, sleeping in a camp bed along with 11 others. Or you can go round town recording intriguing or irritating sounds that will then be included in the exhibition's sound installation. You can take a harbour tour with DFDS Canal Tours and be treated to an alternative account of Copenhagen's history. Or you can get clean and cool in the temporary shower out in the yard at Kunsthal Charlottenborg, surrounded by decoratively painted camper vans and a 3-metre high rocket built of sand.

By calling the exhibition works that work the curator, Charlotte Bagger Brandt, wants to signal that these are interactive works: ingeniously constructed pieces with active mechanisms. But they are also works that work upon you. Several of the artists animate new trains of thought, inviting you to step outside customary boundaries. Bagger Brandt has invited 7 groups of young artists to take part, putting the focus on contemporary art that communicates with the public and encourages active participation. 

Charlotte Bagger Brandt: "The exhibition is inspired by the collective, experimental and playful exhibition Festival 200, which took place in the Charlottenborg Exhibtion Building (as it was then known) over three weeks in 1969. To a great extent the exhibition functioned as an ongoing workshop "where opportunites are exploited, things arise and disappear again", as one newspaper article put it at the time. In this sense it was akin to the exhibition that Kunsthal Charlottenborg has now invited seven groups of young artists to create. The groups involved are all dedicated to cross-fertilisation, mixing music, sound, sculpture, design and painting in their work. They are groups for whom communication plays a key role, both internally within the group and externally in relation to the exhibition's visitors and society at large." 

Participating groups: ArtRebels (which has invited Maria Torp, Ultra Grøn and Christian Kornum), Bosch & Fjord, Büro Detours, Collective Strings, Kvinder på Værtshus ("Pub Women"), Parfyme and Urban Sound Institute. 


Exhibition period: 20 June to 30 August 2009. Open Tuesday to Sunday 12 – 5 pm.

Catalogue: Kunsthal Charlottenborg has entered into a media partnership with the newspaper Politiken, which is publishing a 12-page exhibition newspaper in 16,000 copies. Here the individual groups will be presented with ample photographic material on earlier works and current pieces on show at the exhibition. The newspaper will come out on 18 June. The person in charge at Politiken is Lise Ingemand; layout is by Agnete Schepelern, and the paper has a leader by the art critic Peter Michael Hornung.

Curator: Charlotte Bagger Brandt, Råderum – office for contemporary art, http://www.raaderum.nu

Simon Faithfull

http://www.bfi.org.uk/gallery

Gravity Sucks brings together for the first time the complete series of Simon Faithfull's Escape Vehicles, seven quixotic artworks that utilise an assortment of balloons, insects and rockets to offer the viewer the idea of freeing themselves from the constraints of gravity.

Faithfull's works can be seen as an ongoing investigation into the incomprehensible scale of the earth as an object. The Escape Vehicles employ video cameras, transmission systems and drawing devices as measuring tools to define size, time and distance, and the experiments often involve travel either by the artist himself or by cameras sent out as surrogate, dispassionate eyes.

The early Escape Vehicles are heroic failures – rocket chairs explode, flies fail to buzz and generally things stay on the ground. Alarmingly, as the series progresses the experiments begin to succeed, untilEscape Vehicle no.6 follows the journey made by a domestic chair as it travels into the upper atmosphere.

Dangling from an unseen weather balloon, the chair rushes away from the fields and roads of southern England and ascends through clouds until finally, seen against the curvature of the earth and the blackness of space, it starts to disintegrate. Although precariously successful in itself, the piece is imbued with melancholic failure for the artist asks us to imagine what it would be like to occupy the empty seat and travel to an uninhabitable realm where the temperature falls to -60º Celsius and breathing is impossible.

Josephine Meckseper and Lisa Anne Auerbach

http://www.nottinghamcontemporary.org

In advance of our opening in mid November, Nottingham Contemporary has commissioned, Josephine Meckseper and Lisa Anne Auerbach, to make new works. They will be shown in the large front window of our new building, facing the busy street. In quite distinct ways both artists playfully draw on the sign systems of commerce in order to immanently critique the global rise of capitalist fundamentalism. The installations will echo the retail environment around that part of the building. 

Meckseper's critique of how politics play out in the public sphere has evolved from a documentary approach into an increasingly direct examination of the destructive commercial interests in the war in Iraq. american apparel is an entirely mirrored space featuring a sculpture of three tyres (metonyms for the 'Big Three'?) on a chrome conveyor belt – this element is titled Sabotage on Auto Assembly Line to Slow it Down - alongside two videos shown on stacked television monitors. One of the videos is simply a continuous image of a shattered screen (Shattered Screen). The other, the conceptual core of the installation, is a montage of various car advertisements that flooded the US airwaves in early 2008. 0% Down reveals the violence latent in the otherwise appealing commercials, turning the fetishization of the car in on itself. "The very design of a product is a mirror reflecting its meanings and desires but concealing the power structure implicit in its fabrication" (Meckseper). A sense of instability haunts the clean surfaces of these seemingly benign objects, as if the "reason for their existence is the anticipation of their own destruction". 

At first glance Lisa Anne Auerbach's installation could be taken for a high-spirited display in a women's clothes store. Several cheerleaders' costumes - in yarn rather than lycra - appear on mannequins. Behind them is a photomural showing young women modelling the outfits in a Robin Hood-themed location in Southern California. They offer a post-feminist twist on Robin's Merry Men. On closer inspection phrases echoing Nottingham's radical political history become legible on the knitwear, resonating with the concerns of today's anti-capitalist movement. Robin Hood, as both an overly-commodified cliché and the original re-distributor of wealth, is what ties Los Angeles, with its vast movie industry, to Nottingham, home to Sherwood Forest and medieval buildings contemporaneous with the legendary outlaw, many of them near the new Nottingham Contemporary. For our window display Auerbach has created what she calls 'Sherwood Chic'. Using knitting as a means to begin a political conversation and to intervene in social life, her radical and participatory knitwear gleefully challenges 21st century knitters to abandon knitting patterns and invent for themselves: "Stop making scarves, start making trouble."

These are Auerbach's and Meckseper's first solo exhibitions in the UK. Designed by Caruso St John and opening on the 14th November, Nottingham Contemporary will be one of the leading and largest centres for contemporary art in England. We are in the centre of the city, 1 hour and 45 minutes by train from London.

Join the Protest Against Forgetting: A Brief History of Curating‏

Throughout his 40-year career Walter Hopps (1933–2005) never succumbed to administrative logic or routine. His chronic lateness and near-mythic disappearing acts prompted employees at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C., where he served as director in the 1970s, to make buttons reading walter hopps will be here in 20 minutes. 

The conversation will continue at walterhopps.com, log on to share stories about Walter Hopps and the other legendary curators in A Brief History of Curating, upload your button spottings to Flickr tagged "walterhopps" and join the Protest Against Forgetting at walterhopps.com.

Thanks to Richard Armstrong, Lionel Bovier, William Christenberry, Bice Curiger, Karen Constine, James Demetrion, Alexander Galan, Melissa Goldberg, Eric Hobsbawm, Erin Knutson, Karen Marta, Julia Peyton-Jones, Rachel Schwartz, Nancy Spector, Lorraine Two, Anton Vidokle, Sarah Williams, Christina Yang and curators everywhere that Walter Hopps's spirit has influenced. 

Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum presents Su-Mei Tse

http://www.gardnermuseum.org

Su-Mei Tse: Floating Memories is a new sound installation at the Gardner Museum by Luxembourg artist Su-Mei Tse. The exhibition merges a wide range of media encompassing sculpture, video, and sound into a single poetic form. Floating Memories has the pared-down aesthetic quality of minimalism with an emotional charge. The objects, images, and sounds are positioned to draw the viewer into an intimate and sensual encounter with art.

Su-Mei Tse came to the Gardner Museum as an Artist-in-Residence in 2007. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including one-person shows at Art Tower Mito, Japan (2009); Seattle Art Museum, Seattle (2008); PS1, New York (2006); the Casino, Forum d'Art Contemporain, Luxembourg (2006); the Renaissance Society, Chicago (2005); Museet for Samtidskunst, Roskilde, Denmark (2005); and the Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden (2004). 

In 2007, Tse collaborated with artist Lee Mingwei on a two-part exhibition, Duologue, at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Taiwan. Her work has also been shown at the 2006 Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennial in Japan; the 26th São Paulo Biennial; and the 2003 Venice Biennale, where she was awarded the Golden Lion for Best National Participation for her three-part installation, Air Conditioned.

Tse has recently been awarded the prestigious Fondation Prince Pierre de Monaco Prize for Contemporary Art (May 2009). She is represented by the Peter Blum Gallery, New York, where she will be opening an exhibition in November. 

Su-Mei Tse lives and works in Berlin and Luxembourg. Floating Memories is realized in collaboration with Jean-Lou Majerus.

Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo (MOT) presents Kosho Ito

http://www.mot-art-museum.jp

[Kosho Ito]
In August Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo presents Kosho Ito [WORKS 1974-2009], a major retrospective exhibition. Kosho Ito (1932- ) is an artist who uses clay to create large-scale installations. 

Born in the family of the metal engraving of Kanazawa, Ito got his start in the world of traditional ceramics but thereafter embarked into experimental works and has since been active in the contemporary art field earning him international accolade. In 1978, he represented Japan at the Triennale-India, where he was awarded the Gold Medal and also participated in the Venice-Biennale as the Japanese representative in 1984. 

Ito uses various types of clay in his works. They range from porcelain clay called Kaolin, to a more reddish-clay that contains substantial amount of iron as well as a type that can be found in Kasama, Ibaraki prefecture, where he now lives. Depending on the characteristics of the clay, the resulting effect differs in kaleidoscopic ways. 

An artificial intermediate process is kept to a minimum as he ultimately valued the delicate nuances of the clay and consciously focused on the fundamental nature of the medium. Cracks and ruffles that appear on the surface of Ito's works create an illusion to the viewer as if they are alive-so vibrant and full of life. Consequently, his creation is born under a dialogue one has with nature and its organic ways.

[Exhibition Outline]
The exhibition is based upon Ito's own collection, together with representative works from each period and series of his life as an artist. The exhibition gives a comprehensive prologue to Kosho Ito's oeuvre. In addition to works covering almost 35 years, there will be new works created specifically for this exhibition. These works evolve a relationship between the exhibition space and his works, echoing a mutual relevance and dynamic correlation with the site. Furthermore, his renowned installations will be shown under a new light, as he personally exhibits the works himself. 

Ito's works are usually composed by mounting of infinite number of tiny units. By the artist's own hands, these units are laid, intentionally, on the exhibition floor. These units may perhaps appear very similar almost to the point that they appear identical, yet none of these single units are the same. The countless formal differences in shapes, forms and color tones of these individual units give an impression of the effervescent movement of living organisms. These dynamic installations will, undoubtedly, reveal unlimited possibilities of explorations of nature, order and chaos before us.