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optikes · 3 years

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Kadim Ali b. 1978, Pakistan; lives and works in Sydney Australia

Sermon on the Mount (2020)

Linen, cotton, nylon, ink, natural dye, synthetic dye, acrylic paint; painting, hand and machine embroidery, appliqué 557 x 397.5cm

Born 1978 Quetta, Pakistan, Khadim Ali currently lives and works in Sydney, Australia. After growing up in Pakistan as a refugee, Ali was trained in classical miniature painting at the National College of Arts in Lahore and in mural painting and calligraphy in Tehran.

1 ima.org.au “I became other. I became one of the wearied, dusty faces from across the border. And although there was no boundary between us, and we were all citizens of one country, suddenly an invisible border of horror was drawn around me that made it impossible to get out” Khadim Ali

In his largest Australian solo exhibition to date, Hazara artist Khadim Ali explores the normalisation of war and the experience of refugees through a series of poetic installations and textile works. Invisible Border comprises sound installation, miniature painting, and a monumental 9-metre-long tapestry, hand woven by a community of Hazara men and women, some who have lost family members in war. Featuring existing work alongside new commissions developed for the IMA, the exhibition will also feature Otherness, a major body of work developed in partnership with the IMA and Lahore Biennale Foundation.

Ali’s interest in tapestries developed soon after his parents’ home in Quetta, Pakistan was destroyed by suicide bombers. Amongst the rubble and debris left from the blast, a collection of rugs and weavings remained the only thing intact: miraculously able to withstand the reign of terror inflicted upon his family and community. In this new large-scale tapestry, and other works, Ali explores the impact of war, trauma and displacement drawing parallels from the Book of Shahnameh, a Persian literary masterpiece comprising of 50,000 couplets and written between c. 977 and 1010 CE.

Just like the many great mythic tales in the Shannameh, Ali’s intricate works depict stories of demons and angels, conquest and war through the lens of the persecuted Hazara community. Expressing the profound grief, trauma and loss experienced at the hands of modern-day warfare, Invisible Border is a necessary and vital exhibition during a time of political propaganda, violence, and fear.

2 ima.org.au Ali’s interest in tapestries developed soon after his parents’ home in Quetta was destroyed by a car bomb. Amongst the rubble and debris left from the blast, a collection of rugs and weavings remained the only items intact: miraculously able to withstand the reign of terror inflicted upon his family and community. In these new large-scale tapestries, Ali makes comment on war, geo-politics and personal trauma, drawing from a range of historical and contemporary influences including the recent Black Summer bushfires, Persian literary masterpieces, children’s fables and the Mughal Dynasty. Expressing the profound horror, grief and loss experienced under modern-day warfare, Invisible Border is a necessary and vital exhibition during a time where political propaganda, violence, and fear pervades global relations.

3 Daisy Siddal inqld.com.au Ali has lived in Australia since 2009, nominated to arrive on a distinguished talent visa by then QAGOMA Director Tony Ellwood. Ali has worked between Australia and Afghanistan ever since.

Ali’s most recent work, Sermon on the Mount, adopts inspiration from the Bible and the Black Summer bushfires to generate a criticism of the experience of climate change.

Ali, who lives in Sydney’s inner-west, said his home was 40km away from the Black Summer bushfires.

“During the black summer we had horrible smoke. We were barely able to breathe. I was looking at the smoke and it was nostalgic, reminding me of the war,” he said.

“It reminded me of the stories people told when fleeing from a town that was set on fire, saying there was smoke on the mountain.

“The people who set their villages on fire, the Taliban and Al-Qaeda, they were considered a terrorist organisation. What do you call the corporations who caused climate change and set fire to a significant part of the forest of Australia?” he said.

IMA [Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane] Executive Director and exhibition curator Liz Nowell said she was thrilled to present Ali’s largest exhibition to date, in his adopted home of Australia.

“Khadim Ali is without a doubt one of Australia’s most acclaimed artists. His thought- provoking and poetic works have been seen all over the world: from the Guggenheim in New York to the Venice Biennale,” Ms Nowell said.

“Through intricately constructed textiles that draw on literature, traditional art forms, personal narratives and global politics, Invisible Border speaks powerfully to the experience of displaced peoples everywhere.”

4 guggenheim.org Born in 1978, Khadim Ali grew up in the border city of Quetta, Pakistan, near the border with Afghanistan. Trained in the art of contemporary miniature painting at the prestigious National College of Art in Lahore, Pakistan, and in mural painting and calligraphy at Tehran University, Iran, Ali is inspired by his rich cultural heritage and employs traditional artistic techniques to convey the complex history of this region. His work provocatively confronts the social and religious prejudice his family has faced and considers its effect on the writing of history, particularly during wartime.

5 ima.org.au Since relocating to Sydney twelve years ago, Ali has begun incorporating quotidian Australian iconography such as eucalyptus, currency and kangaroos into his work. Sermon on the Mount (2020) is an example of the artist’s evolving visual language. A direct response to the 2020 Black Summer bushfires—which devasted much of Australia’s bushland—the work depicts a cast of animals and mythical creatures seeking refuge atop a mountain engulfed in flames. The title of the work, Sermon on the Mount, makes direct reference to a series of teachings attributed to Jesus Christ, and widely considered to contain some of his most important messages. This composite tapestry, which was initially constructed as a digital collage, is the artist’s reimagining of a 15th century illustration from the Anwar-i Suhayli. Widely considered a masterpiece of world literature, the Anwar-i Suhayli (also known as Kalīla wa-Dimna, in Arabic, or Panchatantra in Sanskrit) is a collection of fables describing animals as heroic creatures. In the original drawing, held in collection of the British Museum, a crow addresses a group of birds to rally their support against a leader of the owls. In Ali’s version, the crow is replaced by a koala, who is seen towering above a cluster of animals as she delivers a prophecy that foretells the destruction of mother nature at the hands of humankind. While watching the fires unfold on the evening news, Ali was overcome with a deep and pervasive fear, which he likens to his experience living in a conflict zone.

As the artist himself states ‘The bushfires reminded me of the violence I spent my life trying to escape. At the same time as the Taliban burns people and their homes to the ground, a fire—only 40km from my house in Sydney—decimated whole species and blackened thousands of hectares of bushland. As the newsreader described animals feeling for their lives, I recalled whole villages hysterical and panicked as they tried to escape fire. So, what then, should we call these people—these corporations—who are destroying our natural world and quite literally scorching the ground we walk on?’

#khadim ali #Afghanistan #embroidery #applique #textile #narrative #tapestry

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tigerstrikesasteroidnetwork · 3 years

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NY / Night Scenes

Ethan Greenbaum, Night Scene with Leaves, 2021, Inkjet Print, Acrylic Paint, Collage on Paper, 16.5” x 11.5”

Night Scenes September 24 – October 24, 2021 The gallery will be open every Sat & Sun from 1 – 6pm and by appointment

Tiger Strikes Asteroid New York is pleased to present Night Scenes, a group exhibition curated by Sun You and Dominic Terlizzi. Featuring works by Richard Bosman, Ethan Greenbaum, Matt Jones, Christina Yuna Ko, Larysa Myers, Sarah Palmer, Alan Reid, Vanessa Gully Santiago, Ginevra Shay, Yuri Yuan and Monsieur Zohore.

During Covid lockdowns, I was taking a lot of walks at night. I became entranced with the city after dark—illuminated by artificial light and the melancholy, sexy energy of the nocturnal. I feel like now is a good time for a show featuring artists who work with themes of landscape, night, darkness and illumination.

ARTISTS

Richard Bosman is an Australian-American, born in Chennai, India who lives and works in Esopus, New York. He attended the Bryam Shaw School of Painting and Drawing, London, and the New York Studio School. His work has been shown at The British Museum, London; National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; Berggruen Gallery, San Francisco; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Brooke Alexander Gallery, New York; Freddy, Harris, NY; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Brooklyn Museum, New York; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Museo Tamayo, Mexico City; and the 41st Venice Biennale, among others. Bosman is a recipient of a 1994 Guggenheim Fellowship.

Ethan Greenbaum is a New York based artist. Selected exhibition venues include KANSAS, New York; Derek Eller Gallery, New York; Hauser and Wirth, New York; Marlborough Chelsea, New York; Higher Pictures, New York; Marianne Boesky, New York; Circus Gallery, Los Angeles; Steve Turner, Los Angeles; The Suburban, Chicago; Michael Jon & Alan, Miami; The Aldrich Museum, Connecticut; Socrates Sculpture Park; Long Island City and Stems Gallery, Brussels. Recent projects include a solo presentation with Galerie Pact, Paris and solo exhibitions at Lyles & King, New York and Super Dakota, Brussels. His work has been discussed in The New York Times, Modern Painters, Artforum, BOMB Magazine, ArtReview and Interview Magazine, among others.

Matt Jones has had solo or two person shows at Galerie Jerome Pauchant, Paris; Freight + Volume Gallery, New York; Horton Gallery, Berlin; Castor Gallery, New York; The Richard Massey Foundation, New York; Bleecker Street Art Club, New York; and Buia Gallery, New York. He has participated in NADA, Miami; The Hole, New York; Spring Break Art Fair, Brooklyn; Driscoll Babcock, New York; Miami Project, and a solo presentation at Art Brussels, Bodson Gallery, Brussels. His work has been displayed in group shows at Robert Miller, New York; Anonymous, Mexico City; ADA Gallery, Richmond, Virginia; Galleri Geo, Bergen, Norway; and Fiebach Minninger, Cologne.

Christina Ko is a Korean American artist living and working in Queens, NY. She received her BFA from Cornell University in 2013, and has since then shown her work in Los Angeles, CA, Washington D.C., and in NYC. Selected exhibitions include: “In Good Taste”, Dinner Gallery, New York; “Futures Ever Arriving”, Chelsea Market, New York; “Internal Arrangements”, Trestle Gallery, Brooklyn, New York; “Downloading Place”, Wave Hill, Bronx, New York; “Fever Lure”, Selenas Mountain Gallery, Brooklyn, New York; “Crossover: East and West”, Korean Cultural Center, Washington D.C.. Her work has been featured in Gallery Gurls, the Arcade Project Zine, Hiss Magazine, The Fader magazine, The Washington Post, and Ballpit Magazine.

Larysa Myers studied drawing and painting at Grand Central Academy and textile design at Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City, developing a love for classical drawing methods and pattern making. After leaving the city and moving to Beacon, NY, she started a family and began a new body of work focusing on drawing. Her work has been featured in Maake Magazine, ArtMaze Mag, The Concern, and will be in an upcoming book by the Drawing Stall. She has shown her work at Mother Gallery in Beacon, and she participated in residencies at the Wassaic Project and Chashama.

Sarah Palmer was born in San Francisco and lives in Brooklyn. She received her BFA from Vassar College and MFA from the School of Visual Arts, in Photography, Video, and Related Media. She was awarded the 2011 Aperture Portfolio Prize and is represented by Mrs. Gallery in New York. Her work has been exhibited at the Foam_fotografiemuseum in Amsterdam (which holds her work in its permanent collection); NADA Miami with Mrs. Gallery (solo); SPRING/BREAK Art Show in New York; and, most recently, in the two-person exhibition Out of the Folds at Monti 8 in Latina, Italy, in summer 2020. Recent commissions include The New York Times, The New Yorker, and New Directions Press.

Alan Reid is a painter who was born in Texas and currently lives in Brooklyn. He has presented solo exhibitions at Lisa Cooley, New York; Mary Mary, Glassgow; A Palazzo, Brescia and Patricia Low, Gstaad. His monograph “Warm Equations” is published by Patrick Frey. He curated the exhibition Air de Pied a Terre, at Lisa Cooley, NY. Reid's work has been reviewed by Bomb, Frieze, Vogue, NYTimes, New Yorker, among others. He both writes and speaks about art, on occasion. Alan received an MFA at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, MD in 2008, a BFA from the University of North Texas, Denton, TX, 2003 and attended the Summer Program at Yale University, New Haven, CT in 2001.

Vanessa Gully Santiago lives and works in Queens, NY and received her BFA from Cooper Union and MFA from Rutgers University. She has presented her work in solo exhibitions at James Fuentes Gallery, Thierry Goldberg Gallery, and American Medium Gallery, as well as in group and two person exhibits at Rachel Uffner Gallery, Mrs, Helena Anrather Gallery, JTT, Jack Barrett Gallery, Marinaro Gallery, Foxy Production, (all in New York); Smart Objects, in lieu (both in Los Angeles); Embajada Gallery (Puerto Rico), The Green Gallery (Milwaukee), C. Grimaldis Projects (Baltimore), and Rosenwald Wolf Gallery (Philadelphia), among others. She has been in residence at the Vermont Studio Center and Byrdcliffe Art Colony.

Ginevra Shay is based in NYC and Baltimore. They are a current MFA candidate at the Milton Avery School at Bard College. They have exhibited at Houston Center for Photography, Houston, TX; Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens, Sint-Martens-Latem, Belgium; PHROOM, Odessa, Ukraine; JEST, Turin, Italy; Center for Photography at Woodstock, Woodstock, NY; Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore, MD; Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT; Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, PA; amidst many others. Their work resides in public collections including Yale University Art Gallery Library, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, International Center for Photography, Indie Photobook Library, Houston Center for Photography, and many others. They are a Maryland Individual Artist Award recipient for photography.

Yuri Yuan is a current Visual Arts MFA candidate at Columbia University, New York, NY. She received a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL in 2019. Yuan was a recipient of the Helen Frankenthaler Scholarship at Columbia University in 2020, and Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant in 2019. She has exhibited work at Alexander Berggruen Gallery, New York City, NY; Make Room Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; The ROOM Contemporary Art Space, Venice, Italy; Lenfest Center for the Arts, New York, NY; Sullivan Galleries, Chicago, IL; Siragusa Gallery, Chicago, IL; International Center for the Arts, Umbria, Italy.

Monsieur Zohore is an Ivorian-American artist based in New York and Baltimore. Zohore received his BFA from the Cooper Union in 2015, and his MFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 2020. He is the Assistant Professor of Painting and Printmaking at VCU. Recently, he was the 2020 recipient of the WPA and Warhol Foundation Wherewithal Research Grant, and he has been awarded the Socrates Sculpture Park Fellowship for 2021. His work has been exhibited in various venues including Springsteen (Baltimore), Ethan Cohan (New York), Terrault Gallery (Baltimore), New Release Gallery (New York), 56 Henry (New York), Canada Gallery (New York), and Jack Barrett (New York) as well as at the 2020 Material Art Fair (Coyoacan, CMDX). Zohore has also been invited to show at The Baltimore Museum of Art (Baltimore), Washington Projects for the Arts (Washington D.C.), and at The Columbus Museum of Art (Columbus).

photos by Yael Eban

#nightscenes #tiger strikes asteroid #tigerstrikesasteroid

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architectnews · 4 years

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Twenty-two women architects and designers you should know

To mark International Women's Day, we asked 22 of the world's most inspirational women architects and designers to nominate another woman who should be better known for their work.

Each of the prominent architects and designers was asked to select a woman who they think deserves greater recognition.

Several chose to shine a light on historic figures who did not receive full recognition in their lifetimes, with MVRDV co-founder Nathalie de Vries, Bangladeshi architect Marina Tabassum and Neri&Hu co-founder Rossana Hu nominating Jadwiga Grabowska-Hawrylak, Minnette de Silva and Lin Huiyin respectively.

Others took the opportunity to draw attention to a contemporary woman or women-led team that should be better known, with Camille Walala, Tatiana Bilbao, Dorte Mandrup and Eva Franch i Gilabert nominating Unscene Architecture, Taller Comunal, Marie-José Van Hee and V. Mitch McEwen respectively.

Read on for the 22 architects and designers that deserve greater recognition:

Marie-José Van He Nominated by Dorte Mandrup, Dorte Mandrup Arkitekter

"Marie-José Van Hee is a remarkably talented architect. Working primarily in her native country, Belgium, she is forging a significant mark on contemporary architecture with her attention to space, light and natural materials.

"Through her understated, authentic and poetic work, she continuously influences and inspires architects and designers alike. A timeless simplicity and weightlessness permeate throughout her designs, creating a stillness that seems almost tangible – blurring the line between art and architecture."

Iwona Buczkowska Nominated by Farshid Moussavi, Farshid Moussavi Architecture

"Polish-born French architect Iwona Buczkowska's brilliant career is distinguished by an architectural approach opposed to any form of standardisation, thus placing the diversity of users and their agency at the core of her work. Her tireless commitment has led to the creation of works of incredible richness and inventiveness, whether for housing projects or public facilities.

"At a time when we need to question our built environment, and in particular, the housing in which we live, her work on diversification, user empowerment and inclusion seems particularly worthy of attention. As her work is under-studied, and because some of her built projects are currently under threat of demolition, I feel it is particularly important to bring to light what her work has to teach us."

Charlotte Perriand Nominated by Es Devlin, Es Devlin Studio

"Last weekend I went to the South Downs to try to recreate this uplifting portrait of Charlotte Perriand (above) about which her daughter said: 'That photograph of a strong woman, triumphantly embracing nature, is the perfect image of my mother. She announces the contemporary woman, emancipated and free.

"Most of us have sat on the extraordinary and now iconic furniture she made in collaboration with Le Corbusier. Most of us are unaware of her fundamental role in its design. She was a genius in the art of collaboration, especially with powerful male artists. Her practice spanned an astounding range of genres, her work drew deeply on the forms she observed in nature throughout her rich life."

Kenyatta Mclean Nominated by Harriet Harriss, dean of the Pratt Institute School of Architecture

"I'd like to nominate Kenyatta Mclean, co-founder and co-managing director of Blackspace: the black, interdisciplinary, spatial collective comprised of architects, artists, designers and planners who have asserted both the necessity and the agency of 'Black Urbanism'.

"From my perspective, her ability to co-create spatial narratives that are centred in and driven by racial justice is essential and urgent work applicable both to the US where the practice is situated, and cities worldwide, where structural racism and other forms of discrimination are embedded in the materiality and form of the architectures that surround us.

"Moreover, spatial collectives – from Matrix to Assemble – offer a much-needed antidote to the vagaries of starchitecture and the hierarchies typically found in traditional design practices. Kenyatta Mclean's visionary work reminds us all of the need to use this period of Covid-imposed introspection to re-examine how much more inclusive, equitable and impactful our industry needs to become.

"Blackspace also offers a road map and a benchmark for graduates and young practitioners who are committed to leading the changes we need to make."

Unscene Architecture Nominated by Camille Walala, Studio Walala

"I would like to nominate Unscene Architecture. A pair of fantastic women that I met the year before the pandemic started. The architecture design duo – founders Manijeh Verghese and Madeleine Kessler – were the co-creators of the British Pavilion for the postponed 2020 Venice Architecture Biennale. Definitely, ones to watch."

Anupama Kundhoo Nominated by Seetal Solanki

"A rare kind within the world of architecture. Anupama Kundhoo brings people a voice, materials a voice and building a voice that is beyond her own – an egoless practice. Traits that shouldn't be so rare actually, but she's paving the way for so many and hopefully many more to come."

Ndebele women Nominated by Sumayya Vally, Counterspace

"In this tribe, we evoke women near and far – friends, ancestors and mythical figures – women who write, organise, imagine and build worlds into being. I chose to draw attention to the unrecognised architect genius of the Ndebele women – women who craft ritual objects and build and adorn their own homes. The calling of their names invokes the calling of millions of errant, unrecognised, other architects the world over – past, present and future.

"They are Maria Ntobela Mahlangu, Dinah Mahlangu, Johanna Mkwebani, Martina Maghlangu, Anna Msiza, Sara Mthimunye, Sara and Lisbeth, Pikinini and Sara Skosana, Anna Mahlangu, Letty Ngoma, Sarah Mguni, Martha Mtsweni Ndala, Rossinah and Esther Mahlangu."

Jadwiga Grabowska-Hawrylak Nominated by Nathalie de Vries, MVRDV

"When working on our Concordia Design project in Wroclaw, Poland, I met Jadwiga Grabowska-Hawrylak, the grande dame of modern Polish architecture. Born in 1920, she brought architecture to the next level in the second half of the 20th century. In 1974, she was the first woman to receive the prestigious Honorary Award from the Association of Polish Architects.

"In a time when female Polish architects were mostly known as 'the wife of…' Jadwiga had a highly successful career, she had a big part in rebuilding postwar Wroclaw, and was also known for her schools and housing. I am really impressed by her work and her amazing personality. When I met her, she was very energetic and still very much involved in architecture. With her passing in 2018, Poland lost a great architect."

Minnette de Silva Nominated by Marina Tabassum

"The first name that comes to mind is Minnette de Silva (pictured above with Pablo Picasso), an architect ahead of her time. Less celebrated than her contemporary male counterparts. You may have read this article below, but I'm sharing the link again. This tells her story better than I can write."

Marina Willer Nominated by Margaret Calvert

"I would propose Marina Willer, although she may not fit as she's already well known. Apart from being an exceptional graphic designer and filmmaker, Marina was the first woman to be appointed a Pentagram partner. Brazilian by birth, it was at the Royal College of Art, where I was teaching at the time, that I first became aware of her amazing drive, commitment and talent as a student."

Duygu and Begum Ozturk Nominated by Nelly Ben Hayoun, Nelly Ben Hayoun Studios

"I nominate Duygu and Begum Ozturk, the two sisters behind the fashion brand Harem London. Born in Istanbul, they started their all-organic fashion brand recently in Dalston, London; merging traditional techniques from Istanbul and London, bringing together their heritage and future.

"I love that they started a business together as sisters and that they are persevering in developing their beautiful collection despite the pandemic and Brexit and all the complexity this created for them. They need to be applauded for their great work."

Lin Huiyin Nominated by Rossana Hu, Neri&Hu

"Lin Huiyin was the first female architect in modern China. Lin and her partner Liang Sicheng were the pioneers in architectural heritage restoration and documentation in China during the 1930s.

"Although it was the two of them who brought China's ancient architectural treasures to light, Lin's recognition in documenting and restoring China's historic buildings has often been overshadowed by her partner, who is recognised as the 'father of modern Chinese architecture'. In addition to her architectural practice, Lin is also widely acclaimed for her literary creation."

Mary Corse Nominated by Azusa Murakami, Studio Swine

"I would like to pick Mary Corse. She has been gaining much-deserved recognition in recent years with a solo show at the Whitney but has been arguably one of the most innovative artists to come out of the light and space movement.

"We love her material research, her ability to take industrial elements like the glass microbeads used on motorway reflective road markings and using it to make really delicate and sublime optical paintings is really inspiring."

Yemi Awosile Nominated by Morag Myerscough

"I have loved Yemi Awosile's work for many years. She is a wonderful person and I have worked with her in the past on the Bernie Grant Centre where she made some textiles for the centre."

Franziska Porges Hosken Nominated by Jane Hall, Assemble

"Austrian-born, and America-based, designer Franziska Porges Hosken was pioneering in multiple respects. In 1944 she became one of the first women to receive her master's of architecture degree from Harvard's Graduate School of Design and in 1947, together with her husband James Hosken, she founded their successful eponymous furniture business Hosken.

"Despite giving up her design practice to take care of her first child in the late 1950s, Hosken continued to create as a photographer and journalist, publishing numerous books on urbanism including The Language of Cities.

"She was also an activist for women's rights, founding the Women's International Network and publishing reports on Female Genital Mutilation (FGM), a term she is credited with coining, which affected the agenda of major health organisations including the WHO. Continuing to distribute a feminist newsletter well into her eighties, Hosken's legacy demonstrates an extraordinary commitment, undertaken over the course of a lifetime, to connect design with social activism."

Winka Dubbeldam Nominated by Sonali Rastogi, Morphogenesis

"Winka Dubbeldam is an architect whose contribution I would like to acknowledge. She is the founder of the WBE firm Archi-Tectonics. She had visited our studio about 15 years back whilst working on the redevelopment of the New Delhi railway station. I also enjoyed attending one of her juries in UPenn about ten years ago, and ever since, I have been following her.

"Being in academia myself, what resonates with me is her significant influence on the emerging generation through her involvement in architectural education and design juries worldwide. Her designs are evocative and transformative, and she creates architecture that matters.

"I read somewhere that she maintains a fluid balance between energy and calm, precision and informality, experiment and comfort in her designs, studio, and life, a mantra I have been following all my life."

Eva Albarran Nominated by Sofia Von Ellrichshausen, Pezo von Ellrichshausen

"I would like to propose Eva Albarran: a Spanish entrepreneur, living both in Paris and Madrid, who operates in the expanded, and diffuse, field of contemporary art and architecture.

"She is a solid character who has managed to solve complex productions for significant artists (such as Christian Boltaski, Felice Varini or Francis Alys). Together with her husband, they direct a refined gallery and the Solo houses program, a project that might well be read as a radical revision of the current human condition in relation to nature."

Dana Al Amiri Nominated by Pallavi Dean, Roar

"Dana Al Amiri, the co-founder of Watab Studio, is a rising star in the male-dominated Saudi construction industry. I love her minimal pared design philosophy – practicing in a region that is infamous for opulent and OTT statements. She truly represents the next generation of regional architects that are defining Saudi's design identity."

Taller Comunal Nominated by Tatiana Bilbao

"I would like to make Taller Comunal, which is led by Mariana Ordóñez Grajales and Jesica Amescua Carrera, my recommendation. Because for them, architecture is not a profession, it is a service to facilitate architecture to be produced by the people who inhabit it. That should be the future of our profession."

Anne Tyng Nominated by Huang Wenjing, Open Architecture

"Anne Tyng immediately came to mind as a female architect that deserves much more recognition. Born in China in 1920 to missionary parents; a classmate of Eileen Pei and IM Pei — these two little details seem to have brought her closer to me, my being Chinese and had worked in the office that IM founded.

"Tyng was one of the first women to study architecture at Harvard Graduate School of Design; the only woman to take the architectural license test in 1949.

"It is unfortunate and unfair that people often seem to be more interested in her anecdotal affair with the iconic master Louis Kahn than her great influence on his early works — the rigour of geometry and order was very much Anne Tyng's interest and contribution. She went on to be an independent architect, theorist and educator. A true pioneering woman in the field."

V. Mitch McEwen Nominated by Eva Franch i Gilabert

"Mitch is an architect, activist, dancer, rapper, entrepreneur, someone who has taken the lead on many occasions to make space for new ideas.

"We crossed paths several times throughout the last ten years; In 2011, during the Occupy Wall Street Movement, I organised an exhibition and a series of events at Storefront for Art and Architecture hosted by brilliant people; Mitch's workshop "How to Occupy a House in America" was one of them.

"In 2014, Mitch was one of the architects writing letters to the Mayor in the first edition in New York of the global project "Letters to the Mayor" asking Mayor Bill de Blasio: "How can New York City Housing Authority really become the Pride of Our City?" and provided some answers and ideas that still stand.

"Mitch is currently an assistant professor at Princeton University – where I am currently teaching a seminar. Her work is now on display at MoMA in New York as part of Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America."

Mónica Bertolino Nominated by Sandra Barclay, Barclay & Crousse

"Mónica Bertolino is an architect from Córdoba, Argentina, where she lives and works as part of the Studio Bertolino-Barrado founded in 1981.

"Together with Carlos Barrado they have an excellent production of projects in different scales. In their work you understand immediately the search for good qualities in habitability, their sensibility when they intervene in the landscape, and their concern for research about materiality linked to the local traditions of construction.

"I admire and think she deserves recognition especially in her academic role where she transmits her passion and enthusiasm for architecture in an unconditional way. She is devoted to this mission!

"She participates in workshops and as invited professor in different universities in the world as well as a regular professor in the National University of Cordoba and in the Catholic University of Cordoba."

The post Twenty-two women architects and designers you should know appeared first on Dezeen.

#Architecture – Dezeen

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chloerd · 4 years

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Artist Talk - Alena Ruth Donely

Undergraduate 2018

Today, I attended the talk of former student Alena Ruth Donely who spoke about her practice.

First year (2015/16)

In her first year at University, she said she experiment with lots of different mediums, she was more interested in fibre-textiles and had little experience from bits that her grandmother had taught her.

Second year (2016/17)

In the second year, she experimented primarily with textiles and fibres. She took part in the Women’s Equality Party First conference. She also created her first tufted piece and made sure to try as many things as possible. Her inspiration was the biological bodily autonomy. She tufted, loom knitted, and hand stitched.

Alena made numerous works made with different textiles and fibre mediums.

Giant Vagina Series

Touch Me // Please Don’t Touch Me. (2016).

She spoke about her artwork becoming a therapy, to help overcome trauma. The work and textiles are tactile, strong, and durable. She experimented with shapes and tried to figure out her style and capabilities with the medium.

Third Year (2017/18)

Alena said she liked how other people would read her artwork, sometimes it may have been something that she did not mean to portray but how the viewer has interpreted it.

Venice Biennale (2017)

In the Venice Biennale 2017, she stewarded at the British Pavilion on the Cathy Wilkes installation.

“Art could be this spectacular experience.”

Self-portrait (2018)

She began using the tufting gun as a painting tool. The work was mounted on MDF canvas. She had to consider the composition, colour, size, etc. of the piece while making it.

In 2018, she worked with artist, Ruth Barker, and the Castlefield Gallery for International Women’s Day. Inspired by femininity and womanhood. Together, they created a tufted Goddess Face. Alena was Ruth’s assistant.

For the Degree Show, Alena created a 28ft rug. She got her inspiration from photography backdrops, films of her granddad’s slides that showed imagery of her family. She had to consider colours and composition. She spoke about how she felt a connection to the work and the slides, because it was her family, even if she hadn’t met her granddad’s family etc. She used resin and yarn to make sculptures. She exhibited the slide projector on a yellow plinth, and the slides projected on white tufting. You couldn’t make out exactly what was displaying, this was on purpose, it was like a personal secret to the artist, an abstract projection. After the Degree Show, Alena re-purposed her work by cutting each piece and selling them as rugs.

The same year, Alena attended a course with Caroline Achiantre in Austria, Salzburg August. In this, she created portraits and animism and said she learnt a lot of skills. When she returned, she was awarded a place on the Graduate Scholarship Scheme with the University of Salford Art Gallery, where she gained a free studio space at Islington Mill for a year. (2018/2019).

The collaboration that she did with Ruth Barker, where they created a paper sculpture and tufted the Goddess face, went on tour to Glasgow Women’s Library in January 2019. In February 2019, she moved into her new studio space at Unit 4 – Islington Mill.

In 2020, Alena took part in Box on the Docks, where she painted the box luminous colours. The box was part of Wagamamas.

She started running workshops in her studio space, she got a tufting gun and start doing one-to-ones with artists, designers, couples, and singles. She creates up to 1-4 days sessions. She gives discount rates to university of Salford students and collaborates with people.

It was interesting to hear what Alena had done during her time at University, it was also interesting to hear what she had been doing after graduating. The scholarships and opportunities that she had sound amazing, and to have an opportunity to travel somewhere and make work would be incredible, although I can imagine the language barrier would have been difficult. Additionally, I liked the concept of her re-purposing her degree show work by cutting the different pieces up and selling them as rugs. By doing this, a piece of her life lives inside somebody’s home.

#context

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isolated9-blog · 5 years

Photo

Tracey Emin was born in London in 1963 and grew up in Margate on the South East coast of England. She studied at Maidistone College of Art, 1986-1989 and then completed an MA at the Royal College of Art, London in 1992. Emin was shortlisted for the Turner Prize in 1999 and has been selected to represent Britain at the 52ndVenice Biennale of Art, 2007. Emin lives and works in London.

Tracey Emin formed part of a generation of enterprising artists who wanted to reach their audience directly. In 1994 she held a collaborative ‘shop’ selling artworks with fellow arties Sarah Lucas in the East End of London. It was also a significant year as she travelled across the USA recording readings from her autobiography. “Exploration of the Soul”. This performance is recorded in a work entitled Monument Valley (Grand Scale) Arizonan desert valley, Emin performed a healing ritual through recounting painful personal memories as she travelled across the United States. The chair was then also subsequently sewn with the names of the places she visited, and is exhibited as an artwork entitled There’s A Lot of Money In Chairs (1994).

Tracey Emin works in range of different media, including drawing, film performance, photography, printmaking, installation and applique. Her work includes autobiographical text, often with idiosyncratic spelling mistakes, word reversals, of paradoxical statements. Her textile works are particularly characteristic: she takes a medium associated with female accomplishment but turns it on its head to explore sexually explicit statement “here to stay” is embroidered under the United States of America’s flag. This work can also be read as a political critique – it begs the viewer to ask the question: where are the Americans “here to stay”? Indeed here Emin is making a statement about American omnipresence perhaps though its global multinational implantation.

Emin’s works is provocative, not so much in its form, but in its subject matter. My Bed (1998), which formed the central feature of her Turner Prize exhibition at Tate Britain the following year, consisted in short of the artist’s unmade bed surrounded by personal items from her bedroom. Emin’s work is disarmingly autobiographical and emotionally expressive. Often her work expresses angst, it can be tragic, yet it can also be humorous as she uses her working materials as a psychological filter.

Tracey Emin deals with confrontational themes such as love. Sex, death. She describes personal hardship particular to young women today such as rape, abortion, drunkenness, sexual in intimidation and violence. Recently Emin has produced a film, entitled Top Spot (2004), which is loosely inspired be her real-life experiences. Set in her hometown Margate, the film discusses issues of concern to contemporary British teenagers. Emin continuously weaves fact and fiction, autobiography, personal loss and joy, meditation and confrontation in her bold body of work.

Emin’s work featured in important group shows such as “’Brilliant!’ New Art from London”, Minneapolis and Houston, 1995-6 and “Sensation: Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection”, London, Berlin and New York, 1997-9. These exhibitions featured Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963-1995 (1995), a tent appliqued with the names of each person Emin had shared a bed with.

Major solo exhibitions include: Gesellschaft fur Aktulle Kunst Bremen, 1999; Stedelijk, Amsterdam, 2002; Haus der Kunst, Munchen, 2002; Modern Art Oxford, 2002; Platform Garanti Contemporary Arts Center, Istanbul, 2004.

Reading:

“Tracey Emin”. Texts be Neal Brown, Sarah Kent and Matthew Collings. Jay Jopling/White Cube, London, 1988

“Tracey Emin. The Art of Tracey Emin”. Essays by Chris Townsend et al. Thames & Hudson, 2002

“Tracey Emin”. Texts by Jeanette Winterson, Rudi Fuchs and Tracey Emin in conversation with Carl Freedman. Rizzoli, New York, 2006

Picture

<My Bed> 1999

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italianartsociety · 7 years

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By Jean Marie Carey

A site-specific installation combining high-definition video projections and the buildings, public areas, and lagoon environments of Venice opens today – 7 May 2017 – in advance of the Biennale di Venezia, which gets underway later this week. The work by British artist Shezad Dawood, titled Leviathan, also incorporates textile and sculptural works housed in the recently-renovated Palazzina Canonica, situated on the waterfront next to the Giardini della Biennale. Curated by Alfredo Cramerotti, Leviathan is presented by the Fondazione Querini Stampalia and developed in collaboration with the Istituto delle Scienze Marine and Venice’s Fortuny house of fabrics.

Venice, struggling with encroaching waters and damage to its historic structures caused by air pollution, is unfortunately a perfect location for Leviathan, which both documents and imagines the effects of global warming. Dawood says:

This project was already under-way before climate discourse went from the mainstream to the marginal. But the key question then, as now, was how to make the science and the possible future awaiting us more accessible. I hope the collaborative enterprise that begins in Venice, informed by so many generously lending their time and expertise, goes some way towards doing that.

Following the launch this month, Leviathan will embark on a three-year international tour, culminating in a final presentation of all ten episodes in 2020. Leviathan will also be released as a series of short stories that will be published in serial form on the project website. The first episode is now available online at www.leviathan-cycle.com.

Reference: Cleo Roberts. “Shezad Dawood: Kalimpong.” ArtAsiaPacific, April 2017, Issue 102, p.160.

Shezad Dawood, Leviathan Cycle (production stills), 2017. HD video. Courtesy of the artist and UBIK Productions.

Further Reading: Martinus Antonius Maria Drenthen. Environmental Aesthetics: Crossing Divides and Breaking Ground. New York: Fordham University Press, 2014.

Robert Storr; Francesca Pietropaolo; Harriet Schoenholz Bee. Where Art Worlds Meet: Multiple Modernities and the Global Salon: la Biennale di Venezia International Symposium. Venice: Marsilio, 2007.

#otd #venice biennale #biennale di venezia #levi ackerman #shezad dawood #alfredo cramerotti #Giardini della Biennale #Palazzina Canonica #fortuny #Venice #venezia #venuto #installation #contemporary art #climate change #activist art #video art #italian art #british aristocracy

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nofomoartworld · 7 years

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Hyperallergic: A Brief History of Contemporary Art in Myanmar

A bus in Myanmar (all photos by author for Hyperallergic unless otherwise noted)

YANGON, Myanmar — The contemporary art scene in Myanmar (Burma) is undergoing a whiplash-inducing level of change that reflects the trajectory of the country. Consider these stats: In the year 2000, a SIM phone card cost roughly $2,000. The price dropped to $500 around 2006, then $250 in 2012. Today, a SIM card costs a mere $1 in a country where the minimum monthly wage is approximately $67. As recently as 2012, only 1% of the population used the internet, and only 5% had mobile phone access. During that time, internet café users had to supply their passport numbers, addresses, and phone numbers to café owners, with all usage recorded and sent to Myanmar Info-Tech every two weeks. Then, in 2013, Norwegian telecommunications company Telenor and the Qatari company Ooredoo were awarded contracts to connect most of Myanmar to a wireless phone network. The country catapulted from landlines to smartphones and Facebook, flying past computer-based internet in fewer than five years.

* * *

The entrance to the Shwedagon Pagoda in Yangon

The gold-plated, diamond-encrusted main pavilion at the Shwedagon Pagoda, surrounded by 64 lesser pavilions

Myanmar, an overwhelmingly Buddhist country, is know to most Westerners as the home of Aung San Suu Kyi, or “The Lady” who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991 for facing down her country’s military dictatorship. (After spending a total of 15 years of house arrest, she helped bring about, in 2015, the country’s first free election in over a decade.) But the story of contemporary art in Myanmar begins with its time as a British colony, from 1824 until 1948. British painting styles, including Realism and Romanticism, had a large influence on the development of art in the country. For the most part, Burmese artists did not venture abroad, with occasional exceptions, including U Ba Nyan and U Ba Zaw, who studied at London’s Royal Academy of Arts in the 1930s.

A page of traditional textile designs in U Aye Myint’s Burmese Designs Through Drawing

After throwing off the shackles of colonial rule, Myanmar had just 14 years to experiment with independence. It was then that the term “modern art” entered the country’s lexicon, thanks to U or “Bagyi” (which translates as “painter”) Aung Soe, who had studied at Rabindranath Tagore’s art ashram in India and been exposed to some of the giants of 20th-century modernism through visits to the Pushkin Museum in Moscow. He went on to write From Tradition to Modern, one of only three books on modern art allowed to be published in the country until 1988.

In 1952, the Myanmar School of Fine Arts opened, followed by another state school of fine art in Mandalay. The Ministry of Culture also came into being in 1952, with a mandate to control all creative curriculum. Art training emphasized four main subjects: sculpture, painting, music, and dramatic arts. Included within these were traditional temple construction, instruments, marionettes, and classical dance, often grounded in Buddhist myths and stories. Art students tended to imitate their teachers’ work. In 1962, members of the military staged a successful coup, which affected all cultural production.

A page of traditional hair designs in U Aye Myint’s Burmese Designs Through Drawing

* * *

The new military government was staunchly isolationist, and artists in the country became subject to a censorship board, which consisted of a constantly changing coterie of government officials who possessed a minimal understanding of art. They determined what “acceptable” work was, based on vague and ever-shifting standards. Early modernists like Aung Khaing, who used nudity and abstraction, were censored and did not display their work in public for decades. Over the ensuing decades, some artists did manage to travel abroad, bringing back a smattering of influences from the US, Europe, Asia, the Middle East, and Russia. By the end of the 1980s, artists started meeting in Mandalay, Yangon (Rangoon), and other cities, where they traded information and pictures in a manner reminiscent of the Soviet samizdat.

Aung Khaing, “Women” (1971) (image courtesy the artist)

In 1988, a student-led revolt called the 8888 Uprising, or People Power Uprising, attempted to break the hold of the military junta, but was quickly quashed. Scores of artists were jailed, and art became even more heavily censored. It got so bad that specific colors or color combinations were restricted. Red was targeted because of its association with blood and revolution, as well as its symbolic connection to Aung San Suu Kyi’s political party, the National League for Democracy. The pairing of black and white was also policed because it was thought to show a contrast between doom and purity.

Maung Maung Htway, “Starving For the Light” (1999) (image courtesy the artist)

Despite the government crackdown, it was impossible to silence Myanmar’s artists entirely. They found ways around the imposed absurdities by using euphemisms or codes in their paintings to outwit censors, or by refusing to publicly exhibit their work, only showing it in their homes. In 1989, Aung Myint established the Inya Gallery of Art, the first gallery of modern art in the country, in a shed outside his house. Ten years later, Singaporean artist Jay Koh mounted Oriental Curtain, an exhibition of work by members of the Inya Artist Group at Galerie ON in Cologne, Germany. The seven Burmese artists included, among them Myint and San Minn, displayed unmistakable signs of modern abstraction and hinted at what it was like to live under repressive conditions.

San Minn, “The Mask” (1999) (image courtesy the artist)

Koh then joined forces with Malaysian artist Chu Yuan to create the Open Academy, a platform meant to help bring “foreign artists, art educators, curators, theatre practitioners, researchers etc. … into Myanmar to share their knowledge, resources and to develop collaborations with Burmese artists, writers and young adults.” Starting in 2003, Koh and Yuan worked on the academy in Yangon with Networking and Initiatives for Culture and the Arts (NICA); its projects were supported by a number of international organizations, including the Prince Claus Fund of the Netherlands, the LEE Foundation from Singapore, and Arts Network Asia. In 2007, however, another political uprising occurred — the Saffron Revolution, so-called for the color of the robes worn by the monks who participated. The political situation grew too volatile, and the work of NICA ceased.

But the groundwork for artistic expression had begun, and 2008 became a breakout year, as evidenced by the founding of the independent nonprofit New Zero Art Space and the Beyond Pressure Performance Art Festival. Run by Moe Satt, Beyond Pressure featured performance artists Po Po and Aung Ko, poet Maung Day, and a host of other Burmese artists in its first year, and has gone on to include participants from Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and Africa. Performance art is particularly well suited to Myanmar because it is cheap, temporary, and fraught with subtle interpretations. By 2010 the festival was gently pushing boundaries with a piece by Ma Ei, whose work focused on the inequality of women in society. Ei “cooked” dolls as food for her audience, while wearing a necklace of dolls around her neck. It was an innocuous act, but one that symbolically challenged gender roles.

* * *

In 2011, the military made a show of setting up a civilian government, and more art trickled out of the country. Burmese artist Chaw Ei Thein and Vietnamese artist Richard Streitmatter-Tran created “September Sweetness,” a 5.5-ton pagoda made of granulated sugar for the 2008 Singapore Biennale. Husband and wife couple Wah Nu and Tun Win Aung exhibited “White Piece #0132: Forbidden Hero (Heads)” (2012), about independence leader U Aung San, Aung San Suu Kyi’s father, in the 2013 Guggenheim exhibition No Country: Contemporary Art from South and Southeast Asia.

Censorship persisted in the country, however. In 2013, the new coalition government enacted the Telecommunications Act, which includes a contentious section titled “66D” that authorizes putting people in jail for taking a broad range of online actions that fall under the umbrella of defamatory speech. In order to avoid jail time, artists began self-censoring, particularly when dealing with issues related to ethnic minorities, politics, and religion. Passed the same year, the Yangon Municipal Act of 2013 made graffiti especially precarious, fining street artists, if caught, 100,000 kyats (~$75 US), more than many of them earn in a month.

Chaw Ei Thien, still from “Far Away in New York” (2010) (screenshot via YouTube)

Nevertheless, the contemporary art scene continued to grow, and archiving it on video became the mission of artist and curator Aung Myat Htay, through his exhaustive series DVD Magazine, published on YouTube. Htay compiled diverse clips showcasing a variety of Burmese artists. There was Mg San Oo and his early performance piece “The Deep Nest” (2004), in which he crawls through a tube of black fabric symbolizing the moments of life between birth and death. Chaw Ei Thein’s video “Far Away in New York” (2010) displays scenes of fresh snow, unimaginable in Myanmar, accompanied by the wonder and utter freakiness of riding the NYC subway. Min Thein Sung’s “Restroom” (2008–10) features a paper chair sculpted in the shape of a toilet, which the artist says “came from my imagination under pressure and stress,” placed in various anomalous settings. Thyitar explores the relationship between the brain, language, and cognition in works like “My Brain” (2012) and “Whose” (2012). Htay also presents Po Po speaking about the identity of the individual and society in terms of globalization. “In this globalization process, the strong civilization will be shining on and the weak one will be lost,” he says.

Many of the interviews and artworks in the DVD Magazine videos are shot in dark interiors, occasionally bursting out into sunlight. In “Tomorrow” (2012), a gesture as simple as the artist Nora clasping her pink doll behind her back and taking it for a walk becomes a symbolic act representing secret, forbidden thoughts. The videos are furtive and explosive, cautious and ebullient, as if the artists could not yet believe in their own tentative freedom.

The burgeoning scene was also documented in Myanmar Contemporary Art I, a critical book published by theart.com of images, essays, and interviews in Burmese about art in the country from 1960 to 1990. In 2013, artists Zon Sapal Phyu and Khin Zaw Latt and researcher Nathalie Johnston founded Myanmar Art Resource Center and Archive (MARCA), and their first project, fueled by Kickstarter, was to publish an English translation of the volume. MARCA has gone on to become a crucial resource for Burmese art, hosting a digital archive of images related to various artists and exhibitions and a lending library.

* * *

Mon Halsey, “Totem Poles” (2015), at Yangon Gallery (photo courtesy the artist)

In 2014, something auspicious happened: artists convinced the government to allow a one-time event featuring public art, artist talks, and performances to take place in front of the Shwedagon Pagoda at the People’s Park, an iconic cultural location. The following year, Aung Sang Suu Kyi’s political party, National League for Democracy, won the elections, and a new era was underway for Myanmar’s small but vital creative community.

It includes spaces like Yangon Gallery, which has hosted the All Myanmar Photography Festival, the 2017 symposium of the Southeast Asian Directors of Music, and a variety of exhibitions. There is the contemporary art–focused Studio Square gallery, as well as Myanmar Deitta, a nonprofit organization devoted to documentary photography, filmmaking, and multimedia production; the latter hosts workshops and training programs, photography exhibitions, and screenings of documentary films. River Gallery, opened by New Zealander Gil Pattison in 2006, has shown over 40 Burmese artists since its inception. These have all taken their places alongside the venerable Inya Gallery of Art, which continues to operate to this day.

When I visited Yangon in March, I caught the tail end of the My Yangon My Home – Yangon Art & Heritage Festival, founded in 2014 by Andrew Patrick, the British Ambassador to Myanmar, and José Abad Lorente, the director of Abadi Art Space. This year’s edition, curated by Aung Myat Htay, Phuy Mon, Nathalie Johnston, and Matt Grace, focused on how memory transforms locations, highlighting the use of downtown heritage buildings. It also included over 70 local poets and writers, and, in a move to change the city’s perception of what constitutes art, had a gallery day on which the public was invited to visit 18 downtown Yangon art spaces.

Aung Myat Htay, “Wings of Hope” (2017), at the My Yangon My Home Festival

Sculptures were installed in Thakin Mya Park for the festival, including a powerful one dedicated to the idea of individual liberty. Made by Htay and his curatorial team and titled “Wing of Hope,” it featured the arc of a sculpted metal wing placed inside a raised canoe — the former indicating motion through the air, the other motion though the water, symbolic of the aspirations of free ideas and spirits. Its label said it was “represented to the whole public who were hoping to gain freedom to live under the long era of dictatorship.”

Embassy-linked cultural centers like the Institute Française, British Council, and Goethe Institut have been supportive of such local initiatives, especially nurturing media-centric projects. These include the regionally important Yangon Film School; the Yangon Photo Festival, which just completed its ninth year; and significant film festivals like the Human Rights Human Dignity International Film Festival, Wathann Film Festival, and &PROUD, Yangon’s very first LGBTQ film festival. Opening up Myanmar to the world via smartphones has also produced a more recent warp-speed jump into new media, with a festival showcasing electronic music and experimental digital works, as well the first VR art festival in the country. This is how fast the pace of change is occurring.

Zun Ei, “Change or Unchange” (2017), at the My Yangon My Home Festival

With the emergence of the new government, however, the structure of support is changing. Embassy-linked organizations are slowly scaling back grants, while more foreign curators, writers, museum officials, and dealers are visiting, giving artists increased exposure. Unfortunately, a secondary effect is that the cost of art materials is escalating, and there is scant government funding (even if there were more, it would probably privilege traditional forms). Independent spaces face precarious financial realities like unexpected rent hikes, not having their leases renewed, and government scrutiny, making their future uncertain. Nathalie Johnston was attempting to counter this trend when she set up Myanm/art in 2016, paying two years’ rent in advance so the center would have time to develop its programming and give younger artists a place to show their work for free. In 2013, Johnston lamented, “There are no free art spaces in Myanmar. There are no museums, outdoor sculpture gardens, contemporary art galleries, resource centers, libraries or online journals supporting the arts and artists working today.” She now says this has begun to change.

It’s hard for those of us in the West to imagine that painting specific colors could land one in jail. Yet that’s the climate from which Burmese artists are emerging. Today, a small group of dedicated individuals and organizations operating on shoestring budgets (or none at all) is working hard to advance the field of contemporary art in the country. It is these small, independent spaces, and not traditional institutions, that hold the key to the future of creative culture in Myanmar.

The post A Brief History of Contemporary Art in Myanmar appeared first on Hyperallergic.

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fatimakhans12345 · 7 years

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Foreign Minister Gabriel congratulates Anne Imhof and Franz Erhard Walther

Anne Imhof and Franz Erhard Walther from Fulda win Golden Lions at this year’s Venice Art Biennale.

To mark this, Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel issued the following statement:

I would like to sincerely congratulate Anne Imhof and Franz Erhard Walther on their Golden Lions. The Biennale has given awards to two artists who invite us in very different ways to reflect on the limits and possibilities of art and society and integrate the viewer into their works of art. I am delighted by the courage shown by the jury, the artists and Susanne Pfeffer, the curator of our pavilion, in developing this concept and in awarding these prizes. The German Pavilion in Venice is a crucial part of our cultural relations policy. Three days ago, I had the honour of opening the pavilion and attending the “Faust” performance devised by Anne Imhof. Her work helps us to shed light on social spaces and their centres of power. It gives us an opportunity to see things from a different perspective by appealing to the whole individual, their thoughts and feelings. I would like to thank Susanne Pfeffer, our curator, who had overall responsibility for the pavilion, the Institute for Foreign Cultural Relations, the intermediary organisation which organises our contribution at the Biennale, the many patrons and sponsors who helped us make possible this year’s presentation and, most especially, the performers who took part in “Faust”.

Background information

Franz Erhard Walther and Anne Imhof have won the two most important prizes at this year’s Venice Art Biennale. The German Pavilion designed by the Frankfurt artist Anne Imhof was awarded the Golden Lion for best national participation. Franz Erhard Walther from Fulda was awarded the Golden Lion as best artist. This was announced by the jury in Venice on Saturday.

In the German Pavilion, the Frankfurt artist Anne Imhof (39) is staging the approximately five‑hour long “Faust” performance. The pavilion is curated by Susanne Pfeffer, director of the Museum Fridericianum in Kassel. The conceptual artist Franz Erhard Walther (77) is exhibiting a large‑scale textile work. He is known for creating art which allows the observer to take part.

The last time the German Pavilion won the Golden Lion was in 2011, when Christoph Schlingensief was awarded the prize posthumously. In 2013, the German‑British artist Tino Sehgal was awarded the Golden Lion as best artist.

Main exhibition entitled “Viva Arte Viva”

The 57th Art Biennale opened to the public on Saturday. Half a million visitors are expected to go to one of the most important exhibitions of contemporary art until 26 November. The main exhibition entitled “Viva Arte Viva” (long live art) is curated by Christine Macel from France.

Around 120 artists from 51 countries are showing their works, which include three German artists alongside Franz Erhard Walther. In addition to the main exhibition, more than 80 national pavilions are presenting their countries’ contributions.

from UK & Germany http://www.auswaertiges-amt.de/EN/Infoservice/Presse/Meldungen/2017/170513_%2520BM_Goldener%2520Baer.html?nn=479796

#UK & Germany

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mybeingthere · 3 years

Photo

Lynn Chadwick (1914-2003), First Stairs, 1991.

Chadwick was born in the suburb of Barnes, in western London, and attended Merchant Taylors’ School in Northwood. While there he expressed an interest in being an artist, though his art master suggested architecture was a more realistic option. Accordingly, Chadwick became a trainee draughtsman, working first at the offices of architects Donald Hamilton and then Eugen Carl Kauffman, and finally for Rodney Thomas. Chadwick took great inspiration from Thomas, whose interest in contemporary European architecture and design had a significant effect on his development. His training in architectural drawing was the only formal education he received as an artist. He recalled: “What it taught me was how to compose things, a formal exercise in composition, really, it has nothing to do with the building it represents”.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynn_Chadwick

Winning the International Prize for Sculpture at the 1956 Venice Biennale, when it was expected to go to Giacometti (who eventually won it in 1962), was a remarkable achievement for a sculptor who, like Butler, was ‘self-taught’ and had had an exhibiting career of scarcely a single decade. But in truth Chadwick had had a wish to become an artist from the early 1930’s, but had been persuaded by his father to pursue furniture and textile design and architectural draughtmanship in the Depression years. After war service as a Fleet Air Arm pilot, he resumed working with a design firm and began to make mobiles for trade shows in wood, perspex and aluminium. Enrolling on a welding course with the British Oxygen Company (as Butler would also do) in 1950 assisted him in producing two signal and substantial mobiles in 1951, ’Dragonfly’ and ‘Fisheater’, amongst others. In essence these demonstrated his difference from, and his different pathway to, mobile sculpture compared with that of Alexander Calder, to whom Chadwick’s work of this period has often been misleadingly compared.

Read more https://www.osbornesamuel.com/artists/chadwick-lynn/

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micaramel · 7 years

Link

Artist: Andrea Büttner

Venue: Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen

Exhibition Title: Gesamtzusammenhang

Date: March 4 – May 7, 2017

Click here to view slideshow

Full gallery of images, press release and link available after the jump.

Images:

Images courtesy of Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen. Photos by Gunnar Meier.

Press Release:

Andrea Büttner’s (*1972/D, lives in London and Frankfurt) artistic practice is multifaceted and creates an area of tension between ethics and aesthetics, and subjectivity and culture. Büttner deals with themes such as the attribution of value, poverty and shame, using various media including woodcuts, sculptures, textile works and video installations. For her first exhibition at a Swiss institution Büttner is focussing on woodcuts from various series and setting them in a new context: on the one hand her works appear in relation to an exhibition about Simone Weil by the Friedensbibliothek/Antikriegsmuseum in Berlin-Brandenburg (Peace Library/Anti-War Museum of the Protestant Church in Berlin-Brandenburg) and on the other, David Raymond Conroy’s video (You (People) Are All The Same) augments the contextual range. «Gesamtzusammenhang» («Bigger Picture») brings together artistic and non-artistic questions which encompass humanity in connection with work, community and belief. Andrea Büttner is interested in moments of transition, as shown by the religiously and symbolically charged motifs of the woodcuts on view in each room. Subjects such as dancing nuns, tents, beggars and sentences like ‘Yes, I believe every word you say’ challenge contemporary expectations, as does the medium of the woodcut. This centuries-old technique communicates simply and directly but retains an artistic and decelerating aura of the process of its making. A characteristic that is shared by the exhibition wall of the Friedensbibliothek/Antikriegsmuseum, all be it from a non-artistic perspective. Hand-written quotes from the work of the French philosopher Simone Weil (1909 – 1943) hang on an elaborate construction, partly developed back in the time of the GDR, with illustrations by various photographers.

The integrated exhibition from the Friedensbibliothek/Antikriegsmuseum poses questions about the efficiency of messages and their display. Büttner thereby also examines her own art in direct confrontation with aesthetic practices which are both close to and different from her own. The woodcuts and the Simone Weil presentation enter into a reciprocal survey of dividing lines between handwork and art, spiritual experience and contemplation.

The juxtaposition of the two displays is evident in view of Büttner’s artistic practice. Her installative works were created in the context of the early 1990s. Postmodern art discourse such as post-conceptualism and institutional critique attempted to renegotiate the interface between politics and art and pursue a media-based vocabulary but spawned a very normative and mostly male aesthetic. Büttner wants to break with this reception and apply methods that extract a certain sexiness.

The Friedenbibliothek/Antikriegsmuseum was also searching for its own form of expression. Founded in the GDR under the auspices of the Protestant Church in Berlin-Brandenburg, the Friedenbibliothek/Antikriegsmuseum with its mobile exhibitions, subtle critiques of the regime and social networking was part of a resistance movement. Jochen Schmidt, who was part of the team responsible, says that the political changes in Germany brought a feeling of rootlessness. A system, which so many thought could not be brought down, collapsed overnight. At this time Schmidt and his colleagues discovered Simone Weil, a Jewish philosopher whose thought is coloured both by socialism and mystical Christianity. The exhibition on show here is primarily concerned with her posthumously published work The Need for Roots, in which she goes into ‘the most important and least recognised need of the human soul’ as well as ‘uprootedness’ and ‘the growing of root

Büttner has been concerned with Simone Weil for a long time, especially because Weil also addressed philosophical, political and religious questions. With the help of this borrowed exhibition Büttner can import Weil into her work without having to participate in the current notable appropriation of the philosopher. Büttner is interested in Weil’s ideas and her fragmented, historically complex life. The artist is similarly fascinated by monastic activism in France during the 1930s and 1940s and the lifestyle concepts of nuns between religion and politics.

For example, for dOCUMENTA (13) Büttner produced a film about nuns in a religious order who operate a stall at an amusement park in Rome and formulated a theory of smallness, humility, reserve and simplicity. From this work came the Tent Series from which various exhibits are on show. Her dynamic composition of seven dancing figures as a symbol of a positive space is also concerned with nuns. On the other hand, I want to let the work fall down (2005) and Yes, I believe every word you say (2007) are reminiscent of the pop art works of the activist nun Corita Kent. Bush (2010) comes from the cycle about Saint Francis of Assisi whereas Corner (2011-12) is the product of a materialistic examination of the woodcut. Duck and Daisy (2015) is based on the artist’s observation of an intimate moment between a disguised couple of lovers begging in a pedestrian zone in Frankfurt.

In addition, Büttner poses the question of the moral dimension of appropriation in «Gesamtzusammenhang». Alongside the inclusion of the exhibition about Simone Weil, David Raymond Conroy’s film also takes up this theme of appropriation and exposition. In (You (People) Are All The Same) he expounds the problems of the ‘artist as observer of others’ and examines to what extent good art and good gestures correlate. His work reflects the creation process of a film about homeless people in Las Vegas in which Conroy confronts possibilities for the honest production of art. The chosen narrative technique is also central. A female voice describes and comments upon the artist’s process in a way that creates closeness and suggestively allows us to participate in Conroy’s dilemma. We repeatedly hear a catchy melody that accompanies scenes of mostly deserted panoramas.

Like Büttner, Conroy is fascinated by honest, authentic and direct situations and evaluation processes. He suggests that the attribution of value takes place between a feeling of insecurity and the impulse to decide and asks whether there is a gap between what we are and what we want to be or whether it is precisely in this gap that the humane is to be found.

In the same room Büttner adds benches to the exhibition which are simultaneously sculptures and seats. The back rests can be seen as a kind of painting in the background and the bulky wooden benches, on which visitors may sit, also serve as a starting position for viewing art. With both the benches and the luminous orange architectonic interventions Büttner addresses the social connotation of textiles: metaphorically as social fabric as well as in relation to the exhibition and the use of materials. Büttner had the back rests produced by nuns and people with disabilities and for the coverings of the panels used textiles which are usually found in work clothes. The artist deploys these panels as monochrome, as wall covering and to dim the light.

In the third room the luminous orange panel functions as a display for a work from the Beggar Series. The colourful woodcuts Beggar (2017) show veiled figures in begging positions. With this image formula, which goes back to Ernst Barlach, Büttner articulates the interaction of poverty and shame, showing and receiving, shame and ostentation. Shame determines what we show or hide and how we make judgements about art and non-art. The artist also worked on monastic poverty movements and the Arte Povera movement of the 20th century. The newly-produced Potatoes (2017), Coins (2017) and Breadpebble (2017) from the Saint Francis cycle can also be read in this context.

«Gesamtzusammenhang» reflects a certain temperature of subjectivity, community and questions of value. In the process Büttner shifts attention from specific issues to overriding questions: humanity is approached in its philosophical, religious, artistic and political dimensions. Her examination of warmth, empathy, human dignity and equitable coexistence extends through the exhibition. Her reflection on the contemporary is also important, whether empathetic or as a critique of the ‘contemporary’ as a narrow, normative aesthetic practice. Andrea Büttner (*1972 in Stuttgart/D) studied Art at the University of the Arts Berlin, Art History and Philosophy at the Humboldt University Berlin and earned her PhD at the Royal College of Art in London in 2010. She lives and works in London and Frankfurt am Main. Solo exhibitions (selection): Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, Stuttgart (2016); David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles (2016); Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna (2016); Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2015); Museum Ludwig, Cologne (2014); Tate Britain, London (2014); Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt am Main (2013); Whitechapel Gallery, London (2011); Hollybush Gardens, London (2008). Group exhibitions (selection): Mary Boone Gallery, New York (2016); British Art Show 8, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh (2016); dOCUMENTA (13), Kassel (2012); 29. São Paulo Biennale, São Paulo (2010).

David Raymond Conroy (*1978 in Reading/UK) studied Art at the Sheffield Hallam University and at the Royal College of Art in London. He lives and works in London. Solo exhibitions (selection): EKKM, Tallinn (2015); Seventeen, London (2015); Camden Arts Centre, London (2015); Modern Art Oxford, Oxford (2013); GP & N Vallois, Paris (2012). Group exhibitions (selection): Zabludowicz Collection, London (2016); TAIGA, St. Petersburg (2014); Kunsthalle Tallinn, Tallinn (2013); Royal College of Art, London (2013).

The Friedensbibliothek/Antikriegsmuseum of the Protestant Church in Berlin-Brandenburg arose as civil opposition in the 1970s and 1980s. Exhibitions on various pacifist themes can be borrowed.

Link: Andrea Büttner at Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen

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festivalists · 8 years

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Dissolution, transformation, coagulation

Scotland in spring is a place of magic, especially when you add the enchantment of the moving images. Back from Hawick and Alchemy Film And Moving Image Festival, Rohan Berry Crickmar shares his lush “alchemical visions” in an equally lush travelogue. Time to put your film-walking shoes!

Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival has been bringing an excellent selection of artist and experimental film and installation work to the Scottish Borders since 2010. Initially founded through the co-operation of the Scottish charity Alchemy Film & Arts, the Creative Arts Business Network, and the council-run arts venue Heart of Hawick, the festival has been presided over by its Creative Director Richard Ashrowan, who is also involved in Scotland + Venice for this year’s Venice Art Biennale. The event seeks to showcase as wide a selection as possible of contemporary artist and experimental films, and also organizes residency programmes at the Moroccan cultural retreat centre Café Tissardmine. This year’s theme was fixed to the idea that informs the name of the festival itself – alchemy and the alchemical. Ashrowan and his programming team were expressly interested in films that explored the idea of alchemical vision in film and moving image. To that end the selection that they put together reflected a full range of creative possibilities and approaches embodied within the flux and mutability of the alchemical.

Despite having been back in Scotland since 2013, and living in Edinburgh (just 90 minutes, or so, from Hawick), since mid-2015 this was the first opportunity I have had to get down to Alchemy. It has always fallen a little too soon after my annual visits to Rotterdam and Berlin, and even with its relatively close proximity it has felt more difficult to get to somehow. Being one of those carbon-footprint-conscious souls who has resisted the pull of the private car, public transport would become the sole dark cloud to hang heavy over the weekend. My original plan was to attend Saturday and Sunday of the festival, staying overnight to maximize the later Expanded Cinema events on Saturday night. However, some work issues meant that I had to look at Friday and Saturday instead, returning to the festival on Sunday in time to see the Scottish premiere of Karolina Breguła’s minimalist opera THE TOWER / WIEŻA (2016).

Izabella Pruska-Oldenhof, Erin Espelie, Joost Rekveld, Semiconductor; images: courtesy of Alchemy

Still, due to the kind offer – the first of many little kindnesses over the course of the weekend (a press pass from the Festival Producer Harriet Warman) – I was able to also attend the Artists’ Filmmaking Symposium on the opening Thursday of the festival. The festival programme was full of intriguing material, with over 120 films screening in some capacity or another over the course of the five days. I was able to see barely a handful of the things that were on offer, yet even the small selection that I saw left an indelible mark. Undoubtedly, the Symposium event was a crucial way of opening out the festival and its thematic concerns. It introduced me to two artists that I had not come across before: Izabella Pruska-Oldenhof (a last minute replacement for Violaine Boutet de Monvel) and Erin Espelie. It was also an opportunity to reacquaint myself with Joost Rekveld’s singular works of machine-mediated matter, as well as the tangentially related digital-noise experiments of Semiconductor (with Ruth Jarman giving the final talk).

I knew what to expect with Rekveld, as I had just seen #67 (2017) premiere in Rotterdam, accompanied by two substantial talks about his work and working practices. In December of last year, at the Alternative Film/Video Festival in Belgrade, I had been able to enjoy a short showcase of Dutch experimental film curated by Simona Monizza of the EYE Filminstitut, Amsterdam. This was my first encounter with Rekveld in over a decade, and it had made me eager to gorge myself on his most recent experiments with analogue computers and how they can help to capture externally produced sound as visual data.

Likewise, with Semiconductor, I had first come across them at the International Festival of Contemporary Arts in Slovenia in the summer of 2003, where they performed a piece called STRATA (2002), a 3D animated real-time landscape, replete with sound effects triggered by the animation. Since then I had not kept abreast of their (Joe Gerhardt being the other half of the partnership) more recent output. Ruth Jarman’s Symposium presentation, focusing in particular on EARTHWORKS (2016) and BLACK RAIN (2009), made me acutely aware of what I had been missing. Over the past decade, the duo had found their work increasingly taking them into science labs “to make films that help us to explain the material world.” For example, on EARTHWORKS they were utilising seismic data and the way in which that data is visualized to create beguiling animations and soundscapes that seemed to evoke the slow and powerful frictive shifting of the Earth’s surface. Jarman also drew attention to work that they had been doing at the Smithsonian in recent years, where they had come across films that scientists had been making about their experiments and discoveries, going as far back as 1915. What really struck me about Jarman’s talk was the way in which she talked about Semiconductor’s approach to the scientists themselves. The team had become increasingly interested in the language of the scientific, and how that niche tongue could be untied and made more discernible through artistic experimentation and expression.

Colorado-based Erin Espelie came as something of a revelation to me. Her precisely structured and engaging presentation took the audience through her back-catalogue of film work, hinting at her scientific background and drawing upon a reservoir of memories linked to her father’s career as an entomologist and her own youthful experiences of the natural world. What was most striking about her work was the way it melded together expertly poetry, science, film aesthetics, and personal emotional responses. This was film as a truly promiscuous and polyvalent medium, and nothing seemed to capture this better than her 2014 collection of short films THE LANTHANIDE SERIES. In this series, Espelie wed together the idea of rare Earth elements (which are found within the Lanthanide grouping of the periodic table), contemporary digital technology, how we see, and the ecological impact of this seeing. By filming upon portable digital screens (all of which are made possible through the the industrial use of rare Earth elements) and obsidian mirrors, Espelie was explicitly demonstrating how the image is founded in material reality, even when digitally rendered. I have not come across a more impressive image-maker, and one whose images possess, or are possessed, by a world concretizing depth and density.

Izabella Pruska-Oldenhof’s seeming reaction against the new digital dominance within the moving image took on an extreme materiality, subtly masking a remediation as digital artefact. Her installation work for the festival IN MEDIA RES (2015) was composed of photogrammic images of bodies down through centuries of art, structured in such a way as to form a larger mosaic image. Thus, the fragmentary is foregrounded within the presentation of the whole. This material presentation was accompanied by the capture of 16mm spooling film into glass-encased instant sculptures. Then video projections adorned both walls, with the edit of the image creating a glitchy sound design. The photogrammic images were actually constructed via digital means, thus presenting within one space an extensive media archaeology (mosaic, photogram, celluloid, video). As much as I enjoyed her work, the presentation was perhaps the most difficult to fully comprehend.

Thought Broadcasting, Omen, Swings and Roundabouts, Buccleuch Church on the Kirk Burn; images: courtesy of Alchemy

After the Symposium, the festival team put on a series of tours of the various installations within the town. I was fortunate enough to be in a group that had the affable Gateshead-born film critic and programmer, Michael Pattison, taking us from the various snugs, shops, and industrial spaces that housed the works. Hawick has a lot of woolmakers and old industrial architecture associated with textile production. Some of these buildings are still very much in use, whereas others have been abandoned (in a few cases – quite recently and possibly reflecting the economic downturn felt in many parts of the UK since 2008). Each of the spaces had been adapted and modified by the artists whose installations were located within them.

In its most effective manifestations, this meant that the space was transformed into something entirely different, such as in the case of Nick Jordan’s THOUGHT BROADCASTING (2016), in which some of the bureaucratic blandness and industrial sterility of British clinical spaces and British broadcasting studios were suggested through careful arrangement of projected image, found object, and archived material. Similarly, Nazare Soares piece OMEN (2016) converted an upstairs factory room into a darkly ritualistic space of shamanic séance, replete with reclining, hammock-style chairs, that left you lying close to the ground in a strangely transfixed state of readied receptivity.

I must make brief mention of two other delightful installations. Jessie Growden’s playful SWINGS AND ROUNDABOUTS (2016) presented a room with Spirograph elements dangling from the ceiling and a film looping round on a small television set. The film was entrancing, as it found circular patterns in nature (whirlpools and eddies), then had the artist carrying out cyclical activities (the drawing of a spirograph images) and disrupting these cycles through the reversal of the image at points where this initially goes almost unnoticed. The puckish quality of the work was a neat juxtaposition against Soares’ more fugue-like installation on the part of the festival organizers, as both artists inhabited the same space, but with entirely different energies and effects. Finally, Jacques Perconte’s mesmerising loop BUCCLEUCH CHURCH ON THE KIRK BURN (2016) was a layered video image that played with the colour distortion possibilities of video to create an intensely psychedelic and ruminative experience of place, with Ettrick Forest and the Buccleuch Church forming almost fractal-like compositions at the loop’s most expressive moments.

Non-Places: Beyond the Infinite, On a Wing and a Prayer, Second Hand Daylight, Maelstroms; images: courtesy of Alchemy

Getting back down to Hawick for the main closing events of the Sunday, I was able to catch an assortment of shorts, screened in the makeshift cinema / screening room in the office spaces of the Heart of Hawick. There is a real pleasure to be found in the dexterous way in which the festival organizers infiltrate and modify so many different parts of this complex and the wider town. I was pleased to note that the programmers had picked up on Péter Lichter’s masterful NON-PLACES: BEYOND THE INFINITE (2016) from Coos & Chemicals that takes Marc Augé's essay Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity plus Cioran’s philosophical obsession with decay and uses them to underpin a minimalist inversion of 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (1968). I had seen this film at the Alternative Film/Video Festival in Belgrade and wrote about it (for another publication) as one of the standout films of that festival.

ON A WING AND A PRAYER (2016) by Alia Syed from Uncertain Territories was a timely intervention into the discussion about UK asylum laws. It is ostensibly documenting the journey that Abdul Rahman Haroun took, on foot, through the Channel Tunnel. The filmmaker chops up this journey into disorienting and seemingly repetitious POV tracking shots that convert this passage into some looping nightmare of fear and paranoia (tellingly, the footage is so dislocating that the fact it is actually shot within the Rotherhithe Tunnel does not really matter). All the while a voiceover reads out the procedures of the UK asylum policy and extracts from The Malicious Damages Act of 1861, which Haroun would be charged under on gaining asylum in the UK. The inhumane language of legal protocol is foregrounded by the emotional immediacy of Syed’s tunnel footage in a trenchant critique of our border controls.

Simon Aeppli’s SECOND HAND DAYLIGHT (2007) was another powerful political work on display in the from Uncertain Territories strand. An exceptionally well edited digital film approximation of a scrapbook, replete with collage effects and the filmmakers’ actual scrapbooks, it explores the paranoia of the Northern Irish troubles in a way that was vacillated wildly between moments of sharp humor and moments of unsettling portent. Another work that complemented these politically charged pieces was Lana Z Caplan’s MAELSTROMS (2015) from Reasons to Be Anxious, Part 3 – a harrowingly intense look at how modern surveillance imaging creates a dehumanizing gaze. The film cuts between US border-patrol footage, drone footage, and various other forms of surveillance, all of which are presented in disconcerting shades of grey, like a negative transfer. I was lucky enough to be sat beside the filmmaker at Aeppli’s screening, and in our brief conversation afterwards I was not surprized to hear that she found his film to be particularly powerful.

The Tower, Fluid Dynamics, Performance, Incident Reports; images: courtesy of Alchemy

The final day neatly brought together proceedings with three presentations in the main auditorium of the Heart of Hawick. Karolina Breguła’s stunningly simple and surprisingly effective experimental opera THE TOWER has gone through various different versions since its first appearance in early 2016. The version screened at Alchemy was the 79-minute edit, that features the rather abrupt ending and tactile post-credit coda. Breguła is a film artist increasingly aware of Polish film history, and her decision to film an opera in a style comparable to the state-funded documentaries of the likes of Jacek Bławut or Krzysztof Kieślowski gives THE TOWER a curiously contradictory atmosphere of specificity and universality, the quotidian and the magical. As a residence group within a block of flats seeks to build a new space from sugar, their dreams range from utopian living quarters, to a model modernist city, to the eventual reconfiguration of the human body through a realignment with the crystalline structure of sugar. The music is composed by the Oświęcim-born, Glasgow-based electronic musician Ela Orleans, who was present for a Q&A.

Later in the afternoon, the Nature Spirits collection was a fascinating showcase for the diverse talents of artists such as Robert Todd, Jason Moyes, and Charlotte Pryce. Todd’s film FLUID DYNAMICS (2016), which was receiving its world premiere, was the perfect way in to this programme. Through the meticulous use of different aspect ratios and types of shot, Todd creates an apprehension of a natural environment that, first of all, calls upon the viewer to be attentive to the image, in a way that drew me closer to the filmmakers’ actual experience of that environment. Later on, the film begins to fall in to a reciprocal relationship with the natural flows of water and plant matter, the rhythms of the place fuse Todd’s camera into a dance with nature. This exhilarating interlude is then recontextualized when the filmmaker places himself into certain sequences, turning the attention away from the immediacy of our relationship, as viewers, with the film, and placing back upon the filmmakers’ relationship with seeing and feeling the environment he inhabits. This approach was echoed in minimalist fashion in Lea Petrikova’s PERFORMANCE (2015), wrapping the Nature Spirits screening. A camera captures a landscape twinned in the reflection of a lake. It is a stunning natural vista, caught in the lowlight of the gloaming. Petrikova moves the camera so gracefully that it creates a beautiful tension when human figures begin to pull in front of it. Gradually, it is revealed that an audience is gathering upon the lakeshore, and as Petrikova pulls the shot steadily backward over the crowd, a faint murmur of melody and drum can be heard, but the real performance has been in front of our eyes all along.

The closing feature of the festival was the wry Canadian filmmaker Mike Hoolboom’s deeply humane feature INCIDENT REPORTS (2015). Ostensibly a film in the form of a series of reports to an unseen therapist, Hoolboom dissects the contemporary Canadian culture that he inhabits, mourning the disappearance of books and bookstores, embracing the joyous and life-affirming street performances of naked cyclists or revellers at a downtown music festival. Hoolboom consistently interrogates our contemporary notions of a trans-postmodernity that has gone beyond affectation until it inhabits a genuine permissiveness, that is both honest, non-judgemental and accepting. A bit like the films of Roy Andersson, Hoolboom tends to lock the camera down in a fixed position and let things play out in front of the camera. In so doing he is extending the inclusiveness of his vision, failing to privilege or preference any one figure within the frame. This framing also enables him to use a characteristically deadpan voiceover narration to create gentle comedy from what is being observed. The entire film is shot in a color palette that makes reds, yellows, and greens dominant, the final joke of the film comes with the musical revelation of this color scheme.

In the immediate aftermath of the Hoolboom screening, as Richard Ashrowan closed off proceedings by bringing all the members of the festival team and volunteers up on stage to receive a standing ovation, I was made palpably aware of what kind of space this festival had managed to create here in a quiet, predominately working class, Scottish Borders town. Perhaps, I had been trans-fused with inclusive warmth of Hoolboom’s alchemical vision, but it really felt as Alchemy had created a warm, safe, and open space, in which creativity could be shared rather inspiringly. This was truly palpable, and then palpably political, as with all of the myriad divisions, ruptures, and ructions that had taken place globally over the past eighteen months. With a resurgent bigotry and chauvinism seeming to gird the political ideologies of governments within Europe and North America, here was quietly assertive countering of these hostile energies. A demarcated space that was only demarcated because it chose not to traffic in exclusivity. All of this came as a shock to me, for my own prejudices have probably read an exclusivity within such festivals based upon a failure to see them reach out and bring experimental film to a wider audience.

Yet at Alchemy, at the close of the festival, it felt like they had got so much right. From the close proximity to artists and filmmakers, through to the innovative ways of engaging audiences with such works, through to the festivals relationship with the town itself. On leaving the Heart of Hawick. I happened upon a few groups of kids and teenagers killing time in the quiet of Hawick’s main shopping street on a Sunday evening. The kids were huddled in disparate groups, chatting, messing about, having a laugh. I could not help but think that they were missing something, though, something right on their doorstep. I did not want to let go of the blissful feeling that had come over me, but I could not ignore the nag at the back of my head, were the kids missing something, or was there still something more that Alchemy could do to truly realise its vision(s)? Perhaps, Andrew Kötting’s Monday film-walk to the nearby Hermitage Castle would interrogate this gap unseen, now revealed. The space between what was, what is, and what could still be. Or maybe that is asking far too much of Andrew.

vimeo

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mybeingthere · 3 years

Photo

Lynn Chadwick (1914-2003), Winged Figures, 1970 Bronze 30 x 24 x 20 cm.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynn_Chadwick

Read more https://www.osbornesamuel.com/artists/chadwick-lynn/

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mybeingthere · 3 years

Photo

Lynn Chadwick (1914-2003), Sitting Couple on Bench, 1990.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynn_Chadwick

Read more https://www.osbornesamuel.com/artists/chadwick-lynn/

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caveartfair · 7 years

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$1.4 Billion New York Auction Week Wraps Up—and the 9 Other Biggest News Stories This Week

Catch up on the latest art news with our roundup of the 10 stories you need to know this week.

01 An auction week totalling over $1.4 billion in sales kicked off in New York with evening Impressionist and Modern sales at Christie’s and Sotheby’s.

(Artsy)

Monday night’s sale at Christie’s finished with a within-estimate total of $289.1 million, thanks in large part to strong showings from two star lots. The result marks the auction house’s best sale in the category since 2010. The results were a 17% rise from November’s Christie’s New York evening sale, which totaled $246.3 million, and a 104% rise from the prior May, a sign that buyers’ appetites for the choicest works are undiminished. At Sotheby’s, the loss of Egon Schiele’s Danaë (1909), apparently within hours of the sale’s start, put the auction house on the back foot on Tuesday. The painting was estimated to sell for between $30 million and $40 million (roughly one-sixth of the night’s total sale estimate). Still, the evening closed with $173.8 million in total sales, falling squarely within a presale estimate of between $147 million and $210.4 million that was revised downward, following the withdrawals of the Schiele and a work by Camille Pissarro. The results represented a modest 10% uptick from the house’s November haul of $157.7 million, but fell significantly short of the Christie’s sale the prior evening, suggesting the auction market hasn’t fully landed on solid ground after a 2016 marked by uncertainty and caution on the part of sellers.

02 The week’s contemporary evening sales concluded Thursday with strong results from all three auction houses.

(Artsy, Phillips)

Sotheby’s garnered headlines with the $110.4 million sale of Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Untitled (1982), which sold to Japanese e-commerce billionaire Yusaku Maezawa, who had previously set a Basquiat record when he bought one of his paintings last year for $57.3 million. Almost immediately after winning the painting, Maezawa posted a photo on Instagram of himself taken with his prize during a previous trip to see it in New York. The blockbuster sale, which broke the auction record for Basquiat’s work as well as topping Andy Warhol’s standing record for work by an American artist, brought the total for the evening to $319.1 million, including the buyer’s premiums, for 51 lots. Sales had been estimated at $211 million to $277.1 million; the total without the buyer’s fees was just shy of the high estimate, at $276.9 million. Wednesday night’s $448 million Post-War and Contemporary sale at Christie’s had a higher total on 71 lots, but the evening lacked the drama of Thursday night’s 10-minute bidding war over the Basquiat. The result without the buyer’s premiums came to $391.3 million, falling within the estimated $339.2 million to $462.8 million range. Both sales had high sell-through rates and the majority of works falling within or exceeding estimates, a sign that the market may be finding its level. And Phillips rounded out the trio with a sale Thursday night that brought in $110.3 million (with buyer’s premium) with a 100% sell-through rate of the 37 lots (though three were withdrawn). The total is more than double what the same sale brought in last year, with this year’s top lot, a Peter Doig landscape selling for $28.8 million—making him the most expensive living British artist.

03 German artist and choreographer Anne Imhof has been awarded the Golden Lion, the Venice Biennale’s top prize.

(via the New York Times)

Titled “Faust,” Imhof’s show is on view at the German pavilion, one of 85 national pavilions across the Venice Biennale. It features a dozen performers, dressed in black athletic gear and walking through, over, and under the crowd of viewers via glass platforms while a grating, metallic musical score plays in the background. “I thought the sadistic state of hyper-visibility inside was brilliantly conceived,” Tate Modern senior curator Catherine Wood told the New York Times of the work, which won the Golden Lion for national participation. A second Golden Lion, for the best artist in the Christine Macel-curated central exhibition, was awarded to another German, Franz Erhard Walther, for his sculptural textile works that invite audience interaction. Carolee Schneemann won the Golden Lion for lifetime achievement earlier in April, with all three of this year’s Golden Lions going to artists who work with performance. London-born, Egypt-based Hassan Khan was awarded the Silver Lion, which recognized him as the most promising young artist in the Biennale’s central show, for his sound installation.

04 New York City has released a report detailing the results of roughly seven months of public engagement conducted in the lead-up to the city’s forthcoming cultural plan.

(Artsy)

New York City’s Department of Cultural Affairs (DCLA) engaged 188,000 New Yorkers—via focus groups, phone surveys, and hundreds of community events—in order to compile its brief, released Monday. The report, titled “What We Heard,” provides a glimpse as to what will likely be included in the cultural plan (due to be released in early July), spanning commitments to equitably distributed funding, better disabled access, and affordable living for artists. “What We Heard” includes insight into New Yorkers’ cultural habits and perceptions and lays out a list of policy proposals. The findings reveal the robust health and value of the arts in New York, while also showing that issues of inequality and affordability are indeed felt in the cultural sector—an imbalance the cultural plan hopes to mitigate.

05 The trust of Elizabeth Taylor is suing Christie’s, claiming that the auction house improperly canceled the sale of one of the late actress’s diamonds.

(via DNAinfo)

Christie’s sold the diamond, consigned by Taylor’s trust, for $8.8 million in 2011. The auction house promoted the gemstone’s supposed history for the sale, stating it was once owned by the Indian emperor who built the Taj Mahal. However, there are doubts Indian royalty ever owned the work. After discovering this uncertain provenance, the buyer of the piece demanded that Christie’s cancel the sale and repay him—which the auction house did. But Taylor’s trust is calling the reversal “unwarranted” and has refused to return the millions to Christie’s, arguing that the object was listed simply as an “Indian diamond” in the catalogue (although representatives for the auction house did elsewhere claim a royal history). In the suit, the trust further alleges that the proceeds of several separate sales have not been transferred and notes that they are seeking the missing money or return of the objects.

06 The row over a Harper’s Bazaar jacket-decorating party continues with news of three additional allegedly stolen patch designs.

(via Jezebel)

On May 7th, a spokesperson for bi-annual erotic zine Leste accused organizers of a Harper’s Bazaar jacket-decorating party of co-opting a design by their editor Sara Sutterlin without permission or initial compensation, Jezebel reported at the time. Now, three other artists say their designs were also made into patches without permission. Emma McIlroy, of the fashion brand Wildfang, offered to sell Harper’s several designs, including a pin emblazoned with the words “WILD FEMINIST” (the magazine declined this design, though paid for others). Photos of the event, however, show that the design appeared in the party as a patch, a product McIlroy does not offer. A Harper’s marketing associate informed McIlroy that the patch had been “created inadvertently by an intern” and offered compensation. McIlroy declined, asking instead that a public apology be made on social media, a demand Harper’s representatives say they are unable to fulfill. Two more artists—Lotte Andersen and Madison Kramer—have come forward, accusing Harper’s of stealing their designs. Neither Harper’s nor its publisher Hearst have yet responded to these latest accusations.

07 Abby Bangser, currently Frieze’s artistic director for the Americas and Asia, is leaving the fair to join the Dia Art Foundation.

(via Dia Art Foundation)

Bangser will serve in the newly created leadership role of Deputy Director of Strategic Initiatives when she takes up the post in July. According to a statement, Bangser will “advance the strategic priorities of the institution and serve as the main liaison for Dia’s sites around the United States and beyond.” The departure from Frieze, where Bangser liaised with galleries and collectors, comes as the New York edition of the fair saw staid returns earlier this month, though there is no indication Bangser’s transition is a direct result. Many of the galleries under Frieze’s white tent on Randall’s Island who saw significant returns this year had, in fact, pre-sold much of their booths. For galleries relying on sustained foot traffic to generate sales, the relatively out-of-the way fair has always proved challenging—and matters were not helped this year when fierce rains forced the fair’s early closure on the Friday of its four-day run.

08 Publisher Françoise Nyssen has been appointed as France’s new culture minister.

(via Le Monde)

Nyssen, of the Arles-based publishing house Actes Sud, will become the first publisher to occupy the post. Her appointment was announced earlier this week by France’s recently elected President Emmanuel Macron. Through Actes Sun, Nyssen—a Commander in the Order of Arts and Letters—has published novels by Stieg Larsson and Nobel Prize-winner Svetlana Alexievich, as well as books on artists such as Sophie Calle and Giuseppe Penone. With her husband, she established the cultural organization Association du Méjan and the École Domaine du Possible, a school for children neglected by the French educational system. Reception to Nyssen’s appointment has been generally optimistic, especially among artists she has worked with in the past. “I hope she’ll have the means to create a visionary cultural policy that gives a social link in a divided and bruised country,” said French conceptual artist Laurent Grasso, who believes Nyssen will help create a stronger policy dialogue with artists.

09 Twelve art museums will receive $1.87 million in grants from the Knight Foundation, in order to develop immersive visitor experiences through technology.

(via Artforum and The Art Newspaper)

The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation made the announcement Thursday. The institutions—including the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the Akron Art Museum, the New Museum, and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami—were selected from a pool of more than 100 applicants. From chatbots to 3D printing, each project works to incorporate digital tools into the museum experience. “People want those experiences to be personalized, interactive and shareable, just as they experience their daily lives,” said the foundation’s president, Alberto Ibargüen. The Detroit Institute of Arts, for example, will receive $150,000 to further develop an augmented reality tour of their collection—allowing visitors to explore the way their eyes process color in Georges Seurat’s paintings or the symbolism of Diego Rivera’s monumental mural at the institution.

10 Ahead of the U.K.’s general election on June 8th, the Labour Party has promised to invest £1 billion in arts and culture funding as part of its platform.

(via The Art Newspaper)

Released Tuesday, the manifesto would allow for £200 million annually over five years to go towards upgrading “cultural and creative infrastructure.” Specific cultural policies outlined in the 128-page document include a widening of access to the Government Art Collection, which curates artworks in major U.K. government buildings, and an additional £160 million diverted to primary school arts education.Recent polls put Labour at a 17-point deficit to Prime Minister Theresa May’s leading Conservative Party, which also released its manifesto this week. Matt Hancock, the U.K. minister for digital and culture, criticized Labour’s bold pledges and promising to ensure Brexit negotiations under the Conservatives would provide “the best possible Brexit deal” for the arts.

—Artsy Editors

Cover image: Courtesy of Sotheby’s.

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