Charlemagne Palestine. GesammttkkunnsttMeshuggahhLaandtttt

”American-born Charlemagne Palestine is a composer, musician, performer and visual artist. Already in the 1970s he composed repetitive music that clashed with the expectations of Western audiences. His early works were mostly compositions for glockenspiel and electronic musical instruments, but his best-known works are his piano pieces in which short sequences are repeated endlessly and variations appear only gradually. Although he was linked to musicians such as La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Philip Glass and Steve Reich, he rejected the minimalist label and instead created the term “maximalism” for his compositions.

In the 1970s, Palestine also produced a series of psychodramatic video works in which he activated the body through a symbiosis of sound and movement and gave expression to inner qualities. He often took his explorations to a point of physical and mental exhaustion. His performances and music videos repeatedly feature emblematic objects such as teddy bears, cognac bottles or scarves, which function as signatures and become “identification symbols”. In recent years, Palestine has worked chiefly with musicians such as Pan Sonic, David Coulter, Tony Conrad and Michael Gira. He has issued more than twenty solo albums and played at festivals throughout the world.”

Curator: Luca Lo Pinto

for more information please visit kunsthallewien.at

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“Matthew Barney: RIVER OF FUNDAMENT is Barney’s first major solo museum exhibition in Los Angeles. River of Fundament (2014) is one of Barney’s most challenging and ambitious projects to date, and his largest filmic undertaking since the renowned, five-part CREMASTER film cycle (1994-2002). The film, written by Barney in collaboration with composer Jonathan Bepler, tells a story of regeneration and rebirth inspired by Ancient Evenings (1983), Norman Mailer’s sprawling, provocative novel set in ancient Egypt. The presentation at MOCA comprises the epic length, operatic film and approximately 85 works inspired by or made in conjunction with the film, including large-scale sculptures weighing up to 25 tons, drawings, and storyboards. The exhibition also includes Barney’s Water Castings, a new group of sculptures on view for the first time. Overall, the works in the exhibition intertwine history and mythology with the contemplation of fundamental human drives—such as sex, violence, and power—that have continuously propelled civilizations.

Matthew Barney: RIVER OF FUNDAMENT is organized by Haus der Kunst, Munich in collaboration with the Museum of Old and New Art (MONA), Tasmania and curated by Okwui Enwezor. The Los Angeles presentation is coordinated by MOCA Assistant Curator Lanka Tattersall. The exhibition was realized by MOCA in collaboration with Laurenz Foundation, Schaulager, Basel.

For more information please visit moca.org

For more information about the film, visit: riveroffundament.net.

River of Fundament will screen regularly throughout the duration of the exhibition.

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Tom Blachford

Melbourne, Australia based interiors/architecture/travel photographer.

The photographer had the brilliant idea to connect the nostalgic inspiring architecture of Los Angeles’s suburbs with the nausea inducing glow of the moon in creating a series of shots that work as well together as toasty bread works with butter.

You will find Tom Blachford prefers to be quiet about his biography and that his website features not a lot of information about his profession or projects. Still, his website is worth a look as there are other images that mirror the style used in this project.

follow up tomblachford.com for more

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September 12 - October 25, 2015
Canada Gallery, New York

A Fall of Corners

“Ms Golden is a Michigan native. She was schooled at the Minneapolis College of Art and Columbia University.

Samara Golden’s objects roost in ways that sculpture shouldn’t. Built up and carved from 4×8 sheets of silver insulation board, then petrified with a slathering of epoxy resin, these tough flyweight chunks of handmade simulacra are her core constructions. Hung on an armature of bird bones, things fit where they need to. Suspended from hardly disguised strings and wires, stuff gets pinned up and down and over. Her sculpture can encrust itself to any axis. It is free to float.

Ms. Golden is a busy, nearly maniacal orchestrator of space and stuff. Her big silvery worlds are engineered, usually from the ceiling down. In A Fall of Corners, there is a renewed disconnect from gravity, the room is upended, sideways, and re-angled by a plushly carpeted catwalk. The gallery space gets spun like a wheel and falls apart into a kaleidoscope of views and points of view, folding space into sharply rendered scenes that spread out across each wall.  (In this case a country restaurant from the 1980’s, a wedding reception?, a hotel lobby and an apartment/bachelor pad equipped with exercise bike). Each of these set pieces is doubled through a sheet of mirror that spans the entire floor of the gallery. The effect is a kind of vertigo that can’t be measured with a stick.

As immersive as a cave and as personal as an underwear drawer, Golden’s handmade world seems to sample a combination of banal architecture and personal memory. Architecture as the envelope for our private lives is what Ms. Golden’s creations lock into. Flying over these places is a kind of magic that’s reserved for dreams and crane shots. Golden is in the business of making new realities come true, these are not in camera tricks or CGI, this all exists in real blood time.  Whole scenes cascade upon the viewer in a monstrous group hallucination leaving one asking Where am I? Are you seeing this? Am I having a migraine or did someone slip something in my drink?

From motion sickness to deja vu, Golden builds an art that disconnects eyes from mind and body. Perspectives are forced on the viewer like a collapsing building. I am reminded of Conical Intersect or Circus, those late Matta Clark works that shred perspectives on what used to be familiar, where the best photos defy any clear sense of orientation, only a ghost of place is left intact. With Golden there is no wrecking ball, the cuts are domesticated. Cups and saucers remain undisturbed, not one chair gets overturned. Perhaps in the end she is closer to some sort of space aged Kienholz for Golden’s things are life-size models of our feelings first and our architecture second.

There are moments when I am in this room that I lose more than myself. I stand dumbstruck in this thing wondering about bats and dolphins. Echo location comes to mind. Am I missing some inner equipment? In place of thoughts and words there are only feelings and sensations; heartbreak, regret, longing and fondness for the places and missing people of this world, and my own life. Abstraction at its best. The gears are freed up, spinning, sometimes quickly and sometimes slowly, I am just along for the ride. This is dislocation times one thousand and I for one am grateful for the break from myself.

Samara Golden, b. 1973, Ann Arbor, Michigan, has been featured in solo exhibitions at MoMA PS1, New York, Night Gallery, Los Angeles, and Frieze Projects, New York. Group exhibitions include MOCA, Los Angeles, Sculpture Center, New York, Zabludowicz Collection, London, and The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles. Golden will present a solo exhibition at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco in March 2016. She is represented by Night Gallery, Los Angeles, and CANADA, New York. ”

images and press release courtesy of  canadanewyork.com

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WIM WENDERS | TIME CAPSULES. BY THE SIDE OF THE ROAD. WIM WENDERS’ RECENT PHOTOGRAPHS

17 September 2015 – 14 November 2015

Berlin

Blain|Southern Berlin is delighted to present new and recent photographs by Wim Wenders, the artist’s first exhibition in his hometown in over half a decade. The exhibition brings together images of Germany and America – the two countries that have most influenced the artist throughout his career.

for more information please visit blainsouthern.com
Images courtesy of the artist and Blain Southern

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Latest work by Karel Burssens and Jeroen Verrecht (also known as 88888) features a 40′ x 4′ hole in a pond surrounding the Horst medieval castle in Belgium. The structure keeps its interior dry making it possible to be lit up during the night to mark its abnormal presence even more. The project was unveiled at the Horst Art and Music Festival and will be on display until October 11.

Karel Burssens and Jeroen Verrecht  share a general interest in spatial conditions and establish this in a practice of installation art, scenography, architecture and photography. Together or separate, they work on several international projects in the worlds of museums, fashion, contemporary dance and architecture. Their expertise grew on both conceptual and productional levels, the broad interests and experience nurturing mutually.

more info at office88888.com

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Valley Curtain, Rifle, Colorado, 1970-72

” Christo and Jeanne-Claude, respectively, in full Christo Javacheff and Jeanne-Claude de Guillebon   (respectively, born June 13, 1935, Gabrovo, Bulg. born June 13, 1935, Casablanca, Mor.—died Nov. 18, 2009, New York City, N.Y., U.S.), environmental sculptors, noted for their controversial outdoor sculptures and monumental displays of fabrics and plastics.

Christo attended the Fine Arts Academy in Sofia, Bulg., and had begun working with the Burian Theatre in Prague when the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 broke out. He fled to Vienna, where he studied for a semester, and then, after a brief stay in Switzerland, moved to Paris and began exhibiting his works with the nouveaux réalistes. While working there as a portrait artist, Christo met Jeanne-Claude de Guillebon, whom he married in 1959. Jeanne-Claude was once described as her husband’s publicist and business manager, but she later received equal billing with him in all creative and administrative aspects of their work. In 1964 the pair relocated to New York City, where their art was seen as a form of Arte Povera.

Christo’s earliest sculptures were composed of cans and bottles—some as found and some painted or wrapped in paper, plastic, or fabric. Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s first collaborative works included Dockside Packages (1961; Cologne), Iron Curtain—Wall of Oil Drums (1962; Paris), and Corridor Store Front (1968; New York City). In 1968 they also completed a suspended 18,375-foot (5,600-metre) “air package” over Minneapolis, Minn., and “wrapped buildings” in Bern, Switz.; Chicago, Ill.; and Spoleto, Italy. Their monumental later projects included Valley Curtain (1972; Rifle Gap, Colo.), Running Fence (1976; Marin and Sonoma counties, Calif.), andSurrounded Islands (1983; Biscayne Bay, Fla.). In 1985 in Paris, they wrapped the Pont Neuf (bridge) in beige cloth. In a 1991 project, the couple installed 1,340 giant blue umbrellas across the Sato River valley in Japan and 1,760 giant yellow ones in Tejon Pass, California. Four years later they wrapped theReichstag in Berlin in metallic silver fabric. The Gates, Central Park, New York City, 1979–2005 was unveiled in 2005. Stretching across 23 miles (37 km) of walkway in Central Park, the work featured 7,503 steel gates that were 16 feet (5 metres) high and decorated with saffron-coloured cloth panels.The Gates was on display for 16 days and attracted more than four million visitors.

Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s huge, usually outdoor sculptures are temporary and involve hundreds of assistants in their construction. Seen as they are by all manner of passersby, including those who would not necessarily visit museums, these works force observers to confront questions regarding the nature of art. As the scope of the projects widened, increased time was needed for planning and construction phases, the securing of permits, and environmental- impact research. For each project, they formed a corporation, which secured financing and sold the primary models and sketches. Most installations were documented in print and on film, and the materials that created them were sold or given away after the projects were dismantled. ”

via Encyclopaedia Britannica

The Wall – 13,000 Oil Barrels, Gasometer Oberhausen, Germany, 1998-99

The Wall – 13,000 Oil Barrels, Gasometer Oberhausen, Germany, 1998-99

Big Air Package, Gasometer Oberhausen, Germany, 2010-13

Big Air Package, Gasometer Oberhausen, Germany, 2010-13

Wrapped Reichstag, Berlin, 1971-95

Wrapped Reichstag, Berlin, 1971-95

Running Fence, Sonoma and Marin Counties, California, 1972-76

Running Fence, Sonoma and Marin Counties, California, 1972-76

Running Fence, Sonoma and Marin Counties, California, 1972-76

Wrapped Coast, One Million Square Feet, Little Bay, Sydney, Australia, 1968-69

Wrapped Coast, One Million Square Feet, Little Bay, Sydney, Australia, 1968-69

The Wall – Wrapped Roman Wall, Via Veneto and Villa Borghese, Rome, Italy, 1973-74

Valley Curtain, Rifle, Colorado, 1970-72

images courtesy of christojeanneclaude.net

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“Limits” is a relative term. Like beauty, it is often in the eye of the beholder.

—Chris Burden

Gagosian Paris is pleased to present works by Chris Burden, his first exhibition in Paris in more than twenty years.
Since the 1970s, Burden has channeled the daring spirit of his early life threatening performances into sculptures that embody technical feats on an imposing scale. Toys (figurines, train sets, Erector parts) are used as the building blocks for expansive scale models, cities, and battlefields, while actual vehicles (ships, trucks, and cars) are suspended or set in motion in surreal and improbable ways.

Since 2003 Burden has constructed large-scale models of bridges—both real and imagined—by plotting thousands of toy construction parts. Tower of London Bridge (2003) mimics every aspect of the suspension design of the actual bridge, including its functional drawbridge. Tyne Bridge Kit (2004) is Burden’s reimagining of the Erector toolbox: the one-ton wooden chest contains rows of drawers that store the tools, blueprints, and 200,000 metal parts that can theoretically be used to assemble a 9 1/2 meter-long model of the Tyne Bridge in England. In Three Arch Dry Stack Bridge, 1/4 Scale (2013), first exhibited in the major survey “Chris Burden: Extreme Measures” at the New Museum, New York (2013–14), three elegant arches are made up of hand-cast concrete blocks, held together by gravity alone in the manner of classical keystone construction.

for more information please visit gagosian.com

photos by Thomas Lannes

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These images and others may be viewed in Sidney at Koskela Art Gallery, for more information please visit koskela.com

The exhibition is open to the public from 8th August – 27th September 2015, with a launch event at 2:30pm Saturday 8th August.

Koskela
85 Dunning Ave
Rosebery, NSW

images courtesy of brookeholm.com.au

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Galleria Continua is thrilled to present in its exhibition space in Beijing the show Ai Weiwei. For the first time in his life, the famous Chinese artist designs and realizes a solo exhibition in his home country, following the entire development of the project from conception to realization in situ.

The show represents a new “challenge” faced by the artist through what he defines as a “learning process”, an on-going project, which is at the same time a struggle and above all, the organisation of an actual organism. Wang Jiaci (Wang family ancestral hall) was an ancestral temple of Ming age, dedicated to the cult of Wang Hua, an important prince who was reigning during the 6th century A.D., taken as reference by all future dynasties, from Tang to Qing. For hundreds of years, the ancestral temple was considered a sacred place, destined to host offerings and cult ceremonies for ancestors, as well as a place for holding important social activities or meetings and those concerning the Wang family.

Today Wang Jiaci is the hub of Ai Weiwei’s monumental project, an ancient building which was disassembled into more than 1500 pieces and meticulously re-built inside two exhibitive areas: Galleria Continua and Tang Contemporary Art Center, crossing the wall that divides the two galleries. The peculiarity of this traditional architecture lies in its structure consisting of columns and wooden beams, completely independent and detachable from the walls. This building technique, recently developed also in the West, was used in China over one thousand years ago and is strictly related to the Chinese philosophy and thought. The choice to bring a predominant installation with imposing structure, cultural importance and aesthetic beauty inside an exhibition and two galleries, aimed at setting conditions of “totality” where the environment, which is no longer physical but also temporal and social, becomes an essential aspect of the work. Thus, visitors become part of the project, and their behaviour forms an inseparable part of it.

The visitor, invited to enter the two exhibitive areas at different times, is forced to see the work only partially, without ever being able to view and enjoy the entire architectural structure from a single point. The public is invited to walk inside a “social context” rather than a visual one, a condition in which the architectural object was deprived of its original use, thus acquiring a new shape and meaning. The behaviour of those who live this experience becomes, therefore, the focus of the entire project, and even the work itself. Ai Weiwei focuses, once again, on the importance of human actions within a particular event, not only of artistic, but also of social and public character.

For more information please visit galleriacontinua.com

Images courtesy of oak taylor-smith

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Curated by world renowned Australian surfboard designer Hayden Cox, the exhibition launch was hosted alongside surfer and Haydenshapes team reder Craig Anderson and New York Artist Jason Woodside. The Gallery event marked the release of a new artist collaboration between Haydenshapes and Woodside whose bright and colorful signature print was added to Haydenshapes latest model release ”Love Buzz” and displayed in the room along with 3 marble prints from Haydenshapes previous Summer Cage Installation project.

The large scale wave installation was created using sustainable Xantia X-Board Cardboard material. More info can be found at xanita.com.

For more information please visit haydenshapes.com

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Originally from Mexico City, Gabriel Dawe creates site-specific installations that explore the connection between fashion and architecture, and how they relate to the human need for shelter in all its shapes and forms. His work is centered in the exploration of textiles, aiming to examine the complicated construction of gender and identity in his native Mexico and attempting to subvert the notions of masculinity and machismo prevalent in the present day.

His work has been exhibited in the US, Canada, Belgium, and the UK. After living in Montreal, Canada for 7 years, he moved to Dallas, Texas, where he obtained his MFA at the University of Texas at Dallas. For the final two years of his degree, he was an artist in residence at CentralTrak, the Artist in Residency program at UTD. His work has been featured in numerous publications around the world, including Sculpture magazine, the cover of the 12th edition of Art Fundamentals published by McGraw-Hill, and in author Tristan Manco’s book Raw + Material = Art . He is represented by Conduit Gallery in Dallas, and by Lot 10 Gallery in Brussels.

more information on gabrieldawe.com

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In 2015 Serpentine Galleries celebrates the 15th anniversary of the world-renowned Pavilion commission.

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Summary:

Marking the first collaboration of its kind between the Museum of Modern Art of the City of Paris and the Museum of Contemporary Art of Montreal, this major exhibition represents a critical retrospective of the works by internationally renowned artist David Altmejd.

The Museum exhibition brings together some thirty works made over the last 15 years. Altmejd has created, among other things, a new on-site intervention. On of the major parts of the presentation, The Flux and the Puddle, 20140, offers a dazzling compendium of the main motifs and preoccupation that inhabit the artists powerful imagination.

Biography:

Born in Montréal in 1974, David Altmejd lives and works in New York. After studying visual arts at the Université du Québec à Montréal, where he majored in drawing and painting, he graduated as a sculptor in 1998. Fascinated by biology and science-fiction film, he moved to New York, where he earned an MFA at Columbia University in 2001. Altmejd represented Canada in 2007 at the 52nd Venice Biennale with the installation The Index, and took part in the Istanbul and Whitney Biennials in 2003 and 2003, respectively.

more information on www.macm.org

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Rolls-Royce Motor Cars will present the first public showing of Isaac Julien’s new work Stones Against Diamonds during Art Basel in Basel, 2015. The work, commissioned as part of the Rolls Royce Art Programme, will be shown at the Kirche Elisabethen, Basel, from 16-17 June 2015. Following the preview during the Venice Biennale last month, the video installation film will be shown on a larger scale than previously seen, as a unique site specific installation filling the magnificent interior of the imposing church across ten screens. Isaac Julien’s film draws inspiration from a letter written by Brazilian architect Lina Bo Bardi.

Stones Against Diamonds examines themes within her letter, where she praises the beauty of natural elements over preferred precious stones. Filming the work in remote Vatnajökull region in South East Iceland Austurland,, using the breathtaking scenery of glistening ice caves as a set for the film, Julien portrays some of the most beautiful objects as the least precious in a conventional sense. The shoot took place over five days with the crew enduring sub-zero temperatures deep in the heart of spectacular glacial caves, formed in ice over thousands of years and accessible for only a few days a year due to the harsh climate. Signature elements of Bo Bardi’s work have been incorporated into Julien’s work, including a staircase, meticulously built by hand in the ice cave during the production of the film.

In a move providing technical challenges for the fifty-strong crew, a larger version of the staircase was recreated during post-production before being merged, using CGI, replicating Bo Bardi’s famed spiral staircase. Continuing the parallels, Julien incorporates Bo Bardi’s signature easels in his film, made of glass and concrete, two elements present in the majority of her work.

The way in which Julien’s film will be installed in Basel continues this representation, as the artist will multiple screens positioned to draw direct comparison with Bo Bardi’s work. Stones Against Diamonds will be shown on a loop, repeated five times within the hour across the ten screens, each time varying slightly to add an element of surprise for the viewer. Richard Carter, Director of Global Communications, Rolls-Royce Motor Cars said, “The precision incorporated into the production of this work is demonstrated by the crew travelling to the ends of the earth to find the rarest, most beautiful natural components in order to create a piece of moving, dramatic and timeless art. This truly reflects Rolls-Royce Motor Cars, where the master craftsmen and women source the world’s finest materials to create rare, unique and exquisite motor cars, which transcend their primary function as a form of conveyance to become works of art themselves.”

more information on isaacjulien.com

photos by harold cunningham

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”Sean Kelly is delighted to announce From Düsseldorf, a solo exhibition of recent work by prominent German photographer Candida Höfer. This will be Höfer’s first exhibition with the gallery and her first exhibition in New York since 2013. An opening reception will take place on Thursday May 7 from 6:00 to 8:00pm, the artist will be present.

On view for the first time in the United States, the photographs presented in this exhibition were all taken in Düsseldorf, Germany — the city where Höfer first studied photography under Bernd and Hilla Becher and which, to this day, remains an important influence on her work. In the mid 70s, Höfer and her peers at the exalted Kunstakademie, known as The Düsseldorf School of Photography, created one of the most remarkable artistic movements in Germany since the Bauhaus. In the years following, Höfer has continued to photograph Düsseldorf with a fresh eye, revealing an entirely new, and unexpected, minimalist direction in her work.

Alongside the meticulously composed, large-scale, color images of interiors for which Höfer is known, the exhibition presents photographs from the artist’s remarkable new body of work. Höfer’s latest compositions focus primarily on architectural detail and structure, color and form, utilizing extreme angles and close-ups to interrogate abstract forms. These fascinating new images juxtaposed against the Baroque churches, Rococo halls, and Modern opera houses, quintessentially representative of Höfer’s oeuvre, create an exciting visual dialogue that explores the past, present, and future of both the city and the artist.

Höfer’s internationally recognized work has been exhibited in solo exhibitions at the Kunsthalles in Basel and in Berne, the Museum Folkwang in Essen, the Louvre in Paris, the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, Museum Kunst Palast in Dusseldorf and, most recently, at the Kunstmuseum Luzerne. Her work has also appeared in group exhibitions at The Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Power Plant, Toronto; Kusthaus Bregenz; Museum Ludwig, Cologne; the Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao; and Documenta XI, Kassel. Höfer represented Germany at the 2003 Venice Biennale. Her photographs are in major public and private collections worldwide.”

more information available on skny.com

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PAOLA PIVI “YEE-HAW”
Galerie Perrotin, Paris / 4 June – 1st August 2015
Opening reception: Thursday 4 June, 4-9pm
Exceptionnal closure from 25 June to 2 July

“Yee-Haw,” Paola Pivi’s ninth exhibition at Galerie Perrotin in the last fifteen years, introduces a new series of photographs with animals. Her diverse work, spanning performances to sculptures to large installations, is punctuated over the years by her photographic representations of animals in performative happenings; these are her most renowned images.

A long way from unicorns and other chimeras, the animals that appear in Paola Pivi’s world are very real. Yet, set in their strange surroundings, they appear as a dream within reality, imbuing them with a mythological aura (ostriches or a donkey sailing on a small boat in the Mediterranean Sea, 84 goldfish swimming in bowls and flying in a passenger airplane in New Zealand, different white animals grazing in an Edenic land, alligators frolicking in whipped cream in Florida or polar bears covered in multicolored feathers posing during the inauguration of Galerie Perrotin in New York). These images cast a new oneiric light over the world, viewed now through the prism of fantasy, of a fabulous bestiary. They appear to reveal a dimension that is a part of everyday life, which has only by chance never occured before in front of someone’s eyes.

For this exhibition, Pivi brought four horses to the Eiffel Tower. The animals seem to have found a new playground, an architectural landscape made to their measure. Once again, Pivi revisits and juxtaposes elements that are both familiar and archetypal into a fantastic iconography.

for more information please visit perrotin.com

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Damián Ortega

Casino / Curated by Vicente Todolí

from 5 June to 8 November 2015

More information available on hangarbicocca.org

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French photographer Charles Pétillon created the series ‘Invasion’, containing bundles of white, inflated balls within architectural spaces, neighborhoods and natural landscapes. He considers each photo in his series a metaphor for either a period of time, an emotional sensation, or universal urban evolution. They aim to change our perception of the ordinary sceneries we encounter everyday.

The photos were exhibited at Maison Européene de la Photographie between the 20th of February and the the 22th of March 2015.

More information and works available on charlespetillon.com

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Yayoi Kusama’s latest exhibition titled ”Give me love” will be held at the David Zwirner Gallery in New York during May 9 – June 13, 2015.

”David Zwirner is pleased to present Give Me Love, the gallery’s second exhibition with Yayoi Kusama in New York. On view in two spaces, 519 and 525 West 19th Street, will be new paintings from the celebrated My Eternal Soul series, new polka-dotted pumpkin sculptures, and the artist’s seminal installation The Obliteration Room from 2002.

Widely recognized around the world, with a recent survey of museum attendance ranking her as the most popular artist in 2014, Kusama has shaped her own narrative of postwar and contemporary art. Minimalism and Pop art, abstraction and conceptualism coincide in her practice, which spans painting, sculpture, performance, room-sized and outdoor installations, the written word, films, fashion, design, and architectural interventions. ”

more information available on davidzwirner.com

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more information on louisvuitton.com

images courtesy of architecturaldigest.com

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Frieze New York returned to Randall’s Island Park, Manhattan from May 14 to 17, 2015. For the fourth consecutive year, Frieze New York was sponsored by Deutsche Bank.

Housed within an innovative structural design and overlooking the East River, the fair showcased the world’s most exciting contemporary galleries. This year saw the introduction of Spotlight, a new gallery section which took place alongside the existing Frame and Focus sections. The fair also benefited from a celebrated non-profit program comprising Frieze Projects, Talks, Sounds and Education.

Images courtesy of ocula.com
Photographs © Charles Roussel & Ocula
More information available on friezenewyork.com

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Janet Echelman‘s latest aerial sculpture has been suspended 365 feet above Boston’s Rose Kennedy Greenway. On view through October 2015, the monumental installation spans 600 feet, occupying a void where an elevated highway once divided the city’s downtown from its waterfront.

“The sculpture’s form echoes the history of its location,” describes Echelman. “The three voids recall the ‘Tri-Mountain’ which was razed in the 18th-century to create land from the harbor. The colored banding is a nod to the six traffic lanes that once overwhelmed the neighborhood, before the Big Dig buried them and enabled the space to be reclaimed for urban pedestrian life.”

Courtesy of archdaily.com

Images © Peter Vanderwarker

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Like a great skeptical underground project, Shrigley’s conceptual, idea-based art is a never-ending stream of curious propositions and eccentric moral dilemmas. With acerbic humor and strangely profound insights, the artist lays bare the ambiguities, comedy and pathos of everyday life. According to the artist, most aspects of life have the potential to be “ridiculous, absurd, awkward, funny and meaningless all at once.”

Shrigley has consistently experimented with different media and formats, although drawing has been the mainstay of his practice. This exhibition focuses on the economy and eloquence of his unique, funny drawings on paper, with their pared-down, crude graphic forms and puttering script. In all these works, the artist furthers his exploratory unraveling of the world around him with images and words that beckon the viewer to enjoy the liberating power of a good laugh.

Images & text courtesy of Antorn Kern Gallery

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MARCIN MACIEJOWSKI

Unsettled Matters

17 April to 17 May 2015

@ Wilkinson Gallery, London

”Maciejowski paints people in his life, scenes from the media, famous people, and artists, writers and other cultural figures. The paintings that reference other artists could be read as a form of institutional critique, as Maciejowski performs the act ofreimagining moments of history and culture that interest and influence him. The choice of title of the exhibition – Unsettled Matters – is a conscious reference to an article about contemporary art that refers to the past. Often art that does this accumulates these references in a kind of constellation of selfvalidation, creating a hollow surface that looks like art but would collapse if these references were removed. In opposition to this, Maciejowski’s approach to the representation of these people is the same as his approach to painting a person he loves. The images he selects to paint are the accumulation of a vocabulary of how he experiences the world – a strange concoction of the banal and the sublime, like feeling painfully sad in a theme park.

Kathy Noble”

Images & text courtesy of Wilkinson Gallery

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Diana Al-Hadid’s first solo exhibition at the gallery, titled Ground and Figures, presents a combination of various work: three-dimensional paintings, drawings on mylar, sculpture, and a site-specific installation. While continuing her course of inventing visually distinct and compelling work, for which she is well recognized, this exhibition advances several aspects of her practice – in scope, scale, and subtle shifts of color palette.

Myriad topics influence Al-Hadid’s conceptual curve, including anatomy; architecture; geology; history; and art history. These separate subjects synthesize, leading to her ingenious methods of execution, and an aberrant aesthetic emerges as a result. Everything in her repository culminates into creating impossibly intricate works, simultaneously ethereal and ragged. Each piece bridges a realm ­– dimensionality is immeasurable, and matter isn’t tangible.

Large-scale panels merge image and volume. These lace-like works, formed using an additive process combining polymer gypsum, fiberglass, and plaster, held together by a skeleton of steel, finally manifest as apparitional paintings. On the surface of each piece, gold leafing drips along lines and contours, highlighting the collapse of image, and exalting memory against the inevitable passage of time. One of the panels is influenced by a snapshot taken at Piazza San Marco that Al-Hadid captured during her last trip there, when the façade of the cathedral was mostly covered in scaffolding. The bottom of this piece is open, so that the building’s semi-discernable architectural form disintegrates out of the “frame.”

Al-Hadid created an installation specifically for this exhibition, applying a bottomless design, similar to the San Marco piece. This exploit drops a 30-foot long “wall” from the ceiling, spanning the width of the gallery space. Combining landscape and portrait imagery from various Old Master paintings, she constructed this to include a sizable egress, irregular and fissured, allowing people to move through the work. Inviting interaction, this installation is the first of its kind, giving the sense of traversing a painting, or passing through a threshold between a distant past and an obscure frontier.

Diana Al-Hadid (b.1981, Aleppo, Syria) currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. She received a BFA in Sculpture from Kent State University in 2003, and an MFA in Sculpture from Virginia Commonwealth University in 2005. She attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2007. Al-Hadid has received numerous awards, including: a Joan Mitchell Grant; Louis Comfort Tiffany Grant; USA Rockefeller Fellowship; New York Foundation for the Arts Grant; and a Pollack-Krasner Grant. Her work is included in many public collections, such as the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; The Weatherspoon Art Museum, Greensboro; and The Judith Rothschild Foundation, New York. Al-Hadid has had solo exhibitions at Secession, Vienna, Austria; Columbus College of Art and Design, Columbus, OH; Weatherspoon Museum of Art, Greensboro, NC; Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, VA; Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas, TX; Centro de Arte Contemporánea, La Conservera, Murcia, Spain; Nevada Museum of Art, Reno, NV; and The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA.

Images & text courtesy of pacemacgill.com

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The work seven fictive dining ceremonies was particularly made for this exhibition in Milano. Fitted for the theme Luxury and the title of the exhibition Slow City Maastricht I developed the 7-piece place setting from existing cutlery in combination with the self-created parts. The design of the cutlery has the old typical shape of the silverware of Maastricht, which is also equipped with the city brand, the star of Maastricht. Back then the cutlery was a valuable and individually decorated possession, which often functioned as a showpiece and conversational piece. Surprisingly, knife and fork where not meant to be utensils for eating. Neither is my cutlery. Instead it gives seven different answers on what to do with it when you don’t use it for eating. The observer is encouraged to find new appliances to refine his mind and the fine sense for design, dreaming and fantasy.

more info on cargocollective.com

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”Whose Utopia? 2006 contrasts the humdrum reality of life in a lighting factory with the dreams and aspirations of its younger workers at a time of economic growth and social change in China.

Artist Cao Fei spent six months with the employees of a lighting manufacturing plant in China’s Pearl River Delta region, an industrial megalopolis that in the past two decades has attracted great numbers of migrants from poor rural areas. The artist documented the workers’ daily life, from the factory floor to their humble living quarters. At the same time she conducted interviews about their passions and ambitions beyond their day job, and invited some of the workers to be filmed performing scenes based on their responses.

The first part of the video shows workers absorbed in their repetitive tasks, acting almost as extensions of the machinery surrounding them. From the relentless rhythms of the assembly line to the busy offices and orderly stockrooms, the whole process takes on a hypnotic quality, enhanced by the eerie instrumental soundtrack. In the second part the factory aisles are animated by the fantasies of a handful of workers, seen dancing or playing guitar as their colleagues keep toiling, seemingly unaware. The final segment consists of filmed portraits of individual workers, pausing from their tasks to look straight into the camera. Such vignettes offer a glimpse into their personalities and inner lives, depicting them as much more than cogs in the collectivist machine fuelling China’s economy.

Cao Fei was born in 1978 in Guangzhou, China. She lives and works in Beijing.

Curated by Valentina Ravaglia” – description courtesy of tate.org.uk, more information available on their website. Image courtesy of Whose-utopia, My future is not a dream, 2006 © Cao Fei / Lombard-Freid Projects

Even if you are not going to be in London for the show, you can still watch the video part of ”Whose Utopia?” below. Obviously, the experience won’t be the same as being there but still, if you’re curious at least you’ve got an option!

Whose Utopia (Cao Fei, 2006) from Melvin Furnau on Vimeo.

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Starting from February this year, the Centre Pompidou in Paris has hosted the latest exhibition by HERVÉ TÉLÉMAQUE. Maybe you’re already a fan or maybe you’re just lucky enough to bored in Paris and don’t know what to do, either way, you can investigate the artist a bit in the below extract taken from the museum’s official page and also glance at a few of the works which will be present in the exhibition.

25 February 2015 – 18 May 2015

from 11h00 to 21h00

”With 75 works in the form of paintings, drawings, collages, objects and assemblages, the retrospective devoted to Hervé Télémaque is one of the most significant ever devoted to the Haiti-born French artist. It reveals for the first time at the Centre Pompidou all the diversity and consistency of a challenging body of work with undeniable visual power. 

After spending three years in New York, where he became familiar with the abstract expressionism that influenced the assertive gestures of his first paintings, Télémaque settled in Paris in 1961. At this time, he became close to the Surrealist group. On canvas, he orchestrated the meeting of objects from consumer society and popular culture, which led to joyous visual short-circuits. Soon a follower of the “clear line” style, Télémaque produced paintings with a strong autobiographical element. These were constructed as metaphorical sequences with a definite critical import, half-way between counter-culture and anti-colonialism, while exploring the complex relationship between image and language. However, between 1968 and 1970, the artist stopped painting to produce intriguing assemblages of objects, where the white stick, symbol of blindness, took on a major role.

When he returned to painting, Télémaque tackled collage for the first time, profoundly reworking its current techniques.During the Nineties, Télémaque also executed drawings in charcoal, whose dark forms and sophisticated cut-out effects dialogued with a large number of reliefs in salvaged wood covered with coffee grounds. The 2000s were a period when he cast a fresh eye on the world, after returning to his African roots. His works at this time were notable for their frequent allusions to “negritude”, and their more precise comments on current French politics. In the middle of the decade, he made an unexpected and highly productive return to a striking new pictorial form. ”

Images & text courtesy of centrepompidou.fr

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In this landmark work from SFMOMA’s media arts collection, Doug Hall traverses the technologically mediated modern landscape in pursuit of what he calls a “technological sublime.” The Terrible Uncertainty of the Thing Described (1987) incorporates multiple channels of video showing extreme weather and industrial machines into a large-scale sculptural installation that features a functioning Tesla coil. The coil’s unexpected flashes of artificial lightning jolt viewers into a sudden awareness of their own vulnerable presence amid the turbulent stream of media images — the rupture, in Hall’s words, “between the world as representation and the world as fact.” This presentation at the San Francisco Art Institute’s Walter and McBean Galleries marks the first time The Terrible Uncertainty of the Thing Described has been seen in the Bay Area since it was last presented by SFMOMA in 1989. More than 25 years later, at a time when the boundaries between physical experience and the media landscape are even more uncertain, Hall’s work is still electrifying.

The exhibition is jointly curated by Hesse McGraw, vice president for exhibitions and public programs at SFAI, and Rudolf Frieling, curator of media arts at SFMOMA and visiting faculty at SFAI. Hall is professor emeritus at SFAI, where he taught from 1980 until 2008.

Source: http://www.sfmoma.org/exhib_events/exhibitions/587#ixzz3WEwfqeof

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

ABOUT THE ARTIST

San Francisco–based Doug Hall is professor emeritus at SFAI, where he taught from 1980 until 2008. Hall is currently a visiting artist in graduate fine arts at California College of the Arts. His internationally acclaimed work spans performance, video, and photography.

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But still, Philadelphia-based artist Alex Da Corte manages to bring a different type of scare to the surroundings of the bourgeoise neighborhood through his bizarre exhibition ”Die Hexe” (meaning, ”The Witch”). According to Curbed, the exhibition incorporates the work of three other artists: Bjarne Melgaard, Mike Kelley and Robert Gober, in a five-room show that is reminiscent of David Lynch’s Twin Peaks X The Shining X random dodgy 70s strip club.

To me, the revealing nature of each room is what contributes most to this startling feeling of uneasiness you MIGHT get when you are part of the show. And if you ask me, that orange gingham check patterned wallpaper is enough to make you want to flee in terror and never turn back. Still, the artist probably felt like it wasn’t enough and also managed to add a screechy-creepy old rocking chair to make sure he gets the point across and give the room some feng shui.

If you are that lucky to be in New York this spring, then consider going to see this thing rather than go to, let’s say, a park or a conventional museum because hey, you’re crazy and fun (just like you said you were on tinder)

that gingham check, man. too much. it’s too much for me.

Images courtesy of timeout.com

More information over here: luxembourgdayan.com

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Zin Helena Song’s visually complex sculptural paintings are rooted in both Western and Asian art influences melded with modern societal concepts of order and multiplicity. Her process incorporates hard-edge abstract paintings on top of meticulously hand-fabricated three dimensional geometric forms that are mounted to the wall. Each piece is painted with precision, using a subdued and boldly contrasting color palate to accentuate the lines and angles of the shapes. Ultimately the pieces push the boundaries of paintings into the architectural realm by activating space. The series titled Polygon in Space feature sharp edges that imply movement, while the Origami series hover as if hollow and weightless despite the strong and dominating, protruding structure.

Song moved from Seoul to New York in 2009. She completed her MFA at Long Island University Post in 2014. She received the O’Malley Scholarship in 2013 and the Eleanor Lockwood Memorial Award in Sculpture (2014). Her work has been acknowledged in numerous publications including MOMA PS1 Studio Visit, The Jealous Curator and The Brooklyn Rail.

Images and information via carlesmithgallery.com

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Images and text courtesy of Tate Modern

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She believes that forests are potent symbols in folklore, fairy tale and myth, places of magic as well as of danger and mystery and you can clearly see hints of these qualities and descriptions being brought out in her images.

The altered landscapes become a reflection of her personal relationship with the forest that call into question the idea of landscape as a social and cultural construct.

Cyril Foiret via Trendland.com

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The design of the exhibition layout was commissioned to Cano Estudio, a Madrid-based creative agency known for its work with large luxury brands, which created a blank, white space that appears to be completely empty — at least for art-exhibition standards! The idea was of course to give as little visual stimulus as possible, and bring attention to ‘‘the least popular of the senses, olfaction’’. Jesús Cano, the designer responsible for the the display, explains the rationale behind the exhibition design: ‘‘We sought to create a space that intrinsically invited visitors to lower their voices, breathe deep and for a few moments, disconnect from the outside world. The goal was to create a relaxing atmosphere to discover the perfume. Perfume in its purest state. Without decorations. That is, without containers or packaging. Simply, aroma, mind and feeling.’’ Cano Estudio is also responsible for the graphic image of the exhibition, as well as the design of the catalogue that accompanies it.

In addition, this exhibition also reveals the relationship of each perfume with emblematic works of art history: with a QR code, it is possible to discover works of visual art which, just like the perfumes ‘on display’, were icons of their time. The exhibition presents a total of eight artistic trends within the field of olfactory arts:

Romanticism: Jicky by Aimé Guerlain for Guerlain.
Modernism: Chanel No5 by Enest Beaux for Chanel.
Surrealism: Angel by Olivier Cresp for Thierry Mugler.
Neo-Romanticism: Prada Amber by Carlos Benaïm, Max Gavarry and Clément Gavarry for Prada.
Photorealism: Eau de Lierre by Fabrice Pellegrin for Diptyque.
Figurative contemporary: J’adore L’Absolu by François Demachy for Dior.
Neoclassicism: Aqua Universalis by Francis Kurkdjian for Maison Francis Kurkdjian.
20th century retro: Aura by Emilio Valeros for Loewe.

via www.yatzer.com

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Technology allows for new forms of communication; however every system enhances certain types of communication while limiting and simplifying others. It’s these modulated effects and alterations to our perception that has become thematic focus to his works, whether dealing with socio-political issues or inward personal emotions.

Thermal Energy
(2013)
160cm x 120cm x 90cm

Thermal Energy
(2013)
160cm x 120cm x 90cm

(An array of lights intersect through a fence at an angle, with the colors visualizing hot air rising and cold air sinking. This work visualizes what is invisible, air, and shows it passing through a fence, letting the viewer think about air as a substance that fills all open spaces and travels through fences, borders, etc.)

Originally studying film and animation at New York University; at graduate school (NYU’s Interactive Telecommunication’s Program), he came to view televisions as light systems and their own medium. Instead of relying on this set system, he started to develop his own visual systems by controlling and manipulating light itself. These light works became a physical extension of the pixel beyond the screen, pixels that created three-dimensional sculptural form.

Plotted Coordinates
(2013)
120cm x 120cm x 45cm
Metal, 3D Printed Joints, Lights, Filters

(A piece that references the spatial information of three dimensional objects. The steel beams create a grid XYZ reference point in which a jagged line move through ( Up, Down, Left and Right ) spatially plotting coordinates to create a three dimensional form. The lights are filtered to run through the spectrum of colors, alluding to the various colors an object might be.)

In 2007 James moved to Dubai and lived there till 2012. In the five years living there he became an active participant in the development of the arts and culture scene of the globalized city. While his early work dealt with analyzing how technology and media work, his experiences in the Middle East saw his focus shift to how technology and media affect. This included themes of nationalism, globalism, and popular culture in the age of mass information.

In 2012 James moved his studio back to New York where he currently lives and works.

Two Times One Sun
(2013)
160cm Diameter
Lights, Filters

(A visualization of the sun from two different perspectives on earth. One showing the sky with the sun setting and the other showing the sky with the sun rising. This work compresses the timezones between the two perspectives and focuses in on a single object viewable from both places; the sun.)

Synesthetic Timeline at Frankfurt Airport

(2013)
Steel, Acrylic, LEDs, Cables, Microphones, Computers
3m x 26m

“Synesthetic Timeline” is a permanent installation in the Fraport headquarters in Frankfurt Germany. It consists of two audio interactive light installations that convert live sound into geometric lines of light.

These two large wall pieces monitor the live ambient noises in the lobby and translate them into light animations that travel up the (elevator) walls. The bottom of the wall displays the current sound levels, which then move up the geometric structure, allowing people to see the sound and a visual chronology of sound in the space. The installation changes and morphs according to the sound activities in the building environment and as planes fly overhead.

*Additional programming and system design with Kentaro Okuda

Cell Division
Cell Division (Tensile) (2012)
150cm x 90cm x 90cm
Fluorescent lights, acrylic tubes and light filters

(Two spherical tensigrity structures are connected and mirror each other, recreating the moment of cell division through geometric, structural lighting.)

Got Recession
(2010)
100 cm x 80 cm x 60 cm
Magis ‘Puppy (XL)’, Brass Rod, Steel Rod, Acrylic, LED lighting
Edition of 2 + 1 AP

(“Got Recession” is the artist’s version of architecture in Dubai at the height of the economic boom, and then forwarded a few months to the global recession, leaving a half-finished architecture skeleton. Scaffolding still surrounds the building and at night the lighting glows internally. Similar to many projects put on hold in Dubai, the lights were kept on at night, until the project was finally cancelled and the lights went off.)

Versace Singular Suit
(2009)
3 m x 3 m x 2 m

(Versace Suit, Mannequin, FL tubes, Acrlyic
Created for The Singular Suit exhibition at Somerset House, London. Organized by and featured in Esquire Magazine.
18 major fashion designers were asked to select an artist or designer to collaborate in re-imagining the classic suit. The following are the list of collaborations.)

Among the artist’s wide range of pieces, it’s possible to focus on his light installations as stand-alone pieces or, better yet, as a solid body of work. Experimenting with an assortment of materials such as acrylic, metal and fiberglass and, obviously, fluorescent lights, Clar skillfully showcases numerous subject matters: from symbolic reductions or augmentation of an event, form experimentations, pattern replications, to sophisticated criticisms of the pitfalls of daily technology and information.
The extension of a pixel beyond the screen limits to become a complex three dimensional work is one of the many insights from the artist, an exploration of his extensive library is well recommended for media critique and installation art enthusiasts.

Currently displaying wprks at: Rockaway!, MoMA PS1 / Honolulu Biennial, New York
Big Bang Data, Center for Contemporary Culture (CCCB), Barcelona
The Language of Human Conciousness, Athr Gallery, Jeddah
They Sicken Of The Calm Who Know The Storm, Fridman Gallery, New York
OnScreen, Carroll / Fletcher, London

via jamesclar.com and trendland.com

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With an explorer’s thirst for knowledge, Markowitsch has combed through, brought to light and reinterpreted many of the traces left in the Coninx Villa by those who once lived there and by the art they collected. One fundamental aspect of his approach lies in his handling of light. Rooms as bright as day alternate in a crescendo and diminuendo of light with dimly lit spaces and still others that are shrouded in darkness. This score of light and dark not only influences and interprets the effect of the works presented in these rooms, but also points up the architectural changes to the building.

Exhibition View ALP, 2013

Emma’s Gift, Courtesy: Galerie EIGEN+ART, Berlin Leipzig

In his projects, Rémy Markowitsch creates imaginary contextual spaces by drawing on an immense store of references, but these spaces can only be accessed through his objects, photographs and his installations. Whether it is an expedition into our reading of foreign cultures as in On Travel, or the exposure of the convoluted links between money, the stock market, desire, power, politics and industry, as in The Onion Option: all of Markowitsch’s projects are the result of extensive forays into literature and research, history and politics, colonialism, the appropriation of the other, a passion for collection and addiction. In Emma’s Gift, inspired by Flaubert’s novel Madame Bovary, it happens that Emma Bovary gives a present to her author while the artist presents a gift to his public in the form of a song by the band The Hillbilly Moon Explosion,Madame Bovary, c’est moi.

http://www.markowitsch.org

PHOTOS: eigen-art.com

-via artsy.net, http://thenewcollectorsbook.com/

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Architecture is one of her subjects. As modern as the word architecture sounds, Genzken sees every structure as the ruin it could turn into. For her series of sculptures called “New Buildings,” she leaned sheets of glass and plastic against each other. The objects are reminiscent of models of skyscrapers for a new modern age — crystalline, highly aesthetic and yet somehow makeshift. She titled one of her shows “Fuck the Bauhaus,” because so many architects invoked the Bauhaus after 1945 and yet did not adhere to its rules.

Untitled, 2007: The MoMA show, which will later travel to Chicago and Dallas, is a triumph for Genzken, albeit a distant one. She isn’t nearly as famous in her native Germany, even though she has exhibited at the Documenta contemporary art exhibition three times, represented Germany at the Venice Biennale in 2007 and received many important awards.

She repeatedly creates metaphors for vulnerability. She spray-paints twisted pieces of sheet metal with bright colors, hangs them on the wall and calls it “Gay Baby.” Many of her images depict destruction. She builds tableaus that feel like three-dimensional film stills, brutal arrangements with plastic toys and small plastic figures on replicas of fields of ruins. She creates beauty from ugly things, even wheelchairs and shabby umbrellas. Humor is also a recurring theme in her work. For one installation, she placed an assortment of sunglasses onto busts of Nefertiti.

This is Genzken’s world: minimalism and trash, neon and despair. Hieronymus Bosch, Marcel Duchamp, American concept art — it all flows into her work, as does the mood in the clubs she visits and the mood in her own head.

There is something cryptic about Genzken’s art, something mysterious that is unfathomable and yet perceptible. Her art is very private and sometimes irritating, almost as if she were using it as a coping mechanism.

Genzken has bipolar disorder and goes through manic and depressive phases, and she is also an alcoholic. She is constantly in treatment to manage her condition. But anyone who knew her in the 1980s would have hardly believed she would still be alive today. There were times when Buchholz had to pull her off the streets, where she regularly ended up. “It wasn’t always easy,” he says. (“Schauspieler,” 2013.)

She is a nonconformist in the German art world, perhaps more surprising and multifaceted than anyone else. “Yes, that might be true,” she says with a smile. (“Schauspieler,” 2013.)

Genzken’s way of working could be compared to the multiplicity of approaches found in the paintings of Gerhard Richter and Sigmar Polke or the related efforts of James Welling in photography, yet, unlike those artists, Genzken cannot be defined by a single medium or tradition and has made compelling and influential contributions in numerous fields. It is difficult to pinpoint any artist working in this period who has pursued such an intentionally varied path, and in recent years, a new generation of artists, curators, and art lovers has been inspired by her radical inventiveness. The past decade has been particularly productive for Genzken, who has taken her interest in found objects and collage and created several bodies of work that have redefined assemblage for a new era. These works, which range from smaller, diorama-like works to room-filling installations, incorporate photographs, kitschy souvenirs, pop culture cast-offs, cheap household products, and high-end design objects, obliterating any hierarchy of value between them as they are combined into powerfully evocative statements that are immediately recognizable as Genzken’s.

Isa Genzken
Oil XI, 2007

Hotel Tools, 2008
Plastic, metal, spray-paint, tools and household goods

Hospital (Ground Zero), 2008
Artificial flowers, plastic, metal, glass, acrylic, spray-paint, mirror foil, MDF and casters

Disco ‘Soon’ (Ground Zero), 2008
Cardboard, plastic, mirror, spray-paint, acrylic, metal, textile ribbons, light ropes, mirror foil, colour print on paper, MDF and casters

Biography
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Index 8 of 65 works
Spiderman, 2008
Paper, dried plant, fabric, stuffed animal, plastic, spray-paint, acrylic, shoes and tape

Isa Genzken installation, Inverleith House

Mannequins in bizarre fashion-disaster blends of sunglasses and riot gear, plus a toy monkey dressed up for some appalling art fair, ape the puzzled spectators who wander among Genzken’s sprawling collages and junk sculptures. Through it all runs a fascination with the nature of beauty that is oddly appropriate for the botanic garden, after all. In one rollicking combine laid out on the floor, posters of artistic masterpieces from Berlin’s museums including Caravaggio’s Victorious Cupid collide with contemporary ephemera in a meditation on beauty and desire, love and loss, in the modern world.

Isa Genzken is one of the standouts at Edinburgh art festival 2014.

- via moma.org; hauserwirth.com and spiegel.de

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It transpires that hell, 140 years after the French poet published his masterpiece, isn’t other people but their mobile phones. According to Da Corte, these devices can act as a portal to our dreams or to a considerably less pleasant place. At David Risley Gallery in Copenhagen, the two rooms of Delirium I used colour, smell, texture and imagery to explore how hope and expectation can turn out to be the stuff of nightmare.

Photo: davidrisleygallery.com

Alex Da Corte was born in Camden, N.J., in 1981 and currently lives and works in Philadelphia. He received his BFA from the University of the Arts and his MFA from Yale University in 2010.

Da Corte has recently mounted solo shows and presentations at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia; Artspeak, Vancouver; Mother’s Tankstation, Dublin; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Portland, Maine; and Nudashank, Baltimore. His work has been shown at MoMA PS1, the Museum of Modern Art and the deCordova Museum, and he has participated extensively in gallery and non-profit exhibitions in the US and internationally.

In 2012, Da Corte was named a Pew Fellow in the Arts by the Pew Center for Arts and Heritage, Philadelphia.

Photo: davidrisleygallery.com

We live in our phones although we sometimes occupy space beside other people. The telephone is our closest ally, the mediator between the present and our projection of the present. It is in some ways a portal to our dreams. It can be a portal to hell if used properly.

Scene One Room One
The viewer (you) enters the room. The smell of Calvin Klein’s Obsession lingers. There is an acrylic tiled floor. Its pattern is a lattice-type grid; the spaces in between the lattice lines are mirror. It appears as if you might have to walk only on the lines for fear of falling into nothingness. There is a green mirror shelf on the wall. As you enter you see yourself in green. You are comforted. You think of money. You are happy with what you see. You are hopeful that you may find someone like that after the opening at the gallery. You walk further into the space because you see a tapestry/quilt with roses on it. You think it’s an Hermes scarf; it makes sense since you are in a fancy part of town. There are beautiful roses on it. You see red. You are lustful. You see a photo of a woman lying on the floor. You pass by the other side of the green mirror shelf. There is a bloody knife on the shelf. You wonder if the woman is okay. She is clutching the beautiful Hermes scarf. You look at the scarf closely. and realize it is covered in blood drops and spiders and scabs. This scarf is in disguise. It is covered in blood drops and spiders and scabs. It is not the silk you imagined it would be, it is a horrible nylon banner, a cheap knockoff, a myth. You didn’t notice the broken eggs on the floor because you were cloudy from the CK perfume. This place is Hell and you hope to wake up. End scene.

Photo: davidrisleygallery.com

Scene Two Room Two
The space is divided by laminated Ikea shelves. There are several knockoff Hermes scarves on the wall. There is food on the shelves and on the scarves. You want to eat it. You see two pictures of your lover. She is your monster and you are her doctor Frankenstein. You have made her all that she is and could be in your mind. You find that you are on the other end of the telephone. You have her by the bolts. You can bring her joy. You understand she is lost without you. You are cocksure. This is your home, your poem, so do what you want. You are in this space and feel comfortable, warm. You are the maker. You believe you are in control now.

Alas, all is not well. You grow hungry in the space and reach for the food. It is rubbery and tart. It provides no comfort. A telephone rings. But you see no phone. It may be your lover calling but you cannot pick up. Maybe she is calling you back. Maybe the love you made is truly the only thing that will cure your Hell. But in dreams, unfortunately, time is long and slow.

Photo: davidrisleygallery.com

Da Corte’s delirious installation is bright, striking and overwhelming. He says, “The stage sets are comprised of quilts, photographs, perfumes, plastic tiles, and sculptures. It is the fifth installment of an ongoing series of work created in relation to ‘A Season in Hell.’”

The poem was written when Rimbaud was just 18, after a tempestuous affair with his contemporary Paul Verlaine. The poem has served as inspiration for artists for over a century, and has been published alongside the photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe.

Photo: davidrisleygallery.com

Photo: davidrisleygallery.com

Photo: davidrisleygallery.com

Photo: coolhunting.com

Photo: coolhunting.com

Longtime friends and first-time collaborators Alex Da Corte and Jayson Musson create a major new commission for ICA. Featuring lesser-known strengths in their practices—video for Da Corte and language for Musson—Easternsports is a four-channel, multilingual soap opera starring the artists, both of whom have deep Philadelphia roots. A vignette-driven update of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town—equal parts Peter Greenaway and Jim Henson, David Lynch and Duck Amuck—the work will be presented as an in-the-round video installation.Scripted by Musson and directed by Da Corte, this institutional telenovela willbe developed and filmed in the summer of 2014.

Organized by Assistant Curator Kate Kraczon. Accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue.

Exhibited SEPTEMBER 19–DECEMBER 28, 2014 – at Institute of Contemporary art, University Of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia.

Alex Da Corte & Jayson Musson: Easternsports, 2014, video still, color, sound.

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Spanning nearly 20 years as a practicing artist, Curneen’s works, ranging from small scale porcelain pieces to a large terracotta figure installed on the exterior of a Guildhall, explore grand themes about the body and the human condition.

Notable for her application of hand-building, pinching and applying clay in patches that registers the artist’s hand and flesh in the surface of the clay, Curneen produces highly visceral works, which tap into of our deepest desires, fears and mysteries. Referencing Roman Catholic imagery and ideology and early Italian Renaissance paintings such as Piero Della Francesca’s ‘Baptism of Christ’, these figures bear bold narratives of saints, martyrs and rites of passage punctuated by often delicate yet dramatic totems to death, re-birth and the sublime.

In 2011 Curneen received one of the Arts Council of Wales’s most prestigious accolades, a Creative Wales Ambassador Award, and has embarked upon a new body of work inspired by research she will be conducting into the National Museum of Ireland’s collections. Her award also includes use of a drawing studio at The Mission Gallery, Swansea.

Curneen’s work can be seen in over 20 public collections, including the Victoria & Albert Museum, London; National Museums and Galleries of Wales, Cardiff; Taipei Ceramics Museum, Taiwan and the Crafts Council, London.

‘Guardian’ 2012, Porcelain, cobalt, glaze, gold lustre

The title for this piece extends my ongoing interest into religious iconography of Italian Renaissance Painting, in particular ‘Tobias and the Angel’ 1470-1475 by Verrocchio. The story explains how the young Tobias, sets out on a long journey to recover a debt for his blind father, he meets another traveller, the Archangel Rapheal, who guides him and protects him. Guardian explores some of these themes focusing on the intimacy of the relationship. The figure is printed with rich cobalt blue, like chinese blue and white porcelain, which communicates the historical imprint in which a ceramic object can hold, charged with a sense of its own history. Like ‘Tobias and the Angel’ it is witness to the changing world. This figure stands looking forward, it holds back a part of itself in order to act as a guardian, a protector, potent and rich in meaning.

Claire Curneen, “Guardian” 2012, porcelain, cobalt, and gold lustre, 29.5″.

Claire Curneen, “Blue” (detail), 2013, porcelain, cobalt, gold luste, 24 x 21 x 6″.

PHOTO: dyxum.com, Claire Curneen Exhibition by gouldina1, on Flickr

PHOTO: dyxum.com, Claire Curneen Exhibition by gouldina1, on Flickr

PHOTO: dyxum.com, Claire Curneen Exhibition by gouldina1, on Flickr

PHOTO: dyxum.com, Claire Curneen Exhibition by gouldina1, on Flickr

PHOTO: dyxum.com, Claire Curneen Exhibition by gouldina1, on Flickr

PHOTO: dyxum.com, Claire Curneen Exhibition by gouldina1, on Flickr

PHOTO: dyxum.com, Claire Curneen Exhibition by gouldina1, on Flickr

PHOTO: dyxum.com, Claire Curneen Exhibition by gouldina1, on Flickr

PHOTO: dyxum.com, Claire Curneen Exhibition by gouldina1, on Flickr

UPCOMING PROJECTS

Aug 20–Oct 19, 2014
To This I Put My Name at Harley Gallery, Nottinghamshire, England

The figures in To This I Put My Name are in turn serene and violent, beautiful and raw.

Curneen’s figures are inspired by myth and legend, drawing upon religious iconography and her study of art history at the National Museum of Ireland. Angels and saints are decorated with rich glazes or deep smudges of inky colour, reminiscent perhaps of fine porcelain. Other figures are left unglazed and unadorned; like reimagined figures from Ancient Greek vases.

‘To This I Put My Name’ is a Ruthin Craft Centre and Mission Gallery Touring Exhibition.

-via clairecurneen.com

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Since the early 1990s, Joonho JEON has been noted for his installation works, often consisting of sculptural pieces, video images, and paintings, that showcase his unique re-interpretations of Korean socio-political environment. The artist believes that in order to understand reality, one must surpass the given reality and perceive the subject from a different light. With a humorous and satirical undertone, JEON’s hyper-realistic works mainly focuses on the various incidents from the tumultuous Korean history, from which he attempts to elicit questions from the viewer. 

Although the dominant narrative is based on Korean society, the multi-layered reality he depicts remains universal at its core with his commentary on the general conditions of human being. Notable past representations of JEON’s work include, Scai the Bathhouse in Tokyo (2009), Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac in Paris (2008) and Perry Rubenstein Gallery in New York (2007). Important group exhibitions include The Museum of Fine Arts in Houston and Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2009); Moscow Biennial (2009); L’espace Louis Vuitton (2008); Nanjing Triennale, Busan Biennale (2008); Mori Art Museum (2007); Singapore Biennale (2006); Gwangju Biennale (2004). JEON was also the recipient of 2007 Grand Prix of the 27th Biennial of Graphic Art in Ljubljana and 2004 prize at the Gwangju Biennial. His works are included in the public collections of the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, Uli Sigg Foundation, Seoul Museum of Art, National Museum of Contemporary Art in Korea.

“I am a realist, especially in the sense that I am interested in revealing in my work the lifestyles, desires, conflicts and contradictions of contemporary people using a variety of media.” – Jeon Joonho

Jeon Joonho, The White House Photo courtesy of Perry Rubenstein Gallery

For Another Monument, 2004

© Jeon Joonho
Untitled, 2009

BODHISATTVA”, 2008-9, 125 x 58 x 82 cm, Zelkova wood

“THE WHITE HOUSE”, 2005-6, Digital Animation (32′ 16”)

“SWEET VALENTINE”, 2008-9, 230 x 125 x 63 cm,
Gingko wood, Gold plated on fiberglass and resin

“Player 13″, 2007, Installation view at Arario Gallery, Korea

Joonho Jeon 《The Creature of Induction》

‘NEWS FROM NOWHERE: CHICAGO LABORATORY’

Jeon Joonho works will be on display at Gallery Hyunday Seoul starting August 29th through September 28th.

- via artnews.org , scaithebathhouse.com

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Photographer José Ginarte goes behind the scenes of the performance and art summer benefit at the The Watermill Center in Long Island, the interdisciplinary art space started by theater and visual artist Robert Wilson. Art, fashion and performance came together in a dreamy night of costume, art and intrigue, where every turn was a new adventure.

PHOTO: thewildmagazine.com

Theater and visual artist Robert Wilson’s interdisciplinary art space, The Watermill Center, will hold an art auction benefiting their artist residency program. With works by Daniel Arsham, Richard Barnes, Susan Meiselas and many more, the night will include installations and performances across the beautiful Long Island property, attracting patrons of the arts across the world. The works in the auction, all available on Artsy, are a diverse collection, as vibrant as the center itself. Check out the highlights of the event from July 26th!

DERRICK ADAMS, Head Study, Figure Plate, 4, 2011

FARLEY AGUILAR, Portrait of Boy, 2014

DANIEL ARANGO, Holy K gays cereal and Holy K straights cereal, 2013

JEFF BARK, Pull Down, 2014

DANIEL ARSHAM, Ash Eroded Cassette Tape, 2014

RICHARD BARNES, Murmur No. 1, 2005

HANS BREDER, Ophelia, 1971

SUSAN MEISELAS, Shortie On the Bally, Barton, Vermont 1974, 1974

AGANETHA DYCK, Green Hand, 2010-2011

JUSTIN MOTT, Cultural Bliss, A model swims underwater past an elephant and a mahout at a private home in Phuket, Thailand, 2011

GINA VASQUEZ, Rebirth, 2014

SCOTT ZIEHER, Untitled, 2012

Photo by Lucie Jansch

-via thewildmagazine.com

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Visit Frieze London and join in the contemporary art event of the year. In addition to being able to see and buy art by over 1,000 of the world’s leading artists, visitors can experience Frieze Projects, the fair’s unique and critically acclaimed programme of artist commissions and Frieze Talks, a prestigious programme of debates, panel discussions and keynote lectures.

Frieze London is housed in a bespoke structure in Regent’s Park. Located in the heart of London, it is within easy walking distance of the city’s West End.

Frieze London is one of the world’s leading contemporary art fairs and brings an international art audience to the UK capital every October. In previous years the fair has employed a series of globally recognised architectural firms: Carmody Groarke (2011–2013), Caruso St John (2008-2010), Jamie Fobert (2006–2007) and David Adjaye (2003-2005).

Universal’s clients include the Ace Hotel, Vitra, LVMH and major cultural institutions such as The Victoria and Albert Museum, Science Museum and National Gallery in London. Recent completed projects include: Google Web Lab at the Science Museum, London; exhibition design for Vitra’s Vitrahaus exhibition, Weil am Rhein; design of the ‘Magnificent Maps’ exhibition at the British Library, London; and both the interior and exterior of the Ace Hotel, London.

Amanda Sharp and Matthew Slotover, founders of Frieze, commented: ‘The architecture and design of the fair have always been an important part of our identity. This year we were drawn to Universal in particular due to their work on interiors and focus on materials. As some of the best designers work- ing in this area, their lateral thinking has been demonstrated by some of their great furniture and even their design for the olympic torch. We’re really looking forward to them bringing this sensibility to Frieze. ’

Sophia Al Maria (b.1983, USA) will carve out subliminal routes across the fair, pointing to potential conspiracies.

Jason Holley, Director of Universal Design Studio, added: ‘We look forward to producing a spatial experience that cements the fair’s reputation as a must-see destination on the arts calendar.’

Tobias Madison (b.1985, Switzerland)will construct an experiential environment in which visitors’ movements will be translated into light.

At the fair, Nick Mauss (b.1980, USA) will create a ‘living stage’ on which a new ballet will be performed each day.



Jonathan Berger (b.1980, USA) will reassemble fragments from Andy Kaufman’s personal life and career, and restage a forgotten piece of music from Kaufman’s 1979 variety show at Carnegie Hall.

Frieze Art Fair 2009.
Photo by Linda Nylind.
15/10/2009

Find here the complete list of exhibitors 2014.

-via friezelondon.com

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Umbrellium creates and commercialises participatory products and services that empower people to transform their cities.

They are a team of architects, designers, commercial experts, producers and creative technologists with years of proven experience in designing and deploying award-winning participatory platforms and mass-participation urban spectacles like The Burble (which launched the Singapore Biennale in 2006, won London’s Design Museum Design of the Year Award in 2008, and opened the Dubai World Cup in 2009).

Their focus is on constructing delight, fostering real engagement and delivering at scale. With a deeper intuitive and practical understanding of what makes crowds and urban environments valuable, dynamic and delightful, their goal is to enable citizens to join together in making sense of, contributing to, and creating their cities.

Their latest project is Thingful - a discoverability engine for The Public Internet of Things, providing a geographical index of where things are, who owns them, and how and why they are used.

Today, millions of people and organisations around the world already have and use connected ‘things’, ranging from energy monitors, weather stations and pollution sensors to animal trackers, geiger counters and shipping containers. Many choose to, or would like to, make their data available to third parties – either directly as a public resource or channeled through apps and analytical tools.

photo umbrellium.co.uk

photo thingful.net

Marling

Marling, by Usman Haque from haque d+r on Vimeo.

In Open Burble, members of the public come together to compose, assemble and control an immense rippling inflatable form that changes colour in response to the crowd interacting below.

photo umbrellium.co.uk

via umbrellium.co.uk

The post PROJECTS BY UMBRELLIUM STUDIO appeared first on INHALE MAG.

The ]Interstice[ project takes place in a variety of locations in the city - including historic buildings, public, private and alternative spaces - forming a route which the visitor/ resident/ citizen can follow, and thus encouraging an interaction between the public and the city. This ephemeral linkage between spaces redefines the urban territory. The projects that have been brought together for this edition of the ]Interstice[ festival are based on experimentation, and are the work of technological poets. The concept of «new technologies» has shifted from its purely mechanical utilisation towards a poetic approach, at the centre of which is located the object. Using both complex high-tech and low-tech applications the artists transmute ordinary objects and their environments into instruments of sensual poetry which invite us to look at the world anew and allow us to experience the poetic dimension that emanates from our everyday environments.

Artificiel

condemned_bulbes is a sound and light installation made up of 1000W incandescent light bulbs. By passing ordinary electricity through a custom-made light dimmer, artificiel is able to bring the coil in a state of excitation that is clearly audible and controllable. The installation is a sort of electric chorus that manifests itself acoustically.

Condemned Bulbes
photo m-kos.net

Zimoun

Using simple and functional components, Zimoun builds architecturally-minded platforms of sound. Exploring mechanical rhythm and flow in prepared systems, his installations incorporate commonplace industrial objects. In an obsessive display of simple and functional materials, these works articulate a tension between the orderly patterns of Modernism and the chaotic forces of life.

photo zimoun.net

photo zimoun.net

David Letellier

Versus is a sound installation consisting of two kinetic sculptures placed face to face.

Each sculpture is made out of 12 triangular panels, hinged and powered by six linear actuators, controlled by a specific program. At the center of each corolla, a loudspeaker and a microphone allow to play and record sounds. At regular intervals, each sculpture produces a sound, simultaneously recorded and analyzed by the opposite sculpture, which then moves according to the frequencies of this sound.

photo davidletellier.net

VERSUS . David Letellier from David Letellier on Vimeo.

Erik Samakh

The integrality of the work of Erik Samakh is based on an ever-present dialogue between man and nature. He is the watcher, attentive to the noises the sounds and the colors that make up nature’s riches. For the last 25 years, he has captured, recorded and consolidated in the museum space what has become his material. He installs and broadcasts his work in those places most devoted to discovery.

photo festival-interstice.net

Alexandre Joly

One finds in the works of Alexandre Joly a tool which he has taken the habit of working with, the piézo. Small, low-tech speakers, in the shape of a lozenge, which he first found and then harvested from musical greeting cards. He then began sodering them together so that they constitute a circuit -lanky, evanescent, golden- of wires and cables. Once the network is created, the sound of the piézos becomes transformed while simultaneously offering a graphic form, figuring an imaginary world that is both sensitive and animal.

photo alexandrejoly.net

TRAMES 002 ALEXANDRE JOLY from Joly Alexandre on Vimeo.

via festival-interstice.net

The post INTERSTICE FESTIVAL : AUDIO/ IMAGE/ OBJECT appeared first on INHALE MAG.

by Alexandra Pâzgu

Imagetanz – a dance, coreography and performance festival is taking place yearly at Brut Vienna http://www.brut-wien.at/brutproduktion/aktuell/en/

This year’s festival was curated by Katalin Erdödi and included under the umbrella of Care the the premiere of the ongoing action: „Delicate Instruments Handled With Care”, concept by Alexandra Pirici, with Manuel Pelmuş, Mădălina Dan, Mihai Mihalcea and Alexnadra Pirici, lights and photo documentation by Andrei Dinu.

The performance was presented in the last three days of the festival (20,21,22 March) and was followed by a closing party, where Pirici also performed as a musician with her stage name: Adda Kaleh https://soundcloud.com/ama-diver

Alexandra Pirici and Manuel Pelmuş represented Romania at the 55th edition of the Venice  with the ongoing action “An Immaterial Retrospective of the Venice Biennale”. In 2014 she has been commissioned for a new work for the Public Programm of Manifesta 10.

Alexandra Pirici – “Delicate instruments handled with care”, enactment of Beyonce’s Drunk in Love video

After viewing and participating in the performance, I thought that the best way to vizualise what happened, was to have a written interview with Alexandra Pirici, the one who proposed the concept and coordinated the performance.

Public

Q: On a formal level, we may say that the public is deciding the dramaturgy of the performance by choosing a title/theme that they would like to see. I say formal, but maybe I should better use “conceptual”- implying that the public’s choice is a validation of the reenactment, re-creating the political situation that allows “iconic moments” to exist. How would you define the public’s role in the whole event- on a conceptual and physical level? (To what degree is the public’s participation a physical influence on the act of performing?)

Alexandra: The work was created for the context of Imagetanz festival in brut, Vienna and the curatorial frame had to do with “care” so I was also thinking of how to respond to the frame. The fact that the audience “orders” or chooses what they like to see has layered potentialities, for me. I do want them to feel “cared for” and entertained (I don’t shy away from the word, I find the concept of “counterculture” slightly dated) and I do want us, as performers, to make ourselves available for their requests. It also has to do with a more contemporary dynamic of accessing information, one that is more related to an internet-like dynamic (where you’re more encouraged to search for things) than to the general convention of theatre performance or older media in which you are assigned a more passive role. And of course I also think of this situation as potentially subversive, in regard to the power relations that implicitly arise – how the public understands this contract – and how the situation plays on the public, what is remembered and what not, how expectations get fulfilled or not. On a physical level I also like the fact that we merge with the audience, that things are sometimes very fragile and if you haven’t been following you can’t really tell if that person next to you is actually performing something or is just part of the audience. I also think not so many proposals consider how the given structure of the theatre space constructs a specific subjectivity and encourages you to conform. People are seated all together, the lights go off and that’s it, you have to watch what you are being presented until the end (so you must be seduced into that), if you would actually like to go out it looks like you make a strong statement against the play, you stand up, you bother everybody, you draw attention to yourself. I wanted a frame that would be as open as possible – I tried to reduce the given structure of the theatre space to the minimum, there are no tribunes, people can move as they like and can come and go as they please. And of course, if there is no audience to ask for enactments, the work doesn’t exist.

Q.: Did the public react in the way you expected to your proposals? Did you have any big surprises?

Alexandra: I think people react differently, for some it’s very easy to ask for things, others prefer to observe. Either way, you get something. There was only one person who actually tried to “compose” with the enactments we had to offer and asked for two in a row. I thought this would happen more but since it’s not pointed out that you can do that, maybe you don’t think that you can. We are also trying to work with the situations that arise and make the most out of them so I think it’s nice when some things happen simultaneously and different readings are created in the mix. There was this one moment when someone was performing Bolivian president Evo Morales shining the shoes of someone and another performer was delivering Bill Clinton’s apology to the nation speech – for his relationship with Monica Lewinsky, and that was a nice coincidence, for example.

Then thinking of what this kind of dynamic produces and what it can reveal, the audience “ordering” things, there was also this situation during the last night, I enact a Beyonce video, it’s probably one of the most “entertaining” enactments and some people came especially to ask for that. I performed it a few times but then towards the end I refused to perform it anymore and someone got frustrated and asked why can’t they see it if it’s on the list, was it because I was tired? And I said “yes” and I was very tired and felt like I was entitled to say no, especially for that particular enactment. It ended there but I think that’s when it started to get interesting J – just to clarify the context, the work has three hours to be experienced and we programmed it for three days in a row. And we also play with these expectations, some moments can actually deliver, from a “spectacular” point of view, others totally don’t and I like that mix.

Irony

Q.: The proposal of embodying “iconic moments” from the western collective memory is also a claim for a common ground, an agreement, of what is iconic. However, its realization is depending on your own bodies and identities – which rely on subjectivity. I felt that your proposals have been mainly guided by irony. What would you say on this topic? Did you consciously and programmatically use this concept, or is it something that turned out that way?

Alexandra: As a start, we didn’t want to perform iconic moments from western collective memory but indeed, most of the situations belong to the western culture. I was aware of that and I didn’t really try to look for a balance because in a way this is also relevant, the reality of our common, westernized memory, it would have made no sense to try and correct it. Most of the things that came to our minds belonged to the western culture and I think this is beyond critique – it might be more interesting to think of why is that or how western culture had the ability to capture a lot that was non-western. But there are quite a few proposals that are different also and you can spot them on the list.

As for the irony: I think enactment is an implicit ironic commentary, to some extent. In extension to the collaboration with Manuel Pelmus for the Venice biennale, the focus here shifted on performative situations – as the context was also different, the theatre space is dominated by a very different history and function. I was more interested in bringing real-life actions and situations in the theatre context and see how this frames them, what it reveals about them, how it deconstructs them. And irony played an important part, of course, for me, when smartly done, it’s an important critical tool.

Alexandra Pirici, “Delicate Instruments handled with care”, enactment of Osama Bin Laden’s killing”.

Q.: Do you find irony an inspiring concept? What are its flaws and its gains? Do you use it in your practice? If yes,  how? Please give examples.

Alexandra: Yes, I find irony a very inspiring concept. As I said, I think it has a great critical potential when performed intelligently and I do try to use it in my practice. For some moments of the work in brut it might have been too much but I think you also need this shifting between more subtle and more obvious choices.

I am interested in detournement and overidentification, as strategies. The first intervention I did in public space was in 2010, I think, and I proposed an enactment/ embodiment of “Caragialiana”, this horrendous and very expensive figurative statuary group in front of the National Theatre in Bucharest. Public monuments and monumental art seemed to be the only legitimate and supported art form so we claimed to be doing the same thing. And of course, the difference in scale and the gap between the image created by our living bodies trying to mimic the construction and the construction itself produced something interesting, ironic and critical, in my opinion, without being a direct and obvious attack.

The drawbacks are the same as always: our subjective readings of everything. What I find subtle and ironic someone else might find totally boring. We’ll have to live with that – and of course, to try and make things as accessible as we can and to better understand what we produce.

Alexandra Pirici & Manuel Pelmus, “An Immaterial Retrospective of the Venice Biennale, enactment of Joseph Beuys, “Tramstop. A Monument to the Future”

Critical thinking

Q.: A friend asked me in what way is your performance relevant to critical thinking. I answered without hesitation: it is relevant because it transforms the body in a critical tool of questioning the collective imagination. (Do you agree? Why? Why not?); or do you rather link this performance (and your practice, if you want) to a sort of institutional critique that reaffirms the body as a valid subjectivity, a tool of deconstruction?!

Alexandra: I agree with both readings, I am not keen to correct or re-enforce any of them.

Performance Art and political representation

Q.: How far is the project a questioning or a critique of the capitalist society and the commodification of images?

Alexandra: To be totally honest, framing your work as “political” or critical of the capitalist society became such an easy thing to do, like taking shelter under an umbrella that could cover any lack of thought or actual conceptual work. It can be both ineffective and easy to appropriate. The work of the likes of Hans Haacke is very rare, mostly I come across very blunt and dry statements so, depending on the context, I sometimes refrain from emphasizing on this.  But I think I can point out a thread of thought in relation to your question: I have the feeling that you can reclaim reality (of your body) over the simulacra through this conscious enactment of models or images that construct the fabric of our lives, our hyper reality. I think there is some potential there, when you see the human performing the simulation, the imperfection interferes with your projection of what it should be and how you knew it looked like from your mediated experience of that “object”. I think that could be an interesting area of research.

Q: What is your favorite point/scene/theme: why?

Alexandra: I wouldn’t name one – we all brought in material and I think all stuff is interesting from one point of view or another.

Duration

Q.: Are duration and the inherent repetition of specific themes contributing to your idea of how a theme/subject should be performed? I mean, taking into consideration the fact that you will be performing in Bucharest in June, do you consider changing some scenes?

Alexandra: I think some enactments will be different, for the first “free national television broadcast during the Romanian Revolution of 1989” I was translating in real-time to the audience (as the performers were speaking in Romanian) and of course this makes for a different experience but I think both (the mediated/translated one in a foreign country and the un-mediated one in Romania) are valid. As for the repetition: I am looking for potential directions to develop within this practice of enactment, different threads to follow and a better understanding of what it could produce under different circumstances so in that sense I think the work is still in process but also on a more general level, not only referring to this particular piece.

Collaboration

Q.: Is there a way in which you would define your collaboration? What did you discover about each other? What would be worth developing in future projects?

Alexandra: We had a lot of fun. And it was interesting to see what each of us remembered or believed to be relevant, in one way or another, about our experience with “culture” at large. Of course it’s not a comprehensive overview and I would point out a work a like a lot and I would use as a reference – Peter Fischli and David Weiss’s “Suddenly this overview”. I love the low-key and the apparent, misleading “superficiality” of it that made for one of the most amusing yet touching experiences of an artwork.

Inspiration

Q: What would you say is your source of inspiration at the moment? (Perhaps you could name some artists, books, cities, places, words, concepts etc.)

Alexandra: I can’t do that, for everything I name there are so many other names that I forget that it makes it really frustrating afterwards.

Theory in Praxis

Q.: What is the question that would best describe your practice and your interest in art?

Alexandra: I make work for the theatre space more and more rarely and most of the future projects will happen in visual arts contexts. So at the moment, since I’m not so fond of self-precarization and the recent interest (from big visual art institutions) in performance/live art as a mere “event” and cheap advertisement within the economy of attention, the “question of the day” would be: can we work a decent budget? So besides the artistic points, I’m also interested in art as a way to make a living – and talking about that should not make you less interested in your art. This is a common exploitation strategy, I was once told I should work for free if I actually loved what I do. The body is not “cheap” and is not subverting the objected-oriented art market by not getting paid.

Thank you.

Alexandra Pâzgu for Inhalemag  02.04.2014

http://alexandra-pazgu.flavors.me/

http://inhalemag.com/category/contributors/alexandra-pazgu/

The post 10+1 QUESTIONS TO BE HANDLED WITH CARE – INTERVIEW WITH ALEXANDRA PIRICI appeared first on INHALE MAG.

The exhibition will present just under 60 works, some recent and some rather older, including seven very large paintings specially made for the ARoS exhibition. In addition, there will also be a presentation of some of Wes Lang’s more commercial collaborative ventures in which, for example, the artist has specially made motorbikes for Harley Davidson and designed Rolex watches, cups, carpets, jewellery and the like. Lang’s links with the world of music are also represented, for instance through his collaboration with the musician Kanye West and his visual products and merchandise and also through the comprehensive boxed set that Wes Lang created for the rock band Grateful Dead’s great comprehensive release.

An important feature of the exhibition is the fact that Wes Lang’s entire studio is being moved from the USA to ARoS. The walls in the huge factory building that Wes Lang uses as his studio in L.A. are plastered all over with drawings and objects, teeming from floor to ceiling with tableaux, some big and some small, stuck together with remains of paint. The walls and the room are thus transformed into gigantic collages in which splashes on the floor, stacks of playboy magazines and pieces of patinated leather furniture merge with drawings of cowled skeletons, paintings of Indians, horsehair, flags, pin-ups, bunches of flowers and cows’ horns. Wes Lang will himself be present in the museum while the exhibition is being prepared and he will help to install the huge number of large works and to re-create his studio. This exhibition will provide the public with a unique opportunity to look into the artist’s studio his “private space”. A studio has always been shrouded in ideas and myths. In addition to its art-historical role as a particularly magical cradle for art, it is the space which – even today – can in many ways be said to reflect the artist’s role and identity. A visit to a studio will by many people be experienced as a personal encounter in which it will be possible to get a closer understanding of both the art and the artist. The Studio at ARoS is just such a personal and artistic meeting with Wes Lang.

ARoS Museum
Aros Allé 2
8000 Aarhus
Denmark

-text and visuals via aros.dk

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Even if chairs aren’t in regular rotation, most homes have at least a few plastic patio chairs. The design is classic and easily recognizable and that is what makes this photo series so good. Bert twists and reworks the legs and arms of the chairs to give them human-like qualities.

The ubiquitous white plastic monobloc chair is at it again – or rather, Bert Loeschner is. The artist and designer uses the infamous garden chair as a canvas for his projects. He explains, “The contrast between the design and the popularity of this chair leads to questions about the value of innovation, aesthetics and functionality in our way of consuming. The function of a chair is way more than sitting. It also exists to represent, present, communicate, protect, assist, to confine and so on…”
In the end, his work serves to inject a little humour – an emotional touch – into the humble and most ordinary.

Transformed using heat, ‘monobloc’, the titled series of reconstructed seating objects by Bert Loeschner is a hands-on project about the ‘infamous garden chair’ and its role in design culture.
the demonstration between both subject and object, these chairs are sometimes functional,
sometimes not.

His work is humorous, depicting emotion characters with their “arms” around each other, or playful swinging chairs. This project makes the viewer regard these typical chairs as less than garden furniture and more like sensitive anthropomorphic objects.

In the end, his work serves to inject a little humor — an emotional touch — into the humble and most ordinary.

- via http://bertloeschner.com/

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The fascination with architecture, a constant in the work of Dionisio González and his concern for social wreck lead him to a permanent search for sites where chaos and beauty coexist. Dauphin Island, an island located in the Gulf of Mexico suffers the constant scourge of hu-rricanes, the artist was impressed by the energy of its inhabitants to recover what is cyclically destroyed by nature. Dionisio reflects on the acceptance of adversity and the bond esta-blished between construction and destruction, which he believes has generated constructive structures for the resignation. The economic insecurity and resignation to what they consider inevitable prevents the inhabitants of the island to invest in housing grounded in concrete, something as irresponsible as build nuclear plants in seismic areas or houses on the hillsides.

photo yusto-giner.com

This helplessness to the climatic attack causes the artists intervention, leading him to design a project of habitable and sustainable architecture, real futuristic forts made of iron and concrete, replacing wood. An alternative that exists today only on paper on the island of Inge-nuity. The artist intention to provide answers to the problems of the world is rather rare in the world of art, since in most cases the artist limits himself to interpret or simply demonstrate its existence as a reporter or a notary. Dionisio González reaches with his intention a level that exceeds reality and achieves a rather transcendental position while adopting a role close to a town planner, engineer and architect: of a creator who redesigns the established order changing the status quo.

photo latamuda.files.wordpress.com

On the other hand, proposes “Inter-Actions” the relationship between humans and the environment and the use of natural resources by the inhabitants, in a series of fictional recreations of buildings grafted to the environment.

As a counterpoint to the natural environment Dionisio has created “Organograms” an insta-llation inspired by the contrast between the pace and the symphony that produce smoke and exhaust pipes of motorcycles in Hanoi (Vietnam) and the “Khene”, a Vietnamese traditional musical instrument. This “musical composition” is masterfully directed . . . by a robot. It is the first time that this work is exhibited in Spain.

Dionisio González’s work is therefore presented as a way of understanding space in its non-architecture in order to study the mechanisms of adaptation to it, a kind of scientist, alchemist or wizard. A sort of good intentions.

via yusto-giner.com and www.dionisiogonzalez.es

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Underdogs Gallery
Rua Fernando Palha, Armazém 56
1950-132 Lisbon
Portugal

-info and photo via Hypebeast and Juxtapoz

The post A DIFFERENT KIND OF CONTEMPORARY ART @UNDERDOGS GALLERY, LISBON appeared first on INHALE MAG.

Whitney Museum of American Art, 945 Madison Avenue, New York, NY; Architect: Marcel Breuer and Hamilton Smith (1963–1966). Photograph by Jerry L. Thompson

As the preeminent institution devoted to the art of the United States, the Whitney Museum of American Art presents the full range of twentieth-century and contemporary American art, with a special focus on works by living artists. The Whitney is dedicated to collecting, preserving, interpreting, and exhibiting American art, and its collection—arguably the finest holding of twentieth-century American art in the world—is the Museum’s key resource. The Museum’s signature exhibition, the Biennial, is the country’s leading survey of the most recent developments in American art.

EI ARAKAWA & CARISSA RODRIGUEZ IN NEW YORK, JANUARY 2014. ON ARAKAWA: SHIRT: SANDRO. ON RODRIGUEZ: TOP: MILLY. STYLIST: VANESSA CHOW.
One of the most highly anticipated projects of this year’s Whitney Biennial is the collaboration between Ei Arakawa, the New York-based performance artist with a growing cult following, and Carissa Rodriguez, most familiar as a director of the Lower East Side gallery Reena Spaulings Fine Art.

“Hawaiian Presence” , by EI ARAKAWA & CARISSA RODRIGUEZ

Innovation has been a hallmark of the Whitney since its beginnings. It was the first museum dedicated to the work of living American artists and the first New York museum to present a major exhibition of a video artist (Nam June Paik in 1982). Such figures as Jasper Johns, Cy Twombly, and Cindy Sherman were given their first museum retrospectives by the Whitney. The Museum has consistently purchased works within the year they were created, often well before the artists became broadly recognized. The Whitney was the first museum to take its exhibitions and programming beyond its walls by establishing corporate-funded branch facilities, and the first museum to undertake a program of collection-sharing (with the San Jose Museum of Art) in order to increase access to its renowned collection.
The 2014 Whitney Biennial will take a bold new form as three curators from outside the Museum—Stuart Comer (Chief Curator of Media and Performance Art at MoMA), Anthony Elms (Associate Curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia), and Michelle Grabner (artist and Professor in the Painting and Drawing Department at the School of the Art Institute, Chicago)—each oversee one floor, representing a range of geographic vantages and curatorial methodologies.

For the Biennial, Beasley plans to conflate his two practices, creating sculptures from concrete and fabric, each with a microphone buried within, so as to capture what he calls the object’s “internal architecture.”

Donna De Salvo, Chief Curator and Deputy Director for Programs at the Whitney, noted: “The 2014 Biennial brings together the findings of three curators with very distinct points of view. There is little overlap in the artists they have selected and yet there is common ground. This can be seen in their choice of artists working in interdisciplinary ways, artists working collectively, and artists from a variety of generations. Together, the 103 participants offer one of the broadest and most diverse takes on art in the United States that the Whitney has offered in many years.”

ABOVE: EMILY SUNDBLAD IN NEW YORK, JANUARY 2014. TOP: MIU MIU. STYLING: VANESSA CHOW. COSMETICS : CHANEL, INCLUDING SUBLIMAGE LA CRÉME. HAIR PRODUCTS: ORIBE, INCLUDING SMOOTH STYLE SERUM. HAIR: ANDRE GUNN FOR ORIBE/THE WALL GROUP. MAKEUP: KRISTI MATAMOROS FOR CHANEL/KATE RYAN INC. SPECIAL THANKS: TENTON STUDIO
For the Whitney Biennial, co-curator Michelle Grabner asked painter, gallerist, and musician Emily Sundblad to contribute a video.

This Biennial will be the last to take place in the Whitney Museum of American Art’s building at 945 Madison Avenue at 75th Street before the Museum moves downtown to its new building in the spring of 2015. This is the 77th in the Museum’s ongoing series of Annuals and Biennials begun in 1932 by Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney.

You can see the full list of the exhibited artists by following this link.

The Whitney Museum of American Art’s 2014 Biennal includes Zoe Leonard’s camera obscura view of the street outside the museum.
Suzanne DeChillo/The New York times

“Aviarium, a sculpture series by Terry Atkins.

Clothing by Lisa Anne Auerbach

Detail of a wall of paintings by Keith Mayerson

An installation by Public Collectors with personal objects from Malachi Ritscher

via http://whitney.org/ and interviewmagazine.com

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photo rihango.files.wordpress.com

The exhibition highlights the diverse scope of Campbell’s career, featuring an installation from his iconic series Exploded View, in which moving images—depicting birds, runners, and commuters—only become decipherable from a privileged vantage point; his low-resolution artworks including Home Movies (pictured), a large-scale grid of LEDs depicting Campbell’s own home movies, and Motion and Rest. Also on view will be a never-exhibited new work—a digital self-portrait—and the rarely shown Last Day in the Beginning of March, which features 26 suspended light bulbs accompanied by a soundscape that evokes the last day in the life of the artist’s brother.

photo hosfeltgallery.com

photo images.fastcompany.com

photo movingimage.us

photo weloveperth.net.au

photo rihango.files.wordpress.com

photo images.artnet.com

via movingimage.us

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Momentum consists of twelve pendulums that activate light and sound as they swing, drawing attention to the Curve’s vast arc, inviting you to journey through the space guided by your heightened senses. Each pendulum has been meticulously designed and built using steel, aluminium, and custom electronics. The sound is individual to each pendulum, prepared and tuned to seamlessly resonate as they move within the Curve.

Momentum creates an environment that has its foundations in detailed research, sophisticated computer technology and mechanical expertise. Yet, the effect is to create a space that feels wondrously transformed, one which you are invited to experience and explore.


United Visual Artists (UVA) is a London-based art practice founded by Matthew Clark, Chris Bird and Ash Nehru in 2003.  The studio combines a wide range of disciplines including architecture, computer programming and technology, engineering, sculpture, performance and design. UVA’s site-specific projects – sensual, absorbing and immersive – query received assumptions about space and time, combining rigorous research with a poetic vision that confounds expectations and alters perceptions of space.

Origin by United Visual artists constructed by Coachella

Focus, London

Focus, London

Vanishing Point

Vanishing Point

Volume, London

Volume, London

Volume, London

Volume, London

Volume, London

via uva.co.uk

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The book, explain the researchers, senses the page a reader is on, and changes ambient lighting and vibrations to “match the mood”. A series of straps form a vest which contains a “heartbeat and shiver simulator”, a body compression system, temperature controls and sound.

photo flicker.com

“Changes in the protagonist’s emotional or physical state trigger discrete feedback in the wearable [vest], whether by changing the heartbeat rate, creating constriction through air pressure bags, or causing localised temperature fluctuations,” say the academics.

Dubbed “sensory fiction”, the idea was developed by Felix Heibeck, Alexis Hope and Julie Legault at MIT’s media lab. The prototype story used was James Tiptree Jr’s Hugo award-winning novella The Girl Who Was Plugged in, in which the protagonist P Burke – who is deformed by pituitary dystrophy and herself experiences life through an avatar – feels “both deep love and ultimate despair, the freedom of Barcelona sunshine and the captivity of a dark damp cellar”, said the researchers.

photo flicker.com

“Sensory fiction is about new ways of experiencing and creating stories,” they write. “Traditionally, fiction creates and induces emotions and empathy through words and images. By using a combination of networked sensors and actuators, the sensory fiction author is provided with new means of conveying plot, mood, and emotion while still allowing space for the reader’s imagination. These tools can be wielded to create an immersive storytelling experience tailored to the reader.

photo flicker.com

photo flicker.com

“To explore this idea, we created a connected book and wearable [vest]. The ‘augmented’ book portrays the scenery and sets the mood, and the wearable allows the reader to experience the protagonist’s physiological emotions.”

photo flicker.com

photo flicker.com

SENSORY FICTION from Felix on Vimeo.

via theguardian.com

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Wong, who died of AIDS in 1999, donated his collection to the City Museum in 1994.

Wong, who integrated the graffiti subculture while working at Pearl Paint on Canal Street after arriving in New York from San Francisco in 1978, amassed an unparalleled collection of sketchbooks, drawings, and paintings either through trades or acquisitions. He donated all of them to MCNY before his death from AIDS in 1999. The exhibition draws from the 55 “black books” and more than 300 paintings on all types of materials, from canvases and boards to paper and plywood that Wong donated to the museum. The exhibition will also feature a selection of Wong’s own paintings — which are in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum, among others, and were the subject of a 1998 retrospective at the New Museum — including realist street scenes and portraits.

“Graffiti art is now widely admired, but many questioned its merits during the movement’s development in the 1970s. Martin Wong had the foresight to collect graffiti art and advocate for young ‘writers,’ just as New York City’s street art scene was on the cusp of gaining international prominence,” MCNY director Susan Henshaw Jones said in a statement. “Understanding the importance of graffiti as an urban statement, the City Museum embraced the opportunity to acquire Martin Wong’s collection, which included many works by artists living just blocks away. We’re thrilled to show this rare collection for the first time since Wong donated it 20 years ago.”

The exhibition, curated by MCNY’s curator of prints and photographs Sean Corcoran, will also be accompanied by a catalogue edited by Corcoran and critic Carlo McCormick.

The show, titled “City as Canvas: Graffiti Art from the Martin Wong Collection” and slated to run February 4-August 24.

 
via mcny.org

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photo stedelijk.nl

photo stedelijk.nl

The Stedelijk Museum invited LUST, a multidisciplinary graphic design practice based in The Hague, to take part in the exhibition because of their expertise in presenting graphic design presentations with nontraditional media. LUST was asked to use cutting-edge media to create an installation that plays off, reacts to, and dialogues with Schrofer’s work. The visual dynamic of Schrofer’s typographic art suggests that his designs were created on the computer but they predate the digital era: Schrofer designed everything by hand. For LUST, though, the computer is an indispensable tool; they derive inspiration from exploring the possibilities of design for new media and technologies.

Gallery 0.29 contains a presentation of the work of Jurriaan Schrofer. The LUST installation is on view in Gallery 0.28.

photo stedelijk.nl

photo stedelijk.nl

photo designboom.com

photo designboom.com

Type / Dynamics – Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam from Stedelijk Museum on Vimeo.
via stedelijk.nl

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In their daily practice, they translate the story of client into physical experiences or places. KNOL has solid experience in successfully realizing projects from idea to final implementation. Educated as both Industrial Designers and Interior Architects, they know how to make ideas tangible at different scales. To optimize the quality of our work, they always work with a network of freelance experts in various disciplines: builders and makers, programmers, cooks, electronics experts, filmmakers, legal advisors etcetera.

Transit Mantra
Far more than anything the city is a spot where we are continually in transition. Transit Mantra resounds the energy of our movements in the urban landscape. The knowledge of getting in transition now becomes a pleasant moment of reflection. A symbiosis of beautiful design and an improved sense of safety, that is how the installation ‘Transit Mantra’ is best described. Since August 2013, Eindhoven has enriched the Dutmala tunnel with this interactive light and sound sculpture. It guides cyclists and pedestrians through the dark tunnel.

photo knol-ontwerp.nl

TRANSIT MANTRA from KNOL on Vimeo.

photo knol-ontwerp.nl

KNOL is part of Studio Vacant NL. They present Inside the White Whale; large white container bags that can be used to create temporary spaces in any location imaginable. These new flexible spaces can serve a wide variety of purposes, and hereby provide an ideal strategy to colonize vacant buildings or other temporarily available places. When the big bag is used, it gives the space a double function; inside and outside. Although the space is merely divided by the thin white fabric, the meaning of the space becomes completely different. The white spaces become a new world; soft light and visual focus. New spatial use and functions can be created. The inside of the bag can become dirty while the space stays clean, or vice versa. Shown here, are three different pop-up spaces.

White Whale #1: the Barber Shop. The white big bag is turned into a new space, in which the fabric becomes the mantle of the hairdresser her client. When the cutting of the hair is finished, the hair dresser simply pulls or folds up the bag until the next client comes.

photo knol-ontwerp.nl

photo knol-ontwerp.nl

photo knol-ontwerp.nl

SKINNED is a growing collection of fragile mold-casts from places. Memorable parts of buildings and other ‘solid’ spaces can be copied endlessly into foldable skins. These thin fragments of spatial memory show specific details of the structure or material of the original place, but also capture dirt. Like skin transplantations they can be taken to other spaces where they get new spatial meaning. They take us to a world in which places are no longer fixed to specific locations, but become nomadic or ‘liquid’.  The skins as shown here, are casts of several places in Amsterdam; of which most of them vacant buildings. This project was executed within the master Vacant NL at the Sandberg Institute Amsterdam.

photo knol-ontwerp.nl

photo knol-ontwerp.nl

SKINNED / jorien kemerink from KNOL on Vimeo.

Illuminated by 10 overhead projectors, a transparent insect city takes shape. This miniature city houses different insect species. The buildings are connected by transparent ‘highways’ to motivate the insects to mix and move around. The overheads display silhouettes of the insect movements on all surrounding walls. Visitors are on one hand looking down on the small insects, but are on the other hand drawn inside their world, through the large reflections in the space. A cook is preparing wonderful insect delicatessen in a separate space with 1000 loose grasshoppers, the BUGBAR. Bug sweets – chocolates and special lollies containing edible insects and freshly made insect sushi and tempura are served to the visitors. Viewers can look at the swarming insects from behind a large window, and can also experience a new taste sensation by trying one of the cook’s insect specialties. In cooperation with Amaro Industries.

photo knol-ontwerp.nl

photo knol-ontwerp.nl

photo knol-ontwerp.nl

 
via knol-ontwerp.nl

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Centros, live visuals by Iregular, Baillat Cardell & fils and Diagraf
photo thecreatorsproject.com

Most recently, the studio devised Centros, a huge installation that illuminated the Mutek Mexico stage on November 17 as a 15’x15’ wood grid of cascading RGB lights, hooked up a video-source that was manipulated in live time. From a viewers’ perspective, it was an ocular explosion of pretty bursts of neon that were in tune with the musical parade happening onstage on the second night, which included Actress and Mount Kimbie. Those who saw it latched onto its power. “We are in talks to take this project to other festivals early next year,” says Iregui, “someone even offered us to create a solo exhibition in Berlin with our interactive work.”

Centros, live visuals by Iregular, Baillat Cardell & fils and Diagraf
photo thecreatorsproject.com

This isn’t the first time that Iregular has screened the stage—they often showcase the same work around to different festivals, although for Control No Control, an interactive LED sculpture, “we have presented it many times allowing us to experiment and elaborate more on the graphics and audio,” explains Iregui. “Recently at Glow, in the Netherlands, we used an analog synthesizer for the audio instead of digital sounds. With this final touch the piece feels done—for now at least!”

Centros, live visuals by Iregular, Baillat Cardell & fils and Diagraf
photo thecreatorsproject.com

But the work is never done, as Iregui points out, “lately we have been asked to design scenographies.” Big word, but really the concept is rather visceral—literally. In turn, scenographies are merely structural objects that employ gear and lights to change an environment—a small deviation from Iregular’s desire to create installations that actively engage with the audience. “Our work is complete when someone is participating—without this our work is a projection or a sculpture,” Iregui contends, “so even though scenographies are not interacting with the audience, it is organic for us to create them. It involves structures, the influence of the piece on the space, creatively using gear and giving away the control.”

Centros, live visuals by Iregular, Baillat Cardell & fils and Diagraf
photo thecreatorsproject.com

And losing or containing control, after all, is key in the experience of so much of art and music. Hint: it’s not just the DJ or, um, the cerebral supplements. “Everyone has a unique path of exploration, a different memory and a different story to tell,” admits Iregui. Such insight is easily identified in the studio’s other projects, such as Wake Up, a vertical light sculpture that illuminated when a body’s presence is felt show at Montreal’s MLK50 memorial celebration of Martin Luther King Jr. in February 2013; or Waterfalls, which synced kinetic sculpture boxes of LED light and bells with fountain waterfalls outside Montreal’s Place Des Arts in October 2012 that were activated when passersby walked on the boxes’ pressure points. “Interactive installations disrupt people’s normal flow of through a public space, gallery or wherever,” muses Iregui, “they invite the audience to be active and not observers—and to give.”

Centros, live visuals by Iregular, Baillat Cardell & fils and Diagraf
photo thecreatorsproject.com

In an age where the threats of passivity haunt both the creator and the participant, Iregui thinks, “these days anyone can walk into the museums in the world and see works hanging on the walls, or watch a video of any existing performance. By including the audience in our work, we are opening a dialogue and allowing the audience to create and surprise us as well.” While community and “sharing is caring” mentality adopted by so many new media and technology-focused creators these days, it cares nary a surprise when Iregui shares the studios goal: “We dream to create an experience with an artist, Radiohead or Plastikman, where the hole show is generative and the 20,000 audience can have an input too.” But for now, Ireguar is “doing a lot of research with the kinect and depth cameras to create our next piece,” reveals Iregui. “We are also collaborating with Moment Factory in a couple of interactive installations.” Considering the latter studio last created with Jay-Z and Justin Timberlake, Iregui and the gang may just becoming to a mainstage near you.

CONTROL NO CONTROL – Igloofest 2012 from Iregular on Vimeo.

WAKE UP from Iregular on Vimeo.

via thecreatorsproject.com

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To set up the shots, Oefner arranged the pieces with fine needles and string to create the right angle. He photographed each of the components then combined the pictures to form a single image using Adobe Photoshop.

“These are possibly the slowest high-speed images ever captured,” he said. “It took almost two months to create an image that looks as if it was captured in a fraction of a second. The whole disassembly in itself took more than a day for each car due to the complexity of the models. But that’s a bit of a boy thing. There’s an enjoyment in the analysis, discovering something by taking it apart, like peeling an onion.”

The photographs are currently on display at the M.A.D Gallery in Geneva, Switzerland, along with another series by Oefner called Hatch. This set features images in which a 1967 Ferrari 330 P4 appears to have just broken out of a shell like an egg hatching.

-via dezeen.com

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The glass lamps, hand blown in London, use the light’s temperature fluctuations to choreograph the change of state of the ice like substance enclosed in the glass. With the warmth of the bulb, the material begins to thaw, gradually revealing the ‘hot heart’ of the lamp as the ice crystals disappear. With time, the light source changes into a cold one, which triggers the clear, melted liquid to start freezing once more.
Over time, crystals form and expand across the glass, generating an elaborate network of forms.
Parallel to no snowflake in the world being alike, each formed pattern on the glass is uniquely structured, making the object one of a kind at every cycle.
The project in made in collaboration with Lucy Norman.

photo bornanidea.com

photo bornanidea.com

photo bornanidea.com

photo bornanidea.com

photo bornanidea.com

Winter Tide from dagny rewera on Vimeo.

via bornanidea.com

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Fraction is Eric Raynaud, a french electronic music producer and sound plastician currently living in Paris (France). After a 10 years carrier as an indie rock band leader, he ditched in his guitar and her pedal distortion while living in Boston (USA) for a laptop and his virtual tools then began kicking out the jams in 2005 under the name of FRACTION.

photo vimeo.com

“In the field of science and technology that built the Western world there are only machines which accelerates. Whoever invents a machine to slow down will be considered as an absurd man” Paul Virilio, 1991

Dromos is an allegory of the “Dromology concept” as developed by French philosopher and architect Paul Virilio so as to explore the meaning of today’s world. As he becomes aware of the essential part that Speed plays in the organization of our societies and territories, and of its ongoing acceleration, he predicts an “integral” accident.

When increasing the speed, you augment impatience.

Dromos – An immersive performance by Fraction & Maotik from fraction on Vimeo.

Dromos is a metaphoric AV Performance that takes its concept from the philosophical work of P. Virilo who is mostly known for founding the idea of Dromology (science of speed). Dromos invites audience to a criticism experience of the ’peed’ role that impacts all aspects of our daily lives. During 40mns, it focuses people attention on this essential factor that shapes our world. With its message, Dromos invites you to wonder about your relationship with progress. It’s an unconventional work with an original sensorial approach, placing the audience inside an immersive environment.

photo lescreatures.org

photo Caroline Hayeur

photo fractionmusic.com

photo vimeo.com

photo Sébastien Roy – Société des arts technologiques

photo youtube.com

photo pinterest.com

via lescreatures.org

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photo ratsi.com

photo ratsi.com

photo ratsi.com

photo ratsi.com

photo ratsi.com

photo ratsi.com

Onion Skin by Olivier Ratsi – TEASER from ANTIVJ is a visual label on Vimeo.

via ratsi.com

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You can see below a few of her works from the past years, along with the recent “candy looking” bench. Any mix and match ideas for an interesting interiur design?

 

Rhode Island School of Design graduate Misha Kahn exhibited a bench representing a cut log but made of synthetic materials at Venture Lambrate last week. Expanding foam is embedded with plastic conduit, gold plastic gems, climbing rope, tinsel and other man-made flotsam and jetsam.

The post QUIRKY AND FUNCTIONAL: MISHA KAHN’S DESIGNS appeared first on INHALE MAG.

photo yatzer.com

Just to get the ball rolling, can you tell me, in a few words, how you came up with the idea of a superhero that goes out into the world to accomplish things?

From early on, I realised that the goals and standards I had set for myself were really high, that achieving these goals was almost like a dream for me – they seemed so difficult that the only way to achieve them was with superpowers. So on a conceptual level, the reason I became a superhero was to acquire these superpowers and enable myself to achieve those things I’d always wanted to do. That’s how the whole concept began, with the aim of erasing my real self completely and creating a new character in order to begin from zero. And that’s how Theo-Mass was born.

What superpowers did you use as your project evolved?

Basically, when I sat down to set the ground rules for this project, and combine the idea of a superhero with my own work, I came to the realisation that the superpowers of our world today are fashion, media and money. The first major episode in Theo-Mass’s storyline was titled ”My Power Is Beyond Your Understanding” which was an exploration of these superpowers: I printed my own money (”Theo-Mass dollars”), I established connections with the fashion world through the costumes I wear, in my masks, my headpieces and my collaborations with designers and artists who work within the fashion industry and so on. Then I started collaborating with the media internationally, while publishing my own newspaper, Theo-Mass Times. These three elements are the superpowers I deal with and are part of my work.

photo yatzer.com

The success of your project and the huge response that you’ve received from the media do sort of prove that fashion, money and the media are indeed the big superpowers today.

Exactly. The project was built to attract exactly this kind of attention, I mean the elements of fashion, money and media, all these things… All that was needed was the right moment for these things to come together and for the whole project to receive the necessary publicity and get rolling.
You had a solo exhibition last summer in Cyprus, at Morfi Gallery. The title of that exhibition was #POSTDIGITALISM. Can you tell me how do you define or what you mean by #POSTDIGITALISM?

I’ve always used social networks, not only in order to promote my work, but also as tools to create. I’ve been looking into that idea for some time now – the digital coming into the physical, new technologies and the internet, and the evolution these things have seen over the past two or three years… The conceptual framework of the ”#POSTDIGITALISM Part 1” exhibition was to explore the impact of an image or a piece of text which is distributed on the web or social media sites (like Tumblr, Facebook, Instagram or Twitter) in the physical world. For example, all the words in the #POSTDIGITALISM manifesto which was one of the most important elements of that show, were accompanied by the hashtag symbol (#). When the words accompanied with the hashtag symbol are posted on Instagram for example, you are given the possibility to enter themed image archives. When these same words are printed in paper format however, they no longer function in the same way. Instead, a hybrid language emerges. The same phenomenon appears with a GIF file, with the (@) symbol and so on. What happens when we extract the digital world from the screen to reality? The “#POSTDIGITALISM Part 1 was meant to question that. My upcoming “#POSTDIGITALISM Part 2” will function as the answer to the above question.

photo yatzer.com

We know that you collaborate with fashion designers and photographers etc. to create the concepts and visuals for each one of your episodes. Can you tell me something about the nature of your collaborations? Do you commission things to the individuals you collaborate with or do you source items that are already made?

A little bit of everything… Sometimes a designer might contact me to show me his or her work, sometimes I commission a designer to make something from scratch… Other times I have a joint process with a designer; we put our hands and heads together to make something. All kinds of forms of collaborations take place but all the ideas and the coordination come from me. I believe in collaborations – some people can do things other people can’t.

photo yatzer.com

You were recently in Vienna for a month for a residency, working on a new work. Can you tell us more about it?

Yeah, I was at the Museums Quartier, for the ”Faceless” exhibition*. I created a new piece of work which will tour with the exhibition to various countries. My contribution has two elements: one is about #postdigitalism and shows works related to my #POSTDIGITALISM exhibition, and the other is a timeline with unseen material from my appearances, from the preparation of my “creative attacks”… All these ”behind the scenes” images are part of the exhibition, along with masks, costumes, props and various objects that have been used throughout the project. I wanted to show people the whole process, how I do all this, to show that it’s not just about putting my costume on and going out, that there’s tons of research and preparation behind it.

photo yatzer.com

* The Faceless exhibition at Vienna’s Museums Quartier – featuring a new work by Theo-Mass Lexileictous – will be open through November 24th 2013. For more info, have a look at their website.

And what are you up to now?

I’m working on the new episode, which will take place in Los Angeles next spring, in mid April, which I feel is the most important thing I’ve ever done.

Why is that?

Because it has a lot to say… It’s a continuation of #POSTSIGITALISM basically… It’s titled ”#POSTDIGITALISM II #the mutant returns”, and I believe that it’s the most powerful episode yet. It will involve performances, a solo exhibition, a publication; everything is there, and everything’s very solid… Also on a theoretical level I think it’s very well-built. I see an evolution and that’s really important.
How do you see a theory of #postdigitalism evolving through this ”Part 2”?

I am developing #postdigitalist automatic writing or #promography theory. I define #postdigitalism and set its characteristics in relation to either a piece of text or an artwork. The first sample of #postdigitalist automatic writing comes to life in my upcoming column for SID magazine at the beginning of November. In a few words, #postdigitalism is about creating art resulting from a cross between two diverse realities: that of the physical existence and that of the abstractness of the digital world. I am currently working on the upcoming issue of Theo-Mass Times where I’m putting everything together – it’s going to be an augmented reality publication. After all the research that I’ve conducted, I’ve come to realize that #postdigitalism has a direct link to Surrealism, something that will be clearly explained in the upcoming issue of Theo-Mass Times. All of my upcoming performances and appearances are based on that concept as well, offering my audience a spectacle, something unexpected, adding the element of surprise to everything I’ll be doing: unexpected juxtapositions, nonsense and non sequitur. #When #I #cook #fried eggs #in #the #desert #ants #are #melting clocks #in #my #pipe @theomass / This sentence perfectly describes what #postdigitalism is.

photo yatzer.com

So is Theo-Mass going to become a neo-surrealist or a meta-surrealist?

Neither, he’s becoming a #postdigitalist!

[YatzerTip]: Theo-Mass is full of surprises – and there’s an avalanche of exciting new work coming up, even though we’re not allowed to tell! Stay up-to-date with his activity through his facebook page.

photo yatzer.com

photo yatzer.com

photo yatzer.com

photo yatzer.com

photo yatzer.com

photo yatzer.com

photo yatzer.com

The post THEO MASS INFILTRATES THE ART WORLD appeared first on INHALE MAG.

photo camera-etc.be

Andreea: I wanted to start with your work. What is Camera-Etc.?

Jean-Luc: It’s an animation studio based in Liege, in French talking Belgium. We have to improve the cinematography culture in out French talking community. We have three important departments or ways to produce films. The first has an educational level- we are doing workshops with kids, with youngsters, with adults. Then we have a huge international side, we are building projects for cultural exchange between countries, mostly in Africa, but we are working in Asia, in South America, in Mexico, Cuba. And the third part consists of our own productions.

Andreea: How do these intercultural projects work?

Jean-Luc: We go there and try to make some exchanges. In Burkina Faso we are active for 10 years and we’ve built a team, we trained people there that are coming to Belgium as well. And then we are making some projects on the field with kids that we co-produce with local NGOs.

Andreea: How do these projects help the people involved?

Jean-Luc: It’s what we call audio-visual cooperation. Also, I don’t see why african people couldn’t have acces to the new technologies and there are a lot of trainings about the Internet and so on. We think animation is a very good tool to make some collective work, it’s very easy and also you have to use the power of animation, as means of symbolic and metaphoric. And it’s very important to us to respect the local culture, in term of graphic design, but also language.

Andreea: That’s beautiful – with the language as well, since you don’t force them to adapt to a different system.

Jean-Luc: Yes, and it differs a lot from these NGOs – they are thinking about didactic products and we try to impluse cinema products. The big difference is that in cinema we are touching people with emotions, not with a list of things to do. What we are trying to do is avoid giving a solution, but to raise some questions. We have to fight against what the NGOs like, since they like to tell people do this, don’t do this. And we say No, if you want to touch people, if you want to make the people think, you have to raise some questions.

photo camera-etc.be

Andreea: Yes, but they probably have a programme and a direction.

Jean-Luc: Unfortunately, it’s the only way we can find some founds for these projects.

Andreea: Do you feel responsible for a community once you get there?

Jean-Luc: Of course, a major responsibility. This is our professional part of our projects and this is the biggest chance to be given grants by he Government all these years is to really work with a professional team, not only in terms of animation techniques, but the human part of the project. So the main point for us is to valorise the people that take part in the project. This is why we give the people involved, children as well, power.  We give them the chance to do something with the help of professionals.

Andreea: What is the main difference between film and animation?

Jean-Luc: The animation has a is symbolic and metaphorical power. In animation you have to synthetise, to reduce thinks to the essential.

Andreea: And how do you judge an animation? Cause there’s the technical part, the story…

Jean-Luc: That’s a very difficult question every element you talked about, we take care of. But finally, what makes the decision for me is the emotion. If there’s emotion in the film… You can have some films with very good technique, I have some good examples but I’m not allowed to tell you, but which are very bad in terms of story.

photo guimaraes2012.pt

Andreea: I saw some short film this edition that blew me away in terms of technique, that were so different ones from the others, I think in animation you can do so much, but which somehow lacked the story.

Jean-Luc: Yes, this is the main problem in the world and the production of films is so huge, there are made around 7000 feature films every year in Europe, I don’t know what Europe means here, but it’s a huge amount. There is a lack of story especially in animation, since the young film makers are more concerned about the technique, they want to do something well, they learn how to animate, so they are proud of their skills.

Andreea: Yes, but couldn’t they work with some scripwriters?

Jean-Luc: You are right. I’m organizing trainings for 20 years now around the world and it was always the demand on terms of technique. And nowadays I always start with storytelling and scriptwriters. It’s very important.

Andreea: How did this work out? Cause artist have their own ego.

Jean-Luc: You are perfectly right. One problem with some people is the ego.

photo camera-etc.be

Andreea: And how do they work together? Do they have to connect in a way or…

Jean-Luc: The main point is to make people understand that, for me, animation is about a team, it’s a collective work. So, I don’t like the people who come to me and say “I made the film by myself.” This is the worst idea that students have, they think they can make the work thenselves, alone. So in our trainings we try to limit the distance between people since they have to work together. If they don’t, they leave the group.

Andreea: What do you think about this idea that animation is only for children?

Jean-Luc: This is something strange, since animation started at the sparks of cinema. Georges Méliès and all these guys didn’t do animation for kids. So, what I can say is that animation is a huge industry nowadays and what works better in this industry is family entertainment, unfortunately. I’m definitely not a fan of TV series of animation for kids.

photo safcakovec.com

The post JEAN-LUC SLOCK, MEMBER OF THE ANIM’EST JURY: “THE ANIMATION HAS A SYMBOLIC AND METAPHORICAL POWER” appeared first on INHALE MAG.

Following an exhibition late last year at New York’s Opera Gallery, contemporary pop artist Ron English is set to bring his signature caricatures of brand imagery and advertising to SoCal’s Corey Helford Gallery with his new Popagandistan exhibition.

In typical English fashion Popagandistan is set to feature a variety of twisted characters like Ronnnie Rabbbit as English showcases his surrealist vision of a pop utopia across a number of vivid canvases. Popagandistan is set to open October 26.

RON ENGLISH, world famous artist/provocateur, pioneer of street art and pop surrealism, has created his most ambitiously conceptual exhibition to date. POPAGANDASTAN is a series of lavishly painted canvases depicting the expansive universe that lies just beneath the surface of our consciousness, somewhere down an inter-dimensional rabbit-hole.

Like an Acid-Pop Aesop’s Fable, these paintings serve as a conceptual battleground for a multitude of viewpoints in harmonic opposition, creating the ultimate Pop Utopia. English has populated his visionary village with his original characters, each the embodiment of a distinct aspect of the human condition.

The central character is Ronnnie Rabbbit, a three-eyed neurotic rabbit whose two brains argue each side to every argument. The Combrats are a feral group of doe eyed, runaway, militaristic, dinosaur riding clowns who enforce community law. The Snappers are slow moving antagonists of a destructive, hyperactive culture of planned obsolescence. The Wolves are resentful, self aggrandizing dethroned inhabitants of a world they once ruled. The sheep are a cult like tribe that clings to its self-styled spiritual creationism. The Quacks are ambitious, lovable charlatans and creators of quack, the drug that makes you believe anything you think. The Buddha Burgers are a family of supersized proponents of fast food and unbridled consumerism. The Cowgirls are Mother Nature personified, embodying an oddly exhilarating combination of fertility, food and sexual desire.

The story of Popagandastan is told through a dizzying kaleidoscope of surrealist imagery composed of the aspirational iconography and detritus of the TV generation.

www.propaganda.com

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www.propaganda.com

Corey Helford Gallery
8522 W Washington Blvd
Culver City, CA 90232
United States

-via juxtapoz.com

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The team acquired a variety of rifles, pistols, and shotguns seized from drug cartels by the Mexican army and used them to build the musical devices that are controlled by computers and can be pre-programmed to play music. In the video above the Creator’s Project recently sat down with Reyes to learn more about how he “transforms negative instincts into creative instincts.” It’s well worth a watch to see the instruments in use.

photo thisiscolossal.com

You can see more photos of Disarm over at Lisson Gallery in London where it debuted earlier this year. Additionally, many of the Disarm instruments will be at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh starting October 5, 2013 and the artist is also giving a talk on October 1st.

photo thisiscolossal.com

photo thisiscolossal.com

photo thisiscolossal.com

via thisiscolossal.com

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My third contribution on the KFDS is reserved for discussing one of the most inspirationally and avant-gardist piece I have experienced in Brussels this year.

Traditional art has used us with liking or disliking what we see. Few years ago we would go to a performance/show and expect a nice story, well defined characters, an evolution/involution of one of the main hero’s and a tear drop or a hair raise on our left or right hand – all proofs that the show has invested us with some kind of aesthetical appreciation.

It is hardly the case of the performance art going on today. And it is neither a good thing nor a bad thing. Things stand.

As art historian Boris Groys argues in his revelatory Introduction; Global Conceptualism Revisited[1] : Conceptual Art comes with a shift of paradigm in terms of spectatorship; viewing art transgressed from aesthetics to poetics and rhetoric. In other words, art is not supposed to be presented as a nicely wrapped present meant to tickle the spectator’s senses, but has become a tool for communication, transforming the art object into a channel, disputed by both artist and spectator. Spectatorship has enriched its de-codifying role by the participatory feature of creating sense simultaneously with the artist. Translated into practice, this doesn’t imply forcing spectators to intervene into shows; neither does it mean that the creating subject is sitting between the spectators. The perspective is a philosophical and a dramaturgical one. The contemporary paradigm explores the Society as Spectacle and transforms everyone in viewers. The performer becomes a journalist who is reporting on his subject of matter- this may be real or fictive.

“Institute for Human Activities ON THE INSTITUTE OF HUMAN ACTIVITIES”[2] is a performance lecture about a Belgian based kind-of-art-kind-of-sociological institute that developed a long term artistic project in Congo. The lecture is a presentation of the institute’s activity in Congo, from the first steps of the project (buying land on a plantation, doing studies, interviews with the locals) to its inaugural activities (group activities, a conference, skype interview with scholars on the matter of gentrification[3]). The main performer acts as the artistic president and the communication agent of the institute, his role being to inform the public in Brussels about the institute’s philosophy and activity.

photo artnews.org

The performance respects a lecture’s protocol, by investing a speaker with a subject to report on, by the use of rhetoric, and also by documentation the verbal and gestural discourse of the speaker with visual proofs (slide show presentation). As in a typical scenario for a lecture, the public is asked for its feedback on the matter of doing an artistic project in an underdeveloped country with the aim of creating an economy around it. On a long run, this artistic centre this artistic center is a creative space for the locals, who will be offered support to “create” art objects that will be sold on the Western art market, with the specification that the money will come back to the locals and in this way start an economic bubble around the centre. Furthermore, when extended, the centre will offer summer residencies for western emerging artists. One of my friends was so seduced with the idea of the project that he asked the performer Renzo Martens what conditions the participation to such a residency would imply.

After leaving the performance, outside the Wiels[4] people started to murmur about this amazing idea of creating economy by artistic means in low developed countries. Just like art could save the world and this would be possible – here is the example, “IFA” is doing it! Righttttttttt… “how come we Romanians didn’t think of it before?” “Of course, we didn’t we are at least 20 years behind all artistic thought and practice happening in Europe.

photo 24.media.tumblr.com

Towards a synchronisation. In thought, at least….

By means of this article, I hope to start up a discussion upon ways of creating fiction and structures for telling stories. More and more people start to doubt the fact that media presents an undistorted image of reality- using the tools of journalism; media is supposed to present facts not to represent interests. Still, when seen at TV things seem real, people hardly doubt the veridicity of the information they are receiving. Contrary, when going to the theatre, people believe everything because they accept to be part of the convention where fictional facts are presented in order to make us feel connected to each other by the universalism that bounds all living souls on this extremely crowded planet. What happens when, the presented material doesn’t deal with feelings – as “IFA” does, but with questions? What happens when fictional structures are substituted by documentation/research tools (report, lecture, presentation)?  Does art become political? Does politics become art? Maybe that all this questions should quit the dialectical perspective of or/or and should be regarded as proofs of the rise of a new paradigm in art. In today’s Society of Spectacle[5], what is real and what is fiction?

photo 2003-2008.telic.info

Creators of “IFA” seem to be very familiar with these questions, since they are actively using a serious, informative, scientific language to create FICTION. What kind of fiction? It doesn’t matter. Society is demanding this days that art should talk about community[6], all art is political nowadays…well, be it! “IFA” talks about political economy. Is it really? Or is the subject of the economisation of the art and the scientific language only used as tools to speak about the politisation of the art?! But this is less important. What counts is that by means of a subject of interest, art created a debate around DISCOURSE! As Groys stated: ART has shifted from AESTHETICS to RETHORIC.

No actual proof of the existence of the “IFA” artistic centre in Congo, has been found. Still, spectators continue the debate about the power of art to improve economy or even the world’s order. What can be more poetical than an engaged community of spectators who sincerely believe that art can save the world?!

The post KUNSTENFESTIVALDESARTS 2013 UNDER THE SIGN OF PUBLIC DEBATE – A VIEWER’S DIARY – PART 3 appeared first on INHALE MAG.

Mattingly has shown at prestigious art festivals, galleries, and museums all over the world, including the International Center for Photography in 2006, the Palais de Tokyo in Paris in 2009, and the Biennial shows in Venice and Istanbul in 2012. Most recently, she took part in MoMA’s Expo1 initiative this past July, leading a lecture series about sustainable living for the future. Her new show, “House and Universe,” a collection of her favorite works from the last few years, opens this Friday at the Robert Mann Gallery in Chelsea. Earlier this week, we caught up with Mattingly at her Brooklyn studio to get the lowdown on what the show will feature.

interviewmagazine.com

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-via interviewmagazine.com

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Vin is a Sydney based photographer and travels in Australia and around the world for photography projects. His recent accomplishments include winning Architecture Category at the Golden Camera International Photography Awards.

Also, one of his images was chosen among the winning images for International Photography Awards (IPA) One Shot : [Spaces].

Vin Rathod’s photography pursuit developed during his architectural education where he developed an understanding of various design elements such as brightness and darkness, colours and shades, composition and importance of negative spaces etc. His interests are buildings, urban landscapes, city fabric, design models, art and art installations in real as well as abstract form.

For Vin, each photograph is a design; a design for the subject, be it an art, architecture, city, or a sculpture. He thrives on creativity and imagination and is always developing new ideas. For each photography assignment, he tends to have a solid understanding of design concept  While highlighting the essence of the subject using creative photography techniques, each image becomes a wonderful piece of art by itself. His work has been appreciated by many professionals from art, architecture and photography industry.

Vin is also developing a collection of personal photography projects, which will formulate into exhibitions and books in future.

http://theinspirationgrid.com/

http://theinspirationgrid.com/

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-via the inspirationgrid.com

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The International Festival started in 1995 and each year it has a different theme explored by the presented shows. This year’s theme sounds like this: “The crisis and the open sea” and might make us think that an overrated problem is brought into the spotlight. In fact, the crisis goes beyond the economical part and looks for a deeper and wider understanding. So here are some shows that deal with this issue, maybe not in a very obvious way.

The movement crisis – Anatomia publica

Tomeo Verges’ opening show of the festival consists of a number of repetitive movements in which the quotidian is decomposed in small sequences that become strange gestures. Everyday life actions like sitting on a chair, taking a newspaper off the floor, hugging and kissing your wife, putting your coat on the hanger, lighting your cigarette, opening the door, are repeated all over again just like someone is playing with the remote control pushing the back and forward buttons.

The body is tracing the expression of every change: the face muscles are holding a one second grin, the hands and the legs are tense, the body position is stopped in the least expected moment. But there is a story being told and it is related with a true story of the choreographer’s grandmother. She was living with two husbands: while the first one was at the war, his wife married once more… They decided to live together, the three of them, trying to find a new harmony.

The choreography and the title are inspired by the public human dissections from the 16^th century seen as a form of entertainment, but also by the films of Martin Arnold.

The light plays an important role being synchronized with the dancers’ movements and creating a cinematic effect. The image is intermittent just like the image of an old movie. Everything is in fact synchronized: the music, the light, the gestures, the set, the plot, they all follow the same rhythm.

Anatomia Publica
Tomeo Verges
photo journal-laterrasse.fr

The colour crisis – Mystery Magnet

Coming from a visual artist, Miet Warlop, this next show is a colorful madness where some hard-to-define creatures are filling the space with loads of paint. If at the start of the show the stage was almost empty, only one big white wall standing in the back, as the ending scenes are approaching, the stage is almost flooded. The weird characters puke rainbows, fart pink, smash and crash and splash the wall with their hairy heads and a rain of multicoloured little arrows is attacking the stage from beyond the wall. But the performers don’t stop here and they disembowel themselves cutting out flocks of red cotton. Everything seems like an organic protest against symmetry and order, reminding of Jackson Pollock’s performances.

Mystery Magnet
Miet Warlop
photo archive.kfda.be

Some visual effects are created in order to break the colored violence: a girl seems to be hanged on a bouquet of helium balloons, a high heeled man is transformed into a horse, a kitsch painting of dog becomes a sparkling golden dress.

The final touch is an electronic acapella chorus (Laurie Anderson – like) of some white mannequin busts on a white plateau and controlled with a sort of vacuum cleaner that make their soft plastic necks move.

The love/sex crisis – 7 ways

Geumhyung Jeong is a Korean dancer and the choreographer of her own shows. 7 ways proposes a particular approach in which the object is incarnate and comes to life. The performer finds herself alone (and somehow lonely) on the stage, she hides and uses her body as a vehicle for creating 7 possible love stories. That’s how a mask put on a foot can caress a mannequin or a big-headed jellyfish hand can have sex with a melodica.

7 Ways
Geumhyung Jeong
photo concertnews.be

Each story is twisted and has powerful sexual connotations, some parts are poetical and kind and some others create the impression of a strange dream, or even a nightmare. Probably one of the strongest and disturbing images is the one with an old man-vacuum cleaner raping the “dead” body of the dancer.

The difference between the human and the object is blurred and creates an intended confusion, but after several sequences the spectator gets used with the convention and the performance becomes a bit boring.

The meaning crisis- Les Bouveuses de cafe

English translation would be “The coffee drinkers” and, of course, we have two women drinking coffee during the show in a very symmetrical and well calculated way. The set has something from Twin Peaks red room and even the mood is quite similar to the movie. But who would have thought that drinking coffee can produce such a mysterious ambient? Of course, the performance is not reduced only to this: after the first scene, things are getting ambiguous. A third women appears on stage and she is going through a strange ritual that makes her become like the two other women. There isn’t a clear relation between the scenes. “Hey, but that’s normal! Didn’t you hear about postdramatic performance?” you would firmly say. I actually did, but something, I don’t know what, made things illegible this time… The music remains a plus, it can be very catchy for the spectator.

Les buveuses de cafe
mossoux-bonte.be

The body crisis – Sweat baby Sweat

Probably one of the best “crisis”, a hard physical training with a man and a woman. In fact, a love affair that consumes itself on the stage. The choreography follows an approaching process between the two performers, everything is very intimate and touching. So the kissing scene comes as a relief, it is a waited, wanted, needed moment and a natural one. There is also a sort of exhaustion mostly because of the repetitive slow movements: the bodies are getting wicker and wicker and the muscles are shaking.

The second part contains a subtle irony that lets the audience to enjoy an endless romantic song. While the two dancers are crawling and almost fading in the darkness, some lyrics of the song are projected on the wall just like in karaoke. The funny part is when we notice that the romance is gone and we are starting to read what we might think in that moment.

Jan Martens
Sweat baby sweat
photo janmartens.com

Well, I guess this is where the crises end.

by Petro Ionescu

Petro Ionescu is a playwriter, still an unknown one, and she sometimes even performs herself on stage. For the moment she studies in Brussels trying to better understand the performance writing.

The post A SHORT STORY ABOUT PERFORMING CRISES – THE INTERNATIONAL FESTIVAL LES BRIGITTINES appeared first on INHALE MAG.

Just don’t look for any of this art in a museum—yet. Thanks to a resurgent global-art market, some of the world’s top dealers are feeling flush and fueling a new gallery building boom—transforming factories, roller rinks and airplane hangars into showrooms for contemporary art. As a result, some of the most highly anticipated shows of the season are set to open in galleries, not museums.

Increasingly, the artworks on display are just as enormous, requiring cranes and teams of workers to display. Museums were once the only potential buyers for such room-filling pieces, but over the past decade an influx of wealthy collectors around the world has started buying ever-larger art trophies. All of it has prompted dealers to seek out artists whose work is hefty enough to stand out from afar—a prioritizing by size that never occurred in past generations, dealers say

White Cube caused a stir nearly two years ago when it opened a 58,000 square-foot gallery in south London. That’s bigger than a football field. In January, Swiss gallery Hauser & Wirth converted a former roller rink and nightclub in New York’s Chelsea neighborhood into a 24,700 square-foot gallery—complete with an artist-designed bar serving free coffee on weekends. “We don’t need to sell coffee,” said director Marc Payot.

Austrian dealer Thaddaeus Ropac opened the world’s second-largest gallery last October when he transformed a group of eight factory buildings on Paris’s outskirts into a 50,000 square-foot art complex. The $10 million space has allowed him to carve up areas for performance art and outfit several apartments for visiting artists like Anselm Kiefer. But recently, Mr. Ropac realized that his artists didn’t want to use the complex’s studio for fear of attracting onlookers, so he’s rented even more space a few blocks away. “I don’t want my artists to feel like they’re in a zoo,” he said

Like museums, some gallery spaces now boast auditoriums, screening rooms, roof gardens and bookstores. Shows at the dozen biggest galleries are often planned two years in advance and can take more than a month to install. Once up, the art may also stay on view for several months at a time, a typical time frame for a museum exhibit but a fresh stretch for a gallery setting more accustomed to opening new shows monthly(…)

Jason Mandella / Petzel Gallery
10,000 sq. ft.: Midlevel galleries are converting garages into elaborate art showrooms. Shown, New York’s Petzel Gallery’s new home

Matthew Day Jackson’s Supersized Show

On Oct. 26, Richard Serra will open a show of new work at Gagosian Gallery’s two Chelsea spaces. “Inside Out,” shown here in a trial installation in Germany, is reminiscent of Serra’s curvy signature look but other new works in the show are flat and angled.

White Cube Bermondsey

Matali Crasset’s project, ‘Voyage to Uchronia’, at Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac’s Pantin gallery, Paris. Courtesy of Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Paris/Salzburg. © Matali Crasset. Photography: Philippe Servent

Courtesy Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac Paris/Salzburg. Photo: Tom Sachs
Tom Sachs
The Crawler, 2003
Foamcore and hot glue, wood and metal frame
73 x 24 x 40 in (185.4 x 61.0 x 101.6 cm) Shuttle
114.3 x 200.7 x 171.5 cm (45 x 79 x 67.5 in) Base

-via http://online.wsj.com

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Gary Hume, Angela Merkel from the series Anxiety and the Horse (2011), www.artobserved.com

Born in 1962 in Tenterden, Kent, Hume graduated from Goldsmiths College in 1988, and his work is often associated with the YBA (Young British Artists) the group of artists who first rose to prominence in the early 1990′s with their often brash “shock tactics” and oppositional attitude, first supported and collected by Charles Saatchi.  In 1996, Hume was nominated for the Turner Prize, and was elected a Royal Academian in 2001. In 1999, he also represented Great Britain in the 1999 Venice Biennale with his Water series, which he created with gloss paint on aluminum, a medium he has explored extensively.

Gary Hume, Blackbird (1998), all images courtesy Tate Britain; www.artobserved.com

Hume’s large-scale, glossy works were first seen at the 1990 Freeze exhibition, organized by Damien Hirst, and received a great deal of recognition for his “door paintings,” large-scale representations of hospital doors. In the mid-1990s he began focusing on images of celebrities  and animals, as well as images from nature or childhood, such as flowers, birds and snowmen. Taking these images as his starting point, Hume slowly deconstructs them, pulling away layers of detail and context to create works somewhere between surreal landscape and figurative deconstructions.

Gary Hume, “Tulips,” 2009; www.artobserved.com

Gary Hume, Tony Blackburn (1993), via Tate Britain; www.artobserved.com

-via artobserved.com

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She She Pop- “Schubladen”

She She Pop is a Berlin based performance group, formed mainly by female members: Sebastian Bark, Johanna Freiburg, Fanni Halmburger, Lisa Lucassen, Mieke Matzke, Ilia Papatheodorou and Berit Stumpf .

“Schubladen” – is a meeting between former East and West german female residents, confrontating each other, their lives, their education and the society they were brought up. Biographical elements are inserted in the collective history of the last 40 years.

“Schubladen” is a performative encounter of different destinies, all being presented, compared and opposed on stage. There is no good or bad, no right or wrong. Events are regarded with humour and intelligence.

The show is structured as a repetition of confrontations. Sitting face to face, two by two, the 6 participants explore their pasts and bring a personal interpretation to the known historical facts, a catwalk of imagined and reimagined clichés that people have about each other. The conclusion: creating a dialog between opposite sites. Does it work? Can we change who we are if we cannot change the past? Is the past totally defining our lives? The question is to be answered by our personal choises.

Read more on She She Pop’s site: http://www.sheshepop.de/en/productions/schubladen.html

Foto: Katrin Ribbe

www.sheshepop.de

www.sheshepop.de

Mette Edvardsen

“Time has fallen asleep in the afternoon sunshine”

The Royal Library of Belgium has hosted the utopia described by Ray Bradbury in Fahrenheit 451. In a future far far away all the books are burnt and the only way to support knowledge is by becoming yourself a book. So why not try it out before the disappearance of books?! Following Mette Edvardson’s concept, a group of artists from all over the world, have started to learn books by hard and to become the book they love. There are already 30 live books(in German, English, Spanish, Arabic, Norwegian, Greek, Dutch), one of them I met this year in Brussels.

photo bellyflopmag.com

He was Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. He took me somewhere in one of the library’s archive and started talking. It was a weird feeling, the book was not an object anymore but a person. The book was embodied by this middle aged man who had no biography for me. He became the story; without trying to add extra feelings to what he was saying or to set a scenery or to make it theatrical. No, it was just the two of us and the story, and the words, the language, the texture of fiction.

More about the project and about the coregrapher and performer Mette Edvardsen: http://www.metteedvardsen.be/projects/thfaitas.html

by Alexandra Pâzgu

Alexandra Pâzgu is an artistic researcher and practitioner, interested in contemporary dramaturgical dynamics. Currently enrolled in an artistic based Ph.D.  at UBB Cluj, with a proposal that links dramaturgy to conceptual art.

http://flavors.me/alexandra_pazgu

The post KUNSTENFESTIVALDESARTS 2013 UNDER THE SIGN OF PUBLIC DEBATE – A VIEWER’S DIARY – PART 2 appeared first on INHALE MAG.

Japanese artist Hajime Sorayama, best known for his metallic-infused and subtly erotic paintings, is taking to Hong Kong for his first solo exhibition. Having graduated from the Chubi Central Art School in Tokyo in 1969 and steadily expanding his following to global proportions since, Sorayama’s most shocking and astounding piece of work is Sexy Robot, a hyper-realistic depiction of metallic sensualities and reflected light which helped propel him to his title as one of the godfathers of airbrush painting.

Sorayama says, “In pursuit of hyper-realism, I use the airbrush in a way that naturally depicts minute details of human skin, lips, eyeballs, hair, even individual body hair, or the feel of leather or silk clothes, the metallicity of the robot, the reflection of light…” Regarding the possibilities of realistic painting, he has said, “I can make characters with acrobatic postures, which is absolutely impossible with photographs, or costumes that don’t exist in reality. In addition, I can modify the body freely even which is not anatomically correct, or composite to a beautiful woman according to my taste.” Surely we can say that through his insatiable pursuit of aesthetic sense, he has generated something new.

Featuring over 10 of his most iconic pieces, the exhibition is set to run from September 7 to October 5.

www.aishonanzuka.com

www.aishonanzuka.com

www.aishonanzuka.com

www.aishonanzuka.com

www.almostreal.me

AISHONANZUKA
13A, Regency Center, Phase 1
39 Wong Chuk Hang Road, Aberdeen
Hong Kong

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Here’s some more information from Mathieu Lehanneur & David Edwards:

photo dezeen.com

ANDREA, the air purifier that uses indoor plants, designed by Mathieu Lehanneur & David Edwards on sale by October 2009.

Since its outline design two years ago ANDREA has gone thru stringent tests to ensure perfect efficiency, enabling the system to step into the real world. Its market début could not have come at a better time, with calls last month by consumer watchdog UFC-Que Choisir? that public authorities ban dangerous chemical used in common household products.

photo dezeen.com

The safe-goods whistle-blower pointed out – ahem, cough, splutter, wheeze – that the air we mortals breathe in the places where we live and work can be 5 to 10 times MORE NOXIOUS than what it is out on the street! Heading the XXX death’s head list of invisible poisons are glues and plastics that give off formaldehyde particles.

ANDREA is the ideal response to counter domestic pollution, putting a green lung with enhanced capacities to work to filter air and capture toxic particles.

photo dezeen.com

How does it work? Indoor air is cleaned in turn by both the leaves and the roots of the plant housed in the unit. This innovation enables much better de-pollution of indoor air than the ground-breaking tests done by NASA in the 1980s – the starting point for experiments by Mathieu Lehanneur & David Edwards. Curiously, the best-performing plants are quite common. They include Spathiphyllum (spath or peace lily), Dracaena marginata (red-edged dragon tree), Chlorophytum comosum (spider plant) and Aloe vera.

photo dezeen.com

ANDREA is ideal for spaces up to 40 m2 and upkeep is easy since it consists mainly in watering the plant. At a recommended retail price of 199 dollars, ANDREA is also accessible and looks like becoming a must-buy for autumn 2009. This is design that cleans up design. Andrea will be sold from october in the United States by Frontgate, Hammacher Schlemmer and Amazon.

photo dezeen.com

via dezeen.com

The post MATHIEU LEHANNEUR AND BIO-DESIGN: PLANTS PURIFY THE AIR INDOORS appeared first on INHALE MAG.

A TV special he taped in the summer of 1977 epitomized this era as it featured his hopelessly naive Foreign Man character, a sincere interview with Kaufman’s childhood idol Howdy Doody, and a step-by-step tutorial on how to make chocolate milk. The showcase ended with a sing-along to a song called “This Friendly World”.

Due to its unabashedly offbeat nature (is he kidding? is he serious? what is he?) that special was shelved and would not air until two years later, after Kaufman had gained more fame with his role on “Taxi”. But by then, in the summer of ’79, the performer had, as one TV critic put it, “turned.” He had started wrestling women onstage because he loved wrestling and its ridiculous theater. He also found the activity quite arousing and, according to Bill Zehme’s definitive biography Lost in the Funhouse, it was a good way for Kaufman to break the ice with girls he wanted to have sex with after the show. Not very innocent.

photo andykaufman.jvlnet.com

He also invented a new character, Tony Clifton, who was the exact opposite of his lovable Foreign Man– a Vegas-style lout in a bad toupee, tumbling gut, and hideous moustache. Clifton was pure id, a reaction against Kaufman’s kid-friendly former self. Looking back, that period between ’77 and ’79 was especially pivotal for Kaufman– it’s also the timeframe when he taped 82 hours of audio from his everyday life onto his newly purchased microcassette recorder. A keenly edited version of those tapes make up the 48 minutes of Andy and His Grandmother, a comedy album that is, fittingly, unlike any other.

The inspiration behind Kaufman’s home recordings may be a man that his confidant and co-conspirator Bob Zmuda calls Mr. X (due to fear of retribution) in his book Andy Kaufman Revealed!. Zmuda worked for this apparently psychotic Hollywood screenwriter who would get himself into dangerous or outlandish real-life situations– like insulting a mob boss’ mother at her birthday dinner– record them on audiotape, and then use those recordings as catalysts for his writing. Such mixing of fact and fiction was catnip for Kaufman, whose life often seemed like a series of pranks and put-ons. So Andy and His Grandmother– compiled by veteran comedy writer/producer Vernon Chatman (“Louie”, “South Park”, “The Chris Rock Show”) and documentarian Rodney Ascher (the Shining-obsessed Room 237)– isn’t merely a recording of Kaufman’s stand-up performances, but rather recordings of real-life conversations that would plant creative seeds in his eccentric mind. Considering that many of the record’s most memorable moments document wildly heated phone calls, it can seem likeAndy and His Grandmother is more similar to a Jerky Boys album than comedy classics by Steve Martin or Bill Cosby.

photo avclub.com

Because, by-and-large, this is a record of provocation. It’s also probably one of the most clear-eyed accounts of the “real” Andy Kaufman in existence, a serious feat considering his notoriously slippery relationship with what most of us call reality. The candidness here can be startling, even by 2013 standards. A track called “Slice of Life” has Kaufman talking to one of the many women he bedded while on tour in the late 70s. “We just screwed and here’s the afterward conversation,” he announces, before continuing: “It didn’t look to me like you were enjoying it that much.” But this isn’t laugh-out-loud funny. It’s unflinching. He asks her, “What happens if you got a baby?” to which the unnamed woman responds, “I’ll hop a plane to Toronto and get a little abortion.” Naturally, she asks for him to turn off the tape (there’s an entire track here devoted to the voices of people requesting– often in an incensed tone– for Kaufman to “shut that off”) but he’s adamant: “Why is it that nobody understands that the kind of conversations that nobody wants me to tape are the kind of conversations that should be taped?” It’s the sort of philosophy that runs through the work of many great comedians, from Woody Allen to Louis C.K., laid perfectly bare, without the filter of a camera lens, script, or stand-up routine.

photo nedhepburn.tumblr.com

Later on, a series of phone calls show up in which Kaufman diabolically riles up a woman who doesn’t appreciate her feelings being used as some sort of meta comedy exercise. “You are fucked up!” she screams. “I WANT THOSE FUCKING TAPES!” The call is followed by Zmuda and Kaufman plotting how they could release the contentious conversations with this one tremendously angry woman as an album. “The concept would be funny because it’s real, but it would be dramatic at the same time,” Kaufman says, before excitedly suggesting to Zmuda, “Wouldn’t it be great if she killed me and you have the tapes?” It’s uncomfortable comedy, the kind that Kaufman would perfect with Tony Clifton and his inter-gender wrestling career. And these talks with various women accentuate the more problematic sides of his personality, the parts that were addicted to prostitutes and womanizing. “He hated that he needed to be with women,” says friend Wendy Polland in Lost in the Funhouse, “because he didn’t like the mind games they played with him. Which I guess was sort of ironic, wasn’t it?” Andy and His Grandmother shows him fighting back against these women, and it can sound as compelling as a car crash.

photo momaps1.tumblr.com

But it’s not all unusually cringe-worthy. There are moments when Kaufman’s more lighthearted, ’77-era persona shows up, like when he takes his grandmother out for a car ride and tries to convince her that a radar is guiding the vehicle (though that track cannily jump-cuts to a confrontation with a traffic cop who threatens to “knock the shit” out of a belligerent Kaufman). And all that phone yelling toward the end of the album is foreshadowed by another phone bit, “Andy Can Talk to Animals”, where Kaufman gets into a shouting match with what sounds like a squealing pig: “Yeah, whaddya want? Say it fast.” [pig squeal] “I had to change my fucking clothes so I can go out and have a good time and you just made me miss my appointment, so fuck you!” It’s funnier than the real arguments– likely due to the absurdity and lack of actual consequence– but as Kaufman progressed through the late 70s, coaxing laughs from his audience became less and less of an imperative.

photo whenyouputitthatway.wordpress.com

At one point during the album, a wronged woman lashes out at Kaufman in a particularly discombobulated– but not inaccurate– manner: “You think that I really don’t know when you goof on me, and you think that I really don’t know, and really I know, and you know that I really know, but you say I don’t know.” These are the mental hoops this one-of-a-kind performance artist would force people to go through on a regular basis, whether onstage or in front of his tiny personal recorder. It’s why he still resonates and fascinates in our world of meta-this and post-that, why anyone would care about a collection of cobbled together personal recordings from an enigma who’s been dead for nearly three decades. Based on Andy and His Grandmother, Kaufman comes off like an asshole, a hopelessly naive loser, a crazy person, a hothead, a hopelessly sweet grandma’s boy, a sexually confused teenager, and a manipulative monster. In other words, he comes off like Andy Kaufman.

via pitchfork.com

The post ANDY KAUFMAN – A COMEDY ALBUM appeared first on INHALE MAG.

Gaga Pays Tribute to Andy Warhol as “Candy Warhol”
Though Lady Gaga has not actually worked together with the late Andy Warhol, she has credited the King of Pop Art as a driving force behind many of her theatrics, even making her own video tribute to Warhol a few years ago. The pop singer also modeled her her own creative team, Haus of Gaga, after Warhol’s Factory.

The HAUS OF GAGA, the superstar’s personal creative team, has also coordinated an ‘Art Rave’ event prior to the album/app’s November 11 release, featuring collaborative works with the likes of Jeff Koons,Inez & Vinoodh, Marina Abramovic and Robert Wilson.

or the launch of her fragrance Fame, Lady Gaga crept into an egg-like structure in the Guggenheim and fell asleep. Fashion, art, and film celebrities looked on and also reached into an opening in the egg to touch the sleeping beauty. After she woke up from the first half of the performance piece, she invited tattoo artist Mark Mahoney inside the egg. Mahoney proceeded to tattoo Gaga’s neck in front of the onlookers. Of course Gaga doesn’t sleep like anyone else.

Could these collaborations be anything like the one Jay Z did with Marina Abramovic at Pace Gallery in New York? Could the app be anything like Bjork’s Biophilia app from October 2011, corresponding with the release of her album at the time? Perhaps, but regardless, Gaga has repeatedly stated that she’s an artist first and previously collaborated with visual artists like Nick Knight, Steven Klein, and Terence Koh. Photography duo Inez & Vinoodh also directed her “You and I” series of fashion films and photographed her for V Magazine.

Cover | Lady Gaga by Inez & Vinoodh for V Magazine #71

Cover | Lady Gaga by Inez & Vinoodh for V Magazine #71

Photography and Film Collaborations With Inez and Vinoodh

American artist Jeff Koons poses next to his artwork “Michael Jackson and Bubbles” (1988) in the Fondation Beyeler
in Riehen, Switzerland.Photo creativeboysclub.com

The Life and Death of Marina Abramovic- Luminato Festival 2013, Pgoto credits: Lucie Jansch

The Life and Death of Marina Abramovic- Luminato Festival 2013, Pgoto credits: Lucie Jansch

The Life and Death of Marina Abramovic- Luminato Festival 2013, Pgoto credits: Lucie Jansch

While we are looking forward to whatever Lady Gaga has in store individually or collectively with these artists, we are also welcoming a moment where musicians are placing their work in the realm of performance art. For both Jay-Z and Gaga, much remains to be seen, but what we do know is that the next few months will be full of art, pop, performance, and big collaborations between the art and music worlds.

-via hypebeast.com & complex.com

The post JEFF KOONS, MARINA ABRAMOVIC & ROBERT WILSON GO GAGA appeared first on INHALE MAG.