Artipedia - Arts News

In just a few weeks the second part of the exhibition Ideal City –Invisible Cities
will open. Forty-one international artists will reflect from 8
September 2006 onward the ideal city and its sibling, the invisible
city in Potsdam, Germany:

Tarek Al-Ghoussein, Francis Alys, Carl Andre, Archigram, Colin
Ardley, Tim Ayres, Miroslaw Balka, Daniela Brahm, Pedro Cabrita Reis,
Rui Calcada Bastos, Constant, Jonas Dahlberg, Tacita Dean, Jaroslaw
Flicinski, Carlos Garaicoa, Dan Graham, George Hadjimichalis, Rula
Halawani, Franka Hoernschemeyer, Craigie Horsfield, Katarzyna
Jozefowicz, Jakob Kolding, Ola Kolehmainen, Lucas Lenglet, Sol LeWitt,
David Maljkovic, Gerold Miller, Matthias Mueller, Teresa Murak, Brian
O’Connell, Daniel Roth, Albrecht Schaefer, Kai Schiemenz, Les
Schliesser, Melanie Smith, Monika Sosnowska, David Tremlett, Anton
Vidokle, Lawrence Weiner, Tilman Wendland, Krzysztof Zielinski

Curated by Sabrina van der Ley and Markus Richter / European Art Projects
Patron: Matthias Platzeck, Prime Minister of Brandenburg

Preview: 8 September, noon – 6 pm
Opening: 8 September, 6-10 pm
Symposium: 9 September, noon-5 pm

A central concern of the exhibition is to confront the artists with two
plans of ‘Ideal Cities’, or with what has survived of them to this day.
Not only the two historical cities but also the underlying invisible
cities, hidden by time and history became the points of reference for
the works of contemporary artists from twelve European and six
non-European countries.

After its first venue in Zamosc, Poland, an extraordinary treasure of late Renaissance architecture, Ideal City –Invisible Cities now
moves on to the baroque town of Potsdam. Unlike Zamosc whose old town
is almost completely preserved, Potsdam has seen major changes during
the centuries. Potsdam’s old centre was almost entirely destroyed in WW
II and parts of the early baroque city extensions including the city’s
castle were subsequently torn down. Today Potsdam’s new centre is a
melange of restored baroque architecture and buildings from the sixties
to the present, more a collage than an ideal or even planned city.

The artists working site-specifically will react to the disparate body
of the city and insert their work in public spaces and buildings,
courtyards or squares. Most projects are characterized by a distanced,
critical and sometimes even ironic way of dealing with the planned
urban space. The artists are seeking ways to transpose the pre-existing
historical situation into their present and their experience of the
city. They are reacting to the city as an artificial body, to which
they are adding something, partially completing it, filling a gap. They
explore the psychogeography of the city or pursue urban archaeology.
They are analysing structures, grids, proportions and functions, making
them the basis of their interventions. Monika Sosnowska places a dirty
fountain in the wilderness of Staudenhof, while Miroslaw Balka
sculpture reflects wounds, deeply cut during the second World War.
Daniela Brahm and Colin Ardley determine squares and public spaces
anew, Franka Hoernschemeyer comments with her installation on the grid
of the city plan and Lucas Lenglet creates a sombre Potsdam columbarium
for the garden of an apartment building. Les Schliesser continues to
narrate the story of his fictive Zamosc born architect Mikolaj
Chrupkowski now working in Potsdam, Jakob Kolding points out the traps
of functional city planning with a poster project and Craigie Horsfield
introduces a site-specific sound installation. Tilman Wendland’s
installation at Brandenburgischer Kunstverein sculpturally analyzes
ideal city plans of the moderns Le Corbusier, Niemeyer and Hansen and
Jaroslaw Flicinski will install a large wall painting at the gallery of
the University of Applied Sciences Potsdam.

Besides the site specific interventions works by 25 artists relating to
the main themes of the exhibition including architectural critique,
memory and the grid will be shown in altogether five exhibition venues:
Brandenburgischer Kunstverein, the gallery of the University of Applied
Sciences Potsdam, a historical residential building, an old military
hospital and the former theatre building..

All in walking distance, the exhibition will cover a trail through
Potsdam’s first and second baroque city extensions from 8 September,
2006 until 29 October, 2006.

Ideal City - Invisible Cities is funded by the German Federal Cultural Foundation.

Further generous support is kindly provided by the Adam Mickiewicz
Institute, Warsaw and the City of Zamosc. Additional funds thanks to
the British Council, Berlin; Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon;
Filigran Group, Leese, Ford Foundation, Cairo; Henry Moore Foundation,
Perry Green; Instituto das Artes, Lisbon; Luso-American Foundation,
Lisbon; Mondriaan Stichting, Amsterdam, Paschal-Werk G. Maier GmbH,
Steinach and Wienerberger Ziegelindustrie, Hannover.

Project Partners Potsdam: Brandenburgischer Kunstverein, Potsdam;
Filmmuseum Potsdam, Foundation „Grosses Waisenhaus zu Potsdam“; Greige
– Buero fuer Design, Berlin; Hans-Otto-Theater, Potsdam; Haus der
Brandenburgisch-Preussischen Geschichte, Potsdam; University of Applied
Sciences, Potsdam; Zentralverband Sanitaer, Heizung, Klima; Potsdam.

13 August – 17 September 2006
Kunsthaus Baselland, Muttenz/Basel, Switzerland

3 Hamburger Frauen, Maura Biava. Esra Ersen, Sylvie Fleury, Dani Gal,
Andrea Geyer/Sharon Hayes, Zilla Leutenegger, Erik van Lieshout, Katrin
Mayer, Josephine Meckseper, Renata Poljak, Elodie Pong, Naomi Fisher
for the Radical Cheerleaders, Aurora Reinhard, Maki Tamura, Pernille
Kapper Williams, Ella Ziegler

Kunsthaus Baselland
St. Jakob-Strasse 170, CH-4132 Muttenz/Basel
T: 41 61 312 83 88; F: 41 61 312 83 89
http://www.kunsthausbaselland.ch

1 September – 26 November 2006
Lewis Glucksman Gallery, Cork, Ireland

3 Hamburger Frauen, Shannon Bool, Cabello/Carceller, Esra Ersen, Dani
Gal, Andrea Geyer/Sharon Hayes, Jaki Irvine, Katrin Mayer, Josephine
Meckseper, Michaela Meise, Elodie Pong, Aurora Reinhard, Una Quigley,
Pernille Kapper Williams

Lewis Glucksman Gallery
University College Cork, Ireland
T: 353 21 4901844; F: 353 21 4901823

http://www.glucksman.org

16 September – 29 October 2006
Halle für Kunst, Lüneburg, Germany

3 Hamburger Frauen, Dani Gal, Andrea Geyer/Sharon Hayes, Dorit
Margreiter/Annette Baldauf, Katrin Mayer, Josephine Meckseper, MOSH
MOSH, Elodie Pong, Naomi Fisher for the Radical Cheerleaders, Ella
Ziegler

Halle fuer Kunst
Reichenbachstr. 2, D-21335 Lueneburg
T: 49 4131 402001; F: 49 4131 721344

http://www.halle-fuer-kunst.de

A project by Sabine Schaschl-Cooper, Bettina Steinbrügge and René Zechlin

The original goals of the women’s movement, i.e. legal equality,
favorable educational perspectives for women, and combating male
violence, have been achieved almost everywhere—as opposed to culturally
conveyed clichés and traditions passed on from one generation to the
next, which are much harder to overcome. But by and large it seems as
if the women’s movement has become a victim of its own success and has
brought about its own demise, as mostly young women, when being
confronted with such issues as equitable participation in education and
equal opportunities, don’t actually seem to notice the areas in which
they are still substantially disadvantaged. Hence, they often display
negative knee-jerk reactions to and a hostile attitude towards
mainstream feminism or “affirmative action” and quotas for women, and
this simply because they don’t realize that shortcomings still exist
and don’t want to be branded as putative victims. For this reason, the
term “feminism” has come to be negatively connoted. Naturally, things
are a lot more complex, as illustrated by symptoms such as “cooling
out” or by a study conducted by MIT in 1998 which suggests that that
“gender discrimination in the 1990s is subtle but pervasive, and stems
from unconscious ways of thinking that have been socialized into all of
us, men and women alike.” A full-fledged women’s movement pursuing
legitimate goals seems to have vanished; what we can see, however, is
that women are very much involved in the workings of social mechanisms.
This tends to be the view taken by well-educated single women that
belong to the upper middle class—women who are aware that, having
almost the same opportunities, they can also shape public and political
life provided they are smart and know how to act and hold their own in
what is still largely a man’s world. Building women’s confidence and
raising their self-esteem, a professed goal of second-generation
feminists fighting for recognition, seems to have produced tangible
results.

According to Peggy Phelan, feminism is based on the conviction that
gender constitutes a fundamental category in our social systems. The
latter are predicated on hierarchical patterns that normally put men
first and women second, giving preference to the male segment of the
population in a variety of fields. Even though many demands made by the
feminist movement have clearly been met, the cultural image of women
still leaves a lot to be desired. There is a certain backlash regarding
the image of women: In a time of crisis in employment markets outdated
concepts on the division of labor continue to hold sway, as demands for
autonomy and full equality are not given the weight they deserve. To
what an extent do our societies, men and women alike, still consider
the female body the basis of women’s identity? When talking about the
return of sexism, the question arises as to how young female artists
deal with these phenomena. After all, critical feminist artists such as
Hannah Wilke or Nancy Spero have triggered a “mainstreaming” of
sexuality in art. The exhibition revolves around these questions. It
looks into approaches currently taken by young female “post-feminist”
artists to this issue, and it explores whether or not ambivalence or
rejection of feminism can also be found in them. How is feminism
connoted? Are distinctions made between “difference-based feminism” and
its constructivist embodiments, i.e. between essentialist
interpretations of femininity and discursive-relativistic methodologies
that pursue no political or identity-related agenda?