Artipedia - Arts News

Mixed Greens is thrilled to present their second solo show with Dirk Westphal. In this exhibition, Westphal will expand his photography practice to include installation and video.

For several years, Westphal worked with perceptions of natural and manmade beauty by photographing medicinal fluids and fish. For this exhibition, he widens his focus. As an avid surfer, Westphal spent the last two years learning and perfecting the art of surfboard-making. He also invented a process to adhere his signature fish photos to the surface of the boards. The results are beautiful, ready-to-use sculptures.

In conjunction, Westphal made a one-hour instructional video on ‘how to make a surfboard.’ Informative and funny, the video demonstrates the absurd nature of do-it-yourself programs. With over 100 steps, Westphal shows the world how he makes a surfboard and discourages others from doing the same. For a more immediate demonstration, Westphal’s surfboard-making shack will be transported to the gallery. Westphal or one of his crew will demonstrate the art of surfboard-making on Saturdays for the duration of the show. Finished surfboards will be displayed as monolithic sculptures.

In the north gallery, Westphal debuts his new body of shark fin photographs within the context of a studio installation. Unlike most photographer’s studios, Westphal’s studio is a conglomeration of diverse interests in multiple media. Small sculptures, music, self-made board games, videos and found objects abound. In the shark fin photos, Westphal strapped a wooden fin to his body and swam offshore. The resulting photographs are documentary-style shots full of simultaneous hilarity and fear. While the entire show encourages respect for the ocean, Westphal also reveals the flipside to such a close relationship with the water.

The Shape, the Scent, the Feel of Things

Performances October 14, 15, 21, 22, 28, and 29, 2006, at 2 pm

Dia:Beacon
Riggio Galleries
3 Beekman Street
Beacon, New York 12508
845 440 0100 www.diaart.org

Dia presents an encore performance by Joan Jonas, first staged at Dia:Beacon in October 2005. Incorporating movement, sound, live music, and projected video footage, The Shape, the Scent, the Feel of Things is, in part, a response to the writings of German art historian Aby Warburg based on his visit to the American Southwest in 1896. Jason Moran, who will perform live on the piano, has composed new music for this collaborative work.

Tickets are $15 general, $10 students and seniors, and $3 members. Tickets include museum admission. To reserve a ticket, please call 845 440 0100 x 45.

Current hours at Dia:Beacon are 11am to 6pm, Thursday through Monday (closed Tuesday and Wednesday). From October 19 through November 13, 2006, hours will be Thursday through Monday 11am to 4pm (closed Tuesday and Wednesday). Admission to the museum is $10 general, $7 for students and seniors, and free for Dia members and children under 12. The museum is easily reachable via Metro-North Railroad (the MTA’s Hudson Line station in Beacon is within walking distance of the museum). On Saturdays and Sundays, the 11:51am train from Grand Central arrives in Beacon at 1:17pm. Full schedules are available on the MTA’s website at http://www.mta.nyc.ny.us/. The museum is also reachable by major roadways. Driving directions are available on Dia’s website at http://www.diaart.org/dia/visitor/index.html.

Joan Jonas’s commission for Dia:Beacon is made possible by the Dutchess County Arts Council; the Dyson Foundation; Jean Stein, JKW Foundation; and the New York State Council on the Arts. Support for video production during this project was provided, in part, by the Renaissance Society, Chicago, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

THE ITALIAN ACADEMY FOR ADVANCED STUDIES
IN AMERICA AT COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY
presents the

Fall 2006 Film Series

Anni Di Piombo:
Terrorism on Film

Friday, October 13 - Friday, October 20

New York, NY- Sept. 29, 2006- Fresh from the popular success of the
new, compact schedule launched in the spring, the acclaimed film series
at The Italian Academy for Advanced Studies in America at Columbia
University returns with a program highlighting terrorism in movies.

Six screenings over the course of eight days will focus on the wrenching
events of Italy’s “years of lead” or anni di piombo of the 1970s, which
were marked by a wave of violence attributed to right-wing and left-wing
extremists. As always, a selection of New York’s best academics and
cultural observers will introduce each screening and lead a discussion
afterwards.

Friday, October 13, 6:30
Tre Fratelli (Three Brothers, 1981)
Director: Francesco Rosi
Starring: Philippe Noiret, Michele Placido, Vittorio Mezzogiorno
Speaker: Gaetana Morrone-Puglia

Monday, October 16, 6:30
Buongiorno, Notte (Good Morning, Night, 2003)
Dir: Marco Bellocchio
Starring: Luigi Lo Cascio, Maya Sansa, Roberto Herlitzka
Speaker: Nicoletta Marini-Maio

Tuesday, October 17, 6:30
Prova d’orchestra (Orchestra Rehearsal, 1978)
Director: Federico Fellini
Starring: Balduin Baas, Clara Colosimo
Speaker: Leonard Quart

Wednesday, October 18, 6:30
Colpire Al Cuore (A Blow To The Heart, 1982)
Director: Gianni Amelio
Starring: Jean-Louis Trintignant, Fausto Rossi, Laura Morante
Speaker: Ellen Nerenberg

SPECIAL DOCUMENTARY SCREENING
Thursday, October 19, 6:30
Excellent Cadavers (2006)
Director: Marco Turco (based on the book by Alexander Stille)
Speaker: Alexander Stille
Best Documentary, 2005 Festival dei Popoli (Florence)
2005 Locarno International Film Festival

Friday, October 20, 6:30
La Seconda Volta (The Second Time, 1996)
Director: Mimmo Calopresti
Starring: Nanni Moretti, Valeria Bruni Tedeschi
Speaker: Giancarlo Lombardi

All screenings in the Teatro at 6:30 p.m.
English Subtitles
Light Refreshments Served
$5 Donation Recommended

Curated by Jenny McPhee

Italian Academy for Advanced Studies in America at Columbia University
1161 Amsterdam Avenue (between 116th and 118th streets)
Subway Line #1 to 116th Street
www.italianacademy.columbia.edu

SPEAKERS:

Gaetana Marrone-Puglia is a Professor of Italian at Princeton
University, specializing in modern Italian literature and postwar
Italian cinema. She is the author of La drammatica di Ugo Betti, which
won the American Association of Italian Studies Presidential Award, New
Landscapes in Contemporary Italian Cinema (1999), and The Gaze and the
Labyrinth: The Cinema of Liliana Cavani (2000), awarded the Scaglione
Prize by the Modern Language Association of America. She has also
produced two award-winning films, Woman in the Wind (1990) and a
documentary feature on Princeton’s intellectual and social history
entitled Princeton: Images of a University (1996). She is currently
writing a book on Francesco Rosi.

Nicoletta Marini-Maio is Assistant Professor of Italian at Middlebury
College, where she teaches Italian language, literature, and film. After
teaching at the University for Foreigners in Perugia, Italy, from 1999
to 2005 she directed the Office of Cultural Affairs of the Italian
Consulate in Philadelphia and taught Italian language, theater, and
culture at the University of Pennsylvania. She is currently doing
research on the representation of terrorism in Italian film and theater.
She published articles on Italian film and theater and co-edited the
scholarly volume Set the Stage! Teaching Italian through Theater (Yale
University Press, 2007).

Leonard Quart is Professor Emeritus of Cinema Studies at the College of
Staten Island and at the CUNY Graduate Center. He has written essays and
reviews for Dissent, Film Quarterly, The Forward, London Magazine, and
Newsday. He is a Contributing Editor of Cineaste. His major publications
include How the War was Remembered: Hollywood and Vietnam, co-authored
with Albert Auster (Praeger, 1988); The Films of Mike Leigh (Cambridge
University Press); and the third edition of American Film and Society
(Praeger, December 2001).

Ellen Nerenberg is Associate Professor of Romance Languages and
Literatures (Italian Studies) and Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality
Studies at Wesleyan University. She is the author of Prison Terms:
Representing Confinement During and After Italian Fascism (2001), which
won the Howard R. Marraro Prize from the Modern Languages Association.
She is currently working on a study of three post-1989 murder cases in
Italy.

Alexander Stille is the San Paolo Professor of International Journalism
at Columbia University. His latest book, The Sack of Rome (Penguin), is
a monumental work of investigative reportage describing Silvio
Berlusconi’s nefarious rise to power. He is also the author of The
Future of the Past; Excellent Cadavers: The Mafia and the Death of the
First Italian Republic; and Benevolence and Betrayal: Five
Italian-Jewish Families Under Fascism, which won the 1992 Los Angeles
Times Book Award for the best work of General Non-Fiction. Stille is
also a regular contributor to The New Yorker, The New York Times and The
New York Review of Books.

Giancarlo Lombardi is Associate Professor of Italian and Comparative
Literature at the College of Staten Island and at the CUNY Graduate
Center. In 2002, he published a book entitled Rooms with a View:
Feminist Diary Fiction, 1954-1999. He has also published a number of
articles on contemporary women writers, Italian cinema, and Italian
Cultural Studies. He is currently working on a volume on the cinematic
representations of Italian political terrorism.

Viewers may also be interested in seeing the six-hour movie “La meglio
gioventù” or “Best of Youth,” which spans the last four decades of
Italian history, including the anni di piombo; it will be screened in
November at the Brooklyn Academy of Music as part of a celebration of
director Marco Tullio Giordana.

On Friday, October 13, 2006 – The Stride Art Gallery Association will celebrate the opening of Ageographica, a new installation by Crystal Mowry. Using common, everyday materials such as reclaimed plastics, Sharpie pens, and straight pins, Mowry creates fantastical spaces based real locations and events. Her recent work, Ongoing Ideal Forms (After Versailles), which consisted of foam, sponges, sand, spices, resin, a model railroad track, a wireless camera, and miscellaneous electronic and motorized components, was exhibited as part of Quantal Strife at the Doris McCarthy Gallery, UTSC. In it she recreated to scale the gardens of Versailles complete with an encircling model railway and remote camera. For Ageographica, Mowry will install a meticulously detailed network of maps, diagrams, and meandering tourists onto the vacant walls of the gallery.

Please join us at the opening from 8pm until the wee hours.

Also,
Public Lectures:
Alberta College of Art and Design
Friday, October 13, 2006 @ 12PM
Room: s139a (Sculpture Dept.)
Presented by the ACAD Visiting Artist Committee
& the ACAD Sculpture Department

University of Lethbridge
Monday, October 16, 2006 @ 12PM
Recital Hall
Presented by Visitors In The Arts,
University of Lethbridge

Artist Bio:
Crystal Mowry is an artist currently based in Guelph, Ontario. She received an AOCAD from the Ontario College of Art and Design and an MFA from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design University. Her recent exhibitions include Quantal Strife (curated by Sally McKay), and collaborations with Panya Clark Espinal (as Liminal Solutions) for the Manchester Letherium Ideas Competition exhibited at Cornerhouse Gallery (Manchester, UK) and “The Terrarium Project” at Harbourfront Centre (Toronto) in 2006. Her work examines wonder, scale, and knowledge in fictitious versions of tourist-destination landscapes.

The Stride Art Gallery Association
1004 MacLeod Trail SE
Calgary, AB
T2G 2M7
403 262 8507
stride2@telusplanet.net
www.stride.ab.ca

Stride is open to the public from 11 AM - 5 PM, Tuesday - Saturday
Admission is free and all are welcome.

MELTING MIDLANDS
Shay Kun
October 12 ­ November 11, 2006
Opening Reception: Thursday, October 12th, 6-8 pm

BUIA Gallery is pleased to present “Melting Midlands,” Goldsmiths graduate
Shay Kun¹s second solo exhibition at the gallery. Intrigued by the
dissonance of world realities, in particular natural and idyllic versus
man-made and corrupted, Kun posits Pop Art images against eerily activated
High Art landscape motifs from the Hudson Valley School to arrive at
sometimes quiet, sometimes comical painted social critiques. Taking
advantage of the potent Richard Hamilton/Martha Rosler tradition of collage
Kun subtly distorts hyper romanticized Thomas Cole/Albert Beirstadt
backgrounds with cartoon-like figures and decayed objects in often bizarre
scenarios, creating a wry whimsy whose happy humor inextricably seems to
vacillate towards the melancholy. Kun offers a very contemporary snap shot
of consumer culture¹s falsifying and alienating effect on the visual as well
as culture at large as per the thinking of Guy Debord in his seminal work,
“The Society of the Spectacle.” Unlike Debord, however, Kun retains an
appealing ironic optimism that bows towards the brighter side of humanity
and offers a comforting wholesome tempering to the unnerving tension at
stake.

Kun carries his interest in high/low oppositions into the literal making of
the work. Leveling both high and low art techniques by expressing both
through painting and not collage, Kun alleviates the distinguishing factor
of mass production or use into the more sacred realm of painting. At the
same time, however, he inverts the reverence of high art landscape painting
by intentionally overly romanticizing the palette and paint application.
Similarly, Kun utilizes clashing glowing blues, greens, yellows, and reds to
emphasize the abrasive quality of mass produced image. The resulting
pastiche creates an intentional discomfort and allure that ultimately
entices the viewer.

Shay Kun is a graduate of Goldsmiths and a three-year gallery artist. His
highly successful debut solo exhibition in the spring of 2005, “I care
because you do too,” resulted in inclusion in several shows here and abroad.
This coming January he will have his first London solo exhibition,
“Perversion is the Love We Feel When Others Feel Love,” at Seventeen. We
are excited to announce the opening of his second greatly anticipated solo
exhibition.

BUIA Gallery 541 W. 23rd St. New York, NY 10011
T. 212 366 9915 F. 212 366 9846
www.buiagallery.com info@buiagallery.com

Annie Leibovitz: A Photographer’s Life, 1990-2005

On View October 20, 2006 through January 21, 2007

This major international traveling exhibition of more than two hundred photographs, debuting at the Brooklyn Museum, is devoted to the work of one of the most celebrated photographers of our time. The exhibtion and the accompanying book of the same title, to be published by Random House, includes images from Leibovitz’s assignments as a professional photographer as well as personal photographs of her family and close friends.

Refreshments will be served.

A bus reserved for this preview will depart from the Plaza Hotel at 59th Street and Fifth Avenue at 9 a.m. and will leave the Museum at noon to return to Manhattan. Bus reservations are required and must be made no later than October 15.

R.S.V.P. to (718) 501-6334

Annie Leibovitz: A Photographer’s Life, 1990-2005
Organized by the Brooklyn Museum
Sponsored by American Express

Additional support has been provided by
Richard Meier’s “On Prospect Park”,
an SDS Procida Distinctive Property.

Brooklyn Museum
200 Eastern Parkway Brooklyn NY 11238-6052

Press Contact:
sally.williams@brooklynmuseum.org
(718) 501-6330

http://www.brooklynmuseum.org

Shelly Low
Self-Serve at La Pagode Royale
October 13 – November 18, 2006

Reception: Friday 13th October, 7:30pm
(Artist in Attendance)

Artist talk: Saturday 14th October, 2pm

This current work springs from the research in Low’s previous project: La Pagode Royale, and explores the commodification and manufacturing of culture. La Pagode Royale takes its name from the Polynesian/Chinese restaurant, which Low’s parents owned and worked in during the late seventies and eighties.

This project experiments with the use of food, and involves building a large scale Pagoda out of rice krispie squares. Rice krispies are a processed, sweetened derivative of rice. Rice krispies “squares” are a familiar North American treat, with its’ golden color alluring and desirable. The main sculptural element of this project takes the name of Low’s parent’s restaurant and materializes it into a 9 foot pagoda made up of over a thousand rice krispie squares. Already, a golden pagoda is trivial in terms of representing what it is to be ‘Chinese’. And to be built out of a North American processed treat (rice krispie squares), further enhances a ‘served up’ idea of culture.

As a business, restaurant owners manufacture a cultural product by complying to and perpetuating certain stereotypes – in a sense ‘serving up’ notions of an ethnic or exotic ‘other’, based on folklore, nostalgia and myth. As a form of advertisement, the choosing of a name is a self-conscious projection and representation of a ‘status’ or a ‘culture’ while at the same time reflecting and trying to appeal to current trends and expectations of the social milieu.

Shelly Low is also interested in what is considered to be ‘traditional’ or ‘authentic’ and how this is structured through food culture and consumption. In the ‘business’ side of the restaurant business, Chinese food is cooked up to have mass appeal. Dishes made for the Western consumer are fabricated to seem ‘authentic’ but not too strange from what is familiar to their palate. Culture enters the food market in a fragmented processed way – foreign, but safely within the familiar. How do we as consumers accept and perpetuate notions of the ‘other’, and how does the worker/immigrant substantiate a sense of ‘self’? And as Canada continues to become multicultural, what are the things that become cultural signifiers? What are the images we hold on to and perpetuate?

Self-Serve at La Pagode Royale expands this research to include the use of self-portraiture. Some in the form of large digital printouts, photomontage wall installation, others are incorporated and printed out on assembled Chinese take out menus. In these series of portraits Low uses herself as the subject in performance with the implements by which we consume, to explore the relationship between cultural identity and consumption. As someone who crosses both sides of Western/Eastern culture, this new work is a reflection of cultural stereotypes and self-representation, and in relation to the restaurant, Low looks at herself rather than the food.

Shelly Low is a Montreal artist who draws from both the immigrant experiences of her parents and her own hybrid experience as a Chinese-Canadian. Her art practice uses materials that are recognizable and familiar, and through some form of interaction, they are recontextualized to form new meaning. Being fascinated by the concept of small actions acumulating into something large, she highlights the process of making and repetition. In addressing the invented, ephemeral and vague nature of ethnicity, she appreciates the use of humour and irony.

The Artist would like to express her gratitude to CUPFA: Concordia University Part-Time Professional Grant and the Conseil des arts et des lettres Québec.

aceartinc. gratefully acknowledges the generous support of associate members & donors, our volunteers, The Manitoba Arts Council, The Canada Council for the Arts, The Winnipeg Arts Council, The Winnipeg Foundation, WH and SE Loewen Foundation, The Family of Wendy Wersh, The Sign Source, Kromar Printing Ltd. and Design Type.

Untouchable (The Transparency Ideal)
Until September 24
CNAC Villa Arson, 20 avenue Stephen Liegeard, F-06000 Nice, France
http://www.villa-arson.org

Jiri Kovanda Versus Rest Of The World
September 9 – October 14
gb agency, 20 rue Louise Weiss, F-75013 Paris, France
http://www.gbagency.fr

Two Projects curated by Guillaume Désanges & François Piron, Work Method, Paris

Work Method is a Paris-based agency run by François Piron and Guillaume Désanges, both independant french art critics and curators, to initiate and manage independantly individual and collaborative projects, including exhibitions, performances, lecture programs, seminars, and editorial projects linked with contemporary art. This association is purposed to structure an independent art criticism and curatorial activity, sharing projects on intellectual, economical and logistical levels.

Work Method has an office and a shop window in Paris, in Belleville area: 65 rue Rebeval, F-75019 Paris. Email contact : workmethod@club-internet.fr

Untouchable (The Transparency Ideal) is an exhibition freely adapted from Paul Scheerbart’s 1914-manifesto, Glass Architecture. This visionary text claims the coming of a transparent and coloured architecture, fundament of an idealistic transformation of the individual and the society, and opens the reign of transparency as a positive value.

The exhibition focuses on relationships between transparency, reflection and opacity, in aesthetical, economical, political and psychological aspects. The exhibition reflects the fascination for the aesthetics of service economy in contemporary art works, the eroticism and hygienism of transparency, in a movement from a positivist ideal to its corruption: the opacity of economical void, the frustration of glass separation, the subject’s confinement.

The exhibition does not aim to be an illustration of Scheerbart’s projection, but adopts its method: a montage of affirmative statements, through associations and confrontations between works of art of the past forty years, from minimal and conceptual art until now.
With works by: Ignasi Aballi (E), Boris Achour (F), Martin Arnold (A), Art & Language (UK), Larry Bell (USA), David Claerbout (B), Philippe Durand (F), Harun Farocki (G), Hans Peter Feldmann (G), Jonah Freeman (USA), Michel François (B), Ryan Gander (UK), Dora Garcia (E), Liam Gillick (UK), Douglas Gordon (UK), Dan Graham (USA), Rodney Graham (C), Graham Gussin (UK), Hans Haacke (G), Damien Hirst (UK), Pierre Huyghe (F), Les Ready-Made appartiennent à tout le monde ® (F), Corey McCorkle (USA), Laurent Montaron (F), Sarah Morris (UK), Man Ray (USA), Anri Sala (Alb), Joe Scanlan (USA), Rosemarie Trockel (G) Hannah Wilke (USA), Heimo Zobernig (A).

Untouchable (The Transparency Ideal & Glass Architecture)
The 224-pages book contains a new edition of Paul Scheerbart’s Glass Architecture and texts from Philippe Duboy, historian of architecture, Guillaume Désanges and François Piron, art critics and editors of the book, and Marcus Steinweg, philosopher.

Views of the exhibition provide a complete documentation and a reconstruction of the exhibition’s sensitive journey, from total visibility to black-out, from glare to dusk, from purity to contamination and break , from appearance to disappearance.

Jiri Kovanda Versus Rest Of The World
One of the most impressive living artists in Czech Republic, Jiri Kovanda has realised since the late 70s discreet actions, almost impossible to distinguish from real life: bumping into passers-by, waiting for the telephone to ring, attempting to meet girls in the street… Poetical as much as political, like Bas Jan Ader or Douglas Huebler’s works, his gestures question the place of an individual in social space, staying apart from any reaction to the context of the soviet period in Eastern Europe.

With historical and recent pieces, the exhibition will propose as well a curatorial statement: a series of links to Kovanda’s work through a vast number of documents, roughly xeroxed : reproductions of works of art, of news images… Associations of ideas, visual echoes, intuitive links, structural or formal. Jiri Kovanda’s work, at the centre of this web of images, gestures and energies, proves its universality.

Jimmie Durham first showed at Matt’s Gallery in 1988. Almost twenty years on, Durham will return to the Gallery this autumn to present a series of intimate performance events leading to a large-scale sculptural installation.

Durham has described the role of the artist as one who rearranges objects that exist in society. In Building a Nation, Durham will construct an installation using natural and manufactured materials combining wood, laminates, glass and metal. Quotations selected by Durham from famous Americans about American Indians will be interspersed around the structure.

Each week during the installation, Durham will make a performance / presentation as he is working, revealing the progress of the structure and sharing ideas. These presentations will be conducted by Durham in the interchangeable guises of carpenter, craftsman and teacher.

Since moving to Europe from Mexico in 1994, Durham has concentrated on the problems of belief and monumentalism in art and has worked against architecture. Durham has said, ‘Now we can begin, it seems to me, to be more seriously confused, to be more profoundly confused than we were before, especially if we can make a final break within the heroic project of art and architecture.’

Jimmie Durham works primarily in sculpture, his career has spanned theatre, performance, literature, poetry and visual art. Durham is active in politics and has played a crucial part in the American Indian Movement in the US since the 1970s. His work has been exhibited widely at venues including the Palais des Beaux Arts, Brussels; DAAD Gallery, Berlin; Document XI, Kassel; Hamburg Kunstverein; the Whitney Biennial, New York; Kunstverein Munich and the Venice Biennale amongst others. Phaidon produced a comprehensive survey of his work in 1995.

Matt’s Gallery was founded by Robin Klassnik in 1979 and operates as a not-for-profit publicly funded gallery.

Artists shown at Matt’s Gallery include: Sue Arrowsmith | Elisabeth Ballet | Jordan Baseman | Anne Bean | Tony Bevan | Edgar Heap of Birds | John Blake | Ian Breakwell | Jo Bruton | Victor Burgin | Brian Catling | Tom Clark | Hannah Collins | Melanie Counsell | Fiona Crisp | Juan Cruz | Xenia K. Dieroff | Willie Doherty | Sean Dower | Jimmie Durham | Till Exit | Graham Fagen | Joel Fisher | John Frankland | Nat Goodden | Richard Grayson | Lucy Gunning | Gerard Hemsworth | Susan Hiller | Thomas Holley | Nan Hoover | Jeff Instone | Melanie Jackson | Robert Janz | Rose Finn-Kelcey | Robin Klassnik | Jaroslaw Kozlowski | Hanna Luczak | Ian McKeever | Nathaniel Mellors | Mike Nelson | Avis Newman | Gerald Newman | Hayley Newman | David Osbaldeston | Tomasz Osinski | Gail Pickering | Michael Porter | Helen Robertson | Gary Stevens | Imogen Stidworthy | Kate Smith | Matthew Tickle | Imants Tillers | Amikam Toren | David Troostwyk | Alison Turnbull | Phillip Warnell | Carl von Weiler | Anthony Wilson | Richard Wilson |

Current and forthcoming Publications:
Anne Bean monograph ‘Autobituary’ with texts by Guy Brett, Sally O’Reilly and Miria Swain

Lucy Gunning monograph with texts by Michael Archer, Penelope Curtis and Rachel Withers

Matt’s Gallery is supported by Arts Council England, London.
The Daily Telegraph is media sponsor of Matt’s Gallery.

Building a Nation is supported by The Elephant Trust, Henry Moore Foundation and Moose Foundation for the Arts and is sponsored by Pergo and Formica Ltd.
Jimmie Durham

Exhibition:
Building a Nation
1 November – 17 December 2006

Events:
Talking while working with the artist
Each Saturday during October,
2.30 – 4.30pm

Matt’s Gallery
42-44 Copperfield Road,
London E3 4RR
T 00 44 (0)20 8983 1771
F 00 44 (0)20 8983 1435
http://www.mattsgallery.org

The Deste Foundation presents
Anathena

20 October 2006 – 20January 2007
Preview party: Thursday 19th October 2006, at 20:30.

Join our mailing list: http://www.deste.gr/mailinglist

The Deste Foundation presents the group exhibition Anathena proposed by curators Marina Fokidis & Marina Gioti. Following an open call for proposals, Anathena, was selected by a committee comprising of Deste, Deitch Projects and The Wrong Gallery.

This exhibition inaugurates the programme of Deste´s
Yellow Project Room.

Anathena features Athens-based artists and intends to highlight a dynamic yet rarely shown aspect of the ‘local’ contemporary artistic production that has affinities with street and music culture. The exhibition will present works by local artists largely unknown to the city’s ‘mainstream’ art world, as for many years now these artists have been using their self-devised production and distribution mechanisms and channels. This creative universe does not represent a movement or a self-manifested “scene”, but rather local undercurrents of small groups and individuals, who do not necessarily work together while in their vast majority they do not insist on labeling what they do as “art”. This self-exclusion from the local art establishment is, in a way, an “anathema”. Totally lacking the polemic and anger usually related to the term, this “anathema” is gentle, and suggests more an attitude of romantic indifference rather than one of dogmatic denouncement.

Most of the artists that Anathena presents work professionally as graphic designers, internet specialists, are film or media experts or DJs. Their work draws from different aspects of what is broadly termed “visual contemporary culture” and is frequently community-based. It usually grows from contacts and friendships, common influences and preferences.

Anathena will also feature a collaborative mural by artists related to street art. They shape the younger generation of artists who mainly use drawing as a medium and the street as their background to express their social participation. At the same time, an innovative internet radio program will be powered by most of the participating artists in collaboration with “vinyl microstore”, to run during the exhibition’s length. “vinyl microstore” is a music store that acts as the major meeting, discussion, and creative venue for some artists of this community. Most important artists who belong to the underground music scene have performed there, usually at a small festival that takes place every year and it is called YURIA in honor of the owner’s (Nectarios) dog who’s called Yury.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue designed by Christos Lialios, and the website http://www.anathena.com, which is designed by Angelo Plessas.

The logo and communications material have been designed by Black & Decker.

The architect Andreas Angelidakis has been a consultant for the exhibition’s installation.

Special projects will begin on 19th October, 2006 and include:
An electronic fanzine designed and edited by Angelo Plessas. (It can be ordered at http://www.cafepress.com/anathenabook)

A radio program titled Deste ke Akouste (Look and Listen), featuring DJ sets, news, poetry and text readings and talk shows by the participating artists. Powered and hosted on the Internet frequency, of vm radio, http://www.vinylmicrostore.gr

Opening night with specially assembled DJ PROGRAM by participating artists including DJ Bwana, Davidopoulos, Dimitris Politakis, Nectarios Pappas and others…

Participating artists: b., Black & Decker, Alexandros Dimitriadis, Dimitris Emmanouil, Erasers, Stelios Faitakis, Marina Gioti, Karatransavantguardia, Andreas Kasapis, Filippos Kavakas, Panos Koutrouboussis, Fotis Kouzinos, Christos Lialios, Lo-Fi, Dimitris Merantzas, Andreas Mouzakitis, Stavroula, Papadaki, Dimitris Papadatos, Fivos Papadopoulos, Pantelis Pantelopoulos,Marios Perrakis, Angelo Plessas, Natasha Poulantza, Dimitris Protopapas, Hercules Renieris , Ioakim Sidiropoulos, Giorgos Tourlas. Andreas Vais, VM Radio ( http://www.vinylmicrostore.gr ), Lefteris Yakoumakis