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Portikus Frankfurt am Main

Olafur Eliasson: Light Lab, 2006-2008

Portikus Frankfurt am Main

Strobo Night, Blue Moon, Deep Purple Laguna, Movementmeter for the Main, Daylight, The Heiliotropic Month, The Giant Sky Mirror Light, Green River Light, The Ultraviolet City, Water Reflection Wall, Solar Flames, Nebular Orion, Sunrise Pink, Vertical White and Blue, Reversed Full White Sun… These are some of the working titles for Olafur Eliasson’s solar experiments in the large glass roof of the Portikus in Frankfurt am Main. The project, which started in April of 2006, has become recognized far beyond the art world and has turned the Portikus into one of the most discussed architectural sites in Germany.

The glass roof is a light laboratory. Eliasson sees each chapter of the project (planned to continue until 2008) as a new test. ‘What’s getting increasingly clear,’ writes Daniel Birnbaum, ‘is the solar fascination that recurs in his work, from the artificial rainbow “Beauty” (1993) to “Your Sun Machine” (1996) and his succession of synthetic suns the most massive of which formed the centre of Eliasson’s “Weather Project” (2003) at Tate Modern. This heliocentric drive in his art seems to have little to do with recent theoretical or artistic developments but a lot with the most ancient of speculations concerning vision and the power of the mind. Philosophy as such seems to start as a kind of sun dance. Not only sunflowers, also the tropes of language turn towards the celestial light. Writing about the heliotrope as the foundation all philosophical metaphorics in “White Mythology,” Jacques Derrida spelled out the limits of what is natural in nature: “Each time there is a metaph
or, there is doubtless a sun somewhere; but each time there is sun, metaphor has begun. If the sun is metaphorical always, already, it is no longer completely natural. It is always, already, a lustre, a chandelier, one might say an artificial construction…"’

Portikus Frankfurt am Main
Alte Brücke 2 Maininsel
60594 Frankfurt am Main, Germany
Telephone 49 69 962 44 54-0 Fax 49 69 962 44 54-24
http://www.portikus.de

The project is supported by

For more information go to: http://www.portikus.de

The Whitney Museum of American Art

The Whitney Museum
of American Art presents
Seminars with Artists

Since its inception in the late 1960s, Seminars with Artists has provided a forum for intimate engagements with the most notable American artists of the past forty years.

http://www.whitney.org

New York Corners
Taking its cue from the exhibition Gordon Matta-Clark: "You Are the Measure," this season’s speakers explore art practices born from critical intersections with New York City.

Keith Sonnier
Thursday, February 22 at 7 pm
Developing a type of Minimalism from found objects, Keith Sonnier’s sculptural work, “no matter what its size,” notes Richard Kalina, “has the capacity to fill and activate a space.” His most recent installation, Double Monopole (2006), makes use of sixty-foot steel frames, neon, and falling water. “I think it’s my Bellagio,” Sonnier has said. “I finally got to build a big fancy waterfall.” The work serves as a gateway to the Kansas City International Airport.

Mary Heilmann
Wednesday, March 7 at 7 pm
Mary Heilmann moved to New York in 1968 and began exploring and experimenting with abstract painting’s history and materiality, and infusing her compositions with both pop and personal references. Her first retrospective, organized by the Orange County Museum of Art, opens in May 2007 and will also include her work in ceramics, decorative arts, film, and music.

Andrea Fraser
Thursday, March 22 at 7 pm
For the last twenty years, Andrea Fraser’s work has investigated art as a culture and an economy, highlighting the way museums, collectors, and artists themselves invest art-making with meaning and value. Her 2005 book, Museum Highlights: The Writings of Andrea Fraser, collects essays, performance scripts, and texts that are key to her practice.

Trisha Brown
Thursday, April 12 at 7 pm
Acclaimed choreographer Trisha Brown first became known in the 1960s when she showed her work with the Judson Dance Theater. In 1970, she founded Trisha Brown Dance Company among SoHo’s burgeoning alternative-space scene, and began exploring site-specific choreography (like Walking on the Wall, performed in 1971 at the Whitney). From work based on everyday actions and repetitive gestures to dance cycles, choreography for opera, and, most recently, ballet, Brown continues to find new possibilities for movement, collaboration, and postmodern dance.

Lyle Ashton Harris
Thursday, April 26 at 7 pm
Lyle Ashton Harris has incorporated installation, video, and photography in his work, often with himself as the subject. His identity-based photographs of the 1990s explored race, gender, and sexuality through strategies like masquerade, camp humor, and the family snapshot. Of his recent work, Holland Cotter wrote: "Like most really stimulating art, Mr. Harris’s eludes clean readings. It is self-portraiture that is not quite self-portraiture, based on fiction that is not quite fiction." His work was included in the Whitney’s Photography and the Self: The Legacy of F. Holland Day.

Advance ticket sales are strongly recommended, as seating is limited. Tickets may be purchased at the Museum Admissions Desk or by visiting http://www.whitney.org; inquiries at (212) 570-7715 or public_programs@whitney.org.

The Whitney Museum of American Art’s Seminars with Artists program is made possible by the support of The Estée Lauder Companies Inc.

WHITNEY MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART
945 MADISON AVENUE
1 (800) WHITNEY

For more information go to: http://www.whitney.org

Tate Liverpool

Centre of the Creative Universe
Liverpool and the Avant-Garde

20 February – 9 September 2007

Tate Liverpool
Albert Dock, Liverpool, L3 4BB
http://www.tate.org.uk/liverpool
Admission Free

To coincide with the Liverpool’s 800th anniversary celebrations, Centre of the Creative Universe investigates how the city has inspired and influenced a diverse range of nationally and internationally renowned artists since the 1940s.

The sense of Liverpool looking outward beyond the United Kingdom, and the world returning this gaze, is a feature of the city’s character. This exhibition presents Liverpool as a world city with an undying capacity to inspire imaginations. The explores Liverpool as a centre of the 1960s global pop revolution, reveals how the city has inspired documentary photography and politically motivated art, and played host to avant-garde artists and art movements from Pop art to Conceptual art.

Centre of the Creative Universe: Liverpool and the Avant-Garde will feature some of the most important artists of the post-War era, including Keith Arnatt, Stewart Bale, John Baum, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Boyle Family, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Maurice Cockrill, Jeremy Deller, Rineke Dijkstra, Filmaktion, Adrian Henri, Candida Höfer, John Latham, Melik Ohanian, Yoko Ono, Martin Parr, Bob and Roberta Smith, Alec Soth, Sam Walsh, and Tom Wood.

Artist Talks: Imaging Liverpool
In this series of talks, artists from the Centre of the Creative Universe: Liverpool and the Avant-Garde exhibition at Tate Liverpool discuss photographic and filmic representations of Liverpool and their work in general. Speaker include Martin Parr and Rineke Dijkstra.

For more information about the artist talks and other events surrounding the Centre of the Creative Universe: Liverpool and the Avant-Garde visit http://www.tate.org.uk/liverpool

Supported by the Liverpool Culture Company as part of the city’s preparations for European Capital of Culture 2008’.

For more information go to: http://www.tate.org.uk/liverpool

The National Museum of the American Indian

Jeffrey Gibson - Infinite Anomaly: Tahlequah, Oklahoma Project
Part of Off The Map: Landscape in the Native Imagination

March 3, 2007–September 3, 2007

The National Museum of
the American Indian
George Gustav Heye Center
One Bowling Green
New York, NY 10004
http://www.nmai.si.edu

In 2005, artist Jeffrey Gibson began researching a small plot of land in Tahlequah, Oklahoma, that he would one day inherit from his mother. In 1906 the land was given to his family as part of the Federal Indian Allotment Act. “Giving” the land to individual Indians was an acculturation act. It was meant to break apart the collective voice of the tribes into individual landowners who, due to poverty, would most likely sell the land back and therefore become a part of the national economy. Jeffrey has created a body of paintings, sculptures, and a new installation from this history full of anguish, loss, hope, and the natural beauty of the land.

“The relationship of Native people to place, historically and metaphysically, is well documented by scholars and expressed at length in the visual and literary arts. Indeed, this relationship to “the land” is often cited as the very root of our indigeneity. Geography has shaped and defined Native cultures, literally and conceptually, over countless generations. Our origin stories and understanding of the universe often relate to geographical features in the landscape, and the material culture of each community is based on the natural environment of our homelands. For more than 500 years, land has also been a site and source of conflict and struggle with outsiders—be they non-Indian settlers seeking farmland, or commercial enterprises eager to exploit natural resources. As a subject for Native artists, then, the land/landscape is laden with history and expectation. Land is home, culture, and identity, but it also represents violence, isolation, and loss.” – Kathleen Ash-Milby,
Curator

Selected works from this project were included in No Reservations at The Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, and recent works will be included in Off The Map at The National Museum of The American Indian, Smithsonian Institution. This project was made possible by funding from The Creative Capital Foundation. A publication including an essay by Hélène Cixous about The Infinite Anomaly: Tahlequah, Oklahoma Project will be published to accompany the debut of the works included in Off The Map. A catalog will also be available to accompany the exhibition including essays by Kathleen Ash-Milby, Kate Morris, and Paul Chaat Smith.

For more information regarding this project, please contact Camilo Alvarez at 617-357-7177 or visit http://www.samsonprojects.com

For more information go to: http://www.nmai.si.edu

Extra City

NO MATTER HOW BRIGHT THE LIGHT, THE CROSSING OCCURS
AT NIGHT.

02/03 – 29/04/2007
Opening 01/03/2007

More information:
http://www.extracity.org

This collaboratively developed exhibition features works by Natascha Sadr Haghighian, Judith Hopf/Deborah Schamoni, Ines Schaber and Stefan Pente, all addressing themselves to various aspects of the spectral – understood as absences caught in a paradoxical presence, or a discontinued past bound to return. It is not about making ghosts visible, but an investigation of the power relations, institutional forms of display and forms of “enlightenment” which produce shadows and exclusions, and it questions the possibility to speak with and unleash the transformative potential of ghosts.

Ines Schaber speculates on a latent activity within the photograph and its ability to travel through space and time. Using photographs of Pennsylvania workers as her base, she follows images from a series taken for the National Child Labor Committee in the 1910s by Lewis Hine, a pioneer of social documentary photography. These images become the point of departure for a trip through today’s hardly recognizable mining country landscape. There, stored in a former limestone mine, exists one of today’s largest commercial image archives, Bill Gates’ firm Corbis, which offers over 70 million images for sale online, including some from Hine’s series. The overlap of these two moments poses questions for photography as the agent of something that is able to travel, multiply itself, appear in various places and speak with its surroundings.

Judith Hopf works with the specters of bourgeois society. How does the attempt to control, the defense against pathological anxieties and the ideology of complete transparency, inscribe themselves on the body and the faculty of imagination? Apart from a series of sculptures, a new videowork, developed and realized with filmmaker Deborah Schamoni is presented in the exhibition. The video, using the metaphor of the sceleton dance, deals with the representation of specters in the institutional space, in search of usable rituals that would make it possible to assign places to specters as representatives of the repressed.

Natascha Sadr Haghighian investigates societal mechanisms of representation and constructions of inclusion and exclusion. How it is decided when someone will be granted member status in a “civilized community”? When is someone perceived as present and addressable through its voice, image, and concerns? How does one lose this status and when is it withdrawn? For the exhibition, Natascha Sadr Haghighian produced two installations which elaborate on the constitutive function of the address: how one is being named, pictured, and categorised, in which she draws on material from feminist novelist Kathy Acker’s book “Empire of the Senseless“. In various collaborations and dialogues this research is expanded in the accompanying book.

The 200-page reader of the same title is published by Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, Köln, with contributions and dialogues by and with Ines Schaber, Natascha Sadr Haghighian, Stefan Pente, and Judith Hopf, as well as Avery F. Gordon, Anselm Franke, Ashley Hunt, Nanna Heidenreich, Sladja Blazan, Thomas Keenan, and Michael Taussig.

The exhibition was originally produced at KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin in 2006 and was made possible by the support of the Hauptstadtkulturfonds, Berlin and the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, Chicago.

Also at Extra City:
THINKING ARCHITECTURE #1: ANRI SALA

With this exhibition, Extra City launches a series of newly produced projects by artists and architects that reconsider architecture from different and radical points of view. The series opens with a presentation of a new work by Albanian artist Anri Sala, which takes it’s cue from two photographs found in the image archive of Mexican muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros.

New Location:
Klamperstraat 40
2060 Antwerpen

More information:
http://www.extracity.org

Contact:
+32-484-42.10.70
info@extracity.org

For more information go to: http://www.extracity.org

MuHKA

MuHKA lectures
KEYWORDS/CULTURE
http://www.muhka.be

The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts

Andy Warhol Foundation Announces Inaugural Arts Writing Grants

For project descriptions and the 2007 grant calendar for individual writers, please visit http://www.artswriters.org.

The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts is pleased to announce the first round of grants through its Arts Writing Initiative, a three-year, three-million-dollar program to support independent, progressive arts publications and individual arts writers. Designed to encourage and reward writing about art that is both intellectually rigorous and creatively generative, the program aims to strengthen the field as a whole and to insure that critical writing remains a valued mode of engaging the visual arts.

Selected through a nomination-based process for their ambition, commitment and strong editorial vision, each of the eight non-profit journals listed below will receive capacity-building grants of approximately $100,000 intended to stabilize business practices, increase audiences, and encourage the exploration of new partnerships and distribution channels. The grants are meant to enable journals to take creative risks and to showcase ambitious, intellectually committed writing.

Afterall, Los Angeles
Art Papers, Atlanta
Bomb Magazine, New York
The Brooklyn Rail, Brooklyn
Cabinet, New York
Esopus, New York
Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art, Ithaca
X-tra, Los Angeles

Improving the viability of independent, progressive art publications goes hand in hand with sustaining the work of individual arts writers. Administered by the Creative Capital Foundation, the Arts Writing Initiative’s grants to individuals range from $8,500 - $50,000 and were selected by a six-person national panel of distinguished professionals in the field: Douglas Crimp, Fanny Knapp Allen Professor of Art History at the University of Rochester; Anthony Elms, Editor of WhiteWalls and Assistant Director of Gallery 400 at the University of Illinois at Chicago; Okwui Enwezor, Dean of Academic Affairs at San Francisco Art Institute and Adjunct Curator at International Center of Photography; Sylvie Fortin, Editor-in-Chief of Art Papers; Tim Griffin, Editor-in-Chief of Artforum; and Judith Rodenbeck, Editor-in-Chief of Art Journal and Noble Foundation Chair in Art and Cultural History at Sarah Lawrence College.

Representing a broad range of genres from scholarly studies to experiments with new and alternative media, the eighteen selected projects (listed below) are united by their dual commitment to the craft of writing and the advancement of critical discourse on contemporary visual art.

Julia Bryan-Wilson, Art Works: Artistic Labor in the Vietnam War Era (book), Providence

Susan Cahan, The Politics of Race in American Museums, 1968-1972 (book), St. Louis

Eda Cufer, Art as Mousetrap (book), Portland

Catherine de Zegher, Drawing Book (book), Kortrijk

T.J. Demos, The Document Between Fact and Fiction: Contemporary Art in Beirut (article), London

Grant Kester, The One and the Many: Agency and Identity in Collaborative Art (book), San Diego

Tan Lin, Warhol Writer (article), New York

Mary Warner, Documentary Photography: Episodes in the History of Image-Making and Ideas (article), La Fayette

Tom McDonough and Nancy Davenport, Inhabiting Authoritarianism: Students in the Iranian Pavilion in Paris, 1961-1979 (new and alternative media), Binghamton and New York

Judd Morrisey, The Last Performance (new and alternative media), Chicago

Eileen Myles, The Importance of Being Iceland (book), San Diego

Margaret Nelson, Women, the New York School, and Other True Abstractionists (book), Los Angeles

Molly Nesbit, The Tempest Essays (book), New York

John Peffer, The Struggle for Art at the End of Apartheid (book), Lakewood

Frances Richard, Physical Poetics: The Writings of Gordon Matta-Clark (article), Brooklyn

Reiki Tomii, Collectivism in 20th-Century Japan: A History of Strategic Alliances (article), New York

Kenneth Wark, The Situationists: A Users’ Guide (new and alternative media), New York

Gene Youngblood, George Kuchar’s Video Diaries (article), Santa Fe

For project descriptions and the 2007 grant calendar for individual writers, please visit http://www.artswriters.org.

For more information go to: http://www.artswriters.org

Stroom Den Haag

‘After Neurath:
Like sailors on the open sea’
Gerd Arntz, Bureau d’études, Alice Creischer & Andreas Siekmann, Stephan Dillemuth, Chad McCail, Oliver Ressler, Thomson & Craighead

February 25 thru April 8, 2007
Opening hours: Wednesday thru Sunday 12-5 pm

Stroom Den Haag
Hogewal 1-9
2514 HA The Hague
The Netherlands
T +31-70 3658985
info@stroom.nl
http://www.stroom.nl

In recent years there has been a renewed interest in the work of the Austrian utopian philosopher Otto Neurath (1882-1945), in fields as various as fine art, design, philosophy, cultural theory and urban studies. With the ‘After Neurath’ project Stroom poses the question what Neurath, this architect of modernity, this social engineer, can teach us today. The exhibition brings together a group of artists whose work engages with the implications of the work of Neurath. They investigate the possibilities of collectively building a better future, the unification of different fields of knowledge and emancipation through organisation. Subjects closely linked to the social-democratic ideals from the past, which now, at the start of the 21st century tend to be submerged in a culture of individualism, consumerism and indifference.

Gerd Arntz (G/NL) who collaborated with Otto Neurath and Marie Reidemeister (AUT) on the development of Isotype. The exhibition also shows examples from the International Foundation for Visual Education in The Hague, founded by Neurath during the years he lived in The Hague (1934-‘40).

The Bureau d’études (F) shows the latest in a series of works that make the usually invisible links between the institutions that shape our lives (industry, governmental agencies) visible.

Alice Creischer & Andreas Siekmann (USA/G) show a series of collaborative works that use the forms and language of Neurath and Arntz to ask questions of contemporary relevance.

Stephan Dillemuth’s (G) recent work is concerned with groups that came to be collectively known as the Life Reform Movement. Within them they held the kernel of contradictory ideas, like bohemianism, modern socialism and nazism.

Chad McCail (UK) puts up a discussion about a money-driven world using cartoon-like imagery.

Oliver Ressler (AUT) engages with concepts and models for alternative economies and societies, which all share a rejection of the capitalist system.

Thomson & Craighead (UK) question the idea that the use of templates – for example for the web - generates knowledge.

The curator of ‘After Neurath’ is Steve Rushton.

For more information check out the ‘After Neurath web dossier’ on http://www.stroom.nl. Here you will find a comprehensive biography and bibliography of Otto Neurath, texts relating to the After Neurath symposium which took place in 2006, background information on the artists in the exhibition and various web links.

The exhibition is made possible in part by: Mondriaan Foundation, city of The Hague, Embassy of Austria, Goethe-Institut Rotterdam, Gemeentemuseum Den Haag.

Stroom Den Haag focuses on the urban environment from the viewpoint of visual arts, architecture, urban development and design.

For more information go to: http://www.stroom.nl

EFA Gallery

Meme: Romanticism
Organized by Michele Thursz

Artists: Tobias Bernstrup, Jeremy Blake, Claudia Hart,
Michelle Handelman, Reynold Reynolds and Partick Jolley,
and Carlo Zanni

February 16, 2007- March 31, 2007

Opening Reception, February 16, 6:00-8:00 pm

DAILY SCREENINGS Wednesday through Saturday:
Winchester Trilogy: 12PM, 2PM
Mantis City: 1PM, 3PM
This Delicate Monster: 1:30PM, 3:30
Folly & Error: 1:40PM: 3:40
The Possible Ties Between Illness and Success: 1:50, 3:45PM
Sugar: 4-6PM

The Swing and the prints are in the main gallery.

For video synopsis: http://meme-romanticism.blogspot.com/

“I want to compete with the movies”

Meme: Romanticism examines five artists’ cinematic productions that utilize technological aesthetics, cultural symbolism, historic compositions, and narratives to expose the conceptual underpinning of Romanticism. The exhibition will be set up like a theater, with viewing times allocated by length of the video. The room will have a sound system and projection with seating for the viewer’s comfort, so they may enjoy the works. The waiting area will be set up as a traditional gallery space with prints derived or inspired by the films, but still functioning as unique objects.

The exhibition includes the artist collaborative feature film Sugar and prints by Reynold Reynolds and Patrick Jolley; Mantis City, a video and print by Tobias Bernstrup; Winchester Trilogy, videos and print by Jeremy Blake; The Possible Ties Between Illness and Success, an interactive video and prints Carlo Zanni; This Delicate Monster, video and prints by Michelle Handelman; and The Swing, 3-D animation and prints by Claudia Hart.

Romanticism as a movement emerged in the late 1700s. Artists took a stance against formal aesthetics to define art as a place for sentiment, nature, and the play of the imagination. This was an idea of art in which individuals shared their subjective realities with the public. Since that time, technologies of representation have advanced from still to moving images, from early cinema to Hollywood films to personal computers and the Internet. A social medium of representation unfolded with the capability to archive and to edit histories, identities, and geographies. These capabilities allow the public to participate in fantastic situations. Movies became popular because they reflect the dreams, fears, or fantasies of a mass public. The impact of Hollywood film and mass media is intriguing sociologically: How does consumer culture affect the personal? How does it effect the way people define their own identities?

Artists of the 50s and 60s started using the machinery of commercial culture to create and engage a broad public. This tendency was later identified as “Pop”. Today’s contemporary artist raises the ante of the Pop aesthetic by creating works that reflect our communal experiences. Communality is the key to the success of the movies and mass media; both use the tactic of bringing together a general consensus and the popular. The market and the media are based on the human need to share—empathy, opinion, and history—making the media generative by the public and the media reflecting back and forth on each other.

In the contemporary art context these cinematic or communal works become the romantic concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk, the total work of art. The exhibited works are cinematic and poetic by the nature of their production and their narratives. They reference historic compositions to create an emotional outlook on nature. These works are also a good index of the values and needs of our society because they are invested in our cultural life. In them the hierarchies and histories of art making is deconstructed and reapplied to these artists’ craft and aesthetics, aligning theirs artistic intention with the ideas of romanticism.

Meme: Romanticism suggests that Romanticism was more than a formal movement of the past but successful in changing and adapting with the times and the exigencies of history—and with the needs contemporary art making.

—Michele Thursz, 2006

Michele Thursz is an independent curator. Recently she has been appointed as the director of NY Projects, an international art advisory and production company. Her previous projects include Post Media Network; Post Media is a term and action demonstrating the continuous evolution of uses of media and its effect on artists practice, and culture-at-large. Thursz’ recent curatorial projects include Thread, Wood Street Gallery, Pattern: Modernism as Mediator, Borusan Gallery, Istanbul, Cine-O-matic, The New Museum, public.exe: Public Execution, Exit Art, NYC, and Democracy is Fun, White Box, NYC.
Contact: michele.thursz@gmail.com

This exhibition is presented by the EFA Gallery, a program of The Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts. With additional support from The Helen Keeler Burke Charitable Foundation, Peter C. Gould, Materials for the Arts, and Carnegie Corporation Inc. and many generous individuals.

The EFA Gallery is a curatorial project space. Through the gallery, The Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts supports the creative work of independent curators. Curators build the framework in which we understand artists and the art they make. At their best, they redefine how we look at culture. The Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts believes in the essential importance of art in a civil society. The value of the artist’s creative spirit is not limited by age, race, nationality or acceptance by others.

EFA Gallery
EFA Studio Center
323 West 39th Street, 2nd Floor
New York, NY 10018
between 8th and 9th Avenues

Gallery Hours: Wed. through Sat., 12-6 PM

For further information:
Elaine Tin Nyo, Director
T. 212-563-5855 x203, F. 212-563-1875
elaine@efa1.org

For more information go to: http://meme-romanticism.blogspot.com/

la criée center for contemporary art

Curatorial symposium
Exhibition Practices : Stakes & Perspectives

8 March 2007
22 March 2007

la criée center for contemporary art
place Honoré Commeurec, halles centrales
35000 Rennes, France
tel.: (+33) (0)2 23 62 25 10
fax (+33) (0)2 23 62 25 19
la-criee@ville-rennes.fr
http://www.criee.org

Symposium at the Museum of Fine Arts (Auditorium)
20 quai Emile Zola
35000 Rennes, France

With (subject to modifications) :

Thursday 8 March 2007
Chus Martinez, Director of Frankfurter Kunstverein, Germany.
Joanna Mytkowska, curator at Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France.
Raphaële Jeune, Artistic director of the first contemporary art biennial in Rennes, France.
Alexandre Perigot, Artist.

Thursday 22 March 2007
John Welchman, Professor of Art History in the Visual Arts Department at the University of California, San Diego, USA.
Hou Hanru, Director of Exhibitions and Public Programs and Chair of the Exhibition and Museum Studies program at the San Francisco Art Institute, USA.
Manuel Olveira Paz, Artist and Director of Centro Galego de Arte Contemporanea, Spain.

In 2007, la criée center for contemporary art will initiate a series of symposia on exhibition practices in contemporary art. It is our hope that this first edition will be the beginning of a series rich in the exchange of experiences and curatorial perspectives.

The series of symposia on exhibition practices has emerged from la criée’s project for residencies and exhibitions initiated in 2005 in the European cities of the Atlantic Arc. This European project has provided opportunities for productive encounters and collaborations between visiting artists, curators, directors, international art critics and artistic directors.

The discovery of very different ways of working from one context to another, exchanges around production and exhibition projects, encounters, often unexpected, with art theoreticians and practitioners all contributed to our desire to prolong and deepen this reflection, to make these exchanges public and maintain the connections established.

Each symposium will bring together international professionals; these artists, curators, art historians and theoreticians will be invited because they analyze and renew exhibition practices in the field of contemporary art.

The complementary nature of artistic creation, curatorial practice, historical research, critical thought and theorization will enrich the debate and enable the exchange of experiences and the sharing of projects, thereby contributing to the quality of scholarship and prospective thought.

The goal of the 2007 symposium is to share different experiences and perspectives on the way artists and curators work with the history and current status of the exhibition, and how they take charge of, circumscribe or undermine existing exhibition formats.

How do they propose new ways of working with the artist, giving priority to directions within the work or to production rather than to the exhibition or, on the contrary, extending the exhibition model according to specific conditions of exchange, work and visibility?

How can we “produce”, “control”, or “free ourselves from” images in exhibitions in the age of globalization?

Further information (participants, program, etc.) : http://www.criee.org/pdf/curatorialsymposium2007.pdf

Joining the symposium : email at la-criee@ville-rennes.fr

The symposium 2007 has received exceptional support from CULTURESFRANCE within the framework of an agreement with the City of Rennes.

For more information go to: http://www.criee.org