Artipedia - Arts News

Malmö Konsthall

ELMGREEN & DRAGSET
This is the First Day of My Life
10.03 – 6.5 2007

Preview for the press Thursday 8 March 11 a.m.
Opening Friday 9 March 7-9 p.m.

Information is available at our website: http://www.konsthall.malmo.se

The exhibition This is the First Day of My Life by Elmgreen & Dragset is a comprehensive presentation of the artists’ works from 1997-2007. Since 1995 the artists have collaborated on a wide range of performances, interventions and installations. Elmgreen & Dragset have consistently played with and against the exhibition space throughout the vast series of works entitled Powerless Structures. This series challenged architectural, sexual and social structures combined with a critique of institutional spaces. Changing and altering spatial conditions has taken place both within the urban landscape (e.g. Dug Down Gallery/Powerless Structures, Fig. 45 and Cruising Pavilion/Powerless Structures, Fig. 55) as well as within art institutional architecture (Powerless Structures, Fig. 11, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art), or in more radical performative actions, such as when the artists – over a period of 3 months – reconstructed the entire interior design of Kunsthalle Züri
ch.

The title of Elmgreen & Dragset’s exhibition This is the First Day of My Life seems to address the question: What now? What will I choose? How will I deal with this first day? We never choose our first day, our day of birth; somebody else makes that choice for us. From day one, various factors influence our behavioural patterns: Who we are, what we become.

Time to choose. Which door will you open? Upon entering Malmö Konsthall, the spectator is confronted with a long blank white wall and a series of anonymous-looking doors. Some of the doors are dysfunctional and can’t be opened; others will lead the viewer through a complex environment of secret rooms configured in a labyrinthine system. Here the audience will find several new productions together with some of Elmgreen & Dragset’s more well known works such as Just a Single Wrong Move (shown at Tate Modern, 2004) or Queer Bar (Powerless Structures, Fig. 121). In this version of the latter work, the audience is invited to perform the role as bartender in a gay bar for a short while.

During the years Elmgreen & Dragset have staged themselves, actors, workers or friends in different performative acts, which have dealt with duration, process and the viewers’ perception of space. These performances have created a sense of endlessness and voyeurism, whether the artists have been knitting, painting or building a structure or taking it apart. Throughout their 12 years of collaboration Elmgreen & Dragset have created works and exhibitions where the performers and the audience are set up in a who’s watching who situation, which at times has left the spectator puzzled, in between, questioning if the exhibition was about to begin or just about to finish.

It’s all about accepting that nothing is for granted, daring to be confused and being open to new experiences. The work The Incidental Self, Fig. 3 consists of 1000 framed diary-like photographs. They are arranged in groups on white shelves, which are hung along a 30-meter-long corridor. The installation gives a new and more intimate dimension to the exhibition and to Elmgreen & Dragset’s working method. Childhood images are mixed with private snapshots of nightclubs, gay bars, ex-lovers and cityscapes from Europe, Asia and the Americas. Get lost in the arcades of passion!

In the exhibition This is the First Day of My Life go-go dancers, prison inmates, the bourgeois upper-class and club goers live door by door and have just left home to start a new day. Where did they all go? The exhibition gives no answers, it only poses more questions about all the tomorrows to come…this is the first day of our lives.

Michael Elmgreen & Ingar Dragset have been collaborating since 1995 and live and work in Berlin.

You are welcome to contact me for further information!
Kind regards

Lena Leeb-Lundberg +46 (0)40-34 12 94, +46 (0)708-34 12 94 or lena.leeb@malmo.se
Malmö Konsthall

Information is also available at our website: http://www.konsthall.malmo.se

For more information go to: http://www.konsthall.malmo.se

WITTE DE WITH

JESPER JUST
CHLOE PIENE
3 March – 6 May 2007

WITTE DE WITH
CENTER FOR
CONTEMPORARY ART
WITTE DE WITHSTRAAT 50
3012 BR ROTTERDAM
THE NETHERLANDS
+31 10 411 0144
http://www.wdw.nl
info@wdw.nl

Continuing our focus on in-depth presentations of individual artists’ work, Witte de With is proud to announce two solo exhibitions: Chloe Piene and Jesper Just.

Opening simultaneously, they present very different approaches to film by two artists of the same generation, both at an exciting stage in a burgeoning international career.

Jesper Just’s flms are extremely multi-faceted, so complex that the more one tries to analyze them, the more obscure they become. The harder we try to read the behavior of Just’s protagonists and the relationships between them, the deeper we stumble into the psychological traps generously positioned by the artist. We are caught off guard, swamped by our own raw, emotional reactions.

Just’s films can be regarded as incessantly shifting parts in a larger socio-political enquiry into the nature of human interaction and relationships: their pitfalls, failures and perversions, but also their dignity and beauty.

The exhibition – curated by Sophie von Olfers and Nicolaus Schafhausen – will feature several of his recent films and a new work commissioned for this project by Witte de With, the Ursula Blickle Foundation and S.M.A.K. (supported by the Danish Arts Council). The exhibition will run simultaneously at Witte de With and the Ursula Blickle Foundation, with a selection of Just’s films screened in the ursula blickle videolounge at the Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna during April. Just’s works will be on show at S.M.A.K in from April to June, who together with WdW Publishers and the Ursula Blickle Foundation are co-publishing the first major book on Just’s work to date.

Chloe Piene is known for her intense drawings and powerful videos. Since the late 1990s, she has been making charcoal drawings of naked figures, based on images of herself, others and, occasionally, animals. In her videos, Piene twists cinematic tools and conventions. Through the use of simple techniques like the slowing down of sound and image, she forces her viewers to engage at a more subversive level.

Extreme emotions such as isolation and fear are enhanced by strong chiaroscuro images, intense soundtracks and solitary performances. Piene’s work succeeds in a subtle engagement in the plight of victim and hero, viewer and protagonist.

The exhibition – curated by Renske Janssen and Nicolaus Schafhausen – includes a selection of Piene’s recent drawings and videos. It is accompanied by a publication exploring the role of sound in her films, the performative nature of her drawing, and the interplay of fear and fantasy in her practice.

EVENT

5 April, 8 pm
Book launch & artist’s talk: Fear and Fearlessness.
Chloe Piene in conversation with Renske Janssen, featuring clips from horror films that have influenced Piene’s work.
Free entry. Language: English.

PUBLICATIONS

Jesper Just – Film works 2002-2007
Writers: Philippe Van Cauteren, Nicolaus Schafhausen, Nina Folkersma, Sophie von Olfers, Andrew Renton, Ilsa Colsell, Jacob Lillemose
Languages: Dutch, English, German
Published by: Ursula Blickle Foundation, WdW Publishers & S.M.A.K.
Design: Atelier Susana Carvalho Kai Bernau
Publication date: 15 April 2007
ISBN: 978-90-73362-73-4

Chloe Piene
Writers: Nicholas McCarthy, Dominic Eichler, Renske Janssen, Chloe Piene, Nicolaus Schafhausen
Language: English
Published by: WdW Publishers
Design: Kummer & Herrman
Publication date: 5 April 2007
ISBN: 978-90-73362-74-1

For more information, please see our website http://www.wdw.nl or contact info@wdw.nl

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

Crac Alsace

“SO CLOSE / SO FAR AWAY -
SI PRÈS / SI LOIN”
H+F Collection

Exhibition
from 04.03.2007 > 20.05.2007 at Crac Alsace – Opening/brunch: 04.03.07 at 11.00 pm
Venues:
Be-Part, Waregem - (Belgium) 11/11/2007 > 27/01/2008
Museum Het Domein, Sittard- (the Netherlands) summer 2008

Artists:
Adel Abdessemed, Elina Brotherus, Desiree Dolron, Pierre Faure, Juul Hondius, Sutee Kunavichayanont, Esko Männikkö, Zwelethu Mthethwa, Masato Nakamura, Deimantas Narkevicius, Shirin Neshat, Manit Sriwanichpoom, Martine Stig, Céline Van Balen.

From March 4 to May 20, the CRAC Alsace will present So Close/So Far Away, the second exhibition composed of works selected from the collection of the Dutch writer Han Nefkens.

The works selected by curator Hilde Teerlinck deal with the theme of globalization and the paradoxes which it engenders within contemporary societies. We have the impression that our airplanes are flying ever faster, thereby reducing the distances which separate nations and human beings. Anywhere on Earth, everyone, or almost everyone, has immediate access to brands like Coca-Cola and McDonalds, and Moroccan or Thai restaurants can be found even in the smallest European cities. Cultures seem to be mixing together. But are we better acquainted with the citizens of other countries now that we share the same tastes in food and clothing? Does this exchange of customs and technological knowledge automatically bring us closer to foreign cultures?

Of course, this exhibition does not claim to provide answers to these crucial questions, but it does evoke these issues through the works of important artists who have dealt with them.

A French-English-German-Dutch catalogue with texts by Hilde Teerlinck, Han Nefkens, Michele Robecchi, Professor Quin Jian, Brian Curtin, Pascale Saarbach and Laura Zozlik will be published in conjunction with the exhibition.

http://www.cracalsace.com

+ CRAC ALSACE / 18, rue du Château / F-68130 Altkirch / http://www.cracalsace.com / +33 3 89 088 259

+ CRAC ALSACE is supported by: La Ville d’Altkirch, Le Conseil Régional d’Alsace, Le Conseil Général du Haut-Rhin, Le Ministère de la Culture et de la Communication – DRAC Alsace, Le Ministère de l’Education Nationale.

For more information go to: http://www.cracalsace.com