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Sharjah Biennial 8

The Sharjah Biennial 8 (SB8), inaugurates on April 4th, 2007 in Sharjah, United Arab Emirates (UAE).

Director: Hoor Al Qasimi
Artistic Director: Jack Persekian
Curators: Mohammed Kazem, Eva Scharrer, Jonathan Watkins

The Sharjah Biennial 8 (SB8), inaugurates on April 4th, 2007 in Sharjah, United Arab Emirates (UAE).The Biennial’s theme proposes art as a way of creating a better understanding about our relationship with nature and the environment, whilst considering its social, political, cultural and subjective dimensions in an interdisciplinary way. SB8 will focus on the renewed role of art in addressing a wide range of issues that alarmingly affect human existence on earth. The Biennial is aware of the critical ambiguity of its subject matter, and of the fact that it is part of the product-producing and -consuming society, and of the constantly growing tribe of biennials, that year after year, encourage a number of artists, curators, audiences and artworks to travel around the globe. Still, SB8 needs to be critical and will attempt to implicate all sectors of society into questioning our social, political, and ecological praxis.

The Biennial’s programme includes exhibitions, performances, a film programme curated by Mark Nash and a symposium organised in collaboration with the American University of Sharjah, RSA (London) and curatorial practice Latitudes (Barcelona). The entire city of Sharjah is being offered to more than 80 international artists for the creation of new site-specific work. Exhibitions, performances and events will take place across a wide range of venues including the Sharjah Art Museum, the Expo Centre, the Heritage Area of Sharjah, and several outdoor urban and natural sites. The Sharjah Biennial Art Prizes will be awarded to two winning artists by a jury composed of Negar Azimi, Charles Esche and Geeta Kapur. Furthermore, UNESCO will award their Prize for the Promotion of the Arts & the Young Digital Creator Award, in collaboration with the Sharjah Biennial 8.

Participating Artists
Ignasi Aballi; Lida Abdul; Jennifer Allora & Guillermo Calzadilla; Lara Almarcegui; El Anatsui; Roy Arden; Vladimir Arkhipov; Mireille Astore; Lara Baladi; Noor Al-Bastaki; Taysir Batniji; Marjolijn Dijkman; Bright Ugochukwu Eke; Sophie Elbaz; e-Xplo (Rene Gabri, Heimo Lattner, Erin McGonigle ) with Ayreen Anastas; Touhami Ennadre; Mounir Fatmi; Peter Fend; Franz Gertsch; Abdulnasser Gharem; Simryn Gill; Tue Greenfort; Group Tuesday (Fadi Abdallah, Bilal Khbeiz, Walid Sadek); Graham Gussin; Khaled Hafez; Henrik Håkansson; Anawana Haloba; Ilana Halperin; Mona Hatoum; Susan Hefuna; Uschi Huber; Mohamed Ahmed Ibrahim; Alfredo Jaar; Gulnara Kasmalieva and Muratbek Djumaliev; Marya Kazoun; Amal Kenawy; Leopold Kessler; Suchan Kinoshita; Joachim Koester; Christina Kubisch; Deborah Ligorio; Claudia Losi; Lutz & Guggisberg; Tea Mäkipää; Hassan Meer; Gustav Metzger; MindBomb; Abdul Rahman Al Ma’aini; Maha Mustafa; Jesus Bubu Negron; Jacques Nimki; OMA/ Rem
Koolhaas & Reinier de Graaf; Cornelia Parker; Pablo Patrucco; Dan Perjovschi; Dan Peterman; Marjetica Potrc; Michael Rakowitz; Ibrahim Rashid; Noguchi Rika; Budoor Al Riyami; Raeda Saadeh; Abdallah Alsaadi; Huda Saeed Saif; Michael Sailstorfer; Tomas Saraceno; Joe Scanlan; Zineb Sedira; Anas Al-Shaikh; Ranjani Shettar; SOI Project; Samir Srouji; Simon Starling; Gerda Steiner & Jörg Lenzlinger; Rirkrit Tiravanija; Mierle Laderman Ukeles; Sergio Vega; Luca Vitone; Shatha Al-Wadi; Camille Zakharia; Ahmed Mater Al-Ziad.

The Biennial’s commissions include works by artists like Lara Almarcegui, Michael Rakowitz and Joachim Koester, who assess the need for archiving and annotating information and facts by recalling landscapes, structures and national treasures. Others, such as Marjetica Potrc and Steiner/Lenzlinger address the vital need for fresh drinking water, and Kessler examines the gross manifestation of greed and the perversion of need, in his film work of the Hydropolis underwater restaurant. New commissions will also include the first realisation of the monumental, 1972 installation proposal by Gustav Metzger, where 120 cars are arranged around a cubic glass case and their exhaust fumes made to fill the transparent cube. Artists such as Ranjani Shettar and Luca Vitone have chosen to develop works for the Heritage Area, which is a complex of restored historic, low-rise buildings in the traditional architecture of the Emirates.

The Biennial’s Symposium forms itself around five key panel discussions, including presentations and workshops. Discussions will tackle the following topics: The sense of ‘eco’ in the practice of the everyday. Can design and architecture be a political act? How far are recycled and sustainable materials a consideration for artists? What is more important, the issues or the art? And finally, what is the future of the city as a habitat for humanity? The Symposium will include a new video interview with Noam Chomsky by Cornelia Parker, and speakers include Rula Sadik (General Manager, The Design Group, Nakheel, Dubai), Samer Kamal (founder of Bee’ah, the Sharjah Environmental Company), and Stephanie Smith (Director of Collections and Exhibitions, Curator of Contemporary Art, Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago), alongside other international experts, and members of the artistic and directorial teams of the Biennial.

Curated by Mark Nash, the Film Programme includes Andre Zdravic’s ‘Riverglass – A River Ballet in Four Seasons’ – an underwater narrative tracing the path and seasons of a river in Slovenia which has come to represent nationalism and purity; Hubert Sauper’s ‘Darwins Nightmare’ - a starkly juxtaposed foray into the potential ecological disaster zone of Lake Victoria, and the surrounding inhabitants’ ebbs and flow to the area, and Oki Hiroyoki’s ‘The Form of the Palace of Matsumae-kun’s Brothers 1’ - a nostalgic look into communities, through Hiroyoko’s video diaries since 1989, alluding to the changes we must all make with regards to our ecological imprints.

SB8 Programme

3 April, 2007: Press Preview
4 April, 2007: VIP Opening
5 & 6 April, 2007: Symposium at Expo Centre, Sharjah

From 5 April – 4 June 2007:
Exhibitions Opening Hours:
Saturday to Thursday: 9am to 9pm
Friday: 3pm – 9pm

Schedule to be confirmed: Film Programme
Artists’ Performances

About the Sharjah Biennial

Initiated in 1993, under the patronage of H. H. Dr. Sheikh Sultan Bin Mohammad Al Qasimi, Member of the Supreme Council and Ruler of Sharjah, the Sharjah Biennial is organised by the Department of Culture and Information of the Emirate of Sharjah, United Arab Emirates. It occupies a key position in the region for the production and presentation of art and is an active player in the international art arena. The Biennial strives to encourage dialogue between artists, art institutions and organisations locally, regionally and internationally, and seeks to promote cross-cultural exchange whilst fostering experimentation and the production of site-specific work for Sharjah.

For additional information contact:
Mahita El Bacha Urieta, Biennial Coordinator:
mahita.elbacha-urieta@sharjahbiennial.org - M. + 971 504 8255

DIRECTOR: Hoor Al Qasimi - ARTISTIC DIRECTOR: Jack Persekian
CURATORS: Mohammed Kazem, Eva Scharrer, Jonathan Watkins

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

OVERGADEN

21 DAYS – 21 YEARS

5 March – 25 March 2007

OVERGADEN – Institute of Contemporary Art
OVERGADEN NEDEN VANDET 17,
DK-1414 KØBENHAVN K
+45 32 57 72 73
INFO@OVERGADEN.ORG
http://WWW.OVERGADEN.ORG

For three weeks in March OVERGADEN – Institute of Contemporary Art in Copenhagen will light a fire under the Danish art scene with the festival 21 Days – 21 Years.

The festival, which takes place from 5 through 25 March 2007, marks OVERGADEN’s 21 year history with a programme lasting 21 days. OVERGADEN will be hosting a series of different events such as artist talks with Joachim Koester, Annika Eriksson and Simon Starling, book and beer launch by Superflex, lectures by Alex Farquharson and Nina Möntmann, art for children and adults with Akassen and Simone Aaberg Kærn & Suzette Gemzøe, theatre with BankMalbekRau, food by artist group La Loko as well as several public debates and discussions.

Central to 21 Days – 21 Years is a presentation of OVERGADEN’s unique history as one of Copenhagen’s most experimental exhibition spaces for Danish and international contemporary art. Since it was founded in 1986, OVERGADEN has not only showed the way for young, experimental art but has also contributed to creating debate and dialogue about art today. OVERGADEN has invited the Danish artist Kristina Ask to search the archives and stage this 21 year history and the exhibition space’s crucial role on the Danish art scene.

During the festival OVERGADEN will collaborate with the artist-run TV station tv-tv who will be setting up a studio at OVERGADEN, and with the arts portal aarhus.nu who will update daily with interviews and reports on their website. Students from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen will set up and run a bar, thereby creating a meeting place in OVERGADEN’s characteristic rooms by Christianshavn’s Canal.

21 Days – 21 Years marks the transition for OVERGADEN from being an artist-run exhibition space to an art institution with a full-time director with a curatorial background. At this special time in the history of the place, OVERGADEN is not only putting itself and its own role as a non-profit exhibition space on the agenda, but also focussing on art institutions’ responsibilities and possibilities today seen in a national as well as international perspective. To this end we have invited a number of leading artists, critics and curators who will contribute to the debate surrounding the relationship between art and its institutions. Participants include Emily Pethick (Casco – Office for Art , Design and Theory, Utrecht), Kristoffer Akselbo (artist, Copenhagen), Nav Haq (Gasworks, London), Tone O. Nielsen (curator, Copenhagen Vanessa Joan Müller (Düsseldorf Kunstverein, European Kunsthalle), Nicolai Wallner (gallerist, Copenhagen) and artists and curators from Signal (
artist-run space, Malmö). See http://www.overgaden.org for an overview of all of the festival’s events.

21 Days – 21 Years is a visionary suggestion of how to challenge and expand the framework of an art institution.

OVERGADEN hereby welcomes the press and the public to an extraordinary cultural event with a long series of free events that are all open to the public.

Come inside and be informed, provoked and join the debate!

21 Days – 21 years
5 March - 25 March 2007
Opening times: Tuesday-Sunday 3-8pm

PRIVATE VIEW Monday 5 March 2007 at 5pm
Speeches by Henriette Bretton-Meyer (Artistic Director, OVERGADEN), Jacob Lillemose (Chairman of OVERGADEN’s board), Lars Liebst (Chairman of the Danish Arts Council) and Martin Geertsen (Mayor of the Cultural and Recreational Committee, Copenhagen City Council).

OVERGADEN – Institute of Contemporary Art is supported by the Danish Arts Council’s Committee for Visual Arts.
21 Years – 21 Days is presented with support from Montana.

For more information please contact Lotte Boesen Toftgaard on tel: +45 32 57 72 73 or email: lbt@overgaden.org

For more information go to: http://WWW.OVERGADEN.ORG

Peggy Guggenheim Collection

Richard Pousette-Dart
February 17 – May 20, 2007
Curated by: Philip Rylands
in collaboration with Luca Massimo Barbero

Peggy Guggenheim Collection
701 Dorsoduro
30123 Venice
ITALY

phone +39 041 2405411
fax +39 041 5206885
email info@guggenheim-venice.it
http://www.guggenheim-venice.it

RICHARD POUSETTE-DART is the first retrospective of the paintings of this distinguished American painter to be held in Europe. He was the youngest of the pioneering New York group of the Abstract Expressionists, active in New York from the early 1940s. Curated by Philip Rylands, director of the Collection in Venice, together with Luca Massimo Barbero, the exhibition presents 45 paintings, covering Pousette-Dart’s entire career. The exhibition is organized with the Estate of the Artist, and the artist’s widow Evelyn Pousette-Dart, and with the support of the American Contemporary Art Gallery, Munich.

Richard Pousette-Dart (1916 Saint Paul, Minnesota - 1992 New York) belongs to the first generation of the Abstract Expressionists and was a founding member of the so-called New York School, which included other great names of American Modernism such as Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and Willem de Kooning. Peggy Guggenheim gave Pousette-Dart a solo exhibition in 1947 at her Art of This Century gallery, where the artist’s best-known masterpiece, Symphony Number 1, The Transcendental (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, c. 1941-42), was shown for the first time.

Pousette-Dart made essential contributions to the nascent Abstract Expressionist movement. Between 1941 and 1942 he began painting outsize canvases, including Undulation (1941-42) on display in the exhibition, which anticipated Jackson Pollock’s ‘break-through’ to mural-scale work in 1943. Pousette-Dart’s technique changed at this time, with an emphasis on matter, gesture and layering that were the first pictorial statements of what came to be known as ‘action painting.’ Crucifixion Comprehension of the Atom (1944) magnificently exemplifies this. Pousette-Dart’s interest in ancient and Native American mythology and imagery, in works such Bird Woman (1939-40) and Abstract Eye (1941-43), as an image resource for the revelation of hidden truths, made him a leader among New York painters in the early 40s known as the “Myth-Makers.” In 1950 he was photographed together with 14 other Abstract Expressionist painters in an image that has entered the history books as the group of “The
Irascibles.”

Pousette-Dart was considerably influenced by Oriental philosophy and American transcendental thinking. The conviction that the materials and abstract symbols of painting could reveal universal truths and the realm of the spirit never failed him. The solitude he required for this life’s work required him in 1951 to move out of New York. In 1958 he and his wife, the poet Evelyn Gracey Pousette-Dart, moved to the countryside near Suffern, New York, where his studio is still preserved today. Glowing and mysterious “white” paintings, c. 1950-51, include the masterpiece Descending Bird Forms. Pousette-Dart’s work in the 1960s contributed to the color field and lyrical abstraction that were an important evolution of early Abstract Expressionism, with the added charge of the spiritual quest that runs like a continuous thread through all Pousette-Dart’s work from the time he decided definitively to become a painter in 1939. They have titles evoking the magic of their radiant, pulsatin
g and subtly colored surfaces such as Amaranth Garden, Night Landscape, Golden Presence, Byzantine Cathedral, and Lost in the Beginnings of Infinity.

For Pousette-Dart, painting was a gradual and cumulative process revealing atavistic forms and symbols which became a visual metaphor and stimulus and for understanding the complexity of Being. Visitors to the Peggy Guggenheim Collection exhibition can marvel at the sheer abundance and density of the layered surfaces of the artist’s mystical images, pulsating with pigment and life. In 1947 he wrote “I strive to express the spiritual nature of the universe. Painting for me is a dynamic balance and wholeness of life; it is mysterious and transcending, yet solid and real.”

The fully illustrated catalogue, published by Skira, includes essays by Kirstin Hübner and Lowery S. Sims, director of the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, with a chronological biography by Enda Horgan. Technical sponsor: Tratto srl, Fine Art Shippers.

Richard Pousette-Dart

February 17 – May 20, 2007
Opening hours: daily 10 am to 6 pm (closed on Tuesday, open May 1st)

Peggy Guggenheim Collection
701 Dorsoduro
30123 Venice
ITALY
Phone +39 041 2405411
Fax +39 041 5206885
Email info@guggenheim-venice.it
http://www.guggenheim-venice.it

Press Office:
Peggy Guggenheim Collection
Tel. +39 0412405404; press@guggenheim-venice.it

For more information go to: http://www.guggenheim-venice.it