Artipedia - Arts News

Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam

PAUL CHAN – Lights & Drawings
9 March - 10 June 2007

Stedelijk Museum CS
Post CS Building, 2nd floor
Oosterdokskade 5
1011 AD Amsterdam, NL
Tel. +31 (0)20 5732.911
Fax. +31 (0)20 6752.716
http://www.stedelijk.nl

Light and shadow are the focus of the exhibition ‘Lights & Drawings’ by American artist and activist Paul Chan (1973, Hong Kong). His projections, together with charcoal drawings, collages and digital studies are presented in six rooms. The works all revolve around the digital animation series The 7 Lights which Chan has been working on since 2005 and which will ultimately consist of seven pieces. This exhibition in Stedelijk Museum CS, Chan’s first major museum presentation in Europe, presents all the Lights Chan has completed so far.

The Lights series is described by some as a commentary on a world on the edge of disintegration. In the words of the artist, the series is about ‘light and light that has been extinguished’. In the title, although the word light is literally crossed out, the horizontal line can also be read as a ray of light, and symbolizes the tension between light and dark which is the backdrop of Chan’s melancholy, sometimes sinister, animations.

With The 7 Lights Chan intended to make a group of works that deliver a physical experience. With one exception, the Lights are projected from the ceiling onto the floor, or partly on the floor and wall. The works are structured as a cycle of day and night, sunrise to sunset. They are mostly triangular or trapezoid in shape, and reminiscent of light pouring through a window - a window opening onto a faraway outside world, where only the shadows of events are visible.

In The 7 Lights a gamut of contradictions collides: upward and downward movements, inside-outside, slow-fast, light-dark, chaos-order, utopia and apocalypse, the sacred and the profane. In the cycle, Chan makes extensive reference to Christianity and religion in general.
‘I don’t have much belief in faith’, says the artist in a recent interview. ‘What I do believe in is looking at new ways to reinterpret, and even mistranslate, what we imagine as history into another form and I think that’s what art is for. Art is a sovereign place in which things can be up for grabs again’.

Biography
Paul Chan was born in Hong Kong in 1973 and grew up in Nebraska. He graduated with an MFA in Film, Video and New Media from Bard College in 2002, having earned his BFA in Video Digital Arts at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1996. Chan’s teaching activities included lecturing at the Graduate School of Fine Arts, the University of Pennsylvania and the School of the Arts Institute of Chicago. Chan lives and works in New York. His digital animations were previously exhibited at the Whitney Biennale 2006 in New York, the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, Para/site Art Space in Hong Kong, Portikus, Frankfurt, amongst others.

Brochure + Bulletin
A brochure with background information will accompany the exhibition. The Stedelijk Museum Bulletin no. 2 / 2007 (published at beginning of April) will also include an article on the work of Paul Chan, written by Martijn van Nieuwenhuyzen, the exhibition curator.

Press contact: Arjan Reinders, tel. +31 (0)20 5732.662 / pressoffice@stedelijk.nl
General press info and (high res.) images: http://www.stedelijk.nl/press

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Stedelijk Museum CS
Post CS Building, 2nd floor
Oosterdokskade 5
1011 AD Amsterdam, NL
Tel. +31 (0)20 5732.911
Fax. +31 (0)20 6752.716
Open: daily from 10.00 -18.00.
Info & directions: http://www.stedelijk.nl

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

The Vilcek Foundation

Dr. Rudolf Jaenisch and Denise Scott Brown
Named Recipients of The 2007 Vilcek
Foundation Prizes

Honoring the Achievements of
Prominent Immigrants

Prizes To Be Awarded on Wednesday,
March 14, 2007

The Vilcek Foundation has announced the names of the recipients of its annual Prizes in biomedical research and in the arts and humanities. The 2007 Prize recipient for biomedical science is developmental biologist and stem cell researcher, Dr. Rudolf Jaenisch; architect, urban planner, author and educator, Denise Scott Brown is receiving the Prize for arts and humanities. The Vilcek Foundation Prizes are awarded annually to foreign-born individuals for extraordinary contributions to society in the United States. The Vilcek Foundation is one of the very few foundations to bring together the fields of science and arts, and to acknowledge the contributions of some of their most prominent figures. The mission of the Foundation reflects the careers and passions of its founders, Dr. Jan and Marica Vilcek.

The Prizes will be given to their recipients during the second Annual Awards Dinner on Wednesday, March 14, 2007 at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in New York, a private event to which some 250 guests will be invited, among them prominent scientists, architects, cultural leaders, opinion-makers, and arts patrons.

About the Prize Recipients:

A native of Germany, Dr. Rudolf Jaenisch is a Professor of Biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and founding Member of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research. He demonstrated for the first time that foreign DNA could be taken up by the DNA of mouse embryos, and that mice derived from these embryos carried the foreign genes in their tissues. This work established the feasibility of gene therapy. Dr. Jaenisch is also a leader in the field of therapeutic cloning. Furthermore, Dr. Jaenisch showed that embryonic stem cells can be procured without harming a viable embryo.

Born in Zambia and raised in Johannesburg, Denise Scott Brown has helped open the field of architecture to the ideas of pluralism and multiculturalism, social justice and activism, pop art and other contemporary influences. Ms. Scott Brown has been a principal at the Philadelphia firm Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates, whose projects include the Sainsbury Wing of the National Gallery in London and the Conseil Général complex in Toulouse. She is a noted expert on campus planning and has recently written on urban planning and design for the World Trade Center site and New Orleans.

About The Vilcek Foundation:

The Vilcek Foundation strives to increase public awareness of the enormous role immigrants play in enriching professional, academic and artistic activities in the United States. The Vilcek Foundation was established in 2000 by Jan and Marica Vilcek, immigrants from the former Czechoslovakia, and its programmatic mission was inspired by their careers in biomedical science and art history, respectively, as well as their personal experiences and gratitude as successful immigrants.

The Vilcek Foundation Prizes are important national awards that honor outstanding creative achievements by immigrants to America. These prizes were first awarded in 2006 to cancer researcher Joan Massagué, Chairman of the Cancer and Biology Genetics Program at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York, and to the artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude, creators of The Gates project installed in Central Park in 2005. Vilcek Foundation Prize winners receive a $50,000 cash award and a trophy created by designer Stefan Sagmeister.

The Vilcek Foundation recently purchased a former carriage house on East 73rd Street. Once renovated, the building will house the Foundation’s administrative office and serve as a venue for its programs, including lectures and exhibitions. The Vilcek Foundation is a 501(c)(3) private operating foundation based in New York City.

For further information on The Vilcek Foundation, please visit http://www.vilcek.org or call (212) 472-4720.

Media Contact:
For more information, interviews, or images:
Antoine Vigne or Shannon Heth
Blue Medium
T: (212) 675-1800
E: antoine@bluemedium.com or shannon@bluemedium.com

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

Y8

JONATHAN MONK – WITHOUT TITLE
February 8th -10 th April 2007
opening hours: Mon thru Friday 5 –10 pm
introduction: Stephan Schmidt-Wulffen, Akademie der Bildenden Künste, Vienna

As Stefan Berg phrases it in his introduction to the exhibition in Hannover (March 2006) “his works are irritating games with language and ideas”. This places Monk in the tradition of Conceptual Art. At the same time the artist undermines the strict principles of this movement, when he imbues them with aspects of everyday life and confronts them with his biography. His photographs, drawings, objects, installations and films reproduce existing works and seminal works of art history in the 20th century.

In fact Jonathan Monk initially proposed for Y8 to repeat John Armleder’s recent installation (80 fir trees were suspended from the ceiling), except Monk would have turned the installation around, so the trees would have been planted firmly on the ground: “Maybe we should do it again, but the right way…”, he suggested. His artistic process is less about finding/inventing new objects, rather he is concerned with finding again what potentially was at the beginning of creating an art work and went missing as a result of modes of perception and mystification. Strategies of recontextualisation, appropriation, reflection, criticism, doubling and shifting of proportion could certainly be read in a distanced manner, if they were not connected with autobiographical facts. This connection releases Monk’s works into a hybrid field of tension and creates a place, which manages to juxtapose and thus confront concepts and elements.

The floor of Y8 is divided into a grid of 36 equally large fields. They point towards the East and serve for the orientation of daily yoga practice. While Armleder decided to paint over the floor with golden paint so that the slightly elevated marks of the grid appeared as a relief, Monk decided to adapt an iconic late work by the constructivist artist Piet Mondrian (1872-1944) for the grid structure. Inevitably discontinuities occur. In addition his earlier works A journey from here to there and Zero O’ Clock (both courtesy Galerie Meyer Rigger, Karlsruhe) will be shown together with new works by the artist, which relate explicitly to Y8 and its function.

Y8 developed from the long-term project <i.participating, at the same time (since 1995 at Pat Hearn Gallery, NY). With this project Benita-Immanuel Grosser explore the possibility of launching the philosophy and practice of yoga into the context of art, as well as transferring it to the architectural and socially coded situation of exhibition spaces. After this project several public yoga sessions took place at a variety of international art institutions. With the intention of opening up a discussion of contemporary art in the context of yoga Benita-Immanuel Grosser founded Y8 in 2000.

Y8 as a place continuously changes perspective through the different exhibitions.
A grid, calculated especially for the Y8 space, serves as platform for the sessions at the museums.

Y8 projects: 2001 Katharina Grosse - 2002 Angela Bulloch - 2002 Hamburger -Kunsthalle: VIDEOClub 99 - 2003 Silvia Kolbowski - 2004 Rita McBride/Glen Rubsamen - 2005 Klaus Frahm - 2006 John Armleder - 2007 Jonathan Monk

For more information check out our website on http://artyoga.de

Y8
Kleiner Kielort 8
20144 Hamburg
Germany
T + 49 –40 41424546
post@artyoga.de
http://www.artyoga.de

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