Artipedia - Arts News

Frac Lorraine

LIDA ABDUL / TANIA BRUGUERA
MAINTENANT, ICI, LA-BAS
[NOW, HERE, OVER THERE]
Frac Lorraine

Colored illustrations
96 pages
14 x 19 cm
Design: re-p.org

Edition in French and English
ISBN 978-2-911271-11-3
2007

An edition dedicated to two major artists Lida Abdul / Tania Bruguera with important contributions
from international art critics and curators.

What alternatives, what recourse do we have when faced with the prevailing images and information and the official rhetoric ? How can we go about conveying and testifying to what is going on Now, Here, Over There in a different way ? Lida Abdul (Afghanistan) and Tania Bruguera (Cuba) respectively engage in a reflexion on their country’s situation. They break with the distancing of images and set about finding an answer, in the form of an action, performance, or physical commitment, whether it be through the artist’s body or that of the viewer enlisted as a player.

Brought together for the first in a show, Lida Abdul and Tania Bruguera take on a role of player-cum-transmitter that extends well beyond the context of their own countries. They also address the question of how the experience of exile and migration ties in with artistic practices and performance art. The publication is an exceptional extension to the thought given to these issues during the show.

ARTISTS /
- LIDA ABDUL > Born in Kabul, Afghanistan (AF) in 1973, lives and works in Kabul (AF) and Los Angeles (US) / http://www.lidaabdul.com
- TANIA BRUGUERA > Born in Havana, Cuba (CU) in 1968, lives and works in Havana (CU) and Chicago (US) / http://www.taniabruguera.com/

AUTHORS / CONTRIBUTIONS
>"Now, here, over there: the body at war", Béatrice Josse, Frac Lorraine director.
>"On being here and still there", Nikos Papastergiadis, curator, art critic. Senior Lecturer and Deputy Director of the Australian Cenre, University of Melbourne.
>"Monument, Ruin, Memorial - Lida Abdul", Anthony Kiendl, Director of Plug In ICA in Winnipeg, Canada, Leverhulme Visiting Research Fellow at the School of Arts, Middlesex University, London, UK and faculty at The Banff Centre, Banff, Canada.
>"On the subject of Endurance - Lida Abdul", Sara Raza, London-based writer and curator of public programmes at Tate Modern and editor for Art Asia Pacific magazine for the region of West and Central Asia.
> "Tania Bruguera: Her Place and Her Moment", Yuneikys Villalonga, art critic and freelance curator, Havana, Cuba.

CONTACT /
49 NORD 6 EST - Fonds régional d’art contemporain de Lorraine /
1bis rue des Trinitaires, F-57000 Metz / Tel: 0033 (0)3 87 74 20 02 / Fax: 0033 (0)3 87 74 20 56
email : info@fraclorraine.org / site Internet : http://www.fraclorraine.org

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

Zacheta National Gallery of Art

Gustav Metzger. Works of 1995–2007
March 6 – April 22, 2007

Zacheta National Gallery of Art
Pl. Malachowskiego 3
00-916 Warsaw, Poland
tel. (+48 22) 827 58 54
http://www.zacheta.art.pl
Tues - Sun 12 to 8p.m.

The Zacheta exhibition presents only a fragment of the rich oeuvre of Gustav Metzger, whose personal history is as fascinating and dramatic as History to which he refers in his works. Born in Nuremberg in 1926 to an Orthodox Jewish family, its roots in Poland, he was sent in 1939 to Great Britain as part of the Refugee Children’s Movement, thanks to which he was saved from the Holocaust. He has never accepted any citizenship and lives as a stateless person. Lives and works chiefly in London.

The exhibition in Zacheta National Gallery of Art presents Metzger’s works from the 90 – the cycle Historic Photographs, which take up the problem of greatest catastrophies, as well as the newest ones, sculptures-installations In Memoriam and Eichmann and the Angel, referring to the tragedy of Holocaust.

The exhibition is divided between four galleries, each of which constitutes a chapter in the narrative. The first of those is called The Killing Fields. Entering the gallery, the viewer has to pass through a corridor on the wall of which there hangs a huge, rastered-out (but still recognisable) photograph of Hungarian Jews undergoing selection on the Auschwitz ramp in 1942. The room presents objects from the Historic Photographs series, referring to the various turning-point events and bloody conflicts of the 20th century: the 1938 Anschluss of Austria, the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, the napalm air raids against civilian targets in Vietnam in 1972, events from the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, or an ecological disaster – the construction of the Twyford Down highway in the UK. The pictures are almost always covered, their visibility is limited or access to them is hindered, as if the artist was referring to certain clichés, the mediated images of those t
ragedies present in the collective consciousness and memory. Sometimes the viewer is allowed to act. For instance, he can raise a huge curtain and crawl under it to try, from so close a perspective, to examine a huge photo on the floor (To Crawl Into). But instead of really seeing it, he will be able only to guess, to work out, fragments of the image he knows is there: a representation of Viennese Jews forced to clean the sidewalks on their knees following the annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany.

The next gallery room is called In Memoriam. Besides Historic Photographs related to images from the liquidation of the Warsaw ghetto, closely boarded up here, the room includes also an installation from 2006, In Memoriam. Huge cardboard boxes, arranged in rows, are a reference to Peter Eisenmann’s Monument to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin.

Another part of the exhibition is Terror and Oppression – the latest work from the Historic Photographs series, made specially for the Zacheta show. It is comprised by two large-format photographs hanging vis-à-vis each other: Jews waiting in even queues for registration in Buchenwald in 1938, and Germans entering Poland in 1939 in equally even lines. The victim and the perpetrator shown in a similar order and array.

The narrative is closed by a multi-part 1995 installation called Eichmann and the Angel. A reconstruction of the cage in which Eichmann was kept during his trial in Jerusalem stands opposite a wall of newspapers. Alongside the other, longer, wall a transmission belt has been placed, and in front of it lie the newspaper batches left from the construction of the wall. The viewer can spread the newspaper and place it on the moving belt. The machine transports the paper, which eventually lands on the floor on a heap of similarly ‘used’ newspapers. A nameless, mass-scale, nonsensical production of chaos and destruction continues. Hanging above it all is a reproduction of Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus. The original painting was owned by Walter Benjamin, the Paris-based German Jewish philosopher who in 1940 tried to flee from France to the US. Stopped at the border in Port Bou in Spain, when it turned out the papers he had would not get him to the US, he committed suicide. ‘Port Bou’, ‘
New York’, ‘Jerusalem’ – say inscriptions visible from the Eichmann cage. New York – the death place of Hannah Arendt, whose reports from the Nazi criminal’s trial gave rise to Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil – one of the 20th century’s most important pieces of literature.

All of the presented works also confront themselves with the history of the place where they are shown. The history of Poland, of Warsaw, of the Zacheta building – where Gabriel Narutowicz, independent Poland’s first elected President was murdered in 1922. The history of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, which took place not far from the Zacheta and another anniversary of which will be celebrated on April 19. The history in a way still too often forgotten, even though it is part of our identity.

curators Pontus Kyander, Hanna Wróblewska
collaboration Julia Leopold

The exhibition is made in collaboration with Kunsthalle Lund in Sweden and supported by Goethe-Institut.

media patronage: Gazeta Wyborcza, Polityka, TVP, The Warsaw Voice, Onet.pl, Tygodnik Powszechny, EMPiK

For more information go to: http://www.zacheta.art.pl

Reykjavik Art Museum

LIVE
SHOW AS EXHIBITION
Pierre Huyghe’s solo exhibition at the Reykjavik Art Museum, Iceland.
23 February – 29 April

The internationally renowned artist Pierre Huyghe opened a solo exhibition at Reykjavik Art Museum’s downtown location, Hafnarhus, on February 23rd. The exhibition, which is organized in connection with the French cultural festival in Reykjavik, Pourquoi Pas?, will be on display until April 29th, 2007.

For the exhibition, Huyghe has created a new installation that places one of his films in the context of Icelandic art from the museum’s collection. Portraits and landscape paintings from different periods are brought to life through a time-activated lighting program designed by Huyghe. As the title of the exhibition –suggests, the connotations of a live music performance or theater production are invited, but the subtle changes of the colors and movement of the light, carefully choreographed by the artist, bring new and complex dimension to the show and turn it into an art exhibition.

Three films by Huyghe are exhibited at the museum, each in a specially designed environment that captures the atmosphere of the films. The films are ‘This is not a Time for Dreaming’ (2004), ‘A Journey That Wasn’t’ (2006), and ‘Streamside Day Follies’ (2003).

Huyghe was born in Paris in 1962 and still lives and works there. He has gained international recognition for his installations and exhibitions in many of the world’s leading museums, including the Tate Modern in London (2006), the Moderna Museet in Stockholm (2005), and the Guggenheim and The Dia Center for the Arts in New York (2003). He represented France at the Venice Biennale in 2001.

For further information please contact:
Soffía Karlsdóttir
PR and Communications Manager of Reykjavík Art Museum
soffia.karlsdottir@reykjavik.is
tel. + 00 354 590 1200 fax + 00 354 590 1201
http://www.artmuseum.is

For more information go to: http://www.artmuseum.is