Artipedia - Arts News

e-flux

THE BEST SURPRISE IS
NO SURPRISE

copyright: 2006 e-flux, JRP|Ringier, participating institutions
all rights reserved
4-color printing, 316 pgs.
ISBN 10: 3-905770-05-9
ISBN 13: 978-3-905770-05-6

e-flux and JRP|Ringier are pleased to announce a London book launch for a new publication, entitled The Best Surprise Is No Surprise. The book launch will take place at the Serpentine Gallery, London, on Friday, March 16, 2007, from 6:30 pm - 8:30 pm. The evening’s program will include Anton Vidokle and Julieta Aranda in conversation with Hans Ulrich Obrist and Julia Peyton-Jones, as well as surprise guests.

Over the past several years, electronic communications have had a transformative effect on the public discourse on contemporary art by removing temporal and geographical barriers to the flow of information and, for the first time, putting local exhibition makers and institutions in contact with an international art public unmediated by the univocal perspective perpetuated by the few leading art journals.

The Best Surprise Is No Surprise covers a 7-year period beginning in 1999, and chronicles communiqués for exhibitions, publications, events and symposia chosen from the archive of electronic announcements originally distributed by e-flux, and selected both by the e-flux readers and by some of the most active international curators, artists, critics and art historians of our time, including:

Zdenka Badovinac, Ariane Beyn, Mircea Cantor, Binna Choi, Elena Filipovic, Liam Gillick, Jörg Heiser, Jennifer Higgie, Jens Hoffmann, Eungie Joo, Samuel Keller, Francesco Manacorda, Viktor Misiano, Naeem Mohaiemen, Jessica Morgan, Molly Nesbit, Ernesto Neto, Natasa Petresin, Brian Sholis, Nancy Spector, Christine Tohme, Barbara Vanderlinden, Octavio Zaya, andTirdad Zolghadr.

The book, published by JRP|Ringier press, contains an essay by Daniel Birnbaum and an interview by Hans Ulrich Obrist with Anton Vidokle & Julieta Aranda.

The Best Surprise Is No Surprise
copyright: 2006 e-flux, JRP|Ringier, participating institutions
all rights reserved
4-color printing, 316 pgs.

ISBN 10: 3-905770-05-9
ISBN 13: 978-3-905770-05-6

For further information regarding the publication and the launch please contact the Serpentine Gallery, JRP|Ringier, or e-flux

We hope to see you!

Serpentine Gallery
Kensington Gardens
London W2 3XA
http://www.serpentinegallery.org
t. 020 7298 1522
f. 020 7402 4103

JRP|Ringier
Letzigraben 134
CH-8047 Zürich
T. +41 (0) 43 311 27 50
F. +41 (0) 43 311 2751
http://www.jrp-ringier.com / info@jrp-ringier.com

e-flux
53 Ludlow Street
New York City
10002 USA
T/F +212 619 3356
http://www.e-flux.com / liz@e-flux.com

JRP|Ringier books are available internationally at selected bookstores and the following distribution partners:

Switzerland: AVA Verlagsauslieferung AG, 8910 Affoltern a.A., buch 2000@ava.ch; http://www.ava.ch

Germany and Austria: vice versa Vertrieb, D-10405 Berlin, info@vice-versa-vertrieb.de;
http://www.vice-versa-vertrieb.de

France: Les Presses du réel, F-21000 Dijon, info@lespressesdureel.com; http://www.lespressesdureel.com

UK: Art Data, London W4 5HB, info@artdata.co.uk; http://www.artdata.co.uk

USA: D.A.P. Distributed Art Publishers, NY 10014, dap@dapinc.com; http://www.artbook.com

Other countries: IDEA Books, NL-1011 RK Amsterdam, idea@ideabooks.nl; http://www.ideabooks.nl

Asia: D.A.P. Distributed Art Publishers and IDEA Books

For more information go to: http://www.e-flux.com

Australian Pavilion

3 artists, 3 projects, 3 sites - Australia at the 2007 Venice Biennale
Commissioner John Kaldor AM
Senior Curatorial Advisor Juliana Engberg
http://www.australiavenicebiennale.com.au
venice2007@ozco.gov.au

Newly commissioned projects by three Australian artists will be located at three sites in Venice: Susan Norrie at Palazzo Giustinian Lolin, Daniel von Sturmer at the Australian Pavilion and Callum Morton at Palazzo Zenobio.

Susan Norrie explores the pervasive geopolitical issues of a planet in turmoil in her video installation at Palazzo Giustinian Lolin. HAVOC brings together images of environmental trauma and cultural belief. Focusing on the tumultuous disaster zone of East Java, Norrie has followed the volcanic, seismic and climate disturbances which have wrought devastation to the Indigenous peoples of the area. Norrie’s work bears witness to a return to ancient rituals in response to a deluge of mud. Underground music collides with mud and mysticism in a sensory overload.

Daniel von Sturmer will continue his ‘experiments with space’ through an architectural intervention, The Object of Things, especially designed for the Australian Pavilion. What is the interaction between pictorial space and real space, between expectation and perception? A continuous platform supports video projections playing with painterly values and everyday objects. It moves into, over, around and through the space, shifting height and direction as it goes. The play of the perceptible will unfold and punctuate the pavilion’s membrane.

Callum Morton is known for his large-scale, architecturally inspired installations. Valhalla, at Palazzo Zenobio, is a ruined building, his childhood home: ‘torched, sutured together and shot through with holes .. a monument to all those skeletal structures left dangling after disaster strikes’. But this dilapidated domestic exterior is no ordinary ruin. Visitors can enter the ruin to find an immaculate interior space, a corporate cavity where lifts plummet, seismic shudders are felt and muzak soothes. Allusions to the catastrophe movies of Hollywood, ground zero, and various war zones are coupled with the traumatic site of domestic destruction.

The Australia Council for the Arts
The Australia Council has managed and funded Australian representation for more than 30 years. Previous Australian representatives at the Venice Biennale include Judy Watson, Howard Arkley, Patricia Piccinini and Ricky Swallow.

For more information go to: http://www.australiavenicebiennale.com.au

National Glass Centre, UK

Lynette Wallworth – Damavand Mountain, Hold: Vessel 1, 2001, Invisible by Night
Produced by Forma in association with the National Glass Centre
17 March – 17 June 2007

National Glass Centre,
Contemporary Gallery,
Liberty Way, Sunderland,
SR6 0GL, UK
T: +44 (0)191 515 555
Monday - Sunday 10.00 – 17.00.
http://www.nationalglasscentre.com
http://www.forma.org.uk

Australian born artist Lynette Wallworth presents three immersive installation works in her first UK solo exhibition. An artist whose practice spans video installation, photography and short film, Wallworth describes her intention as ‘bringing together technological advances and ancient understandings, new media and old practices, electronics and the electricity of human touch.’

Wallworth’s work is about the relationship between ourselves and nature, about how we are made up of our physical and biological environments, even as we re-make the world through our activities. Produced by Forma, this exhibition presents a series of immersive installation environments that offer tactile gateways for the viewer.

Damavand Mountain is an elegant and simple video installation based on imagery filmed by Wallworth during an artist’s residency in Iran in 2004. A series of images track the cycle of a short lived poppy flower, a woman and a snow covered mountain. The movements of the flower’s petals, the woman’s chador and the clouds suggest the impact of invisible forces that shape them daily. Their adjustments to the changing environment evoke a sense of endurance – in human nature and nature itself. Through this series of visual metaphors Damavand Mountain presents a poetic and unobtrusive exploration of the global and governmental forces that shape the lives of those in Iran and around the world.

In Hold: Vessel 1, 2001 the visitor is invited to carry a glass bowl into a darkened space and encouraged to ‘catch’ projected images of underwater life in the bowl. The work explores the immensity of the natural world and our relationship to it. With intimate moments of synchronised light and sound, Hold: Vessel 1, 2001 celebrates minutiae - the microscopic forms of life. Offering a sensation akin to holding life in your hands, the work creates a sense of communal participation as visitors pass the bowl to each other, leaving them with an impression of shared responsibility and hope.

The gently interactive video installation Invisible by Night responds to touch, presenting a projection of a life–sized woman, whose eternal pacing can be quietly interrupted by the viewer. Commissioned originally for The Melbourne Festival 2004‚ in response to the layered history of the site of Melbourne’s first morgue, the piece explores suffering, the process of grief and loss, and the transient nature of compassion.

This exhibition follows an Arts Council England International Fellowship Residency completed by the artist at the National Glass Centre in 2006. Lynette Wallworth is represented by Forma.

From 9 March – 4 June 2007, Wallworth’s large scale moving image work Evolution of Fearlessness (2006) is presented as part of Turbulence, the 3rd Auckland Triennial. http://www.aucklandtriennial.com

National Glass Centre is a contemporary cultural venue. Housed in a spectacular glass building situated on the banks of the River Wear it is dedicated to offering its diverse audience an exceptional visitor experience, and promoting the innovative and creative qualities of glass through its exhibition and education programme, glass production facilities and visiting artists studios.

Forma is a creative production agency for ambitious, interdisciplinary contemporary art.

Working closely with artists over extended periods of time, Forma produces, tours and publishes groundbreaking new projects that seamlessly combine diverse media. Its extensive international touring programme, delivered in collaboration with major venues and festivals world-wide, pioneers new hybrid forms of music, visual art, film, new media, dance, theatre and live art.

Forma is supported by Arts Council England

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