Artipedia - Arts News

American Federation of Arts (AFA)

Matthew Ritchie
Wednesday, April 25, 2007
6:30 p.m.

American Federation of Arts (AFA)
Spring 2007 AFA ArtTalks
Lecture Series

The American Federation of Arts is pleased to announce that Matthew Ritchie, whose conceptually driven work finds inspiration in philosophy, physics, and mythology, will speak at the next lecture of the AFA’s spring season of ArtTalks. Ritchie will discuss the multiple fields of influence that inform his body of work.

The event will be held on Wednesday, April 25, 2007, at 6:30 p.m. in the Sculpture Court of the National Arts Club, located at 15 Gramercy Park South (20th Street) between Park Avenue and Irving Place, New York. Following the talk, audience members are invited to participate in a question-and-answer session and then to join the artist for a reception.

Seating is limited and reservations are required. For fees and reservations, please call 212.988.7700 ext. 210 or send an email to arttalks@afaweb.org. Attire is business casual.

Included in Time magazine’s “100 Innovators of the New Millennium” for his explorations of “the unthinkable or the not-yet-thought,” Matthew Ritchie has been no less ambitious than to attempt to represent the entire universe and the structures of knowledge and belief we employ to interpret and visualize it. His work considers both the attempts and the limits of human consciousness to comprehend the universe’s vastness. Though often described as a painter, Ritchie works in a variety of media, including paper, prints, projections, installations, freestanding sculpture, Web sites, and short stories, which tie his sprawling works together into a narrative structure. Replete with allusions drawn from religious ideologies, historical forces, and theoretical principles of science, his work is continually expanding and evolving, while investigating and challenging the complex interactions between art and various systems of information.

Born in London in 1964, Matthew Ritchie lives and works in New York. He received a BFA from Camberwell School of Art, London, and attended Boston University. Ritchie’s work has been widely exhibited, including solo exhibitions at the Dallas Museum of Art; the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston; MASS MoCA; SFMoMA; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Miami, among others. His work was also included in the Whitney Biennial (1997), the Sydney Biennale (2002), and the São Paulo Bienale (2004). His work is included in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and the Museum of Modern Art, New York. A frequent lecturer and contributor to several contemporary art journals, he is the author of the recent artist’s book Matthew Ritchie: Incomplete Projects 01-07.

ArtTalks is presented by Target.
Support has also been provided by the Joseph and Sylvia Slifka Foundation, Inc.

The AFA is a nonprofit institution that organizes art exhibitions for presentation in museums around the world, publishes exhibition catalogues, and develops education programs. For more information on the AFA, please visit http://www.afaweb.org

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

Spatiul Public Bucuresti | Public Art Bucharest 2007

Spatiul Public Bucuresti |
Public Art Bucharest 2007
20 April – 15 October 2007
Bucharest – Romania

Curated by Marius Babias and
Sabine Hentzsch
Assistant curator: Raluca Voinea

Spatiul Public Bucuresti | Public Art Bucharest 2007 is a pilot project which creates a platform for trans-disciplinary discussions and debates exploring how public art encourages a critical engagement with the structures of power which are dominant in society.. The non-existence of a public sphere in Romania during Communism created the conditions for the unfettered capitalism of the post-Communist period to acquire a monopoly on the public space. Bucharest is one of the fastest developing cities in Europe, however one where post-Communism and globalization have created specific tensions and eccentric juxtapositions in the architecture, urban environment and social life. The ways in which people in the city perceive, experience and respond to these tensions define an active public space, which needs to be acknowledged by the cultural discourse and analysed in open debates.

The project Spatiul Public Bucuresti | Public Art Bucharest 2007 has three objectives:

unitednationsplaza

Five Short Texts on the Possibility of Creating an Economy of Equivalence
Liam Gillick

May 7 – May 11, 2007
All sessions will start at 7:30 PM

Admission is free but space is limited, please register with Magdalena@unitednationsplaza.org

unitednationsplaza
Platz der Vereinten Nationen 14a
Berlin 10249 Germany
T. +49 (0)30 700 89 0 90
F. +49 (0)30 700 89 0 85
http://www.unitednationsplaza.org

unitednationsplaza is pleased to continue its program with a seminar with Liam Gillick:

Five Short Texts on the Possibility of Creating an Economy of Equivalence
Liam Gillick

May 7 – May 11, 2007
All sessions will start at 7:30 PM

Five thirty minute lectures, followed by drinks in the bar at unitednationsplaza.

The outline of a possible text. Five parts will be tested and developed, quickly.

Day 1: The day before closure of an experimental factory.
Day 2: Redundancy following the lure of infinite flexibility.
Day 3: Reoccupation, recuperation and aimless renovation.
Day 4: Reconfiguring the recent past.
Day 5: Relations of equivalence – three potential endings.

“The text looks again at the dynamic that exists within a group when one set of people thinks that there will ‘have to be change’ and ‘things won’t be able to continue this way’ and the other believes that change will only occur as a result of direct action.”

“We are interested in the cone shaped gap that you could argue is perceivable in the trajectory between modernity and modernism. Modernity leading to both Wal-Mart and memory sticks on one hand and modernism as a kind of ‘circling the drain’ complex of striated, layered forms of self-referentiality which at the same time attempts a way to envision creating continual and endless possibilities of critique in relation to modernity, modernism or any of its late and post iterations.”

“The question is whether they return to the abandoned factory to play out a new economy of equivalence or finally put it to rest and focus on other places that remain fixed and secure in earlier models of spectacular exchange masquerading as revelation or mere reflections of dominant models that currently leave all relationships intact.”

Liam Gillick is based in New York and London. Numerous solo exhibitions since 1989 include ‘Literally’, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2003; ‘Communes, bar and greenrooms’, The Powerplant Contemporary Art Gallery, Toronto, 2003; ‘The Wood Way’, Whitechapel Gallery, London, 2002; ‘A short text on the possibility of creating an economy of equivalence’, Palais de Tokyo, 2005. Selected group exhibitions include ‘Singular Forms’, Guggenheim Museum, 2004; 50th Venice Biennale, 2003; ‘What If’, Moderna Museet, Stockholm, 2000 and documenta X, 1997. Numerous public projects and interventions include Ft. Lauderdale Airport in 2002; the new Home Office government building in London in 2005 and the Lufthansa Headquarters in Frankfurt in 2006. Since 1995 Liam Gillick has published a number of books that function in parallel to his artwork including Literally No Place (Book Works, London, 2002); Five or Six (Lukas & Sternberg, New York, 1999); Discussion Island/Big Conference Cen
tre (Kunstverein Ludwigsburg, Ludwigsburg, and Orchard Gallery, Derry, 1997), Erasmus is Late (Book Works, London, 1995) and most recently PROXEMICS: SELECTED WRITINGS 1988–2006 (JRP|Ringier, Zurich, 2007). Liam Gillick has contributed to many art magazines and journals including Artforum, Parkett, Frieze, Art Monthly and a regular column for Metropolis M in Amsterdam and has taught at Columbia University, New York, since 1997.

Admission is free but space is limited, please register by email with
magdalena@unitednationsplaza.org

unitednationsplaza is exhibition as school. Structured as a seminar/residency program in the city of Berlin, it will involve collaboration with approximately 60 artists, writers, theorists and a wide range of audiences for a period of one year. In the tradition of Free Universities, most of its events will be open to all those interested to take part. unitednationsplaza is organized by Anton Vidokle in collaboration with Liam Gillick, Boris Groys, Martha Rosler, Walid Raad, Jalal Toufic, Nikolaus Hirsch, Natascha Sadr Haghighian and Tirdad Zolghadr.

Selected lectures at unitednationsplaza are now available to view online at http://www.unitednationsplaza.org/broadcast.html

unitednationsplaza
Platz der Vereinten Nationen 14a
Berlin 10249 Germany
T. +49 (0)30 700 89 0 90
F. +49 (0)30 700 89 0 85
http://www.unitednationsplaza.org

For further information, please contact Magdalena Magiera:
magdalena@unitednationsplaza.org

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