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Turner Prize 2007
shortlist announced

Tate has now announced the four artists who have been shortlisted for the Turner Prize 2007. The artists are Zarina Bhimji, Nathan Coley, Mike Nelson and Mark Wallinger. This is the first time that the Turner Prize has been presented outside London since it began in 1984, and is a curtain-raiser for Liverpool European Capital of Culture 2008.

The Prize, established in 1984, is awarded to a British artist under fifty for an outstanding exhibition or other presentation of their work. It is intended to promote public discussion of new developments in contemporary British art and is widely recognised as one of the most important and prestigious awards for the visual arts in Europe.

Zarina Bhimji
For her solo exhibitions at Haunch of Venison, London and Zurich, with work engaging with universal human emotions such as grief, pleasure, love and betrayal using non-narrative photography and film-making. Through powerful, atmospheric and poignant imagery, Bhimji’s recent work demonstrates a new approach to her long-standing preoccupations and research.

Nathan Coley
For his solo exhibition at Mount Stuart, Isle of Bute, the public installation Camouflage Church, Santiago de Compostela, Spain and his contribution to the group exhibition Breaking Step - Displacement, Compassion and Humour in Recent British Art at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Belgrade, Serbia. Through a variety of media, Nathan Coley’s work makes manifest the belief systems embedded in society and its architectures.

Mike Nelson
For his solo exhibitions AMNESIAN SHRINE or Double coop displacement, Matt’s Gallery, London and Mirror Infill (2006), Frieze Projects, Frieze Art Fair, London in which his immersive installations transport the viewer to imaginary, yet plausible worlds. For the Frieze Art Fair he created an installation of a photographic studio that brought the site of creativity to the heart of the commercial environment in which it was embedded.

Mark Wallinger
For his solo exhibition State Britain at Tate Britain. Mark Wallinger’s powerful installation demonstrates art’s unique ability to engage with contemporary political issues. The direct representation of Brian Haw’s banners and paraphernalia creates a force and conviction unmatched by the representation of the Parliament Square protest in the media. The work evokes a heightened sense of reality that communicates an unpalatable political truth.

The Turner Prize 2007 is supported by Arts Council England, Liverpool Culture Company, Northwest Regional Development Agency, Milligan and Tate Members.

Work by the shortlisted artists will be shown in an exhibition at Tate Liverpool opening on 19 October 2007. The winner will be announced at Tate Liverpool on 3 December 2007 during a live broadcast by Channel 4.

The members of the Turner Prize 2007 jury are:
Michael Bracewell, writer and critic
Fiona Bradley, Director, Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh
Thelma Golden, Director & Chief Curator, Studio Museum, Harlem
Miranda Sawyer, freelance broadcaster and writer
Christoph Grunenberg, Director, Tate Liverpool and Chairman of the Jury

Information and features on the Turner Prize and its history can be found at Tate Online ( http://www.tate.org.uk/turnerprize ).

For more information go to: http://www.tate.org.uk/turnerprize

Frankfurter Kunstverein & Ursula Blickle Foundation

Pensée Sauvage – on Freedom
Ursula Blickle Foundation:
May 20 – July 1, 2007
Frankfurter Kunstverein:
May 25 – July 8, 2007

Opening:
Ursula Blickle Foundation:
Saturday, May 19, 7 pm
Frankfurter Kunstverein:
Thursday, May 24, 7 pm

Pensée Sauvage – on Freedom

Artists: Lucas Bambozzi (BRA), Lene Berg (N), Andrea Büttner (D), Patricia Esquivias (COL), Cao Guimarães (BRA), Tamara Henderson (CAN), Marine Hugonnier (F), Henrik Håkansson (S), Deimantas Narkevicius (LT), Rosalind Nashashibi (UK), Markus Oehlen (D), Maria Pask (NL), Anu Pennanen (SF), Lisi Raskin (USA), Mandla Reuter (D), Aïda Ruilova (USA)

May 19 a catalogue will be published in connection with the exhibition by Revolver Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, with texts by Jennifer Allen, Anselm Franke, Chus Martínez, Ingo Niermann/Christian Kracht, Axel Stockburger and Jan Verwoert.

The title of this exhibition has been borrowed from the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss’ seminal book La pensée sauvage, 1962. Pensée sauvage means literally “wild pansy”, a very common wild flower of the family of the violets. The paradox is that the pansy is wild, yet not exotic since it is a common plant. Indeed, one of the most intriguing questions of our time is if it is possible to be a “wild flower”; namely, how one can deconstruct fear as well as being an authority and start taking initiative.

The idea of “freedom” mentioned in the subtitle does not refer to civil rights, but to the possibility – as the Brazilian pedagogue Pablo Freire put it – to be educated towards a free mind. In a world where adaptation to socially accepted forms of living and obedience to norms and laws play a major role, contemporary art is an exercise in a different logic that looks for gaps and possibilities, as well as confronts us with the unexpected. The works presented in the exhibition suggest that there is always another chance to reverse the history of the world: to take the liberty to think and act otherwise. This is freedom.

To name a few examples of the artists to be seen in the exhibition:

Playing with the anachronistic can make us aware of today’s anxiety of being part of the present. Using large-scale woodcut prints executed in a style similar to German Expressionism Andrea Büttner offers a new reading of the cultural centrality of Modern Art, but she also uses an old-fashioned medium to explore our relationship with the past, with tradition and with religion.

Mandla Reuter, on the other hand, bases his practice on the notion of control. He creates installations where several elements alter the perception of the space and creates an environment where it is no longer clear what exactly the viewer is looking at. In Reuter’s installations, it becomes clear how easy it is to alter the feeling of safeness that an institution normally tends to create.

Lisi Raskin poses questions that similarly revolve around the idea of control. Her work departs from an interesting research into the architecture of danger: power plants, nuclear bunkers… Places of fear that sometimes appear in our mind, as powerful myths capable of determining our lives. She reconstructs these places in a hand-made style that gives us the possibility to explore them from a fictional point of view. All of a sudden these architectures are just scenarios, narratives, stories that instead can help us to take control and explore our fears towards the way that hidden powers threaten to take over the world.

The filmmaker Deimantas Narkevicius and the young video artist Patricia Esquivias take a similar approach to history by bringing it close to science-fiction. Cao Guimarães and Lucas Bambozzi present in a very conscious way what is “far way”, understood as an approach to the appeal of otherness: in this way, their films open up a space for an experience of the beauty of the ambiguous, the necessity of the uncommon, the positive value of forgetting time.

In her films and photographic works, Marine Hugonnier tries to bring together the possible and the impossible by obliging us to wonder what everyday life really is. Henrik Håkansson’s fascinating installations with plants and animals can also be read along the same lines; always trying to explore worlds inside the one we are in but that are invisible to our eyes…

To understand that freedom is a matter of travelling in reality with light luggage, a wild common flower is a nice image to keep in mind: it marks the efforts that artistic practice does over and over again to disable pragmatism, to reinforce the importance of being involved in reality, and of underlining enthusiasm as an extremely difficult but desirable form of freedom.

Pensée Sauvage – on Freedom is a production of the Ursula Blickle Foundation in co-operation with the Frankfurter Kunstverein and will be shown at both venues simultaneously. (Please note that not all the artists will be presented at both venues).

An events program will be presented in connection with the exhibition. Please visit http://www.fkv.de for further information.

Pensée sauvage is kindly supported by:
Hessisches Kulturstiftung, Delbrück Bethmann Maffei, Office for Contemporary Art Norway, Palemengarten Frankfurt am Main, Georg und Franziska Speyer’sche Hochschulstiftung

The events program accomanying the exhibition is kindly supported by Stiftung Polytechnische Gesellschaft Frankfurt am Main

Ursula Blickle Foundation
Mühlweg 18
D-76703 Kraichtal-UÖ
T. +49 (0)7251 6 09 19
F. +49 (0)7251 6 65 87
ursula-blickle-stiftung@t-online.de
http://www.ursula-blickle-stiftung.de
Opening hours: Wed. 2 – 5 pm, So. 2 – 6 pm, and by appointment.

Frankfurter Kunstverein
Steinernes Haus am Römerberg
Markt 44
D-60311 Frankfurt am Main
T. +49 (0)69 219 314 0
F. +49 (0)69 219 314 11
post@fkv.de
http://www.fkv.de
Opening hours: Tue.-So. 11 am – 6 pm
Guided tours Thur: 6 pm, or by appointment

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

Open Society Institute

Paradise Lost
The First Roma Pavilion
52. INTERNATIONAL ART EXHIBITION
LA BIENNALE DI VENEZIA

Open to the Public: 10th June – 21st November 2007
Tuesday-Sunday: 10.00AM – 6.00PM
Press Conference: Thursday, 7th June, 3.00PM

Venue: Palazzo Pisani S. Marina (Piano Nobile)
Calle delle Erbe, Cannaregio 6103, Venezia
Curator: Tímea Junghaus, art historian, curator [H]

Scientific Committee:
Viktor Misiano, art historian, international curator and critic [I – RU]
Thomas Acton, Professor of Romani Studies, University of Greenwich [GB]
Barnabás Bencsik, curator, Director of ACAX | Agency for Contemporary Art Exchange [H]
Dragan Klaic, theater scholar and cultural analyst [NL]
Marketta Seppala, Director of Frame Foundation, Commissioner of the Nordic Pavilion 2007 [FI]
Katalin Székely, art historian, art critic [H]

List of Exhibitors:
Daniel Baker [GB], Tibor Balogh [H], Mihaela Ionela Cimpeanu [RO], Gabi Jimenez [F], András Kállai [H - GB], Damian Le Bas [GB], Delaine Le Bas [GB], Kiba Lumberg [FI], Omara [H], Marian Petre [RO], Nihad Nino Pusija [BO - D], Jeno André Raatzsch [H - D], Dusan Ristic [SRB - USA], István Szentandrássy [H], Norbert Szirmai – János Révész [H]

“Paradise Lost” is the first contemporary show representing an international selection of Roma contemporary artists.

The exhibition showcases the visual art talents of the largest European ethnic minority. The artists embrace and transform, deny and deconstruct, oppose and analyze, challenge and overwrite the existing stereotypes in a confident intellectual manner, reinventing the Roma tradition and its elements as contemporary culture.

The archetypical motives provide a firm underlying sentiment, but the result unexpectedly suggests a new interpretation, one that is created by the Roma artists themselves. The envisioned alternative identity highlights the strengths of Roma, the capacity for fusion, the sense of glamour, humor and irony, adaptability, mobility and transnationalism.

The intention of opposing and denying the existing (mis)representations and promoting the contrary carry an irresolvable dichotomy, which embodies in art unfree from sorrowful beauty, paranoia, schizophrenia, and post traumatic syndromes.

If the terra incognita of exotic gypsies has been the target of escape for Europe since 19th century modernism, have we all lost our search for Paradise?

The First Roma Pavilion at the 52nd International Art Exhibition La Biennale di Venezia 2007 is commissioned and sponsored by the Open Society Institute and is supported by the European Cultural Foundation and the Allianz Kulturstiftung.

For more information go to: