Artipedia - Arts News

MALMÖ KONSTHALL

WILLIAM KENTRIGDE
Fragments for Georges Méliès
Black Box / Chambre Noire
31 May – 19 August 2007
MALMÖ KONSTHALL

Opening Wednesday 30 May 7-9 p.m.

William Kentridge’s melancholically poetic drawings and animations have already touched many visitors to art events and have been praised internationally. This spring at Malmö Konsthall he presents two of his most recent and so far largest works: Black Box / Chambre Noire (2005) and 7 Fragments for Georges Méliès & Journey to the Moon (2003). The exhibition is the artist’s largest in Sweden to date and has earlier been showed at Moderna Museet, Stockholm, who also is the producer of the exhibition.

Recurring themes in William Kentridge’s art are history and memory, ethics, guilt and redemption. Raised in a white, prosperous, educated, anti-regime, Jewish family (his father and grandfather were both lawyers engaged in cases against the apartheid regime), he was automatically in a situation where he was both part of the system, and one of its critics – a complex relationship that is processed and reflected in his oeuvre.

The title Black Box / Chambre Noire refers to the black box in an aeroplane (which registers data in the event of a crash), the inside of a camera and the darkened cinema. The work, which Kentridge calls a mourning process, was originally commissioned by Deutsche Bank and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, and deals with the German colonisation of what is now Namibia, a virtually forgotten but dark chapter in history. In a massacre in 1904, which is regarded as one of the worst instances of genocide of the previous century, the Germans practically wiped out the whole population in the area. Black Box / Chambre Noire, was mostly built on site on Skeppsholmen, with the assistance of two stage technicians, and incorporates a theatre with two projections, six mechanical figures and some fifty drawings.

7 Fragments for Georges Méliès & Journey to the Moon was produced in 2003 at the BAC, Visby and now belongs to the Moderna Museet collection. The title alludes to the visionary film pioneer Georges Méliès and his film from 1902, about a journey to the moon. In the work – which consists of eight video projections – Kentridge combines performance, film and animations in a homage to creativity. The fragments were made with materials that happened to be at hand and simple cinematic tricks. An espresso coffee pot serves as a spaceship and the “drawings” made by ants crawling in lines along a pattern made for them by the artist with sugar-water form the sky. Kentridge feels profoundly related to his centennial predecessor Méliès and his creative urges, where the artist studio, despite its spatial and technical limitations, provides infinite potential. With imagination and inventiveness, anything can be used to portray a journey to faraw
ay places. At the same time, he portrays an anxiety relating to the blank page, and Kentridge also gives us glimpses of a parallel story. The dreams of landing on the moon are in the same spirit as the dreams of colonising Africa, with the inherent ambitions of mapping the “dark continent”, taming it, “enlightening it”, and owning it.

The original soundtrack is composed by Philip Miller.

William Kentridge (b. 1955, Johannesburg, South Africa) lives and works in Johannesburg. He studied political science and art in Johannesburg and Paris, France. Kentridge works with drawing and short animated films. His works are often commentaries on South Africa’s history and apartheid.

You are welcome to contact me for further information!
Lena Leeb-Lundberg +46 (0)40-34 12 94, +46 (0)708-34 12 94 or lena.leeb@malmo.se

Information is also available at our website: http://www.konsthall.malmo.se

Next exhibition:
DAVID SHRIGLEY. Everything must have a name. 8 September – 4 November 2007

David Shrigley (b. 1968, Macclesfield. Lives and works in Glasgow) will present his first retrospective solo exhibition in the Nordic region at Malmö Konsthall. Shrigley is mostly known for his black and white text-based drawings, however this exhibition will also present photographs, prints, films, paintings and sculptural pieces; some of which will be produced especially for the exhibition. Over the last 15 years Shrigley has produced a variety of books, t-shirts, record covers and other ephemera that will also be represented in the exhibition. Throughout Shrigley’s many different ways of working the viewer will find a weird, funny and absurd logic to life. Shrigley comments on the world with a dark wit, leaving us question ourselves and what is around us.

For more information go to: http://www.konsthall.malmo.se

MuHKA

MuHKA shows
Luc Tuymans I don’t get it
31.05-09.09.07
http://www.muhka.be

Luc Tuymans is one of the most respected painters of his generation. His work is represented in prominent international museums, such as the Museum Of Modern Art in New York and the National Museum of Modern Art Georges Pompidou Centre Paris. This Summer, the Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp [MuHKA] organizes Luc Tuymans I don’t get it at the 4th Floor of the FotoMuseum. The exhibition does not focus on the paintings of Luc Tuymans, but rather on a number of less well-known aspects of his work, which shed light on its more ephemeral quality. Most, or practically all of Tuymans’ paintings are based upon existing imagery, ranging from drawings, photographs, film-stills and Polaroid’s, etc. This element of his paintings and the ‘collateral damage’ connected with the development of them, forms the heart of Luc Tuymans I don’t get it.

The exhibition consists of an overview of editions and multiples, his early film Feu d’Artifice, various publications, documentation about the wall paintings he made in locations such as Vladivostok and Ruimte Morguen in Antwerp and a small selection of the polaroids, which Tuymans recently donated to MuHKA. He also made a short film with a high speed camera, especially for the exhibition, visualizing the development of polaroids, and thus referring to the process his paintings develop, from vague contours to pictural details. The exhibition will be fitted with a smoking room, simultaneously expressing the importance of smoking in his work, the ephemeral nature of smoke and his resistance to the banning of smoking from public life.

The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue LUC TUYMANS. I DON’T GET IT, published by Ludion.

Location:
4th Floor FotoMuseum
Waalsekaai 47 2000 Antwerp

Contact and information:
MuHKA
Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp
Leuvenstraat 32 2000 Antwerp Belgium
> T +32 [0]3 260 99 99
> info@muhka.be

For more information go to: http://www.muhka.be

Taipei Fine Arts Museum of Taiwan

Taipei Fine Arts Museum of Taiwan at the 52nd International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia, “Collateral Events”

Press Preview 6-7-8-9 June, 2007 Hours open: 10:00 am – 8:00 pm
Venue Palazzo delle Prigioni, Castello 4209, San Marco (Boat station: S. Zaccaria, next to the Palazzo Ducale)
Curator Hongjohn LIN
Artists TSAI Ming-Liang Huang-Chen TANG Kuo Min LEE Shih Chieh HUANG VIVA

Organized by Taipei Fine Arts Museum of Taiwan
Commissioner Wen-ling CHEN
Vice-commissioner Paolo DE GRANDIS
Chief Curator of TFAM Fang-wei CHANG

Taiwan at the 52nd Venice Biennial 2007
ATOPIA

The Taipei Fine Arts Museum of Taiwan is pleased to present the Exhibition, Atopia, curated by Hongjohn Lin, at Palazzo delle Prigioni, Venice on 10 June - 21 November 2007.

Atopia is a “non-place,” unconstrained by borders, due to the politico-economic dynamism of globalization. The disappearance of boundaries - the mixing and merging of cultures, virtual space shaped by technology, and transnational consumption and production - means no single identity can account for contemporary spatial configurations. Yet an atopia does not necessarily assure individual freedom. No longer the expressions of pure will and desire, our bodies are marked by the regulation of individual life by the combined powers of the new empire. The omnipresence of this condition makes true individualism possible, through the self-empowering recreation and rewriting of identities.

Atopia also means that a place cannot be placed, or simply be not-a-place. The impossibility of legitimate representations makes atopia a state of de facto without de jure - a place without its name can only be attended as an exception. Anachronistic histories and dislocated sites all assume the status of atopias. One can envisage that Taiwan is a non-national nation, or a nation without nationality, yet neither post-nation nor pre-nation: in short, an atopian state par excellence. Its name as listed in international settings is confusingly inconsistent and endlessly reinvented: Taiwan (ROC), China (Taiwan), China (Taipei), Taipei/China, Taipei, Chinese Taipei, and so on. Within these brackets, slashes, and aliases, an atopia performs “in-the-name-of-other-names,” i.e., to claim its identity through différance, not difference. Its true identity has always-already been inscribed through reiterations of supplements, arresting the open secret of atopia. The uncertain sta
tus of naming generates a new position between the subject and the big Other, responding to the network of intersubjectivity codified by political realities in order to open up to the impossibility. With reiterations creating the identity in-the-name-of-others, atopia retroactively alludes to its own inexpressible phantom status, a symbolically perverse situation.

What the exhibition Atopia brings to light is that the transference of this unrepresentability belongs to Taiwan’s cultural and political discourse. Through a creative inscription on exile from within, a gesturing to para-sites of the local, the exhibition reflects the acting-out of Taiwan within its own glocalized map. This is a mirrored community reflexive to Taiwanese-ness as a cultural, social, and political terrain that excises a magical reverse of psychogeographical play.

Internationally renowned filmmaker Tsai Ming-Liang bases his work on alienated existences, ungrounded in place, lost in transition. The bewildering temporal-spatial settings of his films are non-places at best, where sexuality, adultery and incest all become the sole actions that people on the margins of society can take. Long and maddening sequences propel the radical silence of his images, evoking fragmentary realities of pathos.

Building on recollections from a well-known Taiwanese postcard, Huang-Chen Tang embarks on a heroic performance, taking participants from international cities on a voyage to reconstruct the scene and moment of that photograph. The impossibility of her action addresses the collective anamnesis of the allegory of travel. Through the untranslatability among different sites and histories, Tang creates an absurd blurring space in between the individual action and collective visual culture.

Kuo Min Lee’s photography documenting vanishing communities is not just an artistic expression but a social action against Taiwan’s urban policy. Revealed in his photographs are chaotic personal dwelling places, once lived in and on the verge of being torn apart. Lee’s work witnesses the transition of political pasts and urban histories, and shows the human conditions of a quasi-community in a state of emergency.

Shih Chieh Huang, a bricoleur of low-tech objects, alters mass-produced consumer appliances through hands-on instructions. His installation generates an interactivity with archi-textures of manipulated home appliances. Not a technocratic utopian, Huang orchestrates a hysterical dialogue between technology and humanity.

VIVA draws comics of new social realism to depict the everyday life of computer geeks in the format of doujinshi, a cultural mimicry from Japan. Quite the opposite of a pop artist who appropriates culture for art, VIVA is a practitioner of culture that speaks for the otaku generation. His work and life altogether render a topsy-turvy picture of the traffic of cultures found in glocalization.

The exhibition’s selected artworks invite viewers to attend not only a showcase of art, but an acting-out of the everyday reality of Taiwan, which in turn is intertwined with the global order. Here, travelism, urbanization, technology, subculture and individual existence all meet at the same crossroad, a terra incognita of self-refabrication in the name-of-other-names.

The exhibition is supported by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, R.O.C. (Taiwan); the Council for Cultural Affairs, Taiwan; the Taipei City Government; the Department of Cultural Affairs, Taipei City Government.

Press contact:
Taipei Fine Arts Museum
Tel +886 2 25957656 Fax +886 2 25851886
info@tfam.gov.tw http://tfam.museum

Arte Communications
Tel +39 041 5264546 Fax +39 041 2769056
info@artecommunications.com http://www.artecommunications.com

For more information go to: http://tfam.museum