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Danish Arts Council

BIENNALIST: Thierry Geoffroy / COLONEL at the Venice Biennale

Biennalist is an art format
Thierry Geoffroy / Colonel does art formats.
Formats that can be transported, repeated, adapted.
Exhibition formats
Geographic formats
Biennalist is a format that questions other formats (like the biennials).
The Venice Biennial will be the springboard for launching Biennalist for the first time.
Once the format is tested and improved the receipt for Biennalist can be exported to any Biennial.

Format is the parameter of form.
It is the format which actualises form.
The format itself is the mere potentiality of form.
Exhibitiongymnastic
The Biennial is a format.
Biennalist is a format.

For the Venice Biennial the format Biennalist will be thematic.
Biennalist will comment on the obsessional topic of Nation-National-Nationalism.
Thierry Geoffroy / Colonel also has expertise in the fields of cultural identity and has produced works on Denmark, Scotland, Germany, and Holland and shown in different international museums, conferences, books, and films.

Biennalist-Venice will take the immediate temperature of the Biennale.
Like the format of Emergency Room, Biennalist will comment immediately what is happening at the Biennial and be the field of an artistic production with an army of exctracteurs and an army of distributeurs

Thierry Geoffroy / Colonel has been seen before at the Venice Biennial when he organised “the curator running lifting competition”. A recent solo show at the Sprengel Museum was about his strategy to surf freely in public space and medias.

Thierry Geoffroy / Colonel has created the format Emergency Room and put it into practice in New York at PS1 / MOMA, at the Nikolaj Copenhagen Contemporary Art Center (with Frank Franzen) and at Galerie Olaf Stüber / Berlin. Thierry Geoffroy / Colonel works with ultrafast exhibitions since 1987.

Thierry Geoffroy / Colonel’s aim is to collectively develop the “awareness muscle”.

Biennalist is faithful to the manifest from 1989.

Thierry Geoffroy / Colonel home site :
http://www.colonel.dk
A daily update of the project will be acccessible from there.

The Danish Arts Council / Venice Biennial site for Biennalist :
http://www.venedigbiennalen.dk/NewFiles/uk_filer/

For the Venice Biennial 2007 Thierry Geoffroy / Colonel has received a grant by the The Committee for International Visual Art of the Danish Arts Council for his project Biennalist

For more information go to: http://www.colonel.dk

TATE ETC.

TATE ETC. Issue 10, featuring Henry II
Visiting and Revisiting Art, etcetera
http://www.tate.org.uk/tateetc

To celebrate our tenth issue, TATE ETC. magazine has collaborated with Franz West and The Wrong Gallery – Maurizio Cattalan, Massimiliano Gioni and Ali Subotnick, to produce an exclusive supplement, entitled Henry II. The oversized poster pays homage to some alternative images of Britishness in the Tate Collection, featuring some lesser-displayed works, such as Edward Burra’s ‘Skeleton Party’ and John Quinton Pringle’s ‘The Window’. It also presents Franz West’s antidote to the theme - ‘Greetings from Vienna’.

Issue 10 highlights include…

Salvador Dali and his lifelong obsession with film
Gilda Williams on Andy Warhol and his Mother
Oliver Sacks on Stereography, including an exclusive look at his first ever photograph, taken age 12. Collect your free 3D glasses from Tate shops.
John Miller on Piero Manzoni’s ‘Merda d’artista’
Marina Warner on Maya Deren
Caetano Veloso on Helio Oiticica
Beate Sontgen on Interiors
Jon Wozencroft on Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures
Stephen Daniels on Peter Blake
David Campany on Photography
Roni Horn on Water

Salvador Dalí as film-maker? “The most decisive moment in the production of a film is when you need the force of will to convince your producers that if this film is not made, the world, as we know it, will come to an end.” Roy Disney on his Uncle Walt, Ian Christie, Jonas Mekas and others on Dalí’s lifelong obsession with film.

Marina Warner explores Maya Deren’s oeuvre and examines how she managed “the profound affinity between the material properties of film and inner states of mind”.

The Brazilian artist Hélio Oiticica is best known for his coloured boxes, architectural constructions and the wearable caps inspired by his time in Rio’s Mangueira favela. Tate Modern’s exhibition provides an opportunity to explore this mercurial artist during the crucial years when he transformed himself from the precocious Neo-Constructivist acolyte of the 1950s into the revolutionary barrier-smasher of the 1960s. Appreciations from Vincent Katz, Caetano Veloso, Ernesto Neto, Marepe and Catherine Yass.

“Warhol stumbled across ‘The Real America’ in the pantry of a woman who never adopted the American Way of Life.” Gilda Williams on Andy Warhol and his Mother.

To coincide with Tate Britain’s first ever photographic survey of Britain’s social history, TATE ETC. asked David Campany, Martin Parr, Anna Pavord and others to reflect on some memorable photographic images, such as the Goddesses series by Madame Yevonde.

“You realise how water never loses its identity, it is always discretely itself. Water is transparence derived from the presence of everything.” Roni Horn ruminates on how water is central to her work in conversation with Bice Curiger.

TATE ETC. is published three times a year.
Subscribe online at http://www.tate.org.uk/tateetc/subscribe
Or call +44 (0)20 7887 8959

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

Greek Pavilion

Greek Pavilion
52nd International Art Exhibition
La Biennale di Venezia

"THE END"
June 10 – November 21, 2007 / special cocktail preview: June 8, 17.00 – 19.00 / official inauguration: June 10, 12.00

Artist: Nikos Alexiou,
Commissioner/Curator: Yorgos Tzirtzilakis
Assistant Curator: Nadja Argyropoulou
Organization: Hellenic Ministry of Culture, Directorate of Visual Arts, Department for the promotion of Contemporary Art
Greek Pavilion location: Giardini (next to the new entrance, Santa Elena vaporetto stop)

Nikos Alexiou will present the installation, The End, in the Greek Pavilion at the 52nd International Art Exhibition in Venice. The work is a modular installation inspired by the floor mosaic in the Catholicon of the Iviron Monastery on Mount Athos (10th-11th c. AD).
The Greek pavilion will hold a launch event on 8th June, 5-7pm (by invitation)

Curator Yorgos Tzirtzilakis comments:
"The Greek participation in the 52nd Biennale of Venice focuses on the possibilities of diversity, and the critical re-negotiation of the concepts of identity. Further, through the sensory materiality and multiplicity of artistic practices, and the repetition of the same, revealing and constructing the different a new condition of handicraft will be described and depicted.”

A close relationship has always existed in non-Western and Eastern cultures in terms the affiliation of aesthetic and religious techniques and practices of repetition for the achievement of ecstasy. Nikos Alexiou’s digital and material appropriation of the monastery mosaic sketches a visual path that suggests a broader change in the way that many have tried to describe and employ these practices in recent years. Alexiou’s installation is a four-piece modular work that consists of an interchangeable projection onto a large screen, paper cut-outs, prints and a table with elaborated paper rests; all as separate elements that will carry the traces of this work’s makings and marked with the memory of previous works. It is inspired by the cosmology of the floor mosaic of Iviron monastery at Mt Athos. Through the precision and intricacy of this work, Alexiou attempts to examine the aura of emotions that surround the mysteries of the mosaic.

Nikos Alexiou comments:
"The work for the Biennale, which I’ve called The End, carries everything I’ve worked on all these years, from the ’80s and a little earlier to this day. All references in my work, from rainbows, lights and galaxies to marble, prisms and the psychedelic stuff, are all in it."

About ‘The End’
Alexiou made frequent visits to Mount Athos and has been hosted at Iviron Monastery at various times from 1995 to date, where he got to know the spirituality, the quickening of the soul and the strange interpersonal experiences of coexisting in monastic communal life. During this time, after much “copying” and redesigning of the mosaic he attempted to understand the mysteries it contains as he sought its semantic structure as well as its vortex. One could describe this ‘mobile immobility’ of this floor as a composite ideogram, a symbolically packed system, the kind of condensing of the Whole that we call “data storage” today.

Nikos Alexiou has participated in the 23rd Biennale of Alexandria (2005), in the Outlook and Athens by Art exhibitions (2004 – Athens Olympic Games), Breakthrough! Greece 2004 (Sala Alcala 31, Madrid, Spain), in Free Transit (?) (2003 – Zappeion, Greek Presidency of the EU), DESTE Prize 2003 (DESTE foundation, Greece), et.al.

Sponsors:
The Stavros Niarchos Foundation, The Alexander S. Onassis Public Benefit Foundation & The J.F. Costopoulos Foundation
With the support of:
Minoan Lines & Boutari

For more information on Nikos Alexiou and the Greek Pavilion in Venice, as well as high resolution visuals, please refer to http://www.nikosalexiou.com

For Media enquiries, please contact:
Katie Taylor at Brunswick Arts on +44 (0) 207 936 1280; ktaylor@brunswickgroup.com
Alexandros J. Stanas at D.ART on +30 210 3821222 ; astanas@d-art.gr
Or coordinator Marina Vranopoulou, vranopoulou@gmail.com

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