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PREMIO LORENZO BONALDI PER L’ARTE – ENTERPRIZE, 4th edition
PRIZEGIVING
Tuesday, 5 June 2007 at 6.30 pm

QUI. ENTER ATLAS – INTERNATIONAL SYMPOSIUM OF YOUNG CURATORS
3 - 4 - 5 June 2007
curated by Giacinto Di Pietrantonio, Philippe Van Cauteren, Alessandro Rabottini, Thibaut Verhoeven

ELDORADO.
PIETRO ROCCASALVA. TRUKA
curated by Alessandro Rabottini
OPENING
Tuesday, 5 June 2007 at 6.30 pm

One prize, one 3-days symposium and one show at GAMeC, Bergamo
For three days GAMeC will be the meeting point for a whole generation of international young curators: meetings and debates between 15 international curators suggested by 15 institutions and coordinated by the artist Dara Birnbaum to mark the award of Premio Lorenzo Bonaldi per l’Arte - EnterPrize. On the same occasion it will be opened the exhibition Pietro Roccasalva. Truka.

PREMIO LORENZO BONALDI PER L’ARTE – ENTERPRIZE, 4th edition
The Premio Lorenzo Bonaldi per l’Arte – EnterPrize, inaugurated in 2003 by the GAMeC and funded by the Bonaldi family to commemorate Lorenzo Bonaldi’s passion for art and collecting, has reached its fourth year.
This prize, the only one of its kind, is intended to support the work of a young curator under the age of 30 and his or her exhibition project.

GAMeC invited five advisors to nominate each one a young curator:
Sabine Breitwieser (Director Generali Foundation, Wien)
Rafael Doctor Roncero (Director Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León)
Tom Eccles, (Director Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, New York)
James Lingwood (Director Artangel, London)
Anton Vidokle (E-flux, New York – unitednationsplaza, Berlin)

The chosen curators are:
Binna Choi
Ovul Durmusoglu
Tom Morton
Manuela Moscoso
Ana Vejzovic Sharp

The projects will be assessed by a jury comprised by:
Dan Cameron (Director PROSPECT.1, New Orleans)
Ralph Rugoff (Director Hayward Gallery, London)
Giacinto Di Pietrantonio (Director GAMeC, Bergamo)

The prize consists in the execution of the winning project at GAMeC in 2008 and publication of a bilingual catalogue.

QUI. ENTER ATLAS – INTERNATIONAL SYMPOSIUM OF YOUNG CURATORS
As part of the fourth Premio Lorenzo Bonaldi per l’Arte – EnterPrize, GAMeC organizes the second edition of Qui. Enter Atlas – International Symposium of Young Curators. The symposium has been organized by GAMeC and S.M.A.K., Gent that will host the second part of it on 19 - 20 - 21 October.

15 international curators under 35, suggested by 15 institutions, will share their experiences around the theme “Art in the Landscape of the Media” coordinated by the artist Dara Birnbaum.

The curators:
Cecilia Alemani (Independent Curator, New York)
Craig Buckley (Independent Curator, New York)
Sarah Carrington (Independent Curator, London)
Binna Choi (Independent Curator, Amsterdam – Seoul)
Sebastian Cichocki (Director Kronika – Contemporary Art Centre, Bytom – PL)
Ovul Durmusoglu (Independent Curator, Austria – Turkey)
Elena Filipovic (Co-Curator at the 5th Berlin Biennial)
Nav Haq (Curator Gasworks, London)
LATITUDES - Max Andrews & Mariana Cánepa Luna (Independent Curators and writers, Barcelona)
Tom Morton (Curator Cubitt Gallery, London)
Manuela Moscoso (Director los29enchufes, Madrid)
Huib Haye van Der Werf (Advisor Visual Arts for the Dutch Government)
Ana Vejzovic Sharp (Director Kantor Feuer Gallery, Los Angeles)
Nina Zimmer (Curator of 19th c. and 20th c. art Kunstmuseum, Basel)

The advisors:
Stacey Allan and Steven Rand (Apexart, New York)
Sabine Breitwieser (Generali Foundation, Wien)
Ann Demensteer (De Appel, Amsterdam)
Rafael Doctor Roncero (Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León)
Yilmaz Dziewior (Kunstverein, Hamburg)
Tom Eccles (Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, New York)
Eva González-Sancho (Frac Bourgogne, Dijon)
Jens Hoffmann (Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art, San Francisco)
Maria Lind (IASPIS, International Artists Studio Program, Stockholm)
James Lingwood (Artangel, London)
Joanna Mytkowska (Foksal Gallery Foundation, Warsaw)
Patrizia Sanderetto Re Rebaudengo (Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin)
Anton Vidokle (E-flux, New York – unitednationsplaza, Berlino)
Etienne Wynants (Etablissement d’en face projects, Bruxelles)

The symposium is organized with the support of: DARC – Direzione generale per l’architettura e l’arte contemporanee; The Henry Moore Foundation; The Instituto Cervantes; Mondriaan Foundation.

The convention programme will be published on http://www.gamec.it

ELDORADO. PIETRO ROCCASALVA. TRUKA
6 JUNE – 29 JULY 2007
The prizegiving will be followed by the opening of the solo show Pietro Roccasalva. Truka, the first one by a museum. For the occasion Roccasalva has produced three new works: a 35mm film, a sculpture and a large soft pastel.

The project will be documented in the first monograph of the artist, published by JRP I Ringier and including texts by B. Schwabsky and A. Rabottini and E. Gnemmi. The catalogue is promoted by the Fondazione Davide Halevim, Milan.

We are grateful to Zero…, Milan

GAMeC – Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Bergamo
via San Tomaso, 53
24121 Bergamo (Italy)
tel. +39 035 270272 – fax +39 035 236962
http://www.gamec.it

Press Office
CLP Relazioni Pubbliche
tel. +39 02 433403
http://www.clponline.it
e-mail: info@clponline.it

For more information go to: http://www.gamec.it

Catharinakapel

SHELTER 07: The Freedom of Public Art in the Cover of Urban Space

Harderwijk, The Netherlands
June 2 – August 31

Artistic Interventions by Lara Almarcegui, Tiong Ang, Ginette Blom, Gijs Frieling, Jeanne van Heeswijk (in collaboration wih Boris van Berkum), Job Koelewijn, Irene Kopelman and Mieke Van de Voort. Curator: Henk Slager

http://www.catharinakapel.nl/shelter07

The objective of the Shelter 07 project is to draw attention to the history of the Dutch city of Harderwijk. To achieve this goal, the genealogical significance of the name Harder-Wijk, "an elevated place offering a safe shelter to refugees in troublesome times", serves as the point of departure for the exhibition in public space. That genealogical significance causes notions such as safety and freedom to appear inextricably bound to Harderwijk’s history. But how did that connection arise? Is it still linked to a spatial, site-specific concept with phenomenological connotations of physicality? Or does a medial, discursive relationship transform the current concept of "place" into a textual issue, i.e., a notion of place as a platform of knowledge and intellectual exchange?

To investigate these questions further, eight artists have been invited to produce artistic research projects related to a number of significant locations chosen in collaboration with the historical society Herderewich. The artists were asked to develop specific proposals underscoring the above problematics in an artistic form. Interestingly, in their projects, a number of related issues and topics emerged.

In order to understand a location’s specificity, Lara Almarcegui employs an archeological method eliciting that precedes space, i.e., the granting of room. On the Blokhuisplein, a historical location renowned for its straightness and power, she will create a fallow field presenting a temporary autonomous zone as a dysfunctional, undefined, and unfounded space escaping the grid of geography. At the same time, the autonomous zone is able to shelter the experience of a total freedom of interpretation.

As a location for his intervention, Tiong Ang chose the former lodge of the duty officer of the colonial yard depot, the building where volunteers for the Dutch East Indies were recruited. The lodge is situated next to a monumental gate that, thanks to the house of ill repute once situated just outside, seamlessly connects two former literary worlds of bourgeois escapism: the reality of Keetje Tippel, a famous woman of easy virtue, recorded by Neel Doff; and the contours of colonial reality, sketched by Multatuli in Max Havelaar.

Ginette Blom’s intervention brings us back to a medieval conception of freedom incorporated to some extent in the double function of the 13th-century Vispoort (Fish Gate). As a crucial element in the fortress structure, this building served initially as a defensive post and lighthouse. However, at the gate’s sea-facing side, there was also a quay where fishermen could freely sell part of their catch. By means of a nighttime light projection on this historical location, a filmic memory of this pre-capitalist free trade site is evoked.

Gijs Frieling rewrites the history of the port as a freewheeling place of leisure in the form of an allegoric mural near the pier. Until the early 20th century, Harderwijk’s economic independence relied to a certain extent on the presence of the (fishing) port. With the arrival of the Zuiderzeewerken - turning the greater part of the South Sea into a polder - Harderwijk’s economy seemed to run aground. However, the sudden arrival of a group of dolphins at the dock entrance turned out to be the beginning of a new period of economic vigor.

Jeanne van Heeswijk (in collaboration with Boris van Berkum) developed a series of wallpapers placed on the bricked-up windows of old houses around the church square, retelling last century’s lingering tales: about the symbolic poet Rimbaud, who lost his identity as a poet during his stay in Harderwijk and vanished in the grand myth of the foreign legion; about the first big stream of (Belgian) refugees who found temporary shelter during World War I in camp Harderwijk; and about the circulating rumors of missing passports popping up during the transformation of the AZC (Refugee Center) Jan van Nassaukazerne into luxury condominiums, as proof of the search for shelter in a new, safe identity for its former inhabitants.

At the spot where, till the late 1970s, the strictly Protestant “church school” (Vismarktschool) was situated, the city of Harderwijk has recently constructed a natural water reservoir. Job Koelewijn considered this an ideal place for his intervention. He put the stream of rising water and all its connotations of Flood, chastening, and eternal return into the liberating perspective of some hundreds of Great Books.

In the City Museum, Irene Kopelman investigates the 18th-century position of the University of Harderwijk as refuge for thought through an artistic interpretation of Linnaeus’ botanical classification system. Just because this university did not choose for a dogmatic movement of thought but rather was open to a variety of epistemological perspectives, it was a safe haven for unorthodox intellectuals from all over Europe.

In the context of Shelter 07, Mieke Van de Voort stays temporarily in Harderwijk in the Zeebuurt area, where she develops a new work in a typical 1950s row house, icon of radical mediocrity. Here freedom seems to be entirely reduced to a one-dimensional concept. Yet, inevitably the question arises: could something cooked up in an anonymous row house ultimately prove meaningful for the balance between freedom and safety?

Parallel to the Shelter 07 presentations in urban public space, the Catharinakapel (Klooster 1) will serve as the source of Shelter 07 information during the summer of 2007, supplying information about the participating artists, the artistic research projects, the work processes and the historicity of the chosen locations.

For more information go to: http://www.catharinakapel.nl/shelter07

Dutch Pavilion

The Netherlands at the Venice Biennale 2007: Citizens and Subjects

Exhibition Duration:
10 June–21 November 2007

Preview Days:
7–9 June 2007

Informal Press Meetings:
Preview Days, 11.30–12.00 hrs,
Dutch Pavilion

For more information,
please visit our website: http://www.citizensandsubjects.nl

Commissioned by: Mondriaan Foundation
Concept, Curator: Maria Hlavajova
Artist in the Dutch Pavilion: Aernout Mik
Critical Reader edited by: Rosi Braidotti, Charles Esche, Maria Hlavajova
‘Extension’ of the Pavilion (The Netherlands, autumn 2007): a collaboration among BAK, basis voor actuele kunst, Utrecht University, Treaty of Utrecht, Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven and Witte de With, Rotterdam
Organized by: BAK, basis voor actuele kunst, Utrecht

Citizens and Subjects is a three-part project conceived as the Dutch contribution to the 52nd International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia. The project reflects on the notion of the nation-state in the present day circumstances of the so-called West and asks how we can negotiate its prospects vis-à-vis the challenges posed by the enduring state of anxiety stemming from various threats, real or imagined. This contemporary condition is co-defined by immigration, an issue of major political and moral consequence, which we seem to have been incapable of resolving. Instead, fear, ‘security’ and violence have increasingly become tools for maintaining the status quo. The project proposes this situation as the paradigm of our contemporaneity and prompts us to think through art about other possible ways that a new kind of political reality could be constructed.

Citizens and Subjects: Aernout Mik
In Citizens and Subjects, Aernout Mik presents a multichannel video installation consisting of three new works – Training Ground, 2007, Convergencies, 2007 and Mock Up, 2007 – embedded in an architectural intervention in the Dutch Pavilion. Training Ground and Mock Up are fictional works (two- and four-channel video installations, respectively), in which Mik starts from the idea of a ‘training’ or ‘exercise’, asking how we prepare teams of first responders (policemen, fire brigades, medical teams, etc.) – and ourselves – to deal with potential future crises or threats to national security and handle issues such as (illegal) immigration. Convergencies (two-channel video installation), by contrast, employs both documentary footage of such trainings and footage from real situations in which the acquired techniques and strategies are applied. Through repetition, re-enactment, mimicry, inertia, building irrational excess by means of staging scenes or editing existing film material
and by over-saturating the work with unexpected play and empowering invention, Mik questions the simplified distinction between citizens (as those with the rights and full privileges of belonging to a state or nation) and subjects (as those under rule or authority) today. On one hand he asks, aren’t we all actually subjected in the same way to this rather disquieting reality? Concurrently, he clarifies the notion of the ‘subject’ as one who is capable of acting in order to overcome the distinction between subjection and possible liberation, metaphorically suggesting that perhaps it is from here that new opportunities might emerge.

Citizens and Subjects: The Netherlands, for example
Instead of a traditional catalogue to accompany the exhibition in the Dutch Pavilion, a critical reader is published, in which ideas and questions that Mik introduces in his project are debated and analysed by a number of scholars and artists based in the Netherlands. The reader takes the state of the Netherlands as an ‘example’ of the contemporary western condition and considers how our society fails to negotiate the challenges posed by economic globalization, human migration and cross-cultural influence. It asks how art and artists can react to these changes and what possibilities they can create to see things differently.

Contributors: BAVO (Gideon Boie & Matthias Pauwels), Sarah Bracke, Esther Captain & Guno Jones, Marlene Dumas, Halleh Ghorashi, Suchan Kinoshita, Sven Lütticken, Aernout Mik, Melvin Moti, Sohelia Najand, Henk Oosterling, Pages (Nasrin Tabatabai & Babak Afrassiabi), Baukje Prins, Willem de Rooij, Iris van der Tuin and Lawrence Weiner.

Edited by Rosi Braidotti, Charles Esche and Maria Hlavajova. Language: English. Number of pages: 336. Published by: BAK, basis voor actuele kunst and JRP|Ringier. Designed by: Kummer and Herrman. ISBN: 978-3-905770-73-5.

Citizens and Subjects: Practices and Debates
The ‘extension’ of the Dutch Pavilion to the Netherlands in autumn 2007 is envisioned as a platform for contributing to the general public debate about a variety of key issues, including changing national identities and the anxieties brought about by such changes. These and other ideas related to the project Citizens and Subjects are debated through art and other disciplines by means of discussion groups, research residencies, teaching modules, lectures and conversations. The programme takes place in Utrecht through a collaboration between BAK, basis voor actuele kunst, Utrecht University and Treaty of Utrecht, as well as at Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven in conjunction with the project Be[com]ing Dutch and at Witte de With in Rotterdam in connection with the German Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. These respective projects have grown out of a similar analysis of current cultural, artistic, social and political conditions, and the possible role cultural institutions can play in
their development.

Project Partners
Utrecht University; Treaty of Utrecht; Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven; Witte de With, Rotterdam

Financial Partners
The project Citizens and Subjects has been commissioned and funded by the Mondriaan Foundation, Amsterdam. The Municipality of Utrecht kindly supported Citizens and Subjects: Practices and Debates. This part of the project has been realized with additional contributions from Utrecht University and Treaty of Utrecht. carlier | gebauer, Berlin has generously provided financial and production assistance. Further financial or in-kind support has been provided by: Forbo Flooring, the Netherlands; Rabo Art Collection, the Netherlands; Independent Television News, London; Associated Press, London.

International press
Beate Barner
t: +49 30 398009609
m: +49 173 6076643
info@citizensandsubjects.nl

Dutch press
Hanna Sohier
t: +31 30 2316125
f: +31 30 2300591
info@citizensandsubjects.nl

For more information go to: http://www.citizensandsubjects.nl