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ArtReview

Cajoling, badgering, interrupting, disturbing – this month ArtReview visits artists hard at work on big summer projects for the Venice Biennale, MoMA, the Schaulager and Gagosian.

On newsstands from 17 May
(US distribution subject to overseas delivery)

We publish the profound insights of Robert Gober, a man willing to answer all but one of our questions. Jeff Koons lowers his guard. And voices from across the creative spectrum answer the question: ‘What does Tracey Emin mean to you?’

Plus Sophie Calle, David Altmejd, Isa Genzken, Chéri Samba and all that Venice has to offer.

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“Where do I stand? What do I want?” – Thomas Hirschhorn

Coming this August – ArtReview:Annual. For the first in ArtReview’s new series of annual collector’s editions, internationally renowned artist Thomas Hirschhorn is creating an exclusive artwork across the entire August issue. In this uniquely personal production, the Swiss artist will investigate, through drawings and collage, the inspirations, aspirations and motivations that drive his work.

The ArtReview:Annual is available only to subscribers to the print edition of ArtReview, and through specialist bookshops worldwide.

To subscribe to the print version of ArtReview, visit http://www.artreview.com

*****

Highlights from the June issue of ArtReview magazine:

Maybe it was the hulking presence of a badly dressed, testosterone-drunk superman with military-green skin, but Jeff Koons was unsilenceable. Mark Rappolt listened in.

Sophie Calle, representing France at the Venice Biennale, has a few complaints about artist profiles, so our writer, Brian Dillon, decided to impersonate her. All the better to understand a work whose origins lie in an ex-lover’s goodbye.

Robert Gober, one of America’s great living artists, has a major retrospective at the Schaulager, a rarity for a man whose preference has always been to “wander into new work” before spending time and energy looking back. So, writes Martin Herbert, if you want to see a sizeable collection of Gober’s work anytime soon, you need to make your way to Basel this summer.

Gober’s not the only New York giant looking back this summer: Jonathan T.D. Neil meets with Richard Serra as MoMA installs the sculptor’s Forty Years retrospective

Object? Installation? Luxury boutique display? David Altmejd makes sculpture, but not as we know it. J.J. Charlesworth meets up with the artist as he puts together The Index at the Canadian Pavilion in Venice, a macabre vision incorporating werewolf parts, ‘bird-men’ and the glitter and sparkle of precious metals.

ArtReview Biennale focus: 18 pages of Tracey Emin, Robert Storr, the off-site pavilions, Congo’s modern-day Hogarth and much more.

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ArtReview:Digital – same magazine, just digital.
Now in its eighth month, ArtReview’s digital twin has 13,000+ subscribers and more than 400,000 page views per month, reaching a global market: Russia, Asia, Europe, the Americas… Essential reading for those who want a bit of opinion with their art, ArtReview:Digital lets you view the magazine when, where and how you feel like it.

Get your FREE digital issues… including an indispensable double summer issue for your carry-on (July/August), the new art season (September), the photography edition (October) and the Power 100 (November) at http://www.artreviewdigital.com

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

Portikus

Salty Water
Paulina Olowska

What of Salty Water
Bonnie Camplin

Opening: May 25, 2007, 8pm
Exhibition on view: May 26, 2007 – July 1, 2007

Press talk: May 25, 2007, 11am

This shared installation is a seamless and simultaneous coexistence of two: “Salty Water” by Paulina Olowska and “What of Salty Water” by Bonnie Camplin.

It’s an intricate configuration of made and gathered objects and images, a product of collaboration and a shared extemporaneous (free fall) voyage and a way into comprehending the modern world and coming to terms with the consequences and manifestations of industrialization and free market economy. Also it’s an intense meditation on the nature of trade, exchange and trust. This includes sex trade and how it incorporates versions of solidarity and collaboration between women. As both artists view themselves as women workers, they consider how this relates to their position as professional artists.

Collaboration between us has been based on working with two points of departure, one is very personal memory based reference and one is an outsider’s view of myths and symbols. Both artists can inhabit both of these positions in relation to themselves and each other. Olowska is from Gdansk and Camplin is from London. Solidarnosc and Colonial history are obvious examples of symbolic and direct influences on the artists.

A boat was found and became a kind of stage onto which were gathered various bits of the haul from our shared venture. Memories in the fabric of the boat/stage of imagined female personalities who embarked on an epic voyage now washed up wrecked in interior space by a wall that also tells stories of misadventure. Apparently our protagonists have passed through psychic spaces where there are no laws of exterior/interior or of scale (like in Gulliver’s Travels). The installation is a haunted and moody theatrical tableau that sparkles faintly in the dark just like the glitter of putrescence.

A performance will take place on the day of the opening.

A publication will accompany this exhibition at the Portikus (scheduled to appear in late July, 2007).

For further information or guided exhibition tours please contact Portikus: info@portikus.de

PORTIKUS
Alte Brücke 2 Maininsel
60594 Frankfurt am Main
Germany
Telephone +49 69 962 44 54-0
Facsimile +49 69 962 44 54-24

For more information go to: http://portikus.de/

Argentine Pavilion

GUILLERMO KUITCA TO REPRESENT ARGENTINA IN 52ND INTERNATIONAL ART EXHIBITION, VENICE BIENNALE

Guillermo Kuitca: Si Yo Fuera El Invierno Mismo (If I Were Winter Itself)

Ateneo Veneto
Campo San Fantin, San Marco 1897, Venezia
(By Teatro La Fenice)
From 10 June to 23 September 2007
Tuesday through Sunday 10 am – 6 pm
Press Preview: 7 - 9 June 2007, 10 am – 8 pm

Internationally acclaimed artist Guillermo Kuitca will represent Argentina in the 52nd Venice Biennale 2007. Housed in the early 17th-century Ateneo Veneto, located near the opera house La Fenice in Campo San Fantin, the Argentine Pavilion will be open to the public from 10 June through 23 September 2007. The artist has created four large-scale paintings specifically for this exhibition.

In addition to showing in the Argentine Pavilion, Guillermo Kuitca’s work will be represented significantly in Biennale Commissioner Robert Storr’s central international exhibition Think with the Senses—Feel With the Mind: Art in the Present Tense. Thirty-eight canvases from the artist’s ongoing “Diarios” series will be featured.

Sergio Baur, Counselor of the Directorate of Cultural Affairs of the Argentine Ministry of Foreign Affairs, International Trade and Worship, and Mercedes Parodi, Cultural Attaché to the Argentine Embassy in Italy, are Commissioners of the Pavilion, which is curated by Inés Katzenstein, Curator, Malba-Colección Costantini, Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires.

Kuitca, who was Argentina’s representative at the 1989 São Paulo Bienal, says, “It has been many years since I officially represented my country in an exhibition. At this moment in my career, I must say being asked was unexpected. It was a happily surprising request—and one to which you must say yes!” He adds, “In the spirit of the Biennale I wanted to create something in a different direction, something that hasn’t much to do with my past work. I can’t think of a better venue than the Venice Biennale to do this, to reach back into art historical time and movements and create from these a new form, which will be shown for the first time in this extraordinary historically significant building and city. Also, it is a particularly great feeling to be in this one directed by Rob Storr, whom I respect so much.”

“This new series of paintings is a dramatic change in the work of Guillermo Kuitca,” comments Inés Katzenstein. “Instead of relying on technical codes of space representation — coming from either cartography or architecture—as he has done in previous works and series, he is for the first time referring to the history of modern painting; specifically to certain heroic moments of the history of abstraction.

“Presenting this new work in the context of the Venice Biennale is a meaningful, brave, and even polemic gesture,” she continues. “Moreover, since the consequences of the dialogue between this new work and the Baroque images of the Ateneo Veneto are uncertain, the whole project is both a challenge and an open proposal to how the art will interact.”

Upcoming Multi-venue Retrospective and Artist’s Biography

The first comprehensive retrospective of Guillermo Kuitca’s art to travel in the United States in fifteen years has been initiated by the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, in association with the Albright-Knox Art Gallery. Examining over two decades of the artist’s painting and including approximately 45 canvases and 20 works on paper made between 1982 and 2008, Guillermo Kuitca will open in June 2009 at the Hirshhorn Museum, and tour until 2011 to the Albright-Knox, the Miami Art Museum, and the Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao.

Guillermo Kuitca is represented by Sperone Westwater, New York ( http://www.speronewestwater.com )

For additional information, please contact:
Glory Jones/Natalie Hoch/Christina Houghton
Resnicow Schroeder Associates
Phone: 212-671-5171/5170/5162
gjones@resnicowschroeder.com
nhoch@resnicowschroeder.com
choughton@resnicowschroeder.com

To obtain media credentials for the June 7, 8, and 9 vernissage and for other information about the Venice Biennale, please visit http://www.labiennale.org

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

EFA Gallery

Horizon
Curated by David Humphrey

June 1-July 27, 2007
Opening Reception, Friday, June 1, 6:00-8:00 pm

EFA Gallery
EFA Studio Center
323 West 39th Street, 2nd Floor
New York, NY 10018
between 8th and 9th Avenues
Summer Hours:
Tues. through Fri., 12-6 PM

EFA Gallery announces a new exhibition curated by David Humphrey, "Horizon." The horizon is subjective, entirely determined by the position of the spectator. Because it has no independent existence it has become a symbol for a variety of thresholds: the visible, the thinkable and the knowable. Every artwork in this exhibition will have a horizon and will be abutted and aligned to adjacent works on it’s left and right so as to make one continuous horizon around the gallery. Horizons in pictures are always cropped fragments, which, nonetheless, confirm the spectator’s position at the center of his or her experience. This exhibition will tether every artist’s horizon with all the other’s to create an irrationally cooperative panorama, a heterogeneous continuity that weakens the boundaries between works while staging their differences.

Approximately 40 artists of all disciplines and career levels will be included in the exhibition including:
Bill Adams, Meredith Allen, Diti Almog, Ellen Altfest, Louise Belcourt, Brian Belott, Katherine Bradford, Benjamin Butler, Dana Carlson, Jennifer Coates, Adam Cvijanovic, Angela Dufresne, Nicole Eisenman, Judith Eisler, Rochelle Feinstein, Jeff Gauntt, EJ Hauser, Catherine Howe, James Hyde, Susan Jennings, Lisa Klapstock, Dorota Kolodziejczyk, Bill Komoski, Julian Kreimer, Michael Lazarus, Medrie MacPhee, Chris Martin, Suzanne McClelland, Elizaveta Meksin, Santi Moix, Donna Moylan, Laura Newman, Gary Petersen, Alexander Ross, Sally Ross, Frank Schroder, Kate Shepherd, Amy Sillman, Elena Sisto, Rebecca Smith, Eva Struble, Team SHaG, Len Tsvetkov, Stanley Whitney, Paula Wilson, and others…

David Humphrey is a curator and artist, born in Augsburg, Germany. He received a BFA from Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore, MD, studied at the New York Studio School of Painting, Drawing, and Sculpture, and received an MA from NYU. Humphrey received a New York State CAPS grant, a New York State Council for the Arts Grant, and has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Humphrey lives and works in New York and he has shown nationally and internationally. He is represented by Sikkema Jenkins & co in New York and will be exhibiting in November at Keith Talent Gallery in London.

Humphrey has curated exhibitions in New York and California, from Feigen Contemporary to KS Art to New York Academy of Art. As an artist Humphrey has also published articles in publications such as Art in America and Art issues. Humphrey is the host of the Internet radio show Sound and Vision on WPS1.org.

This exhibition is presented by the EFA Gallery, a program of The Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts. With additional support from The Helen Keeler Burke Charitable Foundation, Peter C. Gould, Materials for the Arts, and Carnegie Corporation Inc. and many generous individuals.

The EFA Gallery is a curatorial project space. Through the gallery, The Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts supports the creative work of independent curators. Curators build the framework in which we understand artists and the art they make. At their best, they redefine how we look at culture. The Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts believes in the essential importance of art in a civil society. The value of the artist’s creative spirit is not limited by age, race, nationality or acceptance by others.

For further information:
Elaine Tin Nyo, Director
T. 212-563-5855 x203, F. 212-563-1875
elaine@efa1.org

For more information go to: http://efa1.org/EFA/Programs.php

Lithuanian Pavilion

Lithuanian Pavilion
52nd International Art Exhibition –
La Biennale di Venezia

VILLA LITUANIA
Nomeda & Gediminas Urbonas
http://www.villalituania.lt

Special event:
Villa Lituania International Pigeon Race
Pigeons’ liberation:
10.00 am Saturday 9 June, 2007
Launch site:
Campo S. Biagio (Arsenale)

Pavilion vernissage: 11.00 am Saturday 9 June
Ludoteca, Santa Maria Ausiliatrice
Castello 450, 30122 Venice

Nomeda & Gediminas Urbonas’ project takes its title – Villa Lituania – and conceptual impetus from a grand house in Rome closely associated with the Lithuanian nation. Villa Lituania was the Embassy of the first independent Republic of Lithuania to Italy that became the possession of the USSR after its occupation of Lithuania in 1940. The keys to the property were handed by Italian governmental representatives to Soviet officials following the alliance of powers signaled by the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.

Since the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the formation of the Republic of Lithuania the Villa has remained the property of Russia; operating as the Russian Consulate in Rome. It is considered the last occupied territory of Lithuania. For their Venice project the artists are proposing a symbolical restoration of Villa Lituania.

Working with pigeon fanciers in Italy and Lithuania, the artists are proposing to stage two pigeon races from a location at Campo S. Biagio in Venice. The first race is an international challenge race with birds racing to all points in Italy as well as Lithuania, Poland, and Russia. The second event is planned for the autumn of 2007 and is a special race from Venice to Rome. The race’s intention is clear – sending colomba della pace “doves of peace” to the occupied territory of Villa Lituania in Rome.

To achieve this, a pigeon-loft needs to be constructed in Rome. Pigeons’ metriculate the loft they make their first flight from as ‘home’ and always return to that location when released: hence ‘homing pigeon’. Once requests to build at Villa Lituania were effectively denied the artistic team turned their attention to the construction of a loft in a public park in Rome – engaging protocol heavy real politik. The fate of this element of Nomeda & Gediminas Urbonas’ project hangs-in-the-balance.

The Pavilion exhibition documents the process so far, tells the fascinating story of Villa Lituania, and introduces an international audience to the important work that Nomeda & Gediminas Urbonas have been making in Vilnius – protesting the encroachment by neo-liberal government and corporations on Lithuania’s public space.

Presented by the Contemporary Art Centre (CAC), Vilnius
Commissioner: Simon Rees
For more information contact: +370 5 260 89 60 / info@cac.lt / http://www.cac.lt
Principally funded by the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Lithuania

For more information go to: http://www.villalituania.lt

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

Centre culturel suisse de Paris

Obituary to Michel Ritter

It is with great regret that the Centre culturel suisse de Paris is announcing the death of its director Michel Ritter. The CCSP team would like to join in the great sorrow of his parting with his family and close friends.

Director of the Centre culturel suisse de Paris since September 2002, Michel Ritter was born in Fribourg in 1949. He started out as a self-taught artist at the beginning of the 70s, more particularly in New York where he lived for a few years. Back in Switzerland, he decided to concentrate on the work of others and founded the RB gallery, an independent space in Fribourg. In 1981, he organised the important Fri-Art 81 exhibition which was also presented in New York as Fri-Art made in Switzerland and whose impact enabled him to found the Contemporary Art Centre in Fribourg, which was based on the Kunsthalle model. He was director there till 2002, and in 2004, he received the Prix Art Frankfurt for the ambitious international programme he created in this institution.

Michel Ritter was very attached to the cross-disciplinary concepts he followed at the Centre culturel suisse de Paris, and was also artistic director for the Belluard Bollwerk International festival in 1986 and a member of its artistic committee for a number of years.

In 1996, he was awarded the Prix de mérite pour médiatrices et médiateurs d’art and in 2005 the Meret Oppenheim Prize awarded by the Federal Culture Office to leading personalities working in Swiss contemporary art, and true to his generous nature, he redistributed the cash prize that went with this award to three alternative exhibition places.

Commissioner of renowned international exhibitions, Michel Ritter was able to gain the confidence and friendship of all the artists he worked with and widen the influence of Swiss culture, that he was not content to be just national, but critical, demanding and part of a universal reflection. He will always remain a model of engagement, prospection and intuition and a man that believed “an artistic act to be like a political act”.

The Centre culturel suisse de Paris will continue to follow the programme put in place by Michel Ritter.

A good-bye ceremony will be held at the Cathedral in Fribourg (CH) on Thursday, 10 May at 2.30 pm.

A tribute is to be paid to him at the Centre culturel Suisse de Paris, 22 May at 6 pm.

For more information go to:

Musée d’Art Moderne de Saint-Etienne

Orlan: Le Récit
At the Musée d’Art Moderne de Saint-Etienne Métropole!

From May 26 to August 26, 2007

From May 26 to August 26, 2007, the Musée d’Art Moderne de Saint-Etienne devotes to ORLAN the greatest retrospective ever organized on the artist’s work ; “ORLAN: Le Récit.” It is the opportunity to pay homage to the artist on the occasion of her sixtieth birthday, in her hometown of Saint-Etienne. For the vernissage on May 25 and to celebrate the thirtieth birthday of “Le Baiser de l’Artiste”, ORLAN will present a performance Hybrider et Recycler especially conceived for the exhibit in collaboration with Andrea Crews.

Curated by Lòrànd Hegyi and Eugenio Viola

Since the mid-sixties, ORLAN has journeyed through the most important art movements of her time as an extraordinary protagonist. “Her work – unclassifiable – moves beyond the many “posts” and “isms” of art history, and her unique style has always been that of a complex, irreverent, ironic, blasphemous, iconoclastic artist, for whom the provocation of flesh, the reverse of the body, art and life, the play of identity, the constant oscillation between the real and the virtual, reach the heights of poetry,” states Eugenio Viola, co-curator of the exhibit.

With a wide angle on the artist’s life and work, Le Récit builds a bridge between her past, summoned by the present of her research, and a future that promises to be long and fertile. Illustrating the various stages of ORLAN’s work, this retrospective beckons a rediscovery of the history of the artist’s body poetry, from the precious first plastic works of the early sixties when she began exploring the concept of “body-sculpture,” to the works linked to the feminist movement, all the while passing through the artist’s reinterpretation of Judeo-Christian iconography. A number of previously unseen works presented as part of the exhibit bear witness to an-depth review of the baroque metaphor in general, and of Bernini’s Saint Theresa in particular. This “hagiographic” declension of the “Art Corporel” (bodily art) is symptomatic of ORLAN’s artistic journey.

The retrospective also touches upon surgical-operation-performances conceived as original and provocative answers to the crisis of performance. In the early nineties, ORLAN transformed an operating room into an artist’s studio in which an artwork was produced, thus inaugurating the mutating paradigm of contemporary art - a progressive return to “bodily” themes - in a direct relationship with new technologies and biotechnology. The appropriation of plastic surgery as a creative art form, both as subject and object of the performance in which the “oeuvre-action” integrates the artist’s body, marks the passage of bodily art into carnal art in ORLAN’s work.

In the Self-Hybridation series (Pre-Colombian, African and the more recent ones on Native Americans), ORLAN continues her digital journey through the infinite possibility of physical identities. By using various canons of beauty and aesthetics from different times and places, the artist creates “living” totemic figures, almost tangible in their virtuality and fascinating in their disturbing appearance, and seductive in their artificial otherness.

Finally, the Musée d’Art Moderne de Saint-Etienne Métropole presents Le Plan du Film, a work in progress, started in 2001 based on a concept by Jean-Luc Godard. The idea? To make a film “backwards,” as a destabilizing synthesis made up of autobiographical facts and fictional elements.

Thus, Le Récit connects ORLAN’s past and future works, revealing the intrinsic coherence of her multifaceted artistic research, striking in its extraordinary capacity for inquiry, which allows the artist constantly to renew her work and to remain at the cutting edge of innovation. It is that perpetual quest which characterizes this artist’s journey, and precisely what makes her one-of-a-kind in the vast horizon of contemporary art.

Catalogue :
Charta Editions, Milano
Book format: 21 x 30 cm
pages: 304
illustrations: 290

For more information go to: http://www.mam-st-etienne.fr