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[mac], musée d’art contemporain de Marseille

Peter Friedl: Travail 1964–2006
30 June – 16 September 2007
Opening: Friday, 29 June, 7:00 pm

[mac] Marseille
69 avenue de Haïfa
13008 Marseille - France
Tel : + 33 (0)491 25 01 07
dgac-mac@mairie-marseille.fr
Open : Everyday 11am – 6pm.
Closed on Mondays and bank holidays

“What interests me about a new concept of genre is how it can create a difference to the old politics of identity. It offers the freedom to look at things more differently, which becomes again interesting in a political and aesthetic prospect. Things become a little strange if their relative autonomy is enforced.”
Peter Friedl

Le [mac], musée d’art contemporain de Marseille is pleased to present the retrospective exhibition Peter Friedl: Travail: 1964-2006.

Berlin-based artist Peter Friedl (born in Austria, 1960) has made a steady incision in the methods and conventions of contemporary art. He has held numerous solo exhibitions and participated in major group shows such as Documenta X and this year’s Documenta 12 ( http://www.thezoostory.de ). Presented today in the form of a retrospective, Friedl’s work—consistently heterogeneous in terms of medium, style, and meaning—highlights political awareness, autobiography, permanent displacement, design interventions, narratology, potential counter imagery, and the reinvention of genres left over from the history of modernism. His projects present aesthetic models for disarming configurations of power.

Peter Friedl: Travail 1964–2006 problematizes the genre of “retrospective,” that is, the musealization of an oeuvre within the framework of institutional logics and through the context of its own history. For this reason, the works and installations in this exhibition are edited and exhibited nearly as documents. In addition, the exhibition brings together a vast selection of drawings on paper, presented chronologically from Friedl’s earliest artistic production to the present. These drawings offer a glimpse of formal elements (handwriting, motifs, colors) and contents (historical references, signs, and symbols) that often reappear in other works and projects: The poster-piece Map (1969-2005) is based on an early drawing from 1969 assigning the names of Native American peoples to the U.S. territory. In Neue Straßenverkehrsordnung (New Traffic Code, 2000), Friedl uses neon to recreate a motif from 1995 in large scale. The reference is a RAF document from 1971, which outl
ines the possibilities and models of revolutionary activity in Western European cities.

In the form of conceptual aesthetic acts and based on exemplary brief actions, video works such as Dummy (1997) or Tiger oder Löwe (2000) investigate how art history and social history function. The video installation King Kong (2001) features songwriter Daniel Johnston against the backdrop of apartheid history, filmed in “Triomf Park”—located in Sophiatown on the outskirts of Johannesburg. Also included is Friedl’s most recent production, Liberty City—an homage to the community of Liberty City in Miami.

Started in 1995, Playgrounds consists of more than 700 color slides arranged for various digital wall projections in kid-size format. The pictures—all in landscape format and taken by the artist—show public playgrounds from around the world. Another ongoing project, Theory of Justice, is presented as both an extensive installation and an artist’s book. Friedl’s project, begun in 1992, is based on the collection and selection of newspaper and magazine images, which are displayed in specially designed showcases.

The exhibition is produced by the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA), Spain, and curated by Bartomeu Marí.

Peter Friedl: Travail 1964-2006 is accompanied by a 380-page catalogue book featuring a large selection of the artist’s writings, along with essays by Mieke Bal, Roger M. Buergel, Norman M. Klein, Bartomeu Marí, and a conversation with Jean-Pierre Rehm. The French version is published by Analogues and distributed by Les presses du réel.

For more information go to: http://www.marseille.fr/vdm/cms/accueil/culture/musees/musee_art_contemporain_mac

Grand Tour 2007

Thank you!

52nd International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia

Art 38 Basel

documenta 12

skulptur projekte münster 07

… would like to thank you for coming and joining us at the openings in Venice, Basel, Kassel and Münster. We hope that you had an easy Grand Tour travelling through Europe. And if you haven’t yet, please take advantage of getting support in planning your art travel itinerary by using our website http://www.grandtour2007.com.

Come and be welcome in Venice, Kassel and Münster!

http://www.grandtour2007.com

contact@grandtour2007.com

For more information go to: http://www.grandtour2007.com

SCOTLAND AND VENICE 2007

Palazzo Zenobio
Collegio Armeno Moorat Raphael
Fondamenta del Soccorso, Dorsoduro 2596, Venezia 30123
(Vaporetto stops: S. Basilio and Ca Rezzonico)

Sunday 10 June - Friday 2 November
Tuesday - Sunday 10:00 to 19:00
(closed Mondays)
info@scotlandandvenicebiennale.com
press@scotlandandvenicebiennale.com
http://www.scotlandandvenicebiennale.com

CHARLES AVERY, HENRY COOMBES, LOUISE HOPKINS, ROSALIND NASHASHIBI, LUCY SKAER, TONY SWAIN AT SCOTLAND AND VENICE 2007

This exhibition of new work by six of Scotland’s most exciting and innovative artists is hosted by the Scottish Arts Council, National Galleries of Scotland and British Council Scotland.

Curator, Philip Long says: ‘Scotland is recognised as a centre of excellence for the visual arts nationally and internationally and we hope to reflect this through the six highly individual talents, selected for this exhibition. Some on occasion use invented worlds to investigate their concerns; others make use of comparisons, real situations or look back into history. What is clear is that each artist works with such ability and often with such surprising and new means that they have the power to alter perceptions.’

Working across a range of media, Charles Avery’s artwork is characterised by formal beauty, humour and a spirit of philosophical enquiry. This approach to his work is illustrated in the ongoing Islanders project, in which, over a ten-year period, he has described in drawing, painting and sculpture the topology and cosmology of an imaginary island, inspired by his childhood living in the Inner Hebrides, Scotland.

Henry Coombes’ work investigates the entrenched political, cultural and class connotations of the traditional media in which he works. Film, oil paint and watercolour are used to seduce the viewer into familiar images, which on inspection, reveal a subversive subtext.

Using a variety of materials such as furnishing fabric, newspapers, song sheets, maps and comic strips as the basis for her works, Louise Hopkins’ art work can at first appear playful and sensuous. Her primary intention, however, is not one of embellishment, but of disruption and her use of paint to alter the meaning of the original material on which she works is disorientating and at times disturbing.

Rosalind Nashashibi became the first woman to win a Beck’s Future’s award in 2003 for her film The State of Things, which featured images of elderly women rummaging through piles of old clothes at a Salvation Army jumble sale, over the soundtrack of a traditional Egyptian love song. Using primarily film and video, but also photography and printmaking, this work exemplifies Nashashibi’s practice, demonstrating her interest in social ritual and group interaction, shot on 16mm film from an observant standpoint.

Lucy Skaer works conceptually and in three and two dimensions. Her drawings utilise found imagery sourced from photojournalistic reportage, by merging photo-orientated images with different forms of patterning in enamel paint, ink and gold leaf. She also creates public interventions, and was shortlisted for Beck’s Futures in 2003 with a set of give-away posters advertising the fugitive actions she claimed to have performed in public places.

A sheet or cut section of newsprint provides the basis for Tony Swain’s paintings of complex and surreal private worlds. Randomly selected newspaper pages are painted over with considered delicacy, distorting perspectives and entwining abstract motifs with the landscapes and figures of the original print.

Scotland and Venice 2007 will take place within the ground floor rooms of the Palazzo Zenobio and will complement separate presentations taking place within the venue by other countries and organisations including Armenia, Australia, England and South America.

In its broader context, La Biennale di Venezia will see one of the largest British offerings to be staged in recent years with leading artists representing Great Britain, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland in four separate exhibitions across the city.

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