Artipedia - Arts News

Hungarian Pavilion

Andreas Fogarasi: Kultur und Freizeit

Hungarian Pavilion, 52nd Venice Biennale
10 June - 21 November 2007

Commissioner: Dr Zsolt Petrányi
Curator: Katalin Timár
Artist: Andreas Fogarasi
Catalogue/book edited by: Katalin Timár

the book
Edited by Katalin Timár
Published on the occasion of the
Hungarian participation at 52nd Venice Biennale

http://www.biennale07.hu

The project ‘Kultur und Freizeit’ consists of a series of single channel videos, all showing the present state of cultural centres in contemporary Budapest, projected in separate black boxes which both physically and structurally include the spectators. At first, these black boxes seem to be minimalistic sculptural objects. Yet, as we move along them, their structure gets revealed and they look as much sophisticated micro-cinemas as simple wooden props.

These short videos are not straightforward documentaries since they don’t aim at providing the visitors with a comprehensive, anthropological survey of the current situation of these buildings. Rather, they function as signifiers for a contemporary split between mass culture and popular cultures, and their respective institutional frameworks, as opposed to high culture and its locations. This is emphasized by the particular use of the camera movement, the subjective points of view, and the athmospheric quality of the images that trust in the narrative qualities of the architecture itself.

In Hungary, the phenomenon and the proliferation of cultural centres belong to the past political era in which one of the state’s fundamental missions was the democratization of culture. The origins of this endeavour date back not only to André Malraux and French cultural policy of the 1950s, but also to the 19th century tradition of the workers’ club. In this respect, Fogarasi’s project has a geographic and political relevance that goes well beyond the Hungarian capital.

Andreas Fogarasi was born in 1977 in Vienna to Hungarian parents. He has studied art and architecture in Vienna and is co-editor of "dérive — magazine for urban studies". He has held solo exhibitions (among others) at Grazer Kunstverein (2005), Georg Kargl Gallery, Vienna (2006), and Studio Gallery, Budapest (2002) and has participated in numerous group exhibitions including Models for Tomorrow at European Kunsthalle, Cologne (2007); Re-Modern at Künstlerhaus, Vienna (2005); Konstruktion und Situation at Galerie im Taxispalais, Innsbruck (2003); GNS — Global Navigation System at Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2003), and Manifesta 4 in Frankfurt (2002).

Accompanying the exhibition is a book published in English. This 176 page publication features contributions from Jochen Becker, Sergio Bologna, Anthony Davies with Stephan Dillemuth and Jakob Jakobsen, Péter György, Zsolt K. Horváth, Barbara Steiner, is edited by Katalin Timár, and published by the Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König Köln.
ISBN 978-3-86560-287-9

For further information:
http://www.biennale07.hu

Contact:
Biennale Office
Mucsarnok / Kunsthalle, Budapest
Júlia Gáspár
Phone: +36 30340 78 49
Fax: +36 1 363 63 35
biennaleoffice@mucsarnok.hu

For more information go to: http://www.biennale07.hu

Lewis Glucksman Gallery

Ai Weiwei:
Monumental Junkyard
until 7 October 2007

Lewis Glucksman Gallery
University College Cork
Cork, Republic of Ireland
T: +353 21 490 1844
F: +353 21 490 1823
info@glucksman.org

http://www.glucksman.org

Monumental Junkyard

The Lewis Glucksman Gallery in Cork, Ireland, presents a new outdoor installation by the artist Ai Weiwei. The installation Monumental Junkyard has been commissioned and produced in collaboration with Swiss collector Dr. Uli Sigg on the occasion of the exhibition The Year of the Golden Pig: Contemporary Chinese Art from the Sigg Collection.

The installation has been designed to resemble a junkyard of building material that is typically evident in the suburbs of Chinese megacities, dumped outside the Lewis Glucksman Gallery. The piled materials are in fact 56 domestic doors reproduced in Chinese marble — a material that is resonant with the lofty projections of Renaissance sculpture, as well as with kitsch interior décor. The reproduction of wasted domestic doors in marble responds to issues of regeneration and historical-preservation, material and symbolic value, and the ambiguity of contexts as part of affluent consumerist society.

Ai Weiwei

Ai Weiwei (born 1957, lives and works in Beijing) is one of the China’s most influential contemporary artists. He also works as a curator, publisher, architect, and commentator on contemporary art and culture. In the late 1970s, he was a member of ‘The Stars’, a group of largely self-taught artists in Beijing who challenged the official communist mandate and helped set a new horizon of possibilities for contemporary art in China.

After moving to the USA in 1981, Ai Weiwei returned to China in 1993, where he started on a series of ambitious and provocative works: photographs, installations and sculptures using found objects and ancient relics. Influenced by the approaches of Dada, Duchamp, and Warhol, Ai Weiwei has created works which both incorporate and de-stabilise traditional aspects of Chinese culture.

Ai Weiwei’s works respond to China’s rich artistic heritage by reconfiguring objects such as Ming and Qing dynasty furniture and porcelain, Han dynasty urns and Neolithic vases.

He is one of the most eminent artists of his generation and his work has been shown extensively in the United States, Belgium, Germany, France, Korea and Japan. His work was included in the First Guangzhou Triennial 2002, China, the 48th Venice Biennale 1999, Italy, and the 2006 Biennale of Sydney. At documenta 12, he currently presents Fairytale, a work in which he brought over 1001 Chinese people to the small city of Kassel. As well as his artistic projects, Ai Weiwei has also recently worked as a consultant to architects Herzog and de Meuron in their design of the new Beijing Olympic Stadium for the 2008 Olympic Games.

Exhibition The Year of the Golden Pig

The exhibition The Year of the Golden Pig presented a selection from the most important collection of contemporary Chinese art in the world. The exhibition was curated from the collection of Dr. Uli Sigg. The entire collection consists of more than 1,500 artworks across all artistic media. A former Swiss ambassador to China, Dr. Sigg has taken a leading interest in China and its culture since the late 1970s. Together with his wife Rita, he has been building a collection devoted exclusively to Chinese art since the mid-1990s, and can justly be regarded as the pioneer in this field.

A limited edition catalogue is available that documents the Glucksman exhibition, also featuring a conversation between Dr Uli Sigg and Glucksman Director Fiona Kearney.

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

Van Abbemuseum

BÜCHLER / MOGRABI / STARK
3 artists in Van Abbemuseum
12/05 - 02/09/2007

On 12 May, the exhibition trio Büchler / Mograbi / Stark opened in the Van Abbemuseum, where the work of three established artists is shown in their first institutional solo exhibitions. By exhibiting the diversity of works by Pavel Büchler (Czechoslovakia, 1952), Avi Mograbi (Israel, 1956) and Frances Stark (USA, 1967) side by side, an overview of the contemporary art scene today occurs.

Pavel Büchler
A key mode Büchler’s practice is the way he invests objects with storytelling, making the objects speak in a way that changes their effect on the spectator. He works with old technology, audio recording, light and the material and mental presence of texts but all with a focus on how we give things meanings that do not belong to them in the first place. Büchlers’s work evolves around two fundamental concerns: the leftovers of modernism and everyday materials. He uses icons of our recent cultural past from Kafka to Beckett to Warhol to distil and compress history and to give it new currency in the present. His question seems often to come down to a simple one: "How can I reconfigure this artwork so that it works right here and right now, in our world". His answer is usually spare, almost parsimonious in its use of material. Other work uses found material as its inspiration and is excessive, almost grandiose in scale.

Avi Mograbi
Avi Mograbi’s documentaries have been shown worldwide. He studied philosophy at the University of Tel Aviv and Art at the Ramat Hasharon Art Schoo, and has been working in and with film for many years. His films primarily show the military and political situation in Israel and as well as the region. In his documentaries he re-tells commonly known stories in a humorous way, with an often shocking effect, and leaves the audience with a feeling of ‘disbelief’. In his work Mograbi deliberately mixes fiction and real footage in a personal style, implying irony to make his films both dark and confusing. The filmic language he uses helps the audience comprehend the situations he addresses as well as his own position in this almost surreal political situation.

The Fall of Frances Stark
The American artist Frances Stark combines a visual art practice with writing. The numerous connections between literature and art determine her artistic position. The relationship between verbiage and image-making is a persistent theme explored in the work. The starting point of this exhibition is the publication of a book about her body of visual works, which is the counterpart of the book Collected Writings 1993-2003, which was published four years ago. Together they form a diptych, two parts that are simultaneously allied and separated. Stark examines the book and the exhibition as a discursive means; what is the difference between reading a text on the wall or in a book? And conversely, what does it mean for the tactile and detailed collage to find itself on the page?

Curators
Phillip van den Bossche curated The Fall of Frances Stark
Esra Sarigedik Öktem curated the solo exhibitions by Avi Mograbi and Pavel Büchler

Publications
The three exhibitions each have a publication:
Frances Stark: Collected Work ISBN 978-3-86560-263-3
Avi Mograbi: films and video works ISBN/EAN:9789086900800
Pavel Büchler: Absentmindedwindowgazing ISBN/EAN: 9789086900763

Exhibitions
The Fall of Frances Stark is a co-production. The exhibition will go on tour to FRAC Bourgogne, Dijon (September - December 2007) and Culturgest, Lison, 15/02 - 04/05/2008 (Opening 15/02/2008). The solo exhibition by Pavel Büchler is in collaboration with Kunsthalle Bern and Frankfurter Kunstverein.

Van Abbemuseum
BILDERDIJKLAAN 10
EINDHOVEN - THE NETHERLANDS
+31 [0]40 238 1000
info@vanabbemuseum.nl
http://www.vanabbemuseum.nl
TU - SU 11:00 - 17:00
TH 11.00 - 21:00

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