Artipedia - Arts News

The State Russian Museum

Shimon Okshteyn.
Dialogue with Objects
26 July - 3 September 2007
Press preview: 26 July 2007 at 2pm
Opening reception: 26 July 2007 at 4pm

The State Russian Museum
Marble Palace
Millionnaya str., 5/1, Saint Petersburg

http://www.okshteyn.com
http://www.KolodzeiArt.org

The Kolodzei Art Foundation presents Shimon Okshteyn: Dialogue with Objects - solo exhibition by New York-based artist Shimon Okshteyn. This exhibition is the culmination of a two year collaboration between the Kolodzei Art Foundation, USA and the State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia. It is accompanied by a publication focusing on an in-depth exploration of Shimon Okshteyn’s artistic practice.

Shimon Okshteyn: Dialogue with Objects brings together the work produced by the artist in the past 25 years since his immigration from the former Soviet Union. It includes a range of paintings, sculptures, drawings, and a selection of newer pieces that are among Okshteyn’s most ambitious to date. This exhibition is not an attempt to construct a historical narrative but rather an introduction to the general audience and a new generation of Russians who grew up in the post-perestroika era the art of Shimon Okshteyn.

A native of Ukraine, Shimon Okshteyn was regarded as one of the most promising artists of his generation. He graduated from the renowned Odessa School of Art and immigrated to the United States of America in 1979. Since the early 1980s, Okshteyn has created seminal works that oscillated between paintings, drawings, and sculpture. Finding inspiration in his new environment and culture, Okshteyn succeeded in establishing a strong presence on the contemporary American art scene. Shimon Okshteyn has been exhibiting widely in the United States and his works are in the permanent collections of major museums, including the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Brooklyn Museum. This is his first major exhibition in Russia.

Okshteyn’s art defies an easy classification. He works primarily within representational modes, commenting on consumerism, sexuality and cultural memory. In his most recent work the commentary is further aided by utilizing elements of cultural ephemera and images appropriated from art history. By reproducing certain visual elements and by re-inventing others, the work included in this exhibition demonstrates Okshteyn’s involvement with a broad range of interests and a personal and dynamic engagement with a wide social reality.

In conjunction with this exhibition, a 336-page, hard cover book Shimon Okshteyn.: Dialogue with Objects is published by Palace Editions with support from The State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia and The Kolodzei Art Foundation, USA. The book is the first systematic attempt to contextualize Shimon Okshteyn’s art. It includes an introduction by Evgenia Petrova and essays by Charlotta Kotik, Donald Kuspit, José Pierre, Natalia Kolodzei, and Jenifer Borum. ISBN: 0975482920.

Shimon Okshteyn is represented by Stefan Stux Gallery, 530 West 25th Street, New York, NY 10001.

Shimon Okshteyn, Dialogue with Objects is generously supported by lead donors Patricia M. Cloherty, CEO, Delta Private Equity Partners, Oscar Plotkin and Werner Schneider.

For information and images, please contact:
Natalia Kolodzei - Kolodzei Art Foundation, Inc. (USA) Tel. 1-732-545-8425; Fax:1-732-545-8428. In Moscow 7-495-952-0277 Kolodzei@KolodzeiArt.org http://www.KolodzeiArt.org

The Kolodzei Art Foundation, a 501(c)(3) public non-profit organization founded in 1991, organizes exhibitions in museums and cultural centers in the United States, Europe and Russia, publishes books and catalogues on Russian art, and conducts Russian-American cultural exchanges.

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

Project Arts Centre

Play Safe
(Battlefields in the Playground)
Yael Bartana (IL), Ralph Borland (ZA/IE), Joost Conijn (NL)
Gintaras Makarevicius (LT) and Axel Stockburger (DE)
Curated by Jonathan Carroll
Exhibition July 27th-September 1st
Opening 26th July 6pm,
with public discussion 4.30pm

Project Arts Centre
39 East Essex Street
Temple Bar
Dublin 2, Ireland
(+353 1) 881 9613/14

http://www.project.ie

Imagine the folly of allowing people to play elaborate games which do nothing whatever to increase consumption. It’s madness. Nowadays the Controllers won’t approve of any new game unless it can be shown that it requires at least as much apparatus as the most complicated of existing games. Aldous Huxley, Brave New World, 1932.

Play Safe is a group exhibition exploring the interest of artists in several aspects of the creativity of play, from children’s inventiveness and adventure to artists who use new media to explore the area of computer games. While play has developed into a sophisticated means of simulating war it has also become a method of peaceful protest against war and other injustices. In an increasingly regulated society, play is one of the few remaining arenas where scenarios can be tested without risk of censure. Play Safe encompasses play from the innocent play-acting of children to adults who return to a form of play as a political tool.

Notes on the participating artists in Play Safe
Israeli artist Yael Bartana’s Wild Seeds (2005) is a two channel video and sound installation of teenagers (Israeli left activists) playing a game they call ‘The Evacuation of Gilad’s Colony’. The video was filmed in the Occupied Territories and is based on a real and violent confrontation between the Israeli army and Jewish settlers. Bartana’s work is finely balanced between the political and the playful.

Irish based South African artist Ralph Borland will display and demonstrate Suited for Subversion (2002) a protective suit which projects the wearer’s heartbeat from an inbuilt speaker. The suit draws on the protective-wear worn by activists at large-scale street demonstrations around the world.

Dutch artist Joost Conijn’s video installation Siddieqa, Firdaus, Abdallah, Soelayman, Moestafa, Hawwa and Dzoel- Kif (2004) features a group of seven Dutch children living in a squatted site near Amsterdam. The protagonists in Conijn’s video are seemingly abandoned in the world. The carefree joyful children appear to be shipwrecked in a 21st century urban environment where they do as they please- playing, exploring, eating and sleeping without adult supervision.

The children in Lithuanian artist Gintaras Makarevicius’ Vaskichi devise their own logical rules governing war games played in the backyards of their homes in Vilnius, complete with wooden guns of various imagined calibres. Makarevicius’ documentary film starts with a children’s game for choosing opposing teams. There is a sense of nostalgia for the simplicity of means the boys use to act out ever-present acts of war.

German artist and theorist Axel Stockburger interviews teenage computer gamers in a video entitled Boys in the Hood (2005) where they explain in vivid detail the experience of playing. These normally quiet teens react with lucidity when discussing the virtues and norms of the online world.

Play Safe is also supported by the Mondriaan Foundation and Goethe- Institut Dublin.

For further information please contact Aisling McGrane +353 (0) 1 8819608 aisling@project.ie
Project Arts Centre, Dublin http://www.project.ie

For more information go to: http://www.project.ie/cgi-bin/eventdetail.pl?id=617

Cabinet magazine

Cabinet magazine issue 26,
with a special section on "Magic," available now

For a full table of contents, see
http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/26/

Subscribe online at
http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/shop/index.php?cPath=31

Buy the current issue at
http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/shop/index.php?cPath=28

Tricks of the eye, feats of dexterity, and intriguing items of interest, including:

- Jonathan Allen, theme section guest editor, on magicians and warfare
- Yvonne P. Chireau on Jazz Age Hoodoo
- Ian Saville, Sally O’Reilly, and Karl Marx have a chat about the ideology of Saville’s socialist magic acts
- Greg Allen on White House wizardry
- Ruth Claxton’s postcard sleights-of-hand
- Simon During interviewed by Sina Najafi about secular magic’s obscured impact
- Alexander Nagel on animated statues

Also up our sleeve:

- George Prochnik on Freud’s porcupine
- Brian Dillon on impractical 19th-century manuals of gesture
- Margaret Wertheim on frescos and virtual reality
- Dziga Lovechild reviewing Tim Davis’s tired "Olive Standard"
- Sarah Whitney Womack on the lapdogs of colonialism
- Celeste Olalquiaga on André Breton’s unattainable sea urchins
- Joshua Foer’s short history of walking on water

And finally, ta-da!
A poster! A poster by Implicasphere! A poster by Implicasphere on stripes!

Cabinet on sale in the US at independent bookstores, Barnes & Noble, Tower, Borders, Hudson News, and Universal News. Also available in Canada, the UK, Germany, Belgium, Holland, Sweden, Germany, Spain, Portugal, Greece, Turkey, Singapore, New Zealand, and Japan. A partial list of retailers worldwide can be found at
http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/information/wheretobuy.php

Cabinet magazine is published by Immaterial Incorporated, a not-for-profit 501(c)(3) organization. Cabinet receives generous support from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the Jorian Foundation, the Flora Family Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Starry Night Fund of the Tides Foundation, the New York State Council on the Arts, the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, the Danielson Foundation, and Two Trees Management.

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