Artipedia - Arts News

Kuenstlerhaus Schloss Balmoral

You are cordially invited to the vernissage

Kunstportale: Balmoral at Galerie Nord

Sonja Alhaeser, Goez Diergarten, Stefan Ettlinger, Natalie Bewernitz / Marek Goldowski, Misha Le Jen, Martine Locatelli, Ingeborg Lockemann, Cornelia Rössler, Christiane Schlosser, Nicola Schudy, Anja Teske, Barbara Thaden, Myrtia Wefelmeier, Renate Wolff

On August the 1st 2007, 19.30 at Galerie Nord — Kunstverein Tiergarten, Turmstrasse 75, Berlin

Works by 14 artists from the artists’ residence, Künstlerhaus Schloß Balmoral in Bad Ems (Rhineland-Palatinate), will be exhibited at Galerie Nord from the 2nd of August to the 31st of August 2007. The exhibition presents what proved to be a particularly diverse scholarship year in 2006/2007, due to a variety of awards by Künstlerhaus Schloß Balmoral, residency awards, the project award and international scholarships.

The exhibits, which were created from the artists’ impressions of the various places they were staying during their scholarship, illustrate a multitude of artistic viewpoints. While Goetz Diergarten discovered visual motives reminiscent of colour-field-painting in London’s underground stations, it was the noise of the New York subway that inspired the media artists Bewernitz/Goldowski to create a sound installation.

The performance and drawing artist Sonja Alhaeser used her project scholarship to construct buffets with no apparent connection to a place. The latest "Emsrausch" event at Balmoral could have taken it up with lavish baroque festivals. Lockemann, Wolff and Locatelli were inspired by their surroundings: Ingeborg Lockemann followed the tracks of old German buses in Accra. The video shows a high-contrast superimposition depicting the German and African history of the bus. The spatial painter Renate Wolff ventured to make a photographic excursion in Bad Ems to photograph the life of the spa town as seen in the shop-windows. A confusing puzzle is brought about on various spatial levels by virtue of fusing the interior with the mirrored exterior of the windows. Martine Locatelli was fascinated by sunsets and has assembled 100 photographs in a romantic embodiment of the sky, that expresses a desire for graphic effects.

Landscape is also the subject chosen by Nicola Schudy and Stefan Ettlinger. Nicola Schudy’s water colours show segments of landscapes and make visible the destructive traces of human intervention in the natural idyll. Stefan Ettlingers paintings are assembled landscape panoramas comprised of video stills from the mass media as well as his own photos of his environment. Through montage and cross-fading surrealistic, almost intangible scenarios are created.

The works of the Paris-based artist Barbara Thaden (guest at Balmoral) can also lay claim to be surrealistic. Sewing pieces of clothing together she makes art objects which as Dress-Art confound their original function, and gain a new aesthetic status in a different context.

A series of works concentrate on the human body, which is expressed in a variety of disciplines. The texture Cornelia Roessler explores in her light boxes is the human skin, its structure, tangibility and changeability. More cheerful appear the photographs by Anja Teske: intimate pictures of a transsexual friend, "Juwelia", whom she observes closely, but from a respectful distance. The series represents the complexity of his existence and points to the discrepancy between desire and reality. Myrtia Wefelmeier paints children from historical photographs that she places in staged architectural backgrounds and woodland sceneries. At the same time, the atmosphere oscillates constantly between familiarity and alienation and directs you into an uncanny visual space.

For the winner of the arts prize awarded by the Balmoral 03 e.V. (registered fundraising association), the action artist Misha Le Jen, it is the body that is the instrument of his actions, which mainly feature the element of water. In Bad Ems he realized the work "Becken", which alludes as well to the womb as to the basin.

The abstract pictures by Christiane Schlosser are distinguished by their lightness and rhythm. Often assembled into installations, it is a work that inscribes itself in the flow of time, an ornament that picks up on its own rhythm. As a result of this sensitive, discursive textures and colour annotations arise.

For more information consult our homepage http://www.balmoral.de

Kuenstlerhaus Schloss Balmoral
Villenpromenade 11
D — 56130 Bad Ems
Email: info@balmoral.de
T. +49 2603 9419 0
F. +49 2603 9419 16

For more information go to: http://www.balmoral.de

Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

RED HOT — Asian Art Today from
the Chaney Family Collection
July 22 - October 21, 2007

The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
1001 Bissonnet Street
Houston, TX 77005
713.639.7300

http://www.mfah.org

RED HOT — Asian Art Today from the Chaney Family Collection, which opened July 22, 2007, at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, is a sweeping overview of the spectacular rise of Asian contemporary art. It introduces a series of exhibitions and gallery installations the MFAH will devote to Asian art over several years and provides Houston with its first major look at contemporary art from the region. An international phenomenon, literally "red hot" in its energy and rapid development, Asian art has redefined the parameters of today’s contemporary art scene. Drawn from the extraordinary holdings of Houston collectors Robert, Jereann, and Holland Chaney, many of the works have not been seen outside of their home countries. The exhibition runs through October 21.

The Chaney family has assembled one of this country’s foremost collections of the art and technology of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Among the collection’s strengths is its representation of today’s pre-eminent Asian artists. This body of over 120 works reflects the powerful economic shifts and social changes that have influenced a rapidly growing class of young artists, making the nations of East Asia leaders in contemporary art. With a commitment to the cutting-edge, the Chaney Family Collection embraces this radical and exuberant flowering in painting, sculpture, photography, video, and digital media.

The exhibition focuses on artists who emerged after the political and economic upheavals of the late 1980s and early 1990s. Many artists of this generation were forced to find new homes abroad; the exhibition also traces how recent waves of migration have contributed to the globalization of Asian culture.

Dr. Peter C. Marzio, MFAH director, comments, "These works of art have been culled from Pop culture, politics, societal change, and technology in fascinating ways, and challenge us to regard the world afresh. They range from an unqualified optimism to a dystopian realism, expanding our visual vocabulary into the new century."

Robert Chaney adds, "As major collectors of new contemporary art, we are constantly exposed to opportunities from around the world. We always focus our attention on the most fresh and innovative art movements we see, and Asia has clearly been the most important over the last few years."

The exhibition opens with examples of new sculpture from China, including works by Chen Wenling, the Luo Brothers, and Sui Jianguo. This segment of the installation is complemented by a selection of other Chinese artists who have embraced Pop aesthetics, including Feng Zhengjie, Wang Guangyi, and Zhao Bo. Japanese Pop is introduced by Takashi Murakami’s Tongari-kun (Mr. Pointy) Costume, along with examples by Chiho Aoshima, Chinatsu Ban, Yoshitomo Nara, and Yumi Karasumaru. Portraiture is represented in the work of Yang Shaobin, Yue Minjun, Fang Lijun, and Zhang Huan, while the new urban landscape is the chief theme of artists Miao Xiaochun, Weng Fen, and Zhang Dali. Major installations by Korea’s Do-Ho Suh dominate two galleries, and works by Vietnamese-American artists Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba and Dinh Q. Le address the darker chapters of recent history.

Alison de Lima Greene, MFAH curator of contemporary art and special projects, and coordinating curator for the exhibition, states, "The Chaneys have achieved a remarkable feat. Their ambition, genuine curiosity, and ready understanding of new concepts and means of expression consistently animate their collection."

RED HOT — Asian Art Today from the Chaney Family Collection is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue.

This exhibition is organized by the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.
Generous support is provided by Sotheby’s and Compass Bank Wealth Management Group.

This Dramatic Exhibition Initiates New Direction for MFAH

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

Locarno International Film Festival

The 60th International Film Festival Locarno
presents PLAY FORWARD
1-11 August 2007

Locarno International Film Festival
Via Ciseri 23 - 6600 Locarno - Switzerland
phone +41 91 756 21 51
Fax +41 91 756 21 59
http://www.pardo.ch

Acting as an interface for film, video art and all other media, the intention of the Play Forward is to create an ideal space for the entire range of contemporary audiovisual experimentation. Open to any format or length and to every kind of digital technology, the programming brings together works that are strong and radical, whether in form or content. In just a few years, the section has established itself through its selection, courtesy of some of the major international art galleries, from such prestigious artists as Matthew Barney, Shirin Neshat, Isaac Julien, Nan Goldin, Oliviero Toscani, not to mention the most recent forms of expression relating to new technologies, from the web to mobile phones.

A selection of full-length features

One of the full length features presented in 2007 is Después del mar, a project initially conceived as an installation, by Adrian Caetano, known for fiction features such as Bolivia and Un Oso rojo. Likewise, Blood of a Poet, by the great Polish artist Lech Majewski, is a film version of the installation currently on display at the Venice Biennale. Literature and painting went into the making of Johnny 316 by Erick Ifergan (USA), a free adaptation from Oscar Wilde in which Vincent Gallo roams Hollywood as a new Jesus, enhanced by a superb cinematography.

Artists of renown

Play Forward’s second brief is to present artists of world renown (in partnership with major international art galleries), in a dialogue with independent filmmakers, a discerning niche audience and film directors who have decided to make at least one film outside the "classical" canon. This year the Festival will be hosting, among others, recent works by Richard Billingham, Olivo Barberi, Vanessa Beecroft, Yang Fudong, David Austen, Victor Alimpiev, but also new works by established directors such as Bertrand Bonello, Vincent Dieutre and Ghassan Salhab.

Somewhere in between — second part

Play Forward will be deepening the reflection on the frontiers between cinema and arts with the second part of a panel launched in 2006; on Monday August 6th, professionals, artists and filmakers attending the festival will discuss about their newest experiences in the aim of an exchange in the field of visual arts.

Outside the cinema

In the search of this exchange, during the whole period of the festival, two installations, Pshycastenia -2+2 de Knut Asdam and The Dark Side de Pierre Coulibeuf will be presented at La Rada , space for the contemporary art in Locarno, thanks to the collaboration of Fine Arts Unternehmen AG de Franco Marinotti (August, 2 - 11, 2007; Opening August 2, 2007 - 6p.m.)

For more information go to: http://www.pardo.ch

Portland Art Focus

Portland Art Focus
September 2007

Experience international artists, adventurous curators and cutting-edge performances.

The world is coming to Portland.
You should too.

http://www.portlandartfocus.net

Museum of Contemporary Craft
CRAFT IN AMERICA: Expanding Traditio ns
July 22 - September 23

As one of Portland’s oldest cultural institutions - established in 1937 - the recently relocated and rebranded museum promises to be a vibrant center for investigation and dialogue, expanding the definition of craft and the ways audiences experience it. Questions are posed, conversations ignited through curated exhibitions, thoughtful publications, provocative programs and special events.

The Museum’s inaugural exhibition surveys the dynamic evolution of the American craft movement since the Industrial Revolution, recognizing many of the significant social, cultural, political and artistic contributions that make American craft distinctly American.

Hoffman Gallery
Oregon College of Art and Craft
Craft Biennial: A Review of Northwest Art and Craft
August 2 - September 27

Featuring work by over 60 artists, this juried exhibition examines the state of modern craft in the Pacific Northwest.

Portland Art Museum
Camouflage
August 4 - November 4

Eight paintings that explore pattern, including a major new work by Damien Hirst, plus Andy Warhol, Agnes Martin, Christopher Wool, and Philip Taaffe. (Also on view: APEX: Wes Mills, through October 7.)

Douglas F. Cooley Memorial Art Gallery
Reed College
September 4 - December 9

Marko Lulic / Peter Kreider
A part of PICA’s Time-Based Art Festival
Curators Stephanie Snyder / Reed + Kristan Kennedy / PICA

Portland Institute for Contemporary Art
2007 Time-Based Art Festival
September 6 - 16
A contemporary art festival of more than 200 regional, national and international artists presenting performance, dance, music, new media and visual arts projects. Join us for moments of movement and imagery throughout Portland, Oregon.

Portland Art Center
Multi-media works and installations in three galleries
September 6 - 28

Preparations by Mack McFarland; experiments in color, touch, sound and smell. BLAM by Josh Arseneau; an exploration of spectacle and futility. The Family Dynamic; an exhibition of painting, sculpture and photography.

Feldman Gallery + Project Space
Pacific Northwest College of Art
Regina Silveira: OUTGROWN (TRACKS AND SHADOWS)
Part of PICA’s Time-Based Art Festival
September 6 - October 21

Brazilian artist Silveira utilizes the White Cube as the backdrop for her spatial experiments, which are made up of poetically profound, stark, black images.

Affair at the Jupiter Hotel 2007
Organized by Stuart Horodner & Laurel Gitlen
September 14 - 16

Forty rooms of contemporary art; adventurous and thoughtful dealers, curators, collectors and artists meet for an intimate art fair. Special exhibitions, tours of local collections, discussions and parties animate this immersive art weekend.

Portland Art Dealers Association (PADA)

The state’s foremost contemporary art galleries present regional and international exhibits year-round, including: Augen, Blackfish, Bullseye, Butters, Charles Froelick, Elizabeth Leach, New American Art Union, PDX Contemporary Art, Pulliam Deffenbaugh, Quintana, Laura Russo, Mark Woolley. Public receptions are held the first Thursday evening of every month.

Portland Art Focus travel packages available with The Jacobs Group

Packages include three-night deluxe hotel accommodations, tickets to art events, unique and exclusive events, select transportation and a VIP concierge service to help tailor your package to your tastes. http://www.thejacobsgroup.net | 866.362.1039

For more information about Portland Art Focus, visit: http://www.portlandartfocus.net

For more information go to: http://www.portlandartfocus.net

DHC/ART Foundation for Contemporary Art

MARC QUINN
October 5, 2007 - January 6, 2008
Curated by John Zeppetelli

DHC/ART Foundation for Contemporary Art
451 rue St-Jean
Montreal, Québec
H2Y 2R5
(514) 866-6767
info@dhc-art.org

http://www.dhc-art.org

Gathering over forty recent works, DHC/ART’s inaugural exhibition by conceptual artist Marc Quinn is the largest ever mounted in North America and the artist’s first solo show in Canada. Marc Quinn is a central figure within British art whose work is principally concerned with the body’s mutability in time, its physical presence in space and its anxiety within culture. His work also poignantly explores mortality, beauty, kinship and the interplay of art and science.

Marc Quinn’s work ranges across a variety of media - from sculpture to painting, drawing and photography - and includes dazzling, if contentious, frozen self-portraits cast from his own head and filled with his own blood to stunning frozen portraits of his infant sons made with their respective placentas and umbilical chords. The latest of these, Sky, is included in this exhibition.

Quinn’s The Complete Marbles, a suite of sculptural portraits of amputees and disabled individuals in sparkling white marble allude to fragmented Greco-Roman statuary while slyly addressing heroism. Quinn has made DNA portraits of his family and of scientist John Sulston, paintings of improbable gardens, and highly evocative wax castings of people with life-threatening illnesses — Chemical Life Support — where the wax is mixed with daily doses of the medications that keep the individuals alive. Another wax portrait of a serene young woman Beauty and the Beast is colored darkly by animal blood.

Digitally manipulated animal flesh is the basis for two stunning Mirror Paintings on view, as well as for Cybernetically Engineered, Cloned and Grown Rabbit, a seven foot bronze sculpture, at once comic and melancholy, of a shaped rabbit carcass. Quinn has arrested the decay of flowers by immersing them in sub-zero silicone and made painted bronze sculptures of supermodel Kate Moss in extreme contortions. Other bronzes include a series of human skeletons, among them The Selfish Gene, which depicts a couple in the throes of love-making.

In 2004 Marc Quinn won a major public art commission for the Fourth Plinth: his Alison Lapper Pregnant, a large marble portrait of a naked, severely disabled and very pregnant woman was installed in London’s Trafalgar Square — a bold and powerful tribute to both disability and motherhood.

A fully illustrated catalogue with essays by British art historian Lynda Nead and Montreal psychoanalyst Harvey Giesbrecht accompanies the exhibition.

BIOGRAPHY
Marc Quinn was born in London in 1964. He studied History of Art at Cambridge University (1982-85) and began working as a sculptor in 1984. Marc Quinn is represented by White Cube, London and Mary Boone Gallery, New York. His work is in numerous museum and private collections around the world.

http://www.dhc-art.org

Information: Cheryl Sim, Program Coordinator
(514) 866-6767 / cheryl@dhc-art.org

For more information go to: http://www.dhc-art.org

Frankfurter Kunstverein

GARDAR EIDE EINARSSON: "SOUTH OF HEAVEN"
July 27 - September 16, 2007

FRANKFURTER KUNSTVEREIN
Steinernes Haus am Römerberg,
Markt 44, 60311 Frankfurt am Main, Germany
phone: +49.69.219314–0
fax: +49.69.219314–11
post@fkv.de
Tuesday - Sunday, 11 am - 7 pm

http://www.fkv.de

In Underworld, a novel by the American writer Don DeLillo, one of the characters mentions how, "lately, geography seems to have gone back on itself and become smaller." Each of us assimilates only a part of the world that surrounds us, trying to escape from the density of an accelerated multitude of sensations. When withdrawing we only take in a small portion of what is happening around us and thus almost automatically adapt to move around our individual realities.

"South of Heaven", a major solo exhibition by the New York-based Norwegian artist Gardar Eide Einarsson, departs from a similar notion: all of us customize the world in a way or other to make sense of it. Citizens, criminals, outlaws of all kinds as well as artists try to make sense of the systems they operate in. A series of photos depicting political messages taken from the streets of New York, black paintings using tattoo motives, flags, army blankets, a jail table, a bomb checklist, a video showing the US flag fluttering in an eternal loop on the floor of the exhibition space… they all seem remains of a bigger picture that we need to reconstruct in our minds. We have probably heard of most stories to which the works are referring. Actually quite simply the works are preoccupied with all kinds of individual and collective attempts to break the "social contract" from the Unabomber to some legal and illegal power lobbies.

The works of Gardar Eide Einarsson share a sober elegance that contributes even more to intrigue the viewer. Using what at first sight looks like a very depurated formalistic language the artist poses to the viewer the question of what he really is looking at. By absorbing and then isolating motifs from the so-called underground music and from literature scenes and then weaving them together with political references, Gardar Eide Einarsson forces us to reflect upon the difference between contemplating an image and using it.

Black Flag (Liberty), 2004, depicts a black flag with a half moon, or Untitled (American Flag), 2007, an inkjet print on plywood, shows the American flag ready to be used, ready to add a personalized text. The series of Outlaws paintings (2004-2005), displayed on the floor, constitute a strange family album of signs ready to be used by a dubious gang. Their aesthetics convey the spirit of the conservative American south state movement, an interest, which also pops up in Conservative, Traditional, Ultra Traditional, 2005 a photographic work by Gardar Eide Einarsson in which a series of sleeves and bottoms of white-collar politicians appear in the image like a syntax of sartorial conservatism.

Thus "South of Heaven" on one hand is intended to familiarize the viewer with Gardar Eide Einarsson’s very particular and personal way of investigating different media and materials. On the other hand the exhibition discovers the way art can serve to emphasize transversal readings, sourced from street culture and politics. In the works of Gardar Eide Einarsson art and reality come into a relation of mutual resonance and exchange rather than of representation. The artworks in "South of Heaven" have been chosen with the intention to present a working methodology as well as to use the exhibition as a framework for the viewer to engage in the tension that exists between the world of images and the world as a place where action can take place, where violence is more than an image.

Gardar Eide Einarsson’s "South of Heaven" has been organized in collaboration with the Centre d’Art Contemporain Gèneve.

SPONSOR: The exhibition has been realized with kind support from the Office for Contemporary Art Norway.

VENUES: Centre d’Art Contemporain Gèneve (18 January - 16 March 2008).

CATALOGUE: A catalogue with texts by Katya García-Antón, Ina Blom, Dieter Roelstraete, Chus Martínez, Ingo Niermann and a conversation between Gardar Eide Einarsson and Bob Nickas will be published in German, English and French by Revolver, Frankfurt am Main. Designed by Christoph Keller

DIRECTOR/CURATOR: Chus Martínez
OPENING HOURS: Tuesday–Sunday, 11 am–7 pm
INFORMATION: http://www.fkv.de
PRESS CONTACT: Julia Wittwer, Melanie Räuschel, phone: +49.69.219314-30/-40, fax: +49.69.219314-11, e-mail: presse@fkv.de, http://www.fkv.de
(text and image for download under PRESS)

For more information go to: http://www.fkv.de

The Fruitmarket Gallery

Alex Hartley
Edinburgh Art Festival Exhibition
27 July - 21 October 2007

The Fruitmarket Gallery
45 Market Street
Edinburgh
EH1 1DF
P +44 (0) 131 225 2383
F +44 (0) 131 220 3130
info@fruitmarket.co.uk

http://www.fruitmarket.co.uk

The Fruitmarket Gallery’s 2007 Edinburgh Art Festival exhibition is the first major British solo presentation of the work of Alex Hartley, a British artist whose work confronts our experience and understanding of the built and natural environments.

One of the yBa generation of artists, Hartley works primarily with photography, though often incorporating it into sculpture and installation. His practice offers an extremely original analysis of modernist and contemporary architecture and its relationship to landscape. He investigates buildings in terms of vision and the visionary, the individual and the institution, and the relationship of utopian schemes, whether successes or failures, to works of fiction.

The exhibition brings together a significant body of existing and new work. It begins on the facade of The Fruitmarket Gallery on which Hartley will make a new work that particularly exemplifies his highly individual approach. He is interested in ‘buildering’ (climbing on buildings) and has clad the Gallery in an image of itself, marked with routes up the façade that he has climbed as preparation for the exhibition. This work relates to Hartley’s putative guide book to Los Angeles, LA Climbs: Alternative Uses for Architecture, (Black Dog, 2003), a funny and curiously insightful book in which he looks at the city as surface, and through photography and topographic drawings presents landmark buildings in LA in terms of the routes a climber might take to explore them.

Inside the Gallery, other new work extends the possibilities of solo climbing as a metaphorical and actual approach to the built as well as the natural environment, with photographs of the artist tackling a variety of buildings around Scotland. These extreme explorations of the relationship an individual might form with a building are complemented by other photography-based works, including Don’t want to be part of your world, an ongoing series in which Hartley looks at the relationship and interdependence between architecture and nature, and the individual’s position with regard to both. Each work in the series takes the form of a photograph of an impressive natural wilderness into which Hartley has inserted a hand-made architectural relief. The reliefs are all models of highly individualistic buildings, often utopian in aspiration and more often than not doomed to failure.

Two major installations take on the interior architecture of The Fruitmarket Gallery, inserting photographs of unattainable, idealised modernist spaces into the fabric of the building. Untitled (Installation), 2007, offer a tantalising glimpse of an illusory space beyond the Gallery, while the monumental Case Study, 2001 is a photograph of an imaginary, idealised, domestic interior, held within a structure made of translucent glass, wood and plaster. At first glance, it seems as though one might be able to enter the space. Walking round it, however, it reveals itself more of a sculpture than a structure — a closed, tapering, inaccessible form.

Hartley’s practice examines the influence of architecture on the individual in and against the landscape in a physical and conceptual context. It offers a variety of approaches to the built environment, Hartley occupying a shifting set of roles from photographer and architectural historian to builderer, rambler, mountaineer and explorer, offering an original analysis of architecture and its relationship to landscape.

For more information go to: http://www.fruitmarket.co.uk

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/

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

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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!

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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