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Deste Foundation for Contemporary Art

Loukia Alavanou wins The DESTE Prize 2007

Deste Foundation for Contemporary Art
11, Filellinon & Em.Pappa street
N.Ionia 142 34, Athens Greece
tel: +30 210 27 58 490
fax: +30 210 27 54 862
E: info@deste.gr

http://www.deste.gr

The DESTE Foundation for Contemporary Art is delighted to announce that the winner of DESTE Prize 2007 is Loukia Alavanou.

The winner was decided by this year’s Jury, consisting of Dakis Joannou-President, The Deste Foundation, Pawel Althamer-Artist, Laura Hoptman- Curator, New Museum of Contemporary Art, Hans Ulrich Obrist-Co-Director Exhibitions & Programmes and Director of International Projects, Serpentine Gallery and Amanda Sharp-Publishing Director, Frieze Magazine & co-Director, The Frieze Art Fair.

The Deste Prize of 10.000€, was presented to the artist by the Jury at a special event at the Foundation’s premises on the evening of 24th September 2007.The five other short listed artists were Nikos Arvanitis, Savvas Christodoulides, Socrates Fatouros, Yiannis Grigoriadis and Eleni Kamma.

The work of all six artists will be on display at the DESTE Foundation until November 3rd 2007.

According to the statement of the Deste Prize 2007 Jury Committee:

"This year was a particularly strong showing for the DESTE Prize. The Prize has been awarded to Loukia Alavanou whose video work displays a lightness of touch in its frank embrace of the strange, its mordant humor, and its witty mining of cinematic references.
Inspired by historical animation techniques, Loukia weaves narratives that transform a familiar Disney image into a surrealistic nightmare or fantasy. Visually rich, Loukia’s work displays a facility with her craft that we look forward to seeing develop."

Alavanou, (born in Athens in 1979) has had a number of solo shows, including
Haas & Fischer, Zurich (2007), Dead Real, upstairs berlin, Berlin (2006) and Cactus, The Breeder, Athens (2004). Group exhibitions include among others: Satelite Works, Centre de Production et de Diffusion en Art Actuel et Multidisciplinaire, Québec (2007), 100Tage = 100 Videos, Heidelberger Kunstverein, Heidelberg (2006), Videos And More, Vamiali’s Gallery, Athens (2006), This Ain’t No Karaoke, Haas & Fischer, Zurich, curated by M .Henry (2006), Peach, Gallery Eugen Lendl, Graz, curated by E. Martischnig (2006), What Remains Is Future, Arsakion, Patra, curated by N. Argyropoulou (2006).

The DESTE Prize was established in 1999 as part of the Foundation’s policy of supporting and promoting contemporary art in Greece and is awarded every two years to a Greek artist living and working either in Greece or abroad. Through this prize, Deste hopes to endorse the spirit of exploration, ingenuity and ambition so essential to the Foundation’s mission and to the vitality of contemporary art.

Previous DESTE Prize winners have been Panayota Tzamourani, (1999), Georgia Sagri, (2001), Maria Papadimitriou, (2003), Christodoulos Panayiotou (2005).

For more information go to: http://www.deste.gr

sala rekalde

Archaeologies of the Future
27 September to 2 December 2007
Martin Beck / Carol Bove / Dora García / Mathias Poledna /
Pia Rönicke

Curator: Peio Aguirre

sala rekalde
Alameda Recalde, 30
Bilbao 48009 (Spain)

http://www.salarekalde.bizkaia.net

This exhibition revolves around an archaeology of different historical aesthetic forms coexisting at the heart of recent artistic practices. Rather than starting out from this vast storehouse-cum-archive of forms that is History, understood as a linear narrative that stretches from the ‘past’ to the present day, the exhibition focuses on examples and cases from ‘now’ that use different forms of historicity and/or historicism. Archaeology, as everyone knows, centres on research into history and is a discipline based on strict methods of chronological dating, period, epoch, style, school, etc. Only after archaeological analysis of material signs and remains is it possible to enter into anthropological studies on who made what, why and to what end.

One of the underlying intentions of this group exhibition of work by five artists is to reflect on the sedimentation of time in highly codified cultural forms that range from the realm of everyday objects to the configuration of the environment around us, including the formation of artworks. Architecture, design, the moving image and popular culture all intermingle in an X-ray of the cultural present with one eye on yesterday.

There are few cultural productions that transmit as much codified information to us as the cutting edges of image, art and design. The diagnosis of the present is stratified to the extent that "one day we’ll need archaeologists to help us guess the original storylines of even classic films" (William Gibson, Pattern Recognition, G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 2003). This sci-fi novel about the advent of new modes of consumption makes its appearance here like a reference. In a pop-cultural context, what we tend towards is the recognition of forms, patterns and models. In identifying ourselves with aesthetic elements, we mould subjectivities. What is going on here is a contradictory balance between the standardisation of ways of life and the need for their continual singularisation: a "mirror-world" in which everything is recognisable without being alike, in which everything looks like everything else
but is different.

The artistic practices of Martin Beck, Carol Bove, Dora García, Mathias Poledna and Pia Rönicke share this analytical sensitivity towards the artificial constructs that intersect historical memory with mass culture, and are part of a tradition of critique that has continued to question the universal concepts of the aesthetic experience of high modernism through to the present day. It is in the form, the style and the language that the differences between the projections of the Sixties to the present are visible. Style (as residue) in this context is a carrier of the ideology of the times, dissolving the historical within the aesthetic, midway between timelessness and periodization.

This exhibition borrows its name from Fredric Jameson’s book, Archaeologies of the Future: the Desire called Utopia and other Science Fictions (Verso, 2005), a title that is an entire programme in itself. Nevertheless, its origin lies in the conclusion of the author’s previous book on modernity and modernism, A Singular Modernity (Verso, 2000), when he writes that "Ontologies of the present demand archaeologies of the future, not forecasts of the past".

Archaeologies of the Future as a visual essay is an attempt to short-circuit the archaeologies of the past (those of modernity) with a scenario of historicism close to science-fiction.

Another of the notable features lies in the methods used by all the artists, which include appropriation, quotation, re-contextualisation, revision, design, reference and self-reference, and manipulations of style, with culture being read as a second nature.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a catalogue featuring all the projects in the show. This catalogue is being published by rekalde and distributed internationally by Revolver Verlag, Frankfurt.

Archaeologies of the Future has received the support of the Danish Arts Council and the Foro Cultural Austria in Madrid

As part of the exhibition, the British artist Liam Gillick (Aylesbury, 1964) will be giving a talk related to the concept of the show on Thursday 22 November at 7.00 pm.

This talk is being supported by the British Council

During the same dates, the Abstract Cabinet of sala rekalde will be showing a solo project by the young Basque artist Erlea Maneros (Bilbao, 1977), curated by Leire Vergara. The pictorial work of Maneros is noted for its incisive exploration of the vast output of images today. Though abstract in character, her work takes figuration as its starting point and develops and takes shape through the artist’s appropriation of visual documents that are analysed and transformed to the extent that the image is removed from its original context.

The new series of works presented at rekalde takes a specific image as its starting point: a painting by the American Charles Willson Peale, a portrait painter and contemporary of the political figures and events of the United States War of Independence.

For further information please contact:
Press Office
Tel:( +34) 94 406 87 07
Fax: (+34) 94 406 87 54
salarekalde@bizkaia.net

For more information go to: http://www.salarekalde.bizkaia.net

Ludwig Museum

Katarzyna Kozyra
"In Art Dreams Come True"
27 September-28 October 2007

Ludwig Museum
Museum of Contemporary Art
Palace of Arts
H-1095 Budapest, Komor Marcell u. 1.
info@ludwigmuseum.hu

http://www.lumu.hu

Katarzyna Kozyra (Warsaw, 1963-) is one of the most famous contemporary Polish media artists in the world. In 1999 she represented Poland at the 48th International Venice Biennial.

In Hungary, she became famous by shooting a video in one of Budapest’s spas with the help of a hidden camera. In the pieces entitled Men’s Bathhouseand Women’s Bathhouse she investigated from a sociological point of view whether the behaviour of men or women is likely to change in an environment free from the other sex.

Katalin Néray, Director of Ludwig Museum — Museum of Contemporary Art, noticed the work of Katarzyna Kozyra as early as 1997 when, during the Polish cultural festival Polonia Express, the latter presented in the Kunsthalle the artist’s Pyramid of Animals which was inspired by the opera The Musicians of Bremen. In 2003, the video project Rite of Spring was displayed in the ‘A’ wing of Buda Castle, the former location of the museum. In this work, Kozyra substituted old, naked dancers for the young participants moving violently to Stravinsky’s music and Vaslav Nisinski’s choreography. In September 2007, a solo exhibition of Katarzyna Kozyra’s work is presented in LUMÚ for the
second time.

Katarzyna Kozyra’s travelling exhibition, In Art Dreams Come True, uses the visual media of theatre, film, and opera, respectively. In this multimedia piece the Polish artist presents extremely different representations of female types, such as the opera diva, the princess of fairy tales, the pop star, or the femme fatale. The artist chooses masters who help her learn, play, and transform into the
stereotypical roles.

She met her first master, a transvestite DJ and singer named Gloria Viagra in Berlin. Viagra introduced her to the world and atmosphere of night clubs, taught her about proper make-up, hairdo, behaviour and movement, went shopping with her, and helped her choose clothes.

She met the second master, a music teacher referred to as the Maestro, in Warsaw. From him she learnt the breathing technique and the posture required for opera singing, and the exaggerated, almost forced and unrealistic performing methods of sublime emotions. Kozyra was taking singing lessons for more than a year to develop her abilities to express emotions.

The worlds of the opera singer and the street walker are opposing at first sight, but in both artificial environments femininity is the central theme. What is more, they both present the process of transformation, being disguised, and superficiality. The two worlds seem to melt to create a distorted fairy tale centred on the artist about unrealistic dreams and desires. By questioning prescribed roles associated with the sexes and obscuring the differences between femininity and masculinity, Katarzyna Kozyra investigates the true meaning of gender roles in this project.

The exhibition was displayed previously in Poland (in Warsaw and Wroclaw), in the Czech Republic (Brno), and in Slovakia (Trnava).

The Ludwig Museum in cooperation with the BWA Gallery, Wroclaw, displays about 30 video works of the artist involving several different techniques, i.e. televisions, computers, or projectors, and also exhibits five clothes designed by the artist especially for this project to be worn at the performances.

Curators: Hanna Wróblewska, Róna Kopeczky
Venue: 1st floor

Related events:
Thursday, 27 September 2007, 6.30-8.00 p.m. DJ set by Gloria Viagra

Saturday, 29 September 2007, lumú 10-10
Woman in the Centre
5.00-7.00 p.m. Is-Is Rendezvous
As part of the lumú 10-10 on 29 September, we plan a rendezvous between Katarzyna Kozyra and Hanna Wróblewska, Deputy Director of the Zacheta National Gallery of Art in Warsaw, Curator of the exhibition and Pál Tamás, Director of the Institute of Sociology at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences

Guided Tours in English:

Saturday, 29 September 2007, Saturday, 4.00 p.m.Guided tour with Katarzyna Kozyra
Saturday, 6 October 2007, 5.00 p.m.
Saturday, 20 October 2007, 5.00 p.m.
Thursday, 25 October 2007, 7.00 p.m.

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