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Contemporary Art Society

Contemporary Art Society launches
Professional Development Programme

Create Connections. Create Networks. Create Opportunities.
http://www.contempart.org.uk

The role of the curator is changing. Keeping abreast of the prescient ideas in contemporary visual practice and theory is becoming more complex and time-consuming, but at the same time, more rewarding.

We are delighted to announce the launch of our new Professional Development Programme for curators in museums and galleries nationally, as well as independent curators and cultural practitioners across the UK. This new initiative forms a strand of our new National Programmes, through which we help collecting organisations across the country to extend their collections by purchasing and commissioning new work by contemporary artists.

Designed to provide international, national and inter-regional perspectives through a tailor-made programme for contemporary art and craft curators, events include studio visits, gallery trips, major exhibitions, international events and fairs, symposia and seminars, as well as social and
networking opportunities.

For a membership subscription by Direct Debit (plus VAT), the Contemporary Art Society will provide national, regional and international perspectives, encouraging independent thinking and group collaboration. Please note organisational membership costs the same as individual membership.

Subscribe now and join us at one of our forthcoming events.

Forthcoming events include:

Moving Image, London, February 2008
As more museums and galleries are interested in commissioning and collecting work in New Media, guidance about commissioning and acquiring, displaying and maintaining this form of work is becoming more urgent. This event is an opportunity to look at these areas more closely as we engage with a range of organisations that specialise in moving image. With visits to commissioning agencies such as Film and Video Umbrella and the studios of artists’ working with moving image, we will also examine the research possibilities available to curators at specialist film archives like the British Film Institute and talk to agencies and galleries that collaborate and commission video and film-based works.

Berlin Biennial, April 2008
Curated by Adam Szymczych and Elena Fillipovic, the latest Berlin biennial promises to continue its reputation as a major international art event that sets the latest trends in the art world. See the highlights of the opening events of the Biennial with the Contemporary Art Society curators. The trip will also include a selection of visits to off-site projects in galleries of the Mitte district, visits to the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin (National Museums in Berlin), the collection of Bruno Brunnet at Contemporary Fine Art and visits to the studios of a selection of the artists involved in the Biennial.

Asia Triennial Manchester, May 2008
Don’t miss the UK’s first Asian Art Triennial, conceived by Shisha in partnership with Castlefield Gallery, Cornerhouse, Chinese Arts Centre, The International 3, Manchester Art Gallery and Manchester Metropolitan University. ATM08 “echoes Manchester’s strong political and social history, reflects new artistic practise, and seeks resonances between the city and Asia by exploring the notion of ‘protest’ — in its wildest sense”. During the event we will explore a variety of projects within the programme including newly commissioned work, residences, and venue-based exhibitions by artists from China, Hong Kong, India, Korea, Singapore and Taiwan. For many of the artists, it will be their UK debut.

Folkestone Sculpture Triennial and the Whitstable Biennial in Kent, June 2008
Join us for a visit to the Folkstone Sculpture Triennial and the Whitstable Biennial as they present a series of site-specific commissions in the coastal regions of Kent. This year’s projects at the Folkstone Triennial have been curated by Andrea Schleiker and will involve commissions by artists including Tracey Emin, Nathan Coley, Tacita Dean, Richard Wentworth and Richard Wilson. After spending a day viewing the sculptures at Folkstone we travel to Whitstable to view newly commissioned works for screen and performances by a number of emerging artists.

Commissions in response to our public collections, in London, July 2008
Explore the importance of public museum collections to contemporary artists in London. Talk to curators who have commissioned artists to create work in response to their collections. Details to follow in
January 2008.

North America tour (including the New Orleans Biennial), November 2008
2008 will see the launch of the biggest Biennial to reach America, be there with us to witness the events as they unfold on a curator-led tour of North America. The New Orleans Biennial “Prospect1″ has been curated by Dan Cameron and will take place in a variety of venues around the city from CAC (Contemporary Arts Center) and the New Orleans Museum of Art to industrial and outdoor spaces. The hope is that the Biennial will help the city recover from the devastation of Hurricane Katrina and push it forward with arts and cultural renewal. After visiting the highlights of the Biennial we will tour a number of public and private collections in the surrounding area including Dallas Art Dealers Association and the Kenny Gross Collection in Texas.

Previous events include a trip to the Lyon Biennial in September 2007 and more recently the two-day event Economies of Scale in Newcastle and Sunderland in November 2007.

Contact
To subscribe or find out more about the programme please contact Lucy Bayley, National Programmes Coordinator on lucy@contempart.org.uk or call 020 7831 3221.

The Contemporary Art Society is the national, non-profit agency that supports contemporary artists through the promotion of collection and commissioning by individuals, public and private bodies across the UK.

Contemporary Art Society
11-15 Emerald Street
London WC1N 3QL
T +44 (0)20 7831 1243
F +44 (0)20 7831 1214
http://www.contempart.org.uk
Contemporary Art Society is a company limited by guarantee
Registered in England and Wales no 255486
Charity Registration no 208178

MAMbo-Museo d’Arte
Moderna di Bologna

MAMbo - Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna
photo: Raffaello Scatasta

4 solo shows: Adam Chodzko, Eva Marisaldi, Diego Perrone, Bojan Sarcevic
December 2, 2007 - February 3, 2008
MAMbo-Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna
Via Don Minzoni 14
40121 Bologna
Italia
info@mambo-bologna.org

http://www.mambo-bologna.org

On December 2, 2007 the MAMbo-Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna will inaugurate the first solo shows held in its new premises. The exhibitions of Adam Chodzko, Eva Marisaldi, Diego Perrone and Bojan Sarcevic will enable visitors to discover the museum building in which the artists will trace four parallel routes to explore its both physical and symbolic space. While Marisaldi and Perrone’s exhibitions underline the central role played by Italian contemporary artistic research in its programme, Chodzko and Sarcevic’s exhibitions bring to the MAMbo exhibition programme a reflection upon the role of the contemporary museum launched by MAMbo in the two years which preceded and accompanied the opening of its new headquarters, aiming to set up a lively comparison between the institutional activities and the practices of contemporary artists, critics and curators in the form of an ongoing series of projects, shows and books.

Adam Chodzko
M-path and Hole

Envisaged as “gateways”, “thresholds”, “passages” between different dimensions — past/present/future, reality/potentiality, documentary/fiction, public/private — Adam Chodzko’s works appear in fragmentary gestures spreading out from the exhibition site into the intangible sphere of our experiences, memories and intuitions. His interventions — installed both in the exhibition galleries and in the external area of the MAMbo premises — provide us with an opportunity to experience the museum as an entity moulded not only by its management but also by its outside, i.e. by the dynamic relationship between people and their reciprocal expectations. After being requested to enter the exhibition “in someone else’s shoes” (M-path, 2005-07), the visitor will encounter the video installation Hole (2007) which tells a legend set in the near future in which a local woman is bound to the museum by a hypothetical relationship fluctuating between complete identification and distrust. In gi
ving birth to a possible mythical background for the new museum, Chodzko contributes to the formation of its collective identity, discovering and revealing the institution’s history at the very moment in which he invents it. By means of a mysterious short-circuit the remnants of that myth will be already visible on the rear façade of the museum. In this way the artist brings to light the foundations of an event which, though hypothetically destined to come about in the future, is the catalyser of a more pervasive and flexible definition of reality and of its artistic representations.

Curated by Andrea Viliani. Catalogue: texts by Alex Farquharson, Lisa Le Feuvre, Andrea Viliani and a conversation between Adam Chodzko and Mark Godfrey.

Eva Marisaldi
Jumps

Eva Marisaldi is interested in exploring creative and cognitive processes that, by being “lateral” to active life, make imagination real, suggest different logical and linguistic systems, open up alternatives of meaning that challenge the usual way of thinking and emerge as surprising though plausible possibilities. By involving the public in the encounter, rather than the use of her environments, the artist traces routes of discovery as in a “gym of attention”. In her exhibition at MAMbo Marisaldi premieres an installation composed of three new works, which will be fully revealed to the visitor only at the moment he/she comes face to face with them. The journey through these three works is like a “surmountable” obstacle course that constantly questions us the reasons for tackling the next obstacle, for having “left home” with its intensely mediatized life to enter a museum. Wooden and decorated constructions resembling equestrian hurdles, but done on human scale, will be spr
ead out in the exhibition galleries to join an L-shaped plinth (like the Knight’s move in chess) and a small portable theatre for birthday parties installed at the end of that human-equestrian walkthrough. The show at MAMbo follows Marisaldi’s first show held at the Galleria d’Arte Moderna of Bologna in 1999.

Curated by Roberto Daolio. Catalogue: text by Roberto Daolio, interviews with the artist by Hans Ulrich Obrist and the computer programme ‘George’.

Diego Perrone
La mamma di Boccioni in ambulanza e la fusione della campana

Specifically conceived for the main gallery of the museum, the show by Diego Perrone comes to us as witness to a personal dimension within the public space of the museum. An invisible line — traced just by the sequence of three works placed on a ramp — runs up through the entire space. Taking no account of the pre-existing architecture of the museum these “three things in a line uphill” prompt the visitor to rethink his/her relationship to the exhibition space and suggest the possibility of remodelling forms and meanings autonomously. The Casting of the Bell (2007) is a translation into physical and spatial terms of the timely process of casting a bell. The video installation The First Daddy Spins around with His Own Shadow, the Mummy Bends Her Body Looking for a Form, the Second Daddy Hits the Ground with His Fits (2006) shows us three distinct forms in the very act of taking form before our eyes. Boccioni’s Mother in an Ambulance (2007) is an object existing in different
versions and without any single defined sculptural form, in which the face of the mother of Futurist painter and sculptor Umberto Boccioni is superimposed on an image downloaded from Internet and reworked on computer, showing a simulated emergency in an ambulance. By giving new life to that material, the artist envisages a cross between colliding images, forms and times, refashioned by yielding to the possibilities suggested by the potentialities afforded by the appropriation of present-day multi-authored technologies and practices.

Curated by Charlotte Laubard with Andrea Viliani. Catalogue: texts by Luca Cerizza, Massimiliano Gioni and a conversation between Diego Perrone, Charlotte Laubard and Andrea Viliani.

The exhibition is a co-production with CAPC-musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux.

Bojan Sarcevic
Already Vanishing

Bojan Sarcevic explores open and ambiguous forms at the intersection between diverse modes of expression as well as between the various phases of the creative process and of our sensorial experience. To think of the cinema medium as a “sculpture” — as in this exhibition, which follows shows presented this year at the BQ gallery in Cologne and Le Crédac-Centre d’Art Contemporain in Ivry — means conferring to film a physical, concrete presence as to sculpture an ephemeral, impalpable consistence, highlighting the ‘liminal’ expressive possibilities of both film and sculpture. Sarcevic creates a progression marked by distinct pavilions — temporary and ethereal structures which are at the same time individual sculptural compositions, projection spaces and places which define the indissoluble relationship between the work and its architectural setting. In this disintegration of the dividing lines between different entities and media, the real space intersects reciprocally with
the metaphorical and two-dimensional space of the projected image. Matter, form and structure are transposed into a intangible and immaterial dimension, while the solidity of the architecture opens up to the dynamism of the image in motion, the skilfully measured changes of sound, colour, light. The transitory nature of this intervention has crept into the tangibility of the museum building, while a scenario vacillating between invention, sensation and reflection takes on form in the here and now of the white cube.

Curated by Andrea Viliani. Catalogue: texts by Caoimhín Mac Giolla Léith, Marcus Steinweg and
Andrea Viliani.

Arx Portugal

Photo by: FG+SG

Arx Portugal launches website with new and improved format.
http://www.arx.pt

Sixteen years after the birth of the architecture office, ARX Portugal opens up its website in both Portuguese and English versions. It presents, under a totally renewed design (proj. R2), the essential information on the projects, awards, publications and participations in several initiatives related
to Architecture.

Founded in 1991 by Nuno Mateus and José Mateus, the collective of architects ARX very soon conquered a distinguished place in Portuguese architecture, at the same time it was gathering progressive international recognition. ARX’s architecture does not follow a fixed language or lexicon. In each new context the aim is to find the right “words” for a specific language. More than to look for similarities between each project and the previous one, it is in the exploration of each case’s particularities that the potential for discovery, for the creation of the new, resides. This approach opens up inevitably and obviously to a very broad field of research. Not having to work within a static set of presuppositions, the architects choose a more experimental path where they try out new concepts, born from whatever thrills them or holds their attention. When questioned about the nature of the architecture they make, they often quote the Brazilian poet and philosopher António Cícero:
“what matters is not so much to write something new. It is to write something that reading doesn’t age.”

Nuno Mateus (b. 1961) graduated in Architecture (1984) in the FAUTL (Faculty of Architecture of the Technical University of Lisbon. In 1987 he finished his “Master of Science in Architecture and Building Design”, at Columbia University, New York. He worked with, among others, Peter Eisenman in New York and with Daniel Libeskind in Berlin. He has been teaching in several Schools of Architecture and was, from 2004 to 2007, Head of the Architecture Department of the Universidade Autónoma de Lisboa (Autonomous University of Lisbon). Guest Professor at ESARQ-Universitat Internacional de Catalunya (ESARQ - International University of Catalonia) in 2005-7, he has been invited to constitute jury on several national and international awards.

José Mateus (b. 1963), graduated in Architecture (1986) in the FAUTL (Faculty of Architecture of the Technical University of Lisbon. He is vice-president of the South Regional Section of the Portuguese Architects Guild and was General Curator for the 1st Lisbon Architecture Triennial in 2007. He lectured in several Schools of Architecture and was guest lecturer, in 2005-2007, at the ESARQ - Universitat Internacional de Catalunya (International University of Catalonia), in Barcelona. Author and coordinator of the semi-annual magazine Linha (Architecture, Design and Landscape) of the weekly newspaper Expresso, he also authored and coordinated two seasons of the Tempo e Traço television series for Sic-Notícias, besides his regular participation on the radio (TSF), with the program Na Ordem do Dia. He has been invited, at home and abroad, to be jury member in many awards, from which we specially mention the Architecture Prize of São Paulo Biennial in 2003, and the EUROPAN- Sp
ain, in 2007.
Nuno and José Mateus gave lectures in several countries such as Portugal, Spain, USA, Hungary, UK, Brazil, Belgium, Italy and Japan.

ARX was already distinguished with several national and international awards, and its work is often mentioned in reputable international magazines such as A+U, Wallpaper, AV, Architectural Review, Space, 2G, A10, Techniques & Architecture, WA — World Architecture, or the Portuguese arq./a. In 2007, CTT-Correios de Portugal emitted a stamp depicting the Maritime Museum of Ílhavo, as part of a collection on Portuguese contemporary architecture. ARX’s work was also object of a monographic exhibition, “Realidade Real” (Real Reality), which opened the Centro Cultural de Belém Exhibition Centre (proj. Vittorio Gregotti), in June 1993. Since then, it’s work has been presented in several countries as part of collective or individual exhibitions.

Through this renewed website one can follow closely the work being done by this office, the only one selected from Siza Vieira’s homeland to feature in the July’s issue of Wallpaper article “101 of the world’s most exciting new architects”. http://www.arx.pt

Contacts:
Press: Bruno Gonçalves, arxportugal@arx.pt
Projects: Paulo Rocha, paulorocha@arx.pt
Phone: +351213918110