Artipedia - Arts News

sala rekalde

Jan Swidzinski at his studio (1975)
Photo: Zbigniew Dlubak
Courtesy CCA Ujazdowski Castle, Warsaw

1,2,3… Avant-Gardes - Art as Contextual Art
Film/Art between Experiment and Archive
20 December 2007 to 30 March 2008
sala rekalde
Alameda Recalde 30
Bilbao 48009, Bizkaia (Spain)

http://www.salarekalde.bizkaia.net

Curators: Lukasz Ronduda, Florian Zeyfang and Leire Vergara

1,2,3… Avant-Gardes - Art as Contextual Art is the next stage of an exhibition and research project that explores the “continuous” history of experimentation in film and art and the interaction of both fields.

Grounded in the extensive Polish experimental film output of the 1970s, 1,2,3… Avant-Gardes will offer a selection of films mostly produced by Polish artists from that period, whilst including contemporary international artistic proposals that constitute a challenge for the interpretation of the history of experimental cinema. The exhibition follows a schema structured under the following headings: Analytical Strategies. Games and Participation. Political Film and Soc Art (Socialist Art). Image and Sound. Imagination. Consumption. This specific disposition will structure the works with the aim of analysing both formally and conceptually the use of experimental strategies within visual production.

The show at sala rekalde is a new contribution of 1,2,3… Avant-Gardes entitled Art as Contextual Art. It departs from main ideas developed by Polish conceptual artist Jan Swidzinski, who in the early 1970s wrote manifestos and produced art works based on radical ideas about the importance of working within a specific socio-political context. His proposition for producing Contextual Art instead of a more universal Conceptual Art was crucial for the Polish art of the 70s. The exhibition will try to analyse the political, aesthetical and theoretical implications of working with the context of some Polish artists active in the 1970s and will also set out the different ways of negotiating with this issue in contemporary art production.

Understood in a “horizontal” way 1,2,3… Avant-Gardes points to different ideas of modernism and the pluralism of conceptual film and art production which existed parallel to one another during the Cold War period and still exists today. Read in a “vertical” way, it stands for the search for a possible historicisation of Polish avant-garde art and film, a linearity, to be discovered and reconstructed against many distortions in Polish history over the last 80 years.

The Polish film selection from the 1970s includes works by the following artists and producers:

Akademia Ruchu, Antosz & Andzia, Kasimierz Bendkowski, Bogdan Dziworksi, Marcin Gizycki, Janusz Haka, Oskar Hansen, Tadeusz Junak, Jacques de Koning, Grzegorz Królikiewicz, Zofia Kulik, Pawel Kwiek, Przemyslaw Kwiek, Natalia LL, Jolanta Marcolla, Ewa Partum, Andrzej Pawlowski, Zygmunt Piotrowski, Józef Robakowski, Zbigniew Rybczynski, Zygmunt Rytka, Jadwiga Singer, Zdzislaw Sosnowski, Mieczyslaw Szczuka, Michal Tarkowski, Teresa Tyszkiewicz, Ryszard Wasko, Jan Stanislaw Wojciechowski and Krzysztof Zarebski.

Also on show are works by the following contemporary artists:

Pawel Althamer/Artur Zmijewski, Bernadette Corporation, Matthew Buckingham, Discoteca Flaming Star, Jon Mikel Euba, Iñaki Garmendia, Judith Hopf/Katrin Pesch, Joaquim Jordà, Igor Krenz, Jonathan Monk, Jeroen de Rijke/Willem de Rooij, Wilhelm Sasnal, Sra. Polaroiska en Sillón de Taller and Florian Zeyfang.

1,2,3… Avant-Gardes Film/ Art between Experiment and Archive, initiated in the CCA Ujazdowski Castle in December 2006, was curated by Lukasz Ronduda and Florian Zeyfang. The exhibition, following the divisions and theoretical background described above, brought together for the first time the idea of combining archive material based on Polish experimental film production of the 1970s with contemporary artistic proposals.

In the Künstlerhaus in Stuttgart, the exhibition, curated on this occasion by Lukasz Ronduda, Florian Zeyfang and Axel John Wieder, was inaugurated in June 2007. This time, the exhibition concentrated more extensively on the experiments of Polish architect Oskar Hansen and his concept termed Open Form, which was originally developed within the context of international late-modernist debates on architecture in the 1950s and later taken up and further pursued in the direction of film and performance.

In sala rekalde, the exhibition now curated by Lukasz Ronduda, Florian Zeyfang and Leire Vergara extends the initial structure presented in Warsaw with a new list of artists from the Spanish and Basque context. In addition, the symposium Art as Contextual Art, organised as a parallel activity to the exhibition, proposes to analyse the artistic potentials from the past and present time of working with specific contexts. Ideas like universality versus singularity will be developed critically. The activity will be divided into two different sessions: on 15th January 2008 with Carles Guerra, Jan Swidzinski and Jan Verwoert and on 8th February 2008 with Judith Hopf, Asier Mendizabal and Rachel Weiss.

The exhibition is accompanied by the book 1,2,3… Avant-Gardes. Film/ Art between Experiment and Archive published by CCA Ujazdowski Castle and Sternberg Press. For the occasion, sala rekalde has published for the occasion an extended edition of Spanish and Basque translation booklets.

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

Australian Centre
for the Moving Image

Replay Marclay
Thursday 15 November -
Sunday 3 February
10am - 6pm Daily, Late Night
Thursdays until 9pm
Free exhibition
Australian Centre
for the Moving Image
Federation Square, Flinders Street
Melbourne Australia
+61 03 86632200
info@acmi.net.au
http://www.acmi.net.au

The acclaimed videos of artist and musician Christian Marclay feature in an Australian exclusive survey exhibition, Replay Marclay, at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) until
February 3, 2008.

Developed by the Cité de la Musique in Paris, Replay Marclay is the first major exhibition presented in Australia celebrating the work of the New York-based moving image artist, and is the first solo exhibition to be staged in ACMI’s Screen Gallery.

Christian Marclay’s astonishing work explores the overlapping of aural and visual realms in popular culture through a variety of mediums including video, film, sculpture, photography, music and DJ performances. By reframing the media landscape, he challenges us to consume the sounds and images that form our cultural landscape in a new way.

Marclay draws from a range of influences, from 1970s punk rock to the tradition of avant-garde artists such as John Cage, Laurie Anderson and the Fluxus Group. As a musician, he’s collaborated with Sonic Youth, the Kronos Quartet, Elliott Sharp and John Zorn; as a DJ and sound artist his experimental improvised turntable performances continue to push boundaries.

Since Marclay turned to video in the 1980s, his work has featured extensively across the globe including at two Venice Biennales and at the Tate, Centre Pompidou and the Guggenheim. This exhibition featuring large-scale projections and dramatic sound is a rare opportunity for audiences to experience Marclay’s stunning moving image work including the Australian premieres of Video Quartet (2002), a four-screen display of music-related scenes from feature films and Crossfire (2007), a symphony of gunshots compiled using excerpts from Hollywood films.

Curated by Emma Lavigne, Cité de la Musique, Paris.

Replay Marclay is possible thanks to Christian Marclay, the owners of the artworks and the Cité de la Musique, Paris.

For more information visit http://www.acmi.net.au or contact info@acmi.net.au

Witte de With and
Kunsthalle Zürich

LIAM GILLICK
Three perspectives and a
short scenario
Witte de With
19 January - 24 March 2008
Opening: Friday 18 January, 6 p.m.

KUNSTHALLE ZÜRICH
26 January - 30 March 2008
Opening: Friday 25 January, 6 p.m

Three perspectives and a short scenario is a year-long project by Liam Gillick. It will take place at four institutions in four different countries, adopting a different form at each station.

The first station is Gillick’s solo exhibition at Witte de With, running in parallel to his solo exhibition at Kunsthalle Zürich. In June 2008, a “scenario” will be held at the Kunstverein München. And in January 2009, he will have a retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, accompanied by a publication on his practice.

The first two stations — taking place at Witte de With and Kunsthalle Zürich — consist of three inter-related levels:

an architectural meta-structure
For the gallery spaces of these two institutions, Gillick has designed a structure comprising numerous black screens. These create corridors and semi-permeable galleries, while closing off other spaces, altering the visitor’s sensation of space, direction and perspective. They lead the visitor along a labyrinthine route, past a vitrine designed by Gillick — featuring a personal archive — to a screening room at the heart of the exhibition.

a documentary film
Gillick’s first documentary film acts as a reframing of all his previous work, derived from documentation of projects dating from 1988 to the recent unitednationsplaza, and encompassing projects that range in scope from the artist’s many lectures to his architectural designs. The film guides the viewer through a series of images accompanied by a voiceover. Rather than employing the usual format of a retrospective exhibition, the film itself is Gillick’s retrospective.

“institutional zone”
The remaining space within the galleries is categorized by Gillick as the “institutional zone”, which he has offered back to the two curatorial teams. This gesture can be seen as one of generosity or provocation, designed to highlight the division of responsibility between artist and institution in the creation of any exhibition. This comes back to Gillick’s own practice, a practice that questions the conventions of exhibition design and modes of display; and that asks if and how an entire artistic practice can be represented.

Witte de With’s director Nicolaus Schafhausen has decided to use the institutional zone to present the work of other artists during Gillick’s solo exhibition, considering Gillick’s architectural meta-structure as a given. They have not been invited in order to comment upon Gillick’s work, although certain parallels may emerge regardless. Any resulting ambiguities or misunderstandings will raise questions about the roles of art institutions and the expectations of artists and visitors.

Kunsthalle Zürich’s discussions with Gillick have focused on whether an institution is defined by insitutional policy, or is permanently being re-defined by the series of exhibitions and the intentions of the artists whose practice they present. The “institutional zone” at Kunsthalle Zürich will be a collaboration between director Beatrix Ruf and the artist to present a sequence of his lesser known ephemeral and conceptual pieces. Several events, lectures and symposia will also highlight the collaborative and discoursive elements of Gillick’s work.

Liam Gillick (born 1964, UK) lives and works in New York and London. Recent solo exhibitions include Palais de Tokyo (Paris), MOMA (NYC), Powerplant (Toronto) and Whitechapel Art Gallery (London). He is nominated for the 2008 Vincent Award, Amsterdam.

Supported by: The British Council; The Henry Moore Foundation; Volume Magazine; Casey Kaplan; Esther Schipper; Eva Presenhuber; Air de Paris; Corvi Mora; Micheline Szwajcer; Meyer Kainer; Präsidialdepartement der Stadt Zürich; Luma Stiftung; Stanley Thomas Johnson Stiftung.

Witte de With, Center for Contemporary Art
Witte de Withstraat 50
3012 BR Rotterdam
The Netherlands
+31 10 411 0144
http://www.wdw.nl
info@wdw.nl

KUNSTHALLE ZÜRICH
LIMMATSTRASSE 270
CH – 8005 ZÜRICH
SWITZERLAND
+41 44 272 1515
http://www.kunsthallezurich.ch
info@kunsthallezurich.ch