Busan Biennale 2008

Busan Biennale 2008
Theme: Expenditure
Period: Sep. 06. - Nov. 15. 2008 (71 days)
Opening ceremony: Sep. 06. 2008
Venues: Busan Museum of Modern Art and others
Exhibitions:
Contemporary Art Exhibition
Sea Art Festival,
Busan Sculpture Project
Number of artworks: approx. 200 from 30 countries
Host/organizer:
Busan Metropolitan City
Busan Biennale Organizing Committee
Contact: telephone 82-51-888-6691~9
fax 82-51-888-6693
bbiennale@paran.com

http://www.busanbiennale.org

The 2008 Busan Biennale unfolds at the Busan Museum of Modern Art, Gwangalli Beach, and APEC Naru Park between September 6th to November 15th under the theme of “Expenditure.” Made up of the Contemporary Art Exhibition, the Sea Art Festival, and the Busan Sculpture Project, the 2008 Busan Biennale will exhibit a distinctive philosophy of “expenditure” and a vivid scene of contemporary art through a variety of artworks including paintings, photographs, videos, installations, outdoor
sculptures, etc.

The theme of the 2008 Busan Biennale, “Expenditure,” was borrowed from Georges Bataille’s discussion. Since it means consumption, release, and exhaustion, and extends into extravagance and reckless expenditure, “expenditure” is a concept contrary to goal-oriented, power-oriented, and phallic economic concepts, such as production, moderation, accumulation, acquisition, regime, control, etc. Though it has political and economic implications, it also has a great deal of implications for the perspectives of aesthetics and cultural criticism. Bataille pointed out that all studies had pursued to understand a society or a culture through the lens of production and accumulation and this had been an attempt to look at the whole from a part of a society or a culture, leading to a half-baked interpretation. According to Bataille, a complete discussion could be produced when we look at a society or a culture through the lenses of spending, consumption, exhaustion, etc., or concepts that
are the antipodes of production, accumulation, acquisition, control, etc., that is, concepts employed in existing discussion methods. He asserted that, after all, culture had been maintained through activities deemed meaningless, such as releasing and consuming what was produced and accumulated.

The 2008 Busan Biennale attempts to reinterpret the trends of contemporary art as the aesthetics of “expenditure” through a microscopic lens, as well as to interpret “expenditure” through a macroscopic lens from the perspectives of cultural theories. Differentiating itself from existing biennales, which focus on exhibiting latest art trends “with speed” and “in abundance,” the 2008 Busan Biennale seeks to illuminate and predict the latest directions of contemporary art, from paintings to sculptures to videos, under the theme of “expenditure,” employing thorough analyses and maintaining critical views.

First, the Contemporary Art Exhibition will unfold at the Busan Museum of Modern Art, Busan Yachting Center, and other places, under the direction of Kim Won-bang, a professor at Hongik University and art critic, exhibiting some 120 works of 100 artists from 20 countries. The Contemporary Art Exhibition, whose theme is “Expenditure, Art, Culture,” presents the driver of today’s cultural activities through the concept of expenditure, shifting directions from existing production-oriented and appearance-centered values to the disintegration of supernatural values and power of culture.

The Sea Art Festival will be hosted in the Gwangalli Beach, nearby shopping centers, Samik Leports Town, Geumnyeonsan Subway Station, etc. under the direction of Jeon Seung-bo, an independent curator. Some 60 artists from 20 countries will participate in the Festival with 70 artworks. The Sea Art Festival, whose theme is “Voyage Without Boundaries,” seems to be in line with the theme of the biennale, “Expenditure,” in that the Festival embraces contradiction and paradox as the essence of life, addressing formation and creation.

The Busan Sculpture Project, which is headed by a sculptor Yi Jeong-hyeong, is hosted in APEC Naru Park, inviting 20 works of 20 artists from 15 countries. The theme of the Busan Sculpture Project, “Avant Garden,” combined “Avant” from avant-garde with “Garden,” which indicates a more private space than a park. Thus, “Avant Garden” implies the intention of transforming everyday spaces into creative ones by combining epistemological and aesthetic notions with ordinary parks.

Busan Biennale 2008
Sep. 6 - Nov. 15, 2008,
Press Opening
Sep. 5. 2008, Auditorium at the Busan Museum of Modern Art
Opening Ceremony
Sep. 6. 2008

For inquiries, contact:
Busan Biennale Organizing Committee
23rd Floor, Busan City Hall, Yeonsan 5-dong, Yeonje-gu, Busan Metropolitan City
Tel. 82-51-888-6691~9 / Fax 82-51-888-6693 / bbiennale@paran.com
http://www.busanbiennale.org

DHC/ART

Harun Farocki, Deep Play (2007)
Stills from 12-channel video installation
Courtesy of the artist

RE-ENACTMENTS
Nancy Davenport, Stan Douglas, Harun Farocki, Ann Lislegaard, Paul Pfeiffer, Kerry Tribe

Curator: John Zeppetelli
February 22 - May 25, 2008

http://www.dhc-art.org

DHC/ART Foundation for Contemporary Art is pleased to announce its second exhibition

Culture is a repository or an archive to be plundered, contested, evoked or edited. Much contemporary art appropriates, re-imagines or otherwise re-visits established cultural texts, including popular culture and the history of art, film, and performance. The aim is to generate new meanings and fresh relevance from this source material, often by reiterating its value in the form of homage or deflating its claims with critique, but always by rerouting it to mysterious and unexpected places.

DHC/ART Foundation radically transforms its spaces for a major media art exhibition. Re-enactments gathers six artists whose work, in some way, critically re-stages films, media spectacles, popular culture and, in one instance, the intimate moments of daily life. Some of the projects offer bold objectifications of our image-saturated world, while others trigger poetic confusion between memory, fact and fiction. By vividly addressing politics, spectacle and subjectivity these re-workings of cultural texts or events of the past pose compelling questions about the present.

Jean-Luc Godard is the inspiration for two works in the exhibition: Kerry Tribe uses Godard’s experimental television masterpiece France/tour/détour/deux/enfants, made with Anne-Marie Miéville, as the starting point for her poignant dual-screen installation Here & Elsewhere; whereas the extraordinary tracking shot in Godard’s film Le Weekend is the basis for Nancy Davenport’s Weekend Campus, a slow horizontal pan - composed of hundreds of still photographs - over a cataclysm of stalled cars, gruesome accidents and impassive witnesses set at the entrance of a university. Two earlier moments in film history by the Lumière brothers and Georges Méliès are referenced in Davenport’s Workers (leaving the factory) – a speculative, multi-screen take on labour and globalisation. Stan Douglas’ two-projector, single-screen film installation Inconsolable Memories uses the Cuban film classic Memories of Underdevelopment as its foundational text. Douglas’s “recombinant
” installation complicates the original by manifestly displacing its time frame.

Notorious televised sports and entertainment spectacles inform the three projects on view by Harun Farocki and Paul Pfeiffer. Farocki’s Deep Play subjects the 2006 World Cup Final between France and Italy to a stunning formal, scientific, and statistical vivisection over twelve synchronised, real-time video projections. Michael Jackson is the subject of two Paul Pfeiffer works, Live Evil (Bucharest), a small, two-projector piece which shows a quasi-mirrored image of Michael Jackson in performance while visualising the palindrome of the title, and Live From Neverland, an eerie meditation on the pop star’s hugely documented child molestation trial. While not directly inspired by a film or television text, Ann Lislegaard’s I-You-Later-There nonetheless evokes the cinematic experience. The re-enactment in this work consists of a strong halogen light pulsing to the chant-like thoughts of a female voice onto a rectangular surface made of floorboards, which becomes a screen or
a stage, complete with the sounds of a creaking floor.

451 St-Jean Street in Old Montreal
(please note the exhibition continues at 468 St-Jean)
Montreal, Quebec

Opening Hours:
Wednesday to Friday from 12 PM – 7 PM
Saturday and Sunday from 11 AM – 6 PM

http://www.dhc-art.org

Information: Cheryl Sim – Program Coordinator
(514) 866-6767 ext. 206 / cheryl@dhc-art.org

Austrian Cultural Forum
New York

Mathilde ter Heijne, Menschen Opfern, Soundinstallation 2002
Copyright: Mathilde ter Heijne

UNDER PAIN OF DEATH

Through May 10 | 2008
Gallery hours:
Monday - Saturday | 10 am - 6 pm

Austrian Cultural Forum New York
11 East 52nd Street
New York, NY 10022
212 319 5300

http://www.acfny.org

UNDER PAIN OF DEATH

Exhibition dates: January 22 - May 10 | 2008
Gallery hours: Monday - Saturday | 10 am - 6 pm

Raimund Abraham
Matthew Barney
Bigert & Bergström
Mary Ellen Carroll
Barbara Caspar & Andrew Standen-Raz
Chien-Jen Chen
Steven Cohen
Lucinda Devlin
Manfred Erjautz
Harun Farocki
Barnaby Furnas
Ken Gonzales-Day
Michael Haneke
Mathilde ter Heijne
Glenn Ligon
Thomas Locher
Adam McEwen
Errol Morris
Nick Oberthaler
Werner Reiterer
Constanze Ruhm
Andres Serrano
Andy Warhol
Artur Zmijewski

Curated by Gerald Matt and Abraham Orden
Curatorial Consultant | Ilse Lafer
Commissioned and Produced by Andreas Stadler
Exhibition Coordination | Elisabeth Haider
Exhibition Assistance| Natascha Boojar | Marianne Dobner | Henry Grimm | Sigrid Polster | Marie - Theres Posawetz | Maria Simma

In 2006, 1,591 people were executed around the world. They were hanged, shot, beheaded, poisoned, or tortured to death. In China, the country where most executions were carried out, the bodies of delinquents were often used as organ banks. What some view as justified punishment for the protection of human beings and society, others consider an affront, a sin against humanity and creation or a violation of human rights. The question of the legitimacy and non-legitimacy of the death penalty – its history and practice from the electric chair to lynchings and vigilantism – has been dividing humanity from the very outset. It fascinates and disgusts people, including artists. The exhibition surveys the questions and answers explored by contemporary artists in connection with the death penalty as an existentialist phenomenon involving human feelings ranging between fear, hate, anger, revenge, shame, forgiveness, and mercy.

Admission to all ACF exhibitions, concerts, and other events is free.
Gallery Hours: Monday through Saturday from 10 am to 6 pm.
The Austrian Cultural Forum is located at 11 East 52nd Street in Manhattan.

For additional information call 212 319 5300 or visit http://www.acfny.org

Julie Davidow

Julie Davidow: The New Strain
February 16th – March 15th
Opening Reception: February 16th, 6-8 pm

The New Strain #3, 2008, gesso, acrylic, latex enamel, and enamel paint
on canvas, 48′ x 48″

Tarryn Teresa Gallery
2525 Michigan Avenue, G8A
Santa Monica CA 90404
310-453-4752

http://ww.tarrynteresa.com

Santa Monica, CA - Tarryn Teresa Gallery is pleased to present new work by Miami-based artist Julie Davidow. A self-described “frustrated scientist”, Davidow has been collecting specimens from the organic and inorganic worlds for her entire life. Motivated by an endless curiosity for the natural sciences and the systems that govern its functions, her paintings and drawings explore the relationship between these systems and the affect mankind’s existence and coinciding interference have on nature. As a result, Davidow’s imagery is drawn from biological, sexual, botanical, geological, cartographic, and architectural influences.

The exhibition consists of new paintings and drawings, including a site-specific wall drawing which connects the entire space and body of work. The co-infectious relationship between man and nature is explored in Davidow’s work, as each piece takes the viewer on a web-like journey through the natural evolution of growth and the infectious process. Each painting is a snap shot – a momentary glimpse of interaction. Biomorphic abstractions seep off the canvas and onto the walls, evoking various organisms glimpsed in a moment of transition, growth, reproduction, mutation, and conflict. Much like mitosis, the work references a point which expands and grows. It also appears to evolve through an intricate grid like system, spreading at a virulent pace.

The vivid color palette – a purposeful diversion from the insidious subject matter – now includes acid and fluorescent colors, as well as interference pigments suggesting the spectrum of color found in butterfly wings, bird feathers, beetles and sea shells. Earlier work was more pastel colored, but Davidow’s choice for an increasingly fiery color palette is timely, with the world in conflict, and the human footprint inescapable, the earth is undoubtedly a heated place. Intensified colors and more dynamic, complex visual maps are tempered with masses of flat color, referencing both the built environment encroaching on these systems and the subsequent retreat of regions considered too remote to be affected.

The web-like background of her paintings is created from a series of folding. The un-stretched canvas is painted with a layer of white gesso, and folded according to a predetermined composition. This ground invokes the body, creating a “skin” on which the organisms and infectious agents evolve. Ghosts of cellular changes are revealed in the skin – previous battles won or lost; the scars of conflict. These “ghosts” could also be indications of that which is emerging and stimulated by invasion. Most importantly, it is the history, the underlying architecture of the painting from which creation occurs and grows outwards. This creation is an intelligent force, referring to anything that has the innate ability to grow. The grid, which could also be described as a map of space – both real and conceptual - is fundamental to the overall work. It forms a complex and symbiotic relationship with the paint on its surface. Much like the topics her work explores, the artist�!
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process and final product are also interdependent. We see cells, rivers, veins - even neurological webs, but regardless of what these images may or may not evoke, there are continual connections and oppositions. There are labyrinths of connectivity which relate to the fundamental order within chaos. Microcosm and macrocosm. Creation and disease. Creation, both positive and negative is a relentless force and Davidow’s work embodies this sense of unchecked growth. The implications on the body and the earth are vast and almost incomprehensible. Each painting or drawing could be occurring under a microscope or the depiction of vast solar systems in an infinite universe.