Artipedia - Arts News

MartRovereto

Chen Zhen
Purification Room
2000
Oggetti trovati, argilla, muri, pavimento
350 x 800 x 600 cm
Ph. Ela Bialkowska
Courtesy Galleria Continua, San Gimignano-Beijing

Chen Zhen. The Body as Landscape
23rd February 2008 to 1st June 2008

Vincenzo Agnetti
23rd February 2008 to 1st June 2008
http://www.mart.trento.it

Chen Zhen. The Body as Landscape
Curated by Gerald Matt and Ilse Lafer
Co-produced by Mart and the Vienna Kunsthalle
MartRovereto, 23rd February 2008 to 1st June 2008

Vincenzo Agnetti
Curated by Achille Bonito Oliva, Giorgio Verzotti.
In collaboration with: Archivio Vincenzo Agnetti, Milano
MartRovereto, 23rd February - 1st June 2008

The Mart – Museo di Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto – will be showing “Chen Zhen. The Body as Landscape”, the first anthological selection to be hosted in Italy following the premature death of the Chinese artist Chen Zhen (Shanghai 1955 - Paris 2000)

Mart is also the first museum to present an anthological exhibition dedicated to Vincenzo Agnetti (Milan 1926-1981). Curated by Achille Bonito Oliva and Giorgio Verzotti, the exhibition is offered in collaboration with the Archivio Vincenzo Agnetti in Milan.

Both shows will be on display at MartRovereto from 23rd February 2008 to 1st June 2008

The Chen Zhen exhibition will present not only a rich selection of works and installations, produced from 1989 to 2000 and on loan from international museums and private collections, but also a section dedicated to unfinished projects, never before shown to the public.

Having grown up during the Cultural Revolution in China, Chen Zhen has lived and worked in Shanghai, New York and Paris. All his work goes beyond the borders commonly marked between Oriental and Western thinking, and even evades systematic classification on the basis of labels commonly associated with art movements.

Deliberately avoiding rigid membership of any group and consolidated expressive languages, Chen Zhen placed a striving for synthesis as the basis for his work, questioning himself, for instance, on the strength and universality of human desire to avoid wars in favour of peaceful mediation.

A protagonist in the most radical research in the field of the visual arts, Vincenzo Agnetti may be considered the leading Italian exponent of conceptual art, characterising at least a decade of international visual culture.

After a brief period of exploring informal art, in 1960 Agnetti embarked upon an intense activity as writer and theorist of contemporary art, supporting artists such as Piero Manzoni and Enrico Castellani, and such groups as the Azimuth, active in Milan in the early 1960s.

At the end of the decade, Agnetti continued his theoretical reflections on art, its role and languages, but shifting his attention to the actual production of art.

Agnetti’s works are proposals of a mental nature. Frequently, they involve a self-analysis based upon a comparison of image and word, aiming to verify the function of verbal and visual languages. The numerous invitations he received to international exhibitions like Documenta at Kassel, in 1972, and to various editions of the Venice Biennale, gave Agnetti a recognition that placed him at the same level as artists involved in the “deconstruction” of artistic languages, such as John Baldessari or Joseph Kosuth in the United States, or Daniel Buren and Victor Burgin, in Europe.

His premature death at the age of 55 prevented Agnetti from maturing the form of his art, which in the last years was returning to a manual approach, but modified by the use of photography.

The Mart’s exhibition constitutes the first step in a necessary critical re-examination of Agnetti’s work, which has hitherto been the object of only sporadic and incomplete studies.

The catalogue, featuring critical texts by Achille Bonito Oliva, Tommaso Trini, Giorgio Verzotti and Chiara Bertola, will be a particularly broad-ranging monograph and will document the entire corpus of Agnetti’s work, including works not on display.

MartRovereto
Corso Bettini, 43
38068 Rovereto (TN)

Information and bookings
free phone 800 397 760
Tel. +39 0464 438 887
info@mart.trento.it
http://www.mart.trento.it

Opening times
Tues. - Sun. 10 a.m. - 6 p.m.
Fri. 10 a.m. - 9 p.m.
Mondays closed

Public relations
Mart:
Director: Flavia Fossa Margutti
Press office: Luca Melchionna 0464 454127 cel 320 4303487
Clementina Rizzi 0464 454124
press@mart.trento.it

Esma Sultan Yalisi

Sakari Viika/Pyrstotahti

the good old tricks, for one last time.
he’s here and he’s gone.

Memorial Event for Hüseyin Bahri Alptekin [1957 - 2007]
March 15, 2008, from 18:00 on

Esma Sultan Yalısı
Ortaköy, Istanbul

On Saturday, March 15th, a memorial will be held for Hüseyin Bahri Alptekin who passed away in his studio on the last day of 2007.

The evening will include talks, video and photo screenings, and the performance of original musical scores composed in his memory.

Alptekin was an artist, writer, educator and curator. In 1990, Alptekin began to make art, fusing associative images and objects in installations. Befitting a philosopher turned artist, Alptekin’s oeuvre is unified by an ambitious set of themes. In grandly staged installations, neon signs and photographic series, Alptekin freely borrowed images and phrases without declaring them his own. The core of his artistic practice was his consideration of the universe from the viewpoint of an anonymous and plural author working in an unmediated, intercultural and intertextual society. Alptekin never resorted to representation, or false empathy, by peeking into peoples’ lives. Never permitting himself moral superiority, he strove to attain a flawless ethics in his art.

Alptekin represented Turkey in the Arsenale at the 52nd Venice Biennale, presenting Don’t Complain (2007). He took part in numerous international exhibitions including the Istanbul Biennial in 1995 and 2005, the Bienal de São Paulo in 1998, the 2002 Cetinje Biennale in Montenegro, the Tirana Biennial in 2003 and 2005 and Manifesta 5 in 2004. Alptekin won a UNESCO prize for his work in the Cetinje Biennale, and the M. Mulliqi Prize at the 3rd International Exhibition at Kosovo Art Gallery, Prishtina, in 2005. As a curator, he organized exhibitions and events in Istanbul, Tirana, Havana and Helsinki.

Those who wish to join us in memory of Hüseyin Bahri Alptekin, please contact: huseyinsfriends2@gmail.com

New Museum

Martha Rosler, Semiotics of the Kitchen, 1975
Video still
Courtesy the artist

Night School Public Seminar 2:
Martha Rosler
Art & Social Life; The Case of Video Art
Free with Museum admission but
tickets are required*

New Museum
235 Bowery
New York, NY 10002
212.219.1222
http://www.newmuseum.org

Seminar schedule:
Thursday, February 28, 7:30 p.m.
Friday, February 29, 7:30 p.m.
Saturday, March 1, 3 p.m.

Martha Rosler
Art & Social Life; The Case of Video Art

The early history of autonomous video art is a pivotal point in the internal culture wars of the art world. Starting in the late 1960s through the early 1970s, artists with quite diverse practices experimented with the new (but not yet widely available) portable video apparatuses.

Film had by mid-century superseded both architecture and music as the queen of the arts. But by the 1950s the broadcast television industry and its structures of celebrity were challenging the social status of high art. Television was a problem…and then the Portapak was invented. Video suggested varieties of freedom to artists restive about or dismissive of traditional studio practices. Video promised a sort of gesamtkunstwerk on the ruins of a high modernism that had demanded a strict separation between forms. Video offered not just the experience of time married to the illusion of space accompanied by sound; because of poor image quality, video also offered relative freedom even from the concerns of cinema, art film, and movies. It provided the opportunity to sketch or to perform, to record a gesture or a narrative, to sing in the shower or dance in the studio, abetted by simple in-camera edits. Artists could, without commitment, break free of the studio if they chose, an
d, in the political ferment and upheavals of the era, take a look around, report, raise a voice, show a face, register anger, offer an opinion, analyze social structures and events, tell a joke, join with friends, and yell back at the mind-melting products of broadcast television while nevertheless making use of television’s capacity for instantaneous, unrecorded transmission and endless flow, or they could take advantage of a recorded format that was easily reproducible and could be widely disseminated. The international potentials of this form were immediately obvious to artists and even museum administrators, to judge by the range of international “video opens” of the mid-1970s.

The wide-open field of early video may arguably be the typical condition of a medium at birth (compare the Internet, on its way from being a utopian arena of activity to a gated compound locked down by corporate toll takers, if they get their way). Despite the competition of sites like YouTube, video as an art form has become, by definition, an expensive captive of the gallery and museum, the black box inside the white box. But the transformative impulses that drove utopian hopes in the earliest days have not completely evaporated. It is absolutely vital to revisit early video works and their context (including the texts of the era), to provide a deep slice into the moment of origin and see what may be refurbished and adapted for the present-beyond the stylish appropriations of the 1970s “look.” In the face of the Society of the Spectacle, taking back/talking back to the media was a watchword of the era, offering the hope of social transformation through art, activism, and co
mmunity interventions. This hope animates many today, in whatever form and medium it may be furthered.

Video screenings related to this seminar will occur during the week of the seminar and the following week. A complete schedule of screenings will be available at http://www.newmuseum.org/events starting Monday, February 25.

Night School is an artist’s project by Anton Vidokle in the form of a temporary school. A yearlong program of monthly seminars and workshops, Night School draws upon a group of local and international artists, writers, and theorists to conceptualize and conduct the program.

Martha Rosler was born in Brooklyn, New York, where she now lives, after spending the 1970s in California. She works in video, photo-text, installation, sculpture, and performance, and writes on aspects of culture. She is a renowned teacher and has lectured widely, nationally and internationally. Rosler’s work is centered on everyday life and the public sphere, often with an eye to women’s experience. Recurrent concerns are the media and war as well as architecture and the built environment, from housing and homelessness to systems of transport. Her work has been seen in the Venice Biennale of 2003; the Liverpool Biennial and the Taipei Biennial (both 2004); documenta 12 and SkultpturProjekte Münster (2007); as well as many major international survey shows, including several Whitney biennials. She has had numerous solo exhibitions. A retrospective of her work, Positions in the Life World (1998-2000), was shown in five European cities and at the New Museum and the Internation
al Center of Photography (both in New York), concurrently. Rosler has published fifteen books of photography, art, and writing, most recently Imágines públicas: La funcíon política de la imagen (Gustavo Gili, Barcelona, 2007). Decoys and Disruptions: Selected Essays 1975-2001 was published by MIT Press in 2004. Books of her photographs include Passionate Signals (Cantz, 2005), In the Place of the Public: Airport Series (Cantz, 1997), and Rites of Passage (NYFA, 1995). If You Lived Here (Free Press, 1991) addresses her Dia project on housing, homelessness, and urban life. Rosler has been awarded the Spectrum International Prize in Photography for 2005, the Oskar-Kokoschka Prize in 2006, and Anonymous Was a Woman award in 2007. She teaches at the Städelschule in Frankfurt and Rutgers University.

Screening schedule:
Wednesday, February 27-Friday, February 29, 12:30-6 p.m.
Wednesday, March 5-Friday, March 7, 12:30-6 p.m.

Films to be screened include:
Vito Acconci Red Tapes Part 1
Max Almy Leaving the 20th Century
Max Almy Perfect Leader – Static Episodes
Nancy Angelo & Candace Compton Nun and Deviant
Ant Farm & T.R. Uthco Eternal Frame
Eleanor Antin The Nurse and the Hijackers
Sadie Benning It Wasn’t Love
Dara Birnbaum Technology/Transformation
Dara Birnbaum Kiss the Girls: Make Them Cry
Gregg Bordowitz Fast Trip, Long Drop
Joan Braderman Joan Does Dynasty
Nancy Buchanan Selected Works
Christine Choy & Renee Tajima Who Killed Vincent Chin?
Cecelia Condit Possibly in Michigan
David Cort & Curtis Radcliffe Mayday Realtime
Sara Diamond 10 Dollars or Nothing
Juan Downey The Laughing Alligator
Hermine Freed Art Herstory
Kip Fulbeck Banana Split
Paul Garrin Man With a Video Camera
Paul Garrin By Any Means Necessary
Vanalyne Green Trick or Drink
John Greyson Jungle Boy
Julie Gustafson The Politics of Intimacy
Joan Jonas Vertical Roll
Shigeko Kubota My Father
Stashu Kybartas Danny
Suzanne Lacy, Learn Where the Meat Comes From
Fred Lonidier Confessions of the Peace Corps
Yolanda M. Lopez When You Think of Mexico
Susan Mogul Take Off
Linda Montano Mitchell’s Death
Olhar Eletronico Varela in Xingu
Howardina Pindell Free, White and 21
Portable Channel Attica Interviews
Millie Reyes 2371 2nd Avenue: An East Harlem Story
Hector Sanchez Life in the G: Gowanus Gentrified
Richard Serra Boomerang
Richard Serra & Carlota Fay Schoolman Television Delivers People
Shelly Silver Things I Forgot to Tell Myself
Jason Simon Production Notes: Fast Food For Thought
Valerie Soe All Orientals Look the Same
Lisa Steele The Gloria Tapes
Janice Tanaka Who’s Going to Pay for These Donuts, Anyway?
White American Political Association Race and Reason

All events are free with Museum admission but tickets are required. Tickets can be reserved online or at the Museum one week before the seminar’s start; a limited number of tickets will be available one hour before each event’s start. Tickets are limited, distributed on a first-come-first-serve basis, and must be collected prior to the event’s start time. Unclaimed tickets will be released promptly at the event’s start time. Please check individual events below for tickets and more information.

For tickets see http://www.newmuseum.org/events

Night School is part of the Museum as Hub, which is made possible by the Third Millennium Foundation.

With additional generous support from the Metlife Foundation

Additional support is provided by the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, and the New York State Council on the Arts.

Endowment support is provided by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, the Skadden, Arps Education Programs Fund and the William Randolph Hearst Endowed Fund for Education Programs at the
New Museum.

Generous support also provided by the Charlotte and Bill Ford Artist Talks Fund.