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BIDOUN

Bidoun Issue 14: OBJECTS
http://www.bidoun.com

In the latest, double-sized, Bidoun, debuting at Art Dubai and arriving on newsstands in early April, the Middle Eastern arts quarterly considers OBJECTS. Thirty of them, a veritable catalog: of monuments and momento mori; iconic props of iconic people; trusty or beloved cars, desks, blankets, and drums. A treasure trove of stories, of things in their particularity. In their Bidounity, if you like. Anwar Sadat’s pipe. The angel Metatron’s breastplate. Naguib Mahfouz’s white linen suit. Condi Rice’s ice skates. Eldridge Cleaver’s fanciest pants. Muammar Qaddafi’s shifting spectacles. Idrissi’s map. Xerxes’s headlace. The taqwacore bus. The Allah-fish and the fish-girl. The telltale ass. The beating heart of our editor in chief.

Allah’s mighty tag can be found in the froth of the sea and the pulp of the tomato, in the wool of the lamb and the rubber of the Nike. But one of Allah’s favorite mediums is certainly fish scale.
—Sophia Al-Maria

Xerxes has a certain joyfully swishy quality, taking languorous sniffs of Leonidas’s scalp when they meet to parley, wearing clear lip gloss, and dressing like the sartorial stepchild of Liberace and Dhasim from Street Fighter II.
—Tom Morton

It turns out that meeting a Nobel laureate is far easier than meeting a washed-up and possibly castrated pop star. The difficult part is figuring out what to wear.
—Anand Balakrishnan

Bidoun’s regular arts coverage includes a profile of Rosalind Nashashibi by Will Bradley and works in progress from Abbas Akhavan, Christodoulous Panayiotou, Raphaël Zarka, and Tarek Zaki. A new column by Madelon Vriesendorp opens up the quasi-hermetic world of the private collector and her prized possessions. A new department, the gallery, presents works by Hicham Benohoud, Roman Ondák, The Atlas Group, Trisha Donnelly, and Shirana Shahbazi, while Vadim Fishkin’s Children’s Museum, an artist’s project, unleashes the curatorial instincts of ten-years-old-and-under kids. All that, plus Chromeo in conversation, Heavy Metal in Baghdad, profiles in objectum-sexuality, and hieroglyphics for tourists.

Also appearing at Art Dubai 2008: the Bidoun Artists Cinema and Video Bar, featuring three video programs curated especially for the fair by Bidoun and guest curators Nav Haq and Tirdad Zolghadr. Artists include Haluk Akakce, Ziad Antar, Shahab Fotouhi, Nadine Khan, Rosalind Nashashibi, Shahryar Nashat, Yoshua Okon, and Akram Zaatari.

Bidoun is also presenting Panoptikon, a remarkable film by Istanbul-based artist Emre Hüner, at the contemporaneous Creek Art Fair in Bastakiya.

Finally, Bidoun will be launching its inaugural print project at Art Dubai with photographic works by artist Haris Epaminonda, who represented Cyprus at the 52nd Venice Biennale.

Bidoun 14 • OBJECTS • 228 pages • http://www.bidoun.com
Subscribe at https://bidoun.com/shop.php

Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa

Maja Bajevic
18.03 - 27.04.2008
Opening: 18.03, 12.30 am

Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa
palazzetto Tito, Dorsoduro 2826
31023 Venezia
http://www.bevilacqualamasa.it

Maja Bajevic holds her first solo exhibition in a public venue in Italy, the Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa of Venice, together with the publication of the first complete monograph on her work (published by Charta, Milan, edited by Angela Vettese).

The artist lives between her native Sarajevo, Paris and Berlin, and emerged on the international stage thanks to her participation in events such as Manifesta, the Istanbul Biennial, and the Documenta in Kassel. She has gained prestigious forms of recognition, as demonstrated by her DAAD residency in Berlin.

The exhibition takes place in the sombre yet domestic environment of Palazzetto Tito, a venue chosen in the past by artists such as Marlene Dumas, Karen Kilimnik and Richard Hamilton by virtue of the original features of its lancet windows and its antique wooden flooring.

The visitors enter this typically Venetian house to find themselves immediately imprisoned in a room filled with a net of barbed wire. A number of women who normally work for the BLM use this grid as a frame, covering the most dangerous parts of the installation with woollen yarn. ‘Repetitio est mater studiorum’ is the title of this installation/performance, referring also to the professorship that the artist has held for the last three years at the IUAV University of Venice. The piece is part of a series of works entitled “Women at work”, in which Maja Bajevic asked women from specific places (Sarajevo, Istanbul, Barcelona) to work for her and use their feminine manual skills as a form of protection against the aggressiveness of our era, as well as being a way in which to keep their historical memory alive. In the other rooms, which may be reached by braving the wire found in the first room, visitors may view the videos of three other works from the same series: “Women at
Work - Under Construction”, “Women at Work - The Observers”, “Women at Work - Washing Up”, as well as photographs from the series entitled “Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year”. The following room includes a reference to the performance “En attendant”: set in a field of clay ground full of earthworms; there are also a series of hand-written sentences scrawled on a wall saying, “Sometimes I think I don’t know anything. And I feel better. And I think I could go away, somewhere, run away – why not? “. In the last room there is a monitor showing “Here’s to Looking at You, Kid”: the face of the artist seems to weep black clay, like a clown who, once the makeup has been removed, loses his sense of happiness and shows us his real sense of desperation.

Imprisonment, feminine knowledge, the difficulties of sharing but also of bearing solitude and all other forms of constriction: these are the themes that emerge from the works, from the very first, an original performance which will then become an installation, to the others, which bring together the last 10 years of the artist’s work. The end result is an exhibition of great emotional power, one which speaks to us of an individual condition as well as reflecting a collective state of mind and a vertiginous historical condition.

Press Office: press@bevilacqualamasa.it ; http://www.bevilacqualamasa.it ; T.0039.041.5207797
Studio Pesci: http://www.studiopesci.it

Museum Folkwang

Konsortium
Lars Breuer (1974 Aachen): Gazourmah, 2007
Sebastian Freytag (1978 Hannover): Abriss, 2007
Installation für das Museum Folkwang
Copyright: Konsortium; Foto: Jens Nober

Fusion // Confusion
The art of reference
12 January 2008 - 30 March 2008

Museum Folkwang
Kahrstrasse 16, Essen,
Germany

http://www.museum-folkwang.de

A group exhibition with:
Zbynek Baladrán (Czech Republic), Michael Beutler (Germany), Luca Buvoli (Italy), Simon Dybbroe Møller (Denmark), Cyprien Gaillard (France), Dionisio González (Spain), Konsortium (Germany), Ciprian Muresan (Rumania), Deimantas Narkevicius (Lithuania), Veit Stratmann (France)

Why do so many young artists deal with the beginnings of the Modern and those Modernist forms which developed thereafter? Which models do they draw on, which heroes are overthrown? These questions are the starting point of a succinct selection of younger artists from Western and Eastern Europe who have attracted international attention in the last few years. They provide a complex formulation of the ambivalent relation to the Modern, a nostalgia for its innocent purity of language, its utopian potential, but equally critique.

The term “Fusion”, often used in economics today, describes these artists’ methodology.: they take on forms, theses and construction principles from art and architecture through citation, copying or transformation, sometimes refusing clear authorship, commentating critically and ironically, merging artistic genres and transforming existing references.

A new vision of a younger artist generation of the Modern, against a background of global political and economic change, makes evident an ever growing distance to avant-garde art of the 20’s and the 60’s. The visions of the past, however, still define the aesthetic parameters of contemporary art. But the promises of “yesterday” can no longer serve as prescription of today’s reality. They no longer mean the same thing. Where can art go? Which functions can be formulated for art today – beyond the
art market.

Curator: Sabine Maria Schmidt

Together with the exhibition there is an extensive catalogue with numerous essays as well as a rich program of events.

General Visitor Information
Tel. +49(0) 201 – 88 45 301
Fax. +49 (0) 201 – 88 45 330
info@museum-folkwang.essen.de
http://www.museum-folkwang.de

Opening Hours: Tue-Sun 10 a.m. – 6 p.m., Fri to 9 p.m.

The museum is closed:
Easter Monday, Whitsun Monday