Glasgow international Festival of Contemporary Visual Art

Glasgow international Festival of
Contemporary Visual Art
April 11-27, 2008

Venues across Glasgow

http://www.glasgowinternational.org

Glasgow international Festival of Contemporary Visual Art - the Gi Festival - is the city’s curated and commissioning Festival, which provides a platform for the best of contemporary visual arts, from established Scottish and international artists, and from emerging talent. The third Festival, which runs from 11 - 27 April, is the first edition in its new biennial format.

The 2008 programme sees three strands of commissions and new work:
• Artists with strong Glasgow connections that have given the city its international reputation
• Artists from across the world, responding to Glasgow as a city and its people
• The new up and coming generation of artists living and working in the city.

Curator Francis McKee has set a curatorial framework of Private/Public and says, “I felt it was an appropriate theme because so much is changing in Glasgow at the moment. New areas are being developed and the architecture leaves many open spaces but they are seldom genuinely inviting as public space. At the same time, the city’s population is redefining the city in its own way, with different ‘publics’ finding alternative space to flourish.”

Work will be shown in established public and private galleries as well as off-site in a range of temporary venues and found spaces.

GALLERY-BASED EXHIBITIONS

Among the highlights of the gallery-based work commissioned by the 2008 Gi Festival is the largest exhibition in Scotland to date by Jim Lambie. Forever Changes will take over the whole of the ground floor gallery in GoMA and will include a new edition of his celebrated Zobop floor.

Tramway’s, 20th anniversary programme opens with a major new commission from Jonathan Monk. Something No Less Important Than Nothing….Nothing No Less Important Than Something references both his own personal history and that of the gallery itself.

At CCA Catherine Yass will show HIGH WIRE, a multi-screen installation, which was co-commissoned by ArtAngel with the Gi Festival. HIGH WIRE continues Catherine Yass’ interest in vertiginous spaces: architecture, height and scale have been dominant formal themes in her previous work.

OFF-SITE PRESENTATIONS

For the Gi Festival 2008, The Common Guild continues its series of exhibitions in a private house turned “not for profit” gallery. Algerian artist Adel Abdessemed’s works are characterised by a simple, straightforward and transparent use of his chosen media – including video, photography, sculpture and drawing - and an often playful approach to existent forms, symbols or conventions. The first UK solo exhibition of his work, commissioned by Common Guild in association with the Gi Festival, will be presented in Douglas Gordon’s Glasgow House.

Other off-site shows include the Modern Institute presenting a new Simon Starling work and Gi Festival commissions a new Wilhelm Sasnal film exploring the issue of Polish emigration through recent events in Glasgow.

NEW GENERATION PROFILED

The Market Gallery brings together three artists of Japanese origin - recent GSA MFA graduate and New Contemporaries artist Hideko Inoue, Anti-Cool and Kathy Aoki - working to examine themes of community, belonging, diversity and stereotypes.

A. Vermin, the artist-run curatorial project, is to be given free range in the city centre State bar, using the premises as both gallery and event space.

Lowsalt, the artist-led, not-for-profit organisation founded in 2006, will show work both in the gallery - a new exhibition by Andrew Reid - and in a series of unexpected places (in alleyways, under bridges, parks, auditoria, or derelict warehouses).

EVENTS, GIGS AND ARTIST TALKS

Amongst the events and gigs highlights is the sole UK appearance by Rodney Graham the seminal Vancouver-based artist and his band, commissioned by The Common Guild in collaboration with the Public Art Fund, New York and in association with the Gi Festival 2008.

Register your details at http://www.glasgowinternational.org for further information and Festival updates.

Contact Details:
c/o CCA
350 Sauchiehall Street
Glasgow G3 3JD
UK
+44 (0)141 352 4917
http://www.glasgowinternational.org

VIDEOHOLICA

This year for the first time will be presented as a satellite programme VIDEOHOLICA 2008 in the frames of the International Biennial AUGUST IN ART. VIDEOHOLICA 2008 aims to make the contemporary video art to the public with the chain of projections on public spaces, where it is less known. VIDEOHOLICA 2008 will present art works as by the good known artists as and by the young artists, who are working in this area.

All the applicants, who observe the rules and the deadline, will have admission to the jury, which will take a place in the earlier July 2008. After the careful selection the jury will present few one hour programs, which will be shown in different public places in the Varna city. VIDEOHOLICA 2008 will take a place in August 2008 and will be separated to the following sections: video art, experimental movies and art document. The jury will make catalog by the first 15 movies (first 5 in every section).

Decisions are made by the 5 members VIDEOHOLICA 2008 jury, which is made up of artists and other arts professionals. The final results will be announced and sent to the applicants by e-mail approximately by the middle of July 2008.

There is no submission fee.

Deadline: by 31 June 2008

Please send your application to the VIDEOHOLICA 2008 on the following address:

PAVLINA MLADENOVA
VIDEOHOLICA 2008
INTERNATIONAL BIENNIAL AUGUST IN ART
Georgi Velchev Art Museum
8 Radko Dimitriev srt.
Varna 9000
Bulgaria

Tel: + 359 52 611 928

For more information, terms of conditions and application form please visit:
http://www.augustinart.com/edition_2008_en.php

Portikus

Yona Friedman

Opening: 20 March 2008, 8 pm
Duration: 21 March - 4 May 2008
Press conference: 19 March 2008,
12.30 am

http://www.portikus.de

Yona Friedman is one of the most interesting and important theorists and utopians of architecture of our time. Born in Budapest in 1923, he has lived in Paris for many years. Friedman’s oeuvre comprises urban-planning models, theoretical writings, and animated films. His work has been prominently on view at a number of art biennials (Shanghai, Venice, and others) and at documenta 11, Kassel.

In 1958, Friedman published a manifesto, L’Architecture Mobile, that must simultaneously be considered the founding document of Groupe d’étude d’architecture mobile (GEAM). During the same years, he developed important conceptions of city-spaces such as La Ville Spatiale. To this day, these visionary mega-structures, overarching existing cities, whose inhabitants were to be enabled to flexibly shape their spatial and social worlds, have been much-discussed classics of avant-garde urban planning, inspiring generations of architects and urban planners. The ideas behind these manifestos were visionary and far ahead of their time; the point of departure for Yona Friedman’s Ville Spatiale was his conviction that architecture’s task was merely to offer inhabitants a framework, a structure that they would be called upon to implement according to their own ideas. Not unlike Constant, who during the same years, the mid-50s, developed the defining traits of his New Babylon,
Friedman regarded the progressive automation of industrial labor and the concomitant rise of recreation as a decisive social change that would render traditional urban structures obsolete. An immobile and elaborate conventional architecture was to be replaced by flexible and mobile structures.

Over the past decades, his creative work has resulted in innumerable drawings, models, and structural investigations of his visionary ideas. Friedman has worked using very simple means; paper, wire, packaging materials are the primary materials that give structure to his collages and models. The guiding principle is that his ideas be easy to handle and enable creative application. For the Portikus, Friedman, in collaboration with students and alumni/ae of the Städelschule, is developing a multi-part spatial installation that draws upon earlier structural models from his oeuvre. There is Lamellar Technology, a so-called “irregular structure,” wave-like bands molded out of paper or other pliable materials that can serve as a sort of diaphanous roof. Also on view will be a wall work that can be related back to Friedman’s contribution to the 2003 Venice biennial, Rubbish is Beautiful, where styrofoam packaging elements were composed to form a large-scale wall relief. The e
rratic variety of their surfaces creates the impression that the visitor is facing a model elevation of a utopian city. In conjunction with the exhibition, we will screen a series of 13 animated films from 1960 based on African fairy-tales; they have recently been restored.

A catalogue accompanying the exhibition will be published in the summer of 2008. For more information and for guided tours of the exhibition, please contact info@portikus.de

In cooperation with the Culture Board of the City of Frankfurt, the Portikus is showing an additional installation with Space Chains by Yona Friedman on the city’s new studio boat. Docked on the river Main at the Ruderdorf (near Oberrad), it is a charming new site for art. Over the course of this summer, the Städelschule, the Frankfurt Kunstverein and the Museum für Moderne Kunst (MMK) will alternate in using this new venue to show art. From 2009 on, the Culture Board will invite international artists to live and work on the boat. The opening party will be on this boat in collaboration with Freitagsküche, Frankfurt and DJs Dennis Loesch, Michael Riedel (Frankfurt/Berlin) and Guy the Guy (Vienna).

This exhibition and the catalogue have been made possible by generous support from Hessische Kulturstiftung and Deutsche Bank Stiftung.

Portikus
Alte Brücke 2 / Maininsel
60594 Frankfurt/Main
Germany
TEL: +49 69 962 4454-0
FAX: +49 69 962 4454-24
info@portikus.de
http://www.portikus.de

Director: Daniel Birnbaum
Curator: Melanie Ohnemus

Project Arts Centre

Image left: still from ‘Handed Over’, Rosa Barba & David Maljkovic;
Image right: Jeremiah Day

Simone Forti/Jeremiah Day
“News Animations”/”No Words For You, Springfield”
28 March - 3 May 2008

Rosa Barba & David Maljkovic
Handed Over
Until March 15

http://www.project.ie

Simone Forti/Jeremiah Day
“News Animations”/”No Words For You, Springfield”

28 March - 3 May 2008
Performance Forti/Day on 25 March at 6pm.
Opening 27 March at 6pm, preceded by public dialogue with the artists at 5pm.

Jeremiah Day is interested in resistance movements, as well as the flux of knowledge, stories and identity through the migration of people and histories. Day has been researching the movement of the people of the Blasket Islands off the Dingle Peninsula (Ireland), to the town of Springfield near Boston (USA) culminating in a complete evacuation of the Islands in the 1950s.

What we know of the poetic tradition of the Blasket Islands comes to us largely through the efforts of the English linguist George Thompson. In the story-telling of the Blaskets, Thompson felt he’d found a link with the pre-Socratic tradition of Greek epic poetry, where spiritual, personal, political and practical subjects were integrated, and thus the boundary between art and life could be said not to exist at all.

Springfield has been largely in decline for fifty years now, a classic post-industrial American city. Can we imagine that any of the story-telling traditions of the Blaskets have lived on, there? And though the Blaskets are long deserted, what of the now developed Ireland around them? What does progress mean, from the lens of the Blasket tradition?

“Poetry proper is never merely a higher mode of everyday language. It is rather the reverse: everyday language is a forgotten and therefore used-up poem, from which there hardly resounds a call any longer.” – Martin Heidegger
Jeremiah Day

Day will show a new series of photo-works, meditating on the city of Springfield as the end point of the Blasket story-telling tradition. He has also invited legendary dancer Simone Forti to present for the first time in the visual arts context her practice of “News Animations” – a body of work Forti has developed since the early 1980s, improvising movement and speech from the content of the daily news. A member of the pioneering Judson Church Group, Forti’s work has been shown at the Whitney Museum of Modern Art in New York and recently at the Serpentine Gallery in London; this exhibition will be the first presentation of her “News Animations” video.

Whilst in Dublin, Forti and Day will work together to create a new collaborative work. If Jeremiah Day’s practice oscillates between the creation of text and image, Simone Forti bisects his axis with her interest in text and movement. The resulting collaboration will be premiered in Project’s Gallery at 6pm on 25 March, and will be documented and presented as part of the exhibition.

Rosa Barba & David Maljkovic
Handed Over

Until March 15

Fiction exists in the space between two different places of perception.

Rosa Barba and David Maljkovic have staged the creation of a fiction. Between Stockholm and Zagreb they have sent a series of images and texts which occur independently of each other, both by email and by posting a Super 8 camera back and forth. This ‘script-writing’ is as much about the process towards building a narrative or fiction as it is about the formation of a plot. Without a beginning or end, the fiction is suspended between two authors. Some images are their own, some are derived from their autonomous research, some are created together and some are simply taken - or more precisely handed-over. Project’s Gallery premieres the result of this process on 16mm film, installed in a built environment conceived by Barba and Maljkovic. A sound bulb in the foyer also features a soundtrack by Jan St Werner, hanging above Rosa Barba’s collection of Printed Cinema.

Handed Over has been supported by the Goethe Institute and the Embassy of Croatia in Dublin.

Exhibitions curated by Tessa Giblin.
Please contact Publicist, Aisling McGrane for further information and images: aisling@project.ie.

Project Arts Centre is funded by the Arts Council - An Chomhairle Ealaíon and Dublin City Council.

Project Arts Centre
39 East Essex Street
Dublin, Ireland
http://www.project.ie