Artipedia - Arts News

Overgaden Institute of Contemporary Art

Kristofer Hultenberg
Scheme for constructing essentially new ideas (detail), 2008

The World is Flat
26 April - 15 June 2008

Overgaden.
Institute of Contemporary Art
Overgaden Neden Vandet 17
DK-1414 Copenhagen K
Denmark
info@overgaden.org
http://www.overgaden.org

Participating artists: Anonymous (RO), Heman Chong (SG), Shahram Entekhabi (IR), Kristofer Hultenberg (SE/DK), C. Krydz Ikwuemesi (NG), Lasse Lau (DK), Lize Mogel (US), Ursula Nistrup (DK), Dan Rees (UK) and Jee Young Sim (KR/US).

Overgaden is pleased to present the exhibition project The World is Flat curated by Johanne
Løgstrup (DK).

Johanne Løgstrup has invited a number of Danish and international artists to comment on and elaborate the possibilities inherent in geographical maps as media. Both the map as a medium and the artists participating in the project seek to represent the world. Whereas maps are associated with accuracy, factuality and intentional objectivity, the artist’s gaze upon the world is characterised by openness and subjective interpretation.

The artists have used the conventional measures and folding functions of the map as a general template for the artworks. In completely different and very playful and experimental ways they have made maps of places – some of them fictitious, some of them real. The maps vary from Heman Chong’s private landscape of knowledge shown by his personal list of literature to Lize Mogel’s map which has zoomed in on the centre of The UN’s logotype, the North Pole, to take a look at the political conflicts that have lately arisen in this area. Dan Rees contributes with a map where snails have drawn mucos routes across a world map with almost invisible silvery trails and C. Krydz Ikwuemesi’s map is animated with features that contrast the right angels and concise metrical elements that usually characterise maps. Thereby The World is Flat gives new perceptions of the networks, associations and representations of places, people and power.

At Overgaden the exhibition is displayed on a specially designed high, round table, which allows the viewer to get close to the maps; to open them up, turn them around and scrutinize them in detail.

The World is Flat has been developed and conceived as a mobile travelling exhibition. None of the artworks included in the exhibition take up more space than a traditional map. They can therefore be folded and inserted into a large envelope and sent to selected exhibition spaces around the world. Thus, after the exhibition at Overgaden, The World is Flat will travel on to The Centre of Contemporary Art
in Nigeria.

For information about exhibiting the project, please contact curator Johanne Løgstrup: jl@flamingoeffekten.dk

The World is Flat is supported by the BG Foundation, Københavns Billedkunstudvalg, The Committee for International Visual Arts and The Danish Center for Culture and Development.

Overgaden is supported by The Danish Arts Council’s Committee for Visual Arts.

For further information about the exhibition, please contact Julie Broch-Mikkelsen, Press and Communications, at jbm@overgaden.org or tel. +45 3257 7273.

Ernst Museum

Andreas Fogarasi: Parc du Trianon (Kultúrapark), 2002
Courtesy of the artist and Georg Kargl Fine Arts, Vienna

Andreas Fogarasi: Információ
May 17 - June 29, 2008

Ernst Museum
Nagymezo u. 8.
H-1065 Budapest
Phone: (36 1) 413 1310
Fax: (36 1) 321 6410
info@mucsarnok.hu
http://www.ernstmuzeum.hu

Ernst Museum Budapest is pleased to present the solo show of Andreas Fogarasi.

Opening: Friday, 16 May 2008, 6 p.m.
Opening speech by: Miklós Erhardt, artist

In 2007, the Hungarian Pavilion of the 52nd Venice Biennial won the Golden Lion Award for Andreas Fogarasi’s project entitled Kultur und Freizeit (Culture and Leisure). The project, curated by Katalin Timár, deals with a phenomenon that currently affects all of Europe: the present situation of cultural centres, which have provided an ever-changing setting for popular culture, and which were once formed along the lines of specific culture-political decisions and ideas. More than anything, the six films – which have not been shot with an expressly documentary approach – raise questions about the current condition of the clubs, cultural centres and community establishments with their colourful past, on the one hand, and regarding their “new” identity and status as well as the possibilities for their functioning in a changing political, economical and cultural space, on the other.

The slow moving images of the videos projected in the “black boxes”, which function both as mini cinemas and sculptural object, show from an emphatically subjective perspective details of the repeatedly altered and rebuilt spaces and their urban environments as well as the state of community centres which have served – and still serve – as social sites for different small communities, professional exchanges, local cultures and various events.

A number of Fogarasi’s works address the question of cultural identification – including the issue of branding – and the visual changes that manifest in its appearance (Public Brands – The Nine States of Austria, 2003; Westen [aka Osten], 2005). Research on typography, communication design, history of architecture and industrial design have always comprised an organic part of his projects. The complex examination of a chosen structure (in architecture/design/history of culture) and its system of symbols usually become the subject of interpretation through the design of the space and the objects of
the installation.

The solo exhibition, entitled “Információ”, presents for the first time in Hungary an extensive overview of the artist’s work from the past 7-8 years, alongside the “Kultur und Freizeit” project.

Andreas Fogarasi studied architecture at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna. Between 1997 and 1999 he was a collaborative organiser and student of the Freie Klasse (Free Class). He completed his studies in 2003 at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. Since 2001, he has been co-editor of dérive – Magazine for Urban Studies. http://www.derive.at

Supporters: Ministry of Education and Culture, Bundesministerium für Unterricht, Kunst und Kultur
Österreichisches Kulturforum Budapest

Media supporter: Art-magazin

For further information please contact:
Reka Csejdy at rcsejdy@mucsarnok.hu

Olivier Debroise

Photo by Alejandro Navarrete

Olivier Debroise (1952-2008):
Shock Waves

Cuauhtémoc Medina

Some lives can’t fit in a single lifetime; they challenge our expectations about how many stories could possibly be provoked, contained, told and thought by a single individual. Olivier Debroise was one of the most ferocious art critics and curators in Mexico, a homosexual novelist who explored the intersections of history, violence and desire, and a cultural agent who was equally devastating in destroying myths and sustaining institutional transformations; and this is only the beginning. His death has created a massive commotion, because Debroise did not merely treat culture as his profession. He was a potent force within a multitude of critical circles that extend across disciplines, iconographic camps, academic circuits, and creative trajectories, and his loss has permanent ramifications for all those that
he touched.

Tempestuous, brilliant, and tireless, Olivier Debroise was a representative of an era in which fixed concepts of identity—personal, professional, and political—lost meaning, giving way to a contemporaneity in which the past is always active, and radicalism functions without need of dogmas. In a world of organic intellectuals and fossilized academics, Olivier saw the opportunity to treat culture like an adventure series within the cycle of upsets that was the twentieth century. What follows is an incredible, though incomplete, list of the roles he played, shots he fired, and crossfire in which he
was caught:

- A heterodox historian who beginning in the late 1970s bombarded the official narrative of Mexican modernism, exploring the cubist structure underlying Diego Rivera’s work (Diego de Montparnasse, 1979), chronicling the marginal artistic circuits of the 1920s and ’30s (Figuras en el trópico, 1982), dissecting the cadaver of the “mass individual” in Siqueiros’s painting (Portrait of a Decade, 1997), and articulating a polemical geneaology of contemporary art (Age of Discrepancies, 2007).

- An anti-psychiatric activist who worked with Félix Guattari and Suely Rolnik.

- The inventor of the notion of the curator as a leftist cultural politician, a critical virus of globalization, and an agent of continuous intellectual effervescence. The founder and ideologue of Curare (1991-1997), the Camara Nacional de Industrias Artísticas (National Chamber of Art Industries, CANAIA) (2001-2004), Teratoma (2000-2008), and more recently, the curator responsible for reactivating the neglected task of forming public collections of contemporary art in Mexico through his work at the MUAC (University Contemporary Art Museum) of the UNAM (National Autonomous University).

- The experimental filmmaker who, having worked on Jodorowsky’s La Montaña Sagrada, absorbed the actoral improvisation of Claude Lelouch and the intellectual poetics of Godard and Pasolini, and succeeded in producing one of the most audacious feature-length experimental films ever: Un Banquete en Tetlapayac (A Banquet in Tetlapayac, 1997-1998), a re-interpretation and tableau vivant that addresses the paradoxes of Mexicanism, communism and homosexuality within Sergei Eisenstein’s ¡Qué viva México! (1931-2).

- The travelling companion of three or four generations of artists: from Enrique Guzmán and Javier de la Garza to Rubén Ortiz or Miguel Calderón; from Carla Rippey, Adolfo Patiño and Mario Rangel to Francis Alÿs, Silvia Gruner and Melanie Smith; from Lola Alvarez Bravo to Claudia Fernández and Miguel Ventura, etc., etc.

- The axis of a series of unthinkable theoretical, geographic, and literary maps and axes: from Carlos Monsiváis and Luis Zapata to Susan-Buck Morss and Ivo Mesquita; from Sweden to Patagonia and Los Angeles; from Sovietology to Nomadism; from Tijuana/San Diego to the sixteenth-century Chichimec border wars.

- Intellectual accomplist; institutional conspirator; bureaucratic saboteur; infatigable smoker
and seducer.

Olivier frequently insisted that though he was born in Jerusalem in 1952, it was when that city was a part of Palestine. At 17, he deserted his parents’ diplomatic circuit to settle in Mexico, which was, for him, the site of commitment and liberty. In his last moments, Olivier Debroise was accumulating new and unfinished projects. His death was sudden and unpredictable—as impulsive as Olivier himself.

Translated by Jennifer Josten.

Brumaria

Brumaria 10
‘Latin-American Video Art.
A Critical View’ - out now

C/ Santa Isabel 28. 3º 2. 28012
Madrid - Spain
+34 91 528 0527
info@brumaria.net

http://www.brumaria.net

BRUMARIA -artistic, aesthetic and political practices

Latin-American Video Art. A Critical View

Editor: Laura Baigorri

Latin America has been widely neglected in North American and European history of video art. In fact, not even Spanish video art has taken it into account.

Until now, there have been numerous partial histories written about this artistic practice in each country, but there is not one publication that brings them together. Thus, we have considered it fundamental to give a global view of Latin American video art built through the peculiarities and conceptual divergences of the creative processes of each country.

The publication of these essays aims at filling this gap and it will interest a broad sector of the cultural world, be it artists or researchers. On the one hand, because it exposes both the history and the work of all the emerging artists; on the other hand, because the interest on what is produced at a national level is inevitably linked to and associated with what is produced in other countries that are culturally related, favouring the cultural exchange among Latin American countries.

Latin-American Video Art. A Critical View gives a panoramic and analytical critical view of the trajectory of video art practice in Latin America, bringing together its history and the most recent practices. This book contains a series of essays written by notorious art critics and researchers specialized in video art in their respective countries.

CONTENTS : Participants and Topics

- Laura Baigorri, ’Video in Latin America, interweaving memories’

- Rodrigo Alonso, ‘Towards a genealogy of Argentinean video art ‘

- Graciela Taquini, ‘A chronicle of video art in Argentina. From the transition to the digital era’

- Cecilia Bayá Bolti, ‘Video art in Bolivia ‘

- Arlindo Machado, ‘The art of video in Brazil ‘

- Lucas Bambozzi, ‘The exploded video and its fragments floating above us (Brazil)’

- Alanna Lockward, ‘Desolutions and juxtapositions: Echoes for a polyphonic tale of video art from Haiti, Puerto Rico and Dominican Republic’

- Ernesto Calvo, ‘Video art in Central America? eppur se mueve’

- Néstor Olhagaray, ‘Brief review of the history of video art in Chile’

- Gilles Charalambos, ’Videoartistic Colombia. Basic notes on certain problematic aspects of video art
in Colombia’

- Marialina García Ramos & Meykén Barreto Querol, ‘X-ray of an indocile image. (Diagnosis for tracing history of video art in Cuba)’

- María Belén Moncayo, ‘Ecuador: medial imprints from the non-place’

- Raúl Moarquech Ferrera-Balanquet, ‘Transnational Latin video art in USA – Canada: 1960-2007’

- Sarah Minter, ‘As a bird’s flight, video in Mexico: its origins and its context’

- Fernando Llanos, ‘Contemporary Mexican video: a day without a yesterday and a yesterday with
a tomorrow’

- Fernando Moure, ‘Paraguayan soup. A hybrid cookbook for a videography’

- José-Carlos Mariátegui, ‘Video art days. An intense decade of video art in Peru.’

- Enrique Aguerre, ‘Video’s condition 2.0 (25 years of video art in Uruguay)’

- Benjamín Villares Presas, ‘Video art in Venezuela. Four generations of audiovisual art’

Alexandre Magno

The art of Alexander Magno shows the relationship between the natural and artificial, the “worship” of the form, no more using the word “fashion” as a synonym of “style” and its use as a composer of the image, in a few words, only and just art. The aesthetic pleasure can neutralize the pleasure sensitive and vice versa, which is not the case in the series “Fashion & Art”, where the aesthetics of every image brings us the pleasure of observing

Opening: May 17, 7:00 PM
Until June 13, from 1:30 PM to 7:00 PM

Colorida Art Gallery
Rua Costa do Castelo 63, Lisbon - Portugal
Tel 351 211 512 142
http://www.colorida.pt

Sonia Balassanian, Playground of Crosshairs, 2006

THE GATES OF MEDITERRANEAN
from 23rd April to 28th September 2008 in Rivoli (Turin)

As part of the three-year project dedicated to the Mediterranean, the Cultural Council of the Piedmont Regional Government proposes The Gates of Mediterranean , a series of initiatives put together by Martina Corgnati, curator and art historian, which will take place from April to September 2008 in Rivoli and in Turin.
The heart of the initiative will be a great art exhibition, set up in two exhibition areas in Rivoli (Italy). One part will be a historical section at Casa del Conte Verde . Here, through paintings, engravings, drawings and photographs, the relations between Piedmont and the Mediterranean will be reconstructed, together with Piedmont’s passion for the Mediterranean as a crossroads of culture and the cradle of civilisation. This passion has permeated the lives of numerous Piedmontese scholars, archaeologists and travellers. The other part will be a contemporary section at Palazzo Piozzo , which will involve 17 visual and multimedia artists, who have taken the Mediterranean as their theme, their vocation and their project.

During the twentieth century, the Mediterranean has been criss-crossed like an eventfully open gateway for masses of fleeing refugees; and it has often been a gateway that has been obtusely closed in the name of ethnic, social and religious differences, or as ever more impassable economic barriers are raised between the first world and the third. From this standpoint, the Mediterranean is not a geographic region (indeed, an art of the Mediterranean area has never existed, and never will) but is rather a metaphor or a problematic proposal whereby to reconsider human relations and ongoing cultural and social exchanges at all levels.

The contemporary section at Palazzo Piozzo will comprise interventions produced especially for the occasion by the 17 invited artists, the majority of whom will come to Turin not only for the installation of their works but also to take part in seminars, workshops and debates open to the public and to students, as well as meeting the city and its institutions. Meetings and debates will be organised in Turin for the purpose at the Accademia Albertina and elsewhere.

The artists who will exhibit are: Khaled Hafez (Cairo), Mounir Fatmi (Tangiers/Paris), Mounira Al Solh (Beirut/Amsterdam), Tsibi Geva (Tel Aviv), Agnese Purgatorio (Bari), Sonia Balassanian (Yerevan/New York), Cristina Lucas (Madrid), Mrdjan Bajic (Belgrade), Burak Delier (Istanbul), Djamel Kokene (Algiers/Paris/Cairo), Ursula Biemann (Zurich), Armin Linke (Milan), Steve Sabella (Jerusalem/London), Nabil Boutros (Cairo/Paris), Stefano Cerio (Milan/Paris), Hala Elkoussy (Cairo/Amsterdam), Tarin Gartner (Milan/Jerusalem).

Casa del Conte Verde will house the historical exhibition, dedicated to relations between Piedmont, the Piedmontese and the Mediterranean. This relationship is such a deep one that it has contributed significantly to the formation of a landscape and a history characterised by the close participation in Mediterranean happenings and affairs: suffice it to look at Turin’s Egyptian Museum, second only to that of Cairo. In particular, the exhibition aims to take into consideration power, scholarship and travellers’ experiences, through chronicles, historical documents, paintings, photographs and engravings.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a catalogue, published by Skira.

Alongside the artistic events, The Gates of Mediterranean will also see in Turin three conferences dedicated to spirituality, and in particular to a dialogue among the three great monotheist traditions that co-exist on the shores of the Mediterranean: the Hebrew, the Christian and the Muslim traditions. Among guests will be Padre Paolo from Oglio (Mar Moussa – Syria), and contacts are under way with authoritative representatives of Hebrew and Islamic spirituality.

At the Museum of the Resistance, Deportation, War, Rights and Freedom, during the month of June, there will be a cinema review, organised by the National Cinema Archive of the Resistance, in which videos by some of the most interesting artists from the Mediterranean area will be shown. Concerts will also be held with groups and singers who are dedicated to representing the Mediterranean, putting into practice in their training, their choice of instruments and their repertories, the idea of cultural exchange and collaboration – the idea of a “gateway”.

Information
Casa del Conte Verde tel. 011 9563020
Numero verde 800 329 329 - http://www.regione.piemonte.it

Exhibitions
Palazzo Piozzo, Via Fiorito 6 – Rivoli (TO)
Casa del Conte Verde, Via Fratelli Piol 8 – Rivoli (TO)

Admission: 5 euro (single ticket for both exhibitions)

Press Office: Stilema srl - via Cavour 19, 10123 Torino
tel. +39 011 5624259 / 011 530066 fax +39 011 534409 - portedelmediterraneo@stilema-to.it
http://www.stilemarete.it