Artipedia - Arts News

7th Gwangju Biennale

Duration: September 5 - November 9, 2008
Opening: September 5, 2008

Artistic Director: Okwui Enwezor
Co-Curators: Hyunjin Kim, Ranjit Hoskote
Position Papers Curators: Patrick D. Flores,
Jang Un Kim, Abdellah Karroum, Sung-Hyen Park, Claire Tancons

http://www.gb.or.kr

Position Papers
Gwangju Biennale Foundation is pleased to announce the five exhibition projects of Position Papers as one of the three core components of Annual Report: A Year in Exhibitions for the 7th Gwangju Biennale. Position Papers derives from a network of curatorial discourses and theoretical frameworks whose common and shared horizon is to interrogate the fate of the contemporary in the current global moment and to extend the given curatorial model and exhibiting premise governing the displays of
contemporary art.

Bokdukbang Project
Curated by Sung-Hyen Park
Bokdukbang is an old-fashioned Korean term that is now replaced by the professional term real estate agency. Bokdukbang metaphorically stands for a room (bang) filled with fortune (bok) and virtue (duk). Often run by the most knowledgeable person in the town, Bokdukbang once functioned as a place for sharing information and advice. It served as a mediatory open space based on ‘human relations’, an atmosphere often vividly experienced in a traditional Korean market. Located in the Daein traditional market in Gwangju, for the 7th Gwangju Biennale, Bokdukbang will represent not only a place where anyone may interact with others, to share one’s interest or concerns about people or events while receiving, in return, necessary information or commentary, it will also be reimagined as an active site of production beginning with artist workshops and events that will extend from mid June to the end
of November.

Participating Artists
Ho-yoon Shin (Korea, Lives in Gwangju)
Hu-ju Gu (Korea, Lives in Busan)
Kiyoung Peik (Korea, Lives in Ansan)
Mun-ho Ma (Korea, Lives in Naju)
Munjong Park (Korea, Lives in Damyang)

Spring
Curated by Claire Tancons
Like the 7th Gwangju Biennale itself, Spring is not a theme, but a concept that recalls the emancipatory energy of the South Korean Spring in May 1980. However, the references of Spring go well beyond Gwangju, and evoke other popular uprisings from the Canboulay Riots of 1881 in Port of Spain to May 1968 in Paris, as well as encompassing the history of Carnival street processions, especially as found in Brazil and the Caribbean, New Orleans, and Cape Town. Given its format as a street procession, and its location, Gwangju, the attention of the invited artists will be drawn to the May 1980 street uprisings in Gwangju. A principal interest of Spring is to refuse the constricted space of the exhibition gallery, but readapt the exhibition format into a space of active social participation. In this way the processional format is the arena through which this project seeks to experiment with new modes of conducting an exhibition. Spring calls to mind the idea of sudden motion and co
nstant tension, both of which are at the core of popular street manifestations, from carnivals to demonstrations. Beginning this August artists in Spring will assemble in Gwangju for a month of continuous interaction and production with local participants, building the models and displays, that will culminate in an eight hour procession through the streets of the city around the Former Provincial Office (the starting point of the Gwangju May 1980 protests). The procession will begin during the day and end at night with a fiery conflagration to signal the end of the event. The procession will be accompanied by music by DJ GAZAEBAL and filmed by Caecilia Tripp. Both the real time film and the music score will be edited and remixed, and will be the sole reminder of the procession and only element presented in one of the exhibition spaces.

Participating Artists
Mario Benjamin (Haiti, Lives in Port-au-Prince)
Marlon Griffith (Trinidad and Tobago, Lives in Port of Spain)
Jarbas Lopes (Brazil, Lives in Rio de Janeiro)
MAP Office (Laurent Gutierrez and Valérie Portefaix) (France, Live in Hong Kong)
Karyn Olivier (Trinidad and Tobago/USA, Lives in New York)

Jin Won Lee (aka GAZAEBAL) (Korea, Lives in Seoul) Musician/DJ
Caecilia Trip (Germany, Lives in Paris ) Filmmaker

Turns in Tropics: Artist-Curator
Curated by Patrick D. Flores
Turns in Tropics: Artist-Curator focuses on exploring the turns in the practice of art and curation through four germinal figures in Southeast Asian modernity who at once settled within the discourse of the avant-garde and wavered at the threshold of a curatorial practice. The four figures represent artists, who in the late sixties and eighties turned toward curating in order to grapple with the vexations of the inter/national and to provoke reconsiderations of the artist as intellectual, while doing away with the binary separation of spaces of artistic and curatorial practice. Such a transition may also suggest a shift from the modern to the contemporary. This project collects layers of intervention in the production of art, the emergence of curation, and the current reflection on this braided relationship within a curated exhibition of art/curation of artists-curators. The concept is largely shaped by ongoing research on the history of curation in Indonesia and Thailand and
tries to demonstrate a series of turns in tropics, the latter indexing locale, dynamic, and agency.

Participating Artists
Raymundo Albano (Philippines, 1947-1985)
Redza Piyadasa (Malaysia, 1939-2007)
Apinan Poshyananda (Thailand, Lives in Bangkok)
Jim Supangkat (Indonesia, Lives in Bandung)

On Jouissance for those without places to return
Curated by Jang Un Kim
The central premise of this project begins with narratives drawn from episodes encapsulated in three distinctively cultural positions, namely Derek Jarman’s film Blue (1993), Vittorio de Sica’s Miracle in Milan (1951), and The Consecutive Murder Incidents at Boseong (2007), by The Old Fisherman. Each of these narratives are combined as a means to draw the artists and curator into conversation and through their interaction to reflect on the agency of given practices. The purpose is to invite the artists not only to reflect on the mode of the conversations which will be archived and reproduced in the exhibition, but to share their positions across contemporary sociopolitical, cultural, and economic situations, and as such to reflect and re-imagine the world and their practice. What will emerge in the end is envisioned to be provisional but rich, variegated yet collective. In this way these episodes will function as global allegories, prompting a wide range of artistic respo
nses.

Participating Artists
Larnet (In Ae Lim & Eun Young Hong) (Korea, Live in Busan)
Christelle Lheureux (France, Lives in Paris)
Mandla Reuter (Germany, Lives in Berlin)
Seulgi Lee (Korea, Lives in Paris)
Seung wook Koh (Korea, Lives in Seoul)

Expedition7 (Patries relatives)
Curated by Abdellah Karroum
Expedition 7 (Patries Relatives) is a response to the 7th Gwangju Biennial and therefore a starting point for curatorial dialogue. Accordingly, the premise of Expedition 7 (Patries Relatives) is characterized by its tectonic logic of separation and expedition, an attention to the human trace on the earth itself, and an ambiguous presence manifested in forms such as imprints, monuments, pedestals, imagined borders, and deterritorialized atmospheres. Through their individual projects, the artists featured in Expedition 7 (Patries Relatives) address the fundamental concerns of contemporary human life, specifically as they relate to the political, cultural, environmental, social, linguistic, geographic, and ethical position of the artists. The five artists were chosen considering not their individual nationalities but the impact of their work on the “global” art scene inasmuch as their current contexts of practice are extraterritorial, that is located outside the places the a
rtists were born.

Participating Artists
Adel Abdessemed (Algeria, Lives in Paris)
Francis Alÿs (Belgium, Lives in Mexico City)
Seamus Farrell (Ireland, Lives in Paris and Cadiz, Spain)
Vincent Feria (Françoise Vincent & Eloy Feria) (France & Venezuela, Live in Caracas)
Sislej Xhafa (Kosovo, Lives in New York)

For further information please contact:

The Gwangju Biennale Foundation
Jin-Kyung Jeong
Biennale 2-gil Buk-gu Gwangju, South Korea
Tel +82 62 608 4264 / Fax +82 62 608 4269
1212jjk@gb.or.kr
http://www.gb.or.kr

Detroit Dream Project- Temple to the American Dream

Groundbreaking for the “Detroit Dream Project”

Two grass-roots organizations from Detroit and one from San Francisco broke ground in Northwest Detroit on May 10th for a project, which will culminate in a large-scale art installation in June of this year. The Temple of the American Dream, designed by sculptor David Best, will serve as a testament to the positive impact of public art resulting from community collaborations.

NORTHWEST DETROIT. Over the next month, The Society to Promote Art and Recreation in the Community (SPARC) and Motor City Blight Busters, both local Detroit organizations, will work with renowned San Francisco sculptor David Best to transform an empty space in the Brightmoor neighborhood, known as Peace Park, into a unique community setting. The centerpiece of the park will be an ornate pavilion called The Temple of the American Dream.

Groundbreaking began Saturday, May 10th after a year-long grass roots fundraising and planning effort by local volunteers from both organizations. They began working with Best to design the pavilion in the hopes of demonstrating to other local groups how community organizations can work together to create civic spaces in neighborhoods that lack them.

SPARC, a burgeoning non-profit arts organization whose members have experience with large-scale art installations at various events in the city of Detroit and across the country is providing management and technical expertise to the project. They have teamed up with the Motor City Blight Busters, who donated the land for the project, located in the vicinity of Lahser and Grand River Avenue. David Best, in addition to his nationally acclaimed sculptural work, is a member of The Black Rock Arts Foundation (BRAF), a San Francisco-based organization with a mission to promote civic participation through the installation of public, interactive art projects. BRAF has contributed to the project’s planning, funding and design.

Best and volunteers will assemble the structure in one weeks time to be completed in time for 20th year anniversary celebration of Motor City Blight Busters, headed by John George, who have worked to turn despair-wrought neighborhoods into a vibrant, clean and well-organized community.

The collaborators hope their efforts will stimulate more civic-mindedness, economic growth and recovery as well as create a model for collaborations in other communities whose members hope to achieve similar results.

If you any questions I can be reached at 313.608.4580
Website: http://www.detroitdreamproject.org
Myspace.com/detroitdream

Sincerely,

Danielle L. Kaltz

Witte de With

Saâdane Afif, Blue Time (Sunburst), detail, 2004
Courtesy: Galerie Michel Rein, Paris / Annette Kelm
Big Print #6 (Jungle Leaves -cotton twill 1947 design Dorothy Draper,
courtesy Schumacher &Co), 2007
Courtesy: Johann Koenig, Berlin

2 EXHIBITIONS:
Saâdane Afif
Annette Kelm
13 June - 24 August

http://www.wdw.nl

Saâdane Afif: Technical Specifications

Saâdane Afif practices a form of artistic delegation, creating an extensive network of commissions to artists, writers, designers and musicians. In 2004, he began inviting writers to create lyrics based upon his own sculptures and installations. These were presented in exhibitions as wall texts alongside Afif’s original works. He then gave these lyrics to musicians and commissioned them to write accompanying music. The resulting songs were played in gallery spaces and released on various CDs.

At Witte de With, in dialogue with the curators, Afif takes this process of translating his own work a step further. The exhibition consists of several new productions, each of which is an adaptation by Afif of a previous work. The exhibition’s title sets the parameters for this transformation: each new work is determined by the technical specifications of the original.

Visitors to Witte de With will also find radios playing a program of the works’ related songs, broadcast in a loop for the duration of the exhibition. The exhibition Technical Specifications is thus an implosion and explosion of Afif’s practice, as he simultaneously reduces his own works to the sum of their parts and opens them up to new readings, new formats and new audiences beyond the institution’s walls.

Annette Kelm

Opening the same evening, Witte de With presents a solo exhibition of new and existing works by the Berlin-based photographer Annette Kelm. This is the last installment in the series of shows-within-a-show presented within the “institutional zones” that Liam Gillick delineated with his architectural meta-structure, which has dominated the 2nd floor galleries since January.

Kelm’s photographs are at once sober and lyrical, displaying a conceptual bent and a subtle sense of humor. With intense visual clarity, she portrays objects dislocated from their usual context. Contrary to their apparent simplicity and reduced aesthetic, her images contain a wealth of references, from interior design and architecture, to Hollywood films or current day concerns with exoticism and global trade.

For this exhibition, Kelm has produced a new body of work exploring the pre-fabricated houses that emerged in Germany in the post-war years. Intrigued by the high level of ornamentation they display – quite at odds with usual notions of pre-fab architecture – Kelm photographed these houses using a 4×5 large format plate camera, a slow process with only one shot per plate. The resulting images treat each house as an object, but avoid a Becher-like categorization, capturing instead the poetic quality of these “Swiss” chalets and “Swedish” villas.

Thursday 12 June
5 p.m. Tour of Annette Kelm’s exhibition by Nicolaus Schafhausen.
6 p.m. Opening begins.
7 p.m. Saâdane Afif in conversation with Sam Steverlynck (Gonzo magazine)

Both exhibitions are curated by Nicolaus Schafhausen and Zoë Gray and will be accompanied by a monograph to be published in the fall.

With thanks to: Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen e.V.; CULTURESFRANCE – Ministère des Affaires étrangères; Institut Français des Pays-Bas; Goethe Institut; Johann Koenig; Galerie Mehdi Chouakri; Galerie Michel Rein; Galerie Xavier Hufkens.

LECTURES: CORNERSTONES

Continuing the highly successful Cornerstones lecture series, Witte de With welcomes two more key speakers this summer:
7 p.m. Thursday 5th June, Peter Osborne on Robert Smithson.
7 p.m. Thursday 3rd July, John C. Welchman on Mike Kelley.
Please see our website for the program continuing in September. http://www.wdw.nl

NEWS
In May 2008 Witte de With, de Appel and the Fonds BKVB launched the bi-annual Prize for Young Dutch Art Criticism (De Prijs voor de Jonge Kunstkritiek). Please see the website http://www.jongekunstkritiek.net for more details.

LATER THIS YEAR AT WITTE DE WITH

13 September - 26 October: William Hunt & Sung Hwan Kim
7 November - 8 February 2009: Ian Wallace

Witte de With, Center for Contemporary Art
Witte de Withstraat 50
3012 BR Rotterdam
The Netherlands
+31 10 411 0144
info@wdw.nl
http://www.wdw.nl

Middelheim Museum

Copyright picture: mARTine

LEO COPERS
1/06 - 17/08/08

http://www.middelheimmuseum.be

It is difficult to describe Leo Copers (b. 1947, Ghent) in one word. His work is characterised by its versatility: he is not simply a painter, sculptor or installation artist, but combines various disciplines and is equally at home in the terrain of painter and sculptor as he is with object installations and performance art. This makes him a creative object installer. In their inventiveness, his works connect art and everyday reality. He conjures with images and concepts from our familiar surroundings. Remarkably, the installations often cease to exist, for Copers brings his ideas to life without caring about the survival of his oeuvre. Shooting fireworks, puzzling and surprising, are a challenge to the eye.

For the first time, the exhibition in the Middelheim Museum provides an opportunity to see the open-air works of Leo Copers in the best circumstances. The park, the water and the trees provide the perfect setting for these creations. Visitors can discover the most exciting and characteristic works from the early period of his career, as creations that can no longer be seen anywhere else are rebuilt and (re)presented to the public. As always, the installations are temporary and the exhibition is an exceptional opportunity to experience the works for the first time, or to relive them.

Middelheim Museum
Middelheimlaan 61
B-2020 Antwerpen
Tel. +32 (0)3 828 13 50 / +32 (0)3 827 15 34
Fax +32 (0)3 825 28 35
middelheimopenluchtmuseum@stad.antwerpen.be
http://www.middelheimmuseum.be

Marta Ferreira

The first and main merit of the shows “Jesus Christ Superstar”, “Sound of Music” and “The Little Prince” is that they explore not only the delightful music, but also the dance and the physical expression in all their grandiosity.

In the audience, exhilarated people, tears, happiness and nearly always the same opinion: “fabulous”.

In the stage, marvellous interpretations and performances, the most beautiful voices, postures and gestures, commitment, dedication, exceptional make-up.

All this world of glamour, dream and fantasy was captured by the camera of the Portuguese photographer Marta Ferreira and is now showed in this exhibition.

Opening: June 1, from 8:00PM -performance of the Actor/Dancer Ricardo Molar.

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

Until June 30, from Tuesdays to Saturdays, 1:30PM to 7PM.

Philadelphia Museum of Art

Red Morning Drowned, 1977
Gilbert & George, English
Gelatin silver prints (twenty-five panels)
Each panel: 23 5/8 x 19 11/16 inches (60 x 50 cm)
Purchased with the Margaretta S. Hinchman Fund, the Edgar Viguers Seeler Fund, the Gertrud A. White Fund, and with restricted matching funds for contemporary acquisitions, 1982
1982-86-1a–y

ART OF GILBERT AND GEORGE FROM THE 1970s AND 1980s IS SUBJECT OF MUSEUM’S NOTATIONS EXHIBITION
May 2 - November 2, 2008

Philadelphia Museum of Art
Benjamin Franklin Parkway
at 26th Street
Philadelphia, PA 19130
(215) 763-8100

http://www.philamuseum.org

The Philadelphia Museum of Art will present a special installation devoted to the art of British artists Gilbert & George who have created all their art together since the late 1960s and are known for their dramatic, large-scale colorful pictures. Drawn from the Museum collection and supplemented by additional loans, Gilbert & George (May 2-November 2, 2008) includes 13 pictures indicative of the major phases of their art from the 1970s and 1980s. On view in the Alter Gallery (Gallery 176, first floor), the installation is the fifth in the Museum’s Notations series.

Gilbert (born 1943) and George (born 1942) met in 1967 while training as sculptors at St. Martin’s School of Art in London and shortly thereafter the two artists become Gilbert & George. From the outset of their career, the artists explored and redefined picture-making through which they could achieve monumentality. Dressed in suits and displaying decorous manners, Gilbert & George present an image at odds with the passion with which they expose desires and fears. As Living Sculptures, a self-designated term that defined their early presentations, the artists became both the object and subject of their own art, and set the tone for a practice making art accessible to all.

Gilbert & George use their art as a vehicle through which the universals of the human experience are made eloquent. They present a poignant and all-embracing vision of life where isolation, unhappiness and despair, nature and urban beauty are tenderly revealed.

This presentation of large-scale pictures by Gilbert & George traces their stylistic departure from austere black and white and monochromatic compositions of the 1970s to the bolder clashes of images and colors in the 1980s. The installation also includes a number of Postcard Sculptures, in which Gilbert & George used commercially produced images. The artists organized these images on a grid format, which has become part of their practice. Constantly aware of the changes in the social and political climate, Gilbert and George address head-on the burning issues of our times–be it social marginality, religion, the AIDS crisis or multiculturalism–while at the same time defining a unique visual language.

Gilbert and George won the Turner Prize in 1986 and represented the United Kingdom at the 2005 Venice Biennale. A comprehensive exhibition of the art of Gilbert & George organized by Tate Modern in London is currently traveling in the United States. Its final venue will be the Brooklyn Museum where it will be on view from October 3, 2008, through January 11, 2009.

Gilbert & George is the fifth in an ongoing series of gallery installations titled “Notations,” named after the 1968 book by American composer, writer, and visual artist John Cage—widely celebrated for his experimental approach to the arts. Cage’s Notations was an international and interdisciplinary anthology of musical scores by avant-garde musicians that also embraced contributions from visual artists and writers. At the same time Notations was an exhibition in book form, in which the scores doubled as drawings. “Notations” at the Philadelphia Museum of Art is a flexible tool used to explore aspects of contemporary art in the Museum’s expanding collection.

The Philadelphia Museum of Art is among the largest art museums in the United States, showcasing more than 2,000 years of exceptional human creativity in masterpieces of painting, sculpture, works on paper, decorative arts and architectural settings from Europe, Asia and the Americas. The striking neoclassical building stands on a nine-acre site above the Benjamin Franklin Parkway and houses more than 200 galleries. The Museum offers a wide variety of enriching activities, including programs for children and families, lectures, concerts and films.

For additional information, contact the Marketing and Public Relations Department of the Philadelphia Museum of Art at (215) 684-7860. The Philadelphia Museum of Art is located on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway at 26th Street. For general information, call (215) 763-8100.

Contact:
Norman Keyes, Jr.
Director of Media Relations
215-684-7862
nkeyes@philamuseum.org