Artipedia - Arts News

Showroom

Centre A is pleased to present Showroom, a project by Kristina Lee Podesva and Inge Roecker in collaboration with Michelle Allard, Marianne Bos, Patrick Chan, Paul de Guzman, Vanessa Kwan, Gwenessa Lam, Heidi Nagtegaal, Alex Pensato, Ryan Peter, Jordan Strom

Exhibition: June 6 - July 12, 2008

About the project:

Showroom is a platform for addressing the relationship between art and public space through the framework of a condominium showroom/construction site. As a collaborative effort undertaken by artists, architects, curators, and the public, the project engages with urgent themes of contemporary culture, spatial practice, and artistic production through an installation, symposium, and series of public forums. Inspired by Martha Rosler’s If You Lived Here project and the [Un]Common Place: Art, Public Space, and Urban Aesthetics, Showroom facilitates discussion and analysis between cultural institutions, artists, interdisciplinary groups, and individuals involved in looking at the impact of urban (re)development in Vancouver and beyond.

About the participants

Kristina Lee Podesva is an artist, writer, and curator based in Vancouver. Her work has appeared in exhibitions and publications in Canada, the US, and Europe. She is a the founder of colourschool and a co-founder of Cornershop Projects.

Inge Roecker is the principal architect of ASIR architekten and an assistant professor of architecture at the University of British Columbia. She is also co-founder of Living Lab.

Michelle Allard is a visual artist living in Vancouver. She has exhibited work in Canada and held residencies in France, Japan, and Canada.

Marianne Bos is a multi-disciplinary artist living in Strathcona, Vancouver.

Patrick Chan is a designer and theorist with a special interest in design research methodology and urban studies. Currently, he runs a design-build business with Vancouver-based architect/structural engineer Varouj Gumuchian and furniture-designer Michael Beber.

Paul de Guzman is an artist currently living in Vancouver and has exhibited across Canada, in New York, and Europe.

Vanessa Kwan is an artist who recently exhibited “The Storm and The Fall” at Access Gallery in Vancouver.

Gwenessa Lam is a visual artist based in Vancouver. She recently completed a residency at the Macdowell Colony in New Hampshire.

Heidi Nagtegaal is a Vancouver-based artist.

Alex Pensato is an artist living and working in Vancouver.

Ryan Peter is completing his MFA in Visual Art at the University of British Columbia.

Jordan Strom is the curator of “Interior’s Design,” which will be opening at the Republic Gallery in
June 2008. He is also the editor of Fillip and a guest curator at the Vancouver Art Gallery.

Centre A gratefully acknowledges the generous support of its patrons, sponsors, members, partners, private foundations, as well as government funding agencies, including the Canada Council for the Arts, the British Columbia Arts Council, and the City of Vancouver through the
Office of Cultural Affairs.

For more information:
Media contact: Makiko Hara, Curator
makiko.hara@centrea.org
604-683-8326

Exhibition Dates: June 6 - July 12, 2008
Opening Reception: Friday, June 6, 8 pm
Symposium: Saturday, June 7, 10 to 6:30 pm
Doors open at 9:45 am

Centre A Gallery Hours:
Tuesday - Saturday 11:00 -18:00
Sunday-Monday closed
2 West Hastings, Vancouver, BC, V6B, 1G6
Tel: 604-683-8326 Fax: 604-683-8632

Tate Modern

Tony Conrad
Ten Years Alive on the Infinite Plain, 1972
at the Hartware MedienKunstVerein 2004
Photo: Copyright: Christoph Kniel and Ilja Mess

UBS Openings: Saturday Live
Tony Conrad
Unprojectable:
Projection and Perspective
Saturday 14 June 2008,
10pm - 11.30pm

Tate Modern
Turbine Hall
London

http://www.tate.org.uk

This sonic and visual feast features an amplified string quartet, electric drill and motors, alternative film production processes, film projection, and clouds of looming shadows. Specially conceived for the Turbine Hall by vanguard American musician/composer, filmmaker, video artist and writer,
Tony Conrad.

Known for his groundbreaking film The Flicker, his involvement in the Theatre of Eternal Music and the evolution of the Velvet Underground, and collaborations with a host of luminaries including Jack Smith, Mike Kelley and Henry Flynt, Conrad remains a radical figure who challenges cultural conventions.

From 13-15 June, this special weekend at Tate Modern also features screenings of Conrad’s extraordinary film and video work:

Friday 13 June 7pm
Tony Conrad: Flicker and Process Films

Saturday 14 June 7pm
Tony Takes on Video: Who’s Watching Who?

Sunday 15 June 3pm
Tony Conrad in Conversation + DreaMinimalist

Visit http://www.tate.org.uk for full details and to book, or telephone 020 7887 8888.

Performance, Turbine Hall, free, booking recommended

Screenings and Discussion, Starr Auditorium.

Curated by Stuart Comer, Alice Koegel and Mark Webber.

This event is part of UBS Openings: Saturday Live, a series of bi-monthly performance events celebrating contemporary cultural practice at Tate Modern

Opening up art
Tate Modern Collection with UBS

GAMeC

LORENZO BONALDI PRIZE FOR ART – ENTERPRIZE, 4TH YEAR
Data Recovery
curated by Övül Durmusoglu
artists: Julie Ault and Martin Beck, Michael Blum, Banu Cennetoglu, Goldin+Senneby, Klub Zwei, Susanne Kriemann

ELDORADO: KRIS MARTIN
INTER PARES
curated by Alessandro Rabottini

30 MAY - 27 JULY 2008

GAMeC – Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea of Bergamo
Via S. Tomaso, 53
24121 Bergamo (Italy)
http://www.gamec.it

GAMeC presents two shows: Data Recovery, the winning exhibition of the 4th Lorenzo Bonaldi Prize for Art – EnterPrize, and Inter pares by Kris Martin.

LORENZO BONALDI PRIZE FOR ART – ENTERPRIZE, 4TH YEAR
Data Recovery

The group show Data Recovery, curated by Övül Durmusoglu, is the winning project of the fourth Lorenzo Bonaldi Prize for Art – EnterPrize. The project by Durmusoglu, nominated by Sabine Breitwieser (independent curator, Vienna), has been submitted to the jury comprised of: Dan Cameron (Director of Visual Arts CAC – Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans), Ralph Rugoff (Director Hayward Gallery, London) and Giacinto Di Pietrantonio (Director GAMeC, Bergamo).

The Premio Lorenzo Bonaldi per l’Arte – EnterPrize is the first international competition dedicated to young curators under the age of 30, conceived to commemorate Lorenzo Bonaldi’s passion for art and collecting. It was organized by GAMeC, and funded by the Bonaldi family for the first time in 2003. It represents a unique sort of recognition, because it rewards the research of a young curator and his or her exhibition project.

The project proposed by Övül Durmusoglu has taken its original inspiration - knowledge as a performative scene - from “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” by the Argentinean writer Jorge Luis Borges. Processes of knowing and not-knowing become more involved with artistic strategies and research in contemporary art. In particular, artists - by positioning themselves with changing realities and current events - attempt to recover certain untold and deliberately disregarded histories through their different methodologies. That is why Data Recovery has taken its title from the performative process of salvaging data from damaged, failed, wrecked or inaccessible primary storage media.

The artists contributing to the project – Julie Ault and Martin Beck, Michael Blum, Banu Cennetoglu, Goldin+Senneby, Klub Zwei, Susanne Kriemann – engage themselves with information using fresh methodologies of research and process. Ault and Beck realize a super sized mural called Information using data from poverty policies deployed by US government since 1964; Blum performs a fairy tale about the failures of grand ideologies of 20th century – communism, social democracy and capitalism – in his essay performance video The Three Failures; Cennetoglu’s photo installation Determined Barbara makes us question the existence of a SFOR military training ground constructed in Glamoc; Goldin+Senneby present a new stage of their work in progress Looking for Headless with Gone Offshore; Klub Zwei points towards how some histories like that of national socialism are very alive today, shaping perpetrators’ descendents’ personal lives in their video installation Väter Täte
r; Kriemann’s new artist’s edition 12 650 000 – produced for Data Recovery – reframes Berlin’s load test body “Grossbelastungskörper” commissioned by Albert Speer, writing its alternative history in an unexpected format.

The exhibition is accompanied by a bilingual publication containing Jacques Rancière’s comment given in the framework of “Klartext! The Status of the Political in Contemporary Art and Culture” in Berlin 2005 and a new text written for Data Recovery by theorist and curator Stephen Wright alongside an introduction by the curator Övül Durmusoglu.

Data Recovery is realized with the support of: IASPIS (International Artists’ Studio Program in Sweden), The Netherlands Foundation for Visual Arts and the Austrian Cultural Forum in Milan.

Kris Martin. Inter pares

GAMeC hosts Inter pares by Belgian artist Kris Martin, curated by Alessandro Rabottini, as part of the program of Eldorado, the project room dedicated to the most interesting rising artists on the international scene.

After his participation in the Berlin Biennial in 2006 and his recent solo exhibition at PS1 in New York in 2007, Kris Martin (Kortrijk, 1972) has attracted international attention thanks to the originality of his art that combines poetry, conceptual rigor and philosophical and literary memories.

His work reflects the existential questions that are fed by each human being throughout his existence and frequent references are made to religion, art and literature to express the constant amazement, melancholy and aspiration to knowledge that characterize our relationship with life and death.

The three spaces that constitute this exhibition conceived for GAMeC are also stages in an internal journey that touches the human need for awareness and the sense of frustration that is accompanied by hope and mystery, compassion and the perception of a common destination. In the first room are two sculptures from the Idiot series: Idiot III of 2006 and Idiot V of 2007. In both cases the symbols and icons of religiousness are caught in the act of closing into themselves, in a moment of aphasia and suspension. In the second space the spectator is fully immersed in a kind of collective portrait of a human genre and in the last room the protagonist is a sound installation in which a women’s voice whispers a question that is banal, yet vital, in its commonplaceness.

Completing Kris Martin’s exhibition is a publication by the artist conceived and designed by himself and realized in collaboration with Mousse magazine, and which contains a text by Martin Herbert and a conversation between the artist and Alessandro Rabottini, exhibition curator.

On view at GAMeC until 27th July: Yan Pei-Ming with Yan Pei-Ming and Donations to the Permanent Collection in the New Millennium.

Hours:

Tuesday to Sunday: 10 am–7 pm
Thursday: 10 am–10 pm
Closed Monday

For information:
GAMeC - Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea
Via San Tomaso, 53
24121 Bergamo
tel. +39 035 270272
fax +39 035 236962
http://www.gamec.it

Press Office
CLP Relazioni Pubbliche
tel. +39 02 433403
http://www.clponline.it
e-mail: info@clponline.it

Image above:
Top:
Project for the catalogue of the exhibition Data Recovery by Ali Cindoruk, 2008

Bottom:
Kris Martin
Idiot V, 2007
Courtesy Sies + Höke, Düsseldorf
Photo: Achim Kukulies, Düsseldorf

The Power Plant

Walid Raad
Untitled (1982-2007), Beirut/New York, 2008
19 inkjet prints
Courtesy the artist and
Paula Cooper Gallery, New York

Not Quite How I Remember It
7 June - 1 September 2008

Diane Borsato / Gerard Byrne / Nancy Davenport / Felix Gmelin / Sharon Hayes / Mary Kelly / Nestor Krüger / Michael Maranda / Olivia Plender / Walid Raad / Dario Robleto / Michael Stevenson / Kelley Walker / Lee Walton

Curated by Senior Curator of Programs, Helena Reckitt

http://www.thepowerplant.org

Highlighting forms of re-enactment and reconstruction, ‘Not Quite How I Remember It’ explores events, narratives and artifacts from the recent past. Through montage, sampling and remixing, artists examine how the past haunts the present. Neither wistful about bygone days nor deluded about their ability to reconstruct earlier times, artists mobilize history to understand contemporary reality. Recognizing the instability of memory and narration, their works illuminate issues of authorship, ownership, subjectivity, identification, influence, and collectivity.

While building on appropriation tactics, most artists’ approaches differ from the laconic pillaging strategies of the late 1970s ‘Pictures’ generation. Instead they take paradoxically embodied and labour-intensive attitudes to repetition. Drawing on Fluxus ideas about art as instruction, they treat iconic artworks as scripts to improvise upon. Active and recuperative, these gestures valorize collectivity and gift economies above private ownership, fulfilling Roland Barthes’ notion that “a text’s unity lies not in its origin but its destination.” Discussing his use of candy wrappers from a Felix Gonzalez-Torres installation in one of his works, Dario Robleto wonders, “Can a creative gesture begun by one artist be passed like a baton through the years to be continued or completed by another artist in another time so that it never has to end but fulfils Gonzalez-Torres’ ambition to become ‘endless copies’?”

By re-enacting public events, artists also focus on vanquished figures and peripheral narratives instead of heroes and conquerors. In this context, restaging buoys up individuals and groups who rarely see themselves in mainstream histories. While remaining skeptical about easy forms of ‘taking to the streets,’ these projects hold out the promise that revisiting the past might transform us from witnesses into creative participants. Conscious that history is as unstable as the archives that we use to record it, the question of how to bequeath utopian and progressive legacies to subsequent generations underscores the work of several artists. Others share an interest in how to represent political dissent in our media-saturated era. Depicting activist events with a sense of distance in contrast to their original urgency, they recycle footage made famous through media representations. If an event is not recorded and replayed, these projects suggest, it might as well have never
happened.

Distinguishing between history as the study of occurrences and poetry as the imagining of possibilities, Aristotle assigned poetry the higher place. In attending to the unrealized potential of the past, or what Sharon Hayes terms “pending or hypothetical events,” the artists in ‘Not Quite How I Remember It’ collapse the two. They treat the past as a work-in-progress and prompt us to wonder: What time is it? or, When are we? This sense of layered time reverberates with Walter Benjamin’s idea that outdated aesthetic objects make time appear. Interpreting these projects sharpens our awareness of historical place and perhaps prompts questions about how future generations will represent us.

A catalogue with essays by art historian Johanna Burton and curator Helena Reckitt accompanies
the exhibition.

‘Not Quite How I Remember It’ is generously supported by Exhibition Donors Gail Drummond & Robert Dorrance, Liza Mauer, Margaret McNee, Gerald Sheff & Shanitha Kachan, and Nancy Beal Young.

Forum: 7 June
Let’s Do It Again: Contemporary Art and Remaking
With artists and critics including Amelia Jones, Dario Robleto, and Jan Verwoert.

Film: 25 June, 9 July, 15 August
Am I Repeating Yourself?
Features films by John Baldessari, Magnus Bärtas, Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard, Felix Gmelin, Mike Kelley/Paul McCarthy, Jill Godmillow, A S M Kobayashi, Anri Sala, Elisabeth Subrin, and T. R. Uthco and Ant Farm.

The Power Plant
231 Queens Quay West
Toronto ON Canada M5J 2G8
http://www.thepowerplant.org