Artipedia - Arts News

Seventh Shanghai Biennale

TRANSLOCALMOTION

Opening Ceremomy: 8 September 2008

Duration:
9 September - 16 November 2008

Artistic Director: Zhang Qing

Curators:
Julian Heynen and Henk Slager

http://www.shanghaibiennale.com

Since its inauguration the Shanghai Biennale has repeatedly taken the city itself and its urban conditions as a starting point for its artistic explorations. In line with this inner logic, the curatorial team of the 2008 edition proposed to focus on one of the most import cornerstones of urban design: the public square which is a prime location of transfer, connection, connectivity, meeting, social and economical exchange.

TRANSLOCALMOTION

As a starting point for the Seventh Shanghai Biennale the curatorial team suggested utilizing People’s Square, of which the Shanghai Art Museum is actually part of. This public square seems to contain on a small-scale level a lot of crucial issues that the current Chinese society faces today. At People’s Square the curatorial team found many issues related to the transition, such as the topical capitalism, the ultramodern architecture that express a spirit of optimism, the desire for a better life envisioned by for example the Grand Theater and the Museum for Urban Planning, as well as the numerous small stands operated by migrants.

PROJECT

For the 2008 Shanghai Biennale the curatorial team connects the Shanghai Art Museum directly to People’s Square. For this reason, twenty-five emerging and established artists have been invited to take People’s Square as visual metaphor for the complex dynamics of the people’s mobility. Their work will be displayed on various media within and outside of the museum. Works that are shown outside were created with an intent to interact with the environment or the public. Participants: Pawel Althamer, Tiong Ang, Ricardo Basbaum, Mariana Castillo Deball, Chen Zhiguang, Ayse Erkmen, Rainer Ganahl, Jeanne van Heeswijk, Bethan Huws, Jing Shijianm, Kim Sanggil, Lin Chuanchu, Liu Ye, Lu Hao, Ma Baozhong, Thomas Ruff, Hito Steyerl, Tang Maohong, Wang Qingson, Lawrence Weiner, Wu Mingzhong, Yin Xiuzhen, Yu Fan, Zeng Hao, Zhang Qing and Zhou Tao.

KEYNOTES

On the second floor, the curatorial team will focus on solo-exhibitions of three prominent artists. This rather unusual proposal was conceived in reaction to a tendency among many Biennales to present a vast number of hardly distinguishable artistic positions. As a guideline for the choice of artists in this section a more reflective and general attitude towards the issue of mobility related to the urban, economical and social development should be apparent in their artistic production. Keynotes: Lonnie van Brummelen & Siebren de Haan, Mike Kelley and Yue Minjun.

CONTEXT

On the third floor, under the same theme, another thirty artists will be showing their work using non-shanghainese elements, to explore and discuss mobility issues in Asia, Africa, Europe and the Americas. Participants: Guy Ben-Ner, Ursula Biemann, Big Dipper Group, Bu Hua, Chen Yun, Juergen Drescher, Inci Eviner, Harun Farocki, Zvi Goldstein, Yangah Ham, He Wenjue, Huang Hsinchien, Jia Zhangke, Jin Shi, Suchan Kinoshita, Charles Lim, Liu Ming, Angelika Mantz, Klaus Mettig, Roman Ondak, The Otolith Group, Ulrike Ottinger, Son Kuk Gyon, Su Xinping, Mieke Van de Voort, Clemens von Wedemeyer, Wang Qiang, Yang Shaobin, Yu Hua, Zhang Enli, Zhang Weijie and Zhu Jia.

SYMPOSIUM: MAPPING PUBLIC SPACE (September

Parallel to these artistic explorations an international symposium will discuss and evaluate similar research issues:
topics of knowledge production, (public) art as a tool for urban research and ultimately, current curatorial models.
Participants: Irit Rogoff, Mika Hannula, Wu Jiang, Kasper Koenig, Young Chul Lee and Xu Jiang.

PUBLICATION: THE SHANGHAI PAPERS (Hatje Cantz, Fall 2008)

Besides the standard exhibition catalogue the curatorial team will produce a sourcebook that consists of texts by the participating artists. These texts present the artists’ views on their artistic research within the context of the exhibition’s theme (Editors: Annette W. Balkema and Xiang Liping). Book launch: Shanghai Art Museum, Closing Program November 16.

SPECIAL SUPPORT

Bank Sarasin, Goethe Institut, Fonds BKVB, Mondriaan Foundation.

Ursula Blickle Foundation

Alexandra Bircken
“Gelände”, 2006. Plaster, wood, wool, varnish, sheet copper, 27 x 60,1 x 32 cm. Courtesy: BQ, Cologne; Gladstone Gallery, New York; Herald Street, London. Photo: Studio Schaub, Cologne.

Alexandra Bircken / Simon Denny
September 7 - October 19, 2008

An exhibition of the
Ursula Blickle Foundation

Ursula Blickle Foundation
Mühlweg 18, D -76703 Kraichtal-UÖ
Germany

http://www.ursula-blickle-stiftung.de

Fabric, wool, cardboard, wood, metal: here the materials dominate the scene – spun, tacked, taped, hung,leaned, and clamped into place by Alexandra Bircken (*1967 / D) and Simon Denny (*1982 / NZ). In parallel soloexhibitions at the Ursula Blickle Foundation the two artists present subjective form and material canons that create their own idiosyncratically fragile languages. As with textiles assembled out of random fibers, here too net-like structures are developed which do not insist on following a linearity, but only merge into a oneness through the weave itself.

Bircken and Denny pursue differing strategies of combination and assemblage, their work hovering somewhere between sculpture and installation.Under the curatorial guidance of Nicolaus Schafhausen and Florian Waldvogel (Witte de With, Center for Contemporary Art Rotterdam), the artists will be creating new works for the exhibition at the Ursula Blickle Stiftung. They are to be representative positions of a comprehensive group exhibition that the curators have developed as a contribution to the Brussels Biennial 2008. The Biennial addresses different aspects of modernism and makes direct reference to the Brussels World’s Fair in 1958. The point of departure is the assumption that the end of the modern era is marked by a lack of any great inspiring narratives – in other words, knowledge and the resulting actions are no longer legitimized by great narratives but by the individual, who constructs his own frame of reference. This gives rise to a multitude of values and truths, wh
ich are characteristic of the end of the modernage. For the exhibition at the Ursula Blickle Foundation, Nicolaus Schafhausen and Florian Waldvogel have selected two artists (Bircken/Denny) who explore the difference between narrative and scientific knowledge.

Alexandra Bircken’s objects seem delicate and fragile, but at the same time they are made from down-to-earth materials: branches, wool, wood, and aluminum. Mostly they are assemblages that she brings together to create sculptures or site-oriented sculpture formations. Fabric, wool, and yarn inevitably make reference in their textile materiality to the female – a gender theme that is never explicitly addressed in the works, but which is hinted at by the materials as well as the forms. Dwellings, nests, and webs suggest a discourse about femininity; nevertheless, through the openness of Bircken’s artistic form of expression, the artist does not clearly force them in this direction. The materiality and character of the objects resonate like the hybrid of a handcrafted natural entity and artificial synthesis.

Simon Denny also works with fragile constructions that accumulate in space forming idiosyncratic narrative structures. Only in these ensembles do the individual – usually mundane – objects begin, through the contrast of their forms and material characteristics, to generate a friction that produces a strange tension and at the same time order. Seeming to lack past and context, the individual objects and material elements blend into a complex ramified whole. Whereas Bircken’s amorphous objects follow compositional structures, Denny’s installations appear at first glance to be randomly put together, but upon closer examination one notices the many interrelated details. His materials are not “raw ingredients” taken from nature – as is often the case with Bircken – but already processed utility items taken out of their normal functional context.

Both artists devote their work to the fragility that lies in the combination and arrangement of differently selected materials. Nature and the remnants of everyday objects serve them in good stead for building their own narrative structures that manifest themselves in the exhibition space and are enhanced by the viewer’s own past.

Curators
Nicolaus Schafhausen and Florian Waldvogel

Opening
Saturday, September 6, 2008, 7 p.m.

Opening hours
Wed. 2 – 5 p.m., Sun. 2 – 6 p.m.,
and by appointment

Lunds konsthall

Still from Sergei Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible, Part 2 (1945).

After Eisenstein
6 September - 2 November 2008

Lunds konsthall:
Olga Chernysheva, Boris Mikhailov

Kino Cinema Theatre:
Sergei Eisenstein, Kira Muratova

Opening: Lunds konsthall,
Friday, 5 September 6–8 pm

http://www.lundskonsthall.se

It is no coincidence that Lunds konsthall begins the 2008 autumn season with a concentrated presentation of art and cinema from Sweden’s mighty eastern neighbour. Hardly anyone can have missed the return of Russia as a self-confident great power this summer.

The Soviet Union disappeared from the world map in 1991, relatively undramatically and without much bloodshed. In our parts the new freedom in Eastern Europe and the resurrection of the three Baltic States were greeted euphorically, but many people in Russia and other post-Soviet countries regarded the collapse as a humiliating disaster. For them the last 15 years have been a period of protracted political and economic chaos. Now, when living standards are finally rising, they show little understanding for the world’s anxieties about the new authoritarian rulers in Russia and their intentions.

After Eisenstein starts from the legacy of the legendary Soviet filmmaker and offers still and moving images that help us understand what ‘Russian culture’ is today. Instead of attempting to give an overview of post-Soviet visual art, Lunds konsthall collaborates with the Kino cinema theatre to present four extraordinary authors who are not easy to classify or range into genres. Art as social commentary is an established tradition in Russia, but it yields the best results when followed subjectively and uncompromisingly. That is precisely what all participants in After Eisenstein do.

Sergei Eisenstein (born 1898 in Riga, died 1948 in Moscow) is a canonical figure of Soviet culture. Not just a pioneering film director but also an accomplished theoretician, essayist and draughtsman, he can no longer be labelled contemporary. Yet his persuasive cinematic imagery and his ideas about ‘attraction’, ‘montage’, ‘internal monologue’, ‘intellectual cinema’ and ‘emotional thinking’ still inspire filmmakers and other artists throughout the world. Eisenstein’s œuvre, however, also illustrates the ‘engaged’ artist’s complicated relationship with political power.

Two of the participants are key figures in post-Soviet culture. They represent the Ukraine rather than Russia. Boris Mikhailov (born 1938), one of today’s foremost art photographers, comes from the Russian-speaking city of Kharkov in northern Ukraine. Since a few years he also lives in Berlin. Among his best-known series, occasionally shocking to outside observers, are visual accounts of life in his home city during the ‘transitional’ period after 1991. Kira Muratova (born 1934) is originally from Moldova, but has worked in Odessa on the Ukrainian Black Sea coast for almost half a century. She is considered one of the finest filmmakers of the Russian-speaking world.

Olga Chernysheva (born 1962) lives in Moscow and works both at home and internationally. Her art centers on Russian culture and the ongoing fragmentation of its master narratives into puzzling, disconnected absurdities. In photographs and films, but also in drawings and paintings, she observes with both empathy and detached curiosity how people around her are managing post-Soviet and New Russian life.

After Eisenstein is supported by the Culture Programme of the European Union as part of the exchange project Opening Hours, initiated by U-TURN, the Quadrennial for Contemporary Art in Copenhagen. The other collaboration partners are the Berlin Biennial, the Mücsarnok kunsthalle in Budapest and the art journal IDEA in Cluj (Romania).

Lunds konsthall

Mårtenstorget 3

223 51 Lund, Sweden
lundskonsthall@lund.se

http://www.lundskonsthall.se

Piazza Taxingeplan outside Tensta Konsthall

28 August 2008

William Easton has been appointed the new head of Tensta Konsthall. His appointment begins the first of October 2008

Tensta Konsthall is one of the leading centres of contemporary art in Sweden and exhibits the avant garde of the contemporary art, design and architecture scenes. The konsthall was opened in 1998 as a part of the Cultural Capital Year for Stockholm. Tensta konsthall works with a wide notion of art, and has drawn attention both from within Sweden and abroad thanks to its boundary-defying and vibrant visions.

William Easton holds a First Class BFA honours degree from Slade School of Fine Art in London, and a Merit Scholar, MFA from the Chicago Art Institute and is a graduate from the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program in New York. He has been teaching in art, design, advertising, and philosophy for more than 20 years at graduate and undergraduate levels in Sweden the USA, the UK, Canada and Poland. For the last three years he has been rektor at Berghs School of Communication.

As a curator he has presented programs of art and design at a number of places including exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art in Stockholm, Skulpturens Hus, The Baltic Art Centre in Visby and The Centre of Contemporary Art in Szczecin Poland. His own performances, films and art works have been shown widely including exhibitions at the ICA, London, Bornholm Art Museum in Denmark, Museum of Contemporary Art, Warsaw, The Bronx Museum for the Arts in New York, Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas city and at The Kitchen Center for the Arts in NY. He has been the recipient of numerous wards and grants including the Anna Louise Raymond Fellowship, William Townsend Memorial Scholarship and the Betty Park Award For Critical Writing.

He is the author of the book ‘Play’ and a contributor to the work ‘The Bio-apparatus’. As well as having written several artist monographs he has published for numerous magazines internationally. He has worked as English editor for magazines such as Material in Stockholm and the international magazine of Baltic arts Mare Articum. Most recently his work “Playing Polo with Pinter” was published in the anthology Common Ground with a reading at Elverket in Stockholm.

For more information contact:
Ida Ömalm, e-mail: ida.omalm@tenstakonsthall.se

Tensta Konsthall
Taxingegränd 10, Box 4001
163 04 Spånga
Stockholm, Sweden

Phone: +46 8 36 07 63
Fax: +46 8 36 25 60
www.tenstakonsthall.se

Tensta Konsthall is supported by Swedish Arts
Council,The City of Stockholm, Stockholm County
Council,The Foundation for the Culture of the Future
and The Swedish Inheritance Fund.

Iniva (Institute of
International Visual Arts)

Hew Locke –
The Kingdom of the Blind
3 September - 20 October 2008

Curated by: Sebastian Lopez

Iniva (Institute of
International Visual Arts)
Rivington Place EC2A 3BA
London, UK

http://www.iniva.org

A major new installation at Rivington Place
3 September – 20 October 2008

For the past ten years, Hew Locke’s work has explored the visual display of those in power and those who aspire to power. His immense and complex architectural installations and more recently, his monumental wall drawings and figurative sculptures made from the mundane, bright and sparkling ephemera of street markets and pound shops, have adopted, questioned and subverted the iconographies and language of royalty and government in relation to notions of power and cultural identity.

In this major new installation for Iniva at Rivington Place, Locke brings together these prevalent formal and thematic elements of his practice to create his first ever ‘museum display’ – a fictional collection of the possessions of an imaginary ruler. The installation combines a carnivalesque frieze of monumental figures (reaching up to 14 ft tall) with an elaborate backdrop of wall drawings. Depicting this fictional leader’s rise to power, Locke’s figures, enacting victorious moments in battle, act as elaborate votive objects – composed of intricate combinations of fake leather handbags, miniature plastic animals, doll parts, sequins, chains and fake weaponry.

This chaotic and flamboyant commemoration of individual power becomes a poignant parody of today’s social and political global climate. Presented through the formal language of traditional museum display, Locke’s allusions to the language of contemporary dictatorships and war assume a powerful commentary on our national cultural institutions and their relationship to the modern constructs of history and society, cultural identity and national pride.

Locke’s personal history – he spent the first seven years of his life in Edinburgh before moving to the newly independent Guyana and later returning to London in the 1980s – feeds into his ongoing interest in the links between personal and national identity. This piece also draws on the iconography of great historic battles, such as the Battle of San Romano, the Bayeux Tapestry and the British Museum’s Assyrian Lion Hunt reliefs.

Locke comments on his practice:
“At its heart, my work is both political and highly personal, often taking me on strange dreamlike journeys where the past and the present merge and then separate.”

Locke has exhibited extensively within the UK, including Tate Britain as part of BAS6, V&A Museum, The New Art Gallery Walsall, The Bluecoat Gallery and the British Museum. Locke has recently been commissioned to make a permanent installation for the New Art Exchange, Nottingham. In the US he has exhibited at the Luckman Gallery LA, Atlanta Contemporary Arts and at the Brooklyn Museum. Also in Autumn 2008, Locke will present work in the group exhibition ‘Second Life’ at the Museum of Art and Design, New York.

Public Programme
The public programme will include talks, films selected by Hew Locke and a panel discussion.

Every Saturday from 13 September to 18 October, 3pm
A gallery tour for all ages of The Kingdom of the Blind.

Thursday 18 September, 7–8pm
Curator Sebastian Lopez discusses The Kingdom of the Blind in the gallery.

Thursday 2 October, 7–8pm
Artist Hew Locke talks about his practice and new work.

Check http://www.iniva.org for further events accompanying The Kingdom of the Blind.

Exhibition Listings Information

Exhibition: Hew Locke – The Kingdom of the Blind
Dates: 3 September – 20 October 2008
Venue: Rivington Place, London, EC2A 3BA
Public opening hours: Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday: 11am – 6pm
Late Thursdays: 11am – 9pm (Last admission 8.30pm) Saturday: 12noon – 6pm
Sunday, Monday: Closed (with the exception of Sunday 27 July, 12noon – 6pm)
Admission: Free
Nearest tubes: Old Street & Liverpool Street
Rivington Place is fully accessible in all public areas
For parking & wheelchair facilities or further information about Rivington Place +44 (0)20 7749 1240, info@rivingtonplace.org, http://www.rivingtonplace.org/