Artipedia - Arts News

Busan Biennale

The time has almost arrived for the Busan Biennale 2008, international art festival’s grand opening.
September 6 - November 15

Busan Biennale 2008
Busan Museum of Modern Art
and other venues
South Korea

http://www.busanbiennale.org

This year, from September 6 to November 15, the Busan Biennale 2008 unfolds its three exhibitions under the theme ‘Expenditure’. The Contemporary Art Exhibition, the Sea Art Festival, and the Busan Sculpture Project will show 190 artworks by artists from 40 countries.

‘Expenditure’, which is ‘Depense’ in French, is part of the theory that started from French philosopher George Bataille.

Artists manifest the passion in them through endless effort and consuming their psychological energy, and rising above themselves. In this sense, spending and expenditure could also mean purification and catharsis. In the end, expenditure is the process of construction and production through purification, and meaning relaxation and comfort.

The three exhibitions of the Busan Biennale 2008 will elaborate this concept of expenditure. The theme of the Contemporary Art Exhibition is ‘EXPENDITURE-as it is always and already excessive’. It will be housed in the Busan Museum of Modern Art and the spaces in the two Busan Yachting Center’s Measuring Buildings. These exhibitions focus on the right structure that can show the unity and analysis that today’s biennales miss.

The theme of the Contemporary Art Exhibition represents the actual foundation of the general theme of expenditure, in historical, social, and artistic aspect. Today’s world is characterized by excessive orders and power, from regulations in the cyber space to microscopic daily events that govern society. The overflowing life energy of human beings inevitably breaks down the orders in this world, and expressed as ‘always excessive’.

The Busan Museum of Modern Art is taking the role as the main exhibition space, and showing 79 artists, while the Busan Yachting Center is showing 14 artists’ works. This year’s Contemporary Art Exhibition has less video and installation works, and more traditional genres like paintings and sculptures with contemporary vision.

The Sea Art Festival shows more spectacle and various art forms. A total of 77 artists from 27 countries are being shown at Gwangalli Beach and the nearby street galleries. Sculptures and installation works will be established on the beach and the street area, along with the Minlakdong Me World exhibition space, ‘Subway Art Gallery’ at the Geumryunsan subway station, the container box galleries, and the shops near Gwangalli Beach.

‘Voyage Without Boundaries’ is the title of the Sea Art Festival. It is about the un-measurable territory inside the realm of ‘excess and residue’. The ‘Voyage without Boundaries’ is thus the exhibition that manifests how recognition and meaning pursue the impossible excess, and the wise way of consuming superfluous energy. This un-measurable territory will display new meanings through free imagination.

Twenty-three artists will display their works in the Gwangalli Beach area, four at Geumryunsan Subway Station, and 50 at Minlakdong Me World. The Me World exhibition will show a multitude of distinguished video works to stimulate experiences for audiences.

The Busan Sculpture Project is especially different from two years ago. Internationally renowned sculptors such as Robert Morris and Dennis Oppenheim are showing with many other sculptors, and a total of 20 sculptures will be displayed at the Busan Sculpture Project.

The theme is ‘Avant Garden’, ‘Avant’ taking the meaning of ‘proceeding’ and ‘Garden’ meaning ‘personal space’. This year’s Busan Sculpture Project enters into the metropolis area and extends the scope of public art and public sculpture realm. Moreover, it will attempt the avant-garde change through a closer approach to the public.

Four special exhibitions are also being prepared during the Busan Biennale 2008 along with the three main exhibitions. The day before the opening of the biennale, the ‘Art is Alive’ and the ‘Art is Now’ exhibitions are opening at the Exhibition Halls of Busan City Hall and the Busan Cultural Center.

‘Art is Alive’ will provide a great opportunity to view the works of senior artists in Korea, China, and Taiwan. The exhibition, ‘Art is Now’, will show more experimental works of artists who are in the early and midlife of their career’s as artists. Thirty artists in ‘Art is Alive’ and 80 artists in ‘Art is Now’ are being shown.

A parallel exhibition that opens along with the biennale is with the use alternative spaces that will encourage progressive art culture in Busan. Alternative space ‘Bandee’ and ‘Open Space Bae’ are participating in this exhibition with 30 artists’ works and various art related functions like “artists talk”.

The Gallery Festival will also be opening during the Busan Biennale 2008. Thirty-two galleries throughout the city will be part of this festival and will be providing some fabulous additional exhibitions and places to visit during the biennale.

Image by Marc Muench

G2 GALLERY IN VENICE PRESENTS MARC MUENCH LANDSCAPE PHOTOGRAPHY AT ABBOT KINNEY FIRST FRIDAYS ON SEPTEMBER 5TH
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RENOWNED PHOTOGRAPHER ATTENDS G2 GALLERY AS PART OF THE BOUNDLESS VISION EXHIBIT TO MINGLE WITH GUESTS

WHO: The G2 Gallery in Venice, CA presents the exhibit Boundless Vision. Landscape photographer Marc Muench will be in attendance to meet with the guests and discuss his photography.

WHAT: The G2 Gallery will stay open late on the evening of September 5, 2008 as part of Abbot Kinney First Fridays and will present the Boundless Vision exhibit. The first Friday of every month the merchants on Abbot Kinney Blvd. keep their doors open so patrons can experience all the culture offered by the eclectic restaurants, bars, shops and galleries.

Boundless Vision is a unique look at our natural world through the eyes of six accomplished photographers who are all bound by the same vision to promote nature conservation and education. On the evening of September 5, Marc Muench will be in attendance at the exhibit. Muench is the president of Muench Photography Inc. and his works have been featured in several notable publications including National Geographic and Time. Other artists on display are Frans Lanting, Larry Ulrich, Jim Stimson, David Muench, Jack Dykinga, and Thomas Mangelsen.

All proceeds from sales will be donated to environmental charities.

WHERE: G2 Gallery
1503 Abbot Kinney Boulevard
Venice, CA 90291
www.TheG2Gallery.com

WHEN: Friday, September 5th, 2008
6:00 PM – 9:00 PM

Whitney Museum of American Art

Buckminster Fuller and Shoji Sadao, Dome Over Manhattan, ca. 1960. Black and-white photograph mounted on board, 13 3/4 x 18 3/8 in. (34.9 x 46.7 cm). Department of Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries. Image courtesy the Estate of R. Buckminster Fuller.

Buckminster Fuller Symposium
September 12 - 13, 2008

The Great Hall
of The Cooper Union
7 East 7th Street at Astor Place
New York, NY 10003

For complete information and ticket reservations and purchases please visit whitney.org

Visionary designer, philosopher, poet, inventor, engineer, and advocate of sustainability, Buckminster Fuller was one of the great transdisciplinary thinkers of the last century with a legacy that extends to nearly every field of the arts and sciences. This symposium takes its cue from Fuller’s dictum, “I always say to myself, what is the most important thing we can think about at this extraordinary moment,” and explores how contemporary scholars and practitioners are pushing Fuller’s ideas and projects into the 21st century.

In conjunction with the exhibition Buckminster Fuller: Starting with the Universe, on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art June 26 – September 21, 2008
The symposium is co-sponsored by The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Architectural League of New York, and The Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture of The Cooper Union.

FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 12 7 pm
Keynote Roundtable
Sanford Kwinter, Rice University; Harvard University Graduate School of Design
Michael Sorkin, Michael Sorkin Studio
Moderated by Anthony Vidler, The Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture of The Cooper Union
Introduction to the symposium by Allegra Fuller Snyder

SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 13 10 am
On Architecture, Design, and Science
Peter Galison, Harvard University
Chuck Hoberman, Designer, Artist, Engineer, and Inventor
Felicity Scott, The Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, Columbia University
Anthony Vidler, The Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture of The Cooper Union
Moderated by K. Michael Hays, Whitney Museum of American Art; Harvard University Graduate School of Design

SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 13 1 pm
On Influence and Contemporary Art
Carol Bove, artist
Pedro Reyes, artist
Elizabeth A. T. Smith, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago
Victoria Vesna, artist
Moderated by Dana Miller, Whitney Museum of American Art

For further information on the Whitney Museum, please visit http://whitney.org
or call 212-570-3600.

Buckminster Fuller: Starting with the Universe is organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art in association with the Department of Special Collections of the Stanford University Libraries. Major support is provided by the Henry Luce Foundation, the National Committee of the Whitney Museum of American Art in honor of Linda Pace, The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation, the Atwater Kent Foundation, and The Solow Art and Architecture Foundation. Media partner Thirteen/WNET

Magasin 3 Stockholm Konsthall

The island Ejima, Japan. Future location of Les archives du cœur.

CHRISTIAN BOLTANSKI
Les archives
September 5 - December 14, 2008

Curator: Tessa Praun

Magasin 3 Stockholm Konsthall
Frihamnen, SE -115 56 Stockholm
Phone: +46 8 545 680 40
art@magasin3.com
http://www.magasin3.com

“Magasin 3 has followed the career of the legendary French artist Christian Boltanski since the end of the 1980s. We have on several occasions shown works by him that are included in our collection”, says director David Neuman.

Magasin 3 opens its fall season with Boltanski’s first solo exhibition in Stockholm.

Tessa Praun, curator of the exhibition tells us that “Experiences of loss and the need to put a face to anonymous suffering forms the thread that runs through much of Boltanski’s body of work. Our individual and collective memories are central to works that often bear the traces of human life – clothes, photos, letters and other personal material. The exhibition is composed of five installations. Their placement is decided by a specific choreography that winds its way through the structure of Boltanski’s blunt visual language. It is something of a challenge to visitors to experience the variously spooky, serious, but also quite comical atmospheres created by the exhibition.”

Central to the exhibition is his new work, Les archives du coeur, 2008, in which Boltanski works like an archivist or ethnographer collecting proof of the fragility of the human condition. Tessa Praun, comments that: “Up until now Boltanski has made use of personal or found materials. The new work will be created by visitors to the exhibition who contribute by donating the sound of their heartbeat. Starting in Stockholm he will collate an archive of recordings of heartbeats, which will be housed on its very own island belonging to the Benesse Art Site Naoshima in Japan. The thought that my heartbeat will be preserved on a Japanese island is startlingly beautiful – I hope that many people will feel the same way and want to donate their heartbeats.”

Les archives du coeur will continue to record in conjunction with a presentation at La Maison Rouge, Paris, starting September 14th. http://www.lamaisonrouge.org/en/index.php

When a heartbeat has been recorded at Magasin 3, the donor of the heartbeat recieves a copy of the sound recording on a CD along with the purchase of the new publication Exhibition Catalogue no. 39 (price 100 SEK). For every Boltanski catalogue sold, Magasin 3 will donate 20 SEK to the Swedish Heart-Lung Foundation’s research on heart, lung and vascular diseases.

Christian Boltanski was born in Paris, France, in 1944. His first solo exhibition entitled La vie impossible de Christian Boltanski took place in 1968 at the Cinéma le Ranelagh in Paris. As a video artist, and as a conceptual artist he has had a prolific career exhibiting in solo and group shows at prominent art institutions and his works have been included in the Documenta in Kassel and the Venice Biennale several times. His most recent retrospectives took place at PAC – Padiglione d’Arte Contemporanea, Milano in 2005 and at Mathildenhöhe, Darmstadt in 2006-2007. In addition Boltanski has worked extensively with theatre projects for Théâtre du Châtelet, Paris; the Ruhr Triennale in Germany, and many more.

Magasin 3 extends its opening hours! The exhibitions will now open at 11am. Magasin 3 is open from 11am-7pm on Thursdays, 11am-5pm Fridays-Sundays.

Group of Seven Awkward Moments (Beavers and Woo at Tanoo)

September 5 - 27, 2008

Diana Thorneycroft was born in 1956 and currently lives in Winnipeg, MB. Reproductions of paintings by Tom Thomson, Emily Carr and the Group of Seven are used as backdrops to dioramas Thorneycroft has constructed and then photographed. By combining well known Canadian landscape paintings, which some suggest are the visual equivalent of our National Anthem, with scenes of accidents, disasters and instances of poor judgement, she acknowledges and satirizes the mythology and icons of Canadian culture.

http://www.gibsongallery.com

The Visual Gallery

Photo: Koelnmesse

Visual Gallery to present
a varied range of exhibitions
September 23 - 28. 2008

The Visual Gallery
at photokina 2008
Koelnmesse, Hall 1
Cologne, Germany
http://www.visualgallery.de

“Easy Rider” Dennis Hopper at the Visual Gallery • From up-and-coming artists to star photographer: Thomas Höpker returns • BFF presents “old timers” and “young Turks”

From September 23 to 28, the Visual Gallery will once again be presenting the best work of internationally known photographers as well as award-winning young artists at photokina, the world’s leading fair for the photography and imaging industry. The event will feature a special reunion of sorts, as Thomas Höpker will display highlights from his distinguished career as a photojournalist. Höpker received two awards in photokina’s “Jugend photographiert” (Young Imaging Days) competition back in the 1950s, when he was still in his early 20s. In 1958 Höpker, who now lives in New York, took part in photokina’s “Deutsche Bilderschau” (German Photo Review). Further highlights at the Visual Gallery will include exhibitions from Dennis Hopper, Nina Berman, Holger Mühlenbeck, Mercedes Barros …

“Easy Rider” Dennis Hopper at the Visual Gallery
The “top act” at this year’s exhibition will be photographs by the U.S. actor and director Dennis Hopper. Long before he made his international breakthrough in 1969 with “Easy Rider,” Hopper had made a name for himself as a photographer. Between 1961 and 1967 Hopper documented the turbulent scenes of a new era with impressive images of the U.S. civil rights movement and created numerous striking portraits of the young stars of popular art from his own generation. The exhibition includes portraits of David Hockney, Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg, Robert Rauschenberg, James Rosenquist, Ed Ruscha, and Andy Warhol.

“Purple Hearts” and “Marine Wedding” – Photographs by Nina Berman
The political magazine Cicero will exhibit in its gallery area contemporary documentary and press photographs as a way of honoring the importance of political images in our culture. Cicero’s exhibition in the Visual Gallery 2008 will present American documentary photographer Nina Berman’s moving series “Purple Hearts” and “Marine Wedding,” both of which feature portraits of U.S. soldiers wounded in Iraq. The photos will be accompanied by quotes from the soldiers. Only a few of these are political in nature, but together with the images themselves they say more than any political debate.

“Changing Sides” by Holger Mühlenbeck
Wuppertal-based photographer Holger Mühlenbeck will present an exhibition entitled “Changing Sides” that features portraits of transsexual, bisexual, homosexual, and heterosexual people who have either undergone a complete or temporary sex change, or else live with an undefined sexuality, but have yet to take the step of a sex change operation. In his work, Mühlenbeck presents people who remain invisible and unknown in daily life. However, their “transcendent” transformation has allowed them to rid themselves of their insecurities and replace them with confidence, openness, and a lust for life.

Photographs from the U.S. Civil War
The U.S. Civil War was one of the most devastating conflicts of the 19th century. From 1861 to 1865, more than 600,000 people died in the struggle between North and South. The Civil War was not only the first “modern” war, in which railroads, ironclads and submarines were used, it was also the first conflict to be comprehensively documented in photographs. Soldiers had their pictures taken so that their friends and relatives back home would have something to remember them by. At the same time, pictures of their families accompanied the soldiers onto the battlefield. The Civil War also marked the first time that courageous photographers like Mathew Brady, Alexander Gardener, and Timothy O’Sullivan moved from battle to battle to take pictures. The results were not just images of death and devastation, but also pictures of daily life in a grim war. Of the innumerable photographs taken, around 7,200 original plates are still kept in the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. A s
election of the best pictures will be exhibited this year in the Visual Gallery.

Olaf Martens – Fragments
Olaf Martens’ photographs tell stories — stories that come from a great variety of sources. His work combines sober lighting and cool eroticism to create an intense and artificial atmosphere, all the while maintaining a playful, elegant light touch. Martens’ most recent works were inspired by the dystopia depicted in the dystopian science-fiction classics 1984, Brazil, and Metropolis.

Mercedes Barros – “Urban Images”
For Mercedes Barros, the modern urban jungle isn’t just a metaphor, it’s reality. Barros was born in Rio de Janeiro and grew up in Pantanal, not too far from the Amazon River in central-western Brazil. She studied photography in Boston and then later in New York, before moving to Cologne in 1986. In 2002 she moved back to Rio de Janeiro, to the legendary district of Ipanema, where she still lives today. At the 2008 Visual Gallery, Barros will exhibit large-format photos reworked on a computer and presented as surreal collages that often tell alarming stories. In this way, Barros addresses the dilemma she herself has faced with regard to the promise and hope — but also the horror — held out by today’s modern cities. The photos and collages reflect the broad range of experiences the artist has had in these contradictory worlds.

BFF to present “old timers” and “young Turks”
The German Association of Freelance Photographers (BFF) will contribute exhibitions of works by two photographers to the Visual Gallery this year. Thomas Höpker will display highlights from his photojournalistic career, ranging from a portrait of the young Muhammad Ali to the events of September 11, 2001, while world-famous style and fashion specialist Esther Haase will exhibit photos of senior citizens dressed up in outfits designed by punk-fashion pioneer Vivian Westwood. Additional highlights will include interpretations of the “Brave New World” theme by BFF professional photographers and specially created photos by young BFF members on the topic of “Luxury.” The top-class photographic art exhibitions will be rounded out by master’s thesis works from outstanding photography school graduates.

Bettina Flitner — “Women with Vision”
Artists and scientists, writers and researchers, politicians and human rights activists — “Women with Vision” are the subject of Bettina Flitner’s exhibition for the 2008 Visual Gallery. Flitner has been photographing “her European women” since 2001, travelling all around the continent to do so.

This year’s Visual Gallery curator will be Gérard A. Goodrow. Juliane Rückriem will organize the event. Admission to the Visual Gallery will also be free for visitors in 2008.

Reproduction is free of charge; please send a voucher copy or send a link to an online publication to:

Koelnmesse GmbH,
P.O. Box 21 07 60,
50532 Cologne, Germany
g.nohl@koelnmesse.de