Artipedia - Arts News

Vancouver Art Gallery

Marianne Nicolson

The House of the Ghosts
October 4, 2008 - January 11, 2009

Vancouver Art Gallery
750 Hornby Street,
Vancouver, British Columbia
Canada V6Z 2H7

http://www.vanartgallery.bc.ca

Vancouver Art Gallery Transformed into Northwest Coast Ceremonial House by Dzawada’enuxw Artist Marianne Nicolson

Using high-powered theatrical lighting, British Columbian multi-media artist Marianne Nicolson is transforming the Vancouver Art Gallery’s Georgia Street architecture into a spectacular re-imagining of a traditional Kwakwaka’wakw ceremonial house. Glowing with increased intensity as day gives way to night, the more than 30-foot-wide site-specific projection titled The House of the Ghosts will be presented from Saturday, October 4, 2008 to January 11, 2009.

The Gallery resides in British Columbia’s former Provincial courthouse, a turn-of-the-century neo-classical building where laws banning the cultures and languages of Canada’s Aboriginal People were in effect. By imposing the imagery of the traditional Kwakwaka’wakw bighouse on the pillars and lintel of the building, Nicolson symbolizes the survival of Pacific Northwest Coast First Nations cultures and communities, despite active efforts to suppress and eradicate them.

“The House of the Ghosts acts much like traditional performances executed within Kwakwaka’wakw ceremonies where, through an exhibition of the spectacular, it is believed that spirits can be enticed into communion with humans, allowing them to conduct extraordinary feats,” said Nicolson. “In all earnestness, this carefully crafted performance attempts to draw forth the assistance of the supernatural in the healing of First Nations communities and individuals, as well as the conflicted past and present relationships between Aboriginal and Non-Aboriginal groups. Ultimately the work seeks assistance in the healing of the compromised landscape within which all Kwakwaka’wakw, First Nations and Canadians live.”

The House of the Ghosts strongly references the traditional Kwakwaka’wakw belief in a balance that underlies nature. It is understood that the world of ghosts is counterbalanced by the world of humans, and that the spirit world is associated with night and the human world is associated with day. While it is believed that spirits are continuously present, they are only thought to be accessible to humans at night. This concept is made eloquently visible in Nicolson’s installation. Although the work is continuously present on the building’s façade, it only becomes observable in its full form when the sun begins to set.

Though extremely contemporary in its medium, the compositional techniques and subject matter included in The House of the Ghosts are strongly based in the traditions of Pacific Northwest First Nations artists. Using form line, Nicolson has created a highly expressive and symmetrical composition, including stylized killer whales, wolves, owls and a ghost puppet, all believed to heal the sick and revive the dead. Also included is the Sisiutl, a double headed serpent with a human face at its centre, which appears as the crossbeam of the Gallery’s façade, reinforcing a sense of balance.

Marianne Nicolson was born in 1969 and is a member of the Dzawada’enuxw Tribe of the Kwakwaka’wakw Nations of Kingcome Inlet, British Columbia. She first came to prominence in 1998 when she scaled a vertical rock face in Kingcome Inlet to paint a 28 x 38-foot pictograph—the first in the inlet in more than sixty years—to mark the continued vitality of her ancestral village of Gwa’yi. Nicolson studied at the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design, the University of Victoria and with Kwakwaka’wakw carver Wayne Alfred. Her work has been shown nationally and internationally at venues including the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, Artspeak, the National Gallery of Canada and Taipei Fine Arts Museum.

The House of the Ghosts is the eighth work presented as a part of NEXT: a series of artist projects from the Pacific Rim. The series highlights work previously unseen in Vancouver and seeks to engage the diverse practices of Pacific Rim artists. The site-specific project is organized by the Vancouver Art Gallery and curated by Daina Augaitis, chief curator/associate director.

Marianne Nicolson: The House of the Ghosts is generously supported by the Audain Foundation.

Media contact:
Andrew Riley, Public Relations Manager, 604-662-4722
ariley@vanartgallery.bc.ca

Sahara Chronicle, Ursula Biemann

° Networked Cultures, 10 October - 19 November 2008

Opening
9 October, 19.00 – 21.30

Project curators: Peter Mörtenböck and Helge Mooshammer

Participant artists:

Judith Augustinovic
Ursula Biemann
hackitectura.net

Film by Peter Mörtenböck and Helge Mooshammer

Book presentation and panel discussion:
Networked Cultures – Parallel Architectures and the Politics of Space
22 October 2008, 19.00 at Architekturzentrum Wien – Podium

Emiliano Gandolfi, Doris Burtscher, Gulsen Bal and Margarethe Makovec
Moderation: Peter Mörtenböck and Helge Mooshammer

Whether in the form of transnational politics, global economies, new working conditions or urban social movements, networks have become the most powerful figure of thought operating on the way we conceive the organisation of the world. Networks have changed our forms of cultural interaction and coexistence just as they have the way in which we produce and experience spaces.

The engagement with these developments on the part of art and architecture in recent years has resulted in a new form of praxis founded on collective production, process-guided work and transversal project platforms. Such a ‘disciplineless’ praxis of unsolicited intervention in spatial contexts renders legible the dysfunctional rules of planned spatial and cultural containment and creates an avenue for generating new forms of circulation amidst the political efforts to conceal this failure. It makes use of existing networks, expands and changes them, gives rise to new circuits and thereby sketches a mobile geography of self-determined utilization of space and culture.

The project Networked Cultures aims neither to present this development as a contained movement nor to localize it within the particularities of a specific geographic or institutional context. We are far more interested in its propinquity to a plethora of other self-authorized structures, irregardless of their scale – gray markets, informal commerce, alternative economies and migratory practices as well as the innumerable, minor, barely discernible attempts to establish self-determined sociality in the midst of the reconfiguration of our environments.

www.networkedcultures.org

supported by

BM:UKK
Stadt Wien - Kulturabteilung MA 7

in co-operation with:
Architekturzentrum Wien

°About us

Open Space
Zentrum für Kunstprojekte
Lassingleithnerplatz 2
Schwedenplatz
Wien 1020
Austria

(+43) 699 115 286 32

for more info: office@openspace-zkp.org

http://www.openspace-zkp.org

Open Space - Zentrum für Kunstprojekte aims to create the most vital facilities art concerned with contributing a model strategy for cross-border and interregional projects on the basis of improving new approach.

The world of renowed environmental photographer Robert Glenn Ketchum will be on display at the G2 Gallery in Venice on Oct. 10

WORLD RENOWNED ENVIRONMENTAL PHOTOGRAPHER ROBERT GLENN KETCHUM TO BE FIRST GUEST SPEAKER, WITH A SPECIAL INTRODUCTION BY ACTRESS MAUD ADAMS

WHO: Robert Glenn Ketchum, author, teacher and photographer, will be the first guest speaker in a series of environmental lectures at the G2 Gallery in Venice, CA. Actress and environmentalist Maud Adams, best known for her roll in “Octopussy” will deliver a special introduction.

WHAT: Robert Glenn Ketchum’s lecture will mirror his exhibit at the G2 Gallery: Life Well Lived Forty Years in the Making. He will discuss the evolution of his career from his Sundance residency to his environmental interests including his recent work on the Bristol Bay Salmon Fishery, to his digital darkroom. He will also discuss his embroideries that have been meticulously translated from his photography in partnership wit the Suzhou Embroidery Art Innovation Centre (SEAIC) in China. Ketchum’s ongoing commitment to the environment has earned him much critical acclaim, including being named one of Audubon’s 100 people who “shaped the environmental movement in the 20th century.”

G2 Gallery is committed to supporting the environment by showcasing photography of our natural world. G2 Gallery donates 100% of proceeds to environmental charities.

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

WHEN: October 10, 2008
7:00pm

C-print

Loumiotis dimitrios by Gallery kosmima
http://www.artmajeur.com/loumiotis/
chimaras@gmx.at

Wood Street Galleries

KURT HENTSCHLAGER

ZEE[RANGE]
October 3 - December 31, 2008

Wood Street Galleries
601 Wood Street
Pittsburgh, PA 15222
(412)471-5605

http://www.woodstreetgalleries.org

Wood Street Galleries, a project of The Pittsburgh Cultural Trust, presents the world premiere of new work by New York-based Austrian artist Kurt Hentschlager: ZEE[RANGE], October 3-December 31, 2008. In this exhibition, Hentschlager creates an immersive environment of sight and sound reflecting on the nature of human perception and the accelerated impact of new technologies on both individual and collective consciousness.

Trained as a fine artist, Hentschlager began to exhibit his work in 1983, building surreal machine-objects and then video, computer animation and sound works. Between 1992 and 2003 he worked collaboratively as a part of the duo Granular-Synthesis. Employing large-scale projected images and drone like sound-scapes, his performances confronted the viewer on both a physical and emotional level, overwhelming the audience with sensory stimulation.

Hentschlager is a recipient of numerous prizes and large scale commissions. He has represented Austria at the 2001 Venice Biennial and has shown his work internationally for two decades. Selected presentations include the Millennium Museum, Beijing; Staedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Anchorage (Creative Time), New York; MAC - Musee d’Art Contemporain, Montreal; MAK - Museum of Applied Arts, Vienna; National Museum of Contemporary Art, Seoul; Ars Electronica Festival, Linz; ICC Inter-Communication-Center, Tokyo; Fondation Beyeler, Basel; and Palacio de Bella Artes, Mexico City.

His recent performance, FEED, premiered at the 2005 Venice Theatre Biennial and is currently touring. The procedural installation ARMA/cell was commissioned in 2006 by Le Fresnoy, Studio National des Arts Contemporains, France.

ZEE
Immersive Environment
Artificial Fog, Stroboscopes, Pulse Lights and Surround Sound, 2008

ZEE is a “mind-scape” in which artificial fog and stroboscopic light fully obscure the physical installation space. Based on the research and findings with FEED, the performance, ZEE is expanding on composing with multiple interfering strobe lights amidst fog and the effects those have on a human perception and decoding apparatus: the brain. A surround sound-scape synchronizes to interference phenomena - of what could be described as a psychedelic architecture of pure light.

“The result is an immersive environment of flickering light in which the ‘real’ physical world mutates into a primordial soup of pulsing sound, mist and colored light. It is both terrifying and transportive. We are in fact physiologically experiencing ’sublime light,’ a light that is truly psychedelic. This is the world as viewed by a dying robot clone from the inside of a Turner landscape painting,” writes artist Claudia Hart in an essay on ZEE.

RANGE (World Premiere)
Range is a generative audiovisual installation fluctuating between abstract and realistic forms.

The work unfolds in an extremely limited virtual space, in which three-dimensional characters are stuck in place, with barely any room to move, appearing as one ambiguous mass. A kind of shadow play emerges, with both gradual and also abrupt changes over time, in both tone and mood. The sound track of Range, synchronizes to the visual drama and can best be described as colored drone.

An artist talk will be held on Saturday, October 4, at 1 p.m.

http://www.woodstreetgalleries.org

Wood Street Galleries
601 Wood Street
Pittsburgh, PA 15222
(412)471-5605

Nottingham
Contemporary

Evan Holloway: Capital (2005)

The Impossible Prison
31 October - 14 December

at the Police Station,
Galleries of Justice, Nottingham

http://www.nottinghamcontemporary.org

Vito Acconci, Shaina Anand, Atelier Van Lieshout, Angela Bulloch, Chris Evans, Harun Farocki, Dan Graham, Group d’Information sur les Prisons, Mona Hatoum, Thomas Hirschhorn, Evan Holloway, Ashley Hunt, Elie Kagan, Multiplicity, Bruce Nauman, Tatiana Trouvé, Artur Zmijewski

Sixteen international artists become “inmates” in The Impossible Prison, an exhibition in an abandoned police station inspired by Michel Foucault’s thoughts on power, control and surveillance.

The police station, which closed following the 1984 Miner’s Strike, is part of the Galleries of Justice, a crime museum in Nottingham. Built into the cliff that runs through the city, it houses Her Majesty’s Prison Service collection. With five subterranean floors of cells, courts and dungeons that date from 1375, it is a literal archaeology of punishment. Foucault described his own approach to history as ‘archaeological’.

The Impossible Prison is the final instalment of Histories of the Present, Nottingham Contemporary’s year-long programme of exhibitions and events in historical sites in and around Nottingham before moving into their own new building next year. Foucault has been an underlying inspiration. With The Impossible Prison his influence becomes explicit.

The exhibition spreads from two nodes: the first thematic, the second historic. The former specifically addresses prison itself (Hunt, Farocki, Zmijewski); the second is represented by three seminal figures (Acconci, Graham, Nauman) of performance, video and Conceptual art in the late 1960s and 1970s, for whom the relationship of camera to body anticipates and implicates the works’ future viewers, far exceeding video’s documentary function.

Foucault, in a communiqué on behalf of Group d’Information sur les Prisons wrote that “prison these days begins long before the prison gates”. He closes Discipline and Punish (1975) with a vision of how the ‘carceral’ disperses throughout society at the onset of the modern epoch. Bodies were forcibly redistributed and segmented in time and space, and minds were moulded through the institutional implementation of new human sciences that made ‘man’ their object. Resistance was minimised and productivity maximised through ‘technologies’ that enabled continuous surveillance.

Foucault himself is represented in the exhibition by key material related to the Group d’Information sur les Prisons (1971-72) that he co-founded and lead. Its purpose was to develop a counter-discourse on French prisons voiced by prisoners themselves. The group consisted of progressive magistrates, lawyers and social workers, ultra gauchists, ex-inmates and prisoners’ families, as well as French intellectuals including Hélène Cixous, Gilles Deleuze, Jean Genet and Jean-Paul Sartre. Elie Kagan’s visceral photographs of one day in the life of GIP, agitating at the Ministry of Justice re-invoke their struggles.

The Impossible Prison, through contributions by artists and the accompanying public programme, evokes the contemporary carceral, on both micro- and geopolitical scales, from the ‘architecture of occupation’ in the West Bank and Gaza Strip (Multiplicity; Weizman), to ubiquitous CCTV on our city streets (Anand); from the exercise of disciplinary techniques in the modern office (Hatchuel and Starkey), to the privatization and expansion of America’s ‘prison industrial complex’ (Hunt) whose population has reached a staggering two million. The range of concerns reflects the national and transnational diversity of the artists’ lives. Together they come from or live in Palestine, Mumbai, Paris, New York, Los Angeles, Beirut, Brussels, Rotterdam, Berlin, Warsaw and Milan.

These and other lines of enquiry will be developed in a cross-disciplinary programme of lectures and workshops by Armand Hatchuel (The Long Detor: Foucault’s History of Desire and Pleasure), Ashley Hunt, Lisa LeFeuvre, David Macey (The Lives of Michel Foucault), Jonathan Rée, Ken Starkey (Foucault, Management and Organisation Theory), Eyal Weizman (A Civilian Occupation: The Politics of Israeli Architecture), and Erwin James (A Life Inside: A Prisoner’s Notebook). A Reader brings together texts by Foucault, Deleuze, Macey, Hirschhorn, Farocki, LeFeuvre, Daniel Defert and Alessandro Petti.

The Impossible Prison is curated by Alex Farquharson, Director of Nottingham Contemporary.

Issue 118: Out Now

Additional exclusive content online at frieze.com

In the October issue of frieze…

Wolfgang Tillmans discusses trust, photography, politics, abstraction, success, friendship, vulnerability and art with Dominic Eichler.

James Elkins puts forward five reasons to be gloomy about the art world today and five reasons to be optimistic.

Specially commissioned artist’s projects by Matthew Brannon, Cory Arcangel & Dexter Sinister, Wolfgang Tillmans and Donelle Woolford.

Polly Staple explores Seth Price’s multi-media approach to making art, including music, writing, curating, performance, film, video – and plastic. With Price’s eight-hour audio work 8–4, 9–5, 10–6, 11–7 (2007) on Frieze.com.

Case Studies: In a new regular section frieze follows the evolution of an art work. This month: Roger Hiorns, Barbara Bloom, Jane and Louise Wilson and Marc Camille Chaimowicz.

Michael Bracewell reflects on Bridget Riley’s 50-year enquiry into colour, form and visual perception.

Brian Dillon wonders what exactly it means when we call an artist or writer a charlatan.

In the Front section, Christy Lange discusses Olafur Eliasson’s plans for his forthcoming experiment in art education, Jennifer Allen celebrates the multifarious skills of gallery assistants and Robert Storr reports from Moscow.

In ‘Ideal Syllabus’, Janice Kerbel writes about the books that have influenced her and in ‘Life in Film’ Duncan Campbell lists some of his favourite movies.

And in the Back section, 25 reviews of exhibitions from around the world.

Exclusively online at frieze.com
Videos from Focus artists Will Holder and Tania Bruguera.
Zehra Jumabhoy reports on the art scene in Bangalore.
Sam Thorne on the musical legacy of Arthur Russell, on the occasion of a new documentary and biography.
Jennifer Kabat on political pins, buttons and badges.
Eugenia Bell picks the best new design and architecture books.

Plus, the launch of the new Editors’ Blog, as well as additional reviews of current shows in London, Los Angeles, Lisbon and beyond.
………………
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