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This is not going to be my favourite project by Wafaa Bilal (and you know how much i like his work) but if tattoo is what it take to get people's attention on the issue then he has my full support. Whether he becomes the target of a paintball machine that could be triggered by any keyboard across the world or whether he hacks his way into an al-Qaida game to play the role of a suicide bomber, Bilal knows better than many artists or activists how to drag people out of what he calls "their comfort zone" and make them face issues they might otherwise not be willing to engage with. His latest project addresses the issue of the invisibility of Iraqi civilian deaths during the war. Wafaa Bilal's brother Haji was killed by a missile at a checkpoint in their hometown of Kufa, Iraq in 2004. Bilal feels the pain of both American and Iraqi families who've lost loved ones in the war, but the deaths of Iraqis like his brother are largely invisible to the American public. ...and Counting addresses this double standard as Bilal submits his body to a 24-hour live performance. His back will be tattooed with a borderless map of Iraq covered with one dot for each Iraqi and American casualty near the cities where they fell. The 5,000 dead American soldiers are represented by red dots (permanent visible ink), and the 100,000 Iraqi casualties are represented by dots of green UV ink. During the performance people from all walks of life read off the names of the dead.
The performance will take place at the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts in New York on March 8th at 8pm. Bilal is asking visitors to donate $1 which will go to the group Rally for Iraq, to fund scholarships for Americans and Iraqis who lost parents in the war. Previously: Positions in Flux - Panel 1: Art goes politics - Wafaa Bilal, Book Review - Shoot An Iraqi, Art, Life and Resistance Under the Gun and A few words with Wafaa Bilal. |
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New York-based Lebanese artist Walid Raad AKA The Atlas Group has been one of my favorite artists ever since I saw his work at Documenta 11 back in 2002. His technique of taking a grain of history and constructing elaborate narratives around it works extremely well, especially when talking about the often painful history of Lebanon and its civil war. Raad's work moves effortlessly between the factual and the poetic while maintaining one of the sharpest political edges in contemporary art. His recent show at Paula Cooper Gallery in Chelsea, NY was titled Things I Could Disavow: A History of Art in the Arab World. It reflected on the the recent emergence of a new infrastructure for the visual arts in the Arab world, something that Raad himself has been affected by. Accordingly, in one of the pieces, his own body of work becomes the subject of a narrative in which an exhibition of The Atlas Group shrunk. Interestingly, many texts about the show refer to it as a stage for a play to be acted out and Raad has given performative lectures in this setting at various occasions. In those lectures, he quotes from Jalal Toufic's The Withdrawal of Tradition Past a Surpassing Disaster, an essay about the famous opening sequence of Alain Resnais' Hiroshima Mon Amour. Toufic writes that after an event like Hiroshima or the Lebanese civil war, a whole tradition could possibly vanish and Raad suggests that it might be the task of art to "acknowledge and reveal this withdrawal, reflecting the absence of a living being, as mirrors do in vampire movies". These are some of the pieces from the show, accompanied by excerpts of the labels which appear to be as much part of the work as everything else:
This work is based on the names of artists who worked in Lebanon in the past century. In 2002, artists from the future sent me these names by way of telepathy and/or thought insertion and/or using a future technology. That same year, I displayed the names in Beirut in white vinyl letters on a white wall. Due to a telepathic and/or thought-insertion and/or technical glitch, one name (at least) seems to have reached me in distorted form and was misspelled. Johnny Tahan. It was corrected in red pencil by an unsympathetic critic, a self appointed guardian of Lebanese art and artists. I spent the last seven years researching the misspelled artist's life and works, after which I concluded that future artists intentionally distorted Tahan's name. They were not hailing past "artists" and their works but the color red in the critic's hand-written corrections.
Walid must have sensed that what drew me to his installation was not his work and even less Farroukh's paintings. He must have sensed that I was literally after the shadows that shaped his walls and captions. And that in this regard, I didn't need his permission because these shadows move independently of Sadek's will, and are prone to irrupting here and there, in forms other than shadows.
Between 1989 and 2004, I worked on a project titled The Atlas Group. It consisted of photographs, videotapes and sculptures made possible by the Lebanese wars of the past few decades. In 2005 I was asked to exhibit this project for the first time at the Sfeir-Semler Gallery, the first of its kind white cube space in Beirut. [...] When I went to the gallery to inspect my exhibition, I was surprised to find that all my artworks had shrunk. I decided to display them in a space befitting their new dimensions.
It is also clear that these wars affected colors, lines, shapes and forms. [...] I expected such colors, lines, shapes and forms to hide in paintings, sculptures, films, photographs and drawings. I thought that artworks would be their most hospitable hosts. I was wrong. Instead, they took refuge in Roman and Arabic letters and numbers; in circles, rectangles and squares; in yellow, blue and green. They dissimulated as fonts, covers, titles, indices; as the graphic lines and footnotes of books; as letters, dissertations and catalogues; as diagrams and spreadsheets; as budgets and price lists. They planted themselves inside frames that circulated not front and center but on the periphery of Lebanon's cultural landscape. Bigger images. |
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Ayah Bdeir is a media artist, engineer and interaction designer whose work I've been following her work for a few years from the time she was graduating from MIT Media Lab. She is now an artist fellow at Eyebeam in New York. Her most recent project aims to contribute to the democratization of technology and the explosion of creativity by challenging black-boxed technology but also our absent-minded consumption of all things new, pre-packaged and electronic. littleBits is a growing library of preassembled circuit boards, made easy by tiny magnets. All logic and circuitry is pre-engineered, so you can play with electronics without knowing electronics. Tiny magnets act as connectors and enforce polarity, so you can't put things in the wrong way. And all the schematics will be shared under an opensource license so you can download, upload, suggest new bits and hopefully see them come to life. I went to see the littleBits exhibition while i was in New York, the bits and pieces looked like precious candies in a square glass frame, the way littleBits works seems indeed to be very accessible even for clichés like me who need assistance when the light bulb is burnt out. But that doesn't mean i don't have questions for Ayah:
Part of the reason why the version1 of littleBits took time to come out is that we wanted to really focus on making a solid platform that's extendable. the littleBits have 3 lines, a power line, a signal line and a ground line, and a huge amount of things we can think of at this time can somehow fit into the platform. The main trick is to think in terms of interaction design. For every new module, we think: what are the behaviors we would need the module to do? and we pre-program the module to do those behaviors, providing some ability to control (buttons, switches knobs, etc). However, of course, some modules will be too complex or big to be able to get away with interaction design in order to embody their experience . For example so far, i am not sure how to develop a useful multitouch screen.
How do you imagine to spread littleBits around? Would you sell them in kits or organize workshops and invite people to design and craft their own based on your experience? Both. Right now the starter kit is for sale, and soon more advanced and extended kits will be available, and also individual bits. But also, more importantly i would like to organize workshops where we give the littleBits to people and ask them to make something, and see how people with different interests and backgrounds interpret the idea of 'geeky fun'. Eventually we are going to set up a littleBits gallery online where people can post their creations and show off their stuff. I'm also hoping that a community will form around littleBits. People who suggest their own modules, who design them, who make them, who buy them, hopefully they can spread the word and bring them into their work and play places. It started a little, we had over 500 people on our mailing list before the bits were even ready.
Even if littleBits makes prototyping easier, most people still need to know the basics about how electrical systems work. Is that something that the project addresses as well? A lot of these issues, we try to address that through design. i worked with Luma Shihab-Eldin who did all graphics for littleBits to come up with a way to explain electronic circuits in an easy way. For example: the bits are divided into 4 categories, with each category represented by a color (see attachment): Power (magenta), Input (blue), Output (green) and Wire (orange). And the instructions tell you, to make a circuit you need one magenta, at least one green and then blue and orange are optional. Also, as i was saying above, we are looking at electronic modules as if they were electronic appliances. Just like a blender has 3 modes and 3 buttons to control speed of the motor, some littleBits have controls on the board, a potentiometer to adjust length of time (pulse module), a switch to determine direction of rotation (dc motor module), etc.
So like electronic appliances, most functions are pre-programmed. But eventually if people want to do more sophisticated things with electronics, they have to learn. we are hoping with littleBits will make electronics sexy, and when you see how empowering it is, then you will want to learn more, as opposed to thinking it's too hard and boring.
Why did you chose magnets? is it simply because magnets are 'fun' as your video says? The idea for magnets came from a very unusual place. i was doing another project with electronic panties from syria (www.haniyassecrets.com). And in one of them, the panty was held up by an electro magnet, that was remote controlled. So at the time Jeff Hoefs and I were struggling to find tiny, polarized connectors but still be easy to assemble (as opposed to molex connectors etc), and then it hit me: Magnets! magnets are electrically conductive, easy to put together, and will litterally prevent you from connecting littleBits the wrong way no matter how hard you try. The fun part was just an added bonus.
What are the next steps for the project? The immediate next step is maker faire. I will be going to maker faire in San Mateo on may 30th and 31st and selling the littleBits starter kit and trying to present them to talk to people and get feedback. then the next step is to focus on developing a strong web platform for people to share littleBits ideas and schematics through. And after that to do workshops, try to test littleBits out in high schools and design schools, and see how that goes. Of course, along the way, always to continue to develop new modules! Thanks Ayah! Also by Ayah Bdeir: SP4M. D0 Y OU SWA1LOW? and random search. |
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Last Thursday was my merry day walking around Chelsea art galleries. Here's a tiny selection of what i saw: Hords of young guys snapping happy the Gary Taxali's paintings and sculptures at Jonathan LeVine Gallery.
Van de Weghe Fine Art attracted a radically different public with sculptures by Duane Hanson. The exhibitions begin with Hanson's work from the early '70s, when he channeled the overtly political slant of his '60s art into a focus on the more subtle, but no less powerful intrigue of plain, everyday people. Hanson portrays middle-class America in a seemingly harsh way but there seem to be a lot of compassion under the realism of each details. The people who were visiting the show while i was there were, strangely, the mirror of Hanson's sculpted men and women. Only more groomed and with probably much higher incomes.
The blockbuster of the moment is Adel Abdessemed's "RIO" at David Zwirner. Among the sculptures, drawings, photographs, and videos on shows, the installation that stands out is an airplane wreckage twisted and turned to resemble entangled worms. The short films of hideous dog fights didn't seem to provoke as much fuss as the videos currently on show at the Fondazione Rebaudengo in Turin.
Jack Shainman Gallery is showing arresting and very moving photos by Zwelethu Mthethwa. Mthethwa documents domestic life, labor, the environment, and landscape in South Africa and neighboring countries. His work challenges the conventions of both Western documentary work and African commercial studio photography, marking a transition away from presenting Africa and Africans as the visually exotic and diseased, employing a fresh approach distinguished by his use of scale, color, composition, and his collaboration with his subjects. Drawing from the history of portraiture and photojournalism, Mthethwa's works often comment on gender roles and raise consciousness around issues related to post-apartheid South African society and globalization.
Richard Woods' solo exhibition, The Nature Show, graphically re-designs the whole interior of Perry Rubenstein Gallery. Covering the gallery floors with the cartoonish line drawings of flowers from his Floral repeat series on a vivid orange background, Woods' signature wood panel logo series wraps the gallery walls floor to ceiling. A new series called Song Thrush of what the artist calls "reversed repeat tiles" flank the window walls facing the street. The installation also features a selection of Woods' paintings, created with household paint on panels made from leftover floorboards inlayed into raw plywood. These paintings have been integrated into the artists practice in the last few years and are integral to his process.
In 1962 Leonard Freed went to Berlin to photograph the construction of the wall. While there he saw an African American soldier standing in front of the wall and it struck him that at home in the United States, African Americans were struggling for civil rights and in Germany an African American soldier was proudly defending the USA--the same country denying him his rights. When Freed returned, he traveled to New York, Washington, D.C. and all throughout the South, capturing images of a segregated and racially-entrenched society. The Black in White America exhibition is on view at Bruce Silverstein.
Fuzzy Logic, at Cueto Project, features Nicolas Darrot's quirky mechanical marionettes. I'm still wondering whether i liked them or not. As you approach its cage, a parrot with its skull connected to a disproportionate brain explains the logic behind its imprisonment. Nearby, a skeleton plays the guitar and dances on a horse while a shaman with more hair than face spits out excitedly all sorts of strange noises.
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Yesterday i've determinedly coughed my way to Brooklyn and been rewarded by two fantastic exhibitions. The first one, and probably the most photogenic, is Casual Conversations in Brooklyn at Black & White Project Space. The work, created by Alina & Jeff Bliumis, is an anthropological inquiry into Brooklyn's immigrant communities. Confronted by a radically different reality these new Americans are bound together by pursuing their American dreams and searching for new identities reflective of their new lives. How does one retain cultural roots while creating a new identity?
The indoor section of Casual Conversations in Brooklyn project consists of a series of sculptural objects, photographs, video and sound work inspired by public dialogues conducted by the artists in the Brighton Beach community of Brooklyn. For one of these artistic interventions, the duo (who come from Belarus and Moldova) asked people shopping in a Russian-language bookstore to share their American Dream by writing it with a magic marker on a "thought bubble". They photographed their answers.
One of these pictures was turned into a huge graffiti made in astroturf that graces the courtyard of the gallery. The artists chose to use artificial grass as a metaphor for "greener pastures," the search for which entices people to migrate. A few steps away, Pierogi Gallery has dedicated a show to Ward Shelley's time-line drawings: Who Invented the Avant-Garde - and other half-truths. The paintings are aesthetically gripping, i just wish i knew American art history better to be able to fully appreciate their content.
Among the paintings exhibited: The eponymous artwork in the show explores and interprets the history of the Avant Garde. Downtown Body dissects 100 years of art and bohemianism in downtown New York. In addition to the visual arts, lines trace theater, music, and literature, graphically depicting the Rise of the Scene and the explosion of interdisciplinary work as a network of intersecting veins and organs. Matrilineage is a celebration of American woman painters. Casual Conversations in Brooklyn closes on June 14 and Who Invented the Avant Garde (and other half-truths) ends on May 17, 2009. |
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There's a remarkable exhibition running for just a couple more days at the Pratt Manhattan Gallery. Broadcast explores the ways in which artists since the late 1960s have engaged, critiqued, and inserted themselves into official channels of broadcast television and radio. I wish i could find the time to write a more comprehensive post about it. Instead, i'll just mention the piece i found most interesting:
For Search, Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle transformed a monumental bullfight ring in Tijuana into a radio telescope complete with an antenna and a large reflector dish that would search for signs of aliens from outer space. The signals picked up by the telescope created a "white noise" that the artist broadcast to the Tijuana region on pirate FM radio. Realized some 100 feet away from the U.S. border, Search comments also on the constant search along the border for 'aliens' of a more terrestrial kind. Rhizome has a nice write-up of the exhibition. |
