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Encastrable is a series of guerrilla art residencies held inside gardening and DIY megastores in the Paris area. The project, which i discovered it while i was visiting the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs (ENSAD) in Paris a few weeks ago, was initiated by Paul Souviron and Antoine Lejolivet.
At no cost at all, the young artists have at their disposal a huge array of material that they can grab, move, superimpose, and organize onto temporary installations and sculptures. Authorization of the manager of the establishment is obviously never requested. |
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Anyone who ever asked me what to do in Paris has heard me rave endlessly about the Palais de Tokyo. That place makes other contemporary art museums and galleries look 'ringard', outdated and out of touch. The Palais is open from noon to midnight. An entrance won't entitled you to a 2 euros discount on a hefty glossy catalog. No, Sir, when you buy your ticket you are handed out a magazine with all the info you need to visit the exhibition and go further in the discovery once you're back home.
The ongoing exhibition, GAKONA, is set under the aegis of Nikola Tesla and its name refers to a village in Alaska. Little more than 200 inhabitants live in Gakona. There's a service station, a small school, a post office, a couple of diners and a scientific research base: the High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program.
The researchers at the HAARP are studying the transmission of electricity in the uppermost portion of the atmosphere. But because of its military funding and the fears associated with electromagnetism, HAARP is surrounded by a cloud of controversy. Its forest of antennas has been accused of beaming electromagnetic waves that are extremely hazardous to human health, of disrupting climate, of having all sorts of influence on human behaviour and of being weapons able to disrupt communications over large portions of the planet. Made up of 4 solo exhibition (but only 6 artworks) by Micol Assaël, Ceal Floyer, Laurent Grasso and Roman Signer, GAKONA oscillates between fact and rumors, science and imagination.
The icon of the show is Parapluies (umbrellas) by Roman Signer. Two Tesla coils charge up, approx. 5 minutes later an alarm sounds and a blast of electricity spectacularly lights up between the extremities of the umbrellas. I'm not going to delve on this one, have a look at this video or this one instead.
Now Haarp, by Laurent Grasso, is a sculpture clearly inspired by the aforementioned program, not only does it look like its model but its potential effects are invisible as well: are there waves passing through the antennas? Are they harmful? Should we be worried? How real is this?
Chizhevsky Lessons, by Micol Assaël, is a gigantic generator of static electricity. The name of the artwork refers to Alexander Chizhevsky, a scientist who explored the correlation between solar activity and historical events such as wars and revolutions. Right before being allowed to approach the installation, you are warned that people wearing pacemakers or hearing aid and pregnant women should not go any further, advised that you should "avoid touching other visitors' faces, especially the eyes" and promised that the work would "load the body with static electricity." Thank you very much! What visitors experience is the unpleasantness of static electricity re-created artificially with a cascade generator, a transformer, copper plates, and wires that fill the space with negatively charged ions. The discharge only occurs when touching an object or person oppositely charged. Although the installation is not dangerous it definitely invites visitors to step out of their safety zone and explore uncontrollable physical, emotional and psychological experiences.
GAKONA is on view until May 3 at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris. |
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All i knew about Jordi Colomer before entering his solo show at Le Jeu de Paume in Paris was his Anarchitekton series, i was prepared for the absurd. I didn't know the absurd could make so much sense. Colomer's video installations focus on the contemporary city and in particular on the influence of urbanism on human behaviour. They toy with fake actors in real situations, fictions set in barren landscapes, artificial spaces, urban simulacra and architectural narratives. Behind their humour and irony, his productions never fail to reveal us something about the sociological and psychological dimensions of his subjects.
Colomer's aesthetics and architectural explorations pervade the whole exhibition. The videos are screened onto wooden panels, or in some makeshift structures, there is a battered trailer in the middle of one of the exhibition rooms and a mix-match of what looks like second-hand chairs are aligned against the walls.
Pozo Almonte, a body of works which was produced for the Paris exhibition, is a moving trip to one of the few surviving mining towns exploiting saltpetre (potassium nitrate) in the Atacama desert in Chile. Instead of documenting what was left of the mining activity, the artist went to the cemetery and photographed its constructions. Each of them looks like a small house that redresses the builders' meagre resources with inventiveness and personal creativity. Architecture without architects at its best. As Colomer explains: The cemetery is a sort of parallel city, well and truly alive, and full of thoroughly terrestrial little houses. It is an area shared by the living and the dead, where the latter seem to be merely on holiday. And yet this family architecture also looks like the decor of another world...
The Pope's protective vehicle, the Popemobile, is an icon that has traveled all over the world. Says Colomer: I wanted to put this highly meaningful image back into the street − in three-dimensional form but disencumbered of its Vatican pomp, with the nakedness of a prototype − so as to record the reactions of passers-by. The Popemobile's sacred dimension being already somewhat slight, it was chiefly a matter of desecrating its spectacular side and leaving only the bare bones. It was first and foremost a pretext for portraying a heterogeneous group of people, conjuring up a setting, creating a situation and just letting things happen... What kind of people were going past at noon on that summer day in 2005 in the fast-evolving area of Barcelona that lies along Diagonal Avenue in the Poble Nou district?
En la Pampa is an attempt to find whether there is a place on earth that can 'resist fiction'. A man and a woman, chosen because they are not actors, are left free to perform all sorts of activities and discussions in the Atacama desert in Chile. Viewers quickly realize that the mere presence of the camera turns the experiment into a fiction that contaminates the desert itself.
Anarchitekton is a series of videos produced over two years and starring a quizzical personage called Idroj Sanicne. The films shows him cavorting around Barcelona, Brasilia, Osaka and Bucharest, brandishing cardboard models of buildings that are visible in the background. By doing so he stretches the boundaries of architecture, highlights its 'backdrop' character, drags reality into fiction and gains the attention of passersby in the process. Sanicne's performance evokes moments of angry protests, popular parades but also religious processions.
The work of Jordi Colomer is on view at Le Jeu de Paume in Paris until January 4, 2009. |
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In the mid '70s, a group of young photographers were studying at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. Their professors were Bernd and Hiller Becher, a couple who had gained fame for taking sharp b&w photographs of industrial archetypes long before it was fashionable to do so. The Becher took pictures like passionate and determined collectors, treating images of water towers, grain elevators, warehouses and other industrial buildings as if they were butterflies that had to be aligned with the utmost care in a catalog. They portrayed the mundane with an unprejudiced and clinical eye.
You might have heard of some of the students, they are among today's most successful photographers. Actually one of them is said to be the highest-priced photographer alive. While sharing the same tutors at the department of the photography, Andreas Gursky, Candida Höfer, Axel Hütte, Thomas Ruff, Thomas Struth and others have adopted a more personal vision and applied new technical possibilities to the neutral method professed by the Bechers. As a result, their respective artistic paths are exposing greater contrasts than similarities. An exhibition currently running at Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (which has the least modern website a museum of modern art can dream of) retraces the short and inspiring story of what came to be called the Dusseldorf School of Photography . Objectivités: La Photographie à Düsseldorf presents some 160 works that gives a spectacular overview of the breadth of the photography department of the Kunstakademie from the early 1970s to today.
Before turning her lens to sumptuous interiors devoid of any human life, Candida Höfer portrayed the Turkish community living and working in the Germany of the '70s. She would photograph them in their shops, street gatherings or enjoying a family picnic in the park, letting them pose as if for a family album. It was one of my favourite body of works but i haven't been able to find much images online. It is extremely surprising to see how Höfer broke away from the intimate portrays of the Turkish Gastarbeiter (guest workers) to photograph grandiose libraries, museums and other public places, with wow effects, lavish colours but not a single living soul in sight.
Laurenz Berges found fame with his photographies of empty constructions as well. First he documented abandoned Russian barracks, back in the early '90s after the Red Army had left the East of Germany.
The artist now dedicates his work to the ghost villages of the Rhenish brown coal area, a region between Cologne and Aachen abandoned by whole communities who had to relocate because of the advancing open-cast mining. Berges' photographs speak of private lives while having a broader, more social relevance.
Petra Wunderlich pays a more direct homage to the neutrality rule set by her tutors Bernd and Hiller Becher. In 1994, she started to document religious buildings in New York. The frontal view makes the buildings even flatter than they already are, the b&w is made more dispassionate by the absence of any human figure and most of the time only the writings on the facade indicate that these are places of worship. In fact, her images reveal that many local synagogues have been converted into Buddhist temples or Baptist churches, while others have been torn down and a few restored (via).
Ursula Schulz-Dornburg Bus Stops in Armenia (1997 / 2004) pictures dignified people waiting for public transport vehicles to stop by what is often an inadequate shelter.
Thomas Struth gives even more importance to the people in the picture. They become involuntary actors and the setting almost anecdotical. The Museum Photographs series portrays groups of sluggish tourists in shorts, t-shirts and a camera around the neck as they wander around museums. The master pieces behind the visitors are reduced to wallpapers.
Andreas Gursky might be one of the very few artists who, through manipulations, manage to re-invent historical landmarks like the Chartres Cathedral. One of the minuscule silhouettes at the bottom of the photo is none other than movie director Wim Wenders.
To make stunning Kamiokande, the artist traveled to an underground neutrino observatory in Japan. 1000 meters under the surface of the earth, a tank containing 50,000 tons of ultra-pure water and surrounded by over eleven thousands golden photomultiplier tubes keeps watch for supernovas in our galaxy. You could almost miss two tiny figures in lab uniforms standing on their inflatable rafts. Just like the picture of the Chartres Cathedral, Kamiokande is far more impressive in large-format.
Thomas Ruff leads the genre to more audacious abstractions, in particular with his jpegs series. Over the past decades, we've seen pastoral landscapes and tragic disasters alike succumb to digitization. Their passage through a computer leaves its imprint on our collective memory. But no matter how many photos, we don't get any more critical or conscious of what lays before our eyes.
Ruff turns JPEGs culled from the web into abstract works using digital technology. The JPEGs are enlarged to gigantic scale. Seen from close view, the exaggerated pixel patterns leave the image nearly unrecognizable, they acquire an Impressionist patina. The viewer has to stop and take their time to enjoy it, they must watch the images in close-up, mid-range and from far away to fully appreciate them. On view at the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris through January 4, 2009. They have a tiny photo gallery. Photo on homepage: Bernd and Hilla Becher, (Blast Furnace) Neuves Maisons, Lorraine, France, 1971. |
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The Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin in Paris is going all Lolita manga with an exhibition of Mr.'s recent art works. Part of the Superflat movement, heralded by Takashi Murakami, Mr. is showing a series of works that show the girly side of otaku culture.
Five Candy Candy-eyed school girls are declined over paintings, photography and video. Wearing pastel-coloured military outfits, they are busy hiding and taking fight position on the battle ground. They carry heavy guns adorned with kawaii little animals and heart shapes. They are Team Rabbit. Once a week they play capture-the-flag 'survival games' while the rest of their school mates might be busy playing tennis or trading their underwear.
The 30 minute film -a new media for Mr- Nobody Dies was inspired by Mr.'s 2007 painting It hurts when it hits bare skin. The short propels the five teenagers into movement. The first seconds of the screening are nails scratching on a black board. My head was screaming 'Please, please! Could you please stop being caricature of Japanese teenage girls?' But then what do i know? I've never spoken much with any Japanese teenager. Still, i quickly got over that moment of total irritation and enjoyed the syrupy plot, the colours so bright they remained glued on your retina for the rest of the day and the softest form of violence i had ever seen. I took a few pictures for you: Related story: Chiho Aoshima, Mr. and Aya Takano in Lyon. The exhibition Nobody Dies is running until January 10th, 2009 at |
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Bonjour les enfants! I've seen the Sacré-Cœur for the first time in my life. Been to Paris countless time but it was the first time i went in that neighbourhood. Not to visit the basilica. Non, non but because it's very close from the Galerie Paul Frèches which is currently showing the series 4/7: Slavoutich by French photographer Guillaume Herbaut.
This is the fourth section of a work of seven dedicated to the Chernobyl tragedy and it focuses on Slavoutich (or Slavutych in Ukraine), a model city purposefully built to host the personnel of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant and their families, evacuated from the abandoned city of Pripyat. However, the city appears to be also contaminated. It is after all located only 50 km away from the scene of the disaster.
The pictures quietly reveal the everyday life of a city "born" from a technological disaster, its inhabitants living under the constant threat of a poisoned nature. Here is the text that accompanies the photo series: April 26, 1986: Block N° 4 of the Chernobyl nuclear power station explodes. A 30 kilometres zone around the reactor is evacuated, including Pripiat, the city built to house the power station's workforce. Like Pripiat, Slavoutich is constructed as a model city: situated in the middle of a forest, its 22 000 inhabitants live in detached houses with private gardens or in large flats. The streets are clean, the shops are inexpensive. There are no power cuts or heating shortages. A television station broadcasts daily bulletins concerning the power station. As construction reached completion, the authorities discovered that this region is also contaminated. December 2001: The Chernobyl power station is closed definitely. Of the 12 000 workers, 9000 will be made redundant. More images on Paris-art and Oeil Public.
The exhibition runs until Dec. 20, 2008 at the Galerie Paul Frèches in Paris. |
