The Brussels Biennial has opened its first edition a few weeks ago. The programme is good. A bit severe but really good. However, the whole experience is laborious. The first venue we visited was so cold i almost took no picture afraid as i was to remove my gloves (Brussels i love you and that derelict Post Sorting Center was charming but if you can't afford to heat the place do consider to biennial us in the Summer next time, ok?) The second one was remarkably well hidden. Number three was a bit gloomy and the fourth venue was indicated on the Biennial map as 'the Central Station', easy peasy to locate the station but this is a big train station and where the artworks to see actually were remains a mystery to me.

It will be my pleasure to moan and curse in another post but let's focus this one on an art piece that got my attention.

Silke Wagner, Buergersteig, 2001-2002

At the beginning of 2001 Silke Wagner bought a Volkswagen-van.

During one year, the artist drove her Bürgersteig (Pavement) project to three German cities. Her budget for the project was left at the disposal of local socio-political groups to customize the vehicle according to their needs and set up various projects in public.

The third stop of the van was Frankfurt am Main. There, Wagner cooperated with the Hanau activist group kein mensch ist illegal (no-one is illegal) to comment on the practice of deporting refugees and immigrants living illegally in Germany and examine it in the framework of the process of European integration (see Lufthansa Deportation Class brochure). Lufthansa is deeply involved in the deportation process. Germany deports between 30,000 and 35,000 people each year and more than one third are taking off from Frankfurt, making it the country number one airport for deportation.

Sticker on the side of the van

The van was repainted to resemble a Lufthansa van marked with the words "Deportation Class". Different events were carried out in the bus, focusing on the deportation of refugees carried out with the help by the German airline: protests, handling of information leaflets, performances in the street, at the airport but also at a major cultural event such as the Frankfurt Book Fair. The only feature of the project brought to Brussels is the onboard radio that broadcasts the audio documentation of the project.

Lufthansa sued the artist to obtain that they stopped using the van but the airline company lost its case.

The Brussels Biennial runs until January 4, 2009.

The videos of Artur Żmijewski are screened in almost all the major collective exhibitions and biennales these days. I caught a glimpse of his video in one such events and thought 'looks interesting' but i passed my way. In front of art cornucopia, video is always the last on my list and it gets my attention only if there's a seat available for me to have nap in the dark.

But on Thursday i took the train to Utrecht to see the solo exhibition of the Polish artist at BAK, basis voor actuele kunst.

The exhibition presents "social studios," social experiments of sorts documented on film in an openly confrontational way. Think reality shows for art galleries. The artist confronts individuals to uncomfortable situations that explore complex moral issues. He then waits and films as the scenes unfold.

Artur Zmijewski, Repetition, 2005

In Repetition, 2005, Żmijewski revisits the 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment, a two-week investigation to respond to the following question: "What happens when you put good people in an evil place?" At the time, 24 undergraduates were selected to play the roles of both guards and prisoners and live in a mock prison. After six days, Philip Zimbardo was forced to end the experiment. The guards took great pleasure in exercising violence, humiliating and torturing the prisoners; the prisoners, too, lost their ability to distinguish what was real and what was simulated.

Artur Zmijewski, Repetition, 2005

Żmijewski recreated the experiment despite the fact that contemporary science would regard it too dangerous--and effective--to carry out again. Whether you catch the film right from the beginning or arrive in the middle of it, the scenes of sadism, frustration, humiliation, anger, and especially fear look way too real and instinctual, to be just a game.

Artur Zmijewski, Repetition, 2005

Repetition is more than just a mechanical representation of the 1971 undertaking. The artist removes the experiment from its scientific context and the conditions of the time and places it in today's world, to transform it into a "universal manifestation of weakness and moral failure." Besides the 7 inmates and 9 guards (all of them unemployed people without), participants included psychologists responsible of stopping everything if it turned dangerous, a former prison inmate, and a sociologist involved in prison system reforms. The experiment collapsed after only few days as the participants collectively decided to leave the prison. As Maria Hlavajova wrote in her essay for the exhibition, Can this moment of resistance be seen--in a time in which the world struggles to come to terms with Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, and the like--as a humble indication that violence, cruelty, brutality, and terror can be expunged as accepted options for creating the conditions for how to live together after all? What is sure is that the artwork raised much controversy and discussion at the time in Poland.

Apart from Repetition, several other videos can be viewed at BAK. The one i found most moving is 80064. Its title is the camp number of a 92 years old Auschwitz survivor, Jozef Tarnawa. The tattoo has faded with the years and Zmijewski meets the old man in a tattoo parlor and tries to persuade him to have it 'refreshed'.

The old man is not to be convinced easily. He wants to be left in peace. He is worried that the renewed tattoo will not be 'original.' In the end, Zmijweski gets his way and the poor man submits his arm unwillingly to the tattoo artist. In Zmijweski's own words: 'When I undertook this film experiment with memory, I expected that under the effect of the tattooing the 'doors of memory' would open, that there would be an eruption of remembrance of that time, a stream of images or words describing the painful past. Yet that didn't happen. But another interesting thing happened. Asked whether, while in the camp, he had felt an impulse to revolt, to protest against the way he was treated, Tarnawa replied: 'Protest? What do you mean, protest? Adapt - try and survive.' In the film, suffering, power relationships, and subordination are repeated.

Artur Żmijewski: The Social Studio is on view from 28 September until 16 November 2008. n view until 16 November 2008 at BAK, Lange Nieuwstraat 4, Utrecht, the Netherlands.

Related: History will repeat itself (part 1) and (part 2).

White Nightmare (Sedan Chair), 2008

Yesterday i arrived in Manhattan just on time to see the last hour of Anton Kannemeyer's solo exhibition at Jack Shainman Gallery. The title, The Haunt of Fears, comes from the 1950s EC Comics title, The Haunt of Fear, a bi-monthly horror comic from the '50s. As co-editor of Bitterkomix, the satirical comic magazine he started with Conrad Botes in 1992, Kannemeyer became known for creating a new South African brand unconcerned with hypocrisy and political correctness.

Say! If You Speak English..., 2008

Birth, 2008

The gallery presented a selection of Kannemeyer's works on paper from The Alphabet of Democracy-series, a new series entitled Cursed Paradise and drawings from recent sketch books; all of which raise extremely uncomfortable questions in the debate about racial stereotypes and South Africa cultural and socio-political landscape.

"n is for nightmare" (2008)

With The Alphabet of Democracy, the white South African artist tackles many issues politicians and journalists tent to "diplomatically" avoid. The series sharply comments on the madness below the surface of the rabidly conformist parts of white South African society, especially the Afrikaans community. Black politicians are not protected from his sarcasm either as the alphabet also targets the absurdity of some of their statements. However, some images from this series transcend satire. J is for Jack Russell, for example, shows a dog sleeping on the blanket with which its master's murdered body has been covered.

In this context, the word "democracy" becomes subversive. The liberated South African society and its form of government are shown as just another arbitrary social order fraught with moral ambiguity and human absurdity.

M is for Mugabe

R is for Rainbow nation

S is for suicide

In Pappa in Afrika, a parody of the controversial Tintin in the Congo, as a white African trapped in his own incriminating skin - a character who cannot escape his colonial past regardless of his personal political convictions. It depicts a content white man in a car driven by a black servant. A machine-gun-toting black soldier stands guard, while poor black natives watch the car filled with boxes labeled Texaco and Halliburton pass.

White Nightmare: Black Dicks

More images: Michael Stevenson and Jack Shainman Gallery.

A political party has been set up in Sweden that plans to participate to the upcoming national elections. Piratpartiet plans to remove all immaterial rights, including copyrights and patents and also hopes to stop Sweden's participation in international copyright organizations, including WIPO and WTO and to make it illegal to put any restrictions on distribution of digital content.

"Pirate Party" also aims to push even further the privacy laws and to make it illegal to track or monitor citizens' communications online and offline.

To register an official party in Sweden, they need to get 1,500 signatures to support its cause. The organization managed to gather over 4,000 signatures in first 24 hours and is in process of validating the signatures.

The party says that it is against seeing the developing world starve because the developed world refuses to share its intellectual property.

Via El Navegante, the Inquirer and Afterdawn.

Istanbul based photographer Mike Mike is working on an open source web based project called the Face of Tomorrow. His idea is that if you could make a composite of all the faces in a city right now you would be looking at the Face of Tomorrow.

In each city, he takes 100 photos of people in one specific location, divide them into male and female and from these makes a composite face to create a prototypical citizen of a place at a moment in time or at some point in the future when notions of race and individuality are less important (let's hope so, Mike!)

As the Face of Tomorrow is an open source project, anyone can send in 100 photos for Mike to composite the face of that city or place.

Each night of the RNC, Screensavers and the Thing will present the RNC Redux Open Doc Tour, a real time performance created by pulling a broad selection of the day's blog text, photos, audio, and video to mix it into a narrative of the day's events. This live, collective documentary will be generated through a gestalt remix of rich 'personal is public' content.

There are going to be thousands of people textblogging, audioblogging, videoblogging, photoblogging the RNC, most with RSS feeds and most with open content licensing.

Screensavers will use keyworx, a multi-user cross media synthesizer, to generate, synthesize and process images, sounds and text within a shared realtime environment. Then, this RNC Remix Open Doc will be projected on the streets each night from August 29 till September 2 at various locations.

The audience will be encouraged to add their stories to the mix using SMS, AOL instant messenger, webcams, etc. At the same time, the “tour feed” will be streamed to the web. Screensavers also plans to extend the collaboration with simultaneous keyworx sessions in other locations in the US and abroad including Bowling Green Ohio and Amsterdam.

From Eyebeam < del.icio.us/tag/art