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One of the rules of this blog is never to make announcements of events. Every rule comes with its exceptions... The November programme of the VASTAL workshops and lectures is out! The VivoArts School for Transgenic Aesthetics Ltd. is Adam Zaretsky and Waag Society's temporary research and education institute on Art and Life Sciences. It's free, open to the public and i hope you'll allow me to remind you how much we enjoy them: Day 1 at the VivoArts School for Transgenic Aesthetics: Seed broadcasting workshop Wednesday 11 November Body Art Lecture with performance artists: Kira O'Reilly, WARBEAR, Jeanette Groenendaal and Boryana Rossa. Thursday 12 November and Saturday 14 November Body Art Lab which, i'm told, will involve blood and sex performances in the Glove Box. "Various performance artists will be ritually cleansed and enter the glove box one or two at a time. Various performance artists take turns in the box interacting with the public or other actors reaching into them with the gloves. This is experimental Body Art with a biological theme that references experiments, lab animals, the pure and the impure as well as the distance (or presumed distance) that objectivity implies. " The Vivoarts Performance in the Glove Box, is a Mason Juday and Adam Zaretsky Production and will feature Boryana Rossa, Oleg Mavromatti, Zoot Derks, Jeanette Groenendaal and WarBear. Tuesday 17 November Animal Personality Art and Science Lecture and Lab with Dr. Kees van Oers or one of his colleagues and Koen Van Mechelen. Dr. Kees van Oers studies the genetic background, physiology and fitness consequences of variation in avian personality. In 2005 he obtained a personal VENI-grant to study the evolutionary genetics of personality using a linkage study in a natural population. This work is currently extended in collaboration with the Animal Breeding and Genomics Center in an NGI-grant on songbird genomics. Koen Vanmechelen is a Belgian conceptual artist whose work engages with issues of genetic manipulation, cloning, globalisation and multiculturalness. The artist is currently working on The Cosmopolitan Chicken project, an experiment to develop a super-hybrid chicken.
Koen Vanmechelen's The Cosmopolitan Chicken Project chickens will be installed from Nov 5 to Dec 6 at the Muziekgebouw aan het IJ in Amsterdam. Vanmechelen is also having his first solo exhibition in a U.S. gallery at Conner Contemporary Art in Washington. Featuring live chickens, the exhibition also includes taxidermy and blown-glass sculptures, video, and photography, as well as drawings and paintings in tempera made from eggs laid by chickens bred by the artist. |
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The Finnish pavilion might be smaller than most -barely the size of a container- but its location and quirkiness makes it one of my favourite in the Giardini of the Biennale. It was designed by Alvar Aalto in 1956 as a demountable wooden structure to be packed up after each Biennale. However, the wrong bolts and fasteners were shipped with it and it couldn't be dismantled. Since the city bans buildings made of wood, the fire marshals had to bend the rule. The temporary pavilion is still standing in the Giardini.
Fifty years later, firemen are entering the Finnish pavilion. Visual artist Jussi Kivi has turned the whole pavilion into a very personal "Fire & Rescue Museum". You can find all sorts of knickknacks and memorabilia he has been collecting since he was a kid: vintage extinguishers, gas masks and helmets, scale models, postcards, posters, technical firefighting literature, personal drawings, figurines and toys, boardgames and souvenirs.
Kivi 's collection gained gravitas and a new significance last year when the artist discovered the content of an abandoned Soviet underground nuclear bomb shelter in eastern Estonia. Scattered on the walls and floors were partly moldy Soviet information boards and posters presenting civil defense and fire fighting procedures before and after a nuclear fallout.
Kivi's childhood adoration for rescuers takes a darker meaning when confronted with propaganda material that warns of the threat of an attack with weapons of mass destruction.
The project's precarious position between the artist's personal need for order and safety and the disorder and chaos of the surrounding reality presents in miniature the situation we are facing in the world at large. In the safety provided by the walls of the small wooden pavilion in Giardini, designed in the period of reconstruction after WW2 by Alvar Aalto, Fire & Rescue Museum reminds both of the need of caring and the need of forecasting. If the preconditions of life at a time of world-wide environmental deterioration and widespread poverty are neglected, any rescue plans toward threats of future conflicts stand helpless.
The Venice Art Biennale runs until the 22nd of November 2009. Other artists who collect: Fabiola by Francis Alÿs, Parrworld. The Collection of Martin Parr (Part 1) and Parrworld. The Collection of Martin Parr (Part 2). |
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I'm having a fairly busy week but i promised myself i wouldn't abandon my blog as i tend to do when i'm on the road. So... quick post about an installation i was hoping to see earlier this month at Vooruit's festival Almost Cinema in Gent. Sadly, i couldn't make it to Belgium that week. But, youpiiie! Feedforward. The Angel of History, the exhibition that LABoral which opened last Thursday, gave me a second chance to finally get to see Smoke and Hot Air. Designed by Iranian artist Ali Momeni and Robin Mandel, with participation of artist Matthew Brackett, Smoke and Hot Air reflects Momeni's concern about the relentless threats that Iran has been receiving from many other countries in recent years.
The system searches for sentences including the words "attack Iran" on Google News. The sentences go through a text-to-speech synthesizer. The voice is in turn picked up by a microphone, analyzed, and translated into rhythmically corresponding smoke rings from a quartet of wooden smoke ring makers. Reflecting on the perception of countries as they are shaped by the news and media landscape, Smoke and Hot Air reverses the general view of Iran, which is frequently depicted as aggressor. The recent global support for the uprising after the 2009 Iranian election showed how quickly the general attitude towards a country can shift. Translating the news into old-fashioned smoke signals, Momeni's and Mandel's project illustrates how the complexities of national and political identity can get reduced to false impressions, deceit, and posturing.
I found the artwork particularly moving. Is simplicity can only be equaled by its efficiency and its peacefulness by the distressing political situation in the Middle East. The quiet and smoky atmosphere incites you to make a pause and reflect on the issue at stake. Also in the exhibition: Instances of Use of United States Armed Forces Abroad 1798-2006. |
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Publisher Princeton Architectural Press says: Over the last few decades, a rich and increasingly diverse practice has emerged in the art world that invites the public to touch, enter, and experience the work, whether it is in a gallery, on city streets, or in the landscape. Like architecture, many of these temporary artworks aspire to alter viewers' experience of the environment. An installation is usually the end product for an artist, but for architects it can also be a preliminary step in an ongoing design process. Like paper projects designed in the absence of "real" architecture, installations offer architects another way to engage in issues critical to their practice. Direct experimentation with architecture's material and social dimensions engages the public around issues in the built environment that concern them and expands the ways that architecture can participate in and impact people's everyday lives. The first survey of its kind,Installations by Architects features fifty of the most significant projects from the last twenty-five years by today's most exciting architects (...) Projects are grouped in critical areas of discussion under the themes of tectonics, body, nature, memory, and public space. Each project is supplemented by interviews with the project architects and the discussions of critics and theorists situated within a larger intellectual context.
You probably saw many examples of architects installations if you attended the latest Biennale of Architecture in Venice. They provide new platforms for innovative perspectives, ideas and experiments in the field of architecture. Some of these installations will remain at the experimental stage, others might later be implemented into built work. Installations, especially when temporary, enable architects to work outside the constraints dictated by clients and city regulations. The main purpose of installations is not necessarily to be useful but to generate conversations, to invite viewers to reflect on the role and essence of architecture. Installations are also vehicles for teaching and research as the Bauhaus was one of the first schools to demonstrate. Finally, young studios can find in installations a fantastic opportunity to advertise their talent.
I expected Installations by Architects: Experiments in Building and Design to be one of those fancy volumes you open to find big, glossy photos and little text to comment on them. I was expecting a beautiful book that lingers on the coffee table for your guests to admire. There are loads of images in the book indeed but there are even more essays by critics, by theorists and by the authors (Bonnemaison is an associate professor of architecture at Dalhousie University and Ronit Eisenbach is an associate professor of architecture at the University of Maryland). Architects get to give their own view as well. The book is divided into five chapters that explore a different area of discussion. Each of them is illustrated by 8 to 10 architectural installations (this post picks up one of them for each chapter): 1. Tectonics: by exploring new modes of assembly and materials, this section reminds us that architecture doesn't stop at the facade.
Mette Ramsgard Thomse's Vivisection is a spatial experiment that explores how a techtonic surface can embed a capacity for sensing and actuation. The silk and steel fabric is conductive thereby allowing the architects to pass electronic signals through it. By using antenna based sensor chips the fabric "feels" the presence of the audience. The sensors inform a network of distributed micro-computers, that in turn control the fans, inflating and deflating internal bladders in the structure. 2. Body examines the relationship between human body, spatial experience and design.
Thom Faulders covered with pink Memory Foam (as used in the earplugs that expand to fill the cavity of the ear) the floor of his Mute Room, a temporary listening environment for experimental electronic music. The foam's surface operates as a sound baffle to enhance acoustical clarity. Similar to the way that musical notes 'decay' in the air before dissipating, this surface has a transitory quality - impressions linger until fully erased by the slowly acting foam. 3. Nature might help shape a more responsible attitude towards nature.
The Prairie Ladder was commissioned by the Connemara Conservancy (Texas) to preserve, protect, and honor the prairie landscape. The ladder introduces a veritcal axis, making a departure from the natural horizontal axis of the prairie. The ladder also proclaims human defiance of the horizontal limitations of the earth. 4. Memory engages with the collective memory and its relationship with space.
Since 1960, Detroit has lost half of its population and demolished over 200,000 housing units. Kyong Park's 24620: The Fugitive House (2001-), is an abandoned house from Detroit that has been dismantled and reconstructed in several European cities. 24620 is looking for a new home in a 'kinder and gentler" city than Detroit. Europe, however, is becoming just as neo-liberal and neo-con as in the USA With its pieces misplaced and their incisions permanent, the house, when re-assembled, replicates the condition of a dysfunctional city in the violence of dismembered spaces. Wherever it may go, the house takes the ideals and failures of modernism with it, creating discourses on the cultural state and destiny of each community. 5. Public Space offers citizens new ways to inhabit or relate to the city.
Sky Ear, by Haque Design + Research, contains miniature sensor circuits that respond to electromagnetic fields, particularly those of mobile phones. When activated, the sensor circuits in the clouds co-ordinate to cause ultra-bright coloured LEDs to illuminate thousand glowing helium balloons. Related book reviews: Bright: Architectural Illumination and Light Installations, Spacecraft Fleeting Architecture and Hideouts and Ground-up City. Play as a Design Tool. Image on the homepage: land(e)scape (Savonlinna, Finlandia - 1999) by Marco Casagrande and Sami Rintala. |
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I avoid writing about artworks and exhibitions i haven't actually seen but there must be exceptions to the rule. Especially if the exception is ¿De qué otra cosa podríamos hablar? (What Else Could We Talk About?), Teresa Margolles' solo show at the Mexican Pavilion for the Venice Biennale. I read about it the day after my return from Venice. Not only did i miss it but apparently i passed by it twice. I discovered the work of Margolles last year in the exhibition Emotional Systems at the Strozzina, Florence. Her installation filled an empty room with air humidified using the water that had previously been used to wash the corpses of people found dead in the street and brought to public mortuaries in Mexico City. For the Biennale, the artist left the morgue where she had located her studio to explore the urban territory, in search of material traces and residues of the street crimes.
The Mexican press reports that in 2008, over 5.000 people were killed due to violent clashes and executions among criminal gangs, and in operations of the security forces in the country. Approximately 2.800 died in similar circumstances in 2007. Margolles and her assistants went to the scenes of the executions and soaked pieces of cloth with the mud or blood they found there, they collected fragments of windshield glass after a shooting, they also copied narcomensajes -the messages left by drug lords over the corpses of beheaded victims.
The artist transferred the substances of so much sufferings, violence and social waste into the Palazzo Rota-Ivancich, a Sixteenth Century Venetian Palace located near Piazza San Marco. Just like the exhibition in Florence, the show requires you to pay extra attention. At first, all you see is jewellery, embroidery, wet pieces of fabrics drying on the wall and maybe you'll arrive when someone is cleaning the floor of the exhibition room. You might even pass by one of the flags that hang over the canal and ignore it.
The jewels, however, were made with fragments of windshield glass (Ajuste de Cuentas). The gold embroidery on fabric are copies of narcomensajes - "Hasta que caigan todos tus hijos" ("Until all your sons have fallen"), "Así terminan las ratas" ("This is the way rats end"). The flag is dyed with the blood found on the site of shootings and decapitations (Bandera.) And then of course there's that disturbing smell... Every afternoon, someone cleans the marble floors of the Palazzo with a mop dipped in water mixed with the blood found on the site of murders committed during the drug wars in Northern Mexico. How long will traces of it remain on the sole of your shoes?
In a time where borders are no more able to contain the plague, when politics are mobilized by the ideological uses of fear, and where global capital is accompanied by a whole epidemic of violence, What else could we talk about? would want to suggest the need to politicize discontent and disgust, rather than falling prey of the strategies of a new world order erected over the ruins of the perpetual wars and infinite crusades of the powers to be, concludes curator Cuauhtémoc Medina in her statement. The works presented at the Mexican Pavilion make tangible to a foreign audience the vicious circle of prohibition, addiction, accumulation, poverty, hatred and repression that transmogrifies the transgresive pleasures and puritan obsessions of the North into the South as Hell.
Related: Emotional Systems, at the Strozzina in Florence. |
