Part of Thomas Demand's wonderful show Nationalgalerie, "Haltestelle" (2009) is a very recent work, as usual a large-scale photograph of a life-size paper model resembling a space of cultural significance. In this case it is a nondescript rural German bus shelter, which happens to be the place just outside of Magdeburg where the teen pop band Tokio Hotel were waiting for their school bus every morning.

Now this is what I've been told about what happened: due to the band's huge popularity with teenagers, the shelter soon became somewhat of a favourite destination to worship the band, much to the annoyance of the local residents who had to cope with a torrent of emo kids rolling in from all directions on a daily basis. They came up with the idea of removing the shelter and putting it up on eBay, somewhat unsuccessfully. Soon after they realized that, due to their limited pocket money, Tokio Hotel's fans would not be able to purchase an item like this in one piece. In a slight iteration of the plan they sawed it apart and offered the pieces on eBay, this time to much greater success.

What is interesting about this piece is that to some extent it mirrors Demand's own way of working in the way that the residents took advantage of the connotation of an object in the collective memory and used that to produce a new object (or pieces in their case) in its own right.

A text accompanying the exhibition says "Thomas Demand's works test our reception of visual media and explore their influence on the structures of our memory, [he] conducts experiments in visual culture which centre around the questions of whether and to what extent a society's appearance is condensed and concentrated in individual key images as well as being retained in people's minds and remembered through such key images."

The show, situated in Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's Neue Nationalgalerie close to Berlin's Potsdamer Platz features about 35 works, each reflected in a text by Botho Strauss. Runs through January 17th 2010.

Feedforward. The Angel of History, a compelling exhibition that opened a few weeks ago at LABoral in Gijón, addresses the current moment in history where the wreckage of political conflict and economic inequality is piling up, while globalized forces--largely enabled by the "progress" of digital information technologies--inexorably feed us forward. The exhibition title references Paul Klee's watercolor Angelus Novus. Walter Benjamin saw it as depicting "the angel of history" transfixed by the wreckage of the past that is accumulating in front of him while being propelled into the uncertain future by progress.

View of the exhibition space: upstairs

Curated by Steve Dietz and Christiane Paul, the show explores a 21st century made of deep inequalities, complex tensions and a general feeling of instability. Can we count on the media to reflect accurately the political and cultural landscape? Are the media addressing and monitoring the disturbances that surround us? Or are they instead accomplice to the situation?

View of the exhibition space: downstairs

If the media do not do what we expect from them, can art step in? Which kind of role can artists play in this scenario? Is providing feedback to what they observe enough? Shouldn't we instead hope that they will adopt a more "feed-forward" attitude and inspire greater awareness and collective reaction?

The 29 artworks on show do not pretend to provide all the answers nor to cover the full spectrum of the dilemmas and tensions of our time but they explore them under many different angles. The art pieces are distributed according to five themes. One of them investigates the "wreckage" of the 21th century created by conflicts, corruption, economical inequalities, terrorism and corporatism.

Proyecto Coche: excavando el final del siglo XX. Image Barbara Fluxá

Proyecto Coche explores the wreckage quite literally. A few years ago, Barbara Fluxá discovered a Seat 127 car in the Nalón River, Asturias. Together with an archaeologist she excavated the car and documented its removal, conservation and transformation into a beautifully polished debris.

The car's specific re-discovery parallels the dawning realization of the automobile's unsustainable cultural role at the beginning of the 21st century. After the exhibition, the car will be abandoned yet again, this time at a scrap yard where it will be dismantled for re-use. Proyecto Coche is part of a series of projects that focuses on material culture as a reflection of consumer society.

Baghdad In No Particular Order, Paul Chan, photograph 2003

Baghdad in No Particular Order consists of footage that Paul Chan shot when visiting Baghdad in 2002 as a member of Voices in the Wilderness, a group formed to nonviolently challenge the economic warfare being waged by the US against the people of Iraq. The video essay of life in Baghdad shows Iraqis engaged in everyday activities. The images are almost shockingly banal. They shows Iraqis in their homes, at work, among friends, in places of worship. It's the daily, unthreatening life newspaper don't show us. Six year after the beginning of the war, Chan's film amplifies awareness of the damage inflicted on human lives. The people that appear in the movie have survived the first Gulf War. They've been dragged into another war, into oppression and occupation. Are they still alive today?

Another theme explored by the exhibition is the countermeasures of surveillance and repression that the state as well as global capital set up in an to attempt to maintain control and clean up or minimize the wreckage.

DMSP 5B/F4 from Pyramid Lake Indian Reservation (military Meteorological Satellite; 1973-054A), 2009. © Trevor Paglen

Trevor Paglan's Limit Telephotography photo series uses high powered telescopes to picture US government "black" sites and spy satellites. Paradoxically his images deepen the secrecy of their subject rather than uncover it. Limit-telephotography most closely resembles astrophotography, a technique that astronomers use to photograph objects that might be trillions of miles from Earth. Paglen's subjects are much closer but also even more difficult to photograph. To physical distance, one has indeed to add the obstacle of informational obfuscation.

To be continued...

FEEDFORWARD - The Angel of History is on view until April 5, 2010 at Laboral Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial in Gijón, Spain.

Publisher Phaidon says: This is the first book to explore mechanics, light, graphics, robotics, networks, virtual reality and the possibilities afforded by the web from an international perspective. It outlines the importance of figures previously neglected by art history, including engineers, technicians, and collaborators. Included are works by over 150 artists, both familiar - Jenny Holzer, Bruce Nauman, James Turrell, Mario Merz - as well as emerging and recent pioneers, such as Robert Lazzarini, Blast Theory, Granular Synthesis, Simon Penny, Marcel.li Antunez Roca, Mikami Seiko, and Jonah Bruckner-Cohen. The book is divided into seven thematic sections arranged chronologically. Art and Electronic Media is a lucid, accessible, and authoritative evaluation of continually developing media.

As part of the THEMES AND MOVEMENTS series, Art and Electronic Media is intended for uninitiated readers and scholars alike. They include a complete overview of each theme or movement, situating individual artists' work in the context of modern art. Each book contains documents including artists' statements; interviews; manifestos; project notes; reviews and articles by key critics; and parallel texts from other cultural, philosophical, and literary sources. Also featured are approximately 250 plates, including rarely-published installation shots and preliminary drawings. Finally, each book includes biographies of all the artists and authors involved, plus a comprehensive bibliography.

Rebecca Horn, Concert for Anarchy, 1990

Art and Electronic Media has received ecstatic endorsement by media art stars:

• "It is a superb work of scholarship, marked by clarity, subtlety, and comprehensive vision. Art and Electronic Media does us all a great service. More than any other publication that I know of, it will bring our field of practice into the mainstream of art." - Roy Ascott
• "It's the best book of its kind" - Casey Reas
• "This book will be quoted for decades to come" - Eduardo Kac

Catherine Richards, Curiosity Cabinet at the End of the Millenium, 1995

I'm not quite as enthusiastic as they are but that doesn't mean that i don't find the book remarkable under a series of aspects.

First one is that, yes, the book might -maybe but not on its own- bring media art in the radar of contemporary art. Its decades of existence have not quite convinced the contemporary art world to fully embrace media art and a publication by Phaedon, a well-know producer of lavish objects that you will abandon on your coffee table for your guests to admire, could trigger the interest of major curators and art institutions. Besides, some artworks that have traveled the art shows around the globe are discussed in the book, establishing thus bridges between media art and the rest of the art world. One of them, Atsuko Tanaka's Electric Dress, even appears on the back cover of the book.

Lynn Hershman Leeson, CybeRoberta, 1970-1998

To me the biggest asset of the book is that it brings back to our attention a history of media art that has been forgotten or even has never been told in many media art schools (and i'd extend the criticism to interaction design schools.) It looks sometimes as if nothing has been achieved in the '60s, '70s, '80s or even '90s. I've seen so many involuntary 'copies' of Dan Graham's 1974 Present Continuous Past(s) i've stopped counting. Art and Electronic Media should be compulsory reading for students interested in art and technology.

Dan Graham, Present Continuous Past (s), 1974

The last section of the book is superb. It compiles essays by critics and artists. After having spent hours going through the hundreds of art pieces which are illustrated and clearly explained in the "Works" section of the book, i was glad to be able to read or re-read texts such as Jasia Reichardt's introduction to the exhibition Cybernetic Serendipity, Natalie Bookchin and Alexei Shulgin's Introduction to net.art, Michael Rees' Rapid Prototyping and Art, Lev Manovich's On Totalitarian Interactivity, Stelarc's The Body is Obsolete, subROSA's Tactical Cyberfeminism: An Art and Technology of Social Relations, etc.

As i suggested above, i have a few critical remarks. One of them is the incredibly high proportion of artworks from the USA and Europe. There's a couple of Japanese and Australian ones mentioned here and there but apart from Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, there's almost no mention of media artists from Latin America. If you're curious about the dynamism of media art in Latin America, i'd recommend the book that was published two years ago to accompany the exhibition Emergentes at LABoral in Gijón, Spain (cf Emergentes - 10 projects by Latin American artists, part 1 and part 2).

Jim Campbell, I Have Never Read The Bible, 1995 (movie)

My main deception is that the book is a bit stiff. It shows only a slice of the world i discovered with enthusiasm almost 6 years ago. I'm not sure i'd have started we-make-money-not-art and dedicated it to media art (at some point, some of you will remember, the blog was covering only new media art) if i had known about it only through this book. It's a great, useful and well-researched book but it doesn't quite convey the fantastic dynamism of media art. For example, activism and hacktivism are given a fairly modest space. Critical Art Ensemble (plus Beatriz Da Costa and Shyh-shiun Shyu)'s Free Range Grain finds itself printed side by side to the Robotic Chair by Max Dean, Rafaelo D'Andrea and Matt Donovan. Maybe it's because the artworks defile in the book in an almost chronological order. That's a choice but maybe it doesn't give rise to the most thought-provoking associations.

Doug Back and Norman White, Telephonic Arm Wrestling, 1986

Photo on the homepage: Almacén de Corazonadas by Rafael Lozano Hemmer.

Society of the Spectacle (Digital Remix). Created by DJ RABBI : Mark Amerika, Trace Reddell, Rick Silva

Amerika describes himself as a "thoughtographer", an "artist-medium", a "fictional philosopher", a "remixologist", a "network conductor", a wonderer who constantly changes identities and roles in a fragmentary world where time acquires an a-synchronic and non real dimension. By trying to express the complexity and the interest of contemporary digital reality, he delves into different aspects of himself and draws on elements and traits that he transfers to the characters of his works, by using the media the technological platforms of our time. Developing projects on the net, filming with mobile phones, remixing common moments and figures of today`s culture in an VJ-like audiovisual rhythm, Amerika redifines the characteristics of today's culture and opens up the possibilities for new interpretations and thoughts from the audience itself.

What is sure is that he's probably the only net artist who is not only responsible for a publication that Publishers Weekly described as "the literary publishing model of the future" but also the director of a feature-length film shot entirely on mobile phone. After having seen the digital videos -Society of the Spectacle (A digital Remix) is particularly good- and internet artworks on show at the museum, i feel more puzzled than ever. It's one of those shows that require a second viewing (at least in my case) because everything doesn't come to you at the first visit. Just like the OK TEXTS printed on stickers and hidden under the steps of the stairs when you go downstairs to see the Amerika retrospective. I only saw them on my way out of the museum.

I copy/pasted a couple of them below:

We cannot process your information. Your information is corrupt and needs cleansing. Erase brain?

OK

An error has been detected in your consciousness. All source-code is corrupt. Continue?

OK

Revolutionary double-speak has engendered a new information war. The system is about to crash. Download drugs now?

OK

The application could not be opened because your genetic code is dysfunctional. Abort?

OK

A cyborg orgy is not valid. Only digicash transactions are available at this time. Would you like to pay for the privilege?

OK

The network is monitoring your Digital Being. Create alias?

OK

This document wants to blow you. Go to finder?

OK

A transfer of $247,789.40 is about to download. Are you sure you want to disconnect?

OK

VIews of the Media Lounge at EMST

At least, I'll get a second chance with the online works which EMST has listed on one of its webpages and made accessible to visitors in their Media Lounge.

Some images.
Mark Amerika - UNREALTIME, curated by Daphne Dragona, runs at the National Museum of Contemporary Art - EMST until January 3, 2010.

P.S. You can also see Immobilité Remixes at the Vivo Arte.Mov festival in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, on November 12 - 15, 2009.

Nuestro Amor, 2009 (larger version)

Nuestro Amor (detail)

Nuestro Amor, detail (larger version of the image)

Déjeuner sur l'herbe , 2009 (larger version)

Déjeuner sur l'herbe (detail)

The corpse floating face down in a swimming pool, does not belong to William Holden in Sunset Boulevard. It's Mister B., a middle-age art collector.

Elmgreen & Dragset curated not one but two pavilion: the Danish and the Nordic ones. Two venues but one exhibition titled 'The Collectors'. Because the artist duo like art as much as their fictitious collectors, they have also invited to the Venice party the works of Maurizio Cattelan, Tom of Finland, Han & Him, Jonathan Monk, William E. Jones, Terence Koh, Klara Lidén, Norway Says, Nina Saunders, Wolfgang Tillmans and many others.

Installation shot from 'The Collectors' . Photographer: Anders Sune Berg. Jonathan Monk, Maquette for a Giant, Spinning O, 2006 + Norway Says, Cyclos, 2006 + Nina Saunders, Payload, 2009

The pavilions have been turned into domestic settings. Mister B., the dead guy floating in his pool, lived in the modernist Nordic pavilion. He found a sad end but wants you to know that his life was a non-stop party. His luxury pad is filled with designer furniture. There are works by renowned artists all over the walls and a transparent bathroom right in the middle of his house. He used to pin his young lovers' bathing suits in a frame as if they were precious butterflies. Truth is, everything about this interior is very ostentatious and very gay.

Installation shot from 'The Collectors' . Photographer: Anders Sune Berg


Installation shot from 'The Collectors' . Photographer: Anders Sune Berg: 'The Hockney Bathroom' + Elmgreen & Dragset, Marriage, 2004

Han & Him, Butterflies, 2009. Courtesy of the artists

Tom of Finland, Black Magic, 1984. Copyright of image: Tom of Finland Foundation, Los Angeles

A few meters from Mister B.'s home lived his neighbours, Family A. You will get to know them through the dining room, bedrooms, book shelves, kitchen, artworks and the collection of flies (yes, flies!) they've left behind. But you won't meet them. They've probably known better times. Their teenager daughter clumsily sprayed her bedroom in black (she is a goth you see), the stairs are broken, a message scribbled on the entrance mirror says "I will never see you again", there's a crack in the table and plates are scattered on the kitchen floor. Guarded by the family's taxidermied dog, the house is now for sale.

Klara Lidén, Teenage Room, 2009

As the title of the show indicates, the curators approach the topic of collecting, and the psychology behind the practice of expressing oneself through physical objects. Why do we gather items and surround ourselves with them in our every day lives? Which mechanisms of desire trigger our selection?

The Collectors is pure Elmgreen & Dragset. There isn't much depth to uncover (even if some believes that the drowned collector was a perfect metaphor for the state of the art market) but it's efficient, witty and flawlessly executed. The Collectors won a special mention from the Biennale jury of the 53rd International Art Exhibition.

Tata Channel has a video interview. Vernissage TV caught up with Dragset.

Georgy Tryakin Burharov, Mole Antonelliana (Turin Tower), 2009

East of Nowhere - Contemporary Art from post-Soviet Central Asia showed the work of 32 artists coming from countries i'm unable to locate precisely on a map, except when wars or Hollywood mockumentaries give me a helping hand.

Menlibayeva Almagul, Genogramma, 2008

The countries investigated are 5 ex-Soviet republics (Kazakhstan, Kirgizistan, Uzbekistan, Tadjikistan and Turkmenistan), along with Afghanistan and Mongolia. These two had been at some point under Soviet leadership and they show ethnic and cultural affinities with the republics just mentioned.

© Photo: Fondazione 107

East of Nowhere, located in the beautiful but cruelly un-heated Fondazione 107, uses photographic works, videos, installations and sculptures to document a moment of extraordinary transformation for an area that is 5 times as big as Europe. The result is bold and exciting with its mix of "globalization", acceleration, nomadic lifestyle, pre-soviet and islamic traditions.

Dugarsham Tserennadmid, A Marmot Hunter

The oldest artworks in the show are Dugarsham Tserennadmid's b&w photos. From the '60s till the '90s, she documented everyday life in the steppe as well as the key moments her country -Mongolia- was going through. In the '90s she decided to leave the art scene and go back to her roots: nomadism.

Said Atabekov, The Road to Rome (images Impronte contemporary art)

In The Way to Rome , Said Atabekov recalls Marco Polo's thirteenth century journey from Italy through Central Asia and up to China, and how he returned to Rome and became a symbol of the encounter between the East and West. Atabekov traveled through Kazakhstan to capture ordinary actions, landscapes, people, moments and objects that all look very exotic to us.

Ekaterina Nikonorova (Almaty, Kazakhstan), Self Soviet Architecture, 2008

Ekaterina Nikonorova, Self Soviet Architecture: Chairwoman Committee, Blue Stair, Poetess Fantasies. 2008

With her series titled Self Soviet Architecture, Ekaterina Nikonorova imagine there's a syntony between places and the persons who inhabits them.

Regina Shepetya, Diana Yun and Malik Zenger, World War Too, 2008

One of the most exciting works for me was a video animation by Regina Shepetya, Diana Yun and Malik Zenger. Mixing archive images, plasticine figures and playful graphics, World War Too is a super pop and concise account of WW2. A few minutes takes viewers from the rise of Hitler to the invasion of Poland, the Blitz, Operation Barbarossa, and finally to a defeated Hitler puppet fleeing a Berlin under the bombs.

Alimjan Jorobaev, "Men Praying on the Central Square in Bishkek", 1982-2005. Courtesy of the artist

Alimjan Jorobaev's photo series Men Praying on the Central Square in Bishkek looks at the interconnection between manifestations of military and state power and the increased presence of religion in public space in his country, Kyrgyzstan. One of the photos shows people praying with their backs turned to a sculpture glorifying Lenin. A powerful image since ideas of Soviet collectivism have been replaced by identity politics and an obsession with nationhood. Besides, the sculpture has now become a tourist attraction rather than an homage to the communist leader.

I can't end the post without showing a couple of works from Kazakhstan that reflect on the Borat phenomenon with irony and humour:

Natalya Dyu. Stop Borat now, 2008

Malik Zenger, East Kazakhstan), Catching the Horse (by M. Kenbaev), 2008

More images in the Flickr set.

East of Nowhere was the inaugural show of Fondazione 107. I'm afraid it is closed by now but i'm looking forward to see what Fondazione 107 is going to program in the future.

Photo on the homepage: Almagul Menlibayeva, Kissing Totems, Still from the video - 2008.

Capaci. 1980. Woman who believes her son has been killed. ©Letizia Battaglia

Palermo, 1982. Nerina was a prostitute. The mafia killed her along with her two friends because she had not 'respected the rules' ©Letizia Battaglia

Well, that was a pretty inappropriate introduction because i'm actually going to focus on a photographer who gained fame in the '70s and '80s for her documentation of the internal war of the Mafia in Sicily at its bloodiest, and its devastating impact on the rest of the society.

Just like Weegee and Enrique Metinides Letizia Battaglia was covering the cronaca nera, the crime stories for a newspaper. In her case, the left-wing L'Ora in Palermo.

Palermo, 1976. His name was Vincenzo Battaglia. He was killed in the dark, among the rubish. His wife tried to help him but it was already too late. ©Letizia Battaglia

In 1974, when mafia moved from organised crime to heroin trafficking, mafiosi became more brutal. They murdered anyone who would stand in the way of their business, from the chief of police to family rivals. By 1981, there was one killing every three day. Sometimes many more.

Palermo.1979. Judge Cesare Terranova, communist deputy member of the Antimafia Commission Parliament, has just been killed in an ambush. Marshal Lenin Mancuso, the body guard responsible for his safety, died in the hospital shortly afterwards. ©Letizia Battaglia

At the time, the Cosa Nostra was identifiable. It had faces one could photograph and associate with crimes. Today, mafia is much less visible. Battaglia's pictures, because of the corruption, silence, violence and suffering they laid bare, played a crucial role in the anti-mafia campaign. They show anti-mafia Judge Cesare Terranova shot in his car, corpses of mobsters abandoned by the road, tears of the wives and mothers when they discover the scene of the crime, arrests of a mafia boss, teenagers pretending to be though guys with attitude and guns.

Letizia Battaglia, Dead man lying on a garage ramp, 1977

Some of her photos were even used as evidence of corruption against Giulio Andreotti, a man whose authority in Italian politics was so powerful he was known as Divo Giulio, "divine Julius" an epithet of Julius Caesar. In 1993, when prosecutors in Palermo indicted the ex-prime minister, the police searched Battaglia's archives and discovered two 1979 photographs of Andreotti with an important Mafioso he had denied knowing. These pictures were the only physical evidence of the politician's connections to the Sicilian Mafia. Battaglia's life, after she retired from photography, is as awe-inspiring as her images: she's a photoreporter known for taking risks but also an editor and environmental writer and politician.

Palermo, 1998. Police Justice Roberto Scarpinanto with his bodyguards. Scarpinanto was lead prosecutor in the trial of former Prime Minister Andreotti ©Letizia Battaglia

The Cardi Black Box gallery in Milan brought the work of Battaglia to Artissima, along with two other photographers of tragedy: Enrique Metinides and former Swiss police lieutenant Arnold Odermatt who during almost 50 years recorded car accidents.

Palermo 1976, Quartiere Albergaria. Letizia Battaglia

Palermo, 1986. The day of the Dead. ©Letizia Battaglia

Palermo,1982. The two christs ©Letizia Battaglia

Wikipedia has a list of webpages where you can find more photos of Battaglia.

`Photo: © Panos Kokkinias

Established as a nonprofit foundation by art collector Dakis Joannou, DESTE is located in a former socks factory building, in the lovely Nea Ionia suburb, north of Athens.

See? Lovely area, even under the rain:

The old factory has been completely re-vamped. The main entrance to the gallery, designed by the architects of divercity, is particularly spectacular. You enter the building through a wooden crate that evokes the ones used for the transportation of art pieces.

Photo: © Charalambos Louizidis & Katerina Glinou

Detail of the entrance

Each year, a show at DESTE focuses on the collection of Dakis Joannou, the industrialist who established the foundation in 1983. New acquisitions are standing side by side with older pieces, making emerge new meanings and relationships between the artworks.

This years' exhibition A Guest + A Host = A Ghost borrows its title from one of Marcel Duchamp's mixed-media works. The play on words was inscribed on candy wrappers that were handed out during an opening in Paris in 1953.

The show is conceived as a series of solo exhibitions by some of today's most popular artists: Pawel Althamer, Maurizio Cattelan, Paul Chan, Nathalie Djurberg, Urs Fischer, Robert Gober, Jeff Koons, Paul McCarthy, Seth Price, Kiki Smith, Kara Walker, Andro Wekua, etc. You might know all the names and you might even like some of them but that won't prevent you from being surprised by the exhibition. It's an exciting show. Both provocative and satisfying.

Installation View, A Guest + A Host = A Ghost - Works from the Dakis Joannou Collection

"Over the past few years, the exhibitions displayed at DESTE have been the result of many people getting together. They are not thematic in the traditional sense. But one could say that the latest exhibition looks like a compilation of solo displays by the specific artists who are represented in the collection by many works. Creations by other artists have been placed within these 'sub-groups,' hence creating parasitic relations between the exhibits," explained curator Massimiliano Gioni.

I'm just going to highlight a couple of works:


Installation Views, A Guest + A Host = A Ghost - Works from the Dakis Joannou Collection. Photo: Stefan Altenburger

One of the most eye-catching pieces on the ground floor is a sinister structure that cuts through the ceiling. Once you walk upstairs, you discover that the cast aluminum structure is actually a grave being dug up. Urs Fischer's overwhelming Untitled (Hole) takes the whole room, leaving only little space to walk around and admire Kara Walker's gouache on paper works.


Installation Views, A Guest + A Host = A Ghost - Works from the Dakis Joannou Collection. Photo: Stefan Altenburger

Now i almost got knocked down the stairs on my way to the first floor. As i raised my head i was unsettled by Maurizio Cattelan's Ave Maria. Translated as Hail Mary, the title refers to the catholic tradition of revering the Virgin Mary. The right-armed salute is nowadays synonymous with right-wing or extremist political movements. The image brought to my mind the little plastic statues of Benito Mussolini one can sometimes find in Italian highway shops and the content face of Gaetano Saya. And then there's the 'legendary' grip that the Catholic church is said to have on the whole country. So, yes, i smiled broadly when i saw Ave Maria then i remembered that Europe is not always that open-minded, democratic, cultivated place that i love so much. Anyway, I'm probably seeing way more politics here in there than i should.

Maurizio Cattelan, Ave Maria, 2007

In the adjacent room, Paweł Althamer (people in Milan might remember the inflatable giant that floated above the Parco Sempione) had some stunning dolls, spineless leather-clad mannequins and a self-portrait as an old man.

Installation Views, A Guest + A Host = A Ghost - Works from the Dakis Joannou Collection. Photo: Stefan Altenburger

Cattelan followed in the next room, this time with a self-portrait sticking his head through a hole in the floor (yes, another one). The figure is staring at Paul Chan's charcoal portraits of the members of the U.S. Supreme Court, My Laws Are My Whores that hints at the relationship between sex and law.

Paul Chan's portraits of the members of the U.S. Supreme Court, "My Laws Are My Whores" (2008)

The best part for me was on the top floor. A fantastic series of sculptures by Urs Fischer, including a Ghost Chair:

Installation Views, A Guest + A Host = A Ghost - Works from the Dakis Joannou Collection, DESTE Foundation. Photo: Stefan Altenburger

I took pictures for you!

A Guest + A Host = A Ghost - Works from the Dakis Joannou Collection is on view at DESTE Foundation until December 31st 2009. New Museum curator Massimiliano Gioni acted as curatorial advisor with the collaboration of Maurizio Cattelan, Urs Fischer and Cecilia Alemani.

The exhibition takes place at the Natural Science Museum, a seventeenth-century building which used to be the main hospital of the center of Turin. Although i like the museum a lot i must say that the atmosphere of the show was pretty gloomy. The exhibition rooms are below the ground and the lighting is spectacularly bad. Still, there's some very good pieces that need to be seen. I found Ralf Baecker's Rechnender Raum (Calculating Space) particularly intriguing.

Seen from afar, Calculating Space looks like a sculpture made of toothpicks. It's made of sticks, strings and little plumbs. This fragility and transparency give a physical presence as much as they hide the logic and functioning of the machine. Its units operate like a very basic artifical neural network.

Through its strict geometric and otherwise very filigree construction, the observer is able to track the whole processing logic from every viewpoint around the machine. This disclosure of the machines core is enforced by an uncommon distribution of its constructing elements: a nine angled architectural body forms a torus. In contrast to an ordinary alignment of a hidden logic and an outer user facing display its geometric basis is turned inside-out. The core of the machine, with all its computing elements, is shifted outwards on the surface, while the "display" which indicates the results of the tasks is displaced into the center of the system. Even though the tasks and their logic runs directly in front of the viewers eyes and even if one is long sinking into the interaction of the elements which is accompanied by a polyphonic but steady and reassuring buzz, it is not possible to follow the succession of the single conditions of the machine. (...) The results of the computations are sent inwards -into its own center- they are not intended for the viewer.

Rechnender Raum (Calculating Space) was nominated for the Share Prize. You can visit the exhibition until November 8 at the Museo Regionale di Scienze Naturali in Turin.

And of course i took a few pictures of the exhibtion.

(image Deweer Gallery)

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
Image of the day
Tissue Culture Lab at the VivoArts School for Transgenic Aesthetics (part 1)
Tissue Culture Lab at the VivoArts School for Transgenic Aesthetics (part 2)

Wednesday 11 November

Body Art Lecture with performance artists: Kira O'Reilly, WARBEAR, Jeanette Groenendaal and Boryana Rossa.

The artists will speak/perform together about: the body in performance and stressed physiology as personal or public shock chemistry; pure culture technique in science and its effect on the making of clean and dirty bodies; artist's input on future body aesthetics during the present genetic reproductive redesign of the human form; erotic containment and the thrill of contagious patients exploding; experiments, lab animals and the distance (or presumed distance) that objectivity implies, etc.

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, The Cosmopolitan Chicken Project

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.

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.

The Aalto Pavilion in 2007. Photo by Kaisa Hein‰nen

Building of the pavilion in 1956. Courtesy of Museum of Finnish Architecture (Suomen rakennustaiteen museo)

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.

Jussi Kivi: Soviet poster from the series "Civil defense & Fire service, poster nr. 3", detail of the installation: "Fire & Rescue Museum", 2009 (photo: Filippo Zambon)

Contaminated hands, an educational model from the Soviet era illustrating the symptoms of chemical weapons on skin. Discovered in an Estonian bunker in 2008

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.

Fire & Rescue Museum, 2009, detail of installation (photo: Filippo Zambon)

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.

Details of the installation: "Fire & Rescue Museum", 2009 (Photo: Jussi Kivi)

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).

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.

FEEDFORWARD - The Angel of History is on view until April 5, 2010 at Laboral Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial in Gijón, Spain.

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.

Asher DeGroot, David Gallaugher, Kevin James, and Jacob Jebailey, Walking in the Park. Photo credit: Andre Forget (via)

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.

Haus Rucker & Co, Oasis for Documenta 5, Kassel, 1972

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, Vivisection

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, Mute Room (image)

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.

Anderson Anderson with Cameron Schoepp, Prairie Ladder

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.

24260 in "art and Economy at Deichterhollen, Hamburg, 2002

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.

Usman Haque, Sky Ear, 0n September 15, 2004 at the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich Park, London

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.

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.

Teresa Margolles, Jewels, 2009. Jewels made with gold and fragments of windshields collected at murder sites in Mexico. Documentation of the Jewels in Culiacan city, Mexico, Spring 2009

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?

Image woki-toki

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.

A performer uses golden thread to embroider a narcomensaje on a bloodstained fabric in Venice (photo)

Related: Emotional Systems, at the Strozzina in Florence.
You might also be interested in the following articles: México, ¿una sociedad decapitada?, Réplica21's review of the pavilion and The war we gave Mexico.