My Space. Cosa vuol dire ‘pubblico’?

My Space. Cosa vuol dire ‘pubblico’?

Vito Acconci, Fikret Atay, Kuba Bakowski, Michael Beutler,Mieke Gerritzen, Kate Gilmore, Niklas Goldbach, Kaarina Kaikkonen,Lorenza Lucchi Basili, Sabrina Mezzaqui, Cesare Pietroiusti, Melita Rotondo, Gerry Schum, Sissi, Giuseppe Stampone,Janaina Tschäpe, Nico Vascellari, Vedovamazzei

Per la sua nuova mostra d'arte contemporanea internazionale, il PAN invita i diciotto artisti coinvolti a riflettere sulla dicotomia fra “privato” e “pubblico”: dagli elementi fisici, come lo spazio inteso nella sua accezione di nido familiare, piazza aperta o sistema urbanistico, la gamma tematica si estende al comportamento individuale (dall’introverso quasi “invisibile” al performer che si offre al pubblico in modo estremo e senza filtri, fino alla possibilità di diventare una “star”, anche ma non solo tramite i diversi media) fino ai ruoli differenti attributi a uomini e donne. Più che dare risposte, gli artisti stimolano dibattiti immaginari di tipo sociologico e urbanistico, ispirano ricerche architettoniche e più in generale estetiche, sollecitando una riflessione su opportunità e limiti legati al genere. Nella mostra tre linee di ricerca disegnano altrettante modalità di interpretazione del tema: il concetto di pubblico osservato attraverso la dualità tra l’affermazione dello spazio personale e l’approccio urbanistico; il concetto di pubblico attraverso la comunicazione telematica, la condivisione orizzontale del sapere, internet come spazio di interazione globale, i networks come forma di partecipazione collettiva. Infine la riflessione sul rapporto del ruolo pubblico e privato dell'uomo e della donna configura lo spazio d'azione e l'appartenenza al genere maschile o a quello femminile, ruoli definiti sia nella cultura occidentale che in quella orientale. Nell’accezione più comune l’arte pubblica si riferisce ad interventi di natura urbana che presentano opere in spazi pubblici, aperti alla fruizione collettiva. In molti casi, però, tali interventi non instaurando col territorio una vera e propria relazione, provocano attorno all’opera ciò che il critico americano Clement Greenberg definisce “isolamento estetico”.

Palazzo delle Arti Napoli

SLICK Dessin

SLICK Dessin | contemporary art fair

À l’occasion de la semaine du dessin à Paris qui rassemblera tous les spécialistes internationaux de ce domaine de création, l’équipe de Slick est heureuse de vous annoncer l’organisation la seconde édition Slick Dessin, le cabinet de dessin de Slick.

SLICK Dessin | contemporary art fair

DAC'09: Digital Arts and Culture

"Digital Art and Culture 2009 is the 8th in an international series of conferences begun in 1998. DAC is recognized as an interdisciplinary event of high intellectual caliber.

This iteration of DAC will dwell on the specificities of embodiment and cultural, social and physical location with respect to digital technologies and networked communications."

DAC'09: Digital Arts and Culture 2009 | UC Irvine

Voyage of Discovery

Voyage of Discovery: Shek Kip Mei to Tsim Sha Tsui

Jockey Club Creative Arts Centre and Hong Kong Arts Festival proudly present Voyage of Discovery: Shek Kip Mei to Tsim Sha Tsui, a 2009 Hong Kong Arts Festival PLUS Programme, will be held from 6 Feb till 7 Mar 2009 at the Hong Kong Cultural Centre foyer.

One is Hong Kong’s long-recognised cultural nexus, the terrain on which the city’s vibrant artistic spirit captivates audiences. The other plays host to Hong Kong’s first batch of public housing tenements, legendary icons which, in the 1950s, pointed towards a new way of communal living. Public perceptions of Tsim Sha Tsui and Shek Kip Mei have always been poles apart.
Until now, that is. By revitalizing a decommissioned industrial building in Shek Kip Mei into a multi-disciplinary studio centre, the Jockey Club Creative Arts Centre (JCCAC) has found a common language which draws Tsim Sha Tsui and Shek Kip Mei closer to each other – a bond which will now be strengthened further this year during the Hong Kong Arts Festival (HKAF).
With its dedication in advocating art and nurturing local creative talent, JCCAC answers to the same calling which has long driven the work of the Hong Kong Arts Festival. And it is based on such shared sentiments that this collaboration, Voyage of Discovery: Shek Kip Mei to Tsim Sha Tsui, was born – an exhibition of JCCAC’s residential artists. Featuring about 60 artists, including : AU YEUNG Ying Chai, TSE Chi Tak, TAI Sheung Shing, Victor. The art works on show include Chinese ink painting, oil painting, mixed media, glass, ceramics, photography, printmaking and drawing.

To encourage audiences at Tsim Sha Tsui to “explore” Shek Kip Mei while enjoying the HKAF, this exhibition takes the form of a miniaturised JCCAC premises – where the horizontal stripes symbolize the architectural characteristics of minimalism and functionalism, two building styles commonly found in old industrial buildings. The exhibition will provide audiences with an experience akin to a stroll around the former factory building, and to witness how artworks were fabricated in different parts of the building, and relate the artistic element bouncing off from the 37th Hong Kong Arts Festival.

Jockey Club Creative Arts Centre

IMAGE MATTER

IMAGE MATTER

On 21 February 2009, the Mary Boone Gallery will open at its Chelsea location IMAGE MATTER, an exhibition curated by Klaus Kertess. The seven artists in the exhibition are CARROLL DUNHAM, RALPH HUMPHREY, ELIZABETH MURRAY, ALFONSO OSSORIO, PETER SAUL, JULIAN SCHNABEL, JOE ZUCKER.

These artists all draw upon the tenets of post World War II modernist abstraction that reigned into the 1970s – such as allover unity of markmaking and an insistent emphasis on the physicality of painting’s plane – while, at the same time, refiguring that plane with images variously indebted to the suppressed subversions of the plane practiced by many a Cubist collagist, Surrealist dreamer, comic book creator, Mayan glyph maker, and more.

Alfonso Ossorio, influenced by his friends Jean Dubuffet and Jackson Pollock, moved his highly depictive religio-surreal images toward overall abstraction; and then, in 1959 started clotting his canvases with found objects ranging from artificial eyes, to shells and other detritus found on the beach, plastic extrusions and much else to create phantasmagoric abstractions he called Congregations.
Peter Saul, on the other hand, has invented a kind of allover vaporous pointillism to create his uproariously ghoulish representations of our culture’s addiction to violence that look something like digitalized hallucinations.
Ralph Humphrey never renounced his abstract reflections on the architecture of the canvas plane but began, in the early 1970s to first collage cutout painted patches, then painted wooden shapes onto the illusive shimmering of his painted canvases, as though he were imbuing Rothko’s rectangular mists with the solidity of still life objects.
With a kind of a carnivalesque fanfare, Joe Zucker, in the early 1970s, soaked cotton balls in acrylic and spread them across his canvases with due respect to the rectangular architecture of the plane and quite a bit of humor.
Zucker’s friend Elizabeth Murray, imbued with a similar relish for the cosmicomic but a more abstract bent, animated her canvases with zany geometrics looking back to such as Stuart Davis; in 1981 she began to fracture her bright geometries into individual shapes, like giant, precise brushstroke marks, that gleefully hovered on the wall like an askew puzzle in the throes of animation.
The younger Julian Schnabel, in 1979 began to cover his canvases with shattered crockery as giant surrogates for brushstrokes, complimented with paintbrushed configurations and the occasional collaged object such as deer antlers, to create a kind of super-painting.
In the early 1980s, Carroll Dunham began to draw and/or paint erotic organics that seemed to have emerged like bacterial cultures from the knotted wood grain patterns of the wood veneer he employed as hosting ground. A decade later, he employed variously sized, painted Styrofoam balls as the skin of the mutant creature that grew out of and took shape from the rectangular plane of the canvas. For Dunham, as well as for the other six artists included in Image Matter, the physicality of the medium impacted and in many cases visibly catalyzed the subject to make matter and image one.

visit website www.maryboonegallery.com

Ivan Navarro

Opening date for cultural centre - Eastbourne Today: "This exhibition will be his first solo show in a UK public gallery and precedes him representing Chile at the Venice Biennale of international art this Summer."

gorillagorillagorilla

"At the beginning of the bicentenary of Darwin's birth, the Kunsthaus Graz is exhibiting the large-format video installations of Californian artist Diana Thater, which analyse the complexity of nature and its relationship with mankind. Her new work, gorillagorillagorilla, premiered in Kunsthaus Graz, is a study of human and animal behavior and the artist's further investigation of the medium of video as an image production tool capable of creating impressive spatial and visual environments."

Kunsthaus Graz, Diana Thater

Arijana Kajfes

UPGRADE! Östersund-Stockholm

SCULPTURE & NEW MEDIA ART
Arijana Kajfes
Östersunds Konstskola
21st february 2pm-5pm

Upgrade! Östersund-Stockholm are inviting to the third presentation on new media art. For this time we're collaborating with Östersunds Konstskola around new media art in relation to sculpture. Arijana Kajfes will present her works and talk about
the interdisciplinary approach across scuplture, new media art, science.

Arijana Kajfes
Visual experimental artist working with borderlines of perception and meaning. Completed studies in sculpture at Kunglia Konsthögskolan in Stockholm. From 93-95 worked and travelled in Africa and Asia. Between 97-99 involved in the development of CRAC - an artist's digital medialab in Stockholm. Between 99-04 a member of the research team at Smartstudio, an interdisciplinary lab at the Interactive Institute in Stockholm. Spent 2000 in San Francisco at the dept. of Conceptual Information Arts, San Francisco State University, exploring possibilities that arise in the convergence of art, science and technology. Involved in several interdisciplinary experiments. Exhibits, talks and teaches in Sweden and internationally, guest professor at Kungliga Konsthögskolan.
http://www.arijana.net/

Upgrade! Arijana Kajfes - Östersund-Stockholm

ESSL AWARD

The ESSL AWARD CEE is dedicated to the discovery and support of young creative talents in Croatia, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Romania, Slovenia and Slovakia. The ESSL AWARD CEE aims at supporting artists who are still in training. Collaboration with the art academies is a central point in this endeavour, as they are the nucleus and well-established centres for the training of future generations of artists.


Essl Museum - Kunst der Gegenwart

newcontemporaries 2008

"New Contemporaneità is open to all final year undergraduates and current postgraduates of Fine Art at UK colleges and those artists who graduated in the year 2008."
The selectors this year are:

* Ellen Gallagher
* John Stezaker
* Wolfgang Tillmans
* Saskia Olde Wolbers

newcontemporaries 2009

Edith Dekyndt - Agnosia

Witte de With presents Agnosia, a solo exhibition by Belgian artist Edith Dekyndt (b. 1960, Ypres, Belgium). The exhibition includes adaptations of previous works as well as recent productions.
Opening Friday, February 27, 6:00 pm.

For over two decades, Edith Dekyndt has created a large repertoire of single channel video projections, slide projections, sculptures and sound works, all of which are characterized by a sparse but playful aesthetic. Her video works counterpoise the methodical explorations of experimental video with a skeptical and deliberately erratic approach to minimalism. Often flirting with the limitations of recording technology, she produces seemingly simple, evocative images that, in Dekyndt’s words, “are neither spectacular nor consumable,” and which set out to loosen the relationship between subjectivity and the world of facts.

Since 1999, Dekyndt’s installations have been produced under the umbrella of a Universal Research of Subjectivity, a consciously humorous phrase that functions both as an association – established in 2004 – and as a generative pseudonym that provides a speculative framework for her videos, sculptures and installations. This association/pseudonym establishes a focus on the division between microcosm and macrocosm, a fictional yet naturalized division that destines subjectivity to remain caught at the intersection of these two separated worlds.

A total of twelve installations will be on show at Witte de With, including video, sculpture, and sound pieces, as well as slide projections and one set of photographic images. The works will range from wraithlike sculptural works like Ground Control (2008), a black helium balloon that moves around slowly and freely in one of the gallery spaces, to video works like Dream Machine (2006), in which the three primary colors alternate frame by frame at 24 frames per second, producing a jarring, disorienting effect on the viewer.

Dekyndt’s video-installation One Second of Silence (2008), which will be presented at Witte de With, enables a more directly political reading of Dekyndt’s work. Yet, it is not about a politics of identity; rather it is focused on identifying a space of subjectivity not immediately captured by organized political content - “global positions of people,” as the artist states, and a “focus on the occupation of space, by experiencing the meanings, contents, and particularities of the space (in) itself, as well as its socio-cultural and human context.”

Curated by: Juan A. Gaitan, Nicolaus Schafhausen

Witte de With - Project - Edith Dekyndt

Le dessin à Florence au temps de Michel-Ange

Le dessin à Florence au temps de Michel-Ange
Du 12/02/2009 au 30/04/2009

Communiqué de presse

Présentée dans le Cabinet Jean Bonna, l’exposition est consacrée au dessin florentin de la Renaissance à travers un choix de vingt-neuf dessins conservés à l’Ecole des beaux-arts : les plus grands artistes, peintres et sculpteurs, y sont représentés, Michel-Ange, Andrea del Sarto, Baccio Bandinelli, Jacopo Pontormo, Francesco Salviati, Giorgio Vasari, Perino del Vaga, etc.. Foyer intellectuel et artistique de premier plan, Florence est en proie dans la première moitié du XVIe siècle à une instabilité politique – entre le déclin des Médicis et la proclamation de la République, qui génère un climat d’inquiétude et précipite la remise en cause de l’idéal classique. Une période fructueuse d’expérimentation menée par Michel-Ange se met en place et c’est cette passionnante époque de transition entre le style classique et la naissance du maniérisme que dévoile l’exposition.

L’exposition sera présentée en 2010 au musée Fesch à Ajaccio pour sa réouverture après rénovation.

Biographies d’ Artistes

Michelangelo BUONARROTI, dit Michel-Ange
(Caprese 1475 – Rome 1564)

Peintre, sculpteur, architecte et ingénieur.
Il entre en 1488 dans l’atelier de Domenico Ghirlandaio. En 1489, il est admis à l’école de sculpture ouverte par Laurent de Médicis quelques années auparavant. Il poursuit sa formation à Florence sous la protection de Laurent le Magnifique à l’exception d’un séjour de cinq ans à Rome à partir de 1496. En 1505, le pape Jules II l’appelle à Rome pour la réalisation de son tombeau. Il se voit ensuite confier en 1508 la décoration de la chapelle Sixtine. Parmi les nombreuses commandes auxquelles il doit faire face, Michel-Ange entreprend notamment la bibliothèque Laurentienne (1524-1530) les tombeaux des Médicis à la chapelle San Lorenzo en 1527, la basilique Saint-Pierre de Rome commencée par Bramante puis Raphaël.

Andrea DEL SARTO
Florence 1486 – Florence 1530
Andrea del Sarto est d’abord mis en apprentissage chez un orfèvre afin d’y apprendre la gravure. Il séjourne ensuite dans l’ atelier de Pietro di Cosimo. Dès l’âge de 23 ans, en 1511, il se voit confier la décoration du cloître de la confrérie du Scalzo. François Ier l’appelle à sa cour de 1512 à 1518. La révolution de Florence le prive de ses protecteurs et Il meurt abandonné de tous.

Giovanni Antonio SOGLIANI
Florence 1492 – Florence 1544
Peintre de compositions religieuses, il est l’élève de Lorenzo di Credi. Parmi ses œuvres remarquables, on peut citer le Martyre de Saint Arcadius dans l’église San Lorenzo (1521). Il collabore aussi avec Andrea del Sarto et Sodoma à la décoration du grand autel de la cathédrale de Pise.

Andrea PICCINELLI dit BRESCIANINO
Sienne, peu après 1486 – Florence, vers 1527
Il est actif à Sienne de 1505 à 1524 et en 1525 à Florence. Il est le frère et le collaborateur de Raffaello Piccinelli.

Baccio BANDINELLI
Florence 1493 – Florence 1560
C’est sous la direction de son père Michelangelo di Viviano, l’un des plus habiles orfèvres de Florence, que Bandinelli apprend à dessiner. Il entre ensuite dans l’atelier du sculpteur Francesco Rustici et copie abondamment Donatello. Bénéficiant de la protection des Médicis, il obtient la commande d’un Saint Pierre pour la cathédrale de Florence en 1515. Cosme Ier lui confie par la suite les nombreux travaux dans le palais Vieux et à Sainte-Marie des Fleurs. Son œuvre sans doute la plus réussie demeure Nicomède soutenant le Christ mort, destinée à sa propre chapelle funéraire à Sant’Annunziata.

Jacopo da CARUCCI, dit PONTORMO
Pontormo 1494 – Florence 1556
Elève de Piero di Cosimo, il participe avec lui à plusieurs chantiers, notamment à la villa de Poggio a Caïano.
Vers les années 1520, son style évolue, utilisant des tons acides, dessinant des personnages aux proportions inhabituelles et aux expressions pathétiques. La Passion, réalisée pour le cloître de la chartreuse de Galezzo entre 1522 et 1525, marque une étape orientée vers le maniérisme .

Pietro BUONACCORSI, dit PERINO DEL VAGA
Florence 1501 – Rome 1547
D’abord placé chez des petits maîtres, il est finalement accepté dans l’atelier de Raphaël, qui lui confie une partie des décors du Vatican. En 1523, la peste le contraint à quitter Rome pour Florence. En 1525, il revient à Rome, qu’il fuit de nouveau lors sac de 1527. Il se fixe alors à Gênes sous la protection du prince Doria et y fonde une école de peinture en 1528.

Francesco ROSSI, dit SALVIATI
Florence 1510 – Rome 1563
Son surnom lui vient de la protection qu’il reçoit du cardinal Salviati. Fils d’un tisserand en velours, il est mis en apprentissage chez un orfèvre avant d’entrer dans l’atelier d’ Andrea del Sarto en 1529. Avec Vasari, il poursuit ses études à Rome où il regarde Perino del Vaga et Michel-Ange. De Rome, il séjourne ensuite à Venise, Vérone et Florence où il laisse des décors et des tableaux. De retour à Rome, le pape Pie IV le charge de continuer les décorations de la salle dite des Rois.

Giorgio VASARI
Arezzo 1511 – Florence 1574
Giorgio Vasari est surtout connu comme architecte et écrivain d’art, notamment avec son précieux ouvrage : Les Vies des plus éminents peintres, sculpteurs et architectes.
En 1523, le cardinal Pesseriné le prend sous sa protection et l’envoie à Florence. Suite à l’exil des Médicis, Vasari part à Rome où il poursuit ses études en compagnie de son ami Francesco Salviati. A son retour à Florence, il s’adonne spécialement à l’art de l’architecture. A la fin de sa vie, on lui confie la décoration de la coupole de Santa Maria del Fiore qu’’il ne peut achever.

Giovanni CAPASSINI
Actif à Florence vers 1525 – Tournon vers 1579
Après une formation dans l’atelier d’Andrea del Sarto, il part à Lyon de 1555 à 1568. Il est le maître d’Etienne de Martellange.

Alessandro ALLORI
Florence 1535 – Florence 1607
Orphelin dès l’âge de cinq ans, il est recueilli et adopté par son oncle Angelo Allori, dit le Bronzino. A dix-sept ans, il exécute d’après ses propres dessins le tableau d’autel pour la chapelle d’une villa d’Alexandre de Médicis. En 1554, il part pour Rome et y étudie Michel-Ange. De retour à Florence, d’importants travaux lui sont confiés dans les églises et autres monuments publics. Il excelle également dans le portrait.

Giovanni Battista NALDINI
Florence 1537 – Florence 1591
Elève de Pontormo et du Bronzino, il vient à Rome sous le pontificat de Grégoire XIII et travaille pour diverses églises de cette ville. A son retour à Florence, Vasari l’engage pour la décoration du Palazzo Vecchio. Il y travaille quatorze ans.

Giovanni da Benedetto BANDINI
Castello da Benedetto Bandini 1540 – Florence 1599
Elève de Baccio Bandinelli, il exécute pour les barrières du chœur du Duomo de Florence, des figures en bas-relief, et plus tard, pour la même cathédrale, les statues de Saint Philippe et de Saint Jacques le Majeur.

École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts

Flußgeist

Flußgeist est une série de travaux qui s’inspirent du concept de Zeitgeist. Étrangement, les industries se sont approprié très intuitivement cette notion pour désigner les pages donnant accès à une suspension du flux, c’est-à-dire, par exemple pour Google, les mots les plus recherchés au cours de l’année. Flußgeist part du principe que ce qu’on nomme Web 2.0 n’est pas simplement un discours de marketing, mais est la première industrie qui s’alimente de l’existence de chaque individu, via notamment les sites flikr, facebook et youtube.

Avec Flußgeist, il ne s’agit pas simplement de faire une interface de visualisation des données, mais de tenter de construire des fictions sans narration à partir de tous ces flux. Ce sont des vidéos sans fin qui évoluent selon les informations reçues. Cette temporalité n’est plus celle de la durée (Empire d’Andy Warhol ou 24 Hour Psycho de Douglas Gordon) ou de la boucle (How I became a Ramblin’ Man de Rodney Graham), elle implique plutôt un autre mode d’appropriation pour le public. Parcourir le réseau comme on parcourt une ville en imaginant les millions de voix qui l'habitent, celles des habitants, celles des passants. Percevoir cette densité de l'anonymat.

Né à Paris et résidant maintenant entre Montréal et Paris, Grégory Chatonsky a étudié la philosophie à l'Université de la Sorbonne et le multimédia aux Beaux-arts de Paris. Il a fondé en 1994 un collectif d'artistes incident.net, pionners du netart, et a réalisé de nombreuses commmandes : site Internet du centre Pompidou et de la Villa Médicis, identité visuelle du MAC/VAL et fiction interactive pour Arte. Il a enseigné au Fresnoy ainsi qu'à l'école des arts visuels et médiatiques de l'UQÀM. À travers des installations interactives, des dispositifs en réseau, des photographies et des sculptures, le travail de Chatonsky interroge notre relation affective aux technologies, met en scène les flux dont notre époque est tissée et tente de créer de nouvelles formes de fiction. Il a pris part à de nombreux projets solos et collectifs en France, au Canada, aux États-Unis, en Italie, en Australie, en Allemagne, en Finlande et en Espagne. Ses oeuvres ont été acquises par des institutions telles que la Maison européenne de la photograhie. Il est représenté en France par la galerie Numeriscausa, aux Etats-Unis et en Allemagne par la galerie Poller.

OBORO : Flußgeist

Kunstbus

"Musea en galeries in Nederland en België!"

Kunstbus

Yvonne De Rosa

Yvonne De Rosa - CRAZY GOD - curated by Alessandra Masolini

Artist: Yvonne De Rosa
Title: Crazy God
Curator: Alessandra Masolini
Opening: Thursday 26 February 2009 - 7 pm
Prometeogallery di Ida Pisani via Ventura 3, Milano
Through: March 26, 2009 - tue. to sat. 11 am-1 pm /3-7 pm

Prometeogallery by Ida Pisani is glad to announce the opening of the photography exhibition Crazy God by Yvonne De Rosa, entitled after the book published by Damiani and presented last December at the PAN museum in Naples - Palazzo delle Arti Napoli.

Crazy God results from the work the artist did as a volunteer during the 90s in an old psychiatric hospital, whose name and location she deliberately avoids mentioning.
Six years after the healthcare structure closed down, De Rosa returned among the rooms and the already decaying corridors to document the void left by the patients. The result is a sensitive, touching study consisting of portraits of the objects abandoned by the patients and their wall writings – sentences that are often astonishingly lucid.

prometeogallery by Ida Pisani, Milano, Italy - Contemporary Art

NUN

Otto Zoo gallery is pleased to present NUN, an exhibit including the works of artists Gregory Forstner and Giandomenico Sozzi, curated by Marco Tagliafierro.

NUN, now, signifies the instant in which heterogeneous signs find the possibility to come together; a casual and unexpected encounter, the product of a lucky combination that produces energizing misunderstandings, able to open up new forms of language.

This is what usually happens in the artist’s studio and what will take place in the gallery: a spatial and temporal dimension able to act as catalyst for elements that come from differing contexts. It is the artist’s perspective that creates harmony among them.

Curator Marco Tagliafierro references the artist’s studio, a fundamental visual archetype in contemporary debates on aesthetics. By going back to the studio, Tagliaferro creates a visual reference that synthesizes the concept of semantic resonance among different signs. Furthermore, the reference to the artist’s studio recalls a sense of continuity with the last exhibit hosted by Otto Zoo, entitled ICI. ICI dealt with the intellectual dimension of artistic work in relation to the medium of painting.

Otto Zoo

Alexandra Dementieva

Alexandra Dementieva - Alien space


Interactive video installation / Programming MAC: Bart Vandeput / Programming PC & sound: Adam Kendall / Sound objects: Ludo Engels / Set design: Marcus Bering / 3D animation: Real Reality / Production: Vlaams Audiovisueel Fonds - www.vaf.be / Nadine vzw - www.nadine.be / CCNOA center for contemporary non-objective art - www.ccnoa.org / Adem vzw

The installation consists of 800 transparent, pearl-colored latex balloons forming two corridors (each around 3 m long) leading to a central circular space. The balloons are reminiscent of living cells, futuristic buildings, laboratories, children’s rooms at Halloween…
The installation generates mixed feelings of curiosity, attraction and repulsion at one and the same time. The shining metallic surface is threatening and the fragility of the thin balloon disturbing. When the visitor moves through the narrow corridor, from time to time he accidentally touches the balloon wall, triggering mumbling noises and an occasional weak light shining from inside. When he reaches the central space, his movements effect changes in the audio and video environment. The closer he approaches the opposite wall, the more it is populated by blurry images and creatures.
A few steps further on and he can clearly recognize the creatures – television newsreaders interspersed with images of robots and blurry androids. When the visitor is in the middle of the space all the images and faces are clear and bright (as much as they can be on such a surface) but the sounds become loud and irregular, creating noises that are difficult to bear. If the spectator moves close to the wall, the cacophony of voices decreases, creating a place for one or two images. They stay visible; it is possible to understand what they are talking about and recognize what they are. This piece uses images from news bulletins broadcast by various international television stations. They will be recorded over a period of 2 to 3 weeks. The short films (which were first processed journalistically) will be collected and some of them will be reworked and a new soundtrack created. The sequences are regrouped and combined in a 40-cell navigation system. The installation exposes the visitor to staged virtual life while at the same time placing him physically and emotionally face-to-face with a worrying reality filled with accidents, potential destruction, dramas and love stories...

www.alexdementieva.org

CCNOA

view also - Dramhouse - Alexandra Dementieva XL gallery future

The Male Model

"HELGI THORSSON

The Male Model

Helgi Thorsson is known in the Netherlands for his usually metres-high sculptures that look like extraterrestrial creatures and which literally exhale enormous clouds of steam through a hole in the back or let their disco-ball eyes roll creakingly in their sockets. Music can be heard playing within the man-sized sculptures or the artist might give a concert with his bands 'Stilluppsteypa' and 'Evil Madness'. All his exhibitions burst with energy and come visually apart at the seams by means of moving projections, electronic pianos, talking dolls, turning tombolas.

Helgi Thorsson's exhibition 'The Male Model' centres on the cliché image of man. He doesn't analyse society, nor is there any critique of male behaviour in general. There is just an unstoppable stream of paintings, sculptures, multiples, drawings, video projections representing men. What do men do, who are men, Helgi Thorsson seems to be asking in the way he represents men. He draws and paints what he encounters in the media or what occurs to him in his fantasy: 'man'.

Helgi Thorsson received the Stipendium of the Berlage Fonds 2002, and in the same year the Gerrit Rietveld Prize. He won the AIAS Competition for his contribution to the AIAS exhibition in Seoul, South Korea, in 2002. In September 2008 he received the Children's Choice Award for his 'Schwarzenegger Beaver'. "

c u r r e n t s h o w Galerie van Gelder