FLACC Workplace for Visual Artists, Genk is pleased to present the exhibition Time to Destination, hosted by Komplot, from October 2 through October 31, 2009. Time to Destination is the first exhibition in Brussels featuring artists who developed projects commissioned by FLACC. The participating artists are Isoje Chou, Saddie Choua, Sylvie Macias Diaz, and Heidi Voet.
FLACC Workplace for Visual Artists
"Contour presents artists working with film, video and installation in special locations in the historical inner city of Mechelen; unexpected or unusual venues within walking distance from one another.
The fourth edition bears the mark of the Brussels-based curator Katerina Gregos (GRC). Under the title 'Hidden In Remembrance Is The Silent Memory Of Our Future’, the exhibition probes history, advocates its importance and revolves around questions of historical representation and historiography."
Contour 2009 - 4th Biennal of moving image - 4de Biennale voor bewegend beeld - Mechelen
Il prossimo appuntamento Meet the Media Guru
: STEVEN BERLIN JOHNSON :
stevenberlinjohnson.com
Steven Berlin Johnson is the author of The Ghost Map (2006), a chronicle of the 1854 cholera epidemic in London, and The Invention of Air (2008), the story of British scientist Joseph Priestly and his influence on the America’s Founding Fathers. In this lecture Johnson will argue against those who maintain that the internet has fragmented society by enabling us to filter out voices with viewpoints different from our own. On the contrary, he claims that the internet promotes a diversity far more comprehensive than older forms of media.
Steven Johnson, Author, The Ghost Map: "The Myth of the Echo Chamber: Politics in the Age of the Participatory Web" – Septembe - iTunes - VideoWired.com - Get Wired!
Steven Berlin Johnson - Marketing Non Convenzionale – Ninja Marketing
Andrey Golub :: Weblog :: MEET THE MEDIA GURU
"pFARM :: Organic Fetish Biotech"
Film screening
Friday 25 September, 3.30-5pm
Adam Zaretsky and the pFARM Collective
pFARM :: Organic Fetish Biotech documents the activities of the pFarm collective and its phantasmagoric, organic bio-tech experiments in inter-species fantasies, fetishes and flea-market offerings. Created by Adam Zaretsky and the pFARM Collective, the film explores cultural power relations between organic farming, recent advances in new reproductive technology and our domestic conceptions of wildness.
Zaretsky is a PhD Candidate in Electronic Arts at The Department of the Arts at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI). He is a bioartist, performer, researcher and art theorist whose work focuses on Biology and Art Wet Lab Practice. He was the first international resident in SymbioticA, and not only enthusiastically participated in the labs but was instrumental in establishing SymbioticA's undergraduate academic program with the development of the VIVOART course. His work was shown in SymbioticA’s BIOFEEL exhibition in 2002.
For more information visit: http://www.pfarm.org/
SymbioticA - Friday Afternoons
"Sensity. A series of artworks based on sensing the environment. The results are the visualisation and sonification of real time spaces.
Sensity artworks are made from the data that is collected across the urban and environment infrastructure. The sensors interpret the micro-data of the interactive city. The output from the sensors display the 'emotional' state of the city online in real time and the information is also used to create offline installations and sculptural artworks."
Sensity by Stanza....2004 - 2009. A series of artworks sensing the environment. Sensing the 'soul of the city'. Wireless sensor networks from the interactive city. The Emergent City. Digital and interactive cities
Modernologies
23/09/2009 - 10/01/2009 MACBA
This project examines modernity as a promising socio-political movement which, basing itself on industrialization and technology, on the principles of human rights and democracy, on the right to self-determination, on the principle of education for all, on secularisation and Enlightenment philosophy, and above all on the underlying notion of progress and continual development, aspired to form a universal language. Hence, art no longer stood in a direct functional relationship to its former patrons, the Church and the aristocracy, but instead became committed to the ideology of autonomy. The arts were accordingly required to portray modern life not only in adequate forms but also with analogous contents as part of this movement, in order to reflect the utopian potential of modernity but also the destructive and regressive sides of revolution and upheaval. Modernism attempted to illustrate the experiences and ramifications of modernity in artistic forms – and in undertaking this project it was almost post-modern.
Such promises of a better and more beautiful world are juxtaposed with considerations problematizing the notion and category of modernity, defining a fundamental critique on its rhetoric and conditions. Western imperial projects, and especially the colonial expansion, had modernity not as a precondition but as constituent part of their essence according to Walter Mignolo forming its “hidden, darker side” of this “European narrative”. Jacques Rancière claims an “aesthetic regime of art” whose prevailing “indifference” goes back to the democratic principle of a radical demand for equality. Assertions come from Bruno Latour according to which we “have never been modern” because the strict dichotomy in the modern between nature and society was never surmounted.
It is evident that modernity is a popular topos for analyses and reflections of a largely controversial nature. Numerous theories have also been written about the beginning as well as the end of modernity, marking a radical change in all spheres of life. While early formulations of “modern life” can be recognised in Romanticism, primarily in its literature, it is the French Revolution and the first open display of a painting on the occasion of the public viewing of Marat’s murdered body in Paris that are considered as decisive events in the development of modernity in political as well as aesthetic contexts (T.J. Clark). The emergence of the totalitarian regimes in Europe, especially Germany under National Socialism and the Holocaust, mark the decline of the modern individually and societally as well as politically. The architecture theorist Charles Jencks established a date for the “death of modern architecture” at 3:32 p.m. on 15 July 1972, exact to the minute. At this moment the Pruitt-Igoe apartment buildings in St. Louis were being demolished; the expiration of the modern was thereby conceded so to speak, making literal room for “the language of post-modernity”. The non-synchrony and distinctions of the definition of the notion of modernity in terms of the modern era, of style, of society, as model of production in connection with what we have learned from the postcolonial studies lead us to agree to speak about “many modernities” since the last years.
In light of the return of reactionary thinking in society and politics, a renewed functionalization of art by the market strategists of global corporations which relegate economically disadvantaged countries to a pre-modern situation through their economic imperialism, and also the all-commanding role played by the art market today, it seems to be no accident that a younger generation of artists is dealing increasingly with the legacy and the promises of modernity and modernism, indeed with the failure of utopia and searching for possible actualizations, in its works.
The aim of the Modernologies exhibition is to achieve an account of the state of artistic research and to discuss selected contributions to the subject matter that appear central after two to three decades of an ever intensely blazing conflict about the legacy of modernity and modernism as regards form and content, and the (to some extent) solid criticism of this category and the contents that are linked to it. To this effect the project advocates neither a “new formalism” nor a “return to abstraction”. Neither is the focus per se on revealing “unknown modernisms” in countries whose protagonists have been assigned more marginalised roles in relation to this subject matter up to now; it is much more about a fundamental attack that challenges the conditions and constraints of modernity and modernism and will reveal new readings. What is the artists’ relationship to the promises and forms of modernity, and how can this historical era be reflected in artworks in a critical way or even undergo a re-evaluation? At the same time, the ambivalent situation of this exhibition, which paradoxically deals with a project that is associated more than almost any other with its failure, should not go unmentioned.
modernologies attempts to process some of the central approaches to this artistic research and focuses on the present, whereby the point of departure is always the artists’ perspective on this subject area. At the exhibition works will be on display by artists such as Armando Andrade Tudela, Anna Artaker, Alice Creischer/Andreas Siekmann, Doménec, Katja Eydel, Angela Ferreira, Andrea Fraser, Isa Genzken, Dan Graham, Tom Holert/Claudia Honecker, Marine Hugonnier, Irwin, Runa Islam, Klub Zwei, John Knight, Labor k3000 (Peter Spillmann/Michael Vögeli/Marion von Osten), Louise Lawler, David Maljkovic, Dorit Margreiter, Gordon-Matta Clark, Gustav Metzger, Christian Phillip Müller, Henrik Olesen, Paulina Olowska, Falke Pisano, Mathias Poledna, Florian Pumhösl, Martha Rosler, Stephen Willats, Marion von Osten, Christopher Williams.
A publication of the same name is being released at the exhibition with numerous images and texts by Sabine Breitwieser, Cornelia Klinger and Walter Mignolo as well as the artists that will also be given voice through short interviews conducted by Sabine Breitwieser and Andrè Rottmann.
Curator: Sabine Breitwieser
Production: Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA)
Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona
