Aktuelles
Exhibition: Araki. Tokyo
Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich, ‐
Japanese artist Nobuyoshi Araki (b. 1940) is one of the most prolific and provocative photographers of our time. His work spans a wide range of topics, from highly erotic representations of women to artificial still lifes, botanical portraits, photo-journalistic depictions of everyday life, and architectural photography – and almost diary-like shots of himself and his late wife.
Composed of 28 diptychs, “Tokyo” (1969–1973) is the template for one of Araki’s first book projects and stands at the beginning of his long-term engagement with Tokyo’s lifestyles and urban environment. Opposites such as anonymous and familiar, clothed and nude, interior and exterior worlds function as subtle references to the separation between public and private life, between dream and reality.
In 2004, the original edition of the book “Tokyo” (1973) was acquired with the support of PIN. The exhibition introduces the Tokyo series, supplemented by additional early experimental photographs, as well as artists’ books from the sixties and seventies.
Diana Baldon appointed Director of Fondazione Modena Arti Visive
The Italian Copenhagen-based art historian, curator and critic Diana Baldon has been named Director of Fondazione Modena Arti Visive, one of Italy’s newest visual arts institutions based in Modena. The new foundation brings together three of the city’s key cultural institutions: the Galleria Civica di Modena—one of Italy’s oldest and most respected Italian contemporary art centres—together with the more recent Fondazione Fotografia Modena and the Museo della Figurina. Already at the helm of the Fondazione Fotografia Modena since June 1 2017, between 2011 and 2016 Diana Baldon was Director of Malmö Konsthall and Index – The Swedish Contemporary Art Foundation where she staged solo exhibitions by Nina Beier, Cornelius Cardew, Joan Jonas, Goshka Macuga, Ad Reinhardt, Lili Reynaud-Dewar and Heimo Zobernig among others. Prior to her appointments in Sweden, she worked at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna as Curator-in-Residence and as a member of the scientific and artistic teaching staff (2007–2011). After receiving a Master’s degree in Creative Curating from Goldsmiths College, University of London, in 2002, she has curated exhibitions internationally for many institutions and Biennials, such as MIT List Visual Art Center in Cambridge, MA, and Mudam Luxembourg – Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean (both 2017), the Generali Foundation in Vienna (2012) and the Second Athens Biennale (2009). Her critical writing has been featured in numerous artists’ catalogues and international magazines such as Artforum, Texte zur Kunst, and Afterall. Fondazione Modena Arti Visive Coinciding with Baldon’s nomination, Fondazione Modena Arti Visive has been founded by the City of Modena and the private philanthropic foundation Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio di Modena to present contemporary art and visual culture within the framework of the heritage and the driving forces of three cultural institutions, namely the Galleria Civica di Modena, the Fondazione Fotografia Modena, and the Museo della Figurina. While reflecting the individual paths of these public and private cultural institutions with a view to strengthening their individual identities, the aims of the new foundation include the showcasing of the most innovative international artistic practices of the twenty-first century, the promotion of forms of activation and contamination between various disciplines and contexts, and the valorisation of the collections with which it is entrusted. Furthermore, through theoretical and critical research, it will investigate the radical transformation that art and imagery have undergone over recent decades in the wake of the impact of new technologies as well as the new contexts and platforms available for the sharing of information and services.
Exhibition: Robert Frank
Albertina, Vienna, 25. 10. 2017 – 21. 01. 2018
“The Americans”, a group of photos shot by Robert Frank between 1955 and 1957, made photographic history: these works, which Frank took on a series of road trips through the United States, illuminate the post-war “American way of life” in grim black and white, revealing a reality of pervasive racism, violence, and consumer culture. Due to his images’ failure to uphold America’s self-image at the time, it was at first only possible to publish the synonymous book in Europe. But with “The Americans”, Robert Frank did ultimately succeed in creating one of the most influential photographic works of the post-war period while also effecting a sustained renewal of street photography.
The Albertina, in its exhibition, is showing selected groups of works that make it possible to retrace Robert Frank’s development as an artist: from his early travel photos to “The Americans” and on to his introspective late oeuvre, central aspects of his work are placed front and centre.
Guided Tour by the Curator Walter Moser (in German)
13 December 2017, 5.30 pm
Guided Tour with Walter Moser, curator of the exhibition, and Michael Loebenstein, Director of the Austrian Filmmuseum
17 January 2018, 5.30 pm
Tour fee per person EUR 4 (exclusive of entry ticket) | Tickets can be obtained at the museum’s ticket desk (on the day of the tour) | Maximum group size 25 persons | No registration possible | first come, first served | Meeting point: Court of the Albertina | Groups of 10 people or more are requested to arrange a Guided Tour for Groups.
Trevor Paglen is MacArthur Fellow 2017
Photographer Trevor Paglen has been announced as one of twenty-four recipients of the MacArthur Fellowship 2017. The MacArthur Fellows Program is intended to encourage people of outstanding talent to pursue their own creative, intellectual, and professional inclinations. In keeping with this purpose, the Foundation awards fellowships directly to individuals rather than through institutions. Recipients may be writers, scientists, artists, social scientists, humanists, teachers, entrepreneurs, or those in other fields, with or without institutional affiliations. They may use their fellowship to advance their expertise, engage in bold new work, or, if they wish, to change fields or alter the direction of their careers. Although nominees are reviewed for their achievements, the fellowship is not a lifetime achievement award, but rather an investment in a person’s originality, insight, and potential. Indeed, the purpose of the MacArthur Fellows Program is to enable recipients to exercise their own creative instincts for the benefit of human society. The Foundation does not require or expect specific products or reports from MacArthur Fellows and does not evaluate recipients’ creativity during the term of the fellowship. The MacArthur Fellowship is a “no strings attached” award in support of people, not projects. Each fellowship comes with a stipend of $625,000 to the recipient, paid out in equal quarterly installments over five years.
Duane Michaels receives the DGPh Culture Award
New York-based Duane Michals is honoured with the 2017 Culture Award by the German Photographic Association (DGPh), a distinction that marks the association’s recognition of one of America’s most significant contemporary artists. The award ceremony will take place on 21 October 2017 at the Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur in Cologne. The laudatory speech will be made by Dr. Söke Dinkla, director of Lehmbruck Museum in Duisburg. The award, which has been handed out annually by the DGPh since 1959, honors significant photographic achievements, particularly in the artistic, humanitarian, social, technical, educational or scientific field.
Highly active to this day, the artist Duane Michals has been working with the medium of photography since the end of the 1950s. Born in 1932 in McKeesport, Pennsylvania, USA, he studied Graphic Design at the University of Denver between 1949 and 1953; after that, he served in the US Army and was stationed in Germany, among other places. From 1956 onwards he built on his studies at the Parsons School of Design. Michals took his first shots in 1958 on a journey to Russia. From that moment on, the medium of photography was to become an important means of expression for him, and continues to be so to the present day.
He chooses different forms of presentation, while lending particular importance to the serial-narrative aspect. In 1966, Michals took part alongside Bruce Davidson, Lee Friedlander, Danny Lyon and Garry Winogrand in the seminal exhibition “Towards a Social Landscape” at George Eastman House, Rochester. “Stories by Duane Michals” was the title in 1970 of his first solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. It became evident early on that the description “photographer” alone does no justice to Michals’s complex approach, with his imaginatively staged image production. For his concern, again and again, is the staging and heightening of impressions of reality that go beyond the concretely documentary. What chiefly attracts him is not the single image, but, right from the 1960s, the sequence created in black-and-white images, a specific form of visual narrative or photographic “stage play”.
Exhibition and Symposium: The Photographic I. Other Pictures
S.M.A.K., Gent, 07. 10. 2017 – 07. 01. 2018
Symposium: 23. 11. – 24. 11. 2017
The Photographic I – Other Pictures comprises work by artists and photographers including Lewis Baltz, Tina Barney, Mohamed Bourouissa, Moyra Davey, Marc De Blieck, Sara Deraedt, Patrick Faigenbaum, Peter Fraser, Alair Gomes, Jitka Hanzlová, Roni Horn, Stephanie Kiwitt, Aglaia Konrad, Jochen Lempert, Zoe Leonard, Jean-Luc Moulène, Zanele Muholi, Jean-Luc Mylayne, Trevor Paglen, Doug Rickard, Torbjørn Rødland, Michael Schmidt, Arne Schmitt, Allan Sekula, Ahlam Shibli, Malick Sidibé, Danayata Singh, Wolfgang Tillmans, Marc Trivier, and Tobias Zielony.
The Photographic I – Other Pictures is the first part of a diptych spread over two years. The exhibition comprises new and existing work by around 20 international artists and photographers ranging from the 1960s to the present.
The selection demonstrates a lively interest in the power of the still image as a means of examining the world. It concentrates on indefinable images with an open view, whose multi-layering requires slow reading.
John Szarkowski once formulated the familiar distinction between photos that act as a window on the world and photos intended to reflect their maker. Other Pictures demonstrates that photographic images can perform both functions at the same time: they focus on the world and they invariably approach their subject in a subjective and sensory manner.
Photographic images not only show the world we live in, but are among its essential building blocks. New ways of producing and distributing images, and technological innovation in the civil and military spheres, make the medium repeatedly evolve in new directions and also seep into current artistic practice. The way photographers and artists handle these recent possibilities and challenges is one of the focal points of this exhibition.
To accompany this presentation, Roma Publications Amsterdam are publishing an exhibition magazine.
Symposium on the 23th and 24th of November 2017
A symposium organised in association with the Thinking Tools research group (KASK Antwerp) is being held on Thursday 23 and Friday 24 November 2017. In a programme comprising lectures, talks by artists and portfolio viewings, national and international speakers present a picture of where photography currently stands in the field of contemporary art. More details will follow.
Alexander Kluge’s Ouevre on View at Two Exhibitions
Pluriversum, Museum Folkwang, Essen, 15. 9. 2017 – 7. 1. 2018
Gardens of Cooperation, Württembergischer Kunstverein Stuttgart, 14. 10. 2017 – 14. 1. 2018
Alexander Kluge sees himself as an author. He inspires his readers, listeners and viewers with his films, texts interviews and much more besides. On the occasion of his 85th birthday, Museum Folkwang is presenting an exhaustive exhibition destined to visualize the core of his multimedia oeuvre. A comprehensive programme of accompanying events forms an integral part of the exhibition and is intended to offer a performative experience of the holistic intellectual approach underpinning Kluge’s cosmos. Like the show itself, the accompanying programme has been created with the involvement of Alexander Kluge himself.
In Stuttgart, the exhibition Alexander Kluge: Gardens of Cooperation is based on the comprehensive exhibition of the same name—devoted to the writer, filmmaker, and theorist Alexander Kluge—which was on show at the art center La Virreina Centre de la Imatge in Barcelona in 2016. In close collaboration with the director of La Virreina, Valentín Roma, and with Alexander Kluge himself, the Württembergischer Kunstverein has developed a reformulation and expansion of seven single aspects of this project. The exhibition’s two main points of reference in terms of content revolve on the one hand around the metaphor of the garden and the idea of the collective—of cooperation—in Kluge’s oeuvre and modes of operation; and on the other hand around forms of emancipation, which are not only the subject of his theoretical and artistic explorations of history, the present, and the future, but with which he himself also tirelessly engages.
Pluriversale VII: Stealing from the West. Cultural Appropriation as Postcolonial Retaliation
Academy of the Arts of the World / Cologne, Fall Program
20. 9. – 10. 12. 2017
Exhibition:
With Yuri Albert, Kader Attia, Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Younes Baba-Ali, Ines Doujak, Tom Gould, Ramon Haze, Uriel Orlow, Gosha Rubchinskiy, Ulay
Venue: ACADEMYSPACE, Herwarthstraße 3, 50672 Cologne
Other events: (various locations in Cologne)
With Clara Balaguer, Vivek Chibber, Florian Cramer, Jan Peter Hammer, Louis Henderson, The Jitta Collective (Stephanie Thiersch & Kefa Oiro), Hari Kunzru [tbc], Gym Lumbera, Naeem Mohaiemen, Rabih Mroué, Milo Rau, and others
Exhibition concept: Ekaterina Degot
PLURIVERSALE VII is curated by Ekaterina Degot, David Riff, Aneta Rostkowska and the whole team of the Academy of the Arts of the World.
Cultural appropriation has recently become the subject of heated debate. What was until very recently considered a purely aesthetic, vaguely post-modern, individualistic device of free, playful translation and citation of texts from “other” cultures, is suddenly revealed in its frightening political economic dimension of exploitation and profit. A white dominant majority takes everything it likes to the detriment of indigenous voices, people of color, and others who are culturally and politically oppressed.
We, however, want to turn to another side of this story overshadowed by recent discussions: the strategy of cultural counter-appropriation used by the underprivileged, in postcolonial Africa or in the Europe of migrants, as well as by those on the margins of Europe in the former socialist world. The thieves, counterfeiters, and resistant appropriators in Stealing from the West show that stealing from the West and faking its glossy products is not a proof of belatedness. Instead, it is a potent tool of cultural resistance and an instrument of postcolonial retaliation. It is also a strategy to demonstrate that all-white “high culture,” paid for by the lives of millions of slaves and colonial subjects, is common property and belongs to all.
An early intervention by Ulay already made this point in 1976, when he stole one of the most popular paintings in the collection of the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin, The Poor Poet by Carl Spitzweg (1839), only to hang it in the apartment of a Turkish immigrant family. The Poor Poet , not really a high culture masterpiece, represents a territory of Western culture even more fiercely protected, the bourgeois value of sentimentality (Adolf Hitler’s favorite), as well as the hypocritical idea of “pure” noncommercial art. By symbolically giving this painting to the relatively disenfranchised, Ulay exposes the fake compassion to the non-threatening poor that is at the core of the mawkish popularity of the painting.
The exhibition opens with some historical examples of daredevil wrecking and looting that duplicates conscious and programmatic political acts, post-colonial assertions of rights, or maybe just acts of vengeance. The “Pink Panthers” are a legendary gang of diamond robbers from ex-Yugoslavia, who, as many journalists argued, take revenge on the West for the destruction of their socialist country. Perhaps the Pink Panthers are a softer and ironical Eastern European version of the Black Panthers who boast their pride in their difference by assuming violence. In the exhibition, a documentary film by Havana Marking (Smash and Grab: The Story of the Pink Panthers, 2013) tells their story.
Another cultural phenomenon is Lo Life Crew – a Brooklyn gang, formed in 1988, united by a singular passion to be dressed head-to-toe in Ralph Lauren clothes, shoplifted with artistry and rare panache. The cultural détournement consisted in appropriating Ralph Lauren of all labels, this embodiment of all-white American wealth, this territory of the quietly affluent, busy with golf, skiing, and sailing, – territory that could not be more at odds with the lifestyle of a poor black and Latino neighborhood. (In the show, they are represented by archival materials and Tom Gould’s photographs).
This appropriation of brands is a conscious artistic strategy pursued by young designers from the margins of the “big fashion world”, as Moscow-based Gosha Rubchinskiy, whose fake Tommy Hilfiger logos recently made headlines. Artist Ines Doujak’s sculptural Looters (2016) are part of her long term Loomshuttles/Warpaths project where she explores the links between textile production, colonialism, and violence.
They stand for the universal figure of a rioter whose protest against the capitalist system is immediately translated into the language of consumerism in its radical form: property theft. By stealing from the rich and culturally dominant, the looters who do not fit into the mono-ethnic idea of Europe, appropriate their place under the Western sun as well, like Younes Baba-Ali’s illegal migrant street sellers in today’s Italy who proudly display this country name on their sweatshirts (Italianisation, 2016).
Another mode of “stealing from the West” is represented by artists from the formally not colonized, but nevertheless culturally marginalized outskirts of the “big world,” Eastern Europe or East Germany, who mockingly “counterfeit” the Western modernist canon while confessing openly that this imitation is bad and technically poor. This ironic narrative of the failure to be original is central to Moscow-born Yuri Albert. One of his seminal series, begun in the 1980s, engages in self-deprecating tongue-in-cheek “failed imitations” of international textbook artists’ styles – while proclaiming his originality: I am not Jasper Johns, I am not Lichtenstein, I am not Andy Warhol.
Exhibition: Willem de Rooij. Whiteout
KW Institute for Contemporary Art
14. 9. – 17. 12. 2017
Willem de Rooij (born 1969 in Beverwijk, NL) investigates the production, contextualization and interpretation of images. His multifaceted practice includes photography, films, videos, sculpture, soundrecordings, and writing. Appropriated materials, such as found images, objects borrowed from art historical or ethnographic collections, or works by other artists play an important role. De Rooij’s works take the form of installations or temporary groupings that reflect on the physical and contextual qualities of the space they occupy. Willem de Rooij has been Professor at the Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main since 2006. In 2015, he founded BPA // Berlin Program for Artists together with Angela Bulloch and Simon Denny, and since 2016 he is a Visiting Advisor at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam.
This fall, KW Institute for Contemporary Art presents Whiteout—a selection of de Rooij’s production from the last twenty years. The exhibition connects recent work with seminal pieces made together with Jeroen de Rijke (1970–2006), with whom de Rooij collaborated from 1994 to 2006 under the name de Rijke/de Rooij.
Fotodoks – Festival for Contemporary Documentary Photography
Lothringer13 Halle, Munich, 11. – 15. 10. 2017
Theme: ME:WE
Partner country: USA
The exhibition ME:WE will be opened on October, 11th, 2017 in the urban art space Lothringer13 Halle and is the start of the intensive festival with discussions, lectures, screenings and workshops.
Participating Photographers:
Endia Beal (US)
Michael Danner (DE)
Tim Davis (US)
Thomas Dworzak (DE)
Annie Flanagan (US)
Gregory Halpern (US)
Paul Kranzler (AT)
Kristin Loschert (DE)
Mike Mandel and Chantal Zakari (US)
Harris Mizrahi (US)
Stefanie Moshammer (AT)
Andrea Ellen Reed (US)
Richard Renaldi (US)
Ruddy Roye (US)
Lisa Riordan Seville and Zara Katz (US)
Sofia Valiente (US)
Christina Werner (AT)
With the topic ME:WE Fotodoks 2017 illuminates, in dialogue with the partner country USA, the relationship between the individual and the collective. Documentary photographic positions show how social communities are shaped by external influences, such as politics or conflicts, and create the potential for a hopeful connection. The view is directed at what connects or separates people, opposition, diversity and solidarity, and the search for motifs that define attributions and identities in a complex time. Virtual participation is observed critically and influences of nationalism on society and the media are shown. In the same way, the personal behavior of photographers is discussed and the role they can play in social coexistence. The projects of the selected photographers tell of the search for security and love, describe exceptional situations, analyze political commitment and positions, observe boundaries and transgressions, and last but not least, they use the medium of photography as an escape ahead – ME:WE describes a movement, a dynamic process.
Fotodoks is an international and ambitious festival that reflects and discusses contemporary documentary photography in a lively and personal atmosphere. Focusing on a different theme and partner region for each edition, Fotodoks perceives itself as an independent forum, which takes place in Munich every second year and has established itself since 2008 as the largest festival for documentary photography in the German-speaking world. In 2017, Fotodoks presents itself in a space for contemporary art: in the Lothringer13 Halle & Rroom, the group exhibition, the events of the supporting program and a café with photo books are gathered together to create a place for dialog.
ABOUT US
For the first time at Fotodoks, a pool of 150 discussed projects – among thus the 19 photographers selected by the jury – drew up from the proposals of renowned nominators, who we are grateful for their cooperation.
With Michaela Obermair from Vienna, Sabine Schwarzenböck from Munich and Lene Harbo Pedersen from Copenhagen, the Fotodoks Headquarter 2017 has been expanded and becomes even more international.
Screening: Tatiana Lecomte. Hors-Champ
mumok, Vienna, October 11, 2017, 19:00
Tatiana Lecomte is showing a selection of films that have impressed her greatly and influenced her own work, contrasting these with her own film Ein mörderischer Lärm (A Thunderous Noise). This film is based on the experiences of Frenchman Jean-Jacques Boijentin (1920–2015) in the Gusen II concentration camp in St. Georgen an der Gusen (to the east of Linz), a subsidiary camp of Mauthausen. Prisoners were deployed to build a secret underground factory making jet airplanes. Conditions in the camp were inhuman, and the work underground was even worse. The title Hors-champ refers to the space that we do not see in the film, a gap that we fill in automatically with our own experience and knowledge.
Hannes Böck, Fünf Skulpturen aus den ägyptischen Heiligtümern im Museo del Sannio, Benevento: n. 252 Hockender Pavian, Diorit; n. 253 Falke, Amphibolit; n. 255 Falke, Gabbro; n. 256 Hockender Pavian, Diorit; n. 280 Apis-Stier, Diorit, 2013, 9 min
Tatiana Lecomte, Ein mörderischer Lärm, 2015, 21 min
Morgan Fisher, Production Stills, 1970, 11 min
Rainer Wölzl, Die Linke, 2009, 3 min
Hans Schabus, Atelier, 2010, 8 min
James Benning & Bette Gordon, The United States of America, 1975, 27 min
Followed by a conversation with Tatiana Lecomte and Maren Lübbke-Tidow
Tatiana Lecomte lives in Vienna. Exhibitions (selection): Nach einer wahren Begebenheit, Galerie Marenzi, Leibnitz (2017); Tselem ve-Tsilum, Jüdisches Museum am Judenplatz, Vienna (2013); Šejla Kameric, Tatiana Lecomte, Camera Austria, Graz (2011).
Maren Lübbke-Tidow works on photography and visual art. She writes for a range of international magazines, books, catalogues, and artists, and curates exhibitions in different institutional contexts, among others at Camera Austria (Graz).
Magazine Launch: EIKON #99 with Focus “On Publishing Photography” in Cooperation with Camera Austria International
When: 5.9.2017, 7pm
Where: EIKON Schaufenster, Q21 in MuseumsQuartier Wien / Schauräume, Museumsplatz 1, 1070 Vienna
The third EIKON issue of the year marks the beginning of fall with main articles of Jürgen Klauke, Jaakko Kahilaniemi, Elisabeth Czihakund Karin Fisslthaler, as well as an extensive interview with Gerald Bast and Patrick Werkner on the occasion of 150 Years of the University of Applied Arts Vienna.
In Focus: On Publishing Photography – already anticipating the 100th issue of EIKON, launched in November – addresses the question why contemporary photography magazines still hold on to print production in times of digitalization and commercialization and which programmatic strategies they pursue. For this purpose, together with Camera Austria International, EIKON invited selected international photography magazines to present themselves and their ideas and to allow the reader a glimpse behind the scenes.
Alongside discussions, i.e. of the solo exhibition by Shirin Neshat at Kunsthalle Tübingen and the group exhibition “How To Live Together” at Kunsthalle Wien, as well as reviews on new publications, you will find current announcements, open calls and exhibition recommendations.
Stefanie Moshammer wins C/O Berlin Talents Award
After ten successful years, the early career Talents program has been comprehensively restructured: Talents is now the C/O Berlin Talent Award.
Effective immediately, the C/O Berlin Talent Award will honor one outstanding young photographer and art critic each year, awarding 10,000 EUR in total (7,000 EUR in the photography category and 3,000 EUR in the art criticism category). In addition to the cash award, the recipient will be given increased space within the exhibition program, presenting a solo exhibition at C/O Berlin. His or her work will be honored with a comprehensive, individualized catalog, which will also showcase the winning critic and allow him or her to enter into a dialog with the photographic works.
The C/O Berlin Talent Award is the only prize of its kind in Europe. It showcases emerging photographers and art critics under 35, accompanying them on their creative journey and offering a starting point for international exhibitions. The expert jury will nominate the candidates for the selection process. As well as choosing the prizewinners in the categories of photography and art criticism, four participants will be shortlisted. Their works will be published in the C/O Berlin newspaper and presented online as part of the collaboration between C/O Berlin and the photography magazine Der Greif.
C/O Berlin is delighted to award the first C/O Berlin Talent Award in the photography category to the Austrian artist Stefanie Moshammer (b. 1988, Vienna). Stefanie Moshammer and her work won over this year’s jury members—Diane Dufour (LE BAL, Paris), Shoair Mavlian (Tate Modern, London), Aaron Schuman (freelance critic and curator, London), Anne-Marie Beckmann (Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation) and Ann-Christin Bertrand (C/O Berlin)—as an extraordinary example of the current debate on the discourse surrounding the topic of New Documentary Photography. Her solo exhibition at C/O Berlin will allow her to present her work to a broad public at an international level. ARTE will support the C/O Berlin Talent Award as media partner and the prizewinner’s exhibition.
Sylvain Couzinet-Jacques (b. 1983, France), Joscha Steffens (b. 1981, the Netherlands), Stephan Bögel (b. 1983, Germany), and Mafalda Rakoš (b. 1994, Austria) were selected for the shortlist.
Stefanie Moshammer’s photographs—comprised of different media—illuminate the complexity of our contemporary perception. Using existing materials, she develops her own photographs, charts pictures using Google Maps and uses film footage and video as well as fictional shots and images from her own imagination. In doing so, she creates new forms of documentation while combining fictional and narrative moments and touches on fundamental photographic themes: What is reality? What is fiction? Which truths does the photographic image convey?
Stefanie Moshammer was born in Vienna in 1988, where she continues to live and work. After graduating from the Fashion School Vienna, she completed her bachelor of arts in visual communication and photography at the University of Art and Design Linz as well as a course in photojournalism at the Danish School of Media and Journalism in Aarhus. Moshammer received a nomination within the Rencontres d’Arles festival, was selected as a FOAM Talent and nominated for the ING Unseen Talent Award at the Unseen Photo Fair in Amsterdam. Her photographs have been published in numerous magazines including i-D, Collector Daily, GUP Magazine, It’s Nice That, ZEITmagazin, New York magazine, FOAM Talent Issue, and VICE.
KW Institute for Contemporary Art announces »KW Productions Series«
About the artists and projects
Exploring ideas around gender, poetry, and disobedience, Beatrice Gibson’s new film is a collaboration with two of US-America’s most significant living poets—CA Conrad and Eileen Myles—and draws inspiration from the work of a third – the US-American novelist Gertrude Stein and her unrealized script Film: Deux Soeurs qui sont pas Soeurs (1929). Exploring poetry as a means to reckon with the present, Gibson uses Stein’s script as a talismanic guide through a contemporary moment of social and political unrest.
Beatrice Gibson lives and works in London. Gibson has twice won the Rotterdam International Film Festival Tiger Award for Short Film. In 2013 she was shortlisted for the 2013–15 Max Mara Art Prize for Women, and in 2015 won the 17th Baloise Art Prize, Art Basel, Basel (CH). Recent solo exhibitions include MUDAM – Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean, Luxembourg, 2016; Grazer Kunstverein, Graz (AT), 2016; Collective Gallery, Edinburgh (GB), 2015. Gibson’s films have been screened nationally and internationally, and venues include the Rotterdam International Film Festival, Experimenta, London, Wavelengths, Toronto, Projections, The New York, Light Industry, Anthology Film Archives, and LA Film Forum.
‘KW Production Series’ is made possible with generous support by the Julia Stoschek Collection and OUTSET Germany_Switzerland.
KW Institute for Contemporary Art is institutionally supported by the Senate Department for Culture and Europe.
Exhibitions: »Hans Hansen. Still Life« and »Optical Illusions. Contemporary Still Life« mit Lucas Blalock, Annette Kelm, Antje Peters, and Oskar Schmidt
C/O Berlin presents the exhibition Hans Hansen . Still Life from 13th July to 10th Sep- tember, 2017. The opening will be on Wednesday, July 12th, 2017 at 7 pm in the Amerika Haus, Hardenbergstraße 22–24, 10623 Berlin.
A VW Golf, built in 1988, neatly dismantled into around 7,000 pieces, graphically arranged glass blocks, the silhouette of a ower, or the captured image of a Japanese wooden mask—Hans Hansen’s view of things is greatly reduced, linear, and simultaneously full of energy. He always treats industrially manufactured products, natural objects, and everyday objects with the same precision and dedication. Technical accuracy and graphic minimalism lend the objects a visual life. Since the 1960s hardly any other photographer in the profession has shaped our percep- tion of the everyday world of things as decisively as Hans Hansen.
Hansen was one of the rst photographers to set new aesthetic standards in both independent and applied photography, and to this day, he has been able to combine both elds equally. In 1968 he captured a dismantled Beetle for the well-known Volkswagen campaign by the New York- based agency Doyle Dane Bernbach. In the late 1980s he repeated this project with a Golf on behalf of VW. With this work he gained international recognition and linked advertising photography with visual art and design for the rst time. Hans Hansen prefers to capture inanimate things. The objects in his images are always radically isolated and perfectly illuminated—an absolute must for Hansen. Regardless of whether he photographs products for Porsche, Erco, or Vitra, they are always arranged and structured to meticulously compare the form, colors, and the material of the objects. In addition, his photographs are often created using the positive-negative process.
His focus on materials such as glass and water led to commissions for Tapio Wirkkala and the photo series Glaswasser, in which he visually relates the two organic substances. Hansen’s black-and-white images of hair, convoluted bodies, and carrier snails, as well as his color images of vegetables, fruit, or plant models visualize his fascination for the materiality of individual objects. Characteristic of Hansen’s artistic approach is his minimalistic dramaturgy of light, with which he creates graphic forms and idiosyncratic architectural structures. While he con- siders his commissioned work to be in the realm of applied photography, in the past few years he has increasingly devoted himself to independent studio photography, which he describes it as an experimental eld and creative space where he can play with forms and light, bringing natu- ral objects and human artifacts to the fore.
C/O Berlin is presenting the varied work of this German photographer in Hans Hansen . Still Life, which includes both his independent and commissioned works. The selection offers an
overview of the material and sensual quality of his objects, as well as of his artistic and technical production of images, leading us through the visualization of still-life photography of indus- trial, artisanal, and natural objects.
The exhibition was curated by Felix Hoffmann and Hendrik Schwantes. An accompanying book will be published by Spector Books, Leipzig, with texts by Hartmut Böhme, Hannes Böhringer, Falk Haberkorn, Axel Kufus, Juhani Pallasmaa, and Anna Voswinckel.
Hans Hansen born in 1940 in Bielefeld, studied “applied graphics” at the Düsseldorf Art Academy after an apprenticeship as a lithographer. He is a self-taught photographer. Since the beginning of the sixties, he has been working as an independent photographer in Hamburg for renowned companies such as American Express, Audi, Bulthaup, Daimler Benz, Dibbern, Erco, Kodak, Lufthansa, Siemens, Vitra, and VW. His images also appear in well-known German and international journals, specialist magazines and magazines such as GEO Magazin, Greenpeace Magazin, Mare, Stern, Süddeutsche Zeitung Magazin and ZEITmagazin.
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C/O Berlin is presenting the exhibition entitled Optical Illusions . Contemporary Still Life with works by Lucas Blalock, Annette Kelm, Antje Peters and Oskar Schmidt from July 13th to September 10th, 2017. The opening will be held on Wednesday, July 12th, 2017, at 7 pm in the Amerika Haus in Hardenbergstraße 22-24, 10623 Berlin.
Set tables, elaborate floral arrangements, ostentatious compositions of books, trophies, glasses, and instruments count among the well-known motifs of classical still lifes and have for centuries been a canon of European art history. These once precious and symbolically charged objects have gradually given way to everyday objects. Meanwhile, perfume bottles, marbles, soft candy, hair shampoo, Starbucks cups, and pizza boxes are the objects of today’s still lifes.
The traditionally picturesque subject is currently experiencing a renaissance in contemporary photography, breaking down the distinctions between artistically arranged still life on the one hand and commercial product photography on the other.
Even artists of the 1920s and ’30s such as Man Ray, László Moholy-Nagy or Florence Henri experimented with the camera in a studio setting and created new forms of still life that were used as both artistic and advertising photos. Hans Hansen, whose exhibition entitled Still Life is being shown in dialogue with Optical Illusions . Contemporary Still Life, successfully continued this approach from the 1970s on as artistic product photography. Today, advertising and prod- uct photography belong to the visuals of everyday life in our digitized society, once again making the still life an attractive genre for young artists. In this way, artistic arrangements beyond the depicted subject are explored: new technical possibilities are explored, visual codes are reduced to absurdity, and our habits of thinking and perception are investigated in a time in which making and publishing pictures has become commonplace for nearly everyone.
The exhibition Optical Illusions . Contemporary Still Life curated by Ann-Christin Bertrand at C/O Berlin will present four artistic positions through the works of Lucas Blalock, Annette Kelm, Antje Peters, and Oskar Schmidt that do not just reassess the genre in a media sense, but rather also bring it up to date artistically. They all share an impressive precision and strict methodical formalization and use them to dissolve artistic conventions. By using both the rhetorics and aesthetics of everyday photography and at the same time questioning the mechanisms for the creation of photographic images, they open new spaces of thought and perception and readdress the differing conditions of digital image production and the aesthetic norms of photography.
The American photographer Lucas Blalock demonstrates the work process that goes on behind his photographs. Equally interested in both the history and the possibilities of photography, he starts with classical studio photography using an analogue large-format camera, and then scans the negatives and processes them digitally. Instead of disguising the digital pro- cesses, he leaves them perceivable, creating unique hybrid forms between traditional repre- sentations of objects and total alienation. His works thus reflect not only contemporary production methods of photographic images, but also seeing and the complexity of photographic reality.
Annette Kelm is also interested in approaching our optical perception. Drawing on the artistic conventions of advertising photography, like Elad Lassry or Roe Etheridge, her arrangements seem generally cold and calculated. Her photographs are created using the means of industrial and advertising photography. Instead of placing her objects on a neutral background, Annette Kelm often makes the background itself into the subject of the image. Whatever seems to stem from reality is then converted into a formally developed hyperreality, which then loses its legibility. But the strict orientation of formal criteria, the elimination of narrative elements, and the deliberate irritation caused by the insertion of collaged props thwarts the viewer. Her photographs thus become new spaces (of thought) that are balanced between pre- cision and ambiguity, space and surface, and objectivity and abstraction.
Antje Peters’s works deliberately deconstruct the concept of perfect high-gloss photography: she paints expensive cosmetic products with felt-tip pens and tapes them into amorphous bundles with adhesive tape that she positions in the middle of the photograph, or she bunch- es colored pencils together with a Swatch wristwatch. A spilled glass of water, exotic fruits, perfume, marbles, currency, and CDs are arranged more chaotically than perfectly choreo- graphed with soft candy, playing cards, and hair shampoo on a black background—she is always interested in the handicraft behind the perfect, smooth, and cold appearance of digital product photography. This artistic departure from known visual strategies in the advertising world is also being reflected in the presentation of her framed works at C/O Berlin, by con- sciously balancing between commercial window display and artistic installation.
Oskar Schmidt’s clear and highly reduced images are reminiscent of classic panel paintings. With mirrorlike surfaces, hidden objects, and isolated portraits, they are the result of careful arrangements. Schmidt often refers to icons of the history of painting and photogra- phy. At the same time, his images refer directly to so-called stock photography—flawless, mass-produced studio images that are available on image databases or from agencies with- out copyright or authorship and are free of charge. However, Schmidt is less concerned with the perfect reproduction of the original or the staging of the object and the figures themselves: he is more interested in photographic translation and artistic variation. His objective and minimalistic photographs bring up questions that go beyond mere reproduction in photography technique.
Realease and Symposium: Once We Were Artists
BAK, basis voor actuele kunst, Utrecht and Valiz, Amsterdam are proud to announce the release of Marion von Osten: Once We Were Artists (A BAK Critical Reader in Artists’ Practice). To mark the launch of the publication, the symposium “Once We Were Artists” takes place on Saturday 24 June 2017 from 10.30 till 18.00 hrs at the Centraal Museum, Utrecht (Agnietenstraat 1).
The reader critically maps the political commitment of von Osten’s influential work to feminism, theories of labor, knowledge production, education, and (post)coloniality. Von Osten’s practice systematically escapes strictures of canonization by scrutinizing, obstructing, and unsettling divisions categorizing art, art object, history making, theory, authority, curating, organizing, and teaching, opening up routes to radical re-readings of the contemporary. The contributions to this book discuss some of the many aspects of this situated, collaborative, process-oriented work so as to provide a locus from which to further engage her transversal practice, as well as the subject of the artist at present.
On the occasion of the reader’s publication, BAK organizes the symposium “Once We Were Artists,” taking place on Saturday 24 June 2017 from 10.30 till 18.00 hrs at the Centraal Museum, Utrecht (Agnietenstraat 1). The symposium addresses the shifting nature of artistic practices that lay claim to the public sphere and political space, and a collaborative, process-oriented ethos that revolves around issues of feminism, migration, education, and (post)coloniality. Contributors include E. C. Feiss (writer, Berkeley), Tom Holert (art historian, curator, and writer, Berlin), Sven Lütticken (writer and curator, Utrecht), Marion von Osten (cultural producer, Berlin), Maria Papadimitriou (artist, Athens), Farid Rakun (artist, writer, editor, and teacher, member of ruangrupa, Jakarta), and Joanna Warsza (curator, Berlin).
To register for the symposium (€8 per ticket and €6 for students, including lunch), please click here.
On view at BAK from 24 June till 9 July is ABiotic Factors, the MaHKU (Utrecht Graduate School of Visual Art and Design, Utrecht) graduation show, curated by von Osten.
To order a copy of Marion von Osten: Once We Were Artists (A BAK Critical Reader in Artists’ Practice), please e-mail info@bakonline.org or visit the website of Valiz.
10th Berlin Biennale Announces Curatorial Team
Gabi Ngcobo, curator of the 10th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art, has invited Moses Serubiri (Kampala, UG), Nomaduma Rosa Masilela (New York, US), Thiago de Paula Souza (São Paulo, BR), and Yvette Mutumba (Berlin, DE) to collaborate with her as the curatorial team. In addition, Gabi Ngcobo selected graphic designer Maziyar Pahlevan to create the visual identity for the 10th Berlin Biennale.
Each of the collaborators has ongoing, malleable, and open-ended research interests ranging from the politics of opacity to projections on life after the end of the world, to unconventional processes of organizing, and is interested in texts and events that resist power dynamics enacted in the writing of narratives.Their creative strategies continuously reflect historical and current shifts and their uneasy entanglements. Over the years each of the collaborators has been engaged, individually and together with Gabi Ngcobo, in dynamic initiatives of building counter-institutions and instigating creative interruptions.
The 10th Berlin Biennale will be imagined and shaped through these collective dreams and actions. In conversation with artists and contributors who think and act beyond art, the curatorial process will confront the incessant anxieties perpetuated through the misunderstanding of complex subjectivities. Facing the current widespread state of collective psychosis, and starting from the position of Europe, Germany, and Berlin as a city in dialogue with the world, the curatorial process will be selective, non-comprehensive and will not provide a coherent reading of histories or the present of any kind. The curatorial team’s key starting points will be strategies of self-preservation as acts of dismantling dominant structures and building from a non-hierarchical position.
The 10th Berlin Biennale proposes a plan for how to face a collective madness.