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Salon für Kunstbuch 21er Haus, Vienna

At a point, as we were just standing there, ‘something’ else began. We were on the streets. Side by side. We didn’t even know each other, but we were side by side. We were there. This was the hope itself. The spirit of solidarity, the challenge, standing side by side…. Then, nothing changed. We clammed up. … Now, we are tired. Is it possible to remember this hope? We have to start somewhere.“ (Selda Asal)

The exhibition “Stay with me” assembles notebooks and journals created by more than 60 artists in the context of experiences they had during the protests at Gezi Park in Istanbul in 2013. In the spring of 2013, protests against urban planning measures for the square occurred at Gezi Park. During the following week, a wave of demonstrations spread over Taksim square and seized the whole country. People organized in a decentralized manner and gathered for more than 5,000 events, around 3.5 million took to the streets. The demonstrations which were suppressed using extraordinary amounts of violence left eleven dead and more than 8,000 injured. Since the summer of 2013, the inner political situation has continued to aggravate. Is it possible to keep the hope of the time alive?

The exhibits on show allow to discern the different approaches open to an art rooted in self-assertion: retaining the magic of shared moments, capturing the menace on paper, projecting oneself to a different place, remembering experiences through abstraction.

“Stay with me” was initiated by artist Selda Asal, a visual artist, born in Izmir. Studies in Musicology and Art. She initiated the “Apartment Project” in Istanbul and is currently living in Istanbul and Berlin.

With contributions by: Ali Miharbi, Anti-Pop, Aslı Çavuşoğlu, Ata kam, Ayşe Küçük, Azra Deniz Okyay, Balca Ergener & Meltem Ahıska, Berkay Tuncay, Burçak Bingöl, Carla Mercedes Hihn, Ceren Oykut, Christine Kriegerowski, Çiğdem Hasanoğlu, Devrim Ck, Devrim Kadirbeyoğlu, Didem Erk, Eda Gecikmez, Ekin Saçlıoğlu, Elif Çelebi, Elmas Deniz, Endam Acar & Fırat Bingöl, Erdağ Aksel, Erhan Öze, Erdem Helvacıoğlu, Eser Selen, Fatma Belkıs, Fatma Çiftçi, Ferhat Özgür, Figen Aydıntaşbaş, Fulya Çetin, Genco Gülan, Gonca Sezer, Gökçe Süvari, Gökhan Deniz, Göksu Kunak, Gülçin Aksoy, Gül Kozacıoğlu, Gümüş Özdeş, Güneş Savaş & Eren Yemez, Güneş Terkol, Gözde İlkin, Hale Tenger, Hubert Sommerauer, İnci Furni, İpek Duben, Kınay Olcaytu, Melike Kılıç, Merve Çanakçı, Merve Şendil, Mischa Rescka, Murat Tosyalı, Nalan Yırtmaç, Nancy Atakan, Nazım Dikbaş, Neriman Polat, Nick Flood, Nurcan Gündoğan, Onur Ceritoğlu, Onur Gökmen, Özgür Atlagan & Bengi Güldoğan, Özgür Demirci, Özgür Erkök Moroder, Özge Enginöz, Rüçhan Şahinoğlu, Raziye Kubat, Sabine Küpher Büsch & Thomas Büsch, Seda Hepsev, Seçil Yersel, Sena Başöz, Senem Denli, Sevim Sancaktar, Sevil Tunaboylu, Sevgi Ortaç, Suat Öğüt, Sümer Sayın, Şafak Çatalbaş, Ulufer Çelik, Yaprak Kırdök, Yasemin Özcan, Yasemin Nur, Yavuz Parlar, Yeşim Ağaoğlu, Zeyno Pekünlü

Curated by Bojana Piškur and What, How & for Whom/WHW

Opening: 25 October 2016 at 8 p.m., Moderna Galerija / Museum of Modern Art Ljubljana

Taking place a year after A Retrospective by Appointment in Zagreb, Again and Again offers a new take on the genre of retrospective exhibition, tracing narratives and methods that occur in David Maljković’s work. While the Zagreb retrospective opened a subtle dialogue with the Zagreb institutional landscape, the atmosphere of its sociability and rhythms of cultural life through engaging with small-scale institutions, Again and Again looks into the approaches and obsessions recurring in David’s works that offer various points of entry to the institutional and social history of Moderna galerija / the Museum of Modern Art in Ljubljana and the Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova.

Again and Again brings together a range of works, as well as elements of installations from different stages of Maljković’s career, along the way deconstructing the genre of a “mid-career” retrospective by taking a nonhierarchical approach to all the works and objects, putting them side by side on seemingly inadequate, unlikely structures taken from the Museum’s storage areas. Defying expectations and taking a humorous approach to the retrospective format itself, Again and Again problematizes its own relation to the context and infrastructure by reusing and repurposing elements of previous exhibitions’ furniture and displays, thus probing institutional protocols and history.

Key concerns and methods of David Maljković’s work – individual and collective relationships towards the complexities of time, a collagist approach, self-referentiality, referencing the work of other artists, the use of his earlier works and exhibition displays as material, inquiry into the notion of art’s autonomy, exploring the nature of the gaze, carefully choreographing the exhibition experience – are all visible within the exhibition. Throughout his practice, David Maljković creates a web of relations that evoke the various metamorphoses of his work, calling attention to their formal aspects, as well as the circumstances of their production. The architectural reconfigurations of the space, as well as various exhibition constructions taken from the Museum’s storage areas, become elements in David’s method that works with the tensions between the procedures of exhibition display, which draw the viewers into the exhibition narrative, and those that are aimed at creating the estrangement effect. The rhythm and heightened physical presence of the exhibition elements that could equally be called exhibition architecture, scenography, or sculpture, direct the ways of looking and contextualize the individual works within a “choreographed” experience.

Again and Again is organized around subtle clues for tracing and reconstructing fragments, transformations, metamorphoses and references, but humor and a playful nonchalance allow for the “here and now” of the exhibition as an aesthetic and social experience that aims to see what is the core of contemporary art once the forms are disrespected and disrespectful, and how this could open the possibility to radically reimagine both exhibition practice and the future of cultural institutions.

David Maljković, born in Rijeka, Croatia in 1973, lives and works in Zagreb. His recent solo exhibitions include: The Exhibition is Becoming, VOX Centre de l’image contemporaine, Montreal (2016), In Low Resolution, Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2014), Kunstmuseum St. Gallen, St. Gallen (2014), Sources in the Air, Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead (2013), Sources in the Air, Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven (2012), Exhibitions for Secession, Wiener Secession, Vienna (2011), Out of Projection, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid (2009). Maljković has participated in group shows such as: The Eighth Climate (What Does Art Do?), 11th Gwangju Biennale, Gwangju (2016), Scenes for a New Heritage: Contemporary Art from the Collection, Museum of Modern Art, New York, USA (2015), All The World’s Futures, 56th Biennale di Venezia, Venice (2015), Animism, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin (2012), The Present and Presence, Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova, Ljubljana (2011), 29th São Paulo Art Biennial, São Paulo (2010), What Keeps Mankind Alive, 11th Istanbul Biennial, Istanbul (2009), When Things Cast No Shadow, 5th Berlin Biennial for Contemporary Art, Berlin (2008).

UGM, Maribor Art Gallery, Strossmayerjeva ulica 6, Maribor, Slovenia

Nestan Nijaradze / Contemporary Photography from the Caucasus

Saturday, 22 October 2016, at 18:00

Nestan Nijaradze will present contemporary photography from the Caucasus area and the Tbilisi Photo Festival, which was established in 2010 with Nestan as its artistic director from the very beginning. The Tbilisi Photo Festival has already achieved extreme public visibility, and it isn’t only the region’s most important photo event – it is also the most important cultural event in the Caucasus. From the very beginning it has been supported by partners such as the prestigious Photo Festival in Arles. This year the Festival in Tbilisi hosted more than 200 photographers from 20 different countries. The main event of the festival is the Photography Night, which includes numerous outdoor projections and has had more than 10,000 visitors. The main aims of the festival are to create a meeting point for photography from different areas (Asia, Iran, Turkey, Europe, Russia and Saudi Arabia), to introduce the best in the field of world photography, and to promote young local photographers.

Nestan Nijaradze (b. 1971) is the co-founder and artistic director of TBILISI PHOTO FESTIVAL in Georgia, an internationally recognized curator of photography exhibitions, a writer, a TV broadcast host on Georgian national television, an expert in portfolio evaluations at various prestigious festivals, and a promoter of Georgian photography. Between 2007 and 2015, she worked as the director of the House of Photography; between 2007 and 2009, she worked as the main director of PHOTO Magazine; in 2007 she introduced the first permanent collection of Georgian photography; between 2008 and 2009, she coordinated a project for the MAGNUM agency in Georgia. She has a degree in visual art studies from the University of Tbilisi in Georgia, and a master’s degree from the University of Paris-Diderot in Paris. In Georgia, she has represented various Western photographers from numerous institutions (Robert Capa, Stanley Greene, Guiorgui Pinkhassov, Vanessa Winship, etc.), and she regularly promotes Georgian photography (Natela Grigalshvili, Newsha Tavakolian, Guram Tsibakhashvili, Shalva Alkhanaidze) during various world festivals.

The lecture will be held in English and will not be translated.

Klavdij Sluban / Presenting the Author’s Photographic Work
Saturday, 22 October 2016, at 19:00

Klavdij Sluban will present his new projects, including his “silent videos” from Japan. At the beginning of this year he dedicated this project to Japanese poet Matsuo Bashō (1644–1694), who is known as one of the greatest experts in haiku poetry. Klavdij walked the Bash route, a 500 km journey on foot from Kyoto to Tokyo, and was able to immerse himself in Japan’s culture and countryside. He received an award for photography from the Academy of Fine Art for an intimate and poetic series called “Divagation – sur les pas de Bashō”.

For the first time he will also present his photgraphs from the juvenile detention centers, Mario Covas in Arujà in San Paulo, Brazil and from the Fleury-Mérogis Center in France. Between 1995 and 2000 he held photography workshops and also invited other well-known photographers, such as Henri Cartier-Bresson, Marc Riboud and William Klein to collaborate with him. The point of Sluban’s prison photography is not reportage. He focuses on the limitations of time and habitat, defined by the limits of a prison.

Klavdij Sluban (b. 1963) is a French photographer with Slovenian roots. He gained public and critical acclaim with his completely personal approach to photography. His works are seen all over the world in museums and galleries. Since 1995 he has been active in workshops for young prisoners. He has received important international photography awards, such as the European Publishers Award for Photography (EPAP, 2009), the Niepece Award (2000), which is the most important French award for photography, and the Leica Award (2004). One of the awards most dear to him is his Deklica s piščalko award from Kočevje, where he spent his childhood.

The lecture will be held in Slovene.

No entrance fee.

Centre Pompidou, Paris, 12. 10. 2016 – 30. 1. 2017

For the very first time, the Centre Pompidou is showing all of this year’s four Prix Marcel Duchamp finalists: Kader Attia, Yto Barrada, Ulla von Brandenburg and Barthélémy Toguo. With this group exhibition the ADIAF and the Centre Pompidou bring a new dimension to the competition, the new formula allowing the shortlisted artists to exhibit at the Centre Pompidou – sometimes for the first time – so offering a wider public the opportunity to discover their work. This first collective presentation brings out a number of shared themes and approaches: an eye to the contemporary world, an anthropological approach, an interest in ritual, etc. Each year one of the Museum’s curators will help develop the group exhibition.

Yto Barrada : A Fondness for Magic

Gallery Campagne Première, 14. 10. – 3. 12. 2016

In Matthias Müller’s extensive new group of works consisting of photographic works, a multiple and a video, the artist makes use of an archive of 1,500 screenshots. The images come from streams emanating from private chat rooms of the Web 2.0. The hundred postcards of the edition ‘You Are Here’ offer views into one hundred of these empty chat rooms that all share one characteristic: On their walls are geographical maps of all types – urban maps, topographic maps, sections of atlases. They seem to reflect the wish to participate in another, larger world and at the same time express a strange ambivalence arising from the fact that the virtual space on the Internet, concealed by the protagonists through fantasy names such as “Neverland” or “Somewhere,” are linked to their actual location by these references. Coming to light here is the irreconcilable conflict of borderless proximity: the yearning to be simultaneously anonymous and located, both individual and omnipresent. By transforming the screenshots into postcards and thus handing them over to the viewer who can touch and move, even mail them, Müller restores an intimacy and binding character to communication – qualities that are under threat in the World Wide Web.

In the photographic work ‘While You Were Out,’ Müller arranges countless office chairs according to shape and color in the style of a scientific wall chart. Also in ‘Waiting Rooms,’ a frieze consisting of 28 individual prints, the artist transfers interiors into a serial arrangement and, through almost film-like connections, conveys the impression of a common bond existing between them. The selection, treatment and composition of his images gives rise to a concentration of reality which, amid the random nature of the appearances, reveals an almost harmonic order. Müller imbues his spaces with a painterly quality by blurring them slightly in the low-fi resolution of consumer webcams and transforming them into frozenframe images as inkjet prints, thereby restoring them to an analogue sphere. Cracquelé-like, digital artifacts convey the impression of tiny fissures in the glaze upon paintings, and the choice of pictorial motifs is reminiscent of the subjects and representational forms of painting – whether the delicate atmospheres of light in Vermeer’s spaces or the melancholic interiors of the symbolist Hammershøi.

In the video loop ‘Air,’ the “low” provenance and trivial motifs of the visual material stand in contrast to the sublimity of a piece by Johann Sebastian Bach as an elaborate expression of high culture. But just as the images of the empty spaces do not show the presence of any persons, so has the musical composition been partly stripped of its melodic upper voice: The minimalistic bass line seems like an etude with multiple variations of a simple musical motif. The title ‘Air’ alludes to the mode of Internet users whose images provide the visual material of the video: They are broadcasting, are “on air.” At the same time, the title refers to the effects of air currents we are observing; it sometimes seems as if an analogue breeze is stirring up the digital clusters and artifacts of the webcam images.

With his treatment of visual material from the Web 2.0, Müller focuses on a part of moving picture production that differs in various ways from the filmic genres which up to now have been central to his individual works and joint projects with Christoph Girardet. This extensive sector does not consist of professional productions but is the work of amateurs. The recordings made here are not introduced into a new narrative sequence with the help of montage but develop in real time with no external intervention. They have a fleeting character and are normally not preserved. Most of the time, these images involve only one figure who produces them and is simultaneously their subject. Matthias Müller is interested in the moments when the protagonists have departed from the scene. As spaces that are simultaneously private and public, chat rooms have lost the domestic space’s fundamental function of protecting intimacy and turned into virtual contact zones for exhibitionists and voyeurs instead. In Müller’s treatments, they are freed of their subservient function as backdrops for performances. With his studies of presence and absence, the artist is continuing his investigation and representation of spaces which, in his various filmic and photographic works, evolve into autonomous, evocative spheres of contemplation and experience, are transformed into stages and projection surfaces for emotional and psychological states and processes.

Matthias Müller (*1961) numbers among the most renowned experimental filmmakers. His films have been invited to the festivals at Cannes, Venice, Berlin, Toronto and Locarno, among others. He has had film retrospectives at such institutions as the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Center for the Arts, San Francisco; Nederlands Filmmuseum, Amsterdam; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and Image Forum, Tokyo. Numbering among the prizes and awards he has received are the Prix Canal + du meilleur court métrage, Cannes; Preis der Deutschen Filmkritik; Deutscher Kurzfilmpreis; Preis des Verbandes der Deutschen Kritiker; American Federation of Arts Experimental Film Award; and various prizes at the Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen (including the Principal Prize in 1999). Matthias Müller has had solo exhibitions at such institutions as the Tate Modern, London; Neuer Berliner Kunstverein; Sprengel Museum, Hannover; Fotomuseum Winterthur; and Timothy Taylor Gallery, London. Among the numerous group exhibitions he has participated in are the Manifesta 3 in Ljubljana as well as exhibitions at the Migros Museum, Zurich; Hayward Gallery, London; MCA Chicago; Hangar Bicocca, Milan; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; and Haus der Kunst, Munich. In addition to creating his own individual works, he has collaborated since 1999 with the artist Christoph Girardet on a joint oeuvre. Works by Matthias Müller are to be found, among other places, in the collections of the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, Sammlung Goetz, Munich; Sammlung Isabelle & Jean-Conrad Lemaître, London; Tate Modern, London. Since 2003, Müller has been a professor for experimental film at the Kunsthochschule für Medien, Cologne.

Adam Art Gallery, Wellington, New Zealand, 2. 10. – 22. 12. 2016

BAD VISUAL SYSTEMS is a major new exhibition by Berlin-based, New Zealand-born artist Ruth Buchanan. It occupies the entire Adam Art Gallery and also features works by two fellow artists, Judith Hopf and Marianne Wex both of whom live in Germany. The title of the exhibition draws on the idea first articulated by feminist theorist, Donna Haraway that “self-identity is a bad visual system”. Buchanan is drawn to this notion as it succinctly articulates her sense that there are powerful forces vested in architecture, art, language, society and the manifold organisational and structural systems that take place within them, that affect how the human subject behaves and interferes with how they know themselves. She has self-consciously chosen to work with two other women artists of different generations, to position her thinking within a feminist history and discourse.

For this exhibition Buchanan has blurred the roles of artist, curator, and designer, playing all three to create a fully immersive installation with objects, materials, display systems, screens, images, and words. These occupy the space ambivalently, playing off the architecture and doubling as the familiar furniture of exhibition making. The show engages the viewer actively with built-in response mechanisms including an audience-activated soundtrack that serves as audio-guide; videos that spring to life with human contact, and room dividers that rearrange familiar spaces and disrupt existing way-finding.

Buchanan’s process is research intensive. She has spent time in the building learning its physical characteristics and also its history. She has also actively participated in the revival of interest in Let’s Take Back Our Space, the photographic project by Marianne Wex—excerpts of which are included in this exhibition—that has been called “one of the great unsung works of 1970s’ feminist history and cultural analysis”, in its compilation of thousands of images of men’s and women’s differing body language designed to analyse the unconscious ways in which the patriarchy literally occupies more space. And her selection of films and sculptures by Judith Hopf is the result of a deep engagement with that artist’s deadpan practice. This exhibition is a profoundly thoughtful and physically impressive occupation of the Adam Art Gallery.

Adam Art Gallery gratefully acknowledges the support of Creative New Zealand Toi Aotearoa, Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen Institute for Foreign Cultural Affairs (ifa), Jan Warburton Trust, Resene Paints Ltd, and Victoria University of Wellington.

Artist biographies

RUTH BUCHANAN was born in 1980 in New Plymouth and later grew up in Wellington, where her family is now based. She completed a BFA at the Elam School of Fine Arts at The University of Auckland in 2002 and an MA in Fine Art from the Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam in 2007. BAD VISUAL SYSTEMSis the latest in a string of solo exhibitions and major commissions she has undertaken in Europe, New Zealand, Asia and Australia. In each, she creates situations she describes as “meetings with meaning”, where the systems utilised in the production of culture—display formats, collection protocols, museum structures—are interrogated, and exhibition and graphic design is re-appropriated as a means to manage the viewer’s experience. These include the 11th Gwangju Biennale, Gwangju (2016); The actual and its document, Govett Brewster Gallery/ Len Lye Centre, New Plymouth (2016), 24 Hour Body, Hopkinson Mossman at Frieze Art Fair, London (2015), Or, a camera Or, a building Or, a screen, Kunstverein Harburger Bahnhof, Hamburg (2015), Or, a building, Badischer Kunstverein, Karlsruhe (2015), Several Attentions—Lying Freely Part III, The Showroom, London (2009). Buchanan lives and works in Berlin and is represented by Hopkinson Mossman, Auckland.

JUDITH HOPF was born in Berlin in 1969. Her irreverent attitude to art making belies her serious purpose: to address how society, through its institutions and systems, operates to enforce normative behaviour. For this exhibition, Hopf is represented by three film works that typify her practice. Also included are her untitled concrete ‘serpents’, which have teeth made from tiny paper triangles made from her work emails that derive from her thinking about the precarity of labour under present conditions. Hopf teaches at the Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main, currently one of the most influential art academies in Europe. She has undertaken several solo projects throughout Europe and the USA in recent years including: More, Neue Galerie, Kassel (2015), Untitled (1-4), PRAXES Center for Contemporary Art, Berlin (2014), On Time, Maumaus Escola de Artes Visuais, Lisbon (2014), A Line May Lie, Kunsthalle Lingen Kunstverein, Lingen, curated by Meike Behm, and an exhibition at Secession, Vienna (2006). Selected group exhibitions include: Your Lazy Eye, LiMac – Museo de Arte Contemporaneo de Lima, Madrid (2015), the Liverpool Biennial, Liverpool (2014), and dOCUMENTA 13, Kassel (2012). This is the first time she has exhibited in New Zealand. Hopf lives in Berlin. Her works are presented courtesy of Kaufmann Repetto, New York and Milan.

MARIANNE WEX was born in Hamburg in 1937, where she studied at the Hochschule für bildende Kunste. Though a student of painting, she turned to photographing men and women on the streets of the city. She sorted these into categories of body language until she had a vast typology that revealed the differences between men and women’s occupation of space through pose and gesture. To these she added found images from art history, advertising, politics and pornography to show the prevailing ways in which gendered bodies hold themselves. She presented these as a series of panels, first in 1977 in the Artists International 1877-1977 at Neue Gesellschaft für Bildende Kunst in Berlin and then in several exhibitions, including Bonner Kunstverein, Bonn (1979) and London’s Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) in 1982. She also published her complete archive in book form in 1979 as Let’s Take Back Our Space: ‘Female’ and ‘Male’ Body Language as a Result of Patriarchal Structures. Since making this work, Wex withdrew from the art world to become a self-healer. Between 1983 and 1986 she lived in Wellington. She gives seminars on self-healing to small groups of women all around Europe, often drawing on what she felt she had learnt during the 1970s about the effects of comportment on women’s physical and mental health. In 2009 her project was rediscovered by Mike Sperlinger and presented at the Focal Point Gallery in Southend-on-Sea. Since then, Let’s Take Back Our Space has been presented in various venues, including Badischer Kunstverein, Karlsruhe (2012, on screens designed by Ruth Buchanan and Andreas Muller), Yale Union Center for Contemporary Art, Portland (2012), Presentation House Gallery, Vancouver, (2013), La Galerie, Centre d’art contemporain, Noisy-Le-Sec (2013), Gasworks, London (2014), Autocenter, Space for Contemporary Art, Berlin (2014), Frauengesundheitszentrum Sirona e.V., Wiesbaden (2015), and now in Wellington. Wex now lives in Hoehr-Grenzhausen, Germany. All works by Marianne Wex are courtesy of the artist.

20.10.–20.11.2016
Opening: 20.10.2016, 7 p.m, Städtische Galerie KUBUS

The current exhibition focuses on the tension between an autonomous photographic imagery and a critical socio-political reflection. Under the title “More To Come”, works are exhibited, which show the spectrum of photographic means of expression, from documentary to conceptual approaches up to installations. Central and determining for all works is always a moment of disturbance and  interlacing. What appears to be a clear social anchor point or a thematic focus, get an entirely different meaning, or can, in other words, be viewed from a totally different perspective by the subjective pointed emphasis of the artists. Facts are rearranged and interpreted: Unrecognized or disowned connections between political and cultural spheres become visible/obvious.

Curated by Ricus Aschemann und Maik Schlüter

Participating artists:

Absalom & Bardsley (UK), Diana Artus (GER), Sophie Barbasch (US),
Viktoria Binschtok (GER), James Bridle (UK), Eiko Grimberg (GER), Karin Jobst (GER), Jörg Möller (GER), Andrew Phelps (US), Marco Poloni (CH), Ulrich Polster (GER), Andreas Schulze (GER), Oliver Sieber & Katja Stuke (GER), Lucy Skaer (UK)

Showrooms

Städtische Galerie KUBUS

Galerie BOHAI

Galerie vom Zufall und vom Glück

C28-Kunstraum

SCOPE Galerie

the symposium takes place in the auditorium of the Sprengel Museum

Info

COLONNADE PARK (54 min, 2011)

Oct 5, 7pm

ACFNY / Austrian Cultural Forum New York, 11 E 52nd St, New York, NY 10022

On occasion of Archtober 2016 – New York City’s Architecture and Design month – the ACFNY presents a special screening of Heidrun Holzfeind’s Colonnade Park. The film explores architect Mies van der Rohe’s high rise apartment buildings in Newark and the lives and stories of the people inhabiting it. The screening will be followed by a panel discussion with Austrian artist Heidrun Holzfeind, architecture historian Mariana Mogilevich and MoMA curator Barry Bergdoll.

The film portrays Mies van der Rohe’s Colonnade and Pavilion apartment buildings in Newark through conversations with its inhabitants. Built between 1954 and 1960, Mies’ three glass-and-steel towers and the Christopher Columbus Homes, a public housing project in between them, marked the beginning of urban renewal in Newark. Interviews with tenants about their experiences of living in the classic modernist buildings are juxtaposed with shots of their apartments and stunning views from their windows.

“An interesting thing about Heidrun Holzfeind’s work […] is the way it leads us to ask a different sort of question. That is, it manifests a notion of architecture not purely as image, not purely as volume, but as social space, as a molding and molded shell homologous to other social structures reactive with its users, its residents. Holzfeind’s work eludes the category of artifact because the unquantified social relations within and without replace the archeologist’s brush and magnifying glass. It is not buried and unearthed but always inhabited, always operative. It is not concerned with the question of modernism per se but rather with the inter-secting subjectivities produced in spite and because of modernism’s and modernization’s aggregations.” (Nico Vicario)

ABOUT THE PANELISTS

Heidrun Holzfeind is an artist and filmmaker who questions immanent architectural and social utopias of modernist residential buildings, exploring the borders between history and identity, individual histories and political narratives of the present. Her works have been exhibited and screened at numerous art institutions and film festivals, both nationally and internationally.

Mariana Mogilevich is a historian of architecture and urbanism whose research focuses on the design and politics of the public realm. She is Editor in Chief of Urban Omnibus and teaches at Pratt Institute’s School of Architecture.

Barry Bergdoll is curator in the Department of Architecture and Design at MoMA. In 2001 he co-curated the MoMA exhibition Mies in Berlin which was dedicated to an in-depth look at Mies’s early career. Bergdoll is also Meyer Schapiro Professor of art history in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University.

September 17 – December 17
Artists Space Books & Talks
55 Walker Street
New York
NY 10013

Organized by the collective MTL+ at the invitation of Common Practice New York, Decolonize This Place will convert Artists Space Books & Talks into a shared resource for art, research and organizing.

At the core of its process is a weekly program of public events, with collaborators from across the five boroughs anchoring assemblies, trainings, skillshares, readings, screenings, meals, and healing sessions. Confirmed participants include

Aida Youth Center—Palestine
AKA Exit
Al-Awda NY
Black Poets Speak Out
Bronx Not For Sale
Chinatown Arts Brigade
Common Practice New York
Direct Action Front for Palestine
El Salón
Global Ultra Luxury Faction (G.U.L.F.)
Hyperallergic
Insurgent Poets Society
Jive Poetic
Mahina Movement
NYC Stands for Standing Rock Organizing Committee
Queens Anti-Gentrification Network
Take Back The Bronx
Tidal: Occupy Theory, Occupy Strategy
Wing On Wo & Co.
Woman Writers Of Color

with further collaborators added through the duration of the project.

The program of outward- and inward-facing events will center five lines of political inquiry, namely: Indigenous Struggle, Black Liberation, Free Palestine, Global Wage Workers, and De-Gentrification. Different communities will be in dialogue through the space, establishing ties between groups that tend to converge around single issues. Moving beyond politics that rely upon loose definitions of commonality, Decolonize This Place seeks instead to mobilize complex differences to decenter whiteness and repatriate land.

Decolonize This Place will prioritize the presence and work of people of color and will be inclusive of queer, immigrant, and disabled participants—challenging the white supremacy that continues to characterize the economies and institutions of art.

The project will be grounded in the in-house production of posters, banners, t-shirts and other artworks, with a print station providing the means to make zines and publications. Artworks produced will be displayed in the gallery and strategically used in actions across New York, collapsing a feedback loop between exhibition and demonstration. Through this, 55 Walker Street will be coded as a site of continuous social and aesthetic production that feeds directly into movements across the city. A kitchen and greenhouse will root the project in a politics based on abundance, in an attempt to depart from an economic schema that emphasizes scarcity.

Through its three-month duration, Decolonize This Place will question how the alternative arts organization, pressured to justify ever-escalating real estate values, can re-interpret its traditional function as holdout within an art world increasingly quarried for ultra-luxury assets. At a time when so many neighborhoods see art crudely utilized to drive gentrification, what further models of community engagement can nonprofit institutions devise?

A launch and orientation party will open Decolonize This Place on Saturday, September 17th, from 6-9pm, with DJ sets and performances by traxsessions (Devin Kenny, Jesse Hlebo and guests). A website with further information, documentation and a calendar of daily activities will be launched on this date at www.decolonizethisplace.org.

The first event of Decolonize This Place will be a 50th anniversary screening of Battle of Algiers (1966) on Sunday, September 18th, noon-9pm. Titled Casbah, it will feature the film on loop between noon-6pm with an original soundtrack by Razor Step. This will precede a potluck dinner and a conversation between Sohail Daulatzai and MTL at 6pm, centered around discussion of Daulatzai’s newly released book Fifty Years of “The Battle of Algiers”: Past as Prologue (University Of Minnesota Press, September 2016).

MTL+ is comprised of Nitasha Dhillon, Amin Husain, Yates McKee and Andrew Ross, with production support from Kyle Goen and Amy Wang

Common Practice New York is an advocacy group that fosters research and discussions about the role of small-scale arts organizations in New York City. The members of Common Practice New York are Anthology Film Archives, Artists Space, Bidoun, Blank Forms, Danspace Project, Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), ISSUE Project Room, The Kitchen, Light Industry, Participant Inc, Primary Information, Printed Matter, Recess, SculptureCenter, Storefront for Art and Architecture, Triple Canopy, and White Columns

mumok – Museum moderner Kunst, Stiftung Ludwig Wien

Museumsplatz 1 | 1070 Wien

mumok cinema, Tickets: € 6,– / reduced € 4,50

In the opening paragraph of his fantastically crazed modernist masterpiece At SwimTwo-Birds, Irish writer Flann O’Brien wrote: “One beginning and one ending for a book was a thing I did not agree with. A good book may have three openings entirely dissimilar and inter-related only in the prescience of the author, or for that matter one hundred times as many endings.”

Following this logic, one may say that a good curation can have as many concepts entirely dissimilar and inter-related only in the prescience of the curator. This program of four evenings for mumok cinema will therefore have four themes, each of which will be satisfyingly rich in its own right. Each evening will be divided into two parts. The first will be a collection of works by various artists related to the theme of the evening, and the second will focus on the practice of the guest of the evening, the featured artist, if you like.

Stranded at Schwimmen-zwei-Vögel (1)

Each Aspect of Life Is a Thing of Triad

October 5, 2016, 7pm

Stranded at Schwimmen-zwei-Vögel (2)

They Call It Verse-Speaking

November 16, 2016, 7pm

Stranded at Schwimmen-zwei-Vögel (3)

Outwardly a Rectangular Plain Building,

Inside Is Composed of Large Black and

White Squares

December 14, 2016, 7pm

Stranded at Schwimmen-zwei-Vögel (4)

A Curious Offspring Azoic in Nature

January 18, 2017, 7pm

In fact, the structure was the first thing that came into focus in this program. It began as an empty shell, an open architecture, to be filled in with contents. This process was fueled by my desire to address the figure of artist-as-curator, and negotiate the protocols for performing this role. Or, put another way, I wanted to know whether it is possible to disregard the commonly agreed steps in curating, consisting of: decide the concept > select the artists/works > structure the presentation; and still arrive at a good program. This desire was triggered in part by the nature of the invitation I received from mumok. Aside from the few basic practicalities (location and time), I was pretty much given carte blanche in putting together this program, with a decent budget—including a fee for everyone involved, not to be taken lightly these days—and the organizational support of a large institution. If you are an artist at the stage in her career where I am now, it is a rare luxury not to have to define your concept and map out the expected outcome of a project, say for an exhibition proposal or a funding application, well before any preparation has begun. In a sense, I am exploiting this luxury to its limit by indefinitely delaying the formulation of a unifying concept for the program. As I already mentioned, the structure of the program came first. Then, I selected the works that piqued my interest, or I believe to be important, or I simply love. And finally, I separated them into four groups in order to determine what the works in each group have in common with one another. These groups are not united under the rubric of a singular curatorial voice, and instead, I believe, act as independent unit co-inhabiting the structure that is the program. The demand for a clearly defined concept often resembles economic or academic performance evaluation today. Clear communication is good for marketing and funding, but does not always benefit an artwork, an exhibition, or a cinema program. Nuance and weirdness should have their place too. I wanted to put together a program which I cannot easily explain what it is about. (Yuki Higashino)

Yuki Higashino lives in Vienna. He has recently exhibited at Le BBB centre d’art, Toulouse, Schneiderei, Vienna (2016), Mount Analogue, Stockholm, and Skånes konstförening, Malmö (2014, both with Elisabeth Kihlström). In November 2016 he will present a joint exhibition with Elisabeth Kihlström at Gallery G99, House of Arts, Brno.

Wednesday, October 5, 2016, 7pm

Each Aspect of Life Is a Thing of Triad

Politics and economy govern our lives, and art always reflects their systems and structures either directly, as in the portraits of patrons in religious paintings, or indirectly, as in historical conceptualism’s adoption of a white-collar labor aesthetic. Artists may use the system they are compelled to work within to their advantage, deploying it to construct their own logic of production that can perform an intelligent rebuke of political and economic circumstances. This can use both contemporary material, as in Martha Rosler’s dissection of an issue of Vogue, and historical problems, as in comedian Stewart Lee’s demolition of Thatcherite economic policy, in order to offer an insightful worldview, to devise a coping strategy, or simply to make something—art—out of the sorry mess society often finds itself in. The two works by Michael Stevenson presented this evening resemble tapestry weaving, where threads in wildly different colors are put together through a complex procedure to form a cohesive picture. The common motif is the consequences, sometimes improbable, world politics and economy have on lives, and Stevenson shows that the manifestations of this can be found in the most diverse places, while critically considering the role of an artist in narrating such stories. In Introducción a la teoría de la probabilidad, for instance, the story of a chance gathering of the deposed Shah of Iran and his family, together with Manuel Antonio Noriega and Patricia Hearst in a small island near Panama City in 1979, with the geopolitics of the USA and Panama in the background, is told through the prism of mathematics. In On How Things Behave Stevenson draws parallels between the destruction of the environment and works by hermit-like land artist Manfred Gnädinger, linking an oil tanker spill off the coast of Spain in 2002 with the South Sea Bubble, the eighteenth-century financial crisis caused by speculation. These intricate associations of people, places, and events are woven together with astonishing precision.

Presented by Yuki Higashino, guest: Michael Stevenson

Michael Stevenson lives in Berlin. Exhibitions (selection): VIEWING ROOM, Sculpture

Center, New York (2015); Signs & Wonders, Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen

(2015); Liverpool Biennial (2014); A Life of Crudity, Vulgarity, and Blindness, Portikus,

Frankfurt/M (2012).

Wednesday, November 16, 2016, 7pm

They Call It Verse-Speaking

Language has music and music is a language. This simple dictum has given inexhaustible material to poets and composers, but also to artists, particularly since temporality was introduced to art through film, performance, and text. Artists stretch words to their limit, challenge the structure of speech, write songs, and tell stories. And when language became the field for artists to frolic in, their bodies also became important as the medium of their works. Either as tender singing or daring poetry, words have turned the figure of the artist into a valuable carrier and conveyer of possibilities. Leslie Thornton’s work, for example, presents a collision between the asceticism of structuralist filmmaking and the intimacy of language, while Cecelia Condit’s absurd sing-along is a macabre assessment of consumerism. I first came across the name of Sue Tompkins as the singer of Glaswegian band Life Without Buildings. I was struck by her percussive style, at once cheerful and forceful, that rhythmically treated words so that the lyrics became ingrained in the beats and codes of catchy rock tunes. And it is remarkable how seamless her transition from fronting a band to performances in galleries feels. It reveals the consistent practice of an artist rather than a break from one discipline and an entry into another. While her performances are founded on her deep understanding of the relationship between language and art throughout modernity, her delivery of lines, with its unique tempo, idiosyncratic syntax, concisely deployed repetitions, and characteristic inflection, shows that Tompkins’s approach to art and poetry is profoundly musical.

Presented by Yuki Higashino, guest: Sue Tompkins

Sue Tompkins lives in Glasgow. Exhibitions (selection): The Gallery of Modern Art,

Glasgow at Glasgow International (2014); Its chiming in Normaltown, Midway

Contemporary Art, Minneapolis (2012). Performances (selection): LETHERIN

THROUGH THE GRILLE, White Columns, New York (2014); Scottish Pavilion, Venice

Biennale (2005).

Wednesday, December 14, 2016, 7pm

Outwardly a Rectangular Plain Building, Inside Is Composed of Large Black and

White Squares

With its ability to envelop our lives, to record time, to become image, and with its ambition to synthesize disciplines, architecture has always fascinated and confounded artists. In the piece by Judith Hopf, architecture is the site of utter despair, while Aglaia Konrad lovingly and calmly records a building. The history, theory, and language of architecture, and the notes of its frozen music, are both fertile sources and useful models for art making. What concerns architecture beyond individual building also concerns artists: landscape, cityscape, and soundscape, synchronicity and diachroneity, lifestyle and Stilfragen, flâneur-ing and permanence. The practice of Tris Vonna-Michell encompasses many disciplines, including experimental poetry, art history, and photography, and it allows an observer to shift her focus from one aspect to another, as though one is strolling through a varied landscape. For this occasion, the focus is on the artist’s relationship with architecture. It is often said that Vonna-Michell is a storyteller in the Benjaminian mold. Naturally, if one inhabits a city in the sense of Benjamin, one must engage with the surrounding cityscape. This is what Vonna-Michell does in his digital video piece Postscript III-V (Berlin), which is as much a portrait of Berlin as his own autobiographical reflection. Meanwhile, the synchronized slide work A Watermark: Capitol Complex is a more in-depth examination, through fictional narrative, of a particular architectural project, namely Le Corbusier’s building group from Chandigarh.

Presented by Yuki Higashino, guest: Tris Vonna-Michell

Tris Vonna-Michell lives in Stockholm. Exhibitions (selection): Presentation House

Gallery, Vancouver (2015); A story within a story, 8th Göteborg International Biennial

for Contemporary Art (2015); VOX, Centre de l’image contemporaine, Montreal

(2014); Turner Prize 2014, Tate Britain, London (2014).

Wednesday, January 18, 2017, 7pm

A Curious Offspring Azoic in Nature

If the success of a philosophical idea is to be measured by the extent of its infiltration and the depth of its anchoring into popular consciousness, Marx’s concept of commodity fetishism surely is a strong contender for the top position. The idea that goods can behave as though they have a life of their own, or that they can compel us to behave as though they do, is so entrenched in our minds that it has almost become a commonplace. It explains so many aspects of our lives and culture, from vintage car collecting, HAL 9000, to the uncanny valley of cutting-edge robots and digital animation. In works by Michael Eddy or Elizabeth Price, symbols of capitalism such as credit cards (Eddy) or luxury cars (Price) are presented with their souls. What if an economic system, and the exchange of goods and capital, came to resemble an eco-system? For artists, this means the line between reflection on life and imitation of artificial systems has become blurred. In Ann Lislegaard’s works, digital creatures seem to have already moved into their own universe, the space composed of a networked group of various fictional realms of science fiction, leaving our world, the world that constructed them behind. In Oracles, Owls … Some Animals Never Sleep, the robotic owl from Blade Runner gives disjointed prophesies derived from I-Ching. The owl in the film was an exclusive luxury good manufactured by a mega corporation. This is an artificially fabricated creature, initially an imaginary luxury item, gaining independence and imparting its prediction for the future, thereby guiding us; is that the ultimate form of reification? And in Spinning and Weaving Ada, the sentient and apparently literate spider pays its homage to Ada Lovelace as though it were embracing an alternative history of computing in which women can freely pursue their scientific calling. The spider is capable of rewriting not only our past, but also our present and future.

Presented by Yuki Higashino, guest: Ann Lislegaard

Ann Lislegaard lives in New York and Copenhagen. Exhibitions (selection):

Paraspace, Tel Aviv Museum (2015); What if, MOCAD – Museum of Contemporary Art

Detroit (2009); Science Fiction and Other Worlds, Astrup Fearnely Museum of

Modern Art, Oslo (2007); Danish Pavillion, 51st Venice Biennale (2005).

Hamburger Kunsthalle, 30. Sep 2016 to 08. Jan 2017

Clemens von Wedemeyer works as an artist with the media Video and film. His oeuvre ranges between documentaries and feature films, reality and fiction. Within that overlapping artistic zone, von Wedemeyer explores the complexity of locations in the context of their temporal and spatial systems. The many facets of his work are reflected in the installations and photographs which accompany, enhance and expand his cinematic pieces and open multiple levels of perception. At the same time, von Wedemeyer focuses on the fundamental questions of representation as expressed in film and its alternative forms which he extends, distorts and visualises: the cinema is opened, the projection screen becomes transparent as the seam between the auditorium and backstage. The viewers themselves also serve as extras: Are we just the audience, or are we already part of the performance?

The Akademie der Künste is awarding the 2016 Käthe Kollwitz Prize to Edmund Kuppel in honour of his pioneering work on the relationship between photography and sculpture. His extensive oeuvre explores the processes of creation in photography, the technical conditions, and how photography is perceived.

To mark the occasion of this award, the Academy is presenting a selection of Edmund Kuppel’s works produced since the early 1970s. The exhibition showcases sculptural photographic works, film, video, individual presentation devices and projection installations, as well as Das Kabinett des Ferdinand von Blumenfeld. The exhibition is also premièring the film Les marches du héros absurde (2016).

On the occasion of the exhibition an artist’s book is published.

Wednesday, September 28, 2016, 7pm

Hunter MFA Studios 

205 Hudson Street, second floor

Entrance on Canal Street

New York

www.hunter.cuny.edu

The Hunter College Department of Art and Art History is pleased to announce a public lecture by Dr. Omar Kholeif, Manilow Senior Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, Wednesday, September 28, 2016, at 7pm at Hunter’s MFA Studios, 205 Hudson Street in Tribeca, in Manhattan.

In his talk, Dr. Kholeif, the Fall 2016 Foundation To-Life, Inc. Arthur and Carol Kaufman Goldberg Visiting Curator, reflects on image making in and around the Arab world. Using this context as a starting point, he pursues a broader discussion about how visual culture is shifting in what is arguably now a post-digital age: how was the euphoric language around endless springs co-opted and transformed into a fleeting form of soft power? How was the shape of images transformed through the digital distribution mechanisms of the internet? How did artists and cultural practitioners respond to this evolving, “revolutionary” culture? Tracing a genealogy of image making, Kholeif proposes a speculative manifesto that considers the often emotional relationship between politics and the visual culture it produces.

Widely considered one of the world’s leading specialists of modern and contemporary art of the Middle East and North Africa as well as contemporary art and technology, Dr. Omar Kholeif is the Manilow Senior Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. His curatorial work has focused on the intersection of politics, narrative and geography, for an increasingly hyperlinked world. Prior to his appointment at MCA Chicago, Kholeif was Curator at the Whitechapel Gallery, London; Senior Curator at Cornerhouse and HOME, Manchester; Senior Editor of Ibraaz Publishing; Head of Art and Technology at SPACE, London; Curator at FACT, Liverpool; Artistic Director, Arab British Centre, London, and founding director of the UK’s Arab Film Festival. 

Kholeif has curated or co-curated over one hundred exhibitions, commissions, and special projects including the Cyprus Pavilion at the 56th Venice Biennale, the Abraaj Group Art Prize, the Liverpool Biennial, and “Focus: Middle East, North Africa and the Mediterranean” at the Armory Show, New York. He is author or editor of over 20 books including You Are Here: Art After the Internet (2014), Moving Image (2015), The Rumors of the World: Re-thinking Trust in the Age of the Internet (2015), and Electronic Superhighway: From Experiments in Art and Technology to Art After the Internet (2016). His work has been published widely in a variety of venues, including The Guardian, Art Monthly, Wired, Mousse, frieze, and Camera Austria for which he writes a quarterly column. Kholeif is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, a Churchill Fellow, and a member of AICA, the International Association of Art Critics.

The Foundation To-Life, Inc. Arthur and Carol Kaufman Goldberg Curatorial Workshops are designed to bring curators of international stature to the Hunter campus to work with students in the MA program in Art History and the MFA program in Studio Art for an extended period of time. During his residency at Hunter this semester, Dr. Kholeif will lead a seminar on the theme of “Expanding the Field of Exhibition Making,” and meet with students individually and in small groups. The Foundation To-Life Curatorial Workshop program recognizes the curatorial interests and ambitions of Hunter students and the Hunter College Art Galleries’ longstanding commitment to exhibitions whose themes, theses, and checklists have been developed and honed by our students. In the past few years, faculty-initiated, seminar-based exhibitions have included Critical Gestures/Contested Spaces: French Art and Politics in the 1960s and Boundless Reality: Traveler Artists’ Landscapes of Latin America from the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Collection (both 2016), Open Work in Latin America, New York & Beyond: Conceptualism Reconsidered 1967-1978 (2013), Peripheral Visions: Italian Photography in Context, 1950s-Present (2012), and Objects of Devotion and Desire: Medieval Relic to Contemporary Art (2011).

Margherita Spiluttini erhält den Österreichischen Staatspreis für künstlerische Fotografie. Die Auszeichnung, die seit 1991 in unregelmäßigen Abständen verliehen wird, ist mit 22.000 Euro dotiert und wird der gebürtigen Salzburgerin am 29. September im Bundeskanzleramt in Wien verliehen. Die Laudatio wird Otto Kapfinger halten. Bis dato letzter Preisträger war Peter Dressler im Jahr 2013.

“Margherita Spiluttini ist zurecht eine der renommiertesten Architekturfotografinnen Europas”, würdigte sie Kulturminister Thomas Drozda (SPÖ) gegenüber der APA. “Mit ihrer herausragenden Bildsprache schreibt Spiluttini Fotografiegeschichte. Die architektonischen und landschaftlichen Motive ihrer Fotografien demonstrieren eine behutsame Herangehensweise, Gebautes wird nicht in spektakulären Ansichten, sondern stets im Kontext der Umgebung gezeigt.”
Spiluttini wurde 1947 in Schwarzach im Pongau geboren und absolvierte eine Ausbildung als radiologisch-technische Assistentin, bevor sie sich 1981 als freischaffende Fotografin selbstständig machte. Sie hat sich in ihrem Schaffen intensiv mit Architektur auseinandergesetzt. Ihr Fotoarchiv befindet sich mittlerweile in der Sammlung des Architekturzentrums Wien. Zu den zahlreichen Auszeichnungen Spiluttinis gehören das Österreichische Ehrenkreuz für Wissenschaft und Kunst sowie das Goldenen Verdienstzeichen des Landes Wien.

(APA)

Bildanalytische Photographie 1968 – 1974, 2. Juli bis 25. September 2016, Kupferstich-Kabinetts, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen

Die Bildanalytische Photographie gilt als ein Hauptwerk konzeptueller Fotografie der 1960er und 1970er Jahre in Deutschland. Darin lotet Timm Rautert in 56 Bildkompositionen Bedingungen, Möglichkeiten und Grenzen der Fotografie aus und thematisiert Fragen künstlerischer Autorschaft, von Einzelbild und Serie, Glaubhaftigkeit und Manipulation.

Das Symposium beginnt am Freitag, den 16. September 2016, mit einem Abendvortrag von Prof. Dr. Peter Geimer über den Eigenwert der Fotografie im Zeitalter des Digitalen. Am Samstag, den 17. September 2016, werden in sechs Vorträgen verschiedene Aspekte der Bildanalytischen Photographie vorgestellt und diskutiert – vom Begriff der Grammatik einer Fotografie über die sozialen Gebrauchsweisen, den Stellenwert des Zyklus im Gesamtwerk Timm Rauterts bis hin zu zeitgenössischen künstlerischen Umgangsformen, die sich mit bildanalytischen Fragestellungen beschäftigen.

Eine Veranstaltung des Kupferstich-Kabinetts, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden im Hans-Nadler-Saal, Residenzschloss, Taschenberg 2, 01067 Dresden.

Um Anmeldung bis zum 5. September 2016 wird gebeten: kk@skd.museum

Die Teilnahme ist kostenlos.

Programm

Freitag, 16. September 2016

18.30 Uhr Peter Geimer (Berlin)

Was war Fotografie? Sieben Bilder, sieben Kommentare

Samstag, 17. September 2016

9.30 Uhr Einführung

10 Uhr Steffen Siegel (Essen)

Der Kontrakt des Fotografen. Timm Rauterts Fototheorie in Bildern

11 Uhr Kaffeepause

11.15 Uhr Falk Haberkorn (Leipzig)

Ohne Worte. Das unbegreifliche Bild

12 Uhr Christina Natlacen (Leipzig)

Die Fotografie Gebrauchsanweisung. Die Bildanalytische Photographie vor dem Hintergrund der sozialen Gebrauchsweisen der Fotografie

12.45 Uhr Mittagspause

13.45 Uhr Florian Ebner (Essen)

No photographing. Über Repräsentation und Anti-Repräsentation in Timm Rauterts frühem Werk

14.30 Uhr Bertram Kaschek (Dresden)

Die Fiktionalität des Faktischen. L’Ultimo Programma als bildanalytisches Spielfeld

15.15 Uhr Kaffee & Kuchen

15.45 Uhr Maren Lübbke-Tidow (Berlin)

Transformationen: Gegenwärtige bildanalytische Konzeptionen in der zeitgenössischen künstlerischen Fotografie

16.30 Uhr Fragen und Abschlussdiskussion

17 Uhr Ausstellungsrundgang mit Timm Rautert

Moderation: Linda Conze und Rebecca Wilton

18 Uhr Ende des Symposiums mit Weinempfang und Auflösung Richtung Museumsnacht

Referentinnen und Referenten

Florian Ebner ist Leiter der Fotografischen Sammlung des Museum Folkwang in Essen.

Peter Geimer ist Professor für Neuere und Neueste Kunstgeschichte an der Freien Universität Berlin und leitet dort das Forschungskolleg »BildEvidenz. Geschichte und Ästhetik«.

Falk Haberkorn ist Künstler und Autor.

Bertram Kaschek ist Kunsthistoriker und forscht derzeit als Stipendiat der Volkswagen-Stiftung zum fotografischen Werk Christian Borcherts am Dresdner Kupferstich-Kabinett.

Maren Lübbke-Tidow ist Autorin, Kuratorin und Dozentin. Von 2010 bis 2014 war sie Chefredakteurin der Zeitschrift Camera Austria International und Kuratorin des Hauses. Zahlreiche Ausstellungen und Publikationen.

Christina Natlacen ist Juniorprofessorin für Medien- und Kulturwissenschaft an der Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst Leipzig.

Steffen Siegel ist Professor für Theorie und Geschichte der Fotografie an der Folkwang Universität der Künste in Essen.

Storytellers, 5. 7. – 25 .9. 2016

Programme

Portfolio Reviews

Photographers lead and guide us through the subjects that drive them. They document, search and investigate. Photographers are investigators. They know their subjects like the backs of their hands. When they go out on the field, they meet, interact and explore. Photographers are explorers. Looking for new territories, they bear witness to the world’s vastness, interrogate history and question the medium. They are neither historians nor sociologists, but artists who construct a visual cosmology out of still or moving images, texts or sounds. They take us along on their stories. Photographers are storytellers. Examples include Laia Abril, who, in the first chapter of her chronicle of misogyny, focuses on abortion; João Pina, who spent over 10 years investigating Operation Condor and the disappearance of

60,000 political prisoners in six South American dictatorships; and Yan Morvan’s imposing encyclopaedia of battlefields.

AN ARSENAL TO SUPPORT CREATION

As always, the 47th Rencontres d’Arles is an observatory of artistic practices. Our festival plays an active role in revealing trends and talents. Artists need financial support not just to stage their exhibitions, but beforehand, to help them fund the production of their projects. That is why new creations have a key place in the programme. From awards to residencies, the Rencontres d’Arles now has a veritable arsenal of financial aid for production. This year, we have strengthened it by creating a residency. The first recipient is photographer Stéphanie Solinas.

The Luma Rencontres Dummy Book Award, now entering its second year, identifies the most relevant dummy books when they are still in the planning stages and funds the winner’s publication. Yann Gross, its first recipient, is publishing “The Jungle Book”, a vast Amazonian epic. His project is continuing as an installation, “The Jungle Show”.

The Rencontres d’Arles has handed out the Discovery Award for over a decade. The idea is simple: five recognised figures from the art world nominate two artists each; parity has been the rule since 2015. We produce exhibitions for each of them and a jury of professionals votes for the winner, who receives

€5 000 to continue his or her work.

Lastly, the Photo Folio Reviews gives awards to five very young artists with promising projects. The festival produces a show of works by the winner. This year, it is an exhibition of photographs by Piero Martinello.

IN SEARCH OF THE OTHER PHOTOGRAPHY

Images are their words. Whether they produce or borrow them, it is not just the gesture that shapes the artists’ works, but the idea of activation. The artists appropriate anonymous images, take them out of the context in which they were produced, activate them in the field of art, share them with the public by offering a new interpretation and divert them from the purposes for which they were originally intended.

The contamination of the vernacular image is now widespread. An artist, Agnès Geoffray, and a photography historian, Julie Jones, teamed up to examine the practice. Their exhibition, “Where the Other Rests”, reveals the itineraries of images—shifts in nature, value and uses. The show pays tribute to a generation of artists who collect and awaken forgotten images borrowed from others.

The study of popular culture also offers a huge iconographic repertory—often, anonymous images whose initial purpose was primarily utilitarian: illustrating a magazine, publicising a film or documenting daily life. Today, collectors, artists, historians and institutions are increasingly interested in these low-quality images, this other photography. Examples include director Sébastien Lifshitz and the astonishing pictures of transvestites he collected over a 30-year period (the “Sincerely Queer” exhibition); Thomas Mailaender and Marc Bruckert’s contrasting perspectives on the stupid and nasty archives of “Hara Kiri”; and the history of the Camarguais Western, from Joë Hamman holding up the train between Arles and Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer (1910) to a galloping, singing Johnny Hallyday in “Pour Moi la Vie Va Commencer” (“D’où Viens-tu Johnny?”, 1963). We tell the story with the Musée de la Camargue.

AFRICA POP !

The festival looks kindly upon youth and new practices but is also receptive to the world and sets its sights on other places. This year, talented photographers and curators showcase an unexpected, surprising, funny, pop Africa at the 47th Rencontres. Aida Muluneh, the artistic director of Addis Foto Fest—the Addis Ababa photo festival—joins the Discovery Award nominating team and defends the work of Sarah Waiswa and Nader Adem. Through works by approximately 10 artists, Azu Nwagbogu, director of the LagosPhoto festival, looks into the Nollywood film studios’ influence on African photography. In Maud Sulter’s photomontages, however, African and European cutures collide. Lastly, Richard Minier, Thomas Mondo and Madé Taounza tell us the amazing story of Las Maravillas. The Malian music group becomes a wonderful pretext to revisit the swinging ambiance of 1960s Bamako immortalised by the great Malick Sidibé.

RIP

Despite the deaths of Lucien Clergue and Michel Tournier, who both founded the Rencontres d’Arles together with Jean-Maurice Rouquette, our festival is alive and well after 47 years. It is thriving because the same determination, the same passion and the same desire to stand up for photography and artists together drives the whole Rencontres d’Arles team.

Arles and the surrounding area will be photography’s standard-bearers again this summer.

(Sam Stourdzé, Director of the Recontres d’Arles)

Artists/Participants: Daniel Spoerri (CH/AU), Samy Briss (RO/FR), Olga Stefan (RO/USA/CH)/Miklos Klaus Rozsa (HU/CH)/Gabi Basalici (RO), Elianna Renner (CH/G), Myriam Lefkowitz (FR/USA), David Schwartz/ Katia Pascariu/ Ioana Florea/ Alice Marinescu (RO), Romulus Balazs (RO/FR), Simcha Jacobovici (IL/CA)

Curated by Olga Stefan/Itinerant Projects

June 27 – August 30, 2016, Iasi, Romania / Tranzit

Through oral histories and biographical material, the multi-site and multi-media contemporary art exhibition explores the impact on the destinies of survivors of the events of June 27-June 30, 1941 in Iasi, when about 13,000 Jews were killed by the Romanian authorities at the behest of Marshal Ion Antonescu, Romania’s fascist leader, in the largest pogrom in Europe. 

Coinciding with the 75th anniversary of this dark moment in Romanian history, one that has been largely ignored by Romanian society and manipulated politically, the project in Iasi considers the impact of war, violence and persecution on the destinies of victims and their descendants, the past generation’s interrupted biographies that parallel those of today, albeit in other geographical areas.

The exhibition will feature two parts: a historical one including a presentation of written material about the pogrom created by émigré writers who trace their roots to Iasi and who analyse this event through an autobiographical prism, and a contemporary art section that also features film screenings, discussions, and a theater play.

Like the historical section, the contemporary art projects produced especially for the exhibition are by artists whose fate brought them to Switzerland, Germany, Israel, and France yet they trace their roots to Iasi or other parts of Romania, from where their family were forced to flee war or repressive politics. The projects are stories of migrations, displacement, assimilation, memory and forgetting, while reflecting on the notions of home, identity and belonging. 

The exhibition and events take place in art and cultural spaces that during the pogrom were located very close to, or were actually themselves former sites of street massacres, inherently carrying this forgotten history that although invisible today, needs to be reclaimed, and thus inevitably questioning how a city remembers its past.