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Exhibition documents, 2010

 

Kierkegaards Walk

September 17, October 14, 2010

 

Cabelo, Caetano Dias, Debora Bolsoni, Felipe Cohen, Gustavo Rezende, Ilya and Emilia Kabakov, Jac Leirner, Joaquin Cociña, Nilles Attalah E, Christobal León, José Bechara, José Dávila, Lisa Tan, Marlon de Azambuja, Marxz Rosaldo Rios, Oscar Santillan

Curated by Jacopo Crivelli Visconti

 

Galeria Marília Razuk

Rua Jerônimo da Veiga, 131

Itaim, São Paulo

SP - 04536-000

Brazil

www.galeriamariliarazuk.com.br

 

How Copenhagen ended. This way the museyroom. Mind your boots goan out. Phew!

James Joyce, Finnegans Wake

 

In the memories attributed to one of his pseudonyms, but which probably belong to him, Søren Kierkegaard once recounted how his father would not let him leave the house, worried as he was about the dangers of the city. To alleviate this imposed reclusion, the father would pace the bedroom with his son, telling him amazing tales of the world - that is, inventing for his son the very world that he was prevented from experiencing for himself. The no doubt austere nature of a child’s bedroom in Copenhagen, in the 1810s, opposed a runaway imagination, the creation of an extremely personal, free, fantastic and, ultimately, eminently artistic universe. We are left to imagine (for that is what this is about: imagination) the father and son’s rapid footsteps as they sought out the longest route between those four walls, much like the wolf that restlessly stalks back and forth in his cage, dreaming of the in_nite wilderness beyond.

 

Despite the topos of the “end of the grand narratives” that would characterize artistic creation after modernity, contemporary production brings us innumerable examples of works that do not shy away from the task of reinventing the world, of going back and founding it, even with the simplest and most precarious means. Clearly, this is about a fragmented world and an aphasic, non-linear narrative in which everything is what it is, but is also something else: everything is imbued with the weight of objects and the lightness of metaphors. Like the Kierkegaard’s “imaginary” stroll, artistic creation transposes the cold and naked domestic walls, manages to subvert the rules of poverty, silence and loneliness, and takes us, as in the famous prologue from Shakespeare’s Henry V, to see horses and kings when they are only talked of: Let us on your imaginary forces work:

 

(...)

 

Think, when we talk of horses, that you see them

Printing their proud hoofs i' the receiving earth;

For 'tis your thoughts that now must deck our kings,

Carry them here and there; jumping o'er times,

Turning the accomplishment of many years

Into an hour-glass...

 

Each of the works that comprise Kierkegaards Walk explores in its own way the paradox of a domestic, or at least familiar, situation, often marked by anonymity, loneliness, fragility or ephemerality, that becomes the starting point for unfathomable journeys of the imagination.

 

The title of the exhibition, which in turn is programmatically cryptic or even incomprehensible, ironically alludes to Joyce’s Finnegans Wake – probably the least read classic in the history of literature and an extremely personal, dense, fragmented and indecipherable work, an unbeatable example of the impossibility of still resorting to a classic narrative. Joyce’s separation of words from any meaning that might be familiar to us, rendering them into pure sounds and transforming them into something else is echoed by the way in which artistic intervention transforms apparently known objects and scenarios into something new, something never before seen.

 

The objects, videos and sculptures brought together by this exhibition point to the potentialities of daily life, they unveil the mystery hidden within the most banal objects and situations, ones we see so often that we almost don’t see them anymore. Drinking a glass of marble, sharing the dreams of a swarm of _ies, being startled by an extra bird in the samurai’s cage, discovering metaesquemas on the city streets, capturing the movement of a clock that seems to have stopped: here, all this is possible, perhaps even inevitable, because when we look at these objects, we only see what they want to be, what they want to say. And what they might want to say is that houses can no longer contain their furniture, much less their inhabitants: whomsoever has enough imagination can _y into space.

 

- Jacopo Crivelli Visconti

 

Time's Arrow

May 6th - June 24th, 2010

 

Anna Barham, Gerard Byrne, Ann Böttcher, Cecilia Edefalk, Spencer Finch, Martin Karlsson, Lisa Oppenheim, Christodoulos Panayiotou, Lisa Tan, Niels Trannois

Curated by Ben Loveless

 

Galerie Nordenhake

Hudiksvallsgatan 8

SE-113 30 Stockholm

Sweden

www.nordenhake.com

 

 

Martin Amis’ novel Time’s Arrow is written in reverse chronology in which the narrator, together with the reader, experiences time passing backwards. The protagonist’s identity is slowly revealed to him as he goes back in time and becomes younger. In a similar way the exhibition brings together a group of artists who use and address history to better our understanding of “now” and “self”. Using diverse media, from collage and painting to lens-based techniques like photography and video, the artists approach the past. Through the works, the themes of pattern and repetition become apparent, building a rhythm, marking time, like a metronome.

 

The resonance of re-enactment is the focus of both Gerard Byrne and Martin Karlsson’s practice. Byrne’s project A country road. A tree. Evening… photographically hypothesizes the dramatic origins of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, reconstructing the space of the archetypal Modernist play in historically specific locations. Karlsson documents the phenomenon of “live” museums and fake ruins in order to challenge our notions of history and authenticity. The practice of preserving and re-living the past becomes a utopian ideal of re-establishing our connections with nature.

 

Ann Böttcher and Christodoulos Panayiotou reveal the mechanisms through which identity is built, be it cultural, political or social. In Böttcher’s collage she makes visible the underlying ideology in the building of the Autobahn during the Third Reich. Panayiotou’s photographic diptych depicts a seat carved in a rock and the view from it at Belle-Ile, an island off the coast of Brittany. The seat was carved at the beginning of the 20th century at the request of the eccentric actress Sarah Bernhardt from which she could contemplate and recite poetry to the ocean.

 

Using the name of the ancient Roman city Leptis Magna Anna Barham investigates the anagram as poetry. The concept of the ruined Roman city is echoed as the letters that compose its name are moved as building blocks to create new constructions. Her video Proteus re-articulates ruins through language. Niels Trannois’s collage and painting, though abstractions, seem somehow to contain time. The themes of mythology, anthropology, history and poetry are obscurely present and inform his work.

 

The act of seeing and looking back connects the work of Cecilia Edefalk and Spencer Finch. Finch returns to historically significant or charged moments in either a private or historical scale. In Blind Spot he revisits the site of John F Kennedy’s assassination and addresses the relationship between the gap in visual perception and the gap in knowledge. Edefalk has for many years been concerned with themes of representation, seeing, memory, phases and repetition. Her painting depicts a face almost as a faint memory, perhaps from the Antique. As in Finch’s work the eye holds great significance. Here, the reflected glint on the eye suggests a window – a gaze out from the painting, but also our access in to the surface.

 

Lisa Oppenheim and Lisa Tan both appropriate and reconstruct existing cultural production. Oppenheim takes Walker Evans’s rejected negatives from his documentation for the Farm Security Administration’s (FSA) photographic archive in the U.S. Library of Congress. Taking the hole punched through the negative as the site of historical possibilities she replaces the missing detail with her own contemporary images. Tan alters the opening sequence of Melville’s film classic “Le Samouraï” (1967) by adding one more finch to the cage in which the assassin’s only companion is enclosed. The simple gesture foils the film’s evaluation of isolation and interiority, while it fictitiously modifies an occurrence within historical reality.

 

North Drive Press #5

Published January 2010

Edited by Matt Keegan and Sadie Laska

 

Multiples by - Becca Albee, B'L'ing, Lutz Bacher , Bianca Beck, Joe Bradley, Josh Brand, Kerstin Brätsch, Morgan Fisher, Karl Haendel, Tamar Halpern, Nate Hylden, Kim Krans, Andrew Kuo, Lily Ludlow, Mended Veil, Olivier Mosset, Arthur Ou, Nick Relph, Jacob Robichaux, Aura Rosenberg, Aurel Schmidt, Josh Shaddock, Nick Stillman, Lisa Tan, B. Wurtz

 

Interviews and texts by - B'L'ing & UbuWeb, Fia Backström & Joseph Logan, Andreas Bunte & Kathrin Meyer, Ann Craven & Amy Granat, Trinie Dalton & Francine Spiegel, Roe Ethridge & Fia Backström, Eve Fowler & A.L. Steiner, Luke Fowler & Matt Wolf, Martha Friedman & Heather Rowe, Georg Gatsas & Norbert Möslang, Sam Gordon & B. Wurtz, Matt Hoyt & Jay Sanders, Melissa Ip & Cary Kwok, Clifford Owens & Christopher Y. Lew

 

My multiple was a version of the letterpress print titled 2 Americans.  Special thanks to Brad Ewing of Marginal Editions.

 

Les Samouraïs

March 12 - May 15, 2010

 

Curated by Lilou Vidal

 

FDC Satellite

Galerie Les filles du calvaire

Boulevard Barthelemy, 20

1000 Brussels

Belgium

 

 

FDC Satellite (Galerie Les filles du calvaire, Brussels), is pleased to present Lisa Tan’s first one-person exhibition in Brussels in the context of the gallery Project-room.

 

Titled Les Samouraïs (2010), her 3-minute long video encapsulates the opening scene from the French film classic, Le Samouraï (1967), by Jean-Pierre Melville. Through image and sound, Tan’s piece makes an alteration to Melville’s original by adding one more bird to the opening scene. The simple gesture foils the film’s evaluation of isolation and interiority, while it fictitiously modifies an occurrence within historical reality.

 

An auteur to the fullest, Jean-Pierre Melville wrote, directed, and edited his films in Studios Jenner, situated in the 13th arrondissement in Paris. While finishing Le Samouraï, the studio was completely destroyed by a fire, and the bird from the film (which Melville had adopted) was the only casualty .

 

The film moves through the pending death of Alain Delon’s character—an assassin, who adheres to a life of solitude and detachment. In the opening scene, we observe his blank demeanor as he finishes a cigarette in bed, walks over to the bird, and then puts on a trench coat and hat, before closing the door behind him to face the world outside. The only creature the assassin truly connects with is his pet bird, a caged female finch that lives with him in his modest apartment.

Here, the video is presented as a sculpture. The projector and screen are mounted on standard studio light stands, referencing the film set, and maintaining the scale of the birdcage within the assassin’s apartment.

 

Also on view is the diptych, Le Monde June 29, 1967 (2010). The images are taken from the front and back page of the newspaper, published on the day of Melville’s studio fire, and photographed on a wood floor. Reinforcing ideas about the expansion and contraction of larger histories against the everyday, the photographs are hung on opposite sides of the room, implying that what lies between the pages, lies within this space—or within every space.

 

Sur le Dandysme Aujourd'hui: From Shop Window Mannequin to Media Star

January 15 - March 21, 2010

 

anonymous, Ignasi Aballí, Pierre Bismuth, John Bock, Carol Bove, Slater Bradley, Mat Collishaw, TM Davy, Iris van Dongen, Tracey Emin, Suso Fandiño, Dora García, Babak Ghazi, Piero Golia, Douglas Gordon, Richard Hawkins, Jeff Koons, Michael Krebber, Muntean/Rosenblum, Juan Luis Moraza, Joan Morey, Carlos Pazos, Elizabeth Peyton, Richard Prince, Christoph Schmidberger, Steven Shearer, Cindy Sherman, Yinka Shonibare MBE, Zak Smith, Meredyth Sparks, Lisa Tan, Gavin Turk, Francesco Vezzoli, Andy Warhol and TJ Wilcox

Curated by RMS La Asociación

 

Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea (CGAC)

Rúa Valle Inclán

15704 Santiago de Compostela
Spain

www.cgac.org

 

Sur le dandysme aujourd’hui attempts to show how many of the concepts and strategies developed by nineteenth-century dandies can be found in the work and attitudes of certain contemporary artists, and how the iconography and themes of the literature of dandyism are still significant. To do so it takes three landmarks in the unusual history of dandyism—George Brummell, Charles Baudelaire and Oscar Wilde—and studies the way in which each of their contributions are reflected in the art of recent decades. Brummelliana: This part is devoted to Brummellian dandyism which, according to Giorgio Agamben, was characterised by granting things a degree of irreality that exceeded the use and exchange values of the commodity and drew them closer to the work of art. By virtue of its almost complete de-subjectivisation, the dandy tended to become reified, transformed into an unreal commodity, a pure appearance of himself—that Brummell-mannequin on public view in the window of his club on the London Mall. Following Hal Foster’s observations regarding some artists of the eighties and taking Duchamp and Warhol as leitmotifs, this section of the exhibition presents the ready-made and appropriation as processes related to the de-subjectivisation of the dandy. It deals also with the contemporary artist as a self-publicised commodity. Baudelairiana: In 1863 Le Figaro published Charles Baudelaire’s essay ‘The Painter of Modern Life’. The essay analysed customs and forms of modern life taking as an excuse the work by Constantin Guys, an obscure illustrator who is only referred to by the initials M. G. With Baudelaire the term dandy went from being a noun to an adjective. This section encompasses artists who concentrate on youth subcultures of which dandyism is considered a precedent. Wildeana: In 1900 Oscar Wilde died an early death in Paris. Was he the last dandy or one of the first media stars? He was better known for his strange way of dressing and his witticisms than acknowledged as an author in the early stages of his career. Wilde became a fan phenomenon during his tour of the US in his youth years. He also was a marked egotist. Wilde wanted to become a work of art and created his own character. This section is devoted to the theme of the artist as Narcissus, media star and work of art.

 

 

 

Llama

December 16, 2010

 

Lisa Tan, Ana Cardoso, Matt Keegan and Amy Granat

curated by Lisa Oppenheim

 

Conduits

Viale Stelvio 66

20159 Milan

Italy

www.theconduits.com

 

The title of the show is a South American camelid widely used as a pack and meat animal by Andean cultures. It’s the third person conjugation of the Spanish verb to call, or, in its reflexive form, to be called. ¿Cómo se llama? Lisa. Lisa. Ana. Matt. Amy. The premise of this show is a dinner party. It’s someone else’s opening. It’s a bar. It’s where we get together and talk about things that may be related to art or may be related to love or gossip or things we heard on the radio. Another friend of ours described art as the thin membrane that surrounds everything. It’s the thing that brings all of us together in the same room but that we don’t have to talk about all the time. It’s a support and a context that exists both individually and in a group. Llama is a picture of the group, made up individual projects and practices.

 

Kiosk

March 3 - June 4, 2010

 

Haris Epaminonda, Marius Engh, Vlatka Horvat, Charlotte Moth, Kristina Lee Podesva, Lisa Tan, Oraib Toukan and Lucy Raven.

Organized by David Horvitz

 

Golden Parachutes

Kreuzbergstrasse 42E

10965 Berlin

Germany

http://goldenparachutes.net

 

 

In Farsi, کوشک (pronounced kušk), refers to an object that protects or is a shade maker. The kiosk has a history in the Middle East that spans over seven centuries. A word that was originally used to designate a place in the shade, or in the case of the Turkish kösk, a summer residence for the wealthy, has changed over time to encompass not only shaded vendors and newspaper stands, but also parking-lot ticket dispensers and photo printing machines.

 

Golden Parachutes is pleased to present Kiosk, a project organized by the American artist David Horvitz, and featuring Haris Epaminonda, Oraib Toukan, Marius Engh, Vlatka Horvat, Kristina Lee Podesva, Charlotte Moth, Lisa Tan, and Lucy Raven.

 

As a physical space, the non-electronic kiosk functions as a quasi-outpost in both urban and non-urban spaces. Both inside and outside at once (kiosks are usually makeshift structures and seldom proper buildings), the kiosk offers shade to the vendor, as well as possibilities for sustenance and communication for the passerby. While a ticket machine is not a shade maker, a photo kiosk returns to the etymological origins. Using a camera, a literal box of darkness (coming from camera obscura, darkened chamber), as a way of producing images, the photo-kiosk becomes a reproducer of images-literally from the shadows.

 

Twenty-four 13 x 18 cm prints will be exhibited at Golden Parachutes. These photographs, printed from a photo-kiosk at the German drugstore, Rossmann, will be available for open reproduction at the cost of printing (unless shoplifted by the visitor). Upon request, visitors from the gallery will receive the twenty-four image files, and can walk to the nearest Rossmann 0,8 km away to reproduce the exhibition. The image files will also be available to download from Golden Parachutes’ website for those not in Berlin. The photographs, dispersed from Golden Parachutes, will become a kind of “traveling show” through diffusive reproduction.