Exhibition documents, 2013

 

Cimiterie d'Ixelles

September 21 – October 19, 2013

 

Helena Almeida, Germaine Kruip, Jochen Lempert, Alexandra Leykauf, and Eva Löfdahl

An Art in General New Commission by Lisa Oppenheim & Lisa Tan

 

 

Art in General

79 Walker Street

New York, NY 10013

www.artingeneral.org

 

When she came looking for B’s grave a few months after he died in the Hotel de Francia in Port Bou, A found nothing. Nothing, that is, other than one of the most beautiful places she had ever seen. “It was not to be found,” she wrote S shortly afterwards, “his name was not written anywhere.” Yet according to the records provided by the town hall of Port Bou, one of B’s traveling companions, Frau G had paid out seventy-five pesetas for the rental of a “niche” for five years on September 28, 1940, two days after B died from what was diagnosed by the local doctor as cerebral apoplexy, but is generally understood to have been suicide by a massive overdose of morphine tablets.

 

Yet name or no name, the place was overwhelming.

 

“The cemetery faces a small bay directly looking over the Mediterranean,” wrote A. “It is carved in stone in terraces; the coffins are also pushed into such stone walls. It is by far one of the most fantastic and most beautiful spots I have ever seen in my life.”

 

S was not impressed. Years later he seemed downright dismissive, bringing his book-length memoir of B to an end with these words: “Certainly the spot is beautiful, but the grave is apocryphal.” It was an abrupt and sour note on which to end the story of a life, as if the dead man and therefore we, too, had been cheated of an ending, and what we had gotten instead was a suspension, a book whose last page was missing.

 

 

Text: Taussig, Michael. Walter Benjamin’s Grave. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. Edited and altered by Lisa Oppenheim.

 

 

A nonspatial continuum in which events occur in apparently irreversible succession from the past through the present to the future

November 15 - December 21, 2013

 

Toril Johannessen, Elizabeth McAlpine, Laurent Montaron, Evariste Richer, Lisa Tan

 

Schleicher/Lange

Markgrafenstrasse 68

10969 Berlin

Germany

www.schleicherlange.com

 

The title of the exhibition is a precise description of the phenomenon: time, a physical, measurable variable that denotes a sequence of successions and therefore describes a clear and irreversible direction. As the fourth dimension it renders orientation in space possible.

 

Above all, timekeeping complements visual and geographical points of orientation for the observer, enabling us to not only know where we are, but when we are there – on a timeline that is subdivided into the precise units of years, days, and seconds. Due to it’s mono-directionality, it is bound up with transience and mortality, and our attempt to protecting us against the passage of time through memories. Memories are individual and thus play an important role in the creation of a person’s identity. In the context of society, memories serve to create history.

 

The perception and experience of time is subjective and different for every individual, despite the fact that it can be measured objectively using a defined scale. In theory, therefore, it is the same length for each person. Different cultures likewise have strikingly dissimilar ways of approaching time. In Western societies we tend to think of time as being a resource, or consider it as an object of value. We live with the conception that we ought to manage and use our time, and that time is something we can waste, lose or find.

 

All of the exhibited works from the five artists participating in this show refer to time in a different way and investigate possibilities for an alternative approach, not just to time as a theme but also to how it can be measured. They give rise to various questions, all of them taking an angle on the underlying theme: “How is it possible to represent time? Is it possible at all?”

 

 

 

Just what is it that makes today so familiar, so uneasy? LIAF Lofoten International Art Festival 2013

6 – 29 September 2013

 

 

Bani Abidi, Sven Augustijnen, Ann Böttcher, Mircea Cantor, István Csákány, HC Gilje, Pedro Gómez-Egaña, Shilpa Gupta, Leslie Hewitt in collaboration with Bradford Young, David Horvitz, Adelita Husni-Bey, Siniša Ilić, Adrià Julià, Mahmoud Khaled, Karl Larsson, Laida Lertxundi, Britta Marakatt-Labba, Nana Oforiatta Ayim, Oliver Ressler, Allen Ruppersberg, Walid Sadek, Natascha Sadr Haghighian, Lisa Tan, Olivier Zabat, and Knut Åsdam, with Speakers Matthew Fuller, Aaron Levy, Aaron Schuster, Tiago Bom and Ayatgali Tuleubek

 

curated by Anne Szefer Karlsen, Bassam El Baroni, and Eva González-Sancho

 

www.liaf2013.no

 

 

‘Just what is it that makes today so familiar, so uneasy?’ is the title of LIAF 2013. By rephrasing the title of the famous 1956 Richard Hamilton collage ‘Just what is it that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing?' LIAF intends to establish an aesthetic, intellectual, and political position by bringing the public and those shaping contemporary art discourse closer to a heightened and sensitive understanding of the conditions that shape our consciousness and existence today. LIAF 2013 will feature a balanced variety of art projects that create connections with each other and their surroundings, forming a circuit of intense emotions, ideas, and positions.

 

The scarcity of art institutional structures in Lofoten offers LIAF 2013 an opportunity to explore the current moment that can be described as a shift from a condition of successive crises followed by recoveries, to one where crises shape a new permanent condition. LIAF 2013 seriously considers this condition, immersing itself in the fabric of the local community, its domestic, commercial and public spaces while exploring the current moment's global uneasiness.

 

On The Passage of a Few

19 June - 4 August 2013

 

Alexandre da Cunha, Terence Gower, Luis Molina-Pantin and Lisa Tan

 

Simon Preston Gallery

301 Broome Street

New York, NY 10002

www.simonprestongallery.com

 

Borrowing its title from Guy Debord's 1959 film, On the Passage of a Few Persons Through a Rather Brief Unity of Time, the exhibition explores the relationship between citizen and environment, while it simultaneously critiques and pays homage to decaying modernist ideologies. Each artist dismantles the structure of modernist systems by exploiting and transforming the materiality of cultural and architectural tropes in order to make way for new narratives.

 

Terence Gower’s installation The Red Wall (El Muro rojo) dominates the gallery space. An enormous red wall frames a black and white restaged photo of Armando Salas Portugal's famous 1953 image of Casa Barragán. By reducing Luis Barragán's exuberant colours to grey tones, the work highlights Barragan’s aesthetical concerns with emotional experience and architecture. Known for playful appropriation of everyday objects such as plungers, mops, fans or bottles, Alexandre da Cunha uses critical wit to topple hierarchical modernist language. With Full Catastrophe (drum XIV), the simple gesture of liberating a rusted industrial cement mixer from its original function raises complex questions of trade and labor. Luis Molina-Pantin is an obsessive chronicler. Whether using photography, books, everyday objects or postcards, Luis creates inventories of our over-looked cultural landscapes. Non-fiction reviews, is an installation consisting of sixteen fictional vintage books, each cover depicting an airplane disaster. Objectifying the book through the lens of the archive, the series becomes a strategy of representing failed ideologies - the imagery of flight, a classic modern aspiration displayed as a dystopian failure. Lisa Tan incorporates personal and collective histories in order to explore her long-standing preoccupation with the indefinable. In this instance, Alter Nordfriedhof casually documents a cemetery in Munich on a spring day. Overgrown vines and flowers obscure the tombstones into abstract shapes. Through the use of repetition and the apparatus of archival structures, an elegant ontological study transforms into a poetic meditation on mortality.

 

Duet

23 April - 11 May, 2013

 

Filipa César, Lisa Tan, Salma Cheddadi, Julião Sarmento, Jaume Pitarch, Rui Toscano, Raphaël Zarka, Duncan Campbell, Eric Baudelaire, and Pablo Pijnappel.

Curated by Carolina Grau

 

Cristina Guerra Contemporary Art

Rua de Santo António à Estrela 33

1350 - 291 Lisbon

Portugal

www.cristinaguerra.com

 

 

A Duet is an activity performed by a pair of closely connected individuals. Each one has its own characteristics playing the same melody with different tones, tempos and rhythms.

 

Duet is a presentation of specific video works by two artists creating a dialogue with their similitude and differences changing during each day of the week. Using the existing two different spaces at Cristina Guerra gallery, one space darker and more intimate and the other wider for more cinematic experience, the different conversations will develop during each week.

 

The five duets in the exhibition explores different contemporaries issues that are such as combining documentary and viewpoints are the films by Filipa César (1975, Porto) and Lisa Tan (1973, Syracuse, New York); the sensuality and the female body by Salma Cheddadi (1984, Casablanca) and Julião Sarmento (1948, Lisboa); the influence of painting and its manipulation by Jaume Pitarch (1963, Barcelona) and Rui Toscano (1970, Lisboa); the film assembly from archive material, discussing public figures or spaces by Raphaël Zarka (1977 Montpellier) and Duncan Campbell (1972, Dublin) and the presence and the absence of images by Eric Baudelaire (1973, Salt-Lake City) and Pablo Pijnappel (1979, Paris).

 

 

Thinking and Speaking

5th April - 12th May 2013

 

Erica Baum, Francisca Benítez, Iñaki Bonillas, Luis Camnitzer, Haris Epaminonda, Felipe Mujica, Nanna Nordström, Linda Persson, Falke Pisano, Lisa Tan

Curated by Stefanie Hessler

 

Galerie Nordenhake

Hudiksvallsgatan 8

SE-113 30 Stockholm

Sweden

www.nordenhake.com

 

 

“Just as the imaginary situation has to contain rules of behavior, so every game

with rules contains an imaginary situation.”

~ Lev Vygotsky in “Mind in Society”

 

The exhibition “Thinking and Speaking” takes its title from Lev Vygotsky's founding work of constructivist psychology from 1934. It brings together different attempts by artists to appropriate language and invent new idioms as a means for understanding systems and creating new worlds.

 

Language is at the base of societal power structures, and – as Michel Foucault has pointed out – power itself is exercised through discourse. If speech is crucial for determining societal systems and the constitution of subjects, and norms are so embedded as to be beyond our notice, a way to rethink them may be by altering the use of language itself. The exhibition “Thinking and Speaking” looks at modes of appropriating and experiencing idiomatic systems from a meta-linguistic perspective and with an emphasis on play.

 

The artists in the exhibition playfully analyse and question language as we take it for granted. Some invert aesthetically orchestrated and manipulated signs used to exercise power. Others address the relation between speech and temporality. Some deal with the impossibility to translate abstract ideas and dreams into oral speech. Still others point to the formal relationship between diction and physicality, or create abstract and visual forms of poetry. The exhibited works are not all connected to idiomatic language, but build their own regimes by bringing forth objects that do not fit into any category, and expressions of ideas that do not yet have any corresponding semiotic signifier.

 

Play and appropriation can be so associative and replete as to overbear the possibilities of translation from thought to speech completely. By contriving new patterns of expression that transgress or modify existing ones, deadlocked structures may be detected and discarded.

 

Encore!

23 Mar — 16 Apr 2013

 

Encore! is organized by Bonniers Konsthall and takes place at Biografen Sture every Monday and Tuesday from March 25 to April 16. The evenings start at 18.30.

 

Bonniers Konsthall

Torsgatan 19

Stockholm

Sweden

www.bonnierskonsthall.se

 

 

Often, one only sees glimpses of a work in a show, does not have time to stay for the entire film or forgot who made the video that you cannot stop thinking about. Therefore, this past winter we gave our audience the chance to wish for the films they would like to see most. From the many suggestions we received, we have finally created a program that includes everything from classics such as John Smith’s Girl Chewing Gum to Trisha Donnelly’s noted and appreciated work from Documenta 13, 2012. Two evenings are curated by artists Lisa Tan and Pierre Bismuth.

__

 

Tue 9/4  Encore! According to Lisa Tan

Moyra Davey, Les Goddesses, 2011 (61 min).

Davey scours through her earliest black-and-white photographs: portraits of her rebellious Catholic sisters in the early 1980s.  She walks around her apartment, whispers in the microphone and quotes everything from the philosopher Walter Benjamin’s thoughts on photography to the poet Alejandra Piznarnik’s ideas on food.

 

John Bock, Gast, 2004 (11 min).

Gast depicts a rabbit hopping freely in the artist’s apartment, which is littered with sculptures composed of quotidian household items. Bock’s camera follows the rabbit’s movements as his own costume manipulates them. References to Joseph Beuys’ performance How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare (1965) are evident, but Bock reverses Beuys’ mandate by learning from rather than teaching his companion.

 

Lisa Tan, Sunsets, 2012 (23 min).

The video documents an informal translation and transcription (Portuguese to English) of a 1977 interview with the Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector (1920-1977).  Lispector’s figurative and highly imaginative stories approach the limits of subjectivity in remarkable ways.  The piece layers the interview with scenes that were filmed in Sweden during the liminal zone of either 3am during the summer, or 3pm during the winter.

 

KINO DER KUNST Festival and exhibition

April 24 to 28, 2013

 

Gallery Program, presentation of Sunsets (2012)

Andreas Grimm München

Türkenstrasse 11

80333 Munich

Germany

www.andreasgrimmgallery.com

www.kinoderkunst.de

 

 

Is the White Cube turning into a Black Box? Darkness is taking over in the art museums - after a hundred years of discussing the pros and cons of natural or artificial light, overhead spots or neon bulbs. Moving image and digital projection have entered the art world; a growing number of visual artists work with film and fiction, telling stories and directing professional actors. What, however, does contemporary art want from cinema? And is Hollywood’s future really to be found in art museums?

 

These questions are the core of a new, internationally unique event in Munich: KINO DER KUNST wants to be exhibition and film festival in one, showcase for contemporary trends in art and international meeting point for artists, curators and the public. KINO DER KUNST extends the conventions of cinema and investigates new forms of narration.

 

The current relationship between cinema and art is explored with the International Competition for single-channel art works; a historical movie program features films by artists from Hans Richter or Rebecca Horn to Steve McQueen or Julian Schnabel; retrospectives and geographic focuses are presented as well as multi-channel installations. Screenings take place at several movie theatres in the University of Television and Film and the ARRI Kino, talks in the Academy of Fine Arts. Multichannel works are installed in the Pinakothek der Moderne / Schaustelle, Museum Brandhorst and the Goetz Collection.