Exhibition documents, 2021

 

The Ghost Ship and the Sea Change

The 11th edition of the Göteborg International Biennial for Contemporary Art (GIBCA)

Part One: June 5 – August 22

Part Two: September 4 – November 21

 

www.gibca.se

 

 

Michael Baers, Evan Ifekoya & Ajamu X, Damla Kilickiran, Susanne Kriemann, Anna Ling, Ibrahim Mahama, Silvano Lora, Hira Nabi, Daniela Ortiz, Manuel Pelmuş, Tabita Rezaire, Jessica Warboys,Meira Ahmemulic, Henrik Andersson, Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, Gaëlle Choisne, Benjamin Gerdes, Cecilia Germain, Unni Gjertsen, Ayesha Hameed, HAMN (Nasim Aghili & Malin Holgersson), Salad Hilowle, Conny Karlsson Lundgren, Oscar Lara, Marysia Lewandowska, Erika Arzt & Juan Linares, Fatima Moallim, Jonas (J) Magnusson & Cecilia Grönberg, Pedro Neves Marques, M. NourbeSe Philip, Pia Sandström, The Situationist International, Shanzhai Lyric & Solveig Qu Suess, Lisa Tan, Lisa Torell, Alberta Whittle

Artistic proposals for Possible Monuments? by Hanan Benammar, Aria Dean, Ayesha Hameed, Runo Lagomarsino, Fatima Moallim, Daniela Ortiz and Jimmy Robert

 

Curator, Lisa Rosendahl

 

 

Venues: Röda Sten Konsthall, Franska Tomten, Konsthallen Blå Stället, Göteborgs Konsthall, Franska Tomten, Museum of World Culture, The Garden Society of Gothenburg, Röda Sten Konsthall, Risö, Online

 

 

EXCERPT from curator's statement:

The Ghost Ship and the Sea Change relates to the historical layers of the city, asking how different ways of narrating its past might affect its future. Located at the intersection between the historical and the fictive, the biennial explores artistic practice as a method of critical historiography and change. Franska Tomten (currently Packhusplatsen), a plot of land in the city’s harbor that in 1784 was exchanged for the Caribbean island of Saint Barthélemy as part of a trade deal between Sweden and France, is used as the narrative point of departure for the biennial. How might it change the way we think about Gothenburg if we look at the city from the perspective of this particular plot of land and its colonial history?

 

Until the 1840s, Saint Barthélemy was governed by a Swedish administration as a hub for the transatlantic slave trade. In 1878 it was sold back to France. Reflecting on this history through the buildings and activities that occupy Franska Tomten today—a court of law situated in a former shipping palace, a casino, and a museum of migration housed in the harbor’s historical customs house—the past is made visible as an ongoing present. The interrelated flows of goods, bodies, capital, and ideology connected to the site span centuries and geographies: just as the writing of law is historically bound up with regulations of international trade, the global circulation of capital is directly connected to contemporary routes of migration.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

84 Steps

9 April 2021 — Sunday 20 March 2022

 

Afra Eisma, The Feminist Health Care Research Group (Inga Zimprich), Moosje M Goosen and Daily Practice (Suzanne Weenink), Raja’a Khalid, Lisa Tan, Domenico Mangano & Marieke van Rooy, and Romily Alice Walden

 

Curators, Sofía Hernández Chong Cuy, Rosa de Graaf

 

 

Kunstinstituut Melly (formerly known as Witte de With)

Witte de Withstraat 50

3012 BR Rotterdam, NL

www.kunstinstituutmelly.nl

 

 

84 STEPS, which occupies an entire floor of Kunstinstituut Melly, features projects at the intersection of art and education. This transformation of a white-cube gallery into a dynamic space for socializing art follows our 2018 makeover of the ground floor gallery, MELLY. The name - 84 STEPS - marks the distance from the ground floor to the third-floor galleries, where the initiative is sited.

 

84 STEPS features immersive art installations by Afra Eisma, The Feminist Health Care Research Group (Inga Zimprich), Moosje M Goosen and Daily Practice (Suzanne Weenink), Raja’a Khalid, Lisa Tan, Domenico Mangano & Marieke van Rooy, and Romily Alice Walden. Unfolding over the course of a year, the programming within these installations will give special attention to issues surrounding mental health. These include weekend training sessions conducted by health experts organized by Veronika Babayan and Aqueene Wilson, as well as Forums and Workshops organized by Vivian Ziherl and Jessy Koeiman.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Komunikazio-inkomunikazio

28 May 2021 - 29 August 2021

 

Lawrence Abu Hamdan, John Akomfrah, Tarek Atoui, Txomin Badiola, Zbyněk Baladrán, Josu Bilbao, Dora García, Peter Friedl, Susan Hiller, Kimia Kamvari & Nader Koochaki, Louise Lawler, Erlea Maneros Zabala, Jon Mantzisidor, Asier Mendizabal, Itziar Okariz, Olatz Otalora, María Salgado & Fran MM Cabeza de Vaca, Philippe Parreno & Carsten Höller, Lisa Tan, Amaia Urra and José Mari Zabala.

 

Curator, Oier Etxeberria

 

 

TABAKALERA

International Centre for Contemporary Culture

Andre zigarrogileak plaza, 1

20012. Donostia / San Sebastián

www.tabakalera.eus

 

 

This exhibition has as its starting point the work Lekeitioak by the Basque singer-songwriter Mikel Laboa (1934-2008). Placing this series, which began in the 1980s, at the centre of the exhibition, it proposes a crossover between different fields of work based on the communication-non-communication binomial. The “Lekeitios” are artefacts in which the division between popular culture and the avant-garde is diluted and formal concerns and they refer to long-standing formal concerns and deviations: the play between tradition and translation, the mixture of multiple sound and musical registers by means of state-of-the art procedures such as editing, or the exploration of the inflections of language and gestures.

 

Beyond the artist’s creative nature or the interest in placing his legacy within a specific reading space, the project aims to make the form lekeitio a working tool. The works in the show consider folklore and popular culture as changing and transforming forms, at the same time exploring the power relations established by the machinery of language with the surrounding world. They warn of the capacity of their categories to modulate what we hear and see and they seek for correspondences between the known and the unknown, territory and psyche, art and nature, insofar as ideas that are constantly whirling in the whirlwind of words.

 

With the aim of exploring all these regions, the exhibition Komunikazio-inkomunikazio presents archives and historical documents, historical and contemporary works in intersection with new productions commissioned by Tabakalera. The works are presented in seven sections shaping a landscape where the sound, the visual and the textual register are overlapped. The traces of historical transformations are latent in this journey. Lekeitio and Gernika. Sound and sense. Communication and non-communication. Popular and elitist. Individual and common. The language wars are certainly never-ending.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

52proposalsforthe20s

on Instagram

 

 

Throughout 2021, as in 2020, curator Maria Lind invites 52 artists to inhabit this account and make weekly proposals for the decade of the 2020s

 

Beverly was married to a poet. That’s how she ended up living in Westbeth. I once saw her husband duck to hide behind the sofa, as I passed their common area on my way to the room where she held our weekly sessions.

 

She’d taken me on in her retirement because she was interested in the Asian American psyche (her words). Everything in the loft was thoroughly lived in—most of all Beverly herself—she was ancient. She must’ve been among Westbeth’s early residents, some of whom are art world luminaries. Lorraine O’Grady, Hans Haacke, the late Diane Arbus. But most of the artists, writers, dancers, musicians, filmmakers, activists, are not as readily known.

 

Therapy is good, if for nothing else, than for the ritual it creates outside of work. Westbeth had the symbols to lend, by way of its tenant’s doors. The corridors became a kind of processional walkway and a yellow triangle on Beverly’s door consecrated each of our sessions. She wore the same thing: leather pants, a silk shirt, a potent red lip. She’d sometimes use ‘fuck’ as a response to my stories, and she called the guy I was dating—the one I’d end up moving to Sweden for—‘the Swiss.’

 

Beverly’s daughter was a dancer. She had worked with Merce Cunningham, who I’d occasionally see, by then in a wheelchair. His company’s studio was on the 11th floor. Once, @furryteacup and I poked around up there and filmed on 16mm. She was humoring me. I thought I’d found an excuse for the analogue. Westbeth itself was analogue to the core—it originally housed Bell Labs, where early broadcast and communication technology was developed. In 1968 Richard Meier redesigned the building into affordable housing for artists, inaugurating the first work-live lofts in the country.

 

Neither the footage that we took then nor the pictures I’ve taken over the years ended up becoming anything. Some things resist being made into art, or art of a certain order—there’s just nothing more to fabulate. What takes hold instead is mere document.

 

@_lisa_tan

#lisatan #52proposalsforthe20s