Installation
Nineteen Eighty Four posted on August 23rd, 2010
The exhibition entitled Nineteen Eighty Four at Austrian Cultura Centre in New York city, “examines the evolution of imagery and language in what has been described as our panoptic era. While its roots are grounded in the concepts that arose from the 1948 novel by George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four, which clearly reflected the historical background of totalitarianism, this exhibition attempts to distance itself from this source by considering forms of surveillance and control today, where an all-powerful apparatus as described in Orwell’s work appears overly simplistic.” more…
read more via new york times…
Ridley Scott’s 1984 commercial for Apple.
HAPPY PRIDE WEEK posted on July 3rd, 2010
Nina Arsenault recently spoke at IdeaCity 2010 about her art and her body, and how she objectifies herself in the name of both. Read the whole ‘talk‘ because it’s super.
“And, I take my understanding of irony from Donna Harraway’s Cyborg Manifesto. She articulates irony not simply as the idea that an image can contain an implied and literal meaning. Harraway’s deep understanding of irony is that a single image or body can contain a cascading web-like structure of seemingly contradictory yet dependent meanings that can not even be pulled apart. To do so would be to deny the truth of the greater whole.
It’s a beautiful definition of irony.
Dialectics dissolve into one another. Male into female into real into fake into beauty into abomination, worshipfulness and self-annihilation. Cascading into one another.”
Parts of a tour documentary:
Hans-Peter Feldmann in Berlin posted on June 8th, 2010
“It is impossible to capture the amount of images Feldmann has collected from magazines, books and with his own roving camera. The book is the format that brings structure and order to Feldmann’s shuffled deck of images such as knees of women, shoes, chairs, unmade beds, bicycles and portraits. Feldmann recognises the problematic nature of pictures and art in a culture constantly bombarded by images. Feldmann does not discard either mass produced or amateur photographs; on the contrary, he embraces them in his work as if they were his own and offers them equal value. By embracing, accepting and placing images of common objects, monuments, situations and appearances in series, Feldmann at once neutralises and relates them, creating a tension between their similarities and differences.” via e-flux
Read more here.
Sheharzade posted on June 7th, 2010
Syrian-Brazilian artist Hilal Sami Hilal -
“he executes it in the most extraordinary lightness. Even metal becomes a whisper in his hands.” via south/south.
“[Shahrazad (a legendary Persian queen and the storyteller of One Thousand and One Nights)] had perused the books, annals and legends of preceding Kings, and the stories, examples and instances of by gone men and things; indeed it was said that she had collected a thousand books of histories relating to antique races and departed rulers. She had perused the works of the poets and knew them by heart; she had studied philosophy and the sciences, arts and accomplishments; and she was pleasant and polite, wise and witty, well read and well bred.” Sir Richard F. Burton’s translation of The Nights.
A Series of {Various} Small Flames posted on March 22nd, 2010
I love everything about Land of Talk, EVERYTHING! Especially their new EP “Fun and Laughter”.
When I heard from a very special someone:
at a special place that the last song:
“A Series Of Small Flames”
was inspired by another very special someone:
I was in love forever! Then I found this special Special SPECIAL!!!
hmmmm…
Doris Salcedo posted on February 16th, 2010
Bogotá, Colombia’s , Doris Salcedo is a part of the Guggenheim’s current show, Contemplating the Void. For the exhibit, which marks the building’s 50th anniversary, nearly two hundred artists, architects, and designers were invited to imagine their dream interventions in the rotunda of the space. Her mash- up art piece combines a downward view of the rotunda with a photograph of a New York tenement by the German-born artist Hans Haacke. The tenement photograph, part of his series documenting the holdings of a local real-estate baron, was scheduled to be featured in the 1971 Haacke show at the Guggenheim that was canceled for what were widely believed at the time to be political concerns by the museum’s director.
“What Hans was doing was amazing, and it was censored,” said Ms. Salcedo, a sculptor who is also politically inclined. She wrote to Mr. Haacke to obtain his image and then worked with four architects over several months to create the perfect alignment with the other picture. “It was a nightmare in Photoshop,” she said.
Her point is not so much an institutional critique as a take on the power of design, good or bad. “Architecture has a real effect on us,” she said. “The lack of architecture in the ghetto has a real effect on the people who live there.”
In another of her works Shibboleth sets out to intervene directly with the fabric of Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall. Rather than fill this iconic space with a conventional sculpture or installation, Salcedo has created a subterranean chasm that stretches the length of the Turbine Hall. The concrete walls of the crevice are ruptured by a steel mesh fence, creating a tension between these elements that resist yet depend on one another. By making the floor the principal focus of her project, Salcedo dramatically shifts our perception of the Turbine Hall’s architecture, subtly subverting its claims to monumentality and grandeur. Shibboleth asks questions about the interaction of sculpture and space, about architecture and the values it enshrines, and about the shaky ideological foundations on which Western notions of modernity are built.
In particular, Salcedo is addressing a long legacy of racism and colonialism that underlies the modern world. A ‘shibboleth’ is a custom, phrase or use of language that acts as a test of belonging to a particular social group or class. By definition, it is used to exclude those deemed unsuitable to join this group.
‘The history of racism’, Salcedo writes, ‘runs parallel to the history of modernity, and is its untold dark side’. For hundreds of years, Western ideas of progress and prosperity have been underpinned by colonial exploitation and the withdrawal of basic rights from others. Our own time, Salcedo is keen to remind us, remains defined by the existence of a huge socially excluded underclass, in Western as well as post-colonial societies.
Here is another one of her magnificent works she did for the Istanbul Biennial in 2003.
I’m already a big fan of marianne! posted on November 24th, 2009
come check out Marianne Collins’ art.
click
HERE
Christine Eid. Artist. Melbourne. posted on November 10th, 2009
Your Place. A series of 14 taxi domelights made of acrylic, rubber, and stainless steel.
Are we there yet?. Hand-woven beaded seatcover.
Defined by what we dangle? mirrors and trinkets.
I just visited the Museum of Contemporary art here in Sydney, Australia and was blown away by Christine Eid’s ‘Transit’. Inspired by her own family history, Eid’s multimedia work examines the experience of her father and uncles who migrated to Australia from Lebanon and drove taxi cabs. In a powerful video piece, she talks about the racism/descrimination her and her family experienced for being arab and for driving taxis.
I thought each piece in this exhibit stood strong on it’s own and together as a collection was highly inspiring and impressive!
Read more about Christine and her art project here: http://www.t-o-w.info/index.html