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Another edition of the Artissima art fair just ended in Turin, another Artissima report on wmmna. I've always found Artissima brainier, edgier and less art supermarket than other art fairs (let's say that the mercantile side of the operation is a bit more subtle here.) I thought my first visit to Frieze in London last month would dethrone the Turin fair from its pedestal but that didn't happen. Frieze is not as avant-garde as its reputation wants it. At least not anymore. I hope to find time to blog about it soon-ish. Along with the 102 galleries that form its Main Section, Artissima also introduced young galleries, which have been up and running for less than five years. Another section, Emerging Talents, is dedicated to emerging artists while Back to the Future brings the spotlight on artists who were active in the '60s and '70s and whose work has much affinity with current art practice. I'm going to mix and match everything i've seen in a single, almost devoid of any comment, post:
I love love love David Shrigley:
Views from the exhibition space at the Oval (images from the press kit):
Gabriele Arruzzo's proposal of a coat of arms for Italy celebrates the past glories of the country as much as some of the embarrassing clichés that characterize its current identity (or at least the way it is perceived.)
Elia Alba paid homage to disco and its influences, and in particular to club Paradise Garage in New York City and its legendary DJ Larry Levan.
In 2008 the Croatian artist Igor Grubić began a series of micro-political actions dedicated to the revolutionary movements of 1968 that ranged from personal dedications to provocative interventions in public spaces.
The retro section, Back to the Future, ended up being my favourite of all.
When in 1972 Franco Mazzucchelli abandoned some PVC inflatables (A. TO A.) in front of Alfa Romeo he involuntarily triggered a road block as factory workers played with the plastic shapes and created a barrier to block the cars.
My images on flickr. |
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While i ponder on my inability to be the queen of sexy titles, i'm going to give you a last breath of Artissima:
The first time i saw Jan Håfström's work was at the Venice Biennial. I remembered thinking that i wouldn't mind seeing it over and over again. The Brändström gallery in Stockholm has no idea how happy when they decided to fill their booth with Paradise Lost, Walker, Incidents of Grandma's Travel and The Eternal Return to Artissima. The cut-out wood panels create an instant dark cult atmosphere evoking Gustave Moreau, Edgar Allan Poe, secret burial ceremonies and Boris Karloff's hypnotic eyes in The Mummy.
What happened? Why did i miss Francis Upritchard at the last edition of the Venice Biennial?
Now the question i like to ask myself when i'm in an artfair is "if money was no object which work would i want to bag for my penthouse?" At Artissima, i'd have bought a Damien Deroubaix.
I came across the work of David Shrigley at Galleri Nicolai Wallner's booth. I'm now very fond of his Modern Thought animations.
In 2007, Daniel Knorr decorated four trams in Bucharest with the symbols of key institutions: The Army, The Orthodox Church, The Red Cross and the Police. This intervention materializes the Kafkian relationship between institutions and citizens who live physically such relationship in regard to the tram (either if they are inside or outside it, either if it is empty or crowded), always repeating the same run (via.)
Gianni Pettena was one of the leading figures of "radical architecture" in Italy. The little i've seen of his work makes me think that he was a brilliant man, to say the least. Carabinieri were giant word-objects built out of corrugated cardboard erected in a courtyard and abandoned to the wear and tear of time and weather. 'Carabinieri' (the national gendarmerie of Italy) is an old word and it evokes authority. Rain and humidity have quickly and quietly reduced it to pieces.
Zebiba, by Hrair Sarkissian, is a series of portraits of pious men in Egypt who all have the 'Zebiba' or prayer scar on their foreheads, caused by kneeling on a prayer rug or a Mussallah (Stone of God) and touching the ground with one's forehead. On one level, the worshipper aspires to disinvest himself from earthly culture. Paradoxically, the desire to become invisible when facing God, renders him more visible within his social environment.
Best discovery for me was the work of Andrea Salvino at the booth of Antonio Colombo Arte Contemporanea.
I had always associated Romanian artist Dan Perjovschi with sarcastic political drawings so i was surprised to see documentation of his tattoo "anti-performance." In 1993, while his country was facing a national identity debate, and a negative image abroad, Perjovschi participated to a Performance Festival in Timişoara with an "anti-performance" for which he had the name of his country tattooed on his shoulder. Ten years later, he removed the tattoo in a surgical procedure that involved a laser bombardment of the tattoo, each black dot splitting into millions of pieces and each of the pieces carried away through his skin by molecules. The tattoo was not erased but instead spread throughout the whole body of the artist.
And that's it for the 17th edition of Artissima!
Previously: Artissima - the installations, Artissima: Architecture, photo, decay, Artissima - the House of Contamination and Artissima, first images. |
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If you've seen the movie Gomorrah, you won't have any difficulty recognizing the location of Tobias Zielony's photos: Le Vele (The Sails) in Naples. Denatured by modifications to the original plans, obstructed by management failures, excessive housing density and insufficient services facilities, the monumental buildings are to be demolished. Three of them have already been razed to the ground. The remaining four "sails" are in an advanced state of degradation. Only about a hundred families still live in buildings which have now been reduced to ghostlike ruins (via.) Zielony, whose images i discovered at the Artissima art fair 2 months ago, spent several weeks studying and documenting how adolescents "kill time" in Naples suburbia.
Let's not move away from the 'deteriorating architectural heritage' chapter immediately, shall we? This morning i read in The Guardian that UK's largest surviving estate of postwar prefab houses is set to be bulldozed. Only six of the 187 bungalows, erected from factory-built panels by German and Italian prisoners of war in 1945 and 1946, will be saved. The remainder of the Excalibur estate in Catford, south-east London, will be demolished, along with its tin-roofed prefab church, St Mark's.*
The story brought back to my mind another project i noticed at the Artissima art fair in November. Over a year ago, artists Lara Almarcegui came across a patchy assortment of cottages, classrooms and villas on the outskirts of Wellington, New Zealand. The houses are moved there from different places and remain on display until they are sold. The result is a ghost-town like street with empty buildings, some in state of disrepair, others in almost pristine condition. For the One Day Sculpture project, Almarcegui traced the roots and individual stories of each building and communicated it through a tour and a catalogue which was published as an insert in Wellington's daily newspaper, the Dominion Post. Caught between a distant history shared with an almost forgotten owner and their future reinstatement to another site, each house seems to be out of context.
There might not have been as many photographic works as in the previous editions of Artissima, but the ones i saw certainly made it worth the trip.
Thank you McCaffrey Fine Art for bringing Hitoshi Nomura to the art fair. Nomura gained fame in the late sixties with huge works created out of cardboard or dry ice, that he photographed to record their change in shape and aspect over time, thereby manifesting invisible concepts, such as 'gravity' or 'time'. For his Tardiology series (1969/2009), the artist constructed high cardboard towers that he then left to the mercy of gravity, time and weather. He photographed them as they started to sag, bend, and finally toppled. Simple and effective demonstration of the power of gravity over time.
* Nothing to see here points to a lovely PDF about post-war prefabs in the UK. |
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Olala! I'm ridiculously late with the remains of my reports from the Artissima art fair which took place in Turin last November. I posted a couple of quick stories a while back then got on a plane and left catalogues, scraps of papers, hasty notes and memories home. I know new year's resolutions are made never to be respected, but i do hope 2011 will see some form of organization in the way i schedule my reports.
The last edition of Artissima was good. But then i'd usually say such thing because i love art fairs. The booth ladies always wear fancy, sexy attires, none of them has ever heard about the existence of art blogs, i see free booze in my fancy press bag, the concept of a fair makes it possible to ask questions you'd never dare to ask in a gallery or museum, and there are more artworks than even i can absorb. The event this year took place at at the comfortable and luminous Oval - a pavilion built for the 2006 Olympic Winter Games in Turin.
Artissima offered dance shows, performances, mega structures made of trash (see Artissima - the House of Contamination) and a few young galleries and artists i was happy to discover. This post will focus on the installations i found particularly striking: One of the most amazing, yet simple, works at the art fair was a light projection by Ulrich Vogl. Neatly aligned projectors from all brands and sizes were casting onto the wall of the booth slide images that, seen together, suggested the night-time skyline of a distant metropolis.
In 1997 Carl Michael von Hausswolf initiated a series of works under the title "Operations of Spirit Communication", inspired by his research on Electronic Voice Phenomena techniques. His ready-made machines were showing the possibilities of ghosts and other kinds of life forms living inside a certain space or inside the electricity grids. Unfortunately for me the lovely person in charge of the Niklas Belenius booth was a friend of the gallerist and he could not give me much information about this particular piece. He merely gave me the name of the artist and had me press a couple of buttons.
Superflex was showing the Anti-Piracy Machine, from its Free beer / Counter game strategies series. Anti-Piracy Machine models the struggle against counterfeit goods. One player (the 'pirate') places bootleg material (represented by potatos) into the marketplace (represented by the launching tube). The other player (the 'police') uses the subtle and finely-tuned instrument of the law (represented here by a hammer) to remove pirate material from circulation. Five points to the pirate for every potato missed, one point to the police for every potato hit.
Niklas Belenius's booth (again!) had photo documentation of John Duncan's installation The Rage Room, part of The Dream House in which each room is specifically designed to evoke a specific state of consciousness.
Susan Norrie's stunning video installation was dedicated to the people of Porong and East Java who are battling the biggest mud volcano in the world. In 2006, an eruption at the Banjar Panji 1 gas and oil drilling well created an environmental disaster in the region that continues to this day. Company officials claimed that a distant earthquake had triggered the eruption; others believed that the catastrophe was primarily due to the mining company's operational negligence.
The toxic fumes spreading from the well include hydrogen sulphide, which causes long-term neurological and physical effects. The mudslide inundated villages, leaving more than tens of thousands of people homeless. It is expected that the flow will continue for the next 30 years.
Lou Reed lighting a cigarette on the first track, side one, of the LP Take No Prisoners, recorded live at the Bottom Line, New York, May 1978. The sound is played through a microphone connected to the headphones output of a 1970s reel-to-reel tape recorder.
And a very happy new year to you dear readers. Previously: Artissima - the House of Contamination and Artissima, first images. |
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Another update from Artissima, the contemporary art fair taking place this weekend in Turin. There's vodka in the press bag, the art girls wear Melissa shoes, they still rock those pointy shoulder jackets, the men are strongly encouraged to make sartorial efforts, and photography seems to have fallen out of favour. Meanwhile half of the public is either walking up and down the scaffoldings of raumlabor's life-size maquette of an experimental museum or relaxing with friends on the huge heap of smelly discarded clothes that the Berlin-based collective has 'erected' by the bar. When i saw the mountain of clothes from afar i actually thought it was a scaled-down version Christian Boltanski's Personnes at the Grand Palais in Paris. raumlabor's construction -which you can find at the back of the exhibition space- was designed to host the fair's cultural offer, a program mixing dance performances, literature, film screenings and architecture. The idea is brilliant and the structure certainly attracts more passersby than the white rooms where the conferences usually take place.
The House of Contamination forms a parallel architecture in clashing contrast both with the sleek volumes of the Oval building where the fair is hosted and with the squeaky clean walls of the gallery booths.
The walls of this experimental museum are built with compressed stacks of plastic, paper, metal, fabric and wood. All the material is recycled. The books of the library are kept inside disused fridges, tables are installed on top of upside-down washing machines. A huge fan intermittently blows wind that moves the fabric walls of the corridor. Up there, a rudimentary skywalk allows visitors to get a better idea of the architecture of the museum.
As the description of the House of Contamination states, all rooms are intercommunicating, the only dividing wall can move merging cinema and theatre, simultaneously sealing the literary salon. Let's see if this experimental museum gets a life beyond the 4 days art fair.
Abitare has interviewed members of raumlabor about the House of Contamination. |
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I've just spent the afternoon at the professional sneak peek of Artissima, Turin's contemporary art fair. Since i'm still uploading the hundreds of pictures i took, going through the catalogue, trying to identify the performances and screenings worth attending over the coming days and wondering whether i shouldn't get away from this screen and head to the Share festival right now (whoever decided that the few interesting art events in this town should be crammed together in a couple of days should be submitted to the ordeal of hot water), i'm going to do the lazy thing and give you an easy preview of Artissima using a selection of the press images i received a few hours ago. I promise to be more diligent tomorrow. In the meantime, here are the goods:
I loved this one and i'll add that the Polish galleries rocked the fair this year:
Artissima, Turin's contemporary art fair is open to the public on November 5, 6 and 7 from 12.00 to 8.00 pm. |
