A new exhibition at the Wellcome Collection in London takes a closer look at something that surrounds us but that we are often reluctant to confront. ‘Dirt’ travels across centuries and continents to explore our ambivalent relationship with filth, waste, grime, impurity and soil
Laid to Rest was inspired by the commercialisation of waste in Victorian London. A few months ago, Serena Korda asked the public to collect and donate dust. The artwork consists of hundreds of commemorative bricks. Each brick contains the specific dust of its contributor (quite literally since much household dust is made of skin and hair particles) and is imprinted with information describing its origins
The exhibition analyses the most recent developments in Italian contemporary art through a selection of works by the 16 artists nominated to the 2011 Emerging Talents award. Good surprises await the visitor
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Currently on view at Tate Modern’s Level 2 Gallery, Out of Place features four artists who explore the relationship between dominant political forces and personal and collective histories by looking at urban space, architectural structures and the condition of displacement
The piece currently on view in Florence is directly inspired by early prototypes of sound weapons. As the artist explained: I found a series of very suggestive images of some real “sound armies” set up by the Japanese army during the Second World War. They were like guns pointing to the sky, conceived for shooting down planes by using particular airwaves. Unlike current acoustic weapons, which are real weapons, those first prototypes have never been activated. Those images fascinated me a lot. This work probably still recalls these suggestions. It is a structure that juts out a lot from the wall, overhanging and conveying a sort of dangerousness. It produces a deep guttural sound and can be “exhibited” in every sense, both from a spatial and a sound viewpoint
Apologies for updating this blog only once in a blue moon. I’ve been spending the past few days on a quest for the perfect flat. Now that mission is accomplished, i can announce that normal service will resume on Friday (tomorrow i’ll be visiting a couple of shows in Florence.) In the meantime, here’s some of the most stunning images i saw this afternoon at The Museum of London which is running a London Street Photography show until September 4, 2011
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For ‘Cook Me – Black Bile’, designer Tuur Van Balen used leeches and his own blood too cook a recipe for controlling the feeling of melancholy. Synthetic biology and the new interactions it can trigger within our body are proposed as a new form of cooking, guided by one’s personal metabolism
This book investigates this urge for the pure, but also advocates a much deeper need for the impure, not to reinstate a new organicism or back-to-nature movement, but to trace progression to a point where all modernist values reverse, where technology becomes an agent for the impure and the imperfect. Technology, long an agent for homogeneity and purity, is now turning into one for heterogeneity and global contingency
The similarity between fireworks and movies is at the very heart of this exhibition. Both are intermittent ephemeral projection of light in the darkness. Fireworks are yesterday’s action movies. They used to last 90 minutes and followed complex, narrative structures, often telling a story of war and chaos upon which the hero would prevail
Der Lauf der Dinge (The Way Things Go) is a 1987 film by Peter Fischli and David Weiss following a 30 minute long, uninterrupted chain of physical and chemical experiments. One explosion leads to a fire that heats up a teakettle until its steam whistle flies away and hits a bottle that falls and pour its content over a… It goes on and on. One chemical trigger leads to another or sparks a physical phenomenon. The film watches like a thriller (even if you’ve seen it twice already) because every single step can go wrong
Jerram’s interest in perception takes many forms: a kinetic sound installation controlled by the movements of the Moon and Sun, a miracle toaster, an engagement ring etched with a sound message that can be played back with a miniature record player, street pianos left for the public to play, etc. His most spectacular exploration of perception is Sky Orchestra, a series of performances in which hot air balloons fly over a city at dawn and broadcast music designed to turn the dreams of the sleeping public into an artistic experience. There is a lot to like and write about in his portfolio but i’ll just focus on two of his most recent projects: Glass Microbiology and Aeolus – Acoustic Wind Pavilion
Guantanamo: If the light goes out illustrates three experiences of home: at Guantanamo naval base, home to the American community; in the camp complex where the detainees have been held; and in the homes where former detainees, never charged with any crime, find themselves trying to rebuild lives. These notions of home are brought together in an unsettling narrative, which evokes the process of disorientation central to the Guantanamo interrogation and incarceration techniques. It also explores the legacy of disturbance such experiences have in the minds and memories of these men
Following in the footsteps of a Marco Polo-esque spice trade, an expedition led by artist Jon Cohrs traveled by canoe past massive cargo ships and factories in search of the numerous artificial flavoring factories of New Jersey, the flavoring capital of the U.S.
One of the FotoPres grants went to Basque photographer Mikel Aristregi for his mesmerizing reportage entitled “-40ºC/96º” on alcoholic tramps in Ulan Bator, Mongolia.
Ulan Bator is the coldest national capital in the world. It has an average annual temperature of −2.4 °C (27.7 °F). The second coldest capital is Moscow which boast 4,1º C
Interview with Arne Hendriks about The Incredible Shrinking Man, a speculative design research about the consequences of downsizing the human species to 50 centimeters. It has been a long established trend for people to grow taller. As a direct result we need more energy, more food and more space. But what if we decided to turn this trend around? What if we use our knowledge to shrink mankind?
The accelerating crisis in climate change and the realization that humans are the primary cause of this change has raised questions about ownership and responsibility. Who “owns” the climate change crisis and who is responsible for mitigating and reversing it if possible? One overwhelming response by governments on an international level has been to propose a market solution, in essence, to sell the atmosphere. Is the commercial marketplace the only answer? How can art, technology and media offer alternative cultural practices and open new forms of understanding the air?
”Love Ducking” looks at how technology can help reduce the gap between species. In an attempt to try and seduce a female Mallard duck, I try to export myself via technology into the ducks world. My aim is to virtually live like a male Mallard duck in order to find friendship and who knows, maybe love
The line-up of robots, sculptures and installations Fernando Orellana summoned to his show is pretty impressive: there are suitcases maniacally monitoring the space, dysfunctional toys, a bird that talks in its dreams, people trying to jump the queue, Adam, Eve, even the Spaceman is there. I asked the artist to talk to us about his latest pieces
With this installation, Riley Harmon went for the visceral and the powerful. Each time a player dies in a game of Counter-strike, a popular online first person shooter, electronic solenoid valves open up and dispense a small amount of fake blood. The trails left down the wall create a physical manifestation of virtual kills, bridging the two realities. During the show’s run players who have a copy of Counter-Strike can join the game and cause the sculpture to active
Rapidly growing mega-cities and shrinking cities call for new ideas and models for dealing with urban nature. Artists and landscape architects present concepts for the alternative use of vacant city lots and old industrial areas, design parasitical gardens in the middle of the city, or utopian visions for a future symbiotic networking of culture and nature
In 2009, Jens Haaning went to Albania, caught dozens of pigeons, put them in cardboard boxes, loaded the boxes in the truck of his car and drove to Greece. He released the birds in a square of Thessaloniki where pigeons usually gather. Simple. Yet he had performed an illegal act: bringing live animals inside the European Union borders is forbidden to avoid “the transmission of diseases to either the public or other animals” unless you carry the relevant health certificates. Yet, pigeons, migratory birds, even seeds cross borders every day
No matter how much I love exhibitions at new media art festivals, i often find myself suspecting that the curatorial vision behind many of them is little more than an after-thought. This was certainly not the case with Alles, was Sie über Chemie wissen müssen and i can’t praise the work of curators Hicham Khalidi and Suzanne Wallinga enough for their exquisite, intelligent contribution to Club Transmediale
Noah Horowitz exposes the inner workings of the contemporary art market, explaining how this unique economy came to be, how it works, and where it’s headed. He takes a unique look at the globalization of the art world and the changing face of the business, offering the clearest analysis yet of how investors speculate in the market and how emerging art forms such as video and installation have been drawn into the commercial sphere
Everything Ends in Chaos attempts to design, then reverse engineer a single, spectacular Black Swan event. Black Swan events are unpredicted but of such magnitude that they have an important impact on history. According to Nassim Nicholas Taleb who developed the theory, the rise of the Internet, World War I, and the September 11 attacks as examples of Black Swan Events
A couple of weeks ago, Rui Guerra answered one of my facebook rants (which usually target museum press people who refuse to give me access to press images because i’m a blogger therefore ‘images are not safe” with me!) with a comment so smart and informative that i wanted to know more about his opinion about online strategies for cultural spaces
With BACK, HERE BELOW, FORMIDABLE [ the rebirth of prehistoric creatures ], Marguerite Humeau, attempts to ressuscitate the sound of extinct animals by reconstructing their voicebox (lungs, trachea, larynx + vocal folds, mouth and nose). Made of soft tissue, the vocal tract does not fossilize. The only elements which have been preserved through time are their bones. By comparing them with the larynx CT scans of their closest modern relatives, Humeau hopes to bring back the vocal organs of the extinct animals. With the help of a specialist of each animal, the designer plans to remodel the soft tissues of the modern animals on the basis of the bone structure of the extinct one. The structure of the soft tissues will then be printed in 3D.
Right now i’m wrapped up inside a Book Sprint, a one week-long collective authoring of a book. Our A/S/T Book Sprint explores the work of contemporary artists who are working at the intersection of art/science/technology, with a focus on the recent shift from artist/inventor dependent on industry or academy (as embodied by pioneering programs from the 1960s such as Art and Technology at LACMA and Experiments in Art & Technology), to independent agent (artists conducting scientific research or technological experiments outside the framework and discourse of an institution)
Steffen Fielder and Jonas Loh for example questions our relationship to randomness. The designers explored the importance of randomness in our daily life but also investigated whether randomness actually exists or if it is just a lack of knowledge which makes things appear random to us
The Valley of the Shadow is a collection of photography by Miron Zownir that documents a world of unconditional authenticity, dire ecstasy, and demonical possession that exists in the shadows of urban areas in New York, Berlin, and post-Communist Eastern Europe
Every single day, Christin Lahr is giving 1 cent to the German Federal Ministry of Finance via an online bank transfer. She fills in the 108 characters of the ‘reason for payment’ box with a few words from Karl Marx’s CAPITAL – A Critique of Political Economy. Members of The House Of Natural Fiber are teaching Indonesians how to make their own safe, affordable booze and Scott Kildall and Nathaniel Stern ruffled a few feathers when they launched Wikipedia Art
Combining the intricate techniques of food photography with the anthropomorphic tendencies of manga, Utsu has an affinity for kitsch. But instead of taking a strictly documentary approach to the Japanese relationship with food and the natural world, she uses fruit, vegetables, and seafood to construct surreal fantasies populated by kittens with octopus eyes, pineapples full of owls, and phallic carrots
Biomedia artist Paul Vanouse’s latest work, the Suspect Inversion Center, comments on the way genetic evidence is brandished as the ultimate evidence in courtrooms. He set up an operational laboratory at the Ernst Schering Foundation in Berlin where he creates identical “genetic fingerprints” of criminals and celebrities using his own DNA
Arctic Perspective uses media art and the research of artists to investigate the complicated, global, cultural, and ecological interrelations in the Arctic, and to develop concepts for constructing tactical communications systems and a mobile, eco-friendly research station, which will support interdisciplinary and intercultural collaborations
Just back from London where i managed to catch up with up to 7 exhibitions in a day. Btw, there’s only a few more days to enjoy Parreno’s magnificent videos at the Serpentine and i urge you to run there if you haven’t seen the show yet. Another exhibition i liked a lot is Matthias Schaller’s series of Disportraits at Ben Brown Fine Arts
Over the last two years Karen Guthrie & Nina Pope of the London art collective Somewhere have been working on a research and documentary project focusing on pedigree cat breeding. They followed pedigree cat owners at cat shows, worked with breeders, and interviewed Dr Leslie Lyons, an internationally-respected authority on feline genetics who ratified the world’s first cloned kitten and the first GFP (“glow-in-the-dark”) transgenic kitten
The exhibition brought together Israeli artists who explore the daily struggle to define and stretch the boundaries of the territory. Obviously, the word ‘territory’ in Israel comes with tense references to occupied stretches of land such as the ones in the West Bank and the Gaza strip. The term also evokes Israeli settlements on Palestinian land, check points, separation walls, disputed borders, forced evictions, etc. The artists in the exhibition, however, approach territory in a more private context
Vincent Evrard graduated from the Ecole de Recherche Graphique in Brussels with a thesis that explored the relationship between men, the clouds and the internet. One of the outcomes of his investigation is Aphrogenea, an installation that plunges a computer into a bath of sterile oil. The computer does survive the ordeal. It breathes bubbles that slowly rise from the bottom of its screen. Once it has reached the top of the screen, the virtual bubble becomes an air bubble that rises through the oil to the surface of the tank where it vanishes into thin air
If you’re coming to Berlin for Transmediale, i’d recommend that you swing by The Berlinische Galerie. I briefly mentioned Mutations III yesterday, but the gallery has also a Nan Goldin show and a retrospective of Arno Fischer’s wonderful b&w photos. My favourite exhibition however is People, Things, Human Works which presents some of the most iconic photos of Emil Otto Hoppé. I was particularly fascinated by his documentation of industrial complexes and technical buildings. I could not find many photos of the Deutsche Arbeit (“German Work”) series online but i received this one in the press material
Arnold van Bruggen and Rob Hornstra embarked on the Sochi Project, a five year enterprise to map out the area of and around Sochi (Krasnodar Krai, Russia), a small city on the Black Sea that will host the 2014 Winter Olympics. The duo will document the changes the city undergoes while it is getting ready for the Olympics. The choice of this location is surprising, to say the least. This subtropical coastal area exceptionally mild winters by Russian standards, it lacks any kind of facilities and infrastructure to host the event and it is located in Russia’s most unstable region
Landed in Berlin yesterday, almost lost the will to live when i understood that the cold wind which welcomed me with a slap in the face would be my companion for the rest of the week and started running around the city to find solace in art galleries. While i’m trying to put a simulacra of order in the photos and paper press materials i collected, here’s a one-photo peak at what i’ve seen today