After the moving and now iconic series The Hyena and Other Men and the stunning
Nollywood, Hugo’s latest work, Permanent Error, portrays the people, animals and landscape of a dumping ground for computers and electronic waste from Europe and the US. The area, on the outskirts of a slum known as Agbogbloshie, in Ghana, is a shocking contrast to the better faster shinier life promised by the advances of technology
“Not for Nothing” is a typical expression in Philadelphia. It is not by chance that the three artists exhibiting represent the various facets of the human mind: Ben Woodward expresses an existentialism diluted with irony, Kris Chau expresses a pungent and cutting femininity, AJ Fosik represents an atavistic and purely masculine force; eccentric visions of individual contemporary intimacy
Cinema is more than film alone, as Almost Cinema proves every year. At this festival organized by Vooruit and the Ghent Film Festival, artists from a variety of disciplines offer the audience a different take on cinema. With performances, concerts and an exhibition with surprising installations, they dissect the ordinary cinema experience as they experiment with sound, image, light, space and movement
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By cutting thousands of little pieces of polarization filter and putting a rotating polarization filter in front of them, Wim Janssen succeeds in imitating television static by using an almost banal technique
Thousands of buildings in the Netherlands lie vacant. Some of them for a week or a few months, many even for years. The exhibition at the Dutch pavilion, “Vacant NL, where architecture meets ideas”, is a call for the intelligent reuse of temporarily vacant buildings around the world in promoting creative enterprise
Called Usus/Usures, the exhibition investigates a specific phase in the life of construction materials: the time when they are subjected to use and are gradually re-shaped by human beings passing through them, walking on them, touching, pressing, stroking, scratching or holding them
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Creative Characters is a collection of in-depth interviews with the most influential type designers in the business as well as up-and-coming young guns about the motives and methods behind the typefaces
One hundred posters, selected from amongst the thousands of works submitted each year for the most prestigious awards, representing the best of Japanese graphics over the last ten years
Passages. Travels in Hyperspace is a selection of works drawn from the collection of Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary. Consisting primarily of large-scale sculptural or installation work, the exhibition was designed so as to foster a contemplative stroll, making the body central to the visitor’s experience of art and offering a journey into a perceptual dimension that activates the physical, the sensory, and the cerebral
The crushed vehicle does not only serve as an entry point to a discussion about the Iraq conflict, it also comments on the increasingly harsh impact of war on civilian and cultural life. A display at the museum states that at the start of the 20th century, 10 % of war casualties were civilians. Today, they make up 90%
The series that put me in a merry mood for the rest of the day is Tony Hayward’s ‘Loving Couples’ porcelain figurines. The artist found damaged porcelain lovers on a flea market and ‘restored’ them by adding a replacement head that belong to today’s pop culture. The lovely shepherdess shows her legs to a green monster and a love-struck squire courts a girl with a playmobil head
The first book to present the full historical sweep, global reach and technical developments of the street art movement, Trespass features key works by 150 artists, and connects four generations of visionary outlaws including Jean Tinguely, Spencer Tunick, Keith Haring, Os Gemeos, Jenny Holzer, Barry McGee, Gordon Matta-Clark, Shepard Fairey, Blu, Billboard Liberation Front, Guerrilla Girls and Banksy, among others. It also includes dozens of previously unpublished photographs of long-lost works and legendary, ephemeral urban artworks
To discover M10, you have to open a very mundane door. Then another one on your right. And another one in front of you. There are ten of them, each leading to a plain, beige room so claustrophobic you quickly look for more doors that will take you out of there as the art critics mayhem pictured here demonstrates
Félix Luque’s three-fold work tells the story of a computer which, after an electronic alteration, decides to free the other machines and becomes mad in the process
In the previous episode, Austin Houldsworth had installed a ‘Fossilisation Machine’ in the Tatton Park estates in England. He was hoping that his rudimentary machine could fast-forward the fossilisation process and petrify a pineapple and pheasant over the Summer only. Two weeks ago, the artist opened the prototype fossilisation machine and checked out the outcome of the experiment
Some 100 works by photographers as Sibylle Bergemann, Evelyn Richter, Ulrich Wüst, Ute Mahler, Will McBride, Helga Paris and Roger Melis. In black and white, they have documented everyday situations that reflect the more recent history of East-Germany beyond high politics – snapshots that show the professional and private everyday life, political activities, urban landscapes, interiors and nudes
To get a sense of the true vastness of the Solar System, you are invited to follow its walkable scale model. Along one of Britain’s most longest Roman roads, local shopkeepers at the appropriate points on the route are acting as guardians to the planets – hosting models represented by everyday objects, at their correct sizes on this 3.1 km scale
The book provides a detailed insight into the techniques of ten creative individuals (Jason Bruges Studio, Greyworld, HeHe, Crispin Jones, the Owl Project, the Pooch, Bengt Sjolen, Troika, and Moritz Waldemeyer.) and how they exploit the latest computing technologies in their work and the impact this will have for creative practice in the future
Architect Caruso St John and artist Thomas Demand are paying homage to the famous Chongqing nail house with a project that involves reconstructing the Nail House under a road viaduct in Zurich, and to open it to the public as a 24/7 restaurant
Tom Sachs, who made a career revisiting contemporary icons such as Prada, the atomic bomb and Hello Kitty, has been given a large room to exhibit his take on the work and legacy of Le Corbusier. The irreverent artist goes as far as drawing parallels between the Villa Savoye and McDonalds drive-in
Unlike most critics and visitors, i can’t say i’ve found the exhibition of 12th biennale of architecture particularly exciting. Call me a masochist but i missed the overdose of information we were submitted to in 2006. I also missed the extravagance and the speculation of the 2008 edition. The 12th biennale of architecture is mostly aesthetics and lightness. What i did enjoy more than any other year however was the way Kazuyo Sejima played with the architecture of the Corderie. There was air, grace and gaiety
Architect Tetsuo Kondo has teamed up with German climate engineering firm Transsolar to fill a closed space inside the Corderie with clouds. Visitors can experience the cloud from below, within, and above as they climb up 4.3 meter high helical ramp erected in the center of the room
Justin’s work is a prototype responsive screen proposed as a speculative stage set. Blooming mechanical flowers are used as pixels in a grid formation responding to movement. It draws on the balletic tradition of a choreographic poem combining narrative, choreography and score
This book is not only visually inspiring. Because it documents plans, describes associated costs, and suggests concrete solutions for common problems, it is a practical reference for architects, planners, and cultural activists as well as event and marketing managers, to guide them in deciding what types of containers are best suited to their upcoming projects
This year, the biennial was guided by the notion of cybernetic autonomy – by the evolution of principles and patterns derived from the emerging behaviors of the devices themselves. The devices not only possess the ability to enter in a dialog with their surroundings, they also determine the rules for this interaction and change their behavior as if they had “personality”
To many of their fellow Israelis, they are traitors. They are attacked, arrested and demonised. Yet Israelis like Yehuda Shaul, leader of Breaking the Silence and Jonathan Pollack from Anarchists Against the Wall continue to struggle for a more peaceful Middle East. They believe that they can save their state by putting an end to the military occupation
The project explores the difference between the virtual freedoms experienced by a population and the physical constraints imposed upon it by the urban environment. It explores the effects of new technologies of urban sight and urban occupation on the social and political structure of a city. The resultant proposition is a series of physical interventions that subvert the urban landscape through its digital counterparts
In the exhibition JULIE NORD – XENOGLOSSY we are invited into a strange home, where nothing looks as usual. Doll-like girls with shiny, almond eyes, bunches of flowers and cute little animals tempt us to take a closer look at the pictures. It all looks enchanting, but a closer look at them confronts us with an abundance of grotesque hybrid creatures, sculls and meat-eating plant
The graduate project, set in a 16th century hunting castle, uses drawing and modelling to inquire into the spatial possibilities of reinterpreting the artefact as a field of events
In London of the seventies, a dynamic counterculture blossomed against a backdrop of unemployment, racism, and IRA bombings. This volume, a collage of texts and images, provides an overview of the radical political and cultural developments of the decade
The nuclear renaissance offers a clean, near limitless energy solution that could allow us to meet CO2 emission targets (without going short as consumers).
What if we ask for protective barrage balloons, establish concrete emergency services and resign ourselves to the perceived ‘hazards’? What if we embrace pet polar bears and pineapple ice cream along with other benefits that nuclear energy could bring? And what if not; are we prepared for blackouts instead?
Last Saturday i finally dragged myself out of the armchair and visited the ‘Park of Living Art’ in Turin. Although the ‘interactive’ displays i saw in some of the rooms were appalling, I’ll be forever grateful to the place for bringing to Turin exciting artists: Michel Blazy, Andrea Caretto and Raffaella Spagna and now Brandon Ballengee
This year’s Future Exhibitions aims at highlighting the exhibition’s spatial relationship to the visitor. How can architecture, stage design and technical innovation enhance the visitor’s overall experience? In conversation with some of the leading actors in the field, Swedish Travelling Exhibitions examines innovative techniques and explores the exhibition medium of the future
Nille Svensson, former member of Sweden Graphics, is a designer/graphic artist/illustrator i met in Stockholm a few months ago and the guy is so absurdly talented he doesn’t even have a proper website. See for yourself:
Artists play with both the material and the content of the map. Paper plans are all over the book but so are maps made of artist’s hair, drawn on the body, printed onto the sand or turned into large-scale installations. Some maps have a clear activist, political agenda, others are infused with mental visions, covered with alien-abduction sites, etc
Large amounts of sugar are excreted on a daily basis by type-two diabetic patients especially amongst the upper end of our aging population. Is it plausible to suggest that we start utilizing our water purification systems in order to harvest the biological resources that our elderly already process in abundance? In James Gilpin’s scenario, sugar heavy urine excreted by patients with diabetes would be used for the fermentation of high-end single malt whisky for export
Where we get a lecture on the perils of drugs from the curator of the Drugs museum in Mexico, revisit the wonderful design of Mexico ’68 and meet an artist who voluntarily spent hundreds of hours in prison striking deals with inmates
Meet two activists from Mexico. The first is hackarchitect Ehécatl Cabrera who believes that since architecture is not able to answer the many issues that the city has to face, we should raise and ‘make the city ourselves’. The second is Tijuana-based Raúl Cárdenas from Torolab who was in Mexico to present his Institute of Waste
The last time i blogged about Postopolis was two months ago. The idea of getting to grips with a report that had to chronicle a criminally long day was a bit intimidating. The fifth day of our blogathon in Mexico DF started at noon and ended at 10 pm. We were braced for the worst but the whole day was over in no time, thanks to some brilliant presentations and a friendly weather. No time to yawn nor complain
This perceptive work brings art to the masses and helps us to rediscover our every day surroundings. It challenges us to question if the cities we have are the cities we need while adding a touch of magic to mundane places and situations