The ‘Herbologies/Foraging Networks’ programme of events, focused in Helsinki (Finland) and Kurzeme region of Latvia, explores the cultural traditions and knowledge of herbs, edible and medicinal plants, within the contemporary context of online networks, open information-sharing, biological and hydroponic technologies
Interactive Architecture includes contributions from the worlds of architecture, industrial design, computer programming, engineering, and physical computing. The book examines the vanguard movement from all sides, including its sociological and psychological implications as well as its potentially beneficial environmental impact
The exhibition, curated by Domenico Quaranta for Laboral’s new Mediateca Expandida, explores the role played by music in the adoption and manipulation of obsolete technologies: vinyls, old computers, game platforms, etc. I’m going to be the usual procrastinator and promise that i’ll come back with a report later on this week. In the meantime, here’s a link to the catalog of the exhibition and to videos by the extremely talented Raquel Meyers
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Together with the inhabitants of Sampsonia Way in Pittsburgh, two artists staged collective performances and actions on the day the Google Car drove through the neighbourhood: a 17th-century sword fight, a dramatic escape using bedlinen, a parade with a brass band and majorettes. These actions now form part of the digital maps of Sampsonia Way made available online by Google Maps
Look what i didn’t bring you back from Rome! Pieter Hugo (of the Hyena Men fame) ‘fiction documents’ the sets of the flamboyant Nigerian film industry
An office is frozen in an arctic winter, plants propagate behind walls, the same person is repeatedly struck by lightning, money goes up in smoke, and a high frequency soundtrack plays only for the dogs…. CHASING NAPOLEON recognizes how a rise and fall can spread to reality itself. A wavering of interpretations, an inversion of values, and a paradox of situations… Here everything happens as if the world has slipped into a parallel universe
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The exhibition explores the key role that bartering is fulfilling in developing countries. This kind of informal economy is not only often more important than the official economy, but its importance will increase dramatically in the coming years as the cities in poor countries undergo explosive population growth. Reciprocity examines how this system of barter and returning of favors affects the infrastructure and vitality of Jakarta where a large majority of the population receives its wages in kind, and creates its own alternative chain of supply and demand
The world of fashion and design is inundated with a seemingly endless list of rules. Think of “Less is More,” “Form Follows Function,” “Keep it Simple,” “Dress Your Age,” and the list goes on and on. They’re familiar sayings that some designers consider to be valuable words of wisdom, which serve as a guiding line and source of inspiration. To others, these rules are mere restrictions: design dogmas and fashion formulae that need to be bended, twisted or broken altogether
Refuge – Architectural Propositions for Unbound Spaces explores the causes and spatial impact of migration through voluntary or involuntary “refugees” who are transforming cities around the globe. Individuals or groups are elegantly or forcefully encapsulated from within the context of the city and society. Refuge produces an ever more atomized urban tissue where the “camp” has become both spatial paradigm and everyday reality, be it in the form of a gated community, slum, or humanitarian refugee camp
New York-based Lebanese artist Walid Raad has been working as The Atlas Group for the past 14 years. His new work critically reflects on the the recent emergence of a new infrastructure for the visual arts in the Arab world
Since 1955, the World Press Photo Foundation is awarding the most striking and representative images that have documented and illustrated the events of our times in the press. The winners of the photography contest are exhibited this year in 100 cities in 45 countries and is still expanding. The plethora of exhibition venues hardly justify why World Press Photo is so wantonly careless about the way the images are exhibited
It seems that, given a choice, most Americans choose to live in a homogenous community over an heterogenous one. However, the suburban landscape of semi-public spaces that exist in between these homogenous communities reveal, here and there, what Interboro calls “spaces of encounter” where diverse social and ethnic groups coexist, interact and generate complex relationships and networks
Tomas Saraceno’s Galaxies Forming along Filaments, like Droplets along the Strands of a Spider’s Web was the ultimate photo-magnet at this year’s Venice Biennale. No doubt the work he’s exhibiting at ReThink: Contemporary Art and Climate Change in Copenhagen is meeting with the same fascination from the audience. I’ve seen his pieces in numerous group exhibition. They are always striking of course but i never really took the time to sit down and watch his work with enough attention
Yes, i had already seen sk-interfaces. Exploding Borders in Art, Technology and Society at FACT in Liverpool but the Luxembourg version, i was told by friends, is bigger, bolder and even better than the first one. They were right. A couple of pieces have been added to the show. The performances are well documented and there is a corner to watch videos. The space itself is kinder to the artworks. There’s extra drama as the poor Victimless Leather garments had caught some disease and were slowly eaten by decay
A White Elephant is shedding its skin only to reveal an even older, uneven skin underneath
The current issue of this DVD magazine focuses Middle East, presenting nine artists’ perspectives from both inside and outside of the region. Not only focused on the political, religious, and cultural dissent, these works ruminate on language, food, ritual, media, power, fear, humor, and beauty
Sex Cinema Venus is the oldest sex cinema in the Red Light District of Amsterdam, which will soon disappear as a result of the city council’s regeneration plans. Using a slide show and several single photographs Van der Burg portrays the stories that take place behind the doors of this particular cinema
Whether they take the Skyscraper Index seriously or not, people agree that Architecture is conditioned by the economical climate. Architectural projects were the first casualties of the current financial crash, and architects, along with bankers, were the first who suffered collective layoffs. Rien ne va Plus, an exhibition taking place at Bureau Europa in Maastricht, delves into the economic crisis and its intricate relation with architecture
Xiong Wenyun’s “Moving Rainbow” series incorporates the colors of Tibetan prayer flags into landscape photography, and engages with environmental and social issues related to China’s development in its western provinces
The exhibition The Art of Fashion: Installing Allusions explores the intersection between fashion designers’ boldest experiments and the world of contemporary art. 25 international artists and fashion designers participate to this exhibition. 5 of them were commissioned new pieces that investigate the convergence of art and fashion
The exhibition at the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam investigates the borders between fashion and art. Today’s fashion designers use installations and performances, and their designs are often more sculptural than wearable. Five of them have been commissioned to make new work specifically for the exhibition
Scorpio’s Garden at Berlin’s Temporäre Kunsthalle was a very beautiful show. All by Berlin-related artists and curated by Danish artist Kirstine Roepstorff, an explicitly subjective snapshot of a certain scene.
A short selection of the photo works i saw at Turin’s contemporary art fair earlier this month
Artissima never disappoints. It is decidedly the edgiest and most exciting contemporary art fair in the country. In fact, you’d almost think that people come here because they love art, not just because they want to buy, invest and speculate
I first thought Princen’s photograph was fake. How could this be real? Looking online for the location of the photo, Mokattam, i discovered the image is authentic. It’s a suburb of Cairo, called Garbage City. A community of mainly Coptic Christians were allowed to collect and dispose of Cairo’s waste by feeding it to their pigs
I can’t recommend the visit of Persona enough. First, there’s the museum, its colonial-era hauteur is so un-PC, it sometimes made me cringe but it needs to be experienced before the place is renovated to a modern, polite and friction-proof version of itself. The exhibition itself presents the most breathtaking collection of masks i’ve ever seen
Together, the projects featured in Feedforward create a complex picture of the global political and social forces that drive us forward. The exhibition features both the problematic aspects of the present and future, and the potential for collectivity and responsible action. At the nadir of the current global economic crisis, Feedforward is in effect about cleaning up after the 20th century and asks the question, what is progress now?
Part of Thomas Demand’s show Nationalgalerie, Haltestelle is a large-scale photograph of a paper model resembling a nondescript rural German bus shelter, which happens to be the place just outside of Magdeburg where a teen pop band were waiting for their school bus every morning.
The exhibition addresses the current moment in history where the wreckage of political conflict and economic inequality is piling up, while globalized forces–largely enabled by the “progress” of digital information technologies–inexorably feed us forward
A comprehensive, timely international survey that addresses the relationship between art and electronic technology, this volume explores the presence and meanings of mechanics, light, graphics, robots, virtual reality and the Web in the art and visual culture of the last hundred years. It also considers the reaction, development and future of artistic practice in the face of new technology
Developing projects on the net, filming with mobile phones, remixing common moments and figures of today`s culture in an VJ-like audiovisual rhythm, Amerika redifines the characteristics of today’s culture and opens up the possibilities for new interpretations and thoughts from the audience itself
Burgos expands urban apocalyptic visions which proliferate in daily life. His starting point is a children’s storybook, from which he constructs a delirious collage. Anything is possible in his productions. With amazing dexterity he cuts, pastes, digitally photocopies and photocopies again, the result of which he fits into a fascinating stage design. Within these metaphors, there are, mingled with a large cast of characters, iconic elements of national images
The curators approach the topic of collecting, and the psychology behind the practice of expressing oneself through physical objects. Why do we gather items and surround ourselves with them in our every day lives? Which mechanisms of desire trigger our selection?
The exhibition, located in the beautiful but cruelly un-heated Fondazione 107, uses photographic works, videos, installations and sculptures to document a moment of extraordinary transformation for an area that is five times bigger than Europe. The result is bold and exciting with its mix of “globalization”, acceleration, pre-soviet and islamic traditions
Letizia Battaglia’s pictures, because of the corruption, silence, violence and suffering they laid bare, played a crucial role in the anti-mafia campaign. They show anti-mafia Judge Cesare Terranova shot in his car, corpses of mafiosi found by the road, tears of the wives and mothers when they discover the scene of the crime, arrests of the mafia boss, teenagers pretending to be though guys with attitude and guns
In a series of symbiotic encounters and parasitic relationships, the solo presentations are often interrupted by incongruous presences or perturbed by unusual juxtapositions: drawings by Kara Walker surround a tomb by Urs Fischer; Maurizio Cattelan’s homeless man kneels down in front of Kiki Smith’s Bat Woman; Robert Gober’s haunted rooms incorporate Gregor Schneider’s architectural fragments, etc.
Calculating Space is a delicate sculpture made of sticks, strings and little plumbs. The fragility and transparency of its structure reveals as much as it hides the logic and functioning of the machine. Its units operate like a very basic artifical neural network
The VivoArts School for Transgenic Aesthetics Ltd., Adam Zaretsky and Waag Society’s temporary research and education institute on Art and Life Sciences, will be focusing this month on body art
This year the wooden pavilion, designed by architect Alvar Aalto in 1956, hosts a collection of Fire & Rescue Museum by Jussi Kivi. The artist’s museum project is based on his long-term passion of collecting every imaginable item that ever has had something to do with firefighting
The installation echoes the artist’s concern for the relentless threats against Iran made by many countries in recent years. Sentences that include “attack Iran” are scavenged from Google News and spoken using a text-to-speech synthesizer. The voice is then picked up by a microphone, analyzed, and translated into rhythmically corresponding smoke rings from a quartet of smoke ring makers