Like paper projects designed in the absence of “real” architecture, installations offer architects another way to engage in issues critical to their practice. Direct experimentation with architecture’s material and social dimensions engages the public around issues in the built environment that concern them and expands the ways that architecture can participate in and impact people’s everyday lives
Everyday, someone cleans the marble floors of the Palazzo with a mop dipped in water mixed with the blood found on the site of murders committed during the drug wars in Northern Mexico. How long will traces of it remain on the sole of your shoes?
Nathalie Djurberg makes candy-coloured plasticine puppets who have have orgies, who torture each other and suffer alien, abusive relationships. Djurberg, who won the Silver Lion award for best young artist at the Biennale, was the super star of Venice. I went to see her video installation 3 times and the room was always jam-packed with people drooling over her animations and taking photos of her monstruous flowers as if their lives depended on it. Not that i acted any differently
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Laboral Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial in Gijón has opened a very very good exhibition a few days ago. ‘FEEDFORWARD – The Angel of History’ 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. I’ll write about it in details in the near future but i’d like to share with you straight away one of the most interesting artworks i’ve discovered there
I doubt there are many galleries like heliumcowboy. First there’s that name. Charming and puzzling. Not even an interview with the gallery director has helped me uncover its origin. Then of course there’s the artists the space represents. Since its opening in 2003, heliumcowboy has been showcasing artists ‘who are capable of pushing boundaries, are a little underground and whose aesthetic is the forecast of art’
One of the most striking artworks at the Arsenale for me was Pascale Marthine Tayou’s installation ‘Human Being’ which fills in a gigantic room with a bric-a-brac of objects, furniture made of recycled material, colourful figures, videos and urban noises that re-creates the activity of that small village that we call our world
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With this project, Hans E. Thorsen wishes to explore how the reconstruction of another artists work can be worked into ones own production and how the public artwork will transform inside the white cube, with its many corners and structures.
First stop: the show MADDESTMAXIMVS at the Australian Pavilion. I wasn’t expecting to like that one as much as i did. A 1:1 ‘sculptural’ replica of the V8 ‘Interceptor’ car driven by Mel Gibson in Mad Max 1 and 2 parked at the entrance of the pavilion almost made me run in the opposite direction
Ever since i found about his tattoos on the pin-ups and luchadores appearing in vintage Mexican magazines, i was in love Dr Lakra. The tattoo artist lives in Mexico. A couple of weeks ago i was in Mexico too and there was a solo show of Dr Lakra at the kurimanzutto gallery. I felt like the happiest person in the world. Now, in retrospect, i feel that i’d been happier had i not forgotten in a taxi my lovely camera with all the images i had taken at the exhibition
No one dons the moustache like Fernando Llanos. He’s a video artist, a musician, a writer, a blogger, a curator, he makes drawings, he’s the über macho-looking Mexican guy who walks around the city with a chihuahua in his bag. He also produces tv shows, a competition of animation movies, and the moto of his own radio programme is “There’s no need to talk about art in order to talk about art”. When he’s not performing Llanos is always impeccably dressed. He’s probably the one and only media artist whose sense of style i admire
Paper conquers the third dimension and demonstrates the undreamed-of possibilities it holds today for lightweight construction, product design, fashion and art
In the 19th century, despite the best efforts of body snatchers, the demand from medical schools for fresh cadavers far outstripped the supply. One solution to this gruesome problem came in the form of lifelike wax models. These models often took the form of alluring female figures that could be stripped and split into different sections. Other models were more macabre, showing the body ravaged by ‘social diseases’ such as venereal disease, tuberculosis and alcohol and drug addiction
Interviews, reviews and articles. Everything in the latest issue of Neural is green
Filmed during more than three years on location in Hebron in the West Bank, Terje Carlsson’s documentary shows the impact of the occupation on everyday life in Palestine
What does it mean to work with living, semi-living or formely living beings? What’s the meaning of tissue culture for artistic purposes versus health application? Or the development of a new weapon? What are the dilemmas that come with tissue culture technology?
I discovered the work of Edward S. Curtis while i was visiting the Medicine Man exhibition at the Wellcome Collection in London. Curtis documented the American West as well as the rites and lives of Native American peoples
Notes i wrote down during a talk that Oron Catts gave to kick off the TIssue Culture workshop. His presentation, which put our wet lab into a historical narrative, was titled ‘An alternative timeline for regenerative medicine – A biased history’
It was at the Rijksakademie that she made her first series of animal portraits – five police dogs – which grew from a fascination with the portrayal of controlled aggression
Cruel Weather explores artistic responses to crisis and the role of the moving image in today’s Middle East. The festival showcases a series of award-winning documentaries, experimental and mixed genre work
Digital Fabrications explores the methods architects use to calibrate digital designs with physical forms. The book is organized according to five types of digital fabrication techniques: tessellating, sectioning, folding, contouring, and forming. Projects are shown both in their finished forms and in working drawings, templates, and prototypes, allowing the reader to watch the process of each fantastic construction unfold
Untitled Fragile Machine, seen last week at Arthur Ganson’s very charming Long Now seminar titled Machines and the Breath of Time.
Over the course of two years, Muzi Quawson attempts to uncover the reality of this outlandish, boondocks location. Her camera silently follows Ivar “Duke” T Pederson: an aging cowboy who incarnates the Old American West of our most used and abused cliché.
Positioned all over a wall at HMKV, the network of “ghost detectors” read the “auras” of the audience. Rumour has it that the bodies or even the moods of visitors walking around the installation might affect the sonic output
Most of the works exhibited at the Jeu de Paume date from the 70s and 80s, an era dominated in England by the rule of Margaret Thatcher. Parr doesn’t have fond memories of her reign and the photos he collects attest of the social decline and distress the working class went through at the time
Parrworld. The Collection of Martin Parr reveals this artist’s hidden side as a collector of books, photographs, postcards, objects and photographs by British and international artists, alongside the photographs from his “Luxury” series
A few months before the 50th anniversary of Congolese independence from Belgium, Extra City is showing one of Tillim’s recent series: Avenue Patrice Lumumba. The work examines modern history in Africa against the backdrop of its colonial and post-colonial architectural heritage
I discovered this one during a talk that Oron Catts from Symbiotica was giving at the VivoArts School for Transgenic Aesthetics Ltd in Amsterdam. His lecture was entitled “An alternative timeline for regenerative medicine – A biased history”
The 2009 edition of the @rt Outsiders Festival presents works that explore the meaning of living in extreme environments, in the imaginary realm as well as in the physical one, in the political, social and environmental fields as well as in the poetic ones
Medals are supposed to celebrate important figures or heroic deeds, but the stars of this exhibition are medals that condemn their subjects. The last section of the show features medals commissioned from contemporary artists. The most thought-provoking is the Olympic gold-style medal that Michael Landy created to honour English hooligan Dean Rowbotham “for breaking his ASBO on more than 20 occasions”
I met dear dear Betty at the Parrworld exhibition, she was dancing the night away
A selection of artistic time machines expands the notion of linear time, suggesting that the Western world might have become infected by Rumsfeldian knowns and unknowns
The exhibition wishes to reflect upon the concept and meaning of ‘work’ in our present society. The artworks selected deal with issues such as flexibility, mobility, motivation, significance, and the work-life balance
While visiting the Work Now exhibition at Z33 in Hasselt, i got pretty excited by the work of young Belgian artist Helmut Stallaerts
The book compiles over 400 pages of exciting ideas, never before seen experiments, self initiated projects and commercial work from Germans working and studying at home and abroad, as well as non-Germans working and studying in Germany
The artworks question in some way or another the existence of ghosts, they explore the integration of new media and technologies in spiritualist contexts, make visible or perceptible the invisible and trace the political implications as well as the aesthetics of such contemporary trans-communication phenomena
Whether it’s from a hotel room in Vegas, secret prisons in Kabul, buried CIA aircraft in Central American jungles, Washington, D.C., suburbs, or a trailer in Shoshone Indian territory, Paglen’s reporting is impassioned, rigorous, relentless–and eye-opening. Blank Spots on the Map is an exposé of a world that, officially, isn’t even there
20 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the biennial for Moving Image advocates the importance of history (in relation to what the curator calls our “culture of present-ism”) and revolves around questions of historical representation and historiography
Photojournalist Geert Van Kesteren shows the disorienting reality of war-torn Iraq as he chronicles the lives of ordinary Iraqi people living in Baghdad, Jordan, Syria, and Turkey during 2006 and 2007. The book and exhibition combines Van Kesteren’s professionally photographed images with the stories of Iraqis in their own words and hundreds of cell phone pictures and digital snap shots taken by the Iraqis themselves. Some reveal places that journalists dare not tread
Waag Society and Adam Zaretsky’s series of workshops and lectures are back in Amsterdam and this time the focus will be biology and bacterial transformation
Volume 20 is dedicated to the art of storytelling. It presents the storylines of current events and architecture to show that while the truth is important, so is the ability of fiction to elevate fact. Perhaps the best way to understand our era is through narratives that distort, pervert and animate reality?