Capital

Capital is dead labour which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks. The time during which the worker works is the time during which the capitalist consumes the labour-power he has bought from him.

The global banking collapse of 2008 exposed the failures of a deregulated economic system run entirely for private financial gain. Despite the market crash, investors kept the fortunes conjured out of speculative bubbles and bankers kept their remuneration packages and bonuses, whilst governments agreed to pay the bill with huge transfusions of public money. Since then, the rich have grown richer, sucking up ever-larger proportions of wealth, gorging on luxury, whilst working people have been subjected to joblessness, the removal of social provision and benefits, and attacks on wages and working conditions. In the UK the ruling class dullards have used the bank bailouts and the recession not to curb market excesses, but as an opportunity to shrink the welfare state and the public sector, privatising control over areas of our collective lives from housing to health to education. Wealth spurts up towards a bloated mediocrity, while the majority are increasingly proletarianised in order to make the country ‘competitive’; and the media, when they are not celebrating the ruthless spirit of enterprising halfwits, comment on how Dickensian it is all looking, what with all the homelessness and dispossession. As food banks multiply and quaint relics of Victorian charity attempt to mop up the aftermath of frenzied assaults against the poor and sick and most vulnerable, many people, in their effort to understand our collective submission to capital’s relentless intensification, have been led back to the most far reaching analysis and critique of our system of political economy, Marx’ Capital.

Marx takes us beyond both the moral and technocratic complaints that capitalism is an unfair and unstable system in need of reform and regulation, to show that in its very lifeblood, capitalism is a practice of accumulation based on robbery and exploitation backed by compulsion and force. It is a class relation which cannot ultimately be ameliorated but which must be overthrown through collective struggle. The work in this exhibition is an attempt to visualise the moments of this vast, homogenising abstraction that dominates our lives today, as described by Marx in Capital Volume One.

The show has grown out of a regular Marx reading group meeting at the Royal Festival Hall, one of the last vestiges of post-war free public space in London.

Andrew Cooper, Enda Deburka, Dean Kenning, John Russell – Capital

xero, kline & coma
258 Hackney Road
London E2 7SJ
http://www.xero-kline-coma.com

Private view: Wednesday May 1st 19:00 – 21:00
Exhibition runs: 4.5.13 – 26.5.13, Sat. – Sun. 12:00 – 18:00

‘Who’s Afraid of the Public?’ – Film Screening

This is Alaska (2009), courtesy Theo Tsappos, Svenska Filminstitutet

The film programme forms a part of ‘Who’s Afraid of the Public?’, a symposium exploring the social, cultural and political challenges surrounding public participation in relation to social media, examining the strategies and experiments that engage audiences within different rhythms and reflections in the public arena. The programme is curated by John Caviani (Artistic Director Internationale Kurzfilmtage Winterthur, Switzerland) comprising of seven short films that investigate aspects of the public and the public space.Developed in collaboration with University of Reading and in association with University of the Arts Zurich. The programme seeks to engage with these issues within the context of cinema exploring the relationship between audience, film and screen creating a unique collective audience experience.

4 May 2013
£5 / Free to ICA Members

Films include:

Play
Christoph Giradet , Matthias Müller, Germany 2003, 7 mins
Audiences in movies. In Play, the onscreen action can only be seen reflected in the facial expressions and gestures of the audience. In sequences of analogous reactions, individual behavior condenses into collective behavior. The event is transferred from the stage to the hall; audience members become the actors in an unpredictable drama.

Crni Film – Black Film
Želimir Žilnik, Jugoslavia 1971, 14 mins
One night, Žilnik picks up a group of homeless men from the streets of Novi Sad and takes them home. While they enjoy themselves in his home, the filmmaker tries to “solve the problem of the homeless”, bringing along a film camera as a witness. He speaks to social workers, ordinary people and policemen. They all close their eyes in the face of the problem.

This is Alaska
Mårten Nilsson, Gunilla Heilborn, Sweden 2009, 11 mins
A group of people have moved to Alaska, searching for a higher level of freedom.

Bradley Manning Had Secrets
Adam Butcher, United Kingdom, 6 mins
The story of Bradley Manning, not as a Wikileaks ‘hacktivist’, but as a young American soldier simultaneously going through a crisis-of-conscious and a crisis-of-identity. Animated in a rotoscoped pixel-art style and using dialogue from Bradley’s online conversations, the film explores issues of personal and political secrets, digital identity and alienation.

Dogs Are Said To See Things (Dizem que os caes veem coisas)
Guto Parente, Brasil 2012, 14 mins
An omen, a shred of time. Suddenly the huge-bellied man jumps into the pool, holding a glass of whisky.

Untitled (Zimbabwean Queen of Rave)
Dan Halter, Zimbabwe 2005, 4 mins
In 1991 Rozalla’s single Everybody’s Free (To Feel Good) was released. The film expresses a personal reality and the cultural gap between white and black that I was experiencing.

Be Loved (Geliebt)
Jan Soldat, Germany 2010, 16 mins
Life’s all about two things: firstly, being loved, and secondly not being alone. But what happens when people aren’t enough, or when they’re too much? Be Loved (Geliebt) is not a film about the pros and cons of emotional and sexual relationships with animals, but a film about the relationship between humans and animals, poised somewhere between love and dependence.

The full symposium programme can be seen here.

Sentenced, The Old Police Station

Finalists Interim Exhibition

Poster Production, Portman Gallery

For this exhibition Dean Kenning has worked with art students from Morpeth School, Central St Martins and Reading University. Each group of students has produced posters based on different themes and according to various methods of working. Year 12 students from Morpeth have created Social Body Mind Maps which are self portraits stemming from a problem or mystery initiated by an artwork, and connecting outwards with social life worlds of families, friends, passions and the imagination. St Martins students have attended a seminar on Maps, Diagrams and Schemas, and have produced new diagrammatic artworks. Reading University students have created posters with a political theme after being involved with a workshop on Political Posters.

Poster Production brings all this work together in one place, and alongside posters by 11 other artists.

Artists:
Morpeth School 6th Form Art:
Sadeeq Adan, Hamida Begum, Resna Begum, Holly Farrell-Kelly, Tufayel Karim, Usof Khan, Sabil Miah, Joanna Webb.

Central St Martins BA Fine Art
Joseph Evans, Emma Vidal, Tais Bean, Madeline Bohrer, Amy Geyer, Edward Gillman, Alexander Skorobogatov, Jeff O’Loughlin, Ana Gold Chumillas, Nural Moser, Katie Tindle, Tom Camm, Alex Pascall, Kavan Balasuriya, Anna Olenicenco, Alina Buzea, Tosin Ogunsanya, Lou Macnamara, Nashrath Lameer, Aram Kim, Thea Mulvey, Ullrike Nordseth, Joanna Knott, Claudia Rowland, Lilly Vogor

University of Reading BA Fine Art:
Beth Colman, Esther Shilliday, Rosie McCarthy, Faye Nelson, Melanie Aston, Rosanna McNamara, Natasha Day, Lucy Hatch, Robyn Appleton, LEWDJAW///Jack Wilson, Laura Prime

Plus:
David Burrows, Sophie Carapetian, Pil & Galia Kollectiv, Emma Hart, Kate Janes, Kommunist Sex Klub, Esther Planas, Clunie Reid, John Russell, Eva Weinmayr, Mary Yacoob

Curated by Dean Kenning

Supported by UAL: Central Saint Martins and University of Reading

Open File III, HASHFAIL

HASHFAIL
Event/Torrent/Publication
Friday 14th December 2012
7 – 11 pm
Grand Union, Birmingham

Featuring work by: Rhys Coren, Joey Holder, Polly Fibre, JK Keller, Yuri Pattison, Oliver Sutherland and Pil & Galia Kollectiv, alongside a text by Gil Leung.

Download the Open File Torrent
Hashfail is the first in the series of 3 nation-wide events by Open File investigating the distribution and production of art via virtual and digital platforms through sound, performance and digital media. Hashfail coincides with (On) Accordance a project by or-bits.com and Grand Union. A Torrent file is a file distributed via the web through rapid peer-to-peer ‘seeding’ of information. Becoming representative or pirate and copyright-infringing distribution it is also a mode of sharing that relies upon direct connection with other anonymous users of the internet. A Hashfail occours when ‘seeded’ files have become corrupt and therefore certain ‘bits’ of data cannot be recieved. Numerous Hashfails leed to the loss of quality and gradual decomposition of a file, shifting it ever-further from its origin, subjecting it to a new type of physicality and texturing.

Grand Union
19 Minerva Works
Fazeley Street
Birmingham
B5 5RS

Hannah Sawtell at Bloomberg SPACE & ICA

Art at Reading’s Hannah Sawtell has been specially commissioned to create two linked, site-specific exhibitions, Osculator at the ICA, and Vendor at Bloomberg SPACE. These exhibitions of video work and installation mark Sawtell’s first solo projects in the UK. Both exhibitions employ material developed from Sawtell’s experience of the Bloomberg office space during her current residency.

Over the next few months the artist will compile material from the digital realm, sourcing images from the internet and live screen-shots of news footage on Bloomberg’s office monitors. Her visual inventory of ‘contemporary material’ or ‘surfaces’, explore the boundaries of image production and consider the culture of over-proliferation. Sawtell’s parallel semi-archival projects will investigate the politics of seduction as well as the idea of the ‘market’ through spatial and visual devices. By categorising and recording certain images, the artist reveals new relationships between objects and creates playful but critical dialectical encounters.

Operating as ‘real-time’ collages, Sawtell’s video and image-based works reconstruct contemporary media as fragmentary documents that collide visual tones with digital noise. By utilising generic editing programmes to cut digital information and formats, Sawtell initiates a process that designates the computer and its screen as a lens.

The exhibition will be accompanied  by a publication, distributed as an insert in Business Week, with essays by Alun Rowlands (University of Reading) and Diedrich Diedrichsen.

Bloomberg SPACE
Vendor
5 October 2012 – 13 January 2013

ICA
Osculator
9 October 2012 – 18 November 2012

Anthea Hamilton: Sorry I’m Late

firstsite
8 September – 25 November 2012

Anthea Hamilton’s energetic collages explore the surreal and seductive nature of images. Her sculptures, installations and vdeos make reference to the history of art, cinema and performance, playfully inserting the viewer into a three-dimensional composition.

Sorry I’m Late sees work installed across the building with firstsite’s galleries dramatically transformed into a series of environments – from a film studio to a restaurant kitchen. Soft sculptures, Perspex figures mounted on wheels, a giant zoetrope-inspired portrait of John Travolta and a medieval cocktail that is claimed to cure cataracts are amongst the works that comprise the exhibition.

Anthea Hamilton’s work has been exhibited internationally including presentations at the Palais de Tokyo, Paris, the Barbican Art Gallery and Tate Britain, London. Her recent projects include a poster design for the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games and a major commission as part of the Cultural Olympiad, Frieze Projects East which she produced in collaboration with Nicholas Byrne. In October she will present a work as part of The Tanks programme of live art at Tate Modern.

For further information see: http://www.firstsite.uk.net/page/whats-on

ONE AND ONE AND ONE

A group exhibition that considers the idea of incompletion through the imagined and real spaces of architecture.
Amikam Toren | Bernice Donszelmann | Louisa Minkin & Francis Summers | Mary Maclean | Richard Healy | Ruth Proctor | Sally Morfill | Tim Renshaw | Yonatan Vinitsky

CGP London, Southwark Park, London SE16
26 September to 28 October 2012, Wednesday – Sunday from 12 – 6pm.

For ONE AND ONE AND ONE the participating artists explore the ambient qualities of architectural atmosphere through works that, through their process of production, offer a concept of space that is not static. Freed from reaching a point of conclusion (through the withholding of information), the resulting structures create an absence that generates new material languages.

At the heart of this exhibition, is the perception of the incomplete or a space that is begun and worked upon within its own particular suspended history. In this unsettling absence of concrete information or related historical context, audiences must engage with a willful open-endedness and confront distractions that bring their peripheral imagination into play and in which margins can touch, overlap, rub up against each other, but due to the different shapes of their limits they are bound to never fit into each other completely. Verwoert, J. 2007 Forget the National: Perform the International in the Key of the Local (and vice versa).

The works in this exhibition draw on concepts of architectural materiality, a hypothesis of space and our perception of the built environment. Even architecture, which disposes of the more solid materials is a hypothesis about space, in much the same sense that words on a page do not produce meaning directly but first divide the page and consequently thought and poetry, into significance. Said, E.1985. Beginnings Intention and Method.

Constructed space, then, is more than simply the concrete and material substance of constructed structures, the permanence of elements and the architectonics of urbanistic details. It also exists as the sudden proliferation and the incessant multiplication of special efforts which, along with the consciousness of time and of distances, affect the perception of the environment. Virilio, P. 1984 Negative Horizon.

Discussion Event Sunday 21 October from 3 –5pm at Dilston Grove | Southwark Park | Bermondsey

Conversing on the Incomplete

The incomplete and associated terms such as the fragment and the ruin have had a central place in discourse around the arts, architecture and contemporary experience, shifting away from ideals of wholeness and unity. Always dynamic and in process, incompleteness occupies a field of tension. The dialogic nature of the incomplete can be addressed through its elastic relation to time, doubling as a site of radical potential and the way it suggests an abandoned or eradicated historical continuum.

The theme of the incomplete and its related lines of enquiry will be developed in an afternoon of short talks by Ian Hunt, David Ryan and Ciara Healy. Ian Hunt is a writer and critic David Ryan is an artist, musician and writer Ciara Healy is an artist and writer.

Curated by Outside Architecture: Bernice Donszelmann, Tim Renshaw, Mary Maclean.

Projects include Outside Architecture, Stephen Lawrence Galley, London; Architectural Fictions, South Hill Park, Berkshire; Interior Life, Herbert Read Gallery, Kent; House in the Shape of a Stretcher, Five Years, London; Left of Place, Five Years, London.

Amikam Toren ‘Three years ago, Evelyn House (the house where I live) went through a major renovation. Using a video camera I documented the process. On each of the jobs which were done to the house, I placed a voice over which reads letters I have received ever since I lived at this address. Put together in this form the work becomes a self portrait by proxy. The work duration is 45 minutes, to be shown on a monitor as a continuous loop with no beginning or ending.’

Ruth Proctor Ruth Proctor’s work navigates a performative process, bringing into dialogue sculpture, installation, performance, video, 16mm film and works on paper. Simultaneously playing with a physical and conceptual connection to the use of material, gesture and form, Proctor’s current research and works have been examining notions of luck and failure positioned within the context of potentiality and chance. She often works in response to a particular space and time, staging performative moments within the gallery. She draws on autobiographical influences such as her own past as an ice skater and of contemporary dance as well as art historical concepts such as the flâneur and the derive.

Richard Healy Richard Healy’s works often take the form of prototypes or blueprints. Embodied through simulations of design, they frequently engage with the digital realm as a means for artistic production, and the acts of labour that are obscured beneath the computer’s programmed facade. An artist engaged with a search for new possibilities for the object, Healy displays an interest in the exhaustion of form, bringing together design pragmatics with conceptual play.

Sally Morfill The linear motions of spontaneous communicative gestures and notational drawing tracked using motion capture technology provide the starting point for Sally Morfill’s Position series. The drawings offer material translations of fleeting thoughts and actions, framing fragments of a recorded exchange between architects Pierre d’Avoine and Andrew Houlton. Discussing the incompleteness of architecture d’Avoine and Houlton respond to questions posed by Morfill around e.g. the idea of building as a fragment in relation to its site, or the relationship between the sketch and a developed (built or unbuilt) project. The drawings indicate a stage in an ongoing process of translating and re-working and reflect the open-ended and incomplete nature of the conversation.

Louisa Minkin & Francis Summers For ONE AND ONE AND ONE Louisa Minkin & Francis Summers will ask questions about deserts, desertions and occupations; posing these questions in the context of thinking around faculties of encounter and possible reformulations of belonging. A framing concern: where can effective action and politics appear? Their contribution to the exhibition will, like an emblem, have three parts, an epigram, an image, and a gloss. Louisa Minkin and Francis Summers have previously worked together on Preliminary notes for moving between desert and occupation, 2012, as a Five Years web-project. Both artists are committee members of the collectively organised artist-run gallery Five Years.

Yonatan Vinitsky Presents the work DEADENDEADENDEADENDEADENDEADENDEADEND (‘he was a good man!’) from 2011. Vinitsky’s practice is formed from a series of findings that he ‘translates’ into his own works. The finding can be a piece of paper that he found in the street, an art work by an unknown artist or a document from the archive. It is the process of decision-making of those who originally “made” what he found that motivates his work – the need to figure out how an artist works.

Mary Maclean’s work in photography develops her interest in a viewpoint and the space of cultural exchange. In a new body of work she explores a close up view of writing boards in lecture halls, collapsing their functional surface into the flat plane of the image. The abstract surface traces a written inscription and holds a literate history of information exchange. The written signage does not act as a repetition of the oral structure of knowledge transaction, but instead proposes both a material vestige and an anticipation of what is not there.

Tim Renshaw Tim Renshaw looks both at architecture through painting and for architecture in things that fall outside the domain of building. Rather than directly depict an existing space he identifies a basic underlying structure and through a process of recolouring and redesigning his paintings propose that in addition to function there are forms of spatiality that affect the texture of perception and give a different form of density to that experience.

Bernice Donszelmann Bernice Donszelmann’s installations and objects probe how material surfaces within architecture and domestic spaces produce empathic relationships with the human body. Everyday synthetic materials (plastics, foam, fabrics) are transformed into forms of ‘soft architecture’ – provisional modes of enclosure and gathering of space that echo and address the corporeality of the body.

Organized by Outside Architecture, the discussion forms part of the exhibition ONE AND ONE AND ONE at Cafe Gallery | Southwark Park | Bermondsey, which runs till October 28th.

Touring ONE AND ONE AND ONE tours to K3 Project Space, Zurich from 6 – 14 October Artists’ Talk: Sunday, 14 October 2012 from 16.00 – 17.00 Hrs. Tim Renshaw, Mary Maclean, Bernice Donszelmann, Katrine Hjelde, Monika Ursina Jager, Amikam Toren, Justin Hibbs.

NIGHT SKY

A film by Alison O’ Daniel with live sound by POLLYFIBRE
Tuesday July 24th 2012, 7:30 pm at WHIRLED CINEMA
259-260 HARDESS ST LOUGHBOROUGH JCTN LONDON SE24 OHN.

Night Sky is a 75 minute narrative film by Alison O’Daniel that enacts a sensory experience on the bodies of the viewers with live accompaniment and parallel, overlapping stories: two girls–Cleo and Jay–travel through the desert while a group of contestants compete in a dance marathon. This performance emphasizes music within the film by Ethan Frederick Greene, Lucky Dragons, and Evelyn Glennie with live musical accompaniment by *POLLYFIBRE* using adapted tools and objects amplified to create noise-scapes. Balloons will be provided for the Deaf audience spectrum.

There will be a Q&A after the screening with Alison O’Daniel and Christine Ellison (POLLYFIBRE).

Night Sky has received support through the California Community Foundation, the Puffin Foundation, the Creative Capacity Fund, and the Medici Foundation. The film premiered at the Anthology Film Archive in November of 2011 with two screenings as part of Performa 11 and the exhibition Walking Forward-Running Past at Art in General in NYC. The film has also screened in the Black Box Performance festival within Pacific Standard Time: Art in Los Angeles, at Evergreen College in Olympia, WA, Krowswork in Oakland, CA,and at the Fusebox Festival in Austin, TX. In September Night Sky will screen at USA Lounge, a defunct casino in Henderson, NV in conjunction with Pop Up Art House, the Guild Cinema in Albuquerque, NM, Plus Gallery’s Experimental Forum in Denver, CO, The Nightingale Cinema in Chicago, IL, the Cleveland Museum of Art, MOCA Detroit, the Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester, and at NYU.

Merzbarn Residency

Merzbarn Residency, a set on Flickr.

Images from the Merzbarn Residency, June 2011. Our students with Pil & Galia Kollectiv spent a week convening reading groups, screening films and talks from visiting artists in Cumbria. see: http://www.merzbarn.net

Cultivation Field Event

CULTIVATION FIELD Third Thursday 21st June by invitation from Jelly

Cultivation Field Exhibition
8th – 22nd June 2012
At: 3rd Floor, 42 Market Place, Reading, RG1 2DE
and
The Keep, 571 Oxford Road, Reading, RG30 1HL

Open: 8th June 12:00-16:00; 9th to 22nd June 12:00-18:00 (42 Market Place is closed on Tuesdays)
Cultivation Field – Third Thursday 21st June 18:30-21:30 at The Keep, with presentations by:

Sarah Lewison will be talking about work with AND AND AND http://andandand.org (featured at Documenta 13 Kassel, Germany), on Monsanto hearings and other cultural practices in defense of soil and diversity. Some experiments and speculative exercises that challenge the hubris of new agricultural technologies that presume humans are able to understand and therefore control life’s complexity.

Alexandra MyGlynn: Doing more than simply drinking tea.  The talk will consider the origins of the agrarian movement in former communist countries of ex-Yugoslavia and displaced women for example from Bosnia and elsewhere who have come together through international gardening projects to be ‘doing more than simply drinking tea’ as a necessity for their own cooking and self-esteem.

Charlie Tweed: The Isles of Grain, Kent (performance film, a 7 minute preview of an event that will be at the Whitechapel on July 26th)

Maria Deegan: Bombus Accessio (performance)

Sophie Payne-Gifford: The Global Challenges to Agriculture: Is it all doom and gloom? Climate change, water security, population stress: Global agriculture has a number of challenges it must meet over the next decades. Sophie will discuss these challenges by reviewing the academic and grey literatures. Sophie is a PhD student focusing on innovation and the regulation of pesticides and is based in the University of Reading’s School of Agriculture.

http://www.cultivationfield.org

Cultivation Field Exhibition:
Cultivation Field explores plant and land cultivation through diverse art practices. Plant life could be considered a low-tech material, because it is vegetation, but in the second decade of the twenty-first century plant life is in constant production as part of consumerist high tech industry. Cultivation Field looks at the cracks in land cultivation systems, collective engagement within local communities, plant based objects and methods of production.

Participating artists: Robyn Appleton, Tom Baskeyfield, Shameela Beeloo, Rebecca Beinart, Camilla Berner, brook & black, Rob Carter, Rachael Champion, Andrew Dodds, Maria Deegan, Adi Gelbart, Fritz Haeg, Maria Hofstadler, Tom Ingate, Ulrika Jansson, Pil & Galia Kollectiv, Rosalie Kim, Gayle Chong Kwan, Sarah Lewison, Alexandra McGlynn, Stéphanie Nava, Raquel Estrada-Nora, Phil Newcombe, Caitlin Parker, Julian Perry, Minna Pöllänen, Janette Porter, Sneha Solanki, Stih & Schnock, Jo Thomas, Carly Troncale, Charlie Tweed, Jane Cradock-Watson, Elizabeth Wewiora

Cultivation Field is curated by artist Kate Corder, PhD candidate at University of Reading

Cultivation Field is supported by Arts Council England, Earley Charity, University of Reading, Jelly, Open Hand Open Space, Sutton Seeds, Laura’s Organics and Office For Contemporary Art Norway

               

Degree Show 2012 – Press

Degree Show 2012

Degree Show 2012, a set on Flickr.

Left of Place – Mary Maclean

Mary Maclean explores the space of borders and thresholds in the everyday structures within architectural environments. The photographic images suggest a backdrop to a series of routines and exchanges implicated in the surfaces of architectural space. How is the image tied to its space? Can it be split, re-positioned, shuffled or extended? Here a possible disorientation is suggested where the space might be alternately revealed or blotted out. A sequence of images, provisionally positioned so that their surfaces are stacked behind or in front of one another suggests a temporary alignment. Their interplay is cut by a different order, one that interrupts, un-fixing the viewpoint, where a fluid state of endlessness extends beyond the moment of a situation.

Cult of the Amateur

CycLE CLUB event curated by James Harper

Tuesday 29th May 2012, 6-9pm 
24 hour website takeover by bubblebyte.org 
Panel discussion with bubblebyte.org, Arcadia_Missa, Sunday Painter, Hotel Palenque, pyramidd.biz. 
Chaired by Sarah McCrory 
Performance by POLLYFIBRE

The sixth CYcLE CLUB event at Cell Project Space, ‘Cult of the Amateur?’ explores how artists and curators are using the Internet to create a new context and framework to produce and display art. Referencing Andrew Keen’s publication, ‘The Cult of the Amateur’, this event will contest Keen’s argument that the Internet is killing today’s culture and try to underpin the enormous potential of the Internet’s hybrid activity, which inspires and influences artists today. Acknowledging that the Internet has become a vital tool, source, and arena for a vast amount of contemporary art practice, James Harper has selected bubblebyte.org and POLLYFIBRE as part of this new development. Bubblebyte.org have invited Arcadia_Missa, pyramidd.biz, The Sunday Painter and Hotel Palenque to come together in discussion for a one-night event chaired by curator, Sarah Mc Crory. Turning Keen’s publication on its head, this event will aim to reveal emerging independent / artist-led activity in London that is using the internet to find new ways to display, make, and interact with their audience.

Live for 24 hours, and for the duration of the event, bubblebyte.org founders, Rhys Coren and Attilia Fattori Franchini, have invited artist Paul Flannery to create a compliant intervention of Cell’s existing and long standing website. Flannery will interrupt its conventional streamline order to interact with the basic framework of the site, creating a non-linear, auto-destructive viral action.

To complete the event POLLYFIBRE will present ‘SlideShow‘, a live work where digital and analogue media collide. The source for this work uses the Internet as a central point of departure in that the script is taken from the Wikipedia definition for the word ‘slideshow’. Information and words are randomly extracted from the Internet and transferred onto photographic 35mm slide to be projected with analogue carousel slide projectors taking the audience into a visual wordplay, from Google to PowerPoint presentation. The sound of projectors is manipulated gradually into a clashing, confrontational, digital/analogue crescendo. Slideshow aims to highlight how information is sourced, navigated and considered in a culture of accelerating mediation. It posits the notion of a post-digital era in which we are increasingly faced with challenging questions of authenticity and authority.

Sarah McCrory is curator of Frieze Projects, London. She recently formed ‘Arts & Jobs’ in Bethnal Green, London which opened in March 2012.

 Arcadia_Missa, The Sunday Painter, pyramidd.biz, and Hotel Palenque are all active independent art organizations that have all developed web-based projects, which are either part or central to their activity.

bubblebyte.org is an online gallery showcasing artists that engage in a creative way with the digital space and stress the multiple possibilities of the media. bubblebyte.org is, in itself, container and content, artist and gallery. 

 POLLYFIBRE is a noise band that incorporate amplified analogue tools and machines in live performances that confront and engage digital culture. Founding member Christne Ellison is an artist and lecturer at the University of Reading. For Slideshow at ‘Cult Of The Amateur?’ she will perform with Lucyana Moore and Claire Moss.

CYcLE CLUB member, James Harper, is an artist and curator currently studying on the MA curating course at Chelsea College of Art and Design. Harper is a former studio member of ‘The Royal Standard, Liverpool’.

 The work of Paul Flannery looks at the decoration of the Internet and its early aesthetics. Using ornamental elements, often produced by amateurs, as icons, background images and memes, Flannery’s work is a deep analysis about digital time and beauty.

Degree Show 2012

John Russell at MOT International, Brussels

John Russell
JEXUS
18th May – 22nd June
MOTInternational, Brussels
Rue Vandenbrandenstraat 1, 1000
Brussels, Belgium

MOTINTERNATIONAL Brussels is pleased to announce a solo exhibition by artist John Russell.

This is the representation of a crucifixion on an alien planet. Of a deep-space pilot who wakes to find herself nailed to a cross. The details of how this happened are unclear. She remembers she was lying on her bunk considering the nature of surplus value … now her ship is long gone … light years away. Two other people are crucified here but there is no audience. No witnesses of this enactment of a cliché … neither a sacrifice nor a prophesy.

It may seem ridiculous to claim that the ecstatic scream of the Madonna, or saints on the cross is connected to the ecstacy of shit and meat rather than the divine but that is exactly what will be claimed here. Not shit specifically or anality, but “O” as the opening (out) of a throat or tunnel. The shit and anus are still key however, in the way they are used in Bataille’s analyses of the ‘dazzling brilliance’ of apes’ anuses “…the enormous anal fruit of radial and shit-smeared raw pink meat” which he contrasts with the ‘blossoming of the human face’. The animalistic, primitivity of the anus compared to the organizing civilized functions of the face (faciality). As an o-pening up as a hole, or extruded as O-O-O-O-O into a tube or tunnel. Or “O” as an opening out onto infinity as ZERO; or as a mouth splitting open the face, opening it backwards to ‘mammal meat’ and noise. A journey into “O” – either the “o” of PORN or some other word like “freedom” or “revolution” – or as the connection to other “O”s – and through these to still further examples.’

Excerpt of the essay written by John Russell to accompany the exhibition JEXUS and available online at: http://www.john-russell.org/Spring.html

Degree Show 2012: Preview

Degree Show 2012: Preview

Claire Saumtally

Degree Show 2012: Preview

Degree Show 2012: Preview

Alana Francis

Degree Show 2012: Preview

Simon Morgan
Table VII
2012
Balaclava, rope, tool wallet, crowbar with taped handle, 1968 Volkswagen manual

Pollyfibre

On 4 May 2012 Breathe live art will launch with an event at Hotel Elephant, featuring performance art, sonic art, live music, installations, films and DJs. The event will showcase local artists and bands plus graduate and student work from London College of Communication alongside more established artists including Andrew Beedle (performance); Black Mass Rising (film by Shazzula); Chris Shen (installation); Electric Puffs (band);Joe Stevens (performance); Lo-budget mayhem from London Short Film Festival 2012; POLLYFIBRE (performance); Tiger Walking Downhill (sonic art / noise act)

http://breatheliveart.wordpress.com

inter/act 1: Szuper Gallery

“Be realistic! How can lumps of rocks zooming around in space affect our lives down here?”

Projektraum enter 2012 inter/act: New Social Sculptures
A project series at the Kunstmuseum Thun
February 2012 to January 2013

 inter/act 1: Szuper Gallery
31. March – 9. April / 28. April – 24. June 2012

What is the impact of the permanent state of crisis? What do mountain gorillas have in common with 21^st century city dwellers? What are the connections between the utterings of a recovering stroke patient and a group of children lounging in a gallery? These are some of the elements—physical and conceptual— that make up Szuper Gallery’s new project. Economic crisis, global warming, nuclear winter, we are permanently reminded that we are imminently facing a catastrophe. Considering these changing states and the surprising emergence of the normal as crisis, Szuper Gallery presents a multi-layered project in order to explore the notion of performance as social practice. The project includes an installation in the Projektraum enter and a new live performance produced in collaboration with Canadian actor Michele Sereda, featuring Prof. Klaus Zuberbühler, primotologist, University of St Andrews, and Colonal General Hans-Ulrich Haldimann, Kommandant Waffenplatz Thun as well as a group of 30 school children.

Live performance: 30 March 2012, 18.30 h
A co-operarion with the Postgraduate Programme in Curating, Zürcher Hochschule der Künste, www.curating.org. curated by Dorothee Richter

Kunstmuseum Thun
Thunerhof, Hofstettenstrasse 14, CH–3602 Thun
T +41(0)33 225 84 20, F ++41(0)33 22589 06
kunstmuseum@thun.ch,

http://www.kunstmuseumthun.ch/museum/kunstmuseum-thun.html

opening hours :Tues – Sun 10 – 17h, Wed 10 – 19h, Monday closed

It’s Us! It’s Us!

‘It’s Us, It’s Us!’
- a collaborative touring exhibition organised by Reading University Art students and Bristol UWE Students.

It is the first part in a series of group exhibitions between artists working in Bristol and Reading. The opening exhibition at the Motorcycle showroom in Bristol is a parody of conflict between the two cities, as the Reading antagonists intrude the local identity, and any opportunity for compromise is sabotaged. Working in a variety of mediums, the artists present a satiric celebration of the darker desires of the ego, the notion of the masterpiece inspiring their boldest, loudest intentions. An exploration into the nature of group exhibitions, the artist’s work to deliberately out do the other.

The exhibition is being first shown in Bristol (Thurs 9th -11th Feb) and then being transported to Reading to be shown at the Turbine House, Riverside Museum (23rd – 25th Feb).

POLLYFIBRE presents SLIDESHOW

POLLYFIBRE presents SLIDESHOW
A carousel ride from Flickr to Powerpoint via the fairground.
Live Performance at pyramidd.biz
191-205 Cambridge Heath Road, Bethnal Green London E2 0EL
www.pyramidd.biz
www.pollyfibre.com

Reading Experimental Film Festival 2011

Bloomberg New Contemporaries 2011

Hyewon Kwon,  PhD researcher has been selected for Bloomberg New Contemporaries 2011: In the Presence 23 Nov – 15 Jan 2012, ICA London.

Bloomberg New Contemporaries 2011 will be showing at S1 Artspace and Site Gallery in Sheffield between 23 September and 5 November 2011 before travelling to the ICA, London, 23 November 2011 until 15 January 2012.

After Shelley Duvall ’72 (Frogs on the High Line)

Curated by Bjarne Melgaard

September 17 – October 22
featuring
Anonymous Three: Anonymous Three Selects Omar Harvey
Fabienne Audéoud and John Russell
Michael Alig
Alissa Bennett
Sverre Bjertnes
Big Fat Black Cock, Inc.
Caroline Busta
William L. Copley
John Duncan
John Kelsey
Richard Kern
Michael Bernard Loggins
Lydia Lunch 
John Patrick McKenzie
Dwight Mackintosh
Bjarne Melgaard
Marlon Mullen
William Pope.L
Seth Shapiro
Estate of Martin Wong

Performance by
Fabienne Audéoud and John Russell

Saturday, September 17,
8:00 pm

Maccarone 630 Greenwich Street NY, NY 10014  www.maccarone.net 

 

Everything and Nothing

What shapes could the universe be? Does it have an ‘edge’? Is it infinite? A performance project exploring the possible shapes of the universe

Friday 23rd September 6.30pm as part of Researcher’s Night
Department of Art, University of Reading, 1 Earley Gate, Reading RG6 6AT

Intent on creating a map of the universe using complex mathematics, the Everyman Explorer encounters aviator Amelia Earhart who was lost in her 1937 attempt to circumnavigate the globe. The pair find themselves in the company of an order-obsessed librarian who isn’t quite what he seems, in a time-warped universe controlled by an old radio.

In a playful encounter between sound, image, text and mathematics, multi-disciplinary company the19thstep present everything and nothing, devised by composer Dorothy Ker and sculptor Kate Allen with performers Lucy Stevens, Chris Brannick, and Kelcey Swain. The piece was developed in consultation with mathematician Marcus du Sautoy and inspired by Jorge Luis Borges’ story The Library of Babel. Performance lasts c.50 minutes

Angel of History: I Can See for Miles

John Russell ’Angel of History: I Can See for Miles’
A new temporary public artwork commissioned for the railway bridge in Southend-on-Sea

Angel of History: I Can See for Miles’ is the first in Focal Point Gallery’s new series of temporary public artworks commissioned specifically for the railway bridge that spans Southend-on-Sea’s pedestrianised high street. For this inaugural project, artist John Russell has digitally reworked a famous portrait from 1981 of former British Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and focused exclusively on the aging woman’s eyes. This new image, which will effectively gaze down Southend’s main commercial thoroughfare, is installed on the north side of the overpass and printed on a fifteen-metre wide custom-made support. Unveiled between 4.00pm to 7.00pm on Saturday 10 September at The Sunrooms, 20-21 Market Place, Southend-on-Sea

Project runs until Saturday 22 October 2011

Focal Point Gallery Southend Central Library Victoria Avenue Southend-on-Sea Essex SS2 6EX, UK www.focalpoint.org.uk

House of POLLYFIBRE at Absolut Fringe

House of Pollyfibre presents Prêt-à-Médiatiser in this years  Absolut Fringe programme. Deconstructing the conventional fashion show format, artist Christine Ellison manipulates the physical tools and digital technology of design production to create a colourful visual environment accompanied by a live noise scape.

Referencing early software interfaces and magazine culture, Ellison takes this 2 dimensional imagery and creates cut out dresses and hats made of geometric shapes. The live performance will involve and reveal the backstage craziness of model changes and ‘live layering’ with the fashion collection itself offering dual possibilities depending on your perspective. So sounds like one hell of an exciting production already and then add to this the documentation of the event, which will eventually become part of the show itself. Billed as ‘high art meets fashion’ the installation references art and architectural ideas of the Dadaists and Futurists from the early 20th Century, revisiting the effects of new technologies and a new visual culture at the beginning of our own Brave New World. Conceptually is an impressively conceived project that’s super relevant to anybody working in design, but the surface pleasure is all rudimentary style and entertainment.

FOR TWO NIGHTS ONLY 16 – 17 SEPT in South Studios as part of ABSOLUT Fringe – Ireland’s largest multi-disciplinary arts festival 10 – 25 September 2011

INDEPENDENT/NEZALEZHNI. NEW ART OF A NEW COUNTRY 1991-2011

4th Moscow Biennial/Special Project
Museum Complex Mystetskyi Arsenal/Art Arsenal, Kyiv August 22 – September 13, 2011

INDEPENDENT/NEZALEZHNI features 2 new videos projects by Szuper Gallery (Susanne Clausen and Pavlo Kerestey) from the Ballet series in a new installation with a series of new paintings by Pavlo Kerestey. Ballet – Granite is a rock opera performance that flirts with a posthuman conception of action, focusing on the border between human bodies and their outside. Set in a world askew with attempts and remnants of civilization it questions how the world of vibrant and edible matter might affect the way we live. The setting: a mystical landscape, a crash site, in the wild or in the rush of a blackout. Pulling apart the “ballet” of the food system in musical scenes and absurd stories a hysterical cabaret unfolds with simple actions which gradually unravel.

4^th Moscow Biennial

http://4th.moscowbiennale.ru/en/program/special_projects.html

INDEPENDENT / NEZALEZHNI at Art Arsenal http://artarsenal.in.ua/eng/event21.html

Preamble at MK Gallery

Children of Jalun present Preamble

MK Gallery, Milton Keynes Thursday 21st July 2011 6.30pm

Looking for new space in which to present their artistic output; members of the Jalun collective (former students of the Department of Art, University of Reading) come together at MK Gallery in an attempt to inform the second instalment of a series of published works.

Currently working on the second publication, Volume Two: Sin Hipster, the collective will present their initial responses to the subject; one that tracks a move from a performance of parroting as a means of survival, into the theme of artistic puberty and the art practices of the genitally obsessed.

Working predominantly in print media and performance, the group curate and exhibit their collaborative output, as well as invite contributions from other artists. The first publication, Volume Three: Dummy, was launched as a durational performance event and produced in association with Focal Point Gallery, Southend-on-Sea.

www.childrenofjalun.com

Marc Camille Chaimowicz at Tate

For the first time at Tate Britain, a performance work, Marc Camille Chaimowicz’s Partial Eclipse… 1980–2006 will be integrated within the displays. The performance will take place each Saturday afternoon at 3pm.

Has the Film Already Started? is a new suite of collection galleries which highlights ways in which ideas of performance have come to occupy a defining place in art of the last 30 years. These major works explore different approaches to the use of narrative, tableaux and found objects.

Degree Show 2011 – News

 

Read the full article here

Degree Show 2011

We are delighted to invite you to the Department of Art Degree Show 2011 Friday 10 June 2011, 4-7pm.

Join us to celebrate the exciting work of 55 emerging artists from the University of Reading. This public exhibition is the culmination of our undergraduate and postgraduate work, research and their experience of studying art. It will represent the diversity of contemporary art practice. Visitors will encounter performance as masquerade, sculpture exploring the currency of folk, the immateriality of digital images, storytelling and blogging as theoretical fiction.

The exhibition is accompanied by a three-part newspaper publication featuring all our finalists with guest editorials from Simon O’Sullivan, artist Ed Atkins and Caroline Drever (Art History), designed by Liam Yeoh & mmmm, Typography.  The publication is made possible with the generous support from the Joint Standing Committee of Council and Senate for the Arts.

Visit the degree show website

Our Preview is on Friday 10 June 2011 4-7pm / We are open every day 13 – 24 June 2011, 10am – 4pm / Visit us, talk to us and spend some time with us: Department of Art, University of Reading, 1 Earley Gate, Whiteknights Road, Reading RG6  6AT/ Postcode for satellite navigation systems is RG6 7BE / Here is how to get in touch fineart@reading.ac.uk / If you are interested in what we do, please join us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter / You can also see what else we get up to by visiting our blog.

Graduates from the University’s Art Department have gone on to become acclaimed artists, but also make huge contributions across creative and cultural filed as writers, curators and performers. The department, which has produced famous alumni such as Turner Prize nominees Cornelia Parker, Richard Wilson and Mike Nelson, has a long history, originating over 150 years ago in 1860. Since then, the department has been associated with successful artists such as Walter Sickert and Terry Frost.

Jihan Al-Dibouni/ Katie Anderton/ Theadora Ballantyne-Way/ Christina Barratt/ Jose Bei/ Siobhan Belingy/ Stuart Booker/ Michelle Cameron/ Shelagh Casebourne/ Arianne Churchman/ Jodie Clack/ Reena Coceal/ Charlotte Christie/ Benedict Croft/ Pascale Cumming-Benson/ Toby Oliver Dean/ Kara Dennis/ Tom Dickson/Jeremy Godwin/ Zoe Gray/ Midia Hadjixenofontos/ Rose Harvey/ Hannah Hillier/ Anna Hughes/ Zoi Konstantinou/ Julia Langrish/ Christian Laville/ Natasha Maffoletti/ Elisavet Marinou/ Cara Mason/ Melissa Matthews/ Harry McDowell/ Gabrielle Mercer/ Asnawi Mohd Salleh/ Katherine Moore/ Deborah Morris/ Claire Moss/ Zara Norman/ Pani Paniayides/ Petra Palser/ Nisha Patel/ Lara Proctor/ Joseph Rowles/ Stacey Saunders/ Louise Seagrave/ Eva Smets/ Sarah Stein/ Helen Stokes/ Marnie Watts/ Caroline Weaver/ Charlotte Whiteford/ Raquel Borges/ Maria Hofstadler

Melanie Smith at Venice Biennale

Melanie Smith was born in Poole, England in 1965. She received her Bachelor of Arts from the University of Reading.  Since 1989 she has lived and worked in Mexico City, an experience that has enormously influenced her works ever since. Her work has been characterized by a certain re-reading of the formal and aesthetic categories of avant-gardes and post-avant-garde movements, problematized at the sites and within the horizons of heterotopias. Her production is intimately related to a certain expanded vision of the notion of modernity, maintaining a relationship both with what this means in Latin America, particularly in Mexico, and with the implication this has for her formal explorations as a critical moment in the aesthetic-political structure of modernity and late modernity.

Her earlier pieces considered Mexico City itself, recording its multitudes, its violence, its banality, and its clandestine nature and at the same time its inherent decomposition. The most outstanding piece from this cycle is the video Spiral city (2002). In another of her works, she broadens the notions of place and non-place by documenting the small town of Parres on the outskirts of the city.  She produced a trilogy of 35mm films and a series of paintings and installations that rework the modernist idea of the monochromatic.

Her work has been exhibited at numerous institutions, both nationally and internationally, including: P. S. 1, New York; MoMA, New York, UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; ICA, Boston; Tate Liverpool; Tate Modern, London; South London Gallery, London; Lima Art Museum; Tamayo Museum, Contemporary Art University Museum and El Eco Experimental Museum, Mexico City; and Monterrey Museum, among others. Her individual exhibitions include: “Parres,” Tate Britain (2006); “Six steps to reality,” Museum of Contemporary Art – San Diego; “Parres,” Miami Art Museum, and “Spiral city and other artificial pleasures,” a retrospective exhibition that traveled from the University Museum of Science and the Arts (MUCA) in Mexico City to The Lab in Denver (2008) and the MIT List in Boston (2009). She has produced two artist’s books: Spiral city and other artificial pleasures (2006) and Parres (2008). She holds a grant from the National System of Art Creators of the FONCA (Mexico).

Red Square Impossible Pink is a sort of affective archaeology of modernity that allows us to understand the geo-aesthetics of modernity in contemporary societies from another perspective.

To Malevich’s Red Square, as a Suprematist formalization of utopia, Melanie Smith opposes the impossible pink as the unformed place of an historical realization of the projects of modernity. Red Square Impossible Pink spatializes a dialectical image that expresses the opposition between the possible and the impossible. If modernity is something more than the pure Eurocentric fiction of the relationship between history and utopia, if modernity is above all the history of colonial expansion, the square is no doubt something more than the possible and colors something more than their purity. Impossible Pink is an irony and a paradox, a distancing that seeks to dismantle utopias by exploring their heterotopic condition as logics of chaos. The three video pieces presented here were created in collaboration with Rafael Ortega. Their presentation in Venice involves the notion of emplacement as a dialectical play between ruins and chaos, an operation in which painting and installation function as spectral interventions between the Palazzo Rota Ivancich and the video pieces.

http://www.mexicobienaldevenecia.org/eng/exhibition/project/Brochure.pdf

NOVEL at Sculpture Centre, New York

Time Again
Featuring work by: Richard Aldrich, Troy Brauntuch, Manon de Boer, Matthew Buckingham, Moyra Davey, Thea Djordjadze, Aurélien Froment, Rachel Harrison, Charline von Heyl, Ull Hohn, William E. Jones, Elad Lassry, Rosalind Nashashibi, Blinky Palermo, Laure Prouvost, Steve Roden, Emily Roysdon, and Rosemarie Trockel

Novel with: Ed Atkins, Marc Camille Chaimowicz, Steven Claydon, Sergej Jensen, Sam Lewitt, R.H. Quaytman, Josef Strau, and Paul Thek

New York – SculptureCenter is pleased to present Time Again, an exhibition that explores the language of repetition, bringing together works that destabilize conventional ways of seeing and considering what is past and what is present. Engaging gesture, image sequence, material affect, and displaced narrative, the works on view create disjunctions with the way the time of the present is experienced, challenging our understanding of what it means to be contemporaries. Curated by Fionn Meade, Time Again will be on view May 9 – July 25, 2011. An opening reception will take place Sunday, May 8th, 5-7pm and is open to the public.

Within the exhibition, archival and historical settings are re-animated only to be undone, including William E. Jones’s video Berlin Flash Frames, 2010, which parcels out footage from an unedited film produced by the U.S. Information Agency found in the National Archives of the United States labeled with the provisional title “Berlin, 1961″. Jones’s re-edit features distanced shots of the Berlin Wall under construction alongside propagandistic scenarios featuring actors on stage sets. Similarly, Emily Roysdon’s Untitled (David Wojnarowicz Project), 2001-2007, responds to and redirects Wojnarowicz’s earlier work Arthur Rimbaud in New York, 1978-79, while an excerpt from Marc Camille Chaimowicz’s Shoe Waste?, 1971-2005, returns to documentation of a clandestine action performed above and beneath the River Thames in London.

Additional works to be exhibited include a new sculpture by Rachel Harrison, Avatar, 2010; Ull Hohn’s series of plaster relief paintings, Untitled, 1988; Thea Djordjadze’s Deaf and dumb universe (Gerüst), 2008; and Troy Brauntuch’s Stamps, 1975-2007, which gathers together the artist’s collection of figurative rubber stamps that have been used in his collages over the past thirty years. Also on view will be sculpture, collage, and video works from Rosemarie Trockel, including Goodbye Mrs. Mönipaer, 2003, a cinematic pantomime that explores the psychologically fraught role-playing that can emerge between artists and gallerists, studio and market concerns, and private and public selves.

The performing body and political subject present themselves throughout the exhibition via acts of estrangement, reversal, ritualized behavior, and fragmentation. Manon de Boer’s film Attica, 2008, for example, captures a refracted consideration of the 1971 prison uprising in the form of a musical performance, while Rosalind Nashashibi’s This Quality, 2010, offers an indirect view of Cairo through tightly framed observations of likeness and variation. Matthew Buckingham’s Image of Absalon to be Projected Until It Vanishes, 2001, addresses a public that may no longer exist in a fragmented portrait of the Danish warrior-bishop and quasi-mythic founder of the city of Copenhagen. Similarly, the place of abstraction reasserts a longstanding dialog with the place of iconography through modes of projection, superimposition, doubling, and associative image sequences in works by Richard Aldrich, Moyra Davey, Charline von Heyl, Elad Lassry, and Blinky Palermo.

Also included within Time Again is a presentation of works organized in collaboration with Novel, a project founded by London-based editors and curators Matt Williams and Alun Rowlands. A publication project that takes up experimental writing as a parallel practice to visual art making, Novel draws on politics, poetry, theory, and storytelling to promote explorations of language and the possibility of a new critical fiction.

Extending across artistic mediums into sculpture, film and video, photography and painting, Time Again provokes a consideration of how ‘the now?’ of our time is perceived.

A series of talks and performances will take place at SculptureCenter, and a related screening series will be presented in collaboration with Anthology Film Archives in July (Dates TBA). The exhibition catalog will feature texts by contributing artists—including Ed Atkins, Josef Strau, and Richard Aldrich—and essays by Fionn Meade, Jacob King, and Isla Leaver-Yap.

About SculptureCenter
Founded by artists in 1928, SculptureCenter is a not-for-profit arts institution in Long Island City, NY dedicated to experimental and innovative developments in contemporary sculpture. SculptureCenter commissions new works and presents exhibitions by emerging and established, national and international artists. Our programs identify new talent, explore the conceptual, aesthetic and material concerns of contemporary sculpture, and encourage independent vision.

Hannah Sawtell at Vilma Gold

THE GREAT WHITE WAY GOES BLACK
17 APRIL – 29 MAY 2011
OPENING SATURDAY 16 APRIL 6.30 – 8.30pm
PERFORMANCE BY TRISHA BAGA 7:30pm

Trisha Baga, Ann Craven, Michaela Eichwald, Helena Huneke,
Hannah Sawtell, Katharina Sieverding and Julia Wachtel

Vilma Gold are delighted to present an exhibition of work of seven artists, many of whom – Trisha Baga, Helena Huneke, Julia Wachtel and Katharina Sieverding – are shown in London for the first time. The artists can loosely be linked by an awareness of their subjectivity; rather than work back from an existing or even vetted larger order, they look to themselves, their own system of being, as an individual in society, to build outwards in multiple directions and speak as they go.

Czech-born, German artist Katharina Sieverding’s (b.1944; Prague, Czechoslovakia) highly influential practice spans nearly four decades and includes photography, film, and installation. Employing the close-up to challenge conceptions of the relationship between photography and cinema, Sieverding explores areas where these interdependent forms of media coincide and diverge. This exhibition focuses on her large-scale self-portraits, which often appropriate the scale of movie screens and billboards and compose a significant portion of her oeuvre. For this exhibition, Sieverding presents her seminal work IX (1977), a monumental four-part photograph, taken on a New York City rooftop during the notorious blackout in the summer night of 1977; this work also lends the exhibition its title.

Julia Wachtel (b.1956; New York, USA) is fascinated with the visual language of mass culture. Her paintings enter into a visual language game wherein the appropriated vernacular of mass culture is illustrated, simulated, relicated, altered and parodied. The logic of this language is disturbed just enough to provoke a meditation upon the conditions of meaning intrinsic to that vernacular. In her paintings, Watchel inserts grotesque, irritating cartoon characters – popular with the middle class in the 1960s and 1970s when they were seen on greeting cards, bar supplies and T-shirts – into the “readymade” lexicon of mainstream magazine and newspaper photographic images which document the contemporary socio-political landscape of the time. For this exhibition, Wachtel presents her multi-panel work Procession, from 1989.

Trisha Baga (b.1985; Venice, Florida, USA) is a New York based performance and video artist. Of her practice, Baga writes of an idea of ‘present-ness’: she sees her process, and self, as like a dot on a line. Unable to impose an end point from the outside, the only thing to do is to look to what can be done now, to what can be said, with the materials and the self to hand and embark upon a trail. For this exhibition, the artist will present her performance video work Madonna y El Nino (2010), a non-fiction Filipino folk tale, made primarily from media produced by Madonna the pop star, using the El Nino weather phenomenon as a metaphor for changes in the pop landscape brought about by digitization and the internet.

Ann Craven (b. 1967; Boston, USA) uses subject matter such as flowers, moons, birds and dewy-eyed fawns in her multiple wet on wet paintings. She neutralizes her storybook content through continual variations and repetitions, thus removing any sense of preciousness in the work whilst shifting the conversation about her work into a theoretical frame that considers the body as a whole, rather than its individual parts. By reworking, re-presenting and returning to the same stock subject matter, Craven engages questions of consumption, collection, authenticity, value and skill. She examines the durability of a painted icon in a world that consumes mass imagery at record speeds.

Michaela Eichwald (b.1967; Cologne, Germany) makes neo-bohemian bricolaged sculptures and paintings, which suggest life beyond their simple means. In the past, Eichwald’s layered paintings have included such collaged elements as books steeped in thick spills of enamel or texts by other authors and artists. Details of objects are glimpsed through their surface suspension (in resin or varnish) but nothing is ever explained or clearly shown. As finished product, Eichwald’s paintings allow the viewer
to feel included in the process of handling material. It has been said that her works function like an index for the connectivity between sensual and intellectual activity in general, and that in this way it advocates subjective practice. For this exhibition Eichwald presents two new large-scale multi media paintings.

Helena Huneke (b.1967; Luebeck, Germany) is a German artist who lives and works in Hamburg. Her paintings and collages often incorporate sections of found fabrics such as bedsheets and tablecloths, which are painted, folded and overlapped. Sometimes positioned on the floor, sometimes draped and hung in varied configurations, a certain vulnerability permeates the work, a unique vulnerability that is fearlessly exposed. Huneke has talked of faces appearing in the work through the action of folding and unfolding. For this exhibition she presents Der Plan (2011), a painting/collage work composed of abstract colour fields painted onto a folded linen sheet and incorporating the silhouettes of two figures cut from newspapers.

Hannah Sawtell’s (b. 1971; London, UK) multi-disciplinary practice scrutinises the excess of production, through objects, image, text, video and sound. Her ongoing actions utilize a system of collation and manipulation of surfaces retrieved from the digital realm, collonized spaces and simulated matter; she manufactures works that navigate utility, connecting praxis and spectacle. This exhibition shows a recent work from her ‘Optic’ series. Structures that vascilate between window, shelf and screen are industrially manufactured; hand pasted with images that she creates by using current computer programs. All image capture, manipulation or slicing is made by the machine. A floor work from her ‘Mole’/ ‘Egressor’ series will also be shown.

The Future of Things Past

Harry McDowell & Tom Dickson, 2011

WE: Pil & Galia Kollectiv

WE is the ghost of the future of the left. To perform political speech, you have to say WE and we all know this WE will exist as a result of what I have said now – Slavoj Zizek

WE is a live music performance by Pil and Galia Kollectiv, Victor M. Jakeman and Ruth Angel Edwards. Challenging the individualism of Western pop, WE reveals the latent politics of love songs and transforms chart hits by annihilating their liberal subject and replacing it with a collective consciousness. Through the simple substitution of the plural for the singular, intimacy becomes a form of collective action and the unique universal.

8pm, 8 April 2011, Institute of Contemporary Art, London
Book now at: http://www.ica.org.uk/28653/Live-Art/WE-Pil-Galia-Kollectiv.html

Museum of English Rural Life

The Show

 

The Show

THE SHOW
‘THE WALK’, READING Thursday 2nd December, 2010, 5pm-8pm

CURRENT UNIVERSITY of  READING ART students and one recently-graduated artist will be collaborating in a performative exhibition that will occupy empty shop units in the Walk, Reading, for one evening. The Show will bring together artworks spanning performance, installation, video, sound and smell to playfully investigate the disintegration of once-successful entertainers and washed-up circus performers.

Each space will ‘house’ these characters, and the relics of their past. Their depressive nostalgia is trapped in a time that is hard-to-grasp, such that their stories are disjointed yet inter-connected. The visitors will be given the chance to explore the live space and observe the characters that reside there- a bearded showgirl; Punch without Judy; a caged tamer; an obsessive taxidermist; and a gypsy who tells fortunes through folk-song, amongst others.

The Show will become a static exhibition during the week following the 2nd of December 2010.

THEY SHOULDN’T BE ON THESE PEOPLE’S TERRITORY! BUT THEY’VE BEEN INVITED TO IT.

See documentation of the event here

Dummy

Dummy at The Railway Hotel, Clifftown Road, Southend-on-Sea, Essex, SS1 1AJ, between 4pm and 8pm on Saturday 20 November 2010.

This is a live event in which recent University of Reading graduates Katie Barrington, Abi Bryant, Owen Chapman, and Christian Tilt will ‘parrot’ texts by artists including Sue de Beer, Ryan Trecartin, Liam Gillick, Mark Titchner, Stuart Bailey, Patricia MacCormack. Rebecca Warren, Pierre Huyghe and Laura Cull.

The event is organised by Focal Point Gallery, Southend http://www.focalpoint.org.uk/

Interior Life

Marc Camille Chaimowicz at Inverleith House

31^st October 2010 to 6^th February 2011
Inverleith House Royal Botanical Gardens, Edinburgh Arboretum Place/Row EdinburghEH3 5LR
www.rbge.org.uk/inverleith-house

Marc Camille Chaimowicz is one of the most influential visual artists working today with a career that spans four decades. He makes relatively few exhibitions, yet his work is constantly cited and referenced in leading journals devoted to art and theory. The major solo exhibition due to be presented at Inverleith House this Autumn will be the artist’s first in the UK since 2002.

John Russell at Frieze

Dr John Russell from the Department of Fine Art, will be exhibiting a striking piece of artwork in Regent’s Park, London at the end of this week. The piece was commissioned by the Frieze Art Fair, who are the most prestigious contemporary art fair in the UK to present an installation in the Sculpture Park.

‘Public Sculpture [the social]‘ (2010) takes the form of a large scale digital print on vinyl (4.6 x 8.4 metres) depicting a futuristic public sculpture. This imagery was developed in part, from a recent AHRC funded project researching the visualization of philosophical and political ideas as art.

Dr Russell said: “The sculpture presents the image of a virtual sculpture, constructed using 3D modelling, and outputted as a large scale print. In part I was influenced by J.G.Ballard’s descriptions of impossible, futuristic sculptures in his book Vermillion Sands.”

The work can be seen at the Frieze Sculpture Park, from Thursday 14 – Sunday 17 October 2010.