re-title.com Features

Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen, St Gallen

 
« THE DARKNET - FROM MEMES TO ONIONLAND. AN EXPLORATION »
  IN COLLABORATION WITH !MEDIENGRUPPE BITNIK AND :DIGITAL BRAINSTORMING
 
18th October 2014 - 11th January 2015
 
With: !Mediengruppe Bitnik, Anonymous, Cory Arcangel, Aram Bartholl, Heath Bunting, Simon Denny, Eva and Franco Mattes, Seth Price, Robert Sakrowski, Hito Steyerl, Valentina Tanni
 
There is a parallel world beneath the surface of the Internet: the Darknet is an encrypted, invisible network that cannot be accessed by conventional browsers or search engines but is nevertheless used by millions. This digital territory is the impulse for cooperation between the artist collective !Mediengruppe Bitnik (Carmen Weisskopf and Domagoj Smoljo), the project :digital brainstorming from Migros-Kulturprozent and Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen. Forms of organisation, structures and communications systems which penetrate everyday life but which are largely unknown to the public will be examined with the help of other artists, theoreticians and hackers. The exhibition «The Darknet - From Memes to Onionland. An Exploration» will open Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen for interdisciplinary expeditions and encompass themes such as copyright, privacy, illegality and resistance.
 
Public awareness of the Darknet, also called Deep Web or Onionland, has increased as a result of recent events. It has a bad reputation: drugs, weapons, pornography, stolen data and forged documents can be bought there. However, Edward Snowden’s revelations seem to have shifted this one-sided perception. The Darknet is an apparently power-free space with potential that is still little-known and even less used. The participants want to take this factor seriously as critical individuals and articulate its non-transparent mechanisms and systems. Some artistic contributions directly access data and visual worlds from the Deep Web. For example, !Mediengruppe Bitnik transports goods and games from this Internet subculture into the art space while Eva and Franco Mattes present reactions to a video from Onionland. Cory Arcangel’s work remains concealed from exhibition visitors. He is concerned with the visibility of the Kunst Halle on the World Wide Web. Other artists deal with Internet phenomena that also exist on the Surface Web and which are located in the tension-filled area between anonymity and commerce: Robert Sakrowski is curating YouTube films on the history of Anonymous, Valentina Tanni is making available her archive of memes and Simon Denny will provoke questions about business models, income and property in times of global data interchange. In contrast, Heath Bunting examines data storage in relation to identities. These are constructed by means of shopping cards, credit cards or mobile phones. The artist thus also broaches the subject of class systems. Conversely, an identity can also be deleted - as Seth Price demonstrates with How to disappear in America.
 
With this show the Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen links the visible and the invisible which are interlocked - From Memes to Onionland. Aware of the uncertainties in this regard an approach from multiple perspectives is intended. It is an attempt to grasp this extremely controversial phenomenon of our times with artistic contributions, archive material, workshops and discussions. The format of the exhibition gives visitors access to the digital underground and questions familiar notions - Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen can now also be found in Onionland at http://vtw7g7wcdsgxq4ru.onion/ (only with a tor-browser).
 
 
Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen
Davidstrasse 40
CH-9000St. Gallen
Switzerland
T: +41 (0)71 222 10 14
 
Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen
 
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Art Laboratory Berlin

Anna Dumitriu
The MRSA Quilt, 2011
MRSA bacteria on chromogenic agar on calico with natural and clinical antibiotics and diagnostic tests, embroidery silk
© Anna Dumitriu
 
 
[micro]biologies I: the bacterial sublime
Anna Dumitriu
 
Opening: 26 September, 2014, 8PM
Exhibition runs: 27 September - 30 November, 2014
Opening hours: Fri-Sun, 14-18h and by appointment
 
Sunday 28 September, 3PM - Artist talk
Sunday 30 November -Workshop with the artist
 
Curators: Regine Rapp & Christian de Lutz
Press: Olga Shmakova
 
The third exhibition of the series [macro]biologies & [micro]biologies will be a solo retrospective of British artist Anna Dumitriu, whose work in the field of art and science brings together historical narratives, cutting edge biomedical research and an interest in ethical concerns.
 
Dumitriu is well known for creating The VRSA Dress and The MRSA Quilt which were made from so-called ‘superbugs’. To create those works she grew bacteria onto textiles and used natural and clinical antibiotics to create patterns (sterilised prior to exhibition).
 
"Normal flora" is the study of the ubiquitous bacteria, moulds and yeasts that form a key part of the complex ecosystems around us: our bodies, our homes, and the wider planet. Bed and Chair Flora comprises a carved and altered chair with images of the bacteria that were originally cultured from it. The collaborative crochet is based on electron microscope images of bacteria from the artist’s own bed.
 
Bacteria have intricate communication capabilities, which are now being investigated as a form of social intelligence. To explore this The Communicating Bacteria Dress combines bioart, historical textile techniques, such as whitework embroidery, and 3D mapped video projections. The work was created by staining textiles using pigmented bacteria change colour when they send and receive communication signals.
 
The exhibition will also include works from her series The Romantic Disease: An Artistic Investigation of Tuberculosis which explores the history of tuberculosis (TB) from artistic, social and scientific perspectives and covers subjects such as superstitions about the disease, TB's literary and romantic associations, the development of antibiotics and the latest research into whole-genome sequencing of mycobacteria. Dumitriu has worked with researchers from the Modernising Medical Microbiology Project to create a significant new body of work around this clinically and culturally significant disease.
 
Anna Dumitriu is currently Artist in Residence on the Modernising Medical Microbiology Project at The University of Oxford and Visiting Research Fellow: Artist in Residence at the University of Hertfordshire. www.normalflora.co.uk
 
 
Art Laboratory Berlin
Prinzenallee 34
13359 Berlin
 
Art Laboratory Berlin
 
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Gandy gallery, Bratislava

Jana Želibskà
Pleasant transformation of the female body caused by Henri Rousseau 1, 1978
color serigraphy, 86,2x61,2 cm
courtesy the artist and Gandy gallery
 
 
JANA ŽELIBSKÀ
The Parts of the Entity
 
September 30 - November 28, 2014
 
This exhibition of Jana Želibskà (1941) is a continuation in the Gandy gallery permanent ambition to present significant figures of the history of Central Europe art of the second half of the 20th century.
 
Želibskà, who belongs to the progressive generation of action and conceptual authors of the late 1960s in Slovakia, specifically re-evaluated the impulses of neo avant-garde tendencies, French New Realism and post­Moderna. She was present at the birth of environment art in the 1960s, object and installation at the end of the 1980s and video-art in the 1990s. She openly thematizes the female body through a feminist approach which in her work blended with the characteristic period themes of the alternative scene and unofficial art in Slovakia.
 
Jana Želibskà (1941, Olomouc), visual artist living and working in Bratislava, play a key role on Slovak artistic scene from the end of the Sixties. She studied at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Bratislava and she started her artistic and exhibition career in 1967 with the exhibition Možnost’ odkrývania (Possibility of uncovering) at Gallery of Cypriàn Majerník in Bratislava. During the following year she spent several months in a residency program in Paris, but she returned back to already occupied Czechoslovakia. Despite this fact, her exhibition activity was and still continues to be very rich. Her work was exhibited in many Slovak and international institutions: Zachçta - Narodowa Galeria Sztuky (Warsaw), Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig (Vienna), Gosudarstvennyj centre sovremennovo iskusstva (Moscow), Space Apollonia (Strasbourg), Galleria Valentina Moncada (Rome), Muzeul Naţional de Artà Contemporanà (Bucharest), Centre tchèque (Paris), Embassy of the Slovak Republic (Washington D. C.), Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Wörlen (Passau), Nàrodní galerie v Praze (Prague), XLVIII. Biennale di Venezia, Czechoslovak pavilion, Giardini di Castello (Venice), Courtyard Gallery (New York), Musée d’Art Moderne de la ville de Paris (Paris), Museo Universitario (Mexico) and others.
 
In her work, Jana Želibskà is focusing on one specific area of topics executed in different types of artistic techniques. She mostly questions the situation of a woman in the society, the dominance of men, not only in the art world, but as well as around in different relationships between a man and a woman. She uses a human body - mainly woman’s one and its symbols represented by its fragments as breasts or rhombus of female genitals. Despite all these rather serious themes, Zelibskà never misses a certain sense of humour or irony. It is maybe why she never considered herself as a feminist artist who wanted to change the whole society, but rather as someone who pointed out a current condition.
 
Jana Želibskà created traditional painting and prints as well as pop-art objects and environments. Later, during the “normalisation” period in the seventies in Czechoslovakia, Zelibskà focused on more subtle expression such as performances in the nature, happenings and conceptual art. The most recent works include mostly video and large installations.
 
The first exhibition of Jana Želibskà in Gandy gallery in Bratislava called The Parts of the Entity will begin on September 30 and will last until November 28. It will present photo documentation Actions (1960) of some of her performances in nature, printed works from 1960/70 and a installation from 1990s. The graphic art will be presented in extensive way since it is not very well known among the general public, considering those few exhibitions where it has been displayed. In her silkscreen prints and lithographs Zelibskà deals with human body in such a way that she decomposes it in smaller anatomical fragments or she brings forward naked female body represented as a passive erotic object, which can be observed and seized by a visitor without obstacles.
 
 
Gandy gallery
Sienkiewiczova 4
811 09 Bratislava
Slovakia
T: +421 915203082
 
Gandy gallery
 
Read On... Gandy gallery, Bratislava
 

Galerie Jaeger Bucher, Paris

Hanns Schimansky
jusqu'au bout du jardin ...
 
Exhibition presented from September 20 to November 15, 2014
Preview on Saturday September 20, 2014 from 4pm
 


Untitled, 2013. Ink on prepared folded paper, 38 x 46,5 cm © Hanns Schimansky. Photo : Bernd Kuhnert.
 
jusqu’au bout du jardin ...
 
The Gallery is pleased to present new works by the artist Hanns Schimansky with a solo show entitled jusqu’au bout du jardin ... (to the end of the garden ...) that will take place in our Marais space from September 20 to November 15, 2014. Hanns Schimansky is acknowledged by his peers as one of the most talented draughstman of his generation in Germany. His work has integrated important collections, both public and private - and his reputation is spreading internationally. This new exhibition will present his recent drawings. It will include the series entitled ‘micro-canonic orchestra’ shown at the Academy of Fine Arts in Berlin in a room dedicated to John Cage as well as in the recent exhibition shown at the Leonhardi Museum, this Spring in Dresden, Germany. Along with these drawings, the gallery will present inks on paper and a series of foldings by the artist with vivid tones and variable rhythms. Their spatial and infinite possibilities reveal an immense expressive freedom. The space and the tension between the color and the line create a sensory experience driven by the subtle shades of the foldings.
 
With abstract and complex drawings, Hanns Schimansky explores the world in a very personal way. When he draws, the artist observes, touches, feels, deepens, breathes, liberates ... He explores the aesthetical potential of drawing in all its forms of expression. The drawings seek to explore the conditions of our perception and reflect our existence. Contrary to video or photography, drawing demands a stronger visual focus - in opposition to our world filled with technology. With this medium, Schimansky intends to slow down the breathtaking speed of our media-centred world. Each of his drawings demand to be examined carefully so that we can perceive the immensity of what lies within the humble story that unfolds.
 
Schimansky is a poet - continuously creating new linguistic and rythmic possibilities. Drawing with Schimansky is neither a manual exercise nor a preliminary study subject to painting. On the contrary, his drawings result from a long process of observation of his environment - and is also the result of a necessary inner silence.
 
Line
 
The line is very important in his non figurative drawings. Spontaneous and free, it grows slowly but with strength. It is not only a line traced on paper, but a line experienced and felt. It enters from the edge of the paper whether with a brush, a pencil, a feather or a chalk. Trembling, it searches a path, oscillates between undulations and curves. The pencil rolls, wrings, marks off or drifts on the sheet of paper. Always pushing back further the limits of his drawing, the Nature which is expressed here is not an allegory but is mainly environmental as Schimansky collects from his environment visual occurences which nurture the reflexions he develops later on paper. This adventure of the landscape leads Schimansky towards a vegetal but also an urban journey. His explorative line is perpetually growing like a rhizome, working its way through earth, evoking physical as well as mental landscapes where nature seems in full bloom. One can also detect the buzz of a city with its crossroads, poles and electric wires, signs and railroads that cross each other or networks that come together. The landscapes thus created are full of life and imprinted with great freedom. The line animating them releases a crystalline force that stems from an inner journey.
 
Foldings
 
The tridimensional impression is reinforced by foldings of the paper - chosen with great care. Schimansky prepares and shapes these vast sheets in an infinite framework of recto/verso foldings. These horizontal and vertical frameworks create multiple interstices and hidden space where colour amplifies the graphic energy of a drip or a stain. The line that emerges from the folded, unfolded and square-patterned paper and the pencil-line extend beyond the sheet of paper in a tridimensionality. Sinuous lines and curves drawn by the artist result in an aesthetic based on principles of unevenness and movement. Foldings suggest the infinity of matter and the inflexions of the mind. They are the visible expressions of the folds of soul and spirit. The vivid colors spreading from the fold itself or from the wide tinted surface form an echo, resonating with nuances :shades of sounds and tints, shades of folds, shades of maze-like frameworks and variations which call as much to the ear as to the eye.
 
Breath/Energy
 
With delicacy and clarity, the artist creates a field where the energy connecting the forms drawn can expand.
 
Either tinted with an intense black or invigorated by a combined vivacious red and orange, a dazzling yellow or a profound blue or green, these forms transform the paper sheet into a tridimensional space. Being diverse - round, broken, sharp or square-patterned with variable dimensions, these forms fill the surface of the sheet and give a real sense of space and depth. Hanns Schimansky invites the viewer to wander and explore the space of this sheet in a meditation where the ink seems to beat a rhythm similar to that of the heartbeat. Like Asian calligraphies calling for a unique Breath, Schimansky’s drawings seem moved by subtle movements of air such as poetic odes to pneuma - in the noble sense of the greek term.
 
Music
 
In this respect, the melodic and rythmic drawn partitions are similar to those of free jazz, so much loved by Hanns Schimansky. His drawings express the absolute freedom, characteristic of free jazz, and yet they respond to very precise codes in an absolute mastery of breath, whether drawn or played. The harmony springs out of the luxuriant imagination of the artist. But they are the result of a meticulous and controlled technique. The variations of the line incarnate the variations of a sound: high-pitched then deep, resounding or deaf, with its pauses and replays, just like an improvisation cadenced by accents and punctuations.
 
The oeuvre of Hanns Schimansky is composed as much of sonorities as it is of silences: the rustles of the paper folded and unfolded, the ink-pen scratching the paper, the dot repeated forever with precision, the line sliding in variable rythms are all sounds which contribute to the harmony of the artist’s drawings. They are Carpe Diem filled with a subtle atmosphere and express the intensity as much as the fragility of our existence.
 


Untitled, 2010. Folding, ink and gouache on paper, 37 x 49 cm © Hanns Schimansky. Photo : Bernd Kuhnert.
 
 
GALERIE JAEGER BUCHER
5 & 7 rue de Saintonge
75003 Paris
France
Telephone: +33 (0) 1 42 72 60 42
Fax: +33 (0) 1 42 72 60 49
[email protected]
 
Opening Hours
Tuesday - Saturday 11 - 7 PM
 
www.galeriejaegerbucher.com

www.re-title.com/exhibitions/galeriejaegerbucher.asp

 

BEERS CONTEMPORARY, London

BEERS CONTEMPORARY presents
 
IN PLACE OF A TROPHY
 
Exhibition Dates: 11 April - 31 May, 2014
 
Vasilis Asimakopoulos | Leo Babsky | Olivier Kosta-Thefaine | Frank Maier
 

 
‘In Place of a Trophy’ presents forward four internationally based artists whose work evades any conventional reading of the object of art. The selected works present a conceptual understanding of the constructed environment; through a re-imagining of context and materiality, the works consider our relationship of space as imagined, evasive, and unstable.
 


Articulated through an unconventional and diverse array of urban materials, such as concrete, brick, wood and metal, the artists approach such unconventional materialization with a surprising, whimsical, and urgent nature, transforming objects that might otherwise be ignored or discarded to create a new temporal language: a landscape of spatial distortion, which (while reminiscent of its initial framework) reinvents itself and appropriates a sense of masquerade. Reused, reshaped and reinterpreted, each artist exhibits a distinct yet related body of work that can be understood archaeologically, as though a future civilization has embalmed and reinterpreted samples from our contemporary urban environment. Here we see captured street scenes, extracts of the metropolis, items of urbanity, artesania, and even kitsch, reinvented with museum-like dissociation, pseudo-scientific analysis, as though a series of cultural, socio-historic curio on display. Here, the viewer is reverted to passivity, refuted entry as though a museum visitor attempting to process the foreign objectivity that has been displayed. Non-descript rubble lying on the side of a pavement is magnified and printed on denim, disguising as painterly tapestry in Vasilis Asimakopoulos’s Knocking. Discarded cement blocks rendered useless at a construction site are presented by Olivier Kosta-Thefaine, as objects that should be reconsidered, redefined and treasured. Similarly, the ordinary metal grill of a security fence is moulded and transformed into neat, abstract and geometric patterns in Kosta-Thefaine’s Satrouville and La Gaubretiere and six framed spray painted works hang playfully alongside two forgotten bricks, reminiscent of graffiti sprawled on street corners and walls (Detail D’une Rue and Collection 1).
 


In the same vein, Frank Maier creates asymmetrical sculptural paintings from painted detritus: wood and string. Leo Babsky challenges the material aspects of contemporary life by combining every day objects and allowing the viewer to reconsider their appeal as new constructed and desirable entities: 'In Place of A Trophy' presents objects that are stripped of their original frameworks and uses, inciting us to reconsider our ingrained reference models. Marble, latex and ceramics, precariously stacked and balanced offer distorted mirrors of the every day. Combined, the works provide a new landscape with alternate potential, a glossy caricature of the real that serves to garner a new sensitivity for the static material world that surrounds us.
 

 
 
BEERS CONTEMPORARY
1 Baldwin Street
London EC1V 9NU
T: +44 078 1703 1766
 
www.beerscontemporary.com
www.re-title.com/exhibitions/beerscontemporary.asp

 

PROJECT ANYWHERE:

2014 INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITION PROGRAM & 2015 CALL FOR PROPOSALS
 
Project Anywhere is an expanded exhibition model encompassing the entire globe in which the role of curator is replaced with a peer review system comparable with a refereed journal. Emphasizing research outside conventional exhibition circuits, Project Anywhere is specifically dedicated to promoting art at the outermost limits of location-specificity.
 
Following an exhaustive international peer validation and editorial process, we are delighted to promote our 2014 international exhibition program: http://www.projectanywhere.net
 
 
Department Of Biological Flow, Channel Surf

 
Anna Romanenko, Björn Kühn & Gabriel Hensche, Liminal Dome

Erin Bosenberg, Listening For Narrative: Bringing Intimacies Into The Public Presentation Of The Artist

 
John Ryan & Tom Watts, A Popular Destination

 
Ronit Eisenbach, Sharon Mansur & Aleksandra Vrebalov, In Situ: Exploring Sites-In-Transition

 
The deadline for proposal submissions for our 2015 program is September 1, 2014.
 
For proposal guidelines and more information go to http://www.projectanywhere.net
 

 

SHAPE OPEN EXHIBITION AND CLOSING PARTY at Lewisham Arthouse

Wednesday March 12th - 29th 2014
 


James Lake
Entitlement - series number 1
2013
Cardboard
910mm x 520mm x 180mm
© James Lake
 
Lewisham Art House
 
Dates: Wednesday March 12 - 29 2014
Opening hours: Wed- Sun 12-6pm
Late Opening and Closing Party: Friday 28 March 2014 from 6 - 8:30PM
Address: 140 Lewisham Way, SE14 6PD London, United Kingdom
Web: http://www.lewishamarthouse.org.uk
 
The Shape Open is an annual call-out which invites disabled and non-disabled artists to submit work in response to a disability focused theme.
 
This year's theme, 'Disability Re-assessed', generated submissions from an exciting multidisciplinary range of artists and includes painting, textile, photography and video works. After a successful six month tour the exhibition has reached its final destination, opening at the Lewisham Arthouse from Wednesday 12 - 29 March 2014.
 
Join us at the exhibition tour closing party on Friday 28 March 2014 from 6 - 8:30PM for the final opportunity to see this unique and thought provoking collection of works by 29 emerging contemporary artists.
 


Maria Constantinou
Bandaged
2013
C-Type Print
107cm x 72cm
© Maria Constantinou
 
Special mention goes to the Shape Open Prize winners Eric Fong and Katherine Araniello, who were selected by our Open Patron Yinka Shonibare MBE, Marcel Baettig, CEO of Bow Arts and Tony Heaton, CEO of Shape.
 


Eric Fong
Reflection 01
2013
HD Digital File
3 mins 56 Sec
© Eric Fong
 
Yinka Shonibare MBE, launched the exhibition at the Nunnery Gallery (Bow Arts) and commented on the winning submission:
 
'Eric Fong's winning film is piece which plays with perception, and moves between abstraction and reality. What is so impactful here is that it plays with one's own judgment and feelings of how other people might look different to one's own self.'
 
Shape, the UK's leading arts charity working to improve access into arts and culture for disabled people.
 


Aminder Virdee
...And The Odds & Sods
2013
Solid Maple Wood.
25mm x 25mm x 25mm
© Aminder Virdee
 
Featuring artists:
Eric Fong (Winner of the Shape Open best in show prize), Katherine Araniello (runner up for Best in Show prize), Katharine Armstrong, Lizz Brady, Sophie Brown, Charles Burns, Vivi-Mari Carpelan, Ellie Collins, Maria Constantinou, Alice Dass, Beth Davis-Hofbauer, Jon Adams, Tony Allan, Gabriel Andreu, Rachel Gadsden, Ruth Hamblett, Stephen Lee Hodgkins, Matthew Humphreys, Margherita Isola, Fabienne Jacquet, Kasia Kaldowski, Babis Karalis, Ann Kelson, Pragya Kumar, James Lake, Beth Lau, Dene Leigh, Ilsun Maeng, Aga Maria Masternak, Marion Michell, Graham Miller, Cecilia Montague, Annie Morgan, Andrew Omading, Thomas Owen, Jo Paul, Evaldas Pauza, Bekki Perriman, Simon Raven, Yvette Rawson, Sally Redway, Ivan Riches, Christopher Sacre, Tracy Simpson, Monica Takvam, Will Thompson, Aminder Virdee, Jenni-Juulia Wallinheimo-Heimonen, Andy Wild, Naomi Woddis and The Vacuum Cleaner.
 


Marion Michell
Soldier's child
2012-2013
Crocheted from wool/polyester yarn
450mm x 260mm
© Marion Michell
 
Shape Website: www.shapearts.org.uk 
Exhibition Page: http://www.shapearts.org.uk/artandexhibitions/shape-open-2013.aspx
Shape Twitter: @ShapeArts
Shape Facebook: ShapeArts
Enquires Contact:
020 7424 7330
[email protected]
 
 
Lewisham Art House
Wednesday March 12th - 29th 2014
Opening hours are: Wed- Sun 12-6pm
140 Lewisham Way
SE14 6PD London, United Kingdom
Web: http://www.lewishamarthouse.org.uk
 

Andréhn-Schiptjenko, Stockholm

Brad Kahlhamer
Please Pay Me So I Can Pay Them, 2013
Spray Paint, ink pencil on bedsheet
100 x 84 in. (254 x 214 cm)
Courtesy of the artist and Andréhn-Schiptjenko, Stockholm
 
 
BRAD KAHLHAMER
The Four Hairs
 
February 20 - March 29, 2014
 
Andréhn-Schiptjenko proudly announces Brad Kahlhamer's third solo show at the gallery.
 
The exhibition centres around a large wall installation entitled The Four Hairs, with elements spanning from paintings and water colours, collages, vintage photos and Xeroxes to objects and sculptures. It offers a profound insight to the many facets of Brad Kahlhamer's work and his own personal mythology. In his realm he mixes contemporary Native American culture, urban street culture, subjective experiences and mythical symbols and deals with topics such as identity politics and urban, global culture.
 
Another major work in the show is Please Pay Me So I Can Pay Them. It is comprehensive and detailed, mixed media painting on a full-size bed sheet. Here, historical allusions to Native American crafts and symbols are mixed with contemporary materials such as spray paint and ballpoint pens. A large collage and a group of watercolours complement the central pieces with texts and images, referring to Kahlhamer's background both as an art director at Topps Company and as a musician.
 
Brad Kahlhamer was born in Tucson, Arizona and lives in New York City. His work has been exhibited extensively internationally and he will be included in Musée du Quai Branly's exhibition The Art and Life of the Plains Indians opening in 2014 and traveling to the Nelson Atkins Museum of Art, Missouri and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. His work has recently been shown at the Nelson Atkins Museum of Art, Missouri, 2013 and the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Connecticut in 2012. Recent group exhibitions include One Must Know The Animals, Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, Wisconsin, 2012. He was the recipient of the Joan Mitchell Award, 2006 and the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award in painting, 2001.
 
Kahlhamer is included in numerous public collections including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Seattle Art Museum, Washington; the Denver Art Museum, Colorado; the Weatherspoon Art Museum, North Carolina; the Milwaukee Art Museum, Wisconsin and the Hood Museum of Art, New Hampshire.
 
 
Andréhn-Schiptjenko
Hudiksvallsgatan 8
Stockholm
Sweden
T: +46 (0)8 612 00 75
 
Andréhn-Schiptjenko
 
Read On... Andréhn-Schiptjenko, Stockholm

 

AEROPLASTICS, Brussels

HeHe
Fleur de Lys
2009
Installation
285 x 95 x 85 cm
Unique
courtesy of the artists and Aeroplastics contemporay, Brussels
 
 
HeHe
Anthroposphere
 
exhibition runs until March 15th
 
The duo HeHe (Helen Evans, 1972 and Heiko Hansen, 1970) personifies a new generation of artists who create a link between the sphere of technological/digital art (too self-referential, and frequented solely by the initiated), and that of contemporary art (reluctant to accept new modes of expression based on subverting new informational/communicational technologies). Each of these spheres has developed its distinct circuits of communication and 'diffusion', and common points of contact between the two remain rare. HeHe, winner of the Golden Nica at Ars Electronica (Linz) in 2008 - equivalent to the Golden Lion of the Venice Biennial for digital arts - regularly exhibit in locations dedicated to technological art, and extend their interventions into the public domain internationally (New York, Paris, Helsinki, Liverpool, ...). By mounting this first personal exhibition in Belgium, Aeroplastics offers the duo the opportunity to present their work in all its complexity, and to demonstrate the contemporary relevance of the themes they study and pursue.
 
These themes are essentially connected to the conflictual rapport between a humanity that is caught up in an unbridled quest for new sources of energy (along with new ways of wasting it), and an ever-increasingly fragile natural environment. On the gallery's first floor, two installations illustrate recent catastrophes caused by the exploitation of the main energy resources from the industrial age: oil and nuclear energy. Is There a Horizon in the Deepwater (2011) stages the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon oil platform in 2010, while Fleur de Lys (2009), a nuclear plant plunged in an aquarium, evokes the dangers of atomic energy. Here, one naturally thinks of the Fukushima disaster in 2011, but there is also a manner of premonition: at its origin, the piece was conceived as being part of a series devoted to clouds (pollution) generated by human activity. The title Fleur de Lys harks back to the stylized form of the smoke plume emitted by the cooling tower, but also symbolically refers to France, a country 80% dependent on the atom for its energy needs.
 
This study of 'man-made clouds' gave rise to a spectacular performance in the public space, namely Green Cloud (2009), consisting of outlining and highlighting (by way of a directed laser beam) the fumes emitted from a power plant in Helsinki. The sociological and political implications of this project are manifold. In this vein, the prefecture of Seine-Saint-Denis prohibited Green Cloud being projected against the incinerator at Saint-Ouen, arguing that such would contribute "to propagating, in the public's mind, a strongly negative image of the incinerator plant"... And because pollution is only rarely visible to the naked eye: with a series initiated at the Centre Pompidou (Air de Paris), HeHe proposed to make visible the (mediocre) quality of the air we breathe via coloured photographed urban panoramas. Air de Bruxelles was made especially for this exhibition; the fixed image doubles as an under-construction internet site aimed to archive (in real time) atmospheric conditions as recorded by various sensors - or how landscape joins up with that of digital networks.
 
Naturally, every actor carries his or its own responsibility in this state of affairs. And although they defend against passing judgment on whomever, preferring the mise en scène (oftentimes humorous) to moralising, the HeHe pair don't miss targeting the current aberration of automobile traffic (particularly 4X4's) in city-centres (for that matter, HeHe is very active in projects to bring back alternative forms of public transport on the old Parisian intra mural railway line). The Porsche Cayenne, outsized, with its 189 grams per kilometre of CO2, is a perfect illustration. Launched in a miniature model producing a pink cloud through the streets of New York (Toy Emissions, 2007), and dressed up with a feather of the same colour (Porsche's Plume, 2011), it has nonetheless to take on competition from the Land Rover Discovery (269 g for the V6 Supercharged model), above all in its spatial variant (Beckham's one-way ticket to the moon edition, 2013)... And it isn't even necessary to drive a car in order to pollute. The simple fact of existing is sufficient: Million Parts (2008) converts the CO2 emitted by our human organism into modulated light within an enclosed space. "The set-up induces CO2 levels that surpass internationally accepted norms for enclosed spaces, indeed high enough for a last gasp!"
 
Finally, the series "Domestic Catastrophes" focuses on the pollution generated by objects we use in our daily lives, deliberately targeting the simplest among them (pointless to once again raise the question of cell phones or computers, regularly treated in the media): a wall-socket suddenly producing smoke that engulfs the room (Prise en charge, 2011), while a clothes iron, suspended from the ceiling, turns furiously in the air while belching jets of steam. Sometimes, a rise in the collective consciousness results in laws banning toxic substances from everyday life: for those who've forgotten what a room full of smokers smells like, HeHe have produced a delicate fragrance based on organic tobacco, Tobacco Perfume (2010). As for those who judge such laws to be anti-libertarian, they are invited to grill a cigarette under the Smoking Lamp (2005): their act will not go unnoticed...

 

Pierre-Yves Desaive
 
 
AEROPLASTICS contemporary
32 rue Blanche
1060 Brussels
Belgium
T: 32 2 537 22 02
 
AEROPLASTICS
 
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Lisson Gallery, Milan

Rashid Rana
Notions of Narrations II
C-print
228 x 323 cm
Courtesy of Lisson Gallery, London / Milan
 
 
RASHID RANA
 
24 January - 14 March 201
 
"My work is often a three-way negotiation between myself, my immediate physical surroundings and what I receive - whether through the Internet, books, history or collective knowledge."
Rashid Rana, ArtReview, 2013
 
Working with multifaceted, multiplied imagery, Rashid Rana splits the visible universe apart in order to remake it anew. In sculpture, video and photographic prints, Rana transforms snapshots of shop signs in Lahore into abstracted cityscapes or renders reproductions of Old Master paintings as digital fields of colour. Utilising the grid structure, the artist has recently begun to rearrange famous paintings such as The Rape of the Daughters of Leucippus (1618) by Peter Paul Rubens and the Oath of the Horatii (1786) by Jacques Louis-David, scrambling these famous compositions into pixelated and codified puzzles.
 
Rana's splicing and stitching technique can be carnal and violent, as in this ongoing series of brutally lacerated and reassembled Baroque and Neo-classical paintings, collectively known as the Transliteration Series. For his first solo exhibition in Italy, Rana has also reflected the legacy of the surrounding city in his source material, choosing paintings by artists hailing from Milan, such as Andrea Solari and Cesare da Sesto. While the originals are held in the Louvre in Paris and the National Gallery in London, Rana symbolically returns the images to the source of their creators, albeit visually distorted and temporally displaced in the process. Rana complicates and realigns such divided notions as figuration and abstraction, manipulation and reality, but also succeeds in knocking the world off its axis and transcending both traditional and technological means of communication.
 
Widely considered to be the leading Pakistani artist of his generation, Rashid Rana first came to prominence in South Asia alongside artists such as Shazia Sikander and Subodh Gupta, before gaining wider, international exposure after the millennium. Rana's work straddles both Eastern and Western art practices, drawing equally from Islamic forms as from the Renaissance, French Realism or Modernism. Early photomontages - originally made by painstakingly reconfiguring tiny squares of imagery into micro-mosaics by hand, latterly by using computer software - superimposed hardcore pornography on to the silhouette of the burqa (Veil, 2004) and turned hundreds of graphic slaughterhouse snapshots into facsimiles of Persian rugs (Red Carpet, 2007). Rana's telescoping of politics, civilizations and time also appears in three-dimensions, in works from the series Desperately Seeking Paradise (2007-2011), which splice Lahore's humble streets and houses with the architectural promise of skyscrapers and the slick lines of Minimalism.
 
Rashid Rana was born in Lahore, Pakistan in 1968. He lives and works between Lahore and Toronto, Canada. He trained as a painter at the National College of Arts in Lahore and at the Massachusetts College of Fine Arts in Boston, before joining the faculty of Beaconhouse National University in Lahore, where he still teaches. Recent solo exhibitions include: Labyrinth of Reflections at Mohatta Palace Museum, Karachi (2013); Cornerhouse, Manchester (2011) and Musée Guimet, Paris (2010). Participation in major group exhibitions includes the Kiev Biennial (2012); Fotomuseum Winterthur, Whitechapel Gallery and Saatchi Gallery, London (2010); the Asia Society, New York (2009), the fifth Asia Pacific Triennale, Queensland Gallery of Art, Brisbane (2006) and the Singapore Biennial (2006).
 
 
Lisson Gallery
Via Zenale 3
Milan
Italy
T: +39 02 8905 0608
 
Lisson Gallery
 
Read On... Lisson Gallery, Milan