Exhibition documents, 2012

Le prince des rayons

2 June - 15 July 2012

 

Danai Anesiadou, Marianne Berenhaut, Edith Dekyndt, Peter Downsbrough, Amy Granat, Sven Johne, Runo Lagomarsino, Adriana Lara, Erwan Mahéo, Miks Mitrevics, Nick Oberthaler, Mira Sanders, Lisa Tan, Pieter Vermeersch

 

Galerie VidalCuglietta

Boulevard Barthelemylann 5

1000 Brussels

Belgium

info@vidalcuglietta.com

www.vidalcuglietta.com

 

The exhibition “Le prince des rayons” (The Prince of the Rays) explores the resonance of the horizon and its aesthetic, poetic and utopian associations in the thinking and imagery of contemporary art. This article no claim to historical analysis, but it is worth noting that since the 19th century the ho- rizon has characterised and revealed Romantic subjectivity. It oversteps the frontiers of rational knowledge and is invested with feelings. As a structure of the landscape, it becomes a state of mind, the Stimmung referred to by Heidegger. Later, the invisible leads to emptiness, the abyss; the distant horizon floats to the surface, rises up and plunges us into nothingness. “The ego is thrown out of the window”* , and this defenestration allows the mys- tery of the horizon to come about. This is the great leap into the opaque matter of the horizon, of the kind performed by the Dutch artist Bas Jan Ader in his final work, “In Search of the Miraculous” (1975).

 

But who is this “prince of the rays”? His name is so attractive and mysteri- ous that we have preferred not to reveal his identity yet. He is the central axis joining together all the other visual rays in Alberti’s Renaissance-period “Treatise on Painting”. He has become the poetic name substituting for the word horizon in the planning of this project, because, as lord of the gazing eye, he has the magnificence to make us “seers” beyond the limits of the image and perception.

Is it therefore because of its immanence and very inexorability that the ho- rizon so stimulates the imagination? Is it because it retreats before us at each step we take? Is it the horizon’s metaphysical grandeur or a wariness of the temptation of the sublime which causes artists to preserve its repre- sentability? But who was it who asked whether the inaccessible was not the true goal of the quest?

 

Lilou Vidal, May 2012

 

* M. Richir, La Défenestration, L’ARD no. 46: Merleau-Ponty quoted by Céline Flécheux L’Horizon, des Traités de perspective au Land Art, PUR

 

Screening Room: Brussels

December 10-12, 2012

Selection of films by Regina Barunke

 

Temporary Gallery

Mauritiuswall 35

D 50676 Köln

Germany

www.temporarygallery.org

 

"Screening Room" is an ongoing film series that started in 2011 addressing the current international artist film. Each series focuses on the art scene of a specific city: in collaboration with art institutions, galleries, off spaces, artists and producers a high-carat collection of film contributions emerges, being intrinsically linked to and portraying the place. Named after the eponymous TV format "Screening Room" that has been developed and moderated by the American Documentary filmmaker Robert Gardner and aired by the Boston TV broadcast company WCVB between 1973 and 1980, it explicitly gives the voice to the new generation of filmmakers and avant garde and experimental film.

 

Program:

FATAL ECLIPSES

Patricia Esquivias: Natures at Hand, 2011, 3:48 min

Lisa Tan: Sunsets, 2012, 22:30 min

Peter Wächtler: Tim and Racky, 2011, 59:38 min

Chris Kraus: Sadness at Leaving, 1992, 18:57 min

 

ELEMENTS OF SOUNDS

Wim Catrysse: (MSR), 2012, 14:57 min

Aglaia Konrad: Concrete & Samples III, Carrara, 2010, 19 min

Theo Cowley: Untitled, 2012, 5 min

Eleni Kamma: The Tuner’s Monologue, 2012, 13:09 min

Shelly Nadashi: Medium, 2012, 9:24 min

Rosalind Nashashibi: Open Day, 2001, 11:45 min

 

PUT ON STAGES

Simona Denicolai & Ivo Provoost: A dream called Macba, moca, moma, etc., 2010, 9:19 min

Markus Selg: Storrada, 2011, 23:21 min

Franciska Lambrechts: Ideaaahhhl, 2008, 44:26 min

Grace Schwindt: Tenant, 2012, 78:06 min

 

 

Sunsets

24 March – 25 May 2012

 

Galerie VidalCuglietta

5 Boulevard Barthelemylaan

1000 Brussels

Belgium

www.vidalcuglietta.com

 

Galerie VidalCuglietta is pleased to present the new solo exhibition of the Stockholm and New York-based American artist Lisa Tan.

 

For this exhibition, the artist debuts a new single-channel video installation titled Sunsets (2012). Sunsets documents an informal translation and transcription (Portuguese to English) of a 1977 interview with the Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector (1920-1977). Lispector’s figurative and highly imaginative sto- ries approach the limits of subjectivity in remarkable ways. In Sunsets, Tan layers the interview with a seductive and melancholic visual language to address values of productivity and passivity in relation to creation.

 

Lisa Tan has been spending a lot of time in Sweden for the past few years, and anecdotally relates the origin of this piece:

 

...it relies on the most banal topic, something that I thought you really shouldn’t talk about anywhere, but especially at certain latitudes because its presence is so achingly obvious: the weather. Or really, it’s about the light.

 

The footage in the video was shot in Sweden at either 3am during the summer, or at 3pm during the winter. I look at this liminal zone, when it’s not really day or night, or when the sun sets too slowly or too rapidly, as a way of connecting to certain values of productivity and the generative liminal space of translation—of not knowing exactly—or of getting things wrong. So last summer, I woke up in the mid- dle of the night, when I was supposed to be sleeping, when the sleep function on my laptop showed slowly shifting views of our solar system, insisting that I was not supposed to be working, no. I started filming my laptop in this mode, thinking that right now, the computer is perhaps most interesting when it’s asleep.

 

Lisa Tan’s works involve her longstanding interest in persistent ontological questions, and different ex- periences of loss and longing. Her work is known for an elegant visual economy and has taken the form of photographs, videos, sculptures, drawings, installations, and writing. Another work on view, Moving a Mountain, first exhibited in New York in 2008, relates a night spent in Mexico City—its quiet discover- ies and future traces. The piece consists of a found painting, a photograph and a framed text.

 

Shiver in the Shift

24 March - 6 May 2012

 

Kajsa Dahlberg, Gaylen Gerber, David Lamelas, Karl Larsson, Lisa Tan

Curated by Eva González-Sancho

 

Parra & Romero

Claudio Coello 14

28001 Madrid

Spain

www.parra-romero.com

 

an urge, pense-bête

to not forget

and let the imprint

from an aging entity

made out of empty shells

shiver in the shift

between linear reasoning

and informal argumentation

 

Karl Larsson, Parrot, 2010

 

Shiver in the Shift is a phrase taken from Karl Larsson’s book/poem, Parrot, published in 2010, the outcome of Larsson’s research into the work of Marcel Broodthaers (Belgium 1924-1976). Parrot – a mysterious and fascinating bird and also, as Larson says, “a body inhabited by the language of others, a loyal commentator (a marginal actor).” As well as paying homage to Broodthaer’s work, Parrot also sets out to respond to a lack, to something lacking, something necessary for continuing as a poet, whatever this might be, if indeed it exists.

 

The (sonorous and onomatopoeic) phrase Shiver in the Shift is part of another story, one that echoes the work of this major artist, infused with literary strategies and in which language so often operates as symbol or sign. In the context of the exhibition at Parra & Romero, the phrase is transferred to another context, acknowledging the narrative threads running through this group show. This is a multiple narrative, not only because the five artists present a range of different proposals, but mainly because all seem to be marked by references to a third person. Indeed, each work names, refers or alludes to other authors, although this does not take the form of simple quotation. The viewer is invited to make the distinction between reading and looking (to return to Broodthaers’s pense-bête), in order to approach the individual works, the different authors, the multiple layers that lie within each work and between the works as a group.

 

The exhibition brings together five artists of diverse origins and different generations who elicit a series of narrative threads that consider the experience and perception of the work of art, addressing issues of reading, translation, transcription, displacement, and the potential for writing offered by blank space. The emphasis is on the here and now, the moment of encounter between an existing work of art or literature and the viewer/reader’s experience of it.

 

Eva González-Sancho, Madrid, 2012

 

 

A man is walking down the street. At a certain moment, he tries to recall

something, but the recollection escapes him. Automatically, he slows down.

July 18 -September 12, 2012

 

Alejandro Cesarco, Henrik Håkansson, Runo Lagomarsino, Edgar Martins, Katja Mater, Matt Mullican, Joao Onofre, Lisa Oppenheim, Philomene Pirecki, Dieter Roth, Lisa Tan, Jack Vickridge, Lawrence Weiner, Guido Van Der Werve

Curated by Luiza Teixeira de Freitas and Thom O'Nions

 

Cristina Guerra Contemporary Art

Rua de Santo António à Estrela 33

1350 - 291 Lisboa Portugal

www.cristinaguerra.com

 

 

The exhibition brings together a set of artworks that deal with ways of embedding time, either as a conceptual proposition or within the process of making the artwork itself. Time is rendered by the artwork, produced through it. In Archive Fever Derrida remarks that the process of archivisation ‘produces as much as it records the event’, this is an idea that can be put to many of the works in the exhibition. Through attending to time and its representation they produce their own forms of the present, existing discreetly within themselves and within the context of the exhibition.

 

The title of the exhibition is taken from Milan Kundera’s novel Slowness, which flits between two time periods, events take place in the sedately paced 18th century and a hurried, more fragmented present day. Kundera’s narrative however is written entirely in the present tense, it weaves together temporal and geographical space, the act of narration and the subject of the narrative seemingly occur at the same time. This is an idea that runs through the exhibition, the artworks are a simultaneity of times and speeds that occur in different registers and locations yet taking place within the temporal and physical frame of the gallery.

 

The exhibition revolves around a series of questions, brought about by the interaction of ideas of time and of speed; how do we define the speed of a work of art? Does a work dictate its own pace, or is its pace imposed upon it by a viewer? Can an exhibition be conceived of as a collection of relative speeds?

 

Marinetti maintained in his Manifesto of Aeropainting that the act of being in a plane could in itself be an artwork, an ‘aerosculpture’ formed through a ‘harmonious and signifying composition of coloured smokes offered to the brushes of dawn and dusk, and long vibrant beams of electric light’. The assertion that movement in itself constitutes an artwork when framed in a certain way aptly expresses the relationship between time, speed and movement that the exhibition explores.

 

 

 

Difference and Repetition (An Exhibition in Four Stages)

May 9 - June 23, 2012

 

Carlos Zílio, Felix Gmelin, Haris Epaminonda, Héctor Zamora, Lisa Tan, Mabe Bethônico

Curated by Jacopo Crivelli Visconti

 

Galeria Raquel Arnaud

Rua Fidalga, 125

Vila Madalena

05432-070 São Paulo

Brasil

www.raquelarnaud.com

 

 

In his User’s Guide to Détournement, Guy Debord argues that one of the most efficient strategies for social insubordination is the appropriation, or détournement, of extraneous phrases and concepts for revolutionary purposes. Debord identified various types of détournements, among them the minor détournement, in which appropriate words or phrases possess no importance of their own, acquiring it, instead, by virtue of the new context in which they are used, and especially the deceptive détournement, in which the appropriate concept is intrinsically meaningful but takes on a different dimension and a value according to the new context into which it flows. The phrase that lends its name to the exhibition evidently belongs to the latter type: taken from a recent interview with [Brazilian architect] Paulo Mendes da Rocha, in its original context it referred to the need for a revolution in the methodologies of civil construction and, metonymically speaking, in cities and in society as a whole. Within the new context, the phrase retains its fascination while taking on other meanings pointing, first of all, to an art gallery’s constant need for transforming itself, for keeping in touch with the ongoing changes in artistic production and (one might also speak here of metonymy, or even of premonition) of society itself. Evidently, the greater and more prestigious the gallery’s history, the more pressing and arduous such a task becomes...

 

The architect says that revolution must be made little by little. Initially organized in smaller and more conceptually cohesive groups, then finally rearranged according to other criteria in the final reprise, the works gathered here indeed suggest a prolonged revolution, of the sort that does not make it into the history books, perhaps not even into the art history books, for the simple reason that they do not begin or end – they merely happen. And, in fact, the choice of subject matter for the first three stages of the exhibition responds precisely to the desire to regard a single universe from several distinct albeit complementary perspectives. It is also no accident that the majority of the works might fit perfectly into yet another one of these curatorial landmarks: the revolution is magmatic, fluid, like a river that is never the same and that, nonetheless, never changes. On the other hand, the decision to divide the exhibition into stages responds to a desire to disengage from convention, such as the one that dictates, to a gallery, the need to exhibit only “its” own artists, or of not repeating the same work in two consecutive exhibitions, or even of not attempting to construct a narrative that dares to expand beyond the few weeks’ duration of a conventional show. Finally, to disengage from preconceptions that might prevent the revolution from taking place, the first of which, naturally, is the convention that a revolution must be swift, surprising and violent when, in fact, it ought to happen incrementally, taking whatever time may be necessary time in order to occupy and change the world while no one is looking.

 

part 1.

Difference and Repetition

 

Before deciding definitely that the title of the first stage of A revolução tem que ser feita pouco a pouco [The Revolution Must Be Made Little by Little] would be Diferença e repetição [Difference and Repetition], a quite extensive albeit relatively simple search was carried out to verify whether, in fact, there had been other exhibitions with the same title in recent years. Naturally, there were, the last of them having been held only a few months ago, when preparations for the present show were already well underway and, to all intents and purposes, the title had already been decided upon. In this particular event the coincidence (which, in other cases, might have been unfortunate), the fact wound up validating the decision to reflect upon the problem and, more specifically, about the manner in which the idea of repetition which is, nevertheless, always different, constitutes a recurring subject and, in spite of this, is always open to new interpretations and readings, within the field of art and, more generally, within that of contemporary culture. Naturally, the most direct reference is to the book by Gilles Deleuze whence the title was (in this and in other cases) détourned, although another, no less important allusion is made to Pierre Menard, a character in a short story by Borges whose most astonishing enterprise was not that of rewriting two chapters (and part of a third) of Don Quijote, but of writing passages of a book utterly different from the one written by Cervantes, in spite of the fact that the two were exactly identical, line by line and word for word. Equally as pertinent, and in a much closer manner to what is stated by Deleuze himself, it might be argued that, in this, Menard gave proof of no particular ability given that, it is quite simply impossible to remake anything. The more alike, the more distinctly different two versions of a given work, a given image or (it may be worth considering) a given idea will be.

 

Within the specific field of artistic output during the last few decades, these problems have remained in the order of the day, to the point that they constitute the central subject of the work of several artists, from appropriationists who may already be considered “historical” (such as Elaine Sturtevant and Sherrie Levine) to more recent exponents for whom the decision to repeat – albeit with inevitable differences – becomes a political act (Sandra Gamarra), a near-philosophical method of study and reflection (Roni Horn) or a passionate tribute (Jonathan Monk). On the other hand, to the artists included in this exhibition, the question is not fundamental, and it is precisely this consideration that eventually justifies the bringing together of their works, somehow underscoring how much – by pointing out both difference and repetition – of what we do emphasizes the existence of relationships. This notion is evidently central to the work of Lisa Tan, a series of portraits of book “couples”, fruit of the fusion of the artist’s own library with that of her partner. In some cases, the editions are the same, the pair is identical, in others, small or great disparities suggest that any relationship is born from the sum of differences and resemblances, and with the challenge of surviving both. The search for a relationship is also what moves the O Colecionador [The Collector] project by Mabe Bethônico, in which the artist gives in to a temptation (or mania) for taxonomy, compulsively accumulating newspaper clippings with similar albeit never completely identical images, successively classified according to extremely precise typologies, as though this archival fury might help it – and us – to understand the world. A world from which the images of Haris Epaminonda brings us sparse fragments: in making Polaroid camera reproductions of pictures originally shot in the 1950s, the Cypriot artist composes an elegy to time past even as he conducts to its extreme the debate on the impossibility of reproducing anything in different contexts and periods. Héctor Zamora’s swarm of Zeppelins (which had previously invaded Venice in 2009) explores other implications for the concept of repetition by being not only the result of the serialization of a form but a work that aspired to become an urban legend – that is, to be repeated differently each time, until it completely lost all control over itself and became genuinely public. Analogously, the power of the nails drawn by Carlos Zílio in the late 1970s for a series of silk screens (again, repetition, here in the guise of “technical reproduction”...) lies in serialization – in this instance evidently charged with the political messages and metaphors that marked the country’s best work of that period, in a tacit yet powerful invitation to insurrection. The same invitation that animated Gert Conradt’s 1968 film, in which film school students run through Berlin bearing a red flag. Twenty-five years later, in filming an almost identical sequence on video with his students and projecting the two side by side, Felix Gmelin pays tribute to his father, one of the students/actors in the original video, but also points out the fact that, à la Menard, “my film is about something completely different [from Conradt’s original], in spite of the fact that I repeat the same actions”. In the artist’s words, and in a manner surprisingly pertinent to the scope of this exhibition, Gmelin suggests that the principal difference the present day and the time in which his father and Conradt made the original film is that they “were convinced that revolution was the method that would succeed in changing the world”.

 

- Jacopo Crivelli Visconti

 

 

 

PRIVATE VIEW IV

20 April 2012 - 31 May 2012

 

Katarina Burin, Damien Cadio, Andreas Chwatal, Nana Dix, Jeff Grant, Daniel Robert Hunziker, Peter Riss, Stefan Sandner, Matt Saunders, Felix Schramm, Lisa Tan, Cornelius Völker

 

Andreas Grimm München

Türkenstrasse 11

D-80333 Munich

Germany

www.andreasgrimmgallery.com

 

 

PRIVATE VIEW IV gives the viewer an extensive overview of the gallery artists, whose works have been collected and exhibited in museums and institutions worldwide. Their works have been widely published as artists monographs, in prominent art journals, and among critical theory texts.