(Event Ticker Requires JavaScript and Flash) Download the latest Flash player
New Residents of Murcia
Sixten Kai Nielsen and Martin Rosengard are founders of the Copenhagen-based Wooloo, an art network that provides an online platform to connect artists around the world. At Manifesta 8, their New Life Residency, "the world's first non-visual residency programme for artists", sees five artists, selected through Wooloo's trademark open-call for artists via their website, working successively one week each in a dark exhibition space, where they are assisted by a local blind guide to create a guided tour, opened to visitors at the end of the week.
Read More
Inside-Out: David Rych at Manifesta 8
The eighth edition of Manifesta, the nomadic European biennial of contemporary art, opened this month in Murcia and Cartagena, two small cities in Southern Iberia off of Spain's well-touristed art track, in the spirit of Manifesta's aim to explore alternative locations and test the ever-expanding art network. Manifesta 8 was curated by three curatorial collectives: Chamber of Public Secrets (CPS), based in Copenhagen and the Middle East, and founded by Khaled Ramadan and Alfredo Cramerotti; Alexandria Contemporary Arts Forum (ACAF), based in Alexandria (Egypt) and founded by Bassam El Baroni; and tranzit.org, a network of autonomous art associations, based in Austria, Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovakia, with curators Vít Havránek, Zbyněk Baladrán, Dóra Hegyi, Boris Ondreička, Georg Schöllhammer. The biennial spread across two cities and various types of buildings, ranging from from museums of modern art to prisons, to the old post and telegraph office. Each team commissioned some 30 artists to respond to Manifesta's request of a dialogue with northern Africa, in particular focussing on the boundaries of 21st Century Europe.
Read More
East of (and Late to) Eden
One July afternoon in 1993, the 23-year-old founder of London gallery Factual Nonsense, Joshua Compston, staged an eccentric street fair called A Fête Worse than Death in the heart of Shoreditch. It comprised artists, not galleries. Last week, some of the participants gathered at Whitechapel Gallery to talk "Art and London's East End," and to discuss whether the scrappy ole' days might return to the very professional and serious neighborhoods.Amidst all the nostalgia, it was hard not to discuss how far they'd come! Maureen Paley (now of Maureen Paley Gallery), Greg Muir (a director of Hauser and Wirth), Kate MacGarry (Kate MacGarry Gallery), and Iwona Blazwick (Director of Whitechapel Gallery) all have moved up the ranks with their neighborhood. Blazwick set the stage with an abridged history of Twentieth Century East London, which began as a cargo yard. The onset of the plastic container made it "a ghost town, a vast track of uninhabited land." Plastic, it seems, made the art boom possible.
Read More
Ground Beneath Their Feet
Last week a panel of six international architects and curators gathered under the aegis of Tate Modern and The Delfina Foundation to discuss new ways in which the architecture of domination can be reused by those it once dominated. Stemming from the new residency exchange between The Delfina, the London-based organization that aims to promote artistic exchange between the UK and the Middle East and North Africa, and the Bethlehem-based architecture studio Decolonizing Architecture, the panel was chaired with deadpan humor by the writer and curator Shumon Basar, who compared the structure of the evening to Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody" or Wings' "Jet," saying, "the whole is comprised with a series of dissimilar episodes which slowly build up to an awe-inspiring finale." The purpose of the panel, it soon transpired, was to present the theory informing the practice's projects, and (as academic events go) publicize their call for residencies in Bethlehem.
Read More
Or
Stuart Hawkins says she was never any good at drawing. Upon deciding she to be an artist in the first grade, she arranged toys and stuffed animals, ev
