Tuesday, August 28, 2007

Stalking with Stories





Stalking with Stories: The Pioneers of the Un-Rememberable

curated by Antonia Majaca and Ivana Bago

September 19 to November 3, 2007

apexart
291 Church Street
New York, NY 10013

Participating artists:

Zbynek Baladran
Alejandro Cesarco
Felix Gmelin
Sanja Ivekovic
David Maljkovic
Ahmet Öğüt
Artur Zmijewski
Katarina Seda


Stalking with Stories: The Pioneers of the Un-Rememberable

Giorgio Agamben, when contemplating about the 'un-rememberable', reflects on an unintentional memory and concludes that exactly this memory that doesn’t remember is the most powerful memory of all. According to the Russian writer and theorist Svetlana Boym there are two types of nostalgia: the first, restorative nostalgia, tries to reconstruct the lost root that nobody remembers, while reflexive nostalgia, which she locates in art, doesn't try to reconstruct a space or field of home but rather reflects it’s strength, power and time and it can be not retrospective but prospective. It is a thought of the past as a potential, i.e., it is about 'watching' dreams through which we can think about the future. In this equation, there is no rupture between past and future. This triangle between Remembering- Forgotten- Reconstructed is what the Stalking with Stories focuses on. The works in the show can seam like contemporary 'genre scenes' that (un)intentionally take up roles of nostalgia triggers causing, in Agamben's words - brief and fragmented awakening. The works involve navigating real and imagined territories and time - geographic, political, economic and social by revealing how the personal and communal forgotten or 'un-rememberable' construct the nostalgia of/for the future. Thus, the show that presents the works of eight international artists functions as an archive of parallel micro-narratives, expanding on the notion of derive - radical wandering of, in this case, a 'time-flaneur', as a means of touching upon different chronotops. The exhibition strives at formulating an unstable and fragmentary cartography where spatial and time collisions often result in conditions close to pseudo-modernist melancholy. Finally, it reveals how cultural mythologies are inscribed into personal Time-Space-Memory equation

Antonia Majaca & Ivana Bago are the curators of G-MK| Galerija Miroslav Kraljevic, a non-profit contemporary art space in Zagreb, Croatia

www.apexart.org

Sunday, August 26, 2007

Emergency Biennale in Chechnya

World Tour/ stop 9 / İstanbul Biennial
Kadıköy Public Education Centre
September 8-November 4, 2007
Curator: Evelyne Jouanno, Paris/ San Francisco
Co-curator : Ceren Erdem, İstanbul

Emergency Biennale in Chechnya wishes to reintroduce Chechnya to international attention while questioning the phenomenon of proliferation of the international biennials. Emergency Biennale in Chechnya underlines the urgent necessity to redefine the critical commitment of art in reality as well as our human responsibility as actors of both artistic and social life. Emergency Biennale opened on 23 February 2005 both in Grozny (different places in the city) and Paris, Palais de Tokyo. This non-budget project was realized as a mobilization with more than sixty international artists who accepted to provide a work and its duplicate created to fit in a suitcase to be shipped to Chechnya and different other cities in the world for mirror exhibitions. After Paris, the travelling exhibition stopped in Brussels (Matrix Art Project), Bolzano (EURAC), Milan (Isola Art Center), Riga, Latvia (Riga City Hall Exhibitions Center), Tallinn, Estonia (Tallinn Art Hall), Vancouver (Centre A) and as a laboratory in Puebla, Mexico (Plataforma). For each stop, new artists are invited with the collaboration of a local curator and additional suitcases are prepared to be sent to Chechnya. The itinerary around the world is planned to end up in Grozny with the meeting of the artworks and their twins. The collection will then become the base of a museum, even if this one remains nomad and virtual for an indeterminate period.

For this 9th stop of Emergency Biennale in Chechnya/World Tour, the co-curator Ceren Erdem invites the artists Ahmet Öğüt, Hüseyin Bahri Alptekin, Banu Cennetoğlu, Ives Maes.
Artists
Adel Abdessemed, A Constructed World, Dennis Adams, Hüseyin Bahri Alptekin, Maria-Thereza Alves, Francis Alÿs, Aija Apse, Maja Bajevic, Ruth Barabash, Rebecca Belmore, Sabine Bitter & Helmut Weber, Aija Bley, Sylvie Blocher, Blue Noses, Mark Boswell & Anton Kozlov, Marc Boucherot, Véronique Boudier, Hernain Bravo, Kristians Brekte, Mathieu Briand, Hank Bull, Santiago Caicedo, Cao Fei, Jota Castro, Banu Cennetoğlu, Raimond Chaves, Chen Shaoxiong, Paolo Chiasera, Magali Claude, José Luis Cortés S., Jeff Derksen, Jimmie Durham, Al Fadhil, Seamus Farrell, Daniel Faust, Carlos Franklin, Fu Jie, Adriana García Galán, Ghazel, Roya Ghiasy, Kaspars Goba, Babak Golkar, Martinš Grauds, Yves Grenet, Gu Dexin, Andris Grinbergs, Daniel Guzmán, Jens Haaning, Han Myung-Ok, Antonia Hirsch, IN[ ]EX, Alfredo Jaar, Uldis Jancis, Edgars Jurjans, Elina Kalnina, Kolkoz, Koo Jeong-A, Roman Korovin, Linards Kulless & Una Meiberga, Neeme Külm, Gabriel Kuri, Surasi Kusolwong, Marco Laimre, Sally Lee, Raimonds Licitis, HH Lim, Armin Linke, Ken Lum, Juan Pablo Macias, Marko Mäetamm, Ives Maes, Gilda Mantilla, Isaac Munoz & Leonardo Marz, Oda Projesi, Jüri Ojaver, Lucy Orta, Damián Ortega, Gionata Gesi Ozmo, Ahmet Öğüt, Adrian Paci, Alexandre Périgot, Emmanuelle Rapin, David Renaud, Thorbjorn Reuter Christiansen, Römer & Römer, Julian Rosefeldt, Gatis Rozenfelds, Mo Salemy, Jayce Salloum, Krišs Salmanis, Juan Esteban Sandoval, Santomatteo, Sarkis, Zineb Sedira, Shen Yuan, Nedko Solakov, Pascale Marthine Tayou, Bert Theis, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Steven Tong, Enzo Umbaca, Anton Vidokle, Cesare Viel, Luca Vitone, Wang Du, Florence Wang, Hans Winkler, Sislej Xhafa, Yan Lei, Yang Fudong, Yang Jie Chang, Zheng Guogu, Zhu Jia, Aiva Zurina.

with the special participation of Alighiero e Boetti (Francis Alÿs project)

http://www.iksv.org/bienal10/english/proje.asp?pid=6