Thursday, November 13, 2008

Laura Lancaster: "Ego Documents", Kunstmuseum, Bern, Switzerland


Ego Documents. The Autobiographical in Contemporary Art 14 November 2008 - 15 February 2009

List of artists
Darren Almond, Sadie Benning, Louise Bourgeois, Annatina Graf, Mona Hatoum, Xiaoyuan Hu, On Kawara, Martin Kippenberger, Isabelle Krieg, Elke Krystufek, Laura Lancaster, Nicolas Nixon, Jan Peters, Jack Pierson, Anri Sala, Vittorio Santoro, Carolee Schneemann, Annelies Strba, Ana Strika, Pascale Wiedemann/Daniel Mettler.

In her first exhibition in the Museum of Fine Arts Bern, the new curator of the contemporary department, Kathleen Bühler, will be taking as her theme what is autobiographical in contemporary art as an instrument of self-representation and self-discovery. The exhibition will be showing works from the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts Bern and from private collections as well as some works created expressly for the exhibition by young Swiss and international artists.


"Ego Documents" is a collective concept for any kind of autobiographical self-testimony. The autobiography is more than a self-portrait: It is a retrospective and presents the finding of an individual identity in a narrative or documentary process.

In a time in which the borders between public and private, fictitious and real are continually being redefined, the presentation of one's own life can come under fire in the tension between contradictory impulses. Contemporary artists in particular are subject to pressure by the art market to present resumes that are as intriguing as possible.

This exhibition illustrates the fact that although what is autobiographical in art can be a narcissistic reflection of self, it can also be of service in the search for the ego or in the dialogue with transience.

Supported by
Foundation GegenwART, Dr. h.c. Hansjörg Wyss

The Exhibition

Opening
Thursday, November 13, 2008, 18h30

Duration
14.11.2008 - 15.2.2009

Curator
Kathleen Bühler

Opening Hours
Tuesday 10h - 21h
Wednesday to Sunday 10h - 17h
Holidays 24.12.08, 31.12.08, 1.1.09, 2.1.09: 10h - 17h; 25.12.08: closed

Entrance Fee
CHF 14.- / red. CHF 10.-

Francis Gomila and Cecilia Stenbom: "Connecting Principles" Culture Lab, Newcastle University, UK



Connecting Principle: Dialogue is a 2 day public event on Thursday and Friday November 13th and 14th at Newcastle University showcasing work in progress by artists in collaboration with other researchers.

Creative projects will take place throughout the Fine Art Building and Culture Lab, with collaborators from the UK, Germany, Australia and Canada. The event will present 15 diverse activities investigating the dialogue between research methodologies including discussions, performances, installations, transmissions and other works.

http://www.ncl.ac.uk/connectingprinciple/

image:
Cecilia Stenbom
The Protocol
2008
HD Video
Film Duration 27 Minutes (looped)
Courtesy of the artist and Workplace Gallery, UK

Thursday, November 06, 2008

Catherine Bertola: "THE INTERTWINING LINE" Cornerhouse, Manchester, UK


THE INTERTWINING LINE
DRAWING AS SUBVERSIVE ART
From Fri 7 November to Sun 11 January 2009

ARTISTS
Catherine Bertola, Rachel Goodyear, Margaret Harrison, Melanie Jackson, Naomi Kashiwagi, Ulrike Lienbacher, Dan Perjovschi, Guto Nobrega, Sissu Tarka
CURATOR
Tereza Kotyk

The Intertwining Line explores early and contemporary animation and its intertwined relationship with contemporary drawing. The exhibition features work by nine artists, including internationally acclaimed artists Dan Perjovschi and Margaret Harrison, a new generation of British artists, such as Melanie Jackson, Rachel Goodyear and Naomi Kashiwagi, alongside screenings of Czech animations and films selected from the Tricky Women festival. Animation is often considered to be childlike entertainment, however the radical potential of the medium has a long history - whether this is the implicit social criticism that is hidden within early Czech animation, or the use of humour to create powerful social commentary in modern artists’ animations. Drawing also has this potential and this can be through meticulously crafted images that merely hint at social unease or speedily drawn sketches which carry a powerful charge of immediacy to create political statements.

"TOMORROW THE FUTURE" curated by WORKPLACE, Fishmarket Gallery, Northampton, UK


Mon 03 Nov 2008 - Sat 22 Nov 2008

The Fishmarket is proud to welcome artists selected by Workplace Gallery in Gateshead for a special group show.

TANYA AXFORD Hula Hoops incessantly in a pitch-black room. Randomly exposed by oversensitive ‘slave’ camera flashes triggered by an intermittently firing strobe she circumnavigates performance, photography and sculpture.

Well known for his eclectic use of material ERIC BAINBRIDGE has spent his career reconsidering modernism. In Untitled 2008 Sausages and Melamine combine to revel in their own redundancy – visually heroic yet utterly futile.

Old TV sets play DARREN BANKS' re-cut videos from found movies in which Public Sculpture and Armageddon emerge as dominant themes for the present.

Christina Is Not Well after a heavy night out In Sunderland in SOPHIE LISA BERESFORD'S film, which inadvertently explores biography, social commentary and visceral sculptural presence to loud effect.

Human presence is the basis of CATHERINE BERTOLA'S archaeologies. In Flights of Fancy she re-inhabits found C19th glass photographs, posing as a middle class Lady in a Victorian interior.

CATH CAMPBELL presents the interior and exterior space of architecture as one through her intricate perspective drawings on paper that move from object to image to object again via her precise cutting away with a scalpel.

HUGO CANOILAS' arrangement of found and painted objects combines figuration, abstraction and political symbolism to resurrect the energy and ideology of the original avant-garde.

JOE CLARK'S film Gateshead Light Sequence features the humble street lamp shifting through degrees of luminescent intensity via an animated sequence of still photographs at night.

In 'Cadences' MARCUS COATES takes the last bars at the end of pastoral symphonies to construct a new audio landscape.

JO COUPE'S centrifugally cast bronze works fuse high precision jewellery techniques with botanical expertise to explore a complex relationship between beauty and decay.

JENNIFER DOUGLAS brings together carefully selected materials to create a discourse between the material world in which the work exists, and the imagined worlds that form the basis for her sculpture.

ASHLEY HIPKIN'S sculptures examine the memory and ethics of function and use through the combination of reconstructed objects from the past cut up, replicated, reformed and painted with the obsolete colours of yesterday.

Like a Polaroid fading into focus the identities of the subjects of LAURA LANCASTER'S paintings are never clear. This state of flux and fluidity allows the works to exist in a temporal, ambiguous space reaffirming the anonymity of the found photographs that she works from.

RACHEL LANCASTER takes photographs of seemingly insignificant passing shots from ‘cult’ films and television programmes. Her paintings from these photographs interrogate the seemingly unimportant moments of a greater narrative - a blurred portrayal of a corridor from Teenwolf or a car bonnet from The Sopranos. Divorced physically from the story her paintings maintain a mysterious connection with ‘the event’ and a cinematic monumentality.

ANT MACARI'S drawings function at once as a schematic, developmental process and constitute the resolution of ideas themselves. Through drawing and writing he communicates a tacit understanding of the culture that has made him.

PAUL MERRICK combines painting with sculpture, and the made with the ready-made. Investigating colour, shape and architectural arrangement whilst consistently referencing back to Painting as a subject and discipline in and of itself.

PAUL MOSS' work responds to the particularity of the urban environment by conflating hand-made processes with manufactured materials to form motifs that reference the information culture that we live in and also pure abstraction and modularity.

GINNY REED'S photographs are residues and remnants of performance events. Party Hard is incidental, monumental and autobiographical in the same moment, finding a new position between documentation and the authoritative image.

RICHARD RIGG'S work resonates within its own solipsistic self-referentiality. The work is its own context. Object, function and aesthetics combine to find a reductive equilibrium through which he re-examines the minimal strategy in art, moving its flawed logic towards an aesthetic endgame.

Using herself as a template for the individual and challenging the notion of self in today’s media-obsessed society through mediated mainstream reportage

CECILIA STENBOM presents the ideal of the perfect person as an unachievable but self consciously striven-for entity.

MILES THURLOW'S work is deliberately paradoxical - at once conceptually sophisticated and aesthetically bare. Referencing the demise of modernism and the rise of quick fix, cheap alternatives his work investigates the architecture of modern day living and our relationship with the products of consumer culture.

WOLFGANG WEILEDER'S long exposure photographs are of the sculptural rebuilding of specific houses and architecture. Constructed and deconstructed one façade at a time Weileder’s architectures are displaced and isolated through location, labour and time. These ephemeral, time based events become translucent images of urban regeneration portraying haunting civic visions of a possible future.

Image "It's Not The End Of The World", Darren Banks, 2007, Single Channel Video.

www.workplacegallery.co.uk