Alla inlägg under september 2009

Av Lars Vilks - 28 september 2009 23:18

  

Öyvind Fahlström, 1928, Sao Paolo (Brazil) - 1976, Stockholm (Sweden)


Born in Sao Paolo to Scandinavian parents, Öyvind Fahlström spent a portion of his adult life in Sweden. Between 1949 and 1952 he studied art history and classical studies at the University of Stockholm and worked as a journalist. After a two-year stay in Paris (1956-1959), he moved to New York in 1961. It was during this era that he began to integrate comic strip and mass media elements into his artwork. It was also at this time that he introduced three-dimensional components into his works, often presenting playful scenarios that encouraged spectator involvement in the exhibitions. Beginning in 1962, he created numerous “happenings,” most of which were presented at the Moderna Museet. These included Aida (1962), Ur Mellanöl 1 and 2, and Fahlströms Hörna (1964). In 1965, he wrote Hammarskjöld om Gud, a play directed by Bröderna Strindberg and Soren Brunes. Brunes also collaborated with Fahlström on Kisses Sweeter than Wine (1966, as part of 9 Evenings). In 1966, Fahlström exhibited his work in the Swedish pavilion at the Venice Biennale. In addition to his visual, theatrical, and literary works, he directed a number of films (Mao-Hope March (1966), U-Barn, East Village, Revolution Now (1968), Du gamla du fria (1971)) and radio plays (Fåglar i Sverige (1963), Den helige Torsten Nilsson (1966), Cellen, collage for radio (1972)). In 1979, the Moderna Museet launched a posthumous travelling retrospective of his work, which closed at the Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris, France) in 1981.


Fahlström has been shown in Documenta, Kassel, 1997 and in the Venice Biennial 2009.


Work in the biennial: The unexpected return of Öyvind Fahlström to Dr. Schweizer’s Last Mission.

Av Lars Vilks - 26 september 2009 11:03

  

Xu Tan was born in Wuhan, Hubei Province in 1957 and currently lives in Shanghai and Guangzhou. In the early 1990s he joined the ”Big Tail Elephant Group” in Guangzhou. The aim of his work is to develop critical strategies for negotiating the rapidly changing economic and cultural life in China. Xu Tan also draws his inspiration from the teachings of philosopher Chuang-Tzu (circa 250 BC). Successor to Lao Tzu and a foremost proponent of Taoism, Chuang-Tzu presumed that no matter how alike two things are, a difference between them can always be found and, conversely, no matter how different two things are, one can find a similarity between them. Objective similarities and differences do not justify any particular way of distinguishing between things.


His work has been shown around the world including P.S.1 in New York, Biennale di Venezia, Berlin Biennial, Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art in Brisbane, Australia, Guangzhou Triennial, Taipei Biennial, De Appel in Amsterdam. Recent solo shows were held at the DAAD Gallery in Berlin, at the Vitamin Creative Space in Guangzhou, at BizArt is Shanghai and the 2009 Venice Biennial.

Work in the biennial: Fake Karaoke in Ladonia and Key Words (an ongoing project to understand the role of the words he has selected as markers of unknowable power).

Av Lars Vilks - 24 september 2009 20:08

  

Cildo Meireles was born in 1948 in Rio de Janeiro, where he still lives and works. His father worked for the Indian Protection Service and, as a boy, the artist accompanied his family on their constant moves throughout the vast Brazilian territory. We often catch glimpses of these childhood experiences through his art.

His work inherited the legacy of Neo-concretism, a Brazilian movement of the late 1950s that rejected the extreme rationalism of geometric abstraction in favour of more sensorial, participatory works, which engage the body as well as the mind. The utopian optimism of the Neo-concrete artists foundered after the coup of 1964, which ushered in an oppressive military regime.

Meireles’s generation, emerging in the late 1960s and 1970s, were known for more politically engaged works, the extremity of their actions mirroring the extreme political situation. Meireles himself, however, links these two strands of Brazilian art.

”In some way you become political when you don’t have a chance to be poetic. I think human beings would much prefer to be poetic”.


Among a few examples of Cildo Meireles’ exhibitions can be mentioned: Documenta, Kassel, 2002, Istanbul Biennial 2003, Venice Biennial 2005, Tate Modern 2008, Venice Biennial 2009.


Work in the biennial: 1. Babel (2001) 2. Pling Pling Again (2009)

Av Lars Vilks - 22 september 2009 21:05

  

SUNIL GAWDE born in Mumbai, India in 1960, studied at J.J School of Art 1980. Since then he has exhibited widely in India. Now he makes his European debut and follows a years residency at the renowned Glasgow School of Art as part of the Charles Wallace Trust Award. Gawde plays with texture which creates a surface which invites the eye.

He first received acclaim in the early 1990s as an abstractionist who combined the powerful sweep of gesture with a minute calibration of effects. As he developed his approach, negotiating between the sensuality of his material and the elusiveness of what lay just out of reach of form, he came to be recognised as a strong claimant to the mantle of the established Indian abstractionist styles.

Gawde’s work has been exhibited at Sh Contemporary (Shanghai, 2007), Pulse Miami (Miami, 2008), and in Venice Biennial 2009.


Work in the biennial: Metallic Butterfly

Av Lars Vilks - 21 september 2009 18:01

  


Moshekwa Langa is a visual artist working with drawings, installations, videos, paintings, and photography. He was born in 1975 in South Africa and attended different government schools in the then Lebowa area, part of a series of homelands created for different ethnic groups with an education system tailored to fit people from those places. In 1989, Moshekwa enrolled in the former Max Stibbe Waldorf School (now called Ubuntu Centre) in the greater Pretoria region. The Waldorf School was based on the philosophies of Rudolf Steiner and the anthroposophical societies. Upon completing his high school studies, he spent two years in a period of introspection and experimentation. He made drawings and sculptural works and wrote texts pertaining to his life and situation in the dawning new country. He also worked as a contributing producer on an arts and culture program called The Works for the South African broadcasting corporation. From 1997-98, Langa then attended the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten in Amsterdam.


He has participated in numerous public discussions and forums, television and radio specials, and his work has been presented in monographic and group exhibitions such as: The Johannesburg Biennale (1997), The Sao Paulo Biennale (1998), The Short Century: History and Liberation Movements in Africa 1945-1994 (Villa Stuck, 2001), Generation Z (P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, 2002), Ars 01 (Kiasma, 2002), The 50th Venice Biennale (2003), Looking Both Ways (Museum for African Art, New York, 2003). His solo shows include: Live and in Person (The Renaissance Society, Chicago, 1998), Another Time, Another Place (The Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg, 2001), Present + Tense (Düsseldorf Kunstverein, 2004), Moshekwa Langa (Maxxi Museum, Rome, 2005), and The man who cast no shadows (Tache-Levy Gallery, Brussels, 2006), The 53rd Venice Biennale (2009).


Work in the biennale: Temporal Distance (With Criminal Intent). You Will Find Us in the Best Places. (Installation)



Av Lars Vilks - 14 september 2009 17:22

  

Sherrie Levine

born 1947 in Hazletown / Pennsylvania; lives and works in New York. Sherrie Levine made her first public appearance on the occasion of a 1977 exhibition organized by Douglas Crimp for the alternative "Artists Space" in New York (Pictures, with Robert Longo, Jack Goldstein, and other artists), marking the beginning of the discursive as well as artistic confrontation with a modernistic understanding of art in the context of the postmodern debate. Levine is a central figure of Appropriation Art. Alongside her "rephotographs" of icons from the history of photography ("After Walker Evans," "After Alexander Rodtschenko," and "After Karl Blossfeldt"), she also refers to great Avant-garde artists in her mixed media and sculptural works: the gold-painted urinals of her series "fountain" quote those of Marcel Duchamp, and her "bachelors" made of glass the bachelors from his "Big Glass". Levine’s concept of appropriation allows itself to be understood as a feminist strategy: values such as expressiveness, originality and creativity, traditionally ascribed to male artists, are deconstructed at the same time as their great authors are "used".


"I'm not making the art to make a point or to illustrate a theory. I'm making the picture I want to look at which is what I think everybody does. The desire comes first."

Sherrie Levine


Her work in the biennial: Untitled (After Lars Vilks) 2009

Picture HERE  

Av Lars Vilks - 13 september 2009 21:34

  


Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster (b. 1965, Strasbourg, FR) has come up with an extremely varied range of work ever since she started in the early nineties. It includes film projections, photography and spatial installations, but she also enters into joint ventures with such fellow artists as Pierre Huyghe Liam Gillick and Rikrit Tiravanija. She incorporates different media in her artistic practice such as photography, film and video, and installation. Interested in the transitory interspaces in our everyday environment, her works articulate the relationship between place, object and user/beholder.


She has worked out scenarios for the French chansonnier Christophe, designed displays for Balenciaga's fashion boutiques in New York and Paris and designed a house for a collector in Tokyo. When she won the 'Prix Marcel Duchamp' in 2003 it was a confirmation of her international recognition. The most important group exhibitions she has taken part in include 'Utopia Station', the Venice Biennale (2003), the Tirana Biennale (2003), 'Documenta 11', Kassel (2002), the Liverpool Biennale (2002), the Yokohama Triennale (2001), 'Do it', Museo de Arte Carillo Gil, Mexico DF (2001), 'What If', Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2000), 'Cities on the move', Louisiana Museum, Copenhagen (1999) and the Berlin Biennale (1998). In 2004 she mounted the 'Alphavilles' exhibition at deSingel. It was accompanied by two publications: 'Alphavilles' (208 pages) and 'Tropicalisation' (40 pages). For "Skulptur Projekte" in 2007 in Munster she gave her personal version of the history of this event, creating a theme park composed of 1:4-scale replicas of selected sculptures from exhibitions – concrete and metal quotations of the original works. In 2008 with "TH.2058" in Tate’s Turbine Hall, Dominique Gonzalez Foerster looks 50 years into the future. She is also participating in the Venice Biennale 2009.



Her work for the Ladonia Biennial is a Lecture Performance.



Av Lars Vilks - 9 september 2009 13:56


  

Jorge Otero-Pailos, born 1971, Spain; MIT, Ph.D 2002, is a theorist of contemporary preservation and architecture, whose research probes the boundaries between these two disciplines. He is the Founder and Director of Future Anterior, one of the preeminent scholarly journals of preservation history, theory and criticism.

Otero-Pailos teaches courses on the history and theory of preservation and architecture, which deal with architectural transformation, interpretation, and the history of Modernism in North and South America.


His projects on The Ethics of Dust have been shown in Manifesta 2008, Bolzano and in the Venice Biennial 2009.


VIDEO


Project in Ladonia Biennial: The Ethics of Dust: Wotan’s Tower


Skapa flashcards