Friday, April 01. 2011
Via Analix Forever via Domus web
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Concrete Islands / 9–17 April 2011
Curated by Elias Redstone for Analix Forever
Andreas Angelidakis (Greece)
Iwan Baan (The Netherlands)
Frédéric Chaubin (France)
mounir fatmi (Morocco)
Niklas Goldbach (Germany)
Vernissage: Saturday 9 April 2–8pm / drinks from 5pm
Analix Forever’s first show in Paris
6 rue Elzévir, 75003 Paris
Open daily 11am–7pm
www.archiemo.wordpress.com
www.analix-forever.com
Concrete Islands is a group exhibition of photography and video exploring contemporary experiences of utopian architectural projects. For many architects modernism was a physical manifestation of human progress and, as architectural historian Colin Rowe wrote in The Architecture of Good Intentions, “The architect could stipulate an intrinsic connection between the form of his buildings and the condition of society.” The works in Concrete Islands, by a selection of international contemporary artists, document, celebrate and critique architectural projects designed with inherent social and political values that now exist in various stages of inhabitation, dereliction and destruction.
The influence of architects to control space and determine its social structures alters over time. The artists each provoke an emotional response from the architecture as they find it now, adding their own narrative and interpretation, and exposing new relationships between the architecture, society and nature. As the title Concrete Islands suggests, what we find is architecture that exists in some form of isolation – whether that is geographical, social or ideological.
Andreas Angelidakis often introduces fiction and fantasy into his work to reveal truths about architecture. The film ‘Troll’ tells the story of a modernist, low-income apartment building in Athens that wants to be a mountain. The building, called Chara (‘Joy’) was built by Spanos and Papailiopoulos architects in 1960, taking up an entire city block with a network of interior gardens. Over time it has felt the effects of Athens’ extensive urbanization and deteriorating economy. Angelidakis takes a leap of imagination, suggesting that the accumulation of plants and soil in this garden-housing overtakes the architecture and Chara wants to become a mountain and leave the city altogether. Angelidakis suggests that ruins are just buildings on their way to becoming nature.
Iwan Baan’s work is characterized by his portrayal of people in architecture, revealing the context, society and environment around architecture. He has photographed two of the most ambitious urban projects of the 20th century, Chandigarh and Brasília, both conceived out of political agendas and presenting the future as conceived by its creators. Baan’s images show real life taking place in these two invented cities that have adapted to everyday social rituals and basic needs. Oscar Niemeyer’s Museu Nacional provides little protection from the elements within Brasília’s urban plan laid out by Lúcio Costa. A young man remains enthusiastic as he is drenched in the rain, while small crowds find shelter under the building’s entrance ramps. In Le Corbusier’s Palace of the Assembly in Chandigarh two men are viewed bathing and dressing themselves through the perforated concrete façade. Whether they live or work in the building is ambiguous, but here they have found a space suitable to conduct their morning routine.
Over the course of many journeys to Eastern Europe and Asia between 2003 and 2010, Frédéric Chaubin has been searching for and photographing atypical examples of architecture dating from the late Soviet era. Largely located in regions on the periphery of the former USSR, such buildings are defined by a utopian formal language uncharacteristic of the standard paradigms of Soviet state architecture. The buildings express the dreams of architects that were educated within a strict Soviet system yet, perhaps as a paradox, managed to achieve immense creative freedom in their work. According to Chaubin, this diversity of architectural style during the late 1970s is an expression of the demise in Soviet totalitarian homogeneity. His deliberate enhancement of the dramatic dimension to these buildings pays homage to the imagination of those non-conformist architects and underscores the fictional dimension of history.
Le Val Fourré was built in the 1960s in the Parisian banlieue of Mantes-la-Jolie as a large scale, optimistic project to meet the increased demand for homes in the city. Densely populated, under resourced and poorly integrated with public transport, the residential project has become a place of escalating frustrations and civil unrest since the 1990s. During a residency at Le Chaplin in Mantes-la-Jolie, mounir fatmi made several films documenting the gradual demolition of Le Val Fourré. ‘Architecture Now! Etat des lieux #1’ focuses on an individual apartment as it is torn down by a bulldozer. The men demolishing the building are as absent from view as its former residents, leaving the social implications of such an act to the imagination. As the architecture is slowly destroyed, nature is revealed.
‘Gan Eden’, a film by Niklas Goldbach, also inverts the relationship between architecture and nature. It was filmed in 2005 in the remains of the Dutch pavilion designed by MVRDV for the World Expo 2000 in Hanover, Germany. The pavilion was intended as a multi-level park but was left to decay when the Expo closed. Goldbach’s film sees two men cruising in the decaying pavilion as an act of re-appropriation. In a text in the accompanying catalogue, the architects celebrate the creation of a new ruin in this transition from utopia to distopia. Overcome by nature, the pavilion became the park it had always aspired to be.
About the artists
Andreas Angelidakis runs an experimental practice in Athens, Greece, that is involved in building, designing and speculating the contemporary ecosystem of screens and landscapes. His medium is habitation, of buildings, clouds, spaces, furniture, videos, online communities or exhibition spaces, and operates at the intersection of systems: Art and Architecture, Virtual and Real, Building and Nature, Ruin and Construction. His work has been exhibited at the Venice Architecture Biennale, Sao Paolo Biennial, ExperimentaDesign in Lisbon, and Espace Culturel Louis Vuitton and Jeu de Paume in Paris.
www.angelidakis.com
Dutch photographer Iwan Baan is known primarily for images that narrate the life and interactions that occur within architecture. Born in 1975, Iwan grew up outside Amsterdam and studied at the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague. He collaborates with many architects including Rem Koolhaas, Herzog & de Meuron, SANAA, Frank Gehry, Toyo Ito and Zaha Hadid. His photography has been featured in exhibitions at MoMA in New York and the Architectural Association in London. He has also conducted documentary projects across Africa, Asia and Latin America.
www.iwan.com
Frédéric Chaubin, born in Cambodia, is an artist, writer and editor-in-chief of Citizen K magazine for the last fifteen years. His photography considers architecture as an expression of its historical, cultural and anthropological condition. In 2003 he began a seven year project photographing unusual structures within the former USSR. 'Cosmic Communist Constructions Photographed' was published by Taschen in 2011. Solo exhibitions include ZKM Museum of Contemporary Art, Karlsruhe, and the Storefront for Art and Architecture, New York.
www.fredericchaubin.com
mounir fatmi was born in Tangier, Morocco in 1970. His practice involves constructing visual spaces and linguistic games that aim to free the viewer from their preconceptions. His videos, installations, drawings, paintings and sculptures bring to light our doubts, fears and desires. His work was featured in Paradise Now! Essential French Avant-Garde Cinema 1890-2008 at the Tate Modern in London and Traces du Sacré at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris.
www.mounirfatmi.com
German artist Niklas Goldbach creates video, sculpture and photographic works that focus on dystopic aspects of architecture. Gan Eden is the second in a series of videos about utopia in urban culture. His films have been screened at the International Architecture Film Festival Rotterdam, Temporary Kunsthalle Berlin and the Barbican, London. He was an artist in residence at the Palais de Tokyo, Paris, in 2007/08.
www.niklasgoldbach.de
Google has launched a close copy of Facebook's Like button that will crowdsource people's opinions to help the search engine know what's valuable online. Called +1, the button will appear on Web pages and alongside search results, enabling users to signal that they appreciated a piece of content. Google will track clicks of the button to hone search results, using clicks from your friends as a signal of what is most relevant to you.
The search company announced the new feature today, saying:
It's called +1—the digital shorthand for "this is pretty cool."
A YouTube video introduces the feature, which will be "slowly rolling out" on Google.com, at first for users of the English version. Google's new feature is very similar to one built by both rival Bing and search startup Blekko. Both use data from Facebook Like buttons to have your friends' opinions tune your search results.
However, your social network is something of a blind spot to Google, which doesn't have the same understanding of your social connections that Facebook does. Initially the +1s of your Google chat buddies and contacts will be used to "enhance" your results, the company says, while eventually +1s from your Twitter contacts might also be taken into account. At launch, though, +1 seems likely to be somewhat hamstrung by Google's lack of a detailed social "graph" for its users.
When Google previously tried to remedy that, it enraged people by guessing at whom its users were friends with from their e-mail activity, and pitching them into a copy of Twitter called Buzz. Coincidentally, the FTC today delivered its verdict on the debacle, labeling Google's behavior an example of "deceptive privacy practices."
Yet Google's hunger for a better understanding of your social network, and hence whose opinions it should use to tune your search results, is only going to be heightened by the launch of +1. Expect to see Google make renewed efforts to launch features and tools that capture social connections in coming months.
Personal comment:
With the actual hype word "crowdsourced", we can see a bigger trend coming on: the collaboration between a digital network of "universal computer machines" and a physical network of human brains to achieve tasks that humans can't do (as quickly) or that computers are not able to achieve (recaptcha paradigm). We see more and more network applications where computers either allow to organize a network of brains or literally rely on "organic brains" (a big and first exemple to my knowledge being the Mechanical Turk service by Amazon).
It is therefore a double augmentation: the human brain augmented by the networked computer(s) augmented by the brains. We can possibly see the same effects on contemporary space: the physical space augmented by the digital networked/mediated space augmented by the physical space...
Via Art-Agendawww.art-agenda.com/
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Installation View.
Left: Lygia Clark, "Structuring the Self."
Center: Annette Messager, "My Little Effigies (Mes Petites Effigies)."
Right: Lynn Hershman Leeson, "Self-Portrait as Another Person."
bitforms gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition that explores the sense of touch as a metaphor of bodily presence and an extension across boundary. Actualizing our understandings of public/private and inside/outside, touch is a gesture system. It manipulates physical, social, psychological and electronic domains, aiding in their transformation.
Presenting a cross-generational selection of voices, "Touched: A Space of Relations" includes the work of four prominent artists working in Europe and the Americas. With the earliest work dating from 1966, the exhibition brings into focus a visual conversation between the artists Janine Antoni, Lygia Clark, Lynn Hershman Leeson and Annette Messager.
Highlights from the exhibition include four earlier works showing publicly in NYC for the first time: "Self Portrait as Another Person" (1966-68) by Lynn Hershman Leeson; a 13-part installation of the series "Mes Petites Effigies" (1989-90) by Annette Messager; and two pieces from the series "Mes Trophées" (1986-88) also by Messager.
Linking all the works together is touch's ability to function inside the realms of fantasy, dream or simulacrum. Interior worlds of therapeutic sensation are discovered Lygia Clark's "Structuring the Self" (1976/88), in which relational objects serve as surrogates for physical contact. Also rooted in gesture and care of the body, Janine Antoni's bronze urinal prosthesis, "Conduit" (2009) is paired with the beauty-obsessed "Ingrown" (1998). In "Up Against" (2009) Antoni merges architecture of the home with the body.
As an over arching theme in many of the pieces by Lynn Hershman Leeson is a very human impulse to feel the world around us and then respond to it – as seen in two new interactive installations. For example, "Home Front – Cycles of Contention" picks apart the psychology of a domestic dispute, and in the "!WAR Graphic Novel and Curriculum Guide" an intervention is made within the academic history of the American Feminist Art Movement.
Curated by Laura Blereau
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Touched: A Space of Relations
Janine Antoni
Lygia Clark
Lynn Hershman Leeson
Annette Messager
February 26–April 16, 2011
bitforms gallery nyc
529 West 20th St
New York NY 10011
T 212.366.6939
info@bitforms.com
www.bitforms.com
Exhibition Guide (PDF)
Tue–Sat, 11 AM–6 PM
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