nomadaesthetics

Our Magic Hour

2011-08-20T03:31:00.002-07:00

YOKOHAMA 2011 Our Magic Hour
JAPAN
August

Extra Sensory
Performance

From Gutai through Fluxus, to contemporary artists such as, Sachiko Abe and Tatsumi Orimoto Japan is a crucible of innovative and challenging performance and media art. In the context of the thematic strategy of the Yokohama Triennale The ICF convened a series of workshops, meetings and symposium during the opening of the 2011 Triennale to to explore the legacy and future of performance internationally.
Our venue was Noge hana hana in the old city of Yokohama.

Day One : 05.08.11
Workshop 9.30-11.30 | The future is disturbed.
The first workshop was facilitated and moderated by Mark Waugh and translated with support from the Japanese curator Fumiwo Imawoto. With screenings of works and conversation to explore the ways in which artists and curators conceive of the relationship between the artwork and its mediation and how curators working with museums can expand exhibitions beyond the gallery and traditional taxonomies of order.
Keiichi Miyagawa ( Director Gallery Soap ) what is a medium or Futures for Art Museums?

Meiro Koizumi ( Artist )will discuss the animation of the uncanny in his performances.

Nicola Hood. ( Director Spacex Gallery)What is the future of performance in the museum?

Yelena Gluzman ( Director Science Project) Performance Problem Presents. What is the context of performance in Japan?

Day Two 06.08.2011

ONE: The legacy of Performance: Culture, counter culture, from elites to everyone.
Tatsumi Orimoto (Artist), Masafumi Fukagawa (Curator Kawasaki City Museum): Moderator Mark Waugh.

TWO: How to add one metre to an unknown Mountain or how to perform within a physical and political landscape?
Adelaide Bannerman ( Curator); Ben Ponton (Director Amino) and Blanca de la Torre ( Senior Curator Artium)

THREE: Translated Acts or the impact of curators on the geography of art.
Paul Domela ( Director of Programmes Liverpool Biennial); David A Baily (Director ICF): Sally Lai (Director of Chinese Arts Centre).

DAY Three 07.08.2011
Workshop 10.00 12.00 | Curators have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.
The second workshop explored the role of the curator as a catalyst for infrastructure transformation and how to implement cultural change. It was also the scene of a site specific performnce by artist Kimball Bumstead.

Tom Trevor ( Director Arnolfini) Can artworks survive the gallery?
Anthony Gross ( Director the Old Police Station)Is a DIY vision sustainable?
Sook Kyung Lee ( Curator Tate Liverpool) Why do we collect the ephemeral?

The Black Jacobins: Negritude In A Post Global 21st Century International Symposium.

2011-02-23T06:19:00.000-08:00

24th February - 1st March 2011
Bridgetown, Barbados and Fort-De-France, Martinique.

A major Caribbean symposium that links the past with the present and will present a series of historical works as well as existing contemporary works based on the legacies of two major 20th century figures:
the Trinidadian writer and intellectual C.L.R. James and the Martinique poet and intellectual Aime Cesaire.

In his seminal book The Black Jacobins (1938), C.L.R. James (1901-1989) examines the Haitian (Sainte-Domingue) Revolution of 1791-1803. He analyses revolutionary potential and progress according to economic and class distinctions, rather than racial distinctions. The book is also focused on Toussaint L’ Ouverture as the revolutionary spearhead and organizational leader. Thus, The Black Jacobins discusses Caribbean revolt within the context of colonial slavery and furthermore establishes the first black diasporic anti colonial figure hero.
Aime Cesaire (1913–2008) formulated – together with Leopold Senghor and Leon Gontian Damas – the concept and movement of Negritude, the “affirmation that one is black and proud of it”. Cesaire’s thoughts about restoring the cultural identity of black Africans were first fully expressed in Cahier d’un retour au pays natal (Return To My Native Land, 1939), a mixture of poetry and poetic prose that celebrates the ancestral homelands of Africa and the Caribbean. Negritude has been seen as a major intellectual force that has influenced countless liberational leaders to artistic movements from the Harlem Renaissance to the Black Power Movements.

This symposium is not about re-appraising these two Caribbean lives but about the re-examining their ideas within a visual art performative 21st century Caribbean diaspora context. Both these writers were using their art (in the form of the discourse of literature) as a political weapon. Today, Black Jacobins: Negritude In A Post Global 21st Century refers to the historical movement of diaspora artists from the past to the present rising above the singular narrative or notion of ‘Caribbean art’ to produce works that have a unique signature in style and content. The symposium has two major strands: Historical Iconographies (Barbados) and Contemporary Dialogues (Martinique)

Historical Iconographies explores the period spanning World War II, the movement for Federation within the West Indies, and the move towards Independence as a period of evolving ideologies of self-definition and determination. The work and ideas of both C.L.R. James and Aime Cesaire are evident in or parallel those of several artists (their contemporaries) within the Caribbean and from the diaspora. Perhaps most direct is the meeting and collaboration in 1941 between Cesaire and Cuban artist Wifredo Lam. Cesaire’s exploration and affirmation of Afro-Caribbean culture, which influenced and paralleled Lam’s own, reinforced and expanded his visual-poetic expressions of Afro-Caribbean culture and identity.

This occurred in the context of fertile collaboration with surrealists Andre Breton, and Andre Masson; and their encounter with Hector Hyppolite in Haiti. Pioneering art movements led by artists such as Karl Broodhagen (Guyana, Barbados), Edna Manley (UK, Jamaica), and Carlos Enriquez and Amelia Pelaez (both from Cuba) combine art deco and African imagery to project a newly emerging aesthetic that could speak to national and regional identity. Outside of the region, the innovative performer and choreographer Katherine Dunham introduced ideas of negritude into black modern dance during the 1940s after visiting the Caribbean with Zora Neale Hurston. Jacob Lawrence in 1938 produced a series of 41 paintings entitled Toussaint L’Ouverture. And the image of the black angel as performed by Feral Benga in Jean Cocteau’s film Blood Of A Poet (1930) embraced the iconic moving image work with surrealist ideas (which was at the heart of negritude).

Contemporary Dialogues explores existing moving image and other art works that emerged following the achievement of political independence within much of the West Indies, the revolution in Cuba and the attendant waves of migration north. The 1980s short documentary interview between the Jamaican intellectual Stuart Hall and C.L.R. James, the moving image works by Haitian film director Raul Peck (Man Of The Shore) and by Martinique artist Euzhan Palcy established the centrality of James and Cesaire for successive creators in the region and wider diaspora. Edouard Duval Carrie (Haiti), Jose Bedia (Cuba), Tony Capellan (Dominican Republic), Nick Whittle (UK, Barbados) and Stanley Greaves (Guyana) explore themes of politics, migration and transculturation that convey the challenges and the insights that displacement and exile bring. The place of popular artists such as Amos Ferguson (Bahamas), Francis Griffith (Barbados), Everald Brown and Leonard Daley (Jamaica), and Philip Moore (Guyana) within the evolving national identity also needs greater articulation and contextualizing. Other artists in this context include Lubania Himid, Marc Latime, Isaac Julien and Martina Attille, Joscelyn Gardner, Sonia Boyce, Steve McQueen, Alfredo Jaar, Peter Doig and Luc Tuymans.

The conference is organised by:
David A. Bailey: artist, curator and exhibition organiser; Director, International Curators Forum – London / Bahamas
Dominique Brebion: Advisor for Visual Arts, Direction Régionale des Affaires Culturelles – Martinique
Allisandra Cummins: Director, Barbados Museum and Historical Society, President, National Art Gallery Committee, Barbados
Alain Hauss: Regional Director of Cultural Affairs, Martinique
Allison Thompson: Director, Department of Fine Arts, Barbados Community College; Member, National Art Gallery Committee, Barbados

Programme

Thursday, 24 February 2011
Barbados: Savannah Hotel, Bridgetown
Participants arrive / Registration
7.30: Welcome reception – Introduction by David A. Bailey
8.00: Film Screening: CLR James in conversation with Stuart Hall (1984) by Mike Dibb

Friday, 25 February 2011
Barbados: Savannah Hotel, Bridgetown
8.30–9.30: Registration
9.30–9.45: Madam of Ceremonies: Alissandra Cummins
9.45–10.15: Welcome address by the Minister of Culture: The Hon Steven Blackett
10.15–11:00: Introduction / overview: David A. Bailey
11.00–12.00: Response / panel discussion: Yona Backer, Imruh Bakari, Valerie John, Keith Piper, Andrea Wells
12.00–2.00: Lunch
2.00–4.00: Workshop 1: Euzhan Palcy’s Film Practice – discussion led by Imruh Bakari / Moderator: Suzy Landau
7.30: Film Screening: Aime Cesaire (part 2) (1994) by Euzhan Palcy / Introduction: David A. Bailey

Saturday, 26 February 2011
Barbados: Savannah Hotel, Bridgetown
9.00–12.00: Workshop 2: Mike Dibb – The Art Documentary / Moderator: David A. Bailey
12.00–2.00: Lunch
2.00–4.00: Workshop 3: The Diasporic Black Moving Cube: Yona Backer, Christian Bertin, Valerie John, Suzy Landau, Annette Nias, Keith Piper, / Moderators: David A. Bailey, Allison Thompson
7.30: Film Screening: Muxima (2006) by Alfredo Jaar

Sunday, 27 February 2011
5:00 Flight to Martinique

Monday, 28 February 2011
Martinique: Salle Frantz Fanon - Atrium, Fort-de-France
8.30–9.30: Registration
9.30: Opening remarks
10.00–12.30: Richard J. Powell: The Legacy of CLR James and Aime Cesaire / Moderators: Keith Piper and David A. Bailey
12.30–2.00 Lunch
2.00–4.30: John Franklin: The Legacy of Aime Cesaire / Suzy Landau: Colour Of Words / Moderators: Alissandra Cummins and Dominique Brebion
7.30: Film Screening: Zétwal by Gilles Elie-Dit-Cosaque / Introduction: Dominique Brebion

Tuesday, 1 March 2011
Martinique: Salle Frantz Fanon - Atrium, Fort-de-France
9.30–12.00: Curating in the Caribbean: Dominique Brebion: Think global and act local / Veerle Poupeye and O’Neil Lawrence: New curatorship in Jamaica / Claire Tancons: Curating Carnival / Barbara Prezeau: Haïti au 21eme siècle : l’art des mutants / Jennifer Smit: Curating in Curacao: The Challenges
12:00 – 1:30 Lunch

1.30–4.00: Curating in the Caribbean (Part 2): Haydee Venegas: Paradigms on Latin American and Caribbean art / Sara Herman: Unconscious Curatorships / Winston Kellman: The invisibility of the visual arts in the Barbadian conciousness / Krista A. Thompson: How to Install Art as a Caribbeanist? / Moderator: Allison Thompson
4.00: Vote of thanks: Alfred Alexandre
7.30: Closing Reception

THREE MOMENTS - THE CARIBBEAN

2010-09-17T04:04:00.000-07:00

The Caribbean Pavilion at the Liverpool Biennial

Liverpool Biennial
18.9. – 28.11.2010

@ Contemporary Urban Centre
41-51 Greenland Street
Liverpool L1 0BS
Tuesday - Saturday 11am-6pm,
Sunday 11am-4pm

“How are we to write the histories of non-western societies in relation to modernity? Modernity is, as we know, an extremely slippery signifier, and appears here with as many quote marks as I can muster: and ‘the modern’ in its many derivatives – early modern, late modern, post-modern, modernity, modernism – has long been effectively appropriated to the story of the west, monopolizing for western civilization the privilege of living to the full the potentialities of the present ‘from the inside’.

It is therefore difficult to imagine this story in any way other than as a binary polarity: modernity and its ‘others’. Only two narrative alternatives then seem possible. Either the story is told from within the perspective of modernity itself: in which case it is difficult to prevent it becoming a triumphalist narrative in which the ‘others’ are permanently marginalized.

Or one reorients the story within its margins, seeking by this move to reverse and disrupt the normalised order of things by bringing into visibility all that cannot be seen from, or is structurally obscured by, the usual vantage point.”

Modernity and Its Others: Three ‘Moments’ In The Post-war History of the Black Diaspora Arts by Stuart Hall.

In his groundbreaking essay Stuart Hall re-visits modernity through three historical art movements from the perspective of the Diaspora. It is our intention to use this discourse as the theme of Three Moments, the Caribbean pavilion at the Liverpool Biennial, where these moments are symbolised by the three Caribbean islands states: the Bahamas, Martinique and Barbados.The featured artists – Ewan Atkinson, Ras Ishi Butcher and Ras Akyem-i Ramsey from Barbados, Christian Bertin and David Damoison from Martinique and John Beadle, Blue Curry, Lavar Munroe, Lynn Parotti and Heino Schmid from the Bahamas – were selected on their ability to make work that responds to contemporary and historical global themes.

For the first time artists from the Caribbean region are collectively making new work that responds to the city of Liverpool while maintaining a distinctive stance on what Stuart Hall might call a 21st-century Caribbean modernist aesthetic.

Three Moments is selected and curated by Dominique Brebion (Martinique), Alissandra Cummins (Barbados), Holly Parotti (Bahamas) and Allison Thompson (Barbados) in collaboration with the ICF.

photo © Minako Jackson and Lynn Parotti

Omar Fast

2010-08-06T11:01:00.003-07:00

2010-07-26T16:30:00.000-07:00

European Biennial Network - A Foundation 2008

2010-07-20T10:04:00.000-07:00

European Biennial Network, Saturday 20 September 2008 - part 1 from Liverpool Biennial on Vimeo.

European Biennial Network, Saturday 20 September 2008 - part 2 from Liverpool Biennial on Vimeo.

Do you believe in reality? - The Berlin Biennial.

2010-06-10T08:38:00.001-07:00

“Do you believe in reality? What a question, you’ll reply. Reality isn’t something you believe in. It proverbially catches up with you anyway – always. But then what are we talking about here? Maybe we could talk about the fact that you so often hear people saying something was different ‘in reality’? Or about why it has become so customary to add a ‘really‘ or an ‘actually’ or an ‘in fact’ to so many of the things we say? Let’s talk about the cracks in reality, about the gap between the world we talk about and the world that’s really there. But why this distinction? Because reality is always the other? Or the others? Everything that’s waiting out there?
Let’s talk about the self-deceptions where reality becomes too painful. Let’s talk about the fictional arsenal of the mass media and consumerism, about the rhetoric of distraction and appeasement. Won’t that ultimately lead us to question contemporary art, and its relationship to reality?” – BB6

On the occasion of BB6, the International Curators Forum will mediate a group response to the Biennale’s open question in the form of selected studio visits and presentations with Haegue Yang, Nasan Tur, Libia Castro and Olafur Olafsson, Thomas Kilpper, Ming Wong, Omer Fast, Clemens von Wedemeyer, Mayaan Amir and Ruti Sela. Thinking and moving around this question of what constitutes ‘reality’, each encounter will approach and consider the core question in relation to individual research and practice informed by the conditions of trans-nationality, migration, autonomy and community.

Partipants will include: Kitty Anderson, Adelaide Bannerman, Nadege Derderian, Wiebke Gronemeyer, Karli-Jade Fontiverio Hylton, Shahira Issa, Sally Lai, Axel Lapp, Nigel Prince, Barbara Scheuermann, Gary Thomas and Mark Waugh.

Sydney Biennial - THE BEAUTY OF DISTANCE: Songs of Survival in a Precarious Age

2010-05-24T08:52:00.000-07:00

Art Gallery Of New South Wales
Art Gallery Road
Domain Theatre
Lower Level 3
Sydney
NSW 2000

14th 15th May 2010

www.bos17.com
www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/events/cal/biennale_2010_forum?clicked_date=2010-05-14

This two-day forum relates to the core elements around which the 17th Biennale of Sydney – THE BEAUTY OF DISTANCE: Songs of Survival in a Precarious Age – has been built. It starts from a critical consideration of the external forces and hierarchies that affect how we perceive art – forces in relation to which modern and contemporary art have traditionally been defined.

By bringing together speakers from many different disciplines and cultures, the forum also examines the increasingly important (but still neglected) field of comparative aesthetics.

Moving between the ideas and languages of pre-modernity, modernity and now, we consider art’s positive power and critical role, how this relates to different worlds and how it has been used as a means of either reinforcing or subverting ideas of materialism and property, or, alternatively, as an expression of non-material or metaphysical value.

Friday, 14 May 2010

* 9.30am: Registration
* 10am: Introduction
* 10.10 am: Poverty, freedom and rights
Panel: Steven Loft, Leah Gordon, Amareswar Galla, Enrique Chagoya, Margaret Levi (chair)

12noon: Lunch
* 1pm: Is it smart to be materialist?
Panel: Fred Tomaselli, Gonkar Gyatso, Megan Tamati-Quennell, Apinan Poshyananda (chair)
* 2.40pm: History, experience, truth and empathy
Panel: Bruce Ferguson, Fiona Pardington, Dana Claxton, Teka Selman, Catriona Moore (chair)

* 4.20 pm: Chto Delat: Tower Songspiel, Olga Egorova (presents a new work)

Saturday, 15May 2010

* 9.30am: Registration
* 10am: Introduction
* 10.10 am: First people, diaspora and fourth worlds
Panel: Ngahiraka Mason, Kent Monkman, Claudio Dicochea, Brenda Croft (chair)
* 11.50 am: Communities, commons, copyright
Panel: Ben White, Eileen Simpson, Gerald McMaster, Larissa Behrendt/Terri Janke (chair)

* 1.20pm: Lunch
* 2.30pm: Curating what?
Panel: James Putnam, Hu Fang, David A Bailey, Pier Luigi Tazzi, Ekaterina Degot, Simon Njami, David Elliott (chair)

* 4pm: Coffee break
* 4.20pm: Nick Waterlow Memorial Lecture
Lawrence Weschler: Serenity and terror in Vermeer and after.

photos © Julia Waugh.

Distance, Diaspora and Aesthetics in Africa and Caribbean Art - Sydney Biennial - THE BEAUTY OF DISTANCE: Songs of Survival in a Precarious Age

2010-05-23T06:16:00.000-07:00

Distance, Diaspora, Aesthetics in Africa and Caribbean Art
Artspace
SuperDeluxe@Artspace
43/51 Cowper Wharf Rd
Woolloomooloo
Sydney
NSW 2011

13th May 2010

www.bos17.com
creative.puma.com/us/en

“Distance, Diaspora and Aesthetics in Africa and Caribbean Art” organized in collaboration with puma.creative.

ICF is a Public Program Partner of the 17th Biennale of Sydney, Opening Week Forum. Framed within a lens that acknowledges and consults the field of Comparative Aesthetics, the Forum will bring together a cross-disciplinary community of practitioners and theorists to critically consider within panel discussions, roundtable events and presentations the external forces and hierarchies that affect and structure our perceptions of art.

As part of the programming for the Biennale, a puma.creative sponsored forum on Afro-Caribbean contemporary art and culture took place on Thursday May 13th at Artspace in Woolloomooloo. In keeping with the overall theme of this years Biennale, the panel discussion entitled “Distance, Diaspora and Aesthetics in African and Caribbean Art”, will focused on art and curatorship in and around these regions. Notable artists including Roger Ballen, Conrad Botes, Joy Gregory, Amal Kenawy, Nandipha Mntambo, Penny Siopis and Barthélémy Toguo, will engaged in the panel discussion and examined issues under this context including diapora, displacement, poverty and cultural production. Panel speakers were comprised of leading critical thinkers in this field including David A. Bailey MBE, David Elliott (Artistic Director, 17th Biennale of Sydney), Leah Gordon, Colin Richards, Teka Selman and Allison Thompson.

David A. Bailey MBE is the founding Director of the International Curators Forum and Acting Director of the National Art Gallery of The Bahamas. Bailey has established an international reputation, commitment and investment in a variety of issues on the themes of history, race and representation over the past twenty years. Past exhibitions and projects include: The Critical Decade: Black British Photography, MIRAGE: Enigmas, On Race, Difference & Desire, Rhapsodies In Black: Art From the Harlem Renaissance, Back To Black, Shades Of Black, Veil, Remember Saro-Wiwa: The Living Memorial, Black Moving Cube, and in development The Red Shoes.

Roger Ballen is an artist who lives and works in Johannesburg, South Africa. Since the late 1990s Ballen has been working at intensifying this core of his practice. For instance, his often curiously unique subjects now perform with and for him to create images that are in all ways true theatrical partnerships. He has also worked on the environments themselves, responding to drawings on the wall and clusters of objects that become antic sculptural formations as we find an unfathomable blurring of fact and fiction.

Conrad Botes is an artist who lives and works in Cape Town, South Africa. "With the comics, we're dealing very specifically with a South African audience who know what we're referring to. Originally we wrote them in Afrikaans, so many of the references are to things in Afrikaans culture. The paintings I make are much more personal. I can explain them if I have to - but I'd much rather not. It is difficult to explain something that you are meant to feel. People can formulate their own ideas about the work, the viewers reaction is more important than my own explanation".

Joy Gregory, is an artist who lives and works in London, UK. As a photographer she makes full use of the media from video, digital and analogue photography to Victorian print processes. In 2002, Gregory received the NESTA Fellowship, which enabled her time to research for a major piece around language endangerment. She has exhibited all over the world and shown in many biennales and festivals and is also the recipient of numerous awards. Her work included in many collections including the UK Arts Council Collection, Victoria and Albert Museum, Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane, Australia, and Yale British Art Collection

Isaac Julien, is an artist who lives and works in London, UK. Isaac Julien was visiting lecturer at Harvard University's Schools of Afro-American and Visual Environmental Studies and is currently a visiting professor at the Whitney Museum of American Arts. He was also a research fellow at Goldsmiths College, University of London and is a Trustee of the Serpentine Gallery. Julien was the recipient of both the prestigious MIT Eugene McDermott Award in the Arts (2001) and the Frameline Lifetime Achievement Award (2002). Most recently, he has had solo shows at the Pompidou Centre in Paris (2005), MoCA Miami (2005) and the Kerstner Gesellschaft, Hanover (2006). Julien is represented in the Tate Modern, Centre Pompidou, Guggenheim and Hirshhorn Collections.

Amal Kenawy, is an artist who lives and works in Cairo, Egypt. She has taken part in several group exhibitions, including “Africa Remix - Contemporary Art of a Continent” (2004-2007), “Home Works: Forum on Cultural Practices” (2004 and 2005), and “Some Stories” (2005). She has also participated in a number of international theatre festivals, which include La Rose des Vent in Lillie, France (2004) and the Kunsten Festival des Arts in Brussels, Belgium (2004) as well as a variety of international film festivals like FIPA in Paris (2007).

Nandipha Mntambo, Artist Lives and works in Cape Town, South Africa.'The ambiguous space that exists within this (my "present/absence") is really intriguing me... I also enjoy the thought that anyone can occupy that space - viewers of my work can "step into" the shapes that are left empty and occupy the space I once did.'-'Just realising that there's more than just African connotations to the material [of cowhide] allows me the freedom to continue. Experiencing my work in different context, helped me with how I'd like my work to be read. Where I'm functioning from there's a very specific perception about the work. But I have learnt to channel these perceptions more and more.'

Penelope Siopis is an artist who lives and works in Johannesburg, South Africa. She is professor at the University of the Witwatersrand; Was the winner of the Volkskas Atelier prize to live and work at the Cite Internationale des Arts, Paris, France in 1986.; In 2005 Penny was made the subject of a monograph published by the Goodman Gallery.

Barthélémy Toguo, is an artist who lives and works in Paris, France; New York, USA and Bandjoun, Cameroon. In an era of global exchange, Barthélémy Toguo’s work reveals the absurdity of borders, whether psychological, familial, or territorial. He uses drawing, painting, sculpture, photography, performance, and video to reflect upon the places and people he encounters through his numerous travels. He is always both the subject and the narrator of these works, and considers them to be an interactive platform for information and communication.

Allison Thompson is currently director of the Division of Visual and Performing Art, and coordinator for the Bachelor of Fine Arts Programme in Studio Art at the Barbados Community College where she has been teaching art history and critical theory since 1986. Thompson has written numerous articles and catalogue essays on Caribbean art and is the co-author, along with Alissandra Cummins and Nick Whittle, of the book, Art in Barbados: What kind of mirror image. Current research projects include contributions to books on Agostino Brunias, Popular Art in the Caribbean, and the work of Barbadian artist Ras Ishi Butcher.

Teka Selman is Exhibition and Program Coordinator, DocXArts at Duke University, an interdisciplinary MFA program incorporating film, video, documentary and experimental artistic practices. She was previously Partner at Branch Gallery, an art space that received national attention for its focus on the work of emerging artists. Prior to relocating to Durham, North Carolina, she was Director at Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York City. Her writing on artists such as Mark Bradford, Coco Fusco and Kara Walker has been featured in publications including The Black Moving Cube (The Green Box Kunstedition, 2006), Freestyle (Studio Museum in Harlem, 2001), and OneWorld Magazine. She is a 2010 Fellow of the International Curators Forum.

Leah Gordon works as a photographer, filmmaker and curator. She visited Haiti for the first time in 1991, and continues to have a personal and professional relationship with the country. In 2006 she commissioned the Grand Rue Sculptors from Haiti to make 'Freedom Sculpture', a permanent exhibit for the International Museum of Slavery in Liverpool. Continuing her relationship with the Grand Rue artists, Gordon organized and co-curated the Ghetto Biennale in December 2009. She has also been involved in a range of projects as both creator and curator, including documenting experiences of homophobia in London, crossing-dressing in Vodou, links between the Slave Trade and the Thames and exhibitions of Haitian art. Her book 'Kanaval: Vodou, Politics and Revolution on the Streets of Haiti' will be published in June 2010.

“Do you believe in reality? - 6th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art - 5 Burseries

2010-04-27T03:33:00.000-07:00

Bursaries

6th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art 11.6.–8.8.2010

“Do you believe in reality? What a question, you’ll reply. Reality isn’t something you believe in. It proverbially catches up with you anyway – always. But then what are we talking about here? Maybe we could talk about the fact that you so often hear people saying something was different ‘in reality’? Or about why it has become so customary to add a ‘really‘ or an ‘actually’ or an ‘in fact’ to so many of the things we say? Let’s talk about the cracks in reality, about the gap between the world we talk about and the world that’s really there. But why this distinction? Because reality is always the other? Or the others? Everything that’s waiting out there?
Let’s talk about the self-deceptions where reality becomes too painful. Let’s talk about the fictional arsenal of the mass media and consumerism, about the rhetoric of distraction and appeasement. Won’t that ultimately lead us to question contemporary art, and its relationship to reality?” – BB6

On the occasion of BB6, the International Curators Forum will mediate a group response to the Biennale’s open question in the form of selected studio visits and presentations with Haegue Yang, Nasan Tur, Libia Castro and Olafur Olafsson, Thomas Kilpper, Ming Wong, Omer Fast, Clemens von Wedemeyer, Mayaan Amir and Ruti Sela. Thinking and moving around this question of what constitutes ‘reality’, each encounter will approach and consider the core question in relation to individual research and practice informed by the conditions of trans-nationality, migration, autonomy and community.

ICF is offering bursaries of £250.00GBP to five individuals who would like to attend the professional preview of BB6 from 9 to 12 June 2010 and the ICF tour.

The criteria for selection are:
• A track record of curating international artists (minimum of 3 projects)
• A strong interest in the aesthetics and ethics of global curatorial development
• A collaborative approach to sharing knowledge and expertise
• A statement supporting your interest in attending the event and its relevance to your current research (maximum 500 words).

Please send your applications digitally to
info@internationalcuratorsforum.org
The deadline for applications is Friday 30 April 2010. Successful applicants will be notified by 6 May 2010.

You Talkin' to me? Why are artists and curators turning to Education? - A Discussion

2010-03-31T06:28:00.000-07:00

You Talkin' to me? Why are artists and curators turning to Education?

31 March 2010, 8pm-10pm

Faculty of Arts - VU University Amsterdam,
Auditorium
12A00 (12th floor, main building)
De Boelelaan 1105,
1081 HV Amsterdam,
The Netherlands
www.vu.nl/nl/index.asp

Speakers will include: Mélanie Bouteloup, Binna Choi, Sonia Dermience, Annie Fletcher, Wouter Davidts, Hassan Khan, Paul O' Neill, Edgar Schmitz, Mick Wilson and others. Followed by a drinks reception.

Curating and the Educational Turn by Paul O’Neill & Mick Wilson, eds.
(Amsterdam and London, de Appel and Open Editions)
This collection of texts will unravel the notable turn to pedagogical models across a range of recent contemporary curatorial projects, art practices and artwriting as evidenced in a range of projects in recent years: ‘Pedagogy’ adopted as one of the three leitmotifs of documenta12 in 2007; the unrealized Manifesta 6 experimental art school as exhibitionary construct for Nicosia and the associated volume ‘Notes for an Artschool’; unitednationsplaza; ‘proto-academy’; Cork Caucus; Future Academy; para-education; Free Copenhagen University; A-C-A-D-E-M-Y; Mark Dion’s School; Tanya Bruguera’s Arte de Conducta in Havana; ArtSchool Palestine; School of Missing Studies, Belgrade; and many other examples. Instances of curatorial models and art practice conceived as critical cultural pedagogies (often construed as speculative – ‘open’ – emancipatory projects) are widely in evidence across the international scene. These developments are consistent with a turn to discursive models within curatorial practice, especially noticeable since the mid-nineteen-nineties. ‘Curating, and the Educational Turn’ is an anthology, which seeks to critically describe, locate, reflect upon, and think through this turn to pedagogical models and practices. Each contributor was invited to write a text on some aspect of the ‘pedagogical’ or ‘educational turn’ in recent curatorial and art practice and related critical cultural practices.

Contributors include: 16 Beaver Group, Peio Aguirre, Dave Beech, David Blamey & Alex Coles, Daniel Buren & Wouter Davidts, Cornford & CrossCharles Esche, Annie Fletcher & Sarah Pierce, Liam Gillick, Janna Graham, Tom Holert, William Kaizen, Hassan Khan, Annette Krauss, Emily Pethick & Marina Vishmidt, Stewart Martin, Ute Meta Bauer, Marion von Osten & Eva Egermann, Andrea Phillips, Raqs Media Collective, Irit Rogoff, Edgar Schmitz, Simon Sheikh, Sally Tallant, Jan Verwoert, Anton Vidokle, Tirdad Zolghadr.

2 Bursaries - Curating and the Educational Turn - A Book Launch

2010-03-10T04:09:00.000-08:00

Faculty of Arts
VU University Amsterdam
Auditorium 12A00 (12th floor, main building)
De Boelelaan 1105
1081 HV Amsterdam
The Netherlands

Discussion and book launch:
31 March 2010, 8PM-10PM

Deadline: 15 March 2010
2 travel bursaries to attend this discussion and book launch are available. For further information see the ICF-website: www.internationalcuratorsforum.org/bursary

Curating and the Educational Turn.
'You Talkin' to me? Why are artists and curators turning to Education?'

Speakers will include: Mélanie Bouteloup, Binna Choi, Sonia Dermience, Annie Fletcher, Wouter Davidts, Hassan Khan, Paul O' Neill, Edgar Schmitz, Mick Wilson and others. Followed by a drinks reception.

'You Talkin' to me? Why are artists and curators turning to Education?' has been organised in association with de Appel and VU University Amsterdam.

Alexandria Biennale - Curator's Workshop

2010-02-18T03:42:00.001-08:00

Alexandria Biennale
Ministry of Culture
Fine Arts Sector
1 Kafour Street
Orman Post
Cairo
Egypt

Venues:
Alexandria Art Museum
Alexandria Atelier
www.alexbiennale.gov.eg

The Second Curators' Workshop in Alexandria, during the Bienniale from 17th until 20th of December 2009.

Our selected curators will attend a three day series of events and have the opportunity to present their proposals for further projects to the group. There will be both formal and informal discussions that explore ideas around artistic practice and curation.

The first edition of the Alexandria Biennale was held in 1955 at the Alexandria Museum of Fine Arts. Its aim is to fortify the cultural and artistic dialog between Egypt and its neighboring Mediterranean countries extending it to the world as well.

This year the Alexandria Biennale celebrates its 25th anniversary, and it is the first time that the artists' selection is entirely decided by the curator and not through countries' nominations like in former editions.

Mohamed Abouelnaga has selected 31 artists from the Mediterranean region and proposed for the exhibition the theme The Aftermath, in the sense of "What’s Next" facing the latest crises and economic collapses.

Shahira Issa: Independent Curator, Andrea Schlieker: Folkstone Triennial, Elisabetta Fabrizi: BFI London, Haig Aivazian: Artist and Independent curator Dubai, Kyla Mcdonald: Tate London, Mayssa Fattouh: Independent curator Swissland, Laura Mousavi: Permanent Gallery Brighton, Paula Orrell: Plymouth Arts Centre, Pier Vegner Tosta: Independent Cuartor London, Yasmina Reggad: Independent Curator London, Tina Sherwell: Art School Palestine, Kaelen Goldie-Wilson; Independent curator Beirut.

Caribbean Curatorship and National Identity

2009-11-30T04:44:00.000-08:00

28 November - 3 December 2009
Accra Beach Hotel & Spa Hotel
Bridgetown
Barbados

The 21st MAC Annual General Meeting and Conference 2009 will take place from November 29 to December 02, 2009 in Barbados under the theme ‘Caribbean Curatorship and National Identity’. The program includes a walking tour of Bridgetown and an island tour.

The three symposia for the conference are formed around the themes of "Breaking the Silence", "Reconstructing/Deconstructing Identity: Place and Memory" and "Generational Shifts Within The Caribbean Diaspora". Caribbean Curatorship and National Identity is an examination of how history is interpreted and heritage is shaped by communal memory for audiences, old and new, local and foreign. The topic allows for a broad array of issues to be examined in intensive consultation through a regional symposium and master classes to be developed in conjunction with the Museums Association of the Caribbean (MAC), the National Art Gallery Committee (NAGC), the International Curators Forum (ICF) and the International Council of Museums (ICOM).

Speakers include: George Abungu, John Akomfrah, Florence Alexis, Julien Anfruns, Ewan Atkinson, David A Bailey, Adelaide Bannerman, Delia Barker, Lonnie Bunch, Janice Cheddie, Alissandra Cummins, Okwui Enwezor, Graeme Evelyn, Christine Eyene, Kevin Farmer, Tom Finkelpearl, Amareswar Galla, Therese Hadchity, Hans-Martin Hinz, Winston Kellman, Asif Khan, Peggy McGeary, Tumelo Mosaka, Keith Piper, Maureen Salmon, Leslie Taylor, Tom Trevor and W. Richard West Jr.

www.caribbeanmuseums.com/index.php?id=6,0,0,1,0,0

The ICF At The 11th International Istanbul Biennial

2009-09-14T02:20:00.001-07:00

12 September 2009
Akbank Culture and Arts Centre
Istiklal Caddesi 14-18
34435 Beyoglu
Istanbul

In the opening week of the 11th Istanbul Biennial, ICF continues its collaboration with international curators through a symposium, as part of its AFTER IMAGE season, using the Biennial’s theme, What keeps Mankind Alive, as a contextual reference and starting point.

This was inspired by A journey Without Return, a book of poems by the celebrated Turkish writer and political figure Nazim Hikmet, using the poems’ themes of migration to look at the influence of Turkish migration on contemporary art. It explores the ‘Gastarbeiter’ programme and its effect in the UK, Germany and Turkey, through which Turkish workers were invited by Western European countries based on their need for economic development.

This process has given birth to complex, hybrid family structures as well as blurring the concepts of identity and nationality. It has redefined lifestyles, tastes and social relationships. In What keeps Mankind Alive the artists, many of whom are migrants themselves, highlight the personal experience, the realities and connections between migrant communities and places.

In an event hosted by Akbank Culture and Arts Centre, curators and artists of the exhibition – Adam Chodzko, Alice Sharp, Peter Cross, Denizhan Ozer and Zineb Sedira – will be in discussion with David A Bailey.

The programme of ICF is supported by the Arts Council of England.

The Venice Biennial / British Pavilion

2009-06-08T02:12:00.000-07:00

AFTER IMAGE
6 JUNE 2009

This is the ICF’s inaugural dialogue in a series of events addressing platforms of production and exhibition of the moving image, that is to be continued at the Istanbul Biennial in September and during London Film Festival in October of 2009.

In celebration of the work of Steve McQueen the symposium will ask a distinguished panel to reflect on the ways in which the contemporary moving image has become radicalised as a medium of democratic artistic enquiry.

Steve McQueen will present a work in the British Pavilion which has already generated considerable international expectation. Will his exhibition reflect the desire of the Director of the 53rd International Art Exhibition, Daniel Birnbaum, to explore through Making Worlds, the production of ‘vision’ or the projection of a world seen and modeled through the work of art?

In particular we are interested in discussing how artists have engaged with the mainstream processes of production in cinema whilst retaining their aesthetic and political edge. Does this dialogue between cinema, gallery and digital platforms challenge the curator to find new ways to make the staging of vision memorable.

The focus of the discussion will be Steve McQueen and his work in the gallery and cinema.

With John Akomfrah, Clive Gillman, Teka Selman, Allison Thompson & Mark Waugh.

Supported by Arts Council England and Engage: the National Association for Gallery Education and The British Council.

photos © Julia Waugh.

Sharjah Biennial - Curator's Workshop

2009-03-23T01:58:00.000-07:00

16th March - 20th March 2009
Shamsi House
Al-Shyuwaihiyeen
Sharjar
U.A.E.
www.sharjahbiennial.org/en/default.html

The Curator's Workshop took place in Sharjah, U.A.E., timed to coincide with Art Dubai and the Sharjah Biennial between Monday 16 March and Friday 20 March 2009.

The participants attended discussion groups and events for three days during that week.

The series of workshops focused on three key areas:
Commissioning artists and artworks – the process of commissioning artists and artworks from concept to realisation.
Building institutions – from building capital infrastructure to developing an organisation's intellectual capital.
Dialogue and exchange – the relationships between institutions and audiences, between the private and the 'public' sectors and between the national and international.

The programme was led by Gilane Tawadros and Mark Waugh with contributions from other international curators and arts professionals. Our group of Middle Eastern Curators was made possible with the support of the World Collections Fund.

Partipants included:

Andrea Schlieker: Folkstone Triennial, Elisabetta Fabrizi: BFI, Haig Aivazian: Artist and Independent curator Dubai, Kyla Mcdonald: Tate London, Mayssa Fattouh: Independent curator Swissland, Laura Mousavi: Permanent Gallery Brighton, Julia Waugh: Photographer, Paula Orell: Plymouth Arts Centre, Pier Vegner Tosta: Independent Cuartor London, Yasmina Reggad: Independent Curator London, Mark Waugh: A Foundation London, Gilane Tawadros: Independent curator, DAKS, Judith Nesbit: Tate London, Jiyoon Lee: Independent Curator, Wassan Al-Khudhairi: Independent Curator, Julie Lomax: Arts Council England, Francis Morris: Tate London, Sidonio Costa: Independent Curator, Flik Allan: Independent Curator, Reem Shillah: Independent Curator, Ala Younis: Artist and filmmaker, Vali Mahlouji: Independent Curator, Reem Fadda: Independent Curator, Shahira Issa: Independent Curator, Osman Bozkurt: Independent Curator, Didem Ozbek: Independent Curator, Lara Khaldi: Sharjah Biennial and Jack Persekian: Sharjah Biennial.

photos © Julia Waugh.

Thelma Golden In Conversation With David A Bailey - Tate Britain

2009-03-12T06:05:00.001-07:00

Post-Black Art Now, took place at the Tate Britain Auditorium.
In the late 1990s curator and writer Thelma Golden coined the controversial term 'post-black art' with friend and artist Glenn Ligon to refer to a post-civil rights generation of African-American artists whose work she believed could no longer be defined in terms of 'race'. In this lecture and discussion, Golden reflects on the status of the term 'post-black art' in the context of debates about the globalisation of the art of the African diaspora and current notions of cultural difference.

Suzanne Lampla - Association International Des Critiques D'art Section Caraibe Du Sud

2009-03-09T06:08:00.000-07:00

Suzanne Lampla has written a description of the symposia, Black Diaspora Visual Arts at:
http://www.aica-sc.net/aica_en/aica_sc/actu/index.htm

Black Diaspora Visual Arts Symposia at The Frank Collymore Hall Bridgetown

2009-02-18T04:38:00.000-08:00

Frank Collymore Hall
Central Bank Of Barbados
Spry Street
Bridgetown
Barbados
www.fch.org.bb/fch/index.shtml

This conference is part of a series a series of symposia and exhibitions that explore visual art in the Black Diaspora.

It was a major collaboration with the National Art Gallery Committee in Barbados, AICA Southern Caribbean and the Arts Council of England.

The conference took as its starting point Stuart Hall and the question he poses in his essay “Modernity and its Others: Three Moments in the Post – War History of the Black Diaspora Arts”. The essay offers an analysis of three ‘moments’ in the post-war black visual arts in the UK.

The main contrast identiﬁed is between the ‘problem space’ of the artists–the last ‘colonials’–who came to London after World War II to join the modern avant-garde and who were anti-colonial, cosmopolitan and modernist in outlook, and that of the second generation–the ﬁrst ‘post-colonials’–who were born in Britain, pioneered the Black Art Movement and the creative explosion of the 1980s, and who were anti-racist, culturally relativist and identity-driven.

In the work of the former, abstraction predominated; the work of the latter was politically polemical and collage-based, subsequently embracing the ﬁgural and the more subjective strategy of ‘putting the self in the frame’.

This generational shift is mapped here in relation to wider socio-political and cultural developments, including the growth of indigenous racism, the new social movements, especially anti-racist, feminist and identity politics, and the theoretical ‘revolutions’ associated with them.

The contemporary moment–less politicized, and artistically neo- conceptual, multi-media and installation-based–is discussed more brieﬂy.

The symposium explored some of these themes in Hall’s paper with particular reference to their applicability to the contemporary Caribbean context and the relationship of the contemporary moment to earlier developments.

Questions include:
❍ Is there a Caribbean canon?
❍ Can we discuss a Caribbean aesthetic in the 21st century?
❍ What are the institutional models?
❍ How do we identify the different ways forward?

The Symposia took place at the Frank Collymore Hall in Bridgetown in conjunction with a number of site-speciﬁc artists’ projects.

The National Art Gallery Committee Barbados was established for the benefit of all. With a commitment to free admission, a central and accessible site, and extended opening hours, the gallery has ensured that its collection can be enjoyed by the widest public possible, and not become the exclusive preserve of the privileged. The committee continues to pursue a vigorous and socially inclusive outreach programme and caters for the needs of all groups in society.

Speakers and Artsists included:
Alissandra Cummings (Chairperson National Art Gallery Committee, Director Barbados Museum) Steve Blackett (Minister Of Community Development And Culture, Barbados) David Scott (Columbia University; Editor Small Axe) David A. Bailey (MBE, Senior Curator Autograph) Stuart Hall (Cultural Theorist, Professor Emeritus, Open University, London) George Lamming (Professor Brown University) Lowery Sims (Museum Of Arts and design, New York) Veerle Poupeye (Edna Manley College Of Visual And performing Arts) Krista Thompson (Northwestern University, Illinois) Leon Wainwright (Manchester Metropolitan University) Allison Thompson (National Art Gallery Committee) Kara Walker (Artist) Teka Selman (Branch Gallery, North Carolina) Richard Powell (Duke University, North Carolina) Dominique Brebion (President, AICA Southern Caribbean) Christopher Cozier (Artist) Paul Domela (Programme Director, Liverpool Biennial) Andrea Wells (National Art Gallery Committe, NCF) Alfredo Jaar (Artist) Ewan Atkinson (Artist) Ingrid Persaud (Artist) Arthur Edwards (Artist) Frances Ross (Artist) Indrani Gall (Artist) Joscelyn Gardner (Artist) Caroline Holder (Artist) Trevor Mathison (Artist) Gary Stewart (Artist) Ingrid Pollard (Artist) Sheena Rose (Artist)

photos © Julia Waugh.

Contempory Art In The Middle East - Symposium at Tate Britain & Tate Modern

2009-01-23T10:26:00.000-08:00

CONTEMPORARY ART IN THE MIDDLE EAST
22 January - 23 January 2009
Millbank
London SW1P 4RG
020 7887 8888
www.tate.org.uk
Nafas Art Magazine
universes-in-universe.org/eng/nafas

Symposium exploring the theme of translation in the context of the Middle East, Part One. This will be the ICF's most ambitious project and it will take place at three sites: Tate Modern and Tate Britain in London and we are in discussion about making our third site the opening of the Sharjah Biennial.

The main partner of this project is Tate National. In this symposium, we want to explore how the Middle East is defined? How does the interpretation of modern and contemporary art from the Middle East and its diaspora effect its understanding at home and abroad? How have ideas about tradition and modernity emerged in art practice? What will be the impact of new and emerging spaces for seeing and exhibiting modern and contemporary art in different parts of the Middle East? This two-day symposium brings together artists, curators and writers to discuss recent developments in contemporary art from the Middle East and its diaspora.

Taking place over two days with a mix of keynote talks and panel discussions, thesymposium revolves around five discrete sessions:

- Defining the Middle East
- Writing and Translation
- Art Now - Recent Exhibitions
- Tradition and Modernity
- The Politics of Space

Keynote talks will be given by Derek Gregory (professor of geography, University of British Colombia, Vancouver) Mourid Barghouti (poet and author, I Saw Ramallah), Salah Hassan (professor, Art History, Cornell University) and Shumon Basar (curator, architect and author of Cities from Zero).

The distinguished group of panelists includes Anas Al-Shaikh (artist), Oreet Ashery (artist), Negar Azimi (senior editor, Bidoun magazine), Bassam el Baroni (co-founder, Alexandria Contemporary Arts Forum) [tbc], Yto Barrada (artist and founder of Cinemathèque de Tangers, Goldsmiths College, London) [tbc], Pat Binder and Gerhard Haupt (editors-in-chief, Nafas Art Magazine and publishers of Universes in Universe), Stuart Comer (curator, Tate Modern), Suzanne Cotter (chief curator, Modern Art Oxford), Catherine David (chief curator, Direction des Musées de France), David Elliot (artistic director, Sydney Biennale), Khalid Khreis (director, Jordan National Gallery of Fine Arts, Amman), Vasif Kortun (curator, director of Platform, Istanbul), Rahraw Omarzad (editor of Gahnama-e-Hunar and founder of the Centre for Contemporary Art, Afghanistan), November Paynter (independent curator), Jack Persekian (artistic director of the Sharjah Biennial and director of the Al Ma’mal Foundation for Contemporary Art), Khalil Rabah (artist, director of the Riwaq Biennale, Ramallah), Michael Rakowitz (artist), Dina Ramadan (art historian and critic), Andrew Renton (director of curating, Goldsmiths College, London), Zineb Sedira (artist), Nada Shabout (associate professor of Art History, University of North Texas, Denton), Hassan Sharif (artist, co-founder of The Flying House, Dubai), Wael Shawky (artist), Suha Shoman (founder of Darat al Funun, Amman), Issa Touma (artist, curator and founder of Le Pont Art Organization and Gallery, Aleppo, Syria), William Wells (director, Townhouse Gallery, Cairo), Eyal Weizman (director, Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths, University of London).

Tate National reflects the growing importance of the ways in which Tate relates to other organisations in the UK and abroad. It includes sections on the Tate Partnership Scheme launched in early 2000, with the support of the Heritage Lottery Fund; Visual Dialogues, funded by the DCMS, which documents a project initiated and managed by Tate in partnership with a range of art galleries around England; and Tate International, which covers Tate Collection exhibitions and loan exhibitions made in partnership with other museums and galleries and National Collections, and which features the new arrangements for loans between national institutions.

This symposium is organised by Tate and the International Curators Forum and is part of the World Collections Programme in association with NAFAS online magazine. The World Collections Programme is a collaborative initiative between six UK organisations which aims to develop greater access to their collections and expertise by building partnerships with organisations in Asia and Africa.

Santu Mofokeng

2009-01-14T08:26:00.000-08:00

14. Jan - 28. Feb 09
Rivington Place
London
EC2A 3BA
11am-6pm - Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday
11am - 9pm Thursday 12am - 6pm Saturday
www.rivingtonplace.org
www.autograph-abp.co.uk

Santu Mofokeng produces photographs that refuse to be overtly political, but nonetheless contain a fundamental political dimension. He seeks a broader story in which people are portrayed as more than just urban activists locked into violence.

His landscapes are spaces invested with public memory and spirituality, and he investigates them in relation to ownership, ecological impact and power. His Bloemhof Portfolio tells of the lives of rural tenant farmers, while Chasing Shadows is a documentation of religious ceremonies in caves, public parks and urban waste ground.

Another dimension of his work includes an interest in places invested with meaning which led Mofokeng to investigate not only South African but also European monuments and sites of public memory. Mofokeng travelled to British concentration camp sites in South Africa, to Namibia where the Herero were nearly wiped out under German colonialists, to Ravensbrϋck, Auschwitz, Nagasaki, Hanoi and other sites of atrocity.

Autograph ABP in partnership with Izuko SA National Gallery presents a major UK exhibtion of Santu Mofokeng photographs.

www.carliergebauer.com
www.iziko.org.za

The exhibition will be accompanied by a series of free public events.

Robert Storr & David A. Bailey in conversation - The webcast

2008-12-08T02:11:00.000-08:00

Tate Online Events

Date: 21 May 2008
Venue: Tate Britain

In this first London event of the International Curators Forum, an institution which aims to animate and develop the international curatorial community, curator and artist Robert Storr and curator David A Bailey discuss the Venice Biennale. Storr reflects on his role as Commissioner in 2007 and both contemplate the Biennale’s legacy and future.

www.tate.org.uk/onlineevents

Axel Lapp interviews Christian Boros - Art Review

2008-12-04T05:16:00.000-08:00

Art Review Issue 28 December 2008
www.artreview.com

Axel Lapp Projects
Invalidenstraße 161 (Remise)
D-10115 Berlin
axellapp.de

The Brighton Photo Biennial Conference

2008-12-03T02:06:00.002-08:00

BRIGHTON PHOTO BIENNIAL 2008 CONFERENCE
Date: Saturday 15th November
MEMORY OF FIRE: the War of Images and Images of War
www.bpb.org.uk

Introduction
Programmed by Julian Stallabrass, Brighton Photo Biennial 2008 Guest Curator, organised by Brighton Photo Biennial and supported by the University of Brighton, this important event brings together internationally renowned photographers, media theorists and art historians to discuss the production, exhibition and distribution of images of war, referencing historical and contemporary photography.

This is a serious opportunity to explore BPB 2008 through a range of related disciplines and with a focus on photojournalism and contemporary photographic practice.

The conference, Memory of Fire: the War of Images and Images of War, like the Biennial sets out to examine the vast changes that have taken place in the making and use of images of conflict since the last great 'media war', in Vietnam.

Conference Themes and Key Questions/Issues
Among the major themes are:
• What changes are brought about in the use and memory of images by their new ease of making and circulation?
• How do these images change when seen in so many rapidly changing and antithetical contexts?
• Does the plethora of conflict images in the new media realm work against the emergence of highly memorable key images that seem to summarise an event (as famously pictures by Nick Ut, Eddie Adams and Philip Jones Griffiths did for Vietnam)?
• How have artists responded to the changed media landscape, particularly in placing large-format images of conflict on museum walls?

Saturday 15th November

9.30am - Convene

9.45am - Welcome address – Helen Cadwallader, BPB Executive Director

9.50am - Julian Stallabrass (Courtauld Institute of Art and BPB 2008 Guest Curator) introduces the themes of BPB 2008 Memory of Fire: the War of Images and Images of War and the conference.

10.00am - Paper presentations: Hilary Roberts (Head of Collections Management, Imperial War Museum, London) and Eyal Weizman (architect, writer and curator)

11.15am - Break

11.45 - Artist Presentations: Simon Norfolk (artist, BPB 2008 exhibiting at De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill on Sea), Broomberg and Chanarin (artists, BPB 2008 exhibiting at De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill on Sea) and Harriet Logan (artist, BPB 2008 exhibiting at the Independent Photographers Gallery, Battle) present and discuss their work.

1.15pm - Lunch

2.45pm - Paper presentations: Iain Boal (Historian of technics and the commons and a member of the Retort Collective) and Stefaan Decostere (multi-media and online producer CARGO, curator and artist)

4.15pm - Break

4.45pm - In Conversation: Tom Hickey (Course Leader for the Cultural and Critical Theory MA at University of Brighton) and Julian Stallabrass explore themes of the Biennial.

Conference Chair: Mark Waugh, Executive Director The A Foundation and Co-Founder International Curators Forum.

Conference Venue:
Sallis Benney Theatre
University of Brighton
Grand Parade
Brighton

The Dilemma Of Collecting Live Art In Times Of Dematerialisation

2008-11-13T09:19:00.000-08:00

A discussion that raised many questions about collecting and it's influences on the position and intentions of the artist.

2nd November 2008
Goethe Institute
Neue Schönhauser Str. 20
10178 Berlin
Germany
Organised by The DNA Gallery and Valerie Schwarz.

Speakers: David Elliot, artistic director of the Sydney Biennial 2010, Jan Hoet, director of MARTa Herford museum in Herford, Fumio Nanjo, director of Mori Art Museum in Tokyo, Berta Sichel director of audiovisuals at Museo Nacional de Arte Reina Sophia in Madrid, Mark Waugh exective director of the A Foundation in London and Liverpool. The panel was chaired by Mark Gisbourne, who is based in Berlin and is part of the editorial board at ART.ES.

DNA Gallery
Auguststraße 20
10117 Berlin
Germany
www.dna-galerie.de
Tel. + 49 (0)30 28 59 96 52

photos © Julia Waugh.

The British Art Show 7 & The New Art Exchange

2008-11-05T08:13:00.000-08:00

The British Art Show & The New Art Exchange
31st October 2008

...The ICF has been invited to curate a discussion on the issues underpinning the evolution of The British Art Show. Like Documenta this will evolve over a 5 year period, allowing new configurations and diverse approaches to the challenge of presenting a national survey.
What is strategically significant is that the exhibition tours to partner cities that raise the resources to host the exhibition.

For BAS7 one of the host cities is Plymouth, which has not previously benefitted from an exhibition of this scale, raising the question of how infrastructural challenges impact on curatorial choices. These and an array of questions will aim to navigate a path through issues that have, perhaps, been left unanswered since the last
exhibition.

Speakers include: David A. Bailey, Andrea Schlieker, Jason Bowman, Claire Doherty, Alex Farquarson, Hew Locke, Sandy Nairne, Mark Nash, Roger Malbert.

Jason Evans & The ICF - A Salon - The Brighton Photo Biennial

2008-10-06T03:36:00.000-07:00

JASON EVANS DISCUSSES THE INCIDENTAL AND THE ARCHIVE WITH DAVID A BAILEY ORGANISED IN ASSOCIATION WITH THE INTERNATIONAL CURATORS FORUM (THE ICF) AND THE BRIGHTON PHOTO BIENNIAL.
www.bpb.org.uk
4th Oct 2008

Reconciliation

Jason Evans
www.jasonevans.info

The Permanent Gallery
20 Bedford Place
Brighton
BN1 2PT
UK
www.permanentgallery.com

In this new show created specifically for Permanent Gallery, Jason Evans debuts his ongoing Reconciliation project. In this series of outputs he revisits his own diverse back-catalogue and the recurring themes of his practice.

For the Brighton Photo Fringe exhibit, the theme of Street Photography is his focus, and he presents new selections from 4 quite different bodies of work from the last 8 years in order to facilitate speculation about the nature of the discipline.

Where is 'the street'? Where is chance in the 21st Century? Is 'the street' a state of mind ? Have we come to the end of the road?

Also on display are objects collected on location whilst these works were made, as is an especially commissioned limited edition Reconciliation Scarf, made with long-time collaborator Alex Rich. The Gallery has also been re-decorated to bring its location into the equation and interrupt the institution of 'the white cube'.

A small publication designed by Alex Rich and Jason Evans accompanies the show.

The 4 bodies of street-work are :

The New Scent 2000-05
Black and White analogue photographs made with misleading visual imperative in mind. www.thenewscent.com

The Daily Nice 2004-ongoing
Colour digital captures from the web-based project www.thedailynice.com where a positive agenda is brought to 'the everyday'.

NewYorkLondonParisTokyo 2005-07
Black and White, analogue, multiple-exposure photographs, which relocate the decisive moment onto the film plane, inviting chance to combine scenes influenced by the visual precedents of these 4 major sites of street photographic history.

The End of the World is Fine 2000-ongoing
Black and White and Colour still lives and documentary style pictures. Scenes of personal wonder recorded for posterity with considerable pathos, juxtaposed with studies of pieces of things that used to be something else.

***

Bighton Photo Biennial is the UK’s leading festival of photography offering an ambitious celebration of international photographic practice.

The Biennial is committed to stimulating debate on photography in all its forms: new and historic, digital and analogue, still and moving. The Biennial presents the work of international artists, from a range of cultural backgrounds, commissioning new work, premiering recent work and exhibiting historical work in new contexts.

The Biennial includes exhibitions, participatory programmes, publications, conferences, talks, portfolio reviews and outdoor events. An extensive education programme develops local audiences through which the Biennial aims to reach the widest possible audiences and creates exciting opportunities for participation and engagement.

Entitled Memory of Fire: the War of Images and Images of War, Brighton Photo Biennial 2008 will explore photographic images of war, their making, use and circulation, and their currency in contemporary society.

The provocative writer and critic Julian Stallabrass will curate ten exhibitions presenting photography, film and online material produced and circulated in time of war, and analyse how images have been shaped by the changing social and political conditions from the Vietnam era to the present. The exhibitions will include images produced by photojournalists, artists and non-professionals.

***

Julian Stallabrass on Brighton Photo Biennial 2008
The title is borrowed from Eduardo Galeano’s extraordinary book, Memory of Fire, an epic literary account of 500 years of Latin American resistance to imperialism. The book consists of numerous self-contained episodes which can be read in isolation but also combine with their neighbours to produce a larger picture of the book’s subject. Similarly, BPB 2008, which covers a long stretch of the South East England coastline, comprises many exhibitions and events, each of which stands alone, but which may be enriched when other elements are seen.

Memory of Fire: The War of Images and Images of War takes on various issues as its main themes: first, it examines the production and dissemination of images in time of war, especially the changing conditions from the Vietnam era to the present. Images made by photojournalists, both as prints and as published in magazines and newspapers, are shown alongside presentations of online image displays, either on screen or made into wall-bound objects.

Memory of Fire will also illumine through an examination of the media the conditions of conflict, imperialism and expropriation, historically and into the present. By taking in views of the different sides of the various conflicts, radically different perspectives will emerge.

Memory of Fire seeks to frame and inform new imagery with old, and vice versa. In looking at historical imagery alongside the photography of current wars, the Biennial elicits intimations of the collective and individual memory of such images, their forgetting and revision, and their rebirth at times of crisis and war.

Finally, the Biennial looks at the place of the art world in the production of images of conflict, particularly the making of large-scale images of destruction on the scale of the history paintings of old (and like them sometimes commissioned by the state).

www.flickr.com/photos/brightonphotobiennial

photos © Julia Waugh.

2008-09-25T06:00:00.001-07:00

Manifesta7 - A navigation with Axel Lapp

2008-09-24T05:54:00.000-07:00

Manifesta7
www.manifesta7.it
19 July - 02 November 2008

Manifesta 7, the European Biennial of Contemporary Art will be hosted by the Trentino – South Tyrol Region from July 19 to November 2, 2008. For the first time it will take place in Italy and will stretch across an entire regional territory – one hundred and fifty kilometres of crossroads of different cultures and intersecting traditions, rich in historical monuments and in sites of industrial archeology. It involves four cities which together create a single connecting route along the Brenner axis between the north and south of Europe: Fortezza (Bressanone), ex-Alumix factory in Bolzano, the Palazzo delle Poste in Trento, Manifattura Tabacchi and ex-Peterlini factory in Rovereto.

"Manifesta is a pan-European nomadic platform for the contemporary visual arts that is run by the International Foundation Manifesta in Amsterdam. The first Manifesta was held in Rotterdam in 1996. Since then, this European Biennial of contemporary art moved to Luxembourg, Ljubljana, Frankfurt and San Sebastian. Manifesta 6 in Nicosia was cancelled, and Manifesta 7 is the first that is held across an entire region..."

Read the rest of the article...
here...

Axel Lapp is a writer and curator based in Berlin.
www.axellapp.de
Axis is an online resource for information about contemporary art.
The website features profiles of professional artists and curators, interviews, discussions, art news, debates and showcases the artists to watch.
www.axisweb.org

The ICF & The European Biennial Network at the A Foundation - The Liverpool Biennial

2008-09-15T07:29:00.000-07:00

The ICF & The European Biennial Network at the A Foundation.
www.afoundation.org.uk

The European Biennial Network has initiated, with the support of the Culture Programme of the European Union, the Biennial Exchange and Residency Programme: a two-year cycle of workshops, residency and traineeship programmes, research visits, and networking events. These activities are designed to reflect the diversity of different approaches to contemporary art, and to create opportunities for research, exchange of ideas, and creative partnerships.
www.europeanbiennialnetwork.org

The Liverpool Biennial is the UK's largest festival of contemporary visual art. Established in 1998, this year will see the fifth festival take place. Since its inception, this international exhibition has commissioned well over 100 new works, many for the streets and public spaces of Liverpool, by established contemporary artists from around the world.

European Biennial Network & The International Curators Forum.
Is it appropriate on the opening day of Liverpool Biennial to look at the long-term results of biennials? Or is the primary role of biennials to provide a short-term injection into the bloodstream of art and city.

Can they do both? Since the expansion and proliferation of biennials in the 1990s, can we now begin to detect accumulative benefits within their local arts ecologies? If so, why does criticism focus mainly upon the reception of authored curatorial strategies in an ever-expanding global art world?

This debate brings a number of European biennials together to focus the spotlight behind the scene and looks at different approaches of biennials to connect curatorial models with the cultural infrastructure in their cities. An expert panel of invited international curators, artists, commissioners and writers will represent those responsible for the organisation of the biennials.

Chaired by Paul O'Neill, Research Fellow Situations, University of the West of England; with Kerstin Bergendal, artist, and author of Kunstplan Trekoner; Paul Domela, Programme Director Liverpool Biennial; Annie Fletcher, curator van Abbe Museum, Eindhoven; Bige Orer, Director Istanbul Biennial; Renate Wagner, Berlin Biennale; Augustine Zenakos, founder and co-director Athens Biennial; and others and Jan Verwoert, contributing editor at Frieze.

We all experience artworks at different velocities and much has been said about the need for artworks to engage us in both the spectacular flash of first impact and the slow retinal aftershocks of perception.

This vertiginous moment is perhaps most precarious within the context of the international biennial when as the curtain rises the accumulation of ideas is exposed and the work becomes a spectacle in an international melee of artworks.

Hosted by David A. Bailey, Director of ICF and Senior Curator at Autograph, with contributions from Lina Dzuverovic, Curator of Nordic Biennial 2009, co-founder and Director of Electra; Cedar Lewisohn, Curator of Tate Modern Street Art and Tate Triennial, Axel Lapp, Contributing Editor Art Review, publisher and curator; Jiyoon Lee, Director of SUUM and Curator of Fantasy Studio Project; Ed Linse of Artists Anonymous, an art collective based in Berlin and writer and critic J.J. Charlesworth.

Robert Storr & David A. Bailey in Conversation

2008-05-26T07:19:00.000-07:00

Robert Storr & David A. Bailey in Conversation

Tate Britain
Millbank
SW1
London
www.tate.org.uk/britain

21st May 2008

"Before 2007, American art historian Robert Storr was primarily known for his longstanding curatorial role at MoMA's Department of Painting and Sculpture. As the first US Commissioner of the 52nd Venice Biennale last year, however, he received a barrage of criticism from the Italian and art press for, as the New York Times' Michael Kimmelman put it, his "subtle and sober" handling of the Arsenale show, the central international exhibition. Storr effectively "answered his critics" in an interview with The Art Newspaper back in January, in which he spoke candidly about his choices as helmsman of the world's most famous exhibition and the bureaucratic hoop-jumping that ensued.

In booking Storr for the International Curators Forum's first London event, Tate has certainly scored a coup. Ears will doubtless be pinned in anticipation of any art world gossip dropped during his conversation with David A Bailey, senior curator at Autograph. Essentially, though, this is an extraordinary chance to hear a first-hand account of the Biennale's recent past and consider the issues hanging over its future."

Kultureflash issue 240
www.kultureflash.net

Dak'Art Biennale : Dakar Senegal

2008-05-16T07:13:00.000-07:00

Dal'Art Biennale
8th Biennale of Contempory Arts
Dakar
Senegal
9th May - 9th June 2008
www.dakart.org

Africa: Mirror?

Dak’Art Biennale has chosen for its 2008 edition the theme of Mirror in relation to Africa’s current presence in the world, i.e. the multifaceted realities and the crucial issues facing the continent and those living in it on the one hand, and its diaspora on the other hand.

The pregnancy and permanence of the image being consubstantial with the mirror phenomenon, i.e. what is reflected in the double sense of casting and urging to reflect, it is therefore receptacle and vector of images; it is ambivalent and has a double meaning, if one assumes that it can be true or distorting.

The 2008 edition of DAKAR Biennale for Art draws on the metaphor of the mirror to examine, question a destiny and try to outline through Art, a future, that of an Africa more current than ever, in an immediate conscience or in attempts to conceal the presence which raises many issues. This almost temporal issue puts into perspective a threefold questioning: that of attributed identity, attributed and accepted identity, and attributed and rejected identity.

While it is hardly possible for Africa to infer in the first perspective (assuming that the image attributed to it is often built from the outside, from presuppositions, preconceived notions and even pure imaginations), its responsibility is solely and exclusively engaged in the act of acceptance or conscious and elaborated modification of the attributed identity.

Africa and the various stages of its history have been presented and continue to be so in literary genres and forms, from the pre-colonial period to our era of globalization, through prisms which relate again back to the mirror of the past and current human being. What is reflected in this context draws excessively on imageries of Epinal, clichés which, ultimately, relate back to visions and symbols. Anthropologists, ethnographers, writers, and economists have used and have often exploited to excess such reflected products, because they are developed on purpose.

Thus the African Art has come, in a recapturing and reinterpretation process of its discourse, to ignore conventional images, because the artwork offers writing as a means of reflecting other images more valuable, as it corresponds to realities that devices cannot reduce to caricatures. The verb of Africans has gone back up to the genesis of these images and produces unreal counter-models.

In response to the escalation of caricature, Africans, researchers and artists, economists and journalists, all those who, in writing, participate in the demystification move, deconstruct discourses in an archaeology for which Art is, after all, a medium which Africa has recaptured.

The African Art fascinates, motivates, mobilizes and provides a corrective, valuable and rehabilitating prospect. They are demiurge, these masters of the true meaning, and they provide hope for Africa to be what it wants to be.

Thus, the meetings and exchanges of DAK’ART 2008 intend to be a true mirror which allows to show realities and to point to issues through phrases and words by and for a salutary catharsis.

Therefore, Dakar Biennale is at the heart of a multifaceted debate, a necessary and topical debate which calls for introspection, dialogue and solidarity. It will be about determining the responsibility of Africa engaged in a process the course of which it has to imperiously control.

Globalization, cultural diversity, freedom and democracy, economic growth, poverty, dignity, hope and expectation, are themes which deeply raise issues and show that there is no other option than the lucid and courageous taking of individual and collective responsibilities, firstly African, convergent, and respectful of the human being.

This prospect paves the way to recapture the initiative, calls to break with the trap of ethnological look and as Boubacar Boris Diop said, to look at "Africa beyond the mirror."

***

Dak'Art Calling - Reflections by David Drake.

As Senegal's first city, Dakar seems to embody the vitality, complexity and contradictions of Modern Africa. The city's parade of striking modernist architecture may be a legacy of the years of French occupation, but the pot-holed streets, ramshackle urban infrastructure and ubiquitous street hawkers are a reminder of the harsh realities of post-colonial existence.

The Mbalax played nightly in clubs such as Just 4 U and Thiossane is a cosmopolitan blend of Western and African melodies and beats tinged with more traditional flavours. The rhythm of the clubs by night is also the rhythm of the streets by day. In the heart of the city, people always seem to be on the move, whether on foot or by assorted forms of road transport. Some cling onto the blue and yellow painted car rapide minibuses, which are reproduced in miniature as toys in the workshops of the central market, souvenirs deftly fashioned out of recycled tin cans. A few miles off the coast lies the idyllic Ile de Gorée, a haven for the many tourists who travel there daily by ferry to escape the hustle and bustle of the mainland. But for over a century Gorée was the island where slaves were delivered and traded by their African and French captors.

Like so many places in modern Africa, Dakar carries itself with beauty, elegance and grace, but also with a certain restlessness and vulnerability, as if haunted by its past. Curator Simon Njami has commented:

"Contemporary Africa no longer refers to a physical or geographic reality. It does not refer to a valid cartography, because the ebb and flow movement are the two constituent elements of this new citizenship. This new citizenship, intangible and fluid, is naturally based on the ripples of history and on memory"

For Dak'Art 2008, the eighth instalment of the Dakar Biennale of Contemporary African Art, the chosen theme was 'Africa: Mirror'. The theme sought to reflect both Africa's presence in the world - the multifaceted realities and issues facing the continent's inhabitants and its diaspora - and also the position of contemporary art and artists in Africa and on the world stage.

Apart from participating artists, curators, organisers and local dignitaries, the majority of those on hand for the opening festivities were a ragbag of arts professionals with a pre-existent interest in African arts and culture. Conspicuous by their absence, the globetrotting elite of international curators and collectors obviously does not consider Dakar on a par with Venice, Miami, Munster and the other must-visit Biennales. The importance of the event to Africa itself, however, was demonstrated by the presence at the opening of Senegal's President, Abdoulaye Wade, and also by the plethora of critical essays by African intellectuals in the accompanying catalogue. In these essays, distinguished writers dissect the issues underlying the 'Africa: Mirror' theme, asserting the need for more contemporary art collectors on the continent and further opportunities to showcase African creativity at home and abroad.

For Dak'Art 2008 to seek to create just such a platform for African contemporary artists is a laudable ambition. It therefore seemed wholly appropriate to roll out the red carpet for a grand opening in the gardens of the National Museum d'Ifan in Place de Soweto. Wearing gold-braided cloche hats and red tunics with sabres tucked under their belts, the ornamental guard of honour stood solemnly to attention as long welcoming speeches were given and various awards were handed out to artists by ambassadors, sponsors and VIPs.

However, the pomp and prestige of the opening ceremony could not mask the sad reality that the Biennale itself lacks the organisational resources and high presentational standards one has come to expect from an international art event of this profile and standing. This inevitably hinders the curators' efforts to present the artists' work in the best possible light. These shortcomings were immediately apparent in the main Exposition Internationale in 'Le Village de la Biennale'. Video monitors faltered, technicians nervously scrambled up and down ladders and artist names were scribbled on sheets torn from exercise books that lay on the floor beside the artworks. This last touch might have been an ironic statement by the organisers on the global position of African contemporary art, but we later discovered that they simply forgot to commission someone to produce laminated display panels.

After mentally adjusting to the somewhat ragged display, it was possible to discern the curators' intention to highlight work that drew on traditional forms to make contemporary statements about African experience. Senegalese artist Ndary Lo's expansive collection of iron trees with outstretched begging hands at the end of their branches offered an earnest protest at the deforestation of the continent. Jems Robert Koko Bi from the Ivory Coast had created a sculptural ensemble Darfur composed of three large, charred wooden figures with expressions of suffering and anguish. Lucas Johannes Van de Schiff's contribution represented racial tensions in South Africa by a head-shaped suspended punch bag with a brown face on one side, white on the other. However well intentioned, works like these did come across as one-dimensional and somewhat hectoring in tone, largely due to the overly literal approach adopted by the artist.

Video and media-based work generally fared better. Senegalese artist Cissé Soly's Union Europeenne had animated stars dancing around the European Union flag to a computer generated riff on integration and exclusion. Achille Komguem Kamsu from Cameroon's engaging installation Precarié featured a video loop of a busy downtown crossroads scene where motorcycles, cars, handcarts and pedestrians converge in the middle of the road, narrowly avoiding collision and serious injury by swerving at the last minute around oncoming traffic. This meditation on the disorder and precariousness of daily life in Africa worked well, on both a visual and intellectual level. South African born British artist Grace Ndiritu's video installation combined performance with historical imagery, juxtaposing references to genocide with images of Egypt and Meso-American civilisation.

The Exposition Internationale is but the tip of the iceberg in terms of the amount of work on display at Dak'Art 2008. With 140 'off-site' exhibitions in Dakar and on Gorée it pays to allow several days to sample the fringe programme. Some sites are conveniently located downtown, others are harder to find with exhibitions in private homes, colleges, cultural institutions and various backstreet shops and businesses, including a hairdressing salon. Overall the off-site programme has the feel of a huge artist open studios event cum art trail. Sustained by meal breaks, during which we tasted delicious chicken and fish with onion and lemon sauce and the Senegalese national dish thiéboudienne, we travelled to various off-site locations in search of quality work. More often than not we were disappointed by what we found. Many of the exhibitions had a traditional, 'arty-crafty' feel with batik and glass painting much in evidence, along with wood carving and sculpture using recycled materials. It seemed as if many of the artists were caught in that awkward space between wanting to stay true to their roots and seeking more modern and stylish forms of expression.

There were some notable exceptions. Amsterdam-based photographer Judith Quax imaginatively sited her evocative image and text series Immigration Clandestine in the windows of a downtown Mercedes showroom. The work featured images of empty rooms where young Senegalese men had lived, before they risked their lives trying to reach the Canary Islands in small fishing boats. The texts were based on interviews with the family and friends of the men, explaining why they made this perilous trip and what happened to them. Some died, some reached Europe and for others there is still no news. Further along the shoreline at the Place du Souvenir, a limestone piazza built as a memorial to the 2000 people who died in the MS Joola ferry tragedy in 2002, there was a major retrospective of the work of Iba Ndiaye. Ndiaye is a distinguished Senegalese artist who achieved some notoriety in European art circles in the 70s and 80s. His paintings and drawings of jazz masters, including John Coltrane and Miles Davis, may take us back to the jazz cellars of Paris and an earlier chapter in modern art history, but they are the work of an artist with a strong and distinctive voice. We ran into the exhibition curator Florence Axis outside the gallery and expressed our appreciation of her efforts in bringing his work to wider public attention.

Back at the hotel, we spent an hour in conversation with the curators Simon Njami and Fernando Alvim. As well as hearing once again about the financial and other problems they experienced in curating the African Pavilion at the Venice Biennale 2007, we learnt that Dak'Art 2008 had also been left seriously under-resourced when the President diverted state funds intended for the Biennale to a major sports and cultural event happening in 2009. Simon and Fernando also suggested that the lack of rigour in the selection of artists and staging of exhibitions was due in part to the appointment of a German Professor of History as the Artistic Director of the Biennale. Later that evening we met Gilles Hervio, Chief Ambassador of the delegation of the European Union, who confirmed that Dak'Art 2007 would have collapsed but for a last minute rescue package of European funding.

We were left in no doubt that better artistic leadership and sustained investment are needed if Dak'Art is to rise above its present hand to mouth existence. These issues are complex and problematic. Increasing state support and involvement whilst retaining artistic and intellectual independence in any situation is a difficult balance to strike. There are also dangers in looking outside Africa for artistic direction. For Dak'Art 2004 Canadian curator Sara Diamond was President of the International Selection Committee. Although she showed her customary sensitivity to the local political and cultural context, aesthetically and critically the work chosen seemed more suited to prevailing Western tastes and less representative of the spectrum of African contemporary art. This is merely an observation on rather than a criticism of the approach adopted in 2004. To truly flourish, Dak'Art needs the moral and practical support of the international art community, but not interference in it or, worst of all, a stance of critical disdain towards the event.

Our last afternoon was spent back at the Le Village de la Biennale. We attended the premiere of Manthia Diawara's documentary film Maison Tropicale which told the story of Jean Prouvé's modernist Tropical House, the prototypes of which were originally installed in Brazzaville in the Republic of Congo and Niamey in Niger, and were subsequently 'reclaimed' by the Western world. At one level, this is a parable about how modernism failed to adapt to the realities of the African continent. Once removed from Africa, the two prototype houses changed hands for millions of dollars on the international art market before being re-constructed in New York and Paris. The fate of the Tropical House was the subject of the artist Angela Ferreira's contribution to the Portugal pavilion at Venice 2007.

Diawara's film provoked lively audience discussion after the screening. The Tropical House is clearly an important cultural artefact and part of Africa's heritage. On the face of it, the prototypes should have remained in Africa rather than being re-sited in a new context. However, as Diawara's film points out, Africa has an underdeveloped museum infrastructure and a poor track record for conservation. The West, and most crucially Africa itself, mistrusts its ability to value and look after its cultural treasures.

This debate seemed to crystallise my thoughts around what I feel is Dak'Art's greatest challenge. With the right creative and organisational resources combined with renewed conviction and self-belief, Dak'Art can realise its ambition to become Africa's premier contemporary visual arts event. Without these elements in place, the biennale will continue to face an uncertain futur

David Drake attended the opening week of Dak'Art 2008 on an International Curators Forum Field Trip in May 2008

- © David Drake 2008

The ICF & Axel Lapp Projects - 5th Berlin Biennial

2008-04-01T09:38:00.000-07:00

Axel Lapp Projects
4th April 2008
www.axellapp.de

International Curators Forum launches its 2008 programme with an intimate afternoon salon at Axel Lapp Projects to mark a light performative parenthesis around the 5 Berlin Biennial, When things cast no shadow, curated by Adam Szymczyk and Elena Filipovic.

Using the freedom of speech in an uncontested space the ICF will explore the possibility of breaking with conventions, exploring the 24/7 economy as a temporal structure well suited to Berlin. The Curator and critic Axel Lapp will lead a conversation on these themes and discuss the rise of the independent gallery scene in Berlin and its resonances with the curatorial agendas of the Biennial.

The salon will also be an opportunity to see a selection from the current exhibition a season of films that feature work by Sonia Boyce & David Bickerstaff [UK], Nick Crowe & Ian Rawlinson [UK], Jeanne van Heeswijk & Marten Winters [NL], Mona Jas & Holger Friese [D], Sonia Khurana [IND], John Sealey [UK].

* * *

An Introduction to the ICF

In 2007 the newly formed International Curators Forum (ICF) staged two International Symposia and facilitated a group of over eighty arts professionals on a curatorial networking project. This experience has given us a unique insight into the needs of contemporary curators and in particular those from culturally diverse backgrounds. It ideally positions the organisation to consolidate its reputation and constitution as a leading provider of skills development and business opportunities for professional curators:

"An organisation which marks the changes, disruptions, and interventions that occur across major biennials over the next decade and documents these processes to allow future and emerging curators to discover, learn and develop their professional practice." David A Bailey July 2007

The next phase of the ICF will maintain the momentum and inspiration of the 2007 'Tactical Interventions' and create a portfolio of activity that consolidates key partnerships and explores a wider range of professional development opportunities for curators such as master classes, residencies, workshops and salons. For this programme we are looking to work with partners and funders both within and beyond England and the European Union. We are looking to use our base in England as a foundation upon which to grow our work internationally.

photos © Julia Waugh.

2007-09-01T04:55:00.001-07:00

Which way is East?

2007-09-01T04:43:00.000-07:00

The International Curators Forum (ICF), the radical new tactical intervention that has been casting a new critical light on the major art events of summer 2007’s Grand Tour, is now set to complete its 2007 itinerary at the Istanbul Biennale.

The ICF is both a professional development programme for emerging curatorial talent from the UK of Black or Asian origin, and an arena for exploring and contesting the roles that race and cultural heritage play within contemporary visual culture and the international arts scene. Earlier this summer, it successfully mentored and guided the experience of over 30 young, culturally diverse curators through the Venice Biennale, Documenta 12, and the Munster Sculpture Project, as well as programming the acclaimed and explosive symposium Pan-European Encounters at the Venice Biennale. Now, the ICF will engage with a more distinctive and significantly younger event in the art calendar, one which sits, both geographically and culturally, on the borderlands between East and West – the Tenth International Istanbul Biennial.

Under the directorship of Hou Hanru, this year’s Biennial will explore some of the most progressive and provocative ideas about the role of the Biennials in pushing the frontiers of curatorial practice in the twenty-first century. The principal thematic concern of the Istanbul Biennial is space – how artists and curators connect with the situation and location of a work of art. The ICF is concerned with how space can be charged politically, as well as creatively. Its contribution in Istanbul will consequently be a forum in which leading curators and artists will engage with the main themes of the Biennial, in the context of the ICF’s own focus on the relationships between global and racial politics, and art.

Which Way is East? is an open dialogue, organised in collaboration with the Istanbul Modern, which will led by the Turkish curator and artist Esra Sarigedik (who was Assistant Curator of the Ninth International Istanbul Biennale). The discussion will feature a diverse range of important practitioners and theorists, who will be discussing the politics and practice of curatorship in the twenty-first century art world, and how the relationships between global and local spaces, and art, can be mediated by the figure of the curator.

Esra Sarigedik Öktem is a curator and writer based in Istanbul and Eindhoven. She is currently working as curator at Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven where she recently organised solo exhibitions by Avi Mograbi, Pavel Buchler and Erinc Seymen. From 2004-5 she worked as assistant curator for 9th International Istanbul Biennial curated by Charles Esche and Vasif Kortun and organised by the Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts. In 2003 Esra was assistant curator at the Rooseum Center for Contemporary Art in Malmö, Sweden and assistant curator for the 3rd Berlin Biennial curated by Ute Meta Bauer.

David A Bailey is the founder of the International Curators Forum and is currently Senior Curator at Autograph APB and is curator of the Black Moving Image Cube season; Remember Saro-Wiwa the Living Memorial and the London segment of Channel 4’s Big Art Project. He was actively involved in setting up autograph: the Association of Black Photographers in 1986 and the International Institute of Visual Arts (inIVA) in 1994.

Vasif Kortun is the director of Platform Garanti Contemporary Art Center in Istanbul. He was the founding director of Proje4L Istanbul Museum of Contemporary Art (2000-2003). He was co-curator with Charles Esche of the 3rd Istanbul Biennial in 1993. Between 1994 and 1997 he was director of the Museum Center for Cultural Studies, Bard College. His writing and interviews have appeared in many books, magazines and exhibition catalogues.

Hamra Abbas is an artist practice Hamra Abbas takes a satirical and playful approach toward widely accepted traditions. By appropriating significant imagery and iconography, she transforms them into new works that may be experienced spatially and temporally. Hamra was invited to participate in the Istanbul Biennial (2007), participated in the Sydney Biennale (2006) and was awarded a collaborative residency by the V&A London, Gasworks and Green Cardamom (2006).

Sherman Mern Tat Sam is an artist, writer and curator. His paintings have recently been exhibited at The Suburban in Chicago; in addition he has shown internationally, particularly in Porto and Dublin. He has written for various art magazines and catalogues, and regularly contributes to The Brooklyn Rail and www.kultureflash.com. Born in Singapore, he studied fine art at Otis-Parsons in Los Angeles and read for a Master of Letters in the History of Art at the University of Oxford. He currently holds the Inspire Fellowship at the Hayward, London, where Ralph Rugoff is the new director, and is at present touring A Secret Service: Art, Compulsion and Concealment (contemporary group show), Mind Forg'd Manacles: William Blake and Slavery and Rembrandt as Printmaker.

Which Way is East is set to build on the success of the ICF’s intervention in Venice, where the symposium Pan-European Encounters offered a critical and discursive counterpoint to one of the outstanding elements of the exhibition – the African Pavilion, Check List Luanda Pop. The debate between Robert Storr, curator of 52nd Venice Biennale, and the co-curator of the African Pavilion Simon Njami, in particular laid bare the sensitivities, politics and passions that surrounded this controversial gesture in art history. By providing the space for open debate and discussion, the ICF made a historic contribution to this year’s Venice Biennale, and will continue to make vital and valuable interventions in the international art scene, from the Istanbul Biennial through to next year’s Liverpool Biennial and beyond.

ICF Director David. A. Bailey commented, “The International Curators Forum is both about developing the professional practice of young, culturally diverse British curators, and staging tactical interventions and platforms for discussion in this summer’s international arts events. However, these two processes are really intertwined and cannot be readily disentangled.”

He went on, “The curators who have been guided on the Grand Tour this summer have offered a walking, breathing collective critique of so many of the assumptions and practices of the international arts scene, a critique which has fed into, and fed on, the series of incredible talks that the ICF has programmed. We hope that we have started a journey which still has many miles to go, and that we have made an important contribution towards putting cultural diversity back into the thinking and working of the international visual arts world.”

Skulptur Projekte Munster - Documenta 12 Kassel - The Gift

2007-07-05T02:40:00.000-07:00

IS ART THE ARCHETYPICAL GIFT?

Is its reception also a burden of care and responsibility.

This is the burden of the gift received in the recordings of the ICF. All names have been erased and meanings confused and scrambled. This is the the whispering game of meaning and its distribution. Do not be alarmed if you have been reframed that is the obligation of the curator.

“The colour scheme is in itself a subtle history of previous Documenta exhibitions. mauves, greens and other delicate hues of beige all tell a story. In the era of post wallpaper culture there is both genius and lunacy in this degree of narcissism. The grammar and architecture of the space of exhibition speaks for itself.”

The impossibility of the return, of performing history, to a moment like
Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y in which the world of art is changed forever.., that is where we are coming from when we say, “Reality talks to the present but somewhere there is crisis of translation.”

Is there any underground left in art, an avant garde in the emerging markets of the East?

Hyper commodification of the markets. Everything becomes a subsidiary of the entertainment industry and should be measured by its standards. Harvey Kietel is better in Bad Lieutenant than forty feet tall in pastel blue reciting Shakespearesque soliloquies. How relevant or needed are the questions of these revenants that traipse through these exhibitions? It feels very sunday afternoon. There was a sense of fabulous vacuity. All works pulled out of any traction with the world and pushed into vague universalisms. The works are not given the opportunity to claim the space around them.

Neither pop nor hermetic but oblique. But any complex architectonic is collapsed by the poor choices of works.
The real difficulty is to shut down the mind from the industry necessity to see something in the work. And accept it might be rubbish.

The themes receding.
“We search for the essential but all we find is things.”
Leitmotiv: A theme that transforms itself as it repents.

Is it the gallery walls that make the difference?

What is the communist party going to do with the revolution "What is to be done"

If we must have nostalgic pseudo Marxism then at least let it be positive!

"People who destroy commodities show their human superiority over commodities. They stop submitting to the arbitrary forms that distortedly reflect their real needs. The flames of Watts consummated the system of consumption. The theft of large refrigerators by people with no electricity, or with their electricity cut off, is the best image of the lie of affluence transformed into a truth in play. "

1965 Situations International, "The Decline and Fall of the Spectacle-Commodity Economy,"

Hearing the conversations of twenty curators moving through the exhibitions of Venice, Documenta and Muenster we feel the tension between the hype and delivery of exhibitions that are self consciously staged on the world stage. One conclusion that can be drawn is that although philosophy and political theory have moved from the universal to the particular and the intimate there is a confusion about how these shifts in perspective are positioned in terms of curatorial practice.

On a global scale economics, militarism and ecological catastrophe are poorly articulated within the world media. Should we expect more from art?

The geography of art : Does the art world need lessons in geography. The local and the specific experiences of people become the universal content of artworks, the meaning of the real transformed by the logic of translation and distribution. Into the narrative of experience for the globalized viewer. How can we reflect on Africa in the Arsenale of Venice?
How do economics and politics always exceed the the frame or illusion of art and intervene in the world and make its structures of power ever more legible and brutal?

To answer this we must perhaps abandon Venice for Documenta letting the conversations recorded reply through the replayed amnesia of that City and its mesmeric currents. Our conversations were again brought back to the finite geography of a City. The finite geography of an Exhibition within a City and the properties of specific works in relationship not only to each other but also to what was not there, the ghosts of works that usually inhabit the Museum spaces, and the texts to contextualise the grand theoretical trilogy that we were asked to consider as a post to each location.

We were like the 1001 chinese visitors whom I took to be chairs spread about the colour sequenced interiors of the exhibition spaces. We were waiting to be used as support for an exhausted body.

In the conversations there was a tendency to drift back to Venice and power of seduction of specific works and Pavilions, The Russian, the French and The Canadian. To question again the thematic of Robert Storr and logic of the Africa Pavilion. Was it by chance that Storr had hung Sophie Calle in the Italian Pavilion as if to alert us to the banal strategy that was to be deployed in Kassel?

The Documenta exhibition was so slow that we drift back across the lagoon in search of random thoughts. The layering of curatorial decisions across the venues was intensely problematic. Although the supplied i-Pods gave some access to the approaches they were also deliberately obtuse. Our conversations accrue our likes and dislikes in small piles. The lattice of meaning spelt out; dull and anti sensational, artificial and polite. A profound distribution of ideas was not created by the distribution of key artists such as Kerry James Marshall, Hito Steverl and Charlotte Posenenske across each of the venues, merely a rather prosaic and iconoclastic modernist poetic discourse. This some felt was an ambitious and non hermetic game with the audience. Some thought it was fun that some of the artists popped up across different venues, we saw Kerry James Marshall misplaced once too often.

The history of performance documented and then forgotten was perhaps the most articulate themed show. The reanimation of the Trisha Brown work, the intervention of a contextual work by Tino Seghal. Lin Yilin work casually installed in a corner portraying the building of a temporary of a wall across a road. Jiri Koranda Actions 1976-77. But elsewhere we struggled.
What stops us in our tracks and remixes the expectation of the work of art.

“Come to the heart of Germany only to read the word, "Art "in your own shadow.”

The weight of expectation disputes both art or entertainment. What is the function of these liberal aesthetics, To be merely thought provoking would be enough!

Pan European Encounters - The Venice Biennale 2007

2007-06-12T08:09:00.000-07:00

The ICF is both a professional development programme for emerging curatorial talent from the UK of and an organisational platform for exploring and contesting the roles that race and cultural heritage play within contemporary visual culture and the international art scene. . An inaugural symposium ‘Pan-European Encounters’ was also organised during the Venice Biennale to discuss and explore the changing idea of identity and the diaspora in the 21st century. Twenty-three curators from the UK were selected to participate in the visits and 10 group leaders were recruited to accompany them. More than 20 speakers were also engaged for related symposia, seminars and debates.

Participants also included: Nike Jonah, Terry Adams, Tanya Wilmer, Ellie Stout, Mark Waugh, David A Bailey, Axel Lapp, Philip Abraham, Julia Waugh, Huttson Lo, Tim Eastop, Adelaide Bannerman, Melanie Keen, Yvette Mutumba, Yasmin Canvin, Sally Lai, Sook-Kyung Lee, Sarah Raza, Atsuko Ramirez, Sutapa Biswas, Cheryl Gallagher, Juan Sebastian Ramirez, Michael Forbes, Sherman Sam, Emma Boyd, Catherine Lucktaylor, Qian Jing, Alicia Campbell, Cedar Leishon and Esen Kaya.

Pan European Encounters
Sala corte Room
Hotel Monaco & Grand Canal
San Marco 1332
Venice

7th June - 8th June 2007

DAY ONE: Thursday 7th June
Welcome: Samenua Sesher, Robert D’Agostino (President of the Arsenale) and Robert Storr (Curator of 52 Venice Biennale)
Prologue: Mario De Michelis (Dean of the University of Venice for Arts)

Keynote: David A Bailey (Curator) - A Black Aesthetic

Panel discussion: A Black Aesthetic. Chair: Mike Philips (Independent curator and Cross-cultural Consultant to Tate Britain), Deborah Smith (Curator), Yu Yeon Kim (Curator), and David Adjaye (Architect).

Questions from the audience.

Break

Keynote: Simon Njami (Curator) - A South African Pavilion

Panel discussion: Chair: Mariam Sharp (Arts Council England), Ekow Eshun (Director, Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) London), Courtney J Martin (Curator), Thelma Golden (Director, Studio Museum Harlem).

Questions from the audience.

-

DAY TWO: Friday 8th June
The Black Moving Cube
Introduction: The Black Moving Cube by David A Bailey

Panel Discussion: Chair: Gilane Tawadros (Curator), Jacques Ranciere (Theorist/Critic), Otolith Group: Anjalika Saga and Kodwo Eshun (Artists), John Akomfrah (Artist), Zineb Sidera (Artist).

Questions from the audience.

In Conversation: David Lammy (Minister for Culture UK) and Dr Augustus Caseley-Hayford (Executive Director Arts: Arts Council England) Close

The Symposium is delivered with support from the University of Venice and Decibel

The aim of the ICF was to present, a textured geometry - memory and representations; two days of symposia exploring the present tense of aesthetics, politics and the diasporic cultures in the global landscapes of the 'Art World'.

Against the push and pull of a mechanic reproduction of simple stereotypes the ICF has been at the margins of the sometimes disturbing terrain - the space of production and distribution of artworks. We have created a fragile but autonomous borderless state in which as Gillian Tawadros might say the 'Fault Lines' of history shift before us.

This gentle tremor is not merely the rupturing of grand narratives but also a moving through the various 'posts' and missives of a historic discourse into a micro cartography of bodies metabolised, passionate and articulate - urgently exploring the limits of specific locutions; particularly in the context of the Africa Pavilion and the exhibition Check List - Luanda Pop curated by Fernando Alvim and Simon Njami. There is no exit from this space instead we are now always Exiles, displaced signs pointing to histories that have been erased only to be reanimated as artworks.

My moment of elucidation within the symposia was the dialogue between Robert Storr and Simon Njami which exposed the frayed edges of a collaboration and the limits and ethics of curatorial responsibility.

It revealed not only the philosophy of the neighbourhood as Deleuze might say but the symptoms of the sickness Neitzsche would have diagnosed as endemic within power structures such as the Venice Biennale and organisations that are global in their profile and their political power. Their conversation by default located the fissures and economies of determination which are the 'worldliness' of the 'art world'. Could it it be anything but without resorting to bad faith?

Beyond the symposia dialogues we were delighted that our curatorial groups talked around themes raised in the symposia, and by our group leaders but also the intimate resonances each of them had with particular works in the pavilions.

The ambition of the ICF was to develop a professional network within the paradigms of hospitality and friendship. We hope we have facilitated an important set of dialogues and raised questions which can be expanded as we travel through Documenta and Munster. We are keen to stay connected and want to hear what moved, frustrated, excited, shocked and inspired your journey through the labyrinth of the 52 Venice Biennale...

- © Mark Waugh.

www.myspace.com/icuratorsforum
www.internationalcuratorsforum.org.uk

***

Venice Biennale 2007 - Notes from the panel.

1. The Symposium Moment between Robert Storr, Simon Njami and Fernando Alvim. A dialogue at the limits of responsibility.

2. David Altmejd - The Canadian Pavilion. The exquisite bricolage of the Flaneur

3. Chairing a Panel with Gillian Tawadros, Otolith Group, John Akomfrah, Zineb Sedira and Jacques Ranciere... wow more time please.

4. The security guards in the Africa Pavilion behind the work of Yinka Shonibare, ironic displacement?

5. Crashing out in the Jason Rhodes and feeling my body say, enough is enough!

***

Monday, 14 May 2007
Letter to The International Curators Forum :
"I have just read the text on the Documenta website titled Migration of Form. It is a clear articulation of where Documenta 12 is heading and I thought made some interesting points regarding the aesthetic moment as liminal space into which we move or depart according to our our volition. You cannot force people to experience art. That is the beauty and sublime nature of art. It calls you into its abyss and broken surfaces to challenge your stable reflection of yourself. In this journey we all become others, multiplicities of territories, routed without clear origin and destined to a future we cannot present.

Has anyone else read it?"

Labels: Documenta, ICF, International Curators Forum, Migration of Form.

photos © Julia Waugh.