Tuesday 26 June 2007

SIMON POPPER AT WHITECHAPEL PROJECT SPACE








SIMON POPPER
'I have no eye deer why in representation elephants appear smaller than in life and fleas appear larger'
Preview Thursday 21st June 7-9pm
23.06.07 -22.07.07

Whitechapel Project Space
20 Fordham Street
E1 1HS
www.whitechapelprojectspace.org.uk
t. 07808 732340/ 07748 235428
Open Sat-Sun 1-6pm

Thursday 21 June 2007

SUPERM, A COLLABORATION AND EXHIBITION BY BRIAN KENNY AND SLAVA MOGUTIN OPENS AT BLOW DE LA BARRA JULY 10



SUPERM (Slava Mogutin & Brian Kenny)
July 10 to August 10, 2007
Blow de la Barra

Slava Mogutin & Brian Kenny
1974, Kemerovo/Siberia, Russia + 1982, Heidelburg, Germany
Live and work in New York

Superm is the name that dissident - journalist - porno - star - photographer - poet - video - artist Slava Mogutin and musician and multimedia artist Brian Kenny use since 2004 to collaborate in exhibitions and other art events. In the art world, Mogutin is mainly known for morose and impulsively sexy Cibachrome prints, mostly un-staged and unrehearsed, of Danish skateboarders, Dutch sneaker boys, soccer players, German skinheads, Russian military cadets, California buddy boxers, wrestlers and fetishists that we find in his honest portrayal of fixations and obsessions of youth culture and its feelings of isolation and melancholy, conformism and desire. Brian Kenny produces his own music, which combines elements of hip hop and electronic ambient; in his artwork, mainly in drawing, graffiti, photography, video and multimedia installations, he surveys queer and other identities on the edge as influenced by hip-hop culture and New York. Together they merge their raw, in-your-face aesthetics to produce layered multimedia installations combining photography, drawings, graffiti and video projection. Their best and most satisfying collaboration is Wigger, which takes its title from the slang expression originally derived from contracting “white nigger,” a term referring to a large suburban youth culture in the US and beyond, where white and mostly male youngsters imitate black urban hip-hop culture in its music, fashion, language and lifestyle. Still frequently used in a pejorative sense, the term refers to the construction of identities from parts adopted from different environments and its hybrid nature in terms of race and class. The “wigger” is said to be inauthentic, a “wannabe nigger.” Mogutin and Kenny, who both in different degrees adopt the cultural identity of the “wigger”, as Superm seek to address the complex questions of racial, sexual and cultural identity raised by this phenomenon on various levels in their work, from the questions regarding a subcultural tourism in search of the exotic, lacking what is associated with the so-called authentic background and experience, to the problematic dealing with the dissemination and perpetuation of the hip-hop phenomenon by the mass media, who seems to have constructed this “authentic experience.” In its complexity, always maintaining a youthful boundless attitude, Superm explores the processes of identity formation among adolescents and the new possibilities of emerging adulthood.
(Text by Octavio Zaya)

Tuesday 19 June 2007

HABITAT/VARIATIONS AT BAC GENEVA



exhibition design by Pablo Leon de la Barra

HABITAT/VARIATIONS
A project by María Inés Rodríguez, independent curator (Paris) In collaboration with Juan Herreros and Pablo León de la Barra At the invitation of the Centre d’édition contemporaine and the Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève, Exhibition produced jointly with La Casa Encendida, Madrid

Exhibition at the Bac – Bâtiment d’art contemporain, Geneva

28, rue des Bains et 10, rue des Vieux-Grenadiers, 1205 Genève
Opening hours: Tuesday to Sunday, 11 am to 8 pm
June 23, 2007 - September 2, 2007
Friday, June 22, 2007, from 6 pm
Symposium: Saturday, June 23, 2007, from 2 to 7 pm
http://www.bac-ge.ch/

Where to live and how? This exhibition proposes a reflection around projects by artists and architects whose work investigates the living environment. The projects presented are derived from various contexts which lie at the intersection between architecture and art, utopia and reality, individual and collective space.

With: Alexander Apóstol, Pablo León de la Barra, Ronan et Erwan Bouroullec, Sergio Cabrera, Raúl Cárdenas, Santiago Cirugeda, Jimmie Durham, Didier Fiuza Faustino, Yona Friedman, Jakob Kolding, Josep María Martín, Hans-Walter Müller, N55, Maria Papadimitriou, Marjetica Potrč, Tercer un Quinto, Pedro Reyes, Pia Rönicke, Gabriel Sierra et Barbara Visser.

A symposium, directed by the architect Juan Herreros, will take place on Saturday June 23, from 2 to 7 pm, at the Bac. With : Santiago Cirugeda, Philippe Rahm, Kees Christiaanse, Anne Lacaton, Salvador Pérez Arroyo.

Where and how to dwell, to inhabit and to live? This exhibition proposes an overview of a series of projects by artists and architects, who reflect on the subject of the habitat and that by doing so, complicate this issue through their work. The projects that will be presented in the exhibition come form a rather diverse range of contexts and are situated in the intersection between architecture and art, utopia and reality. Some of them account for very active, emerging urban forms, and pose very complex economic, political and social questions that escape the traditional notions of art, architecture and urbanism.

If we are to think the city as the "assemblage of settlings and style assimilations, of icons and of cultural practices that congregate the construction of the past, the tradition as well as of the projects, that is to say, its idea of the future1, it would be interesting to see if the different projects presented can actually transform or at least question the way in which the problematic of the habitat is taken on by the specialists, the State and the users.

In this way, as pointed out by architect Juan Herreros, "social lodging cannot longer be conceived within a systematic perspective of expulsion towards the edges of the city. The lodging programmes can become an engine of transformation of the usage and the image of public space so that the issue is not limited to the construction of buildings. It is in this way that habitat and political space becomes a double component that has to be taken into account when experimenting with these variables, the limits of which we still have to take on”2

Establishing the connections and creating the exchange networks between the concerned agents (artists, architects, political decision makers and inhabitants) can produce new strategies in terms of the habitat.

For this project, in collaboration with artist/curator/architect Pablo Leon de la Barra, we have conceived a working space that we will call Activation Zone (zone d'activation). This AZ is presented as a device that gathers all the elements that constitute the project: exhibition, library, working table and seminar space (conferences and film club). Each of these elements is indispensable and constitutes part of the ensemble.

notes:
1 Romero, Jorge, Tres lecturas de la cultura moderna en América Latina, (mitos y reflexiones de un planteamiento), in Modernidad y posmodernidad, Caracas, Museo Alejandro Otero, p. 109.

2 Presentation floating workshop "INFRAESTRUCTURAS RESIDENCIALES DE USO PÚBLICO" directed by Juan Herreros at the edge of the Naumon ship. Barcelona, Fundación MIES VAN DER ROHE. 2004.


Monday 18 June 2007

OTRA DE VAQUEROS OPENS IN GENEVE THIS FRIDAY




On an invitation of the Centre d’édition contemporaine
Perros Negros (Mexico City) & Toasting Agency (Paris) are presenting :
OTRA DE VAQUEROS (REDUX)
Exhibition from June 23 to September 2, 2007
Opening on Friday June 22, 2007 (from 6 pm)

With Sean Snyder (Berlin), Jeremy Deller (London), Karl Holmqvist (Stockholm/Berlin), Bernadette Corporation (Paris/Berlin), Artemio (Mexico City), Reena Spaulings (New-York), Bruno Serralongue (Paris), Claire Fontaine (Paris), Jennifer Allora-Guillermo Calzadilla (San Juan), Jay Chung & Q Takeki Maeda (Berlin/Düsseldorf), Mario García-Torres (Los Angeles/Mexico City) and Minerva Cuevas (Mexico City)

Redux version and inevitably different from an exhibition – preceded by a one month residence – which took place in Mexico City at the beginning of the year, OTRA DE VAQUEROS brings together artists who work in a singular way starting from the remains of the concept of culture and its contemporary misadventures.

"When considering Otra de vaqueros (Another Story About Cowboys, a Mexican saying that refers to an almost unbelievable story, a story that here seems to remain unnamed), one gets the sense that the exhibition as a whole was thought as a clever intervention in the specific context of Mexico city’s artistic scene, which is probably one of its most powerful assets. The show seems to reinvigorate the disinterested enthusiasm that labeled the Mexican cultural sphere of the last decade but this time brandishing as a collective political statement the refusal of a fixed identity and the reinvention of the artistic self. The exhibition brings together artists and collective initiatives that question the problematics raised by the notion of authorship and style. By using distorted or constructed identities through production and branding, some of them advance specific spaces in which to develop their practice such as Bernadette Corporation, Reena Spaulings and Claire Fontaine. This critical approach seems to go hand in hand with what turns out to be the main premise of a great number of works, that is an activist character pointing to the creation of social alternatives that aspire to challenge the multinational economical and political powers of today. These range from Bruno Serralongue’s quasi-journalistic photographs of meetings and protests that replicate to the instrumentalization of information by the media, to Bernadette Corporation’s famous Get Rid of Yourself, a post 9-11 film-tract aligned with the spirit of anarchic movements aiming to recreate the anonymous fierceness of a shared resisting experience. In a similar spirit, Claire Fontaine’s We Are All Whatever Singularities, a text inspired by Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, focuses on the intensity of life and its affects in order to promote a sense of a possible future as a remedy to the colonization of our subjectivities. Some works point to a more day-to-day strategies of individual resistance such as Jennifer Allora & Guillermo Calzadilla’s Sweet Gland, Sweet Lands... (a video depicting a roaster improvised on the wheel of the back axle of a suspended car), or refer to the everyday impact of major companies, not on the lives of regular citizens but of those that are currently involved in the Middle East conflicts as in Sean Snyder’s video Casio, Seiko, Sheraton, Toyota, Mars. Others draw on long-lasting historical associations like Minerva Cuevas’ mural painting morphing Scrooge McDuck with images from the Spanish colonial times portraying the local “savages”. This piece echoes with Claire Fontaine’s Foreigners Everywhere, a neon modified to fit the specificities of the context that was this time translated not into Spanish, as one would expect, but into Náhuatl, a pre-colonial language in the region.

Although the works in Otra de vaqueros are bound by the artists’ criticality and suspiciousness regarding, among other things, the artistic system that brought them together, interestingly enough it is those very same processes of exchange that, raising the artists enthusiasm for the residency preceding the show, might help to renew the spontaneous politicization of art-making in a locale that feels everyday closer to the global cultural centers."

Exhibition presented by the Centre d'édition contemporaine at the Bac - Bâtiment d'art contemporain
28, rue des Bains et 10, rue des Vieux-Grenadiers, 1205 Genève
Opening hours: Tuesday to Sunday, 11 am to 8 pm

http://perrosnegros.info/

http://toastingagency.free.fr/
http://www.bac-ge.ch/

Sunday 17 June 2007

LOS SUPER ELEGANTES TO CREATE A NEW DANCE PAINTING AT MOCA CHICAGO. THE PAINTING WILL BE DESTROYED WHEN THE EXHIBITION ENDS.

Los Super Elegantes dance and lypsinch to their pop hit "te quiero a ti" from their soon to be released album " Nothing Rally Matters. Performed at Blow de la Barra Gallery, London in November 2005.

Saturday 16 June 2007

STEFAN BRUGGEMANN AND LOS SUPERELEGANTES AT "ESCULTURA SOCIAL" IN MOCA CHICAGO


Stefan Bruggemann, Nothing Boxes, (stack 11 x 8 x 5 boxes), unique, 2006

Escultura Social: A New Generation of Art from Mexico City
June 23 - September 2, 2007

Over the last ten years, Mexico, and Mexico City in particular, has become a thriving hub of contemporary art activity that has had an international impact. A dynamic young generation of artists has developed a rigorous new vocabulary that embraces non-traditional sculptural materials as well as video, photography, and performance. Informed by twentieth-century art historical movements such as conceptualism, "actions" or "happenings," which are being re-examined not only in Mexico, but worldwide by a younger generation of artists, the work also refers to aspects of popular culture -- television, music, advertising, or flea markets -- and its history, urban life, and current political issues, but does so in a fresh new way that is not readily identifiable as Mexican.

German performance artist Joseph Beuys's idea of social sculpture, translated into the Spanish escultura social, is used as a multivalent point of reference: the works are all socially engaged, they draw connections between people, animals, and nature, they revisit conceptual practices/actions from the 1960s, and promote a demystified and democratic idea of artmaking. In addition, the circulation and meaning of images, objects, and actions are at the crux of these artists' works and the exhibition provides an opportunity to showcase their recent developments. It includes site-specific, performative and ephemeral projects in addition to videos, photographs, and installations by several artists, including Maria Alós, Carlos Amorales, Julieta Aranda, Gustavo Artigas, Stefan Bruggemann, Miguel Calderon, Fernando Carabajal, Abraham Cruzvillegas, Mario Garcia-Torres, Daniel Guzman, Pablo Helguera, Gabriel Kuri, Dr. Lakra, Los Super Elegantes, Nuevos Ricos, Yoshua Okon, Damian Ortega, Fernando Ortega, Pedro Reyes, and dynamic young architect Fernando Romero.

This exhibition is curated by MCA Assistant Curator Julie Rodrigues Widholm. A bi-lingual and illustrated catalogue with contributions from the artists accompanies the exhibition.

Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago

220 East Chicago Avenue
Chicago, Illinois 60611-2643

Wednesday 13 June 2007

TETINE PRESENTS TROPICAL PUNK AT WHITECHAPEL ART GALLERY!


TROPICAL PUNK AT WHITECHAPEL ART GALLERY!
Tetine are proud to invite you for an evening of radical TROPICAL PUNK manifestations at The Whitechapel Art Gallery Late Nights on FRIDAY 22 JUNE from 7-11 pm! 


Expect a cannibalistic hot evening of mixed media mayhem covering sound, film, art videos, performance, drawings and T Shirts including a RARE screening of the ONLY unbiased RIO BAILE FUNK music doc 'I'M UGLY BUT TRENDY (2004) by DENISE GARCIA at the cinema gallery – think RIO female FUNK CARIOCA MC's and the whole structure of Funk Carioca beat production and party politics including a Tetine set of experimental punk funk carioca.
The event also presents a specially curated video programme featuring selected art/music videos by AVAF (a very anxious feeling), OBJETO AMARELO, MICHAEL ARMS, TETINE, ALEXANDRE DA CUNHA, PAUL B DAVIS, LUCAS BAMBOZZI, SOLANGE TO ABERTA, 7MAGNIGICOZ, MERCENARIAS, SEXO EXPLICITO, PIPA, MAURICIO IANES, RICK CASTRO & RODRIGO GARCIA DUTRA – including a limited edition of a TROPICAL PUNK FANZINE and TETINE's brand new funk carioca mix tape SLUM DUNK VOL 2 - if you liked the SLUM DUNK PRESENTS FUNK CARIOCA wait and see this one - with texts by PABLO LEON DE LA BARRA, RICARDO DOMENECK, SARA QUIN, BRUNO VERNER and collages by FABIO GURjAO, CASSIA TABATINI, TIAGO BORGES DA SILVA, GUILHERME ALTMAYER, CIBELLE CAVALLI, ERIKA VERZUTTI e ADRIANO COSTA to mark the occasion.


PROGRAMME CINEMA:

7:30 pm I’M UGLY BUT TRENDY’ (Brazil, Rio De Janeiro 60 min), Director: Denise Garcia
8:30 pm Q&A with Denise Garcia
9 -11 pm videos + DJs + live + drinks + t-shirts

COME AND DO THE DANCE - IT WON'T COST YOU MUCH!

INFO: TETINE PRESENTS TROPICAL PUNK
WHEN: Friday / June 22
TIME: 7 to 11 pm
WHERE: WHITECHAPEL ART GALLERY
ADDRESS: WHITECHAPEL HIGH STREET, E1 7QX
ENTRY:£ 6/5 concessions £ 3 Whitechapel Members

**********************
www.tetine.net
www.myspace.com/tetine




Tuesday 12 June 2007

BLOW DE LA BARRA STAND IN ART ATHINA


view of the stand with Angelo Plessas' black and white striped wall painting

Federico Herrero painting and Stefan Bruggemann Obliteration

Angelo Plessas' website, Los Super Elegantes video and Maria Papadimitriou painting

view of the stand

Stefan Bruggemann Obliteration and Andreas Angelidakis Cloud House

Angelos Plessas website www.veryupsetwithyou.com

Miltos Maletas new painting, painted above an old laptop painting

Andreas Angelidakis

Milena Muzquiz and Liliana Sanguino

Milena Muzquiz and Angelo Plessas

art crowd sitting on Andreas Angelidakis bench

the end
(some pictures courtesy Angelo says)