SLAVA MOGUTIN IN THE COVER OF NEW BUTT

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ATHENS: VISIT TO COLLECTOR'S HOME/ART GODS' PANTHEON

friendly house mascot


welcoming committee


home decoration


marble atrium


dead president


one of the living rooms


and the gymnasium

'DISCO COPPERTONE' IN ATHENS, TEXT BY PLB IN FROG MAGAZINE ISSUE 6

Disco Coppertone
Piraeus Port, Athens
September 7, 2007 to October 12, 2007
Text by Pablo Leon de la Barra
1589 words
Installation photos by Pablo Leon de la Barra

Last May, while in Athens, I went with Maria Thalia Carras to visit the site where Locus Athens, the curatorial agency she directs with Sofia Tournikiotis, would organize their next exhibition: a passengers terminal in the port of Piraeus from where tourists board their cruises to travel around the Mediterranean. I was surprised by the location: they couldn’t have chosen a more characterless place. The port station is what Marc Auge called a ‘non-place’, a generic space for the transit and circulation of passengers, but also a spaces of parenthesis, of a shared solitude and of a shared identity as tourists. If Athens is the city where it’s impossible to ignore the presence of the Acropolis, and where there’s always a connection with the origins of Western civilization, then choosing to do an exhibition in Piraeus is an attempt to escape this weight of history through the non-place. If recent contemporary aesthetic production in Athens has been marked in most cases by a fascination with neo-figuration or with the destruction, fracture and fragmentation of these figurations, that the exhibition happens in a non-place, opens the door for other type of discourses to be presented and examined.

Since it was founded in 2004, Locus Athens has had a non-space, and organized exhibitions, events, talks and publications without having a physical exhibition location. This has given them the flexibility to adapt their projects to the context and to create a critical dialogue with and within Athens. Past projects have included, a video-tea night, a book on art for children, an exhibition in which Dan Perjovschi drew on walls of a school, a publication and a series of performances by Greek artists including Poka-Yio and Yorgos Sapountzis in different public spaces in Athens, the production of Los Super Elegantes ‘Nothing Really Matters’ video and a concert with them in the rooftop of a hotel where they performed an aquatic ballet, a manifestation against abstract public sculpture in Athens together with a celebration of the Greek mustache, among other things.

Back in Athens in September, I took a taxi to the ferry station where the exhibition was taking place. Upon entering the station, my first stop was the café of the station where a group of people were gathered. To my surprise, they were not art people watching an art video, but normal users, mostly port workers having dinner and watching the news. I continued towards the station’s lobby, there in a shop called ‘Heaven on Earth’, Aleksandra Mir continued her investigation on tourism and the production of multiples, by inserting a series of tourist products designed by her which made reference and played with travelers expectations within the Greekland: bags with images of the Three Graces, T-shirts printed with a design of two classic men wrestling for Justice, and mugs containing an inscription reading ‘I love Greece’.

Inside the passengers terminal, in the hall where tourists wait in line for their passports to be stamped before boarding the cruise, there are two works that totally modify the space (which before only had some posters promoting tourism to the Greek Islands), transforming through interventions the ‘non-place’ into a place: this works provide decoration, distraction and comfort for the tourist, returning him from the abstract non-place to a sensation of being somewhere else. Olaf Nicolai has covered the columns and the passport control booths with posters with the colours of the rainbow blurring into each other. With this he has transformed an aggressive place of surveillance into a friendly place. Meanwhile, Nikos Alexiou has created a curtain that runs all along the space, next to the luggage conveyor belt. The curtain is made of sewn and dyed table-cloths from Greek tavernas and dyed in the different tones and shades of the Greek sea and sky. The curtain anticipates the shining reflections of the sea and sky. Both posters and curtain act like hypnotic mantras in which the mind can get lost from the boredom of waiting within the terminal. Nearby a work by Ian Kier, a giant inflatable plastic ball covered with gold liked the one used in Greek icons, waits for the bored tourists to come and play with it.

Three other works avoid the tourists desire for escapism and further reveal the fissures of the non-place, creating connections and providing for a critical dialogue with more subtle and hidden yet still present layers in the passengers terminal. It is in the empty space of the non-place where the mind searches for understandable signs in order to orientate itself, it might be also here where the mind is more receptive to codified messages. In the background one can hear the lyrics ‘Somewhere over the rainbow skies are blue, and the dreams that you dare to dream really do come true…’. The soundtrack for the terminal and the exhibition was part of Christodoulos Panayiotou’s video documentation of his performance ‘To Be Willing to March into Hell for a Heavenly Cause’ which took place a few days before the opening of the exhibition on a boat leaving Piraeus Port where handsome Danish singer Kristian Finne Kristensen sang 7 songs from American musicals produced during the Cold War. All the songs, like ‘The sun will come out tomorrow’ from Annie, ‘When you walk through a storm’ from Carousel, ‘Somewhere over the rainbow’ from The Wizard of Oz, etc. sang about a better future through climatological metaphors. The work was complemented by screenings of American utopian musicals shown on ships traveling from the port. The songs and musicals reminds us of the romantic and comforting power of the cold war feel-good propaganda, so different from today’s media fascination with celebrities, and the distraction with global warming and the dramas, tragedies, kidnappings and murders of common people, used to distract common people of the bigger picture of today’s Hot and Holy War.

From the ceiling of the terminal hang Carolina Caycedo’s flags created out of the crossover of different national identities. While some of the flags allude to her own identity as British citizen born of Colombian parents, or as a Colombian married to a Puerto Rican, others are a direct comment to the political and territorial context of Greece, specifically a Greek-Albanian and a Greek-Turkish-Cypriot flag. The fact that the flags are hung in a real space, and not in the safe white space of a gallery or a museum, provoke an instant reaction. Caycedo’s flags are immediately torn down and confiscated by the hot but tough military guards in charge of the security of the port. Caycedo’s flags remind us of art’s potential to effectively affect the world existing outside of the art world. In a highly nationalistic Greek context, this kind of art games are seen as a violation of the nation’s sovereignty and a sign of disrespect towards the national symbols. Needless to say, the attempts to exhibit or recover the flags were ineffective. Words are exchanged with the passionate military guards remind the curators that there is only one Greek flag, and that in the past Albanians have violated Greek women. The response by one of the curators, that in the past Greek men have also violated Albanian woman, seems to have no effect on the military.

The last work of the exhibition is a slide show narrative presented as vacation diaporama. A project by Mario Garcia Torres, ‘What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger’ is an homage to Martin Kippenberger’s relationship with the Greek Island of Syros. The narrative begins in a kind of naïve tone, explaining us the islands and who Kippenberger was, a reminder that the immediate public of the exhibition, is not an art public, but a general public, many who might have never entered a contemporary art museum or know or are interested in knowing who Kippenberger was. Similar to the tourists and travelers searching for escape in the Greek islands, it was there where Kippenberger liberated himself. In Syros he established MOMAS, The Museum of Modern Art Syros which he founded in 1993 in the structure of an abandoned and unfinished cement abattoir. Kippenberger was the director and curator of MOMAS’ and he invited his friends Ulrich Strotjohann, Johannes Wohnseifer, Stephen Prina, Cosima Von Bonin, Christopher Williams, Michel Majerus, Heimo Zobernig, and Christopher Wool to exhibit there. Similar to other projects done by Garcia Torres, here he re-examines past narratives in order to expand their meaning and make them relevant to contemporary culture and larger realm. For this exhibition, Garcia Torres, in Kippenberger style, produced a series of posters, which were pasted around Athens, and in which he stands next to the sea pointing towards the museum inviting people to his exhibition. With this, Garcia Torres reactivated MOMAS, now transformed into a wastewater treatment plant, and exhibited within the building some early works he had never made together with other pieces related to museum stories.

Contrary to what its name suggests in Disco Coppertone there is no reflecting disco balls or sun protection lotion. Disco Coppertone offers no art escapism through holiday evasion, but provides through the transformation of a non-place into a temporary space of exhibition, for a space of transition and thought on the role of art, institutions, public and artists… All this happening before one boards his cruise or returns to Athens to view more ruins…

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THE BREEDER, RODEO GALLERY, AND PABLO DE LA BARRA OFFER A PARTY IN ATHENS

Sylvia, Christian Viveros, Christodolous, Angelo and Andreas arriving to the party!


Recital's facade


Roof Garden neon sign


living room area


Tiger art


Rock Bar


Back Bar


roof garden vegetation and greek sculpture


veranda gazebo at roof garden


David Waddington posing next to fountain-jacuzzi


Recital's disco godess


Angelo Plessas in the velvet sofa


Nadia from the Breeder


Nicolaich


Stathis and George from The Breeder, Sylvia Kouvalis from Rodeo and Christodoulos Panayotiou


disco ball

BLOW DE LA BARRA AT ART ATHINA 08

view of the booth.


Stefan Bruggemann's 'Everything is the Same, Nothing is the Same', Matthieu Laurette's 'I am an Artist' series, Los Super Elegantes 'The Falling Leaves of St. Pierre' installation.


Federico Herrero's painting, Carolina Caycedo's 'Greek-Albanian' and 'Greek-Cypriot' flags, and Marcelo Kracilsic's photos.


Los Super Elegantes 'The Falling Leaves of St. Pierre' installation.


Working table with Carolina Caycedo's 'Live Local Love' patch and Los Super Elegantes' 'St Pierre' CD.


Andreas Angelikdakis.


Angelo Plessas reading LSE 'St Pierre' script.


Christodolous Panayotiou.


Dimitris Kouloris of Pablo Magazine fame.


Sofia Broid, between Mexico and Tel Aviv.


LA artist Jen Nokon.


Locus Athens curator Maria Thalia Carras.


Milena Muzquiz arriving to the fair.


David Waddington (as St Pierre) and Milena getting ready to perform.

THE STORE, CURATED BY ADAM CARR, OPENS IN VILNIUS ON MAY 23

THE STORE
Curated by Adam Carr

May 23rd – June 21st, 2008

With works by: Saâdane Afif, Olivier Babin, Stella Capes, Tomas Chaffe, Jason Dodge, Gintaras Didžiapetris, Claire Fontaine, Liam Gillick, Loris Gréaud, Arunas Gudaitis, Henrik Plenge Jakobsen, Gabriel Kuri, Matthieu Laurette, Juozas Laivys, Flávia Müller Medeiros, Darius Mikšys, Jonathan Monk, Paola Pivi, Dan Rees, Hannah Rickards, Yann Sérandour, Dexter Sinister, Andreas Slominski, Superflex, Ron Terada, Mungo Thomson, Mario Garcia Torres, Tris Vonna-Michell

And other people's projects: ‘Top 100’ by Davide Bertocchi; 'Dot Dot Dot' by Dexter Sinister; 'Lester & Malasauskas' by Raimundas Malasauskas & Gabriel Lester; 'Old News' by Jacob Fabricius; 'Pin-Up Badges' by Pierre Beloüin & Nicolas Simonin

Tulips & Roses, Vilnius is extremely delighted to announce its inaugural exhibition, THE STORE, curated by Adam Carr.

THE STORE takes as its starting point the location of the gallery––Vilnius, a place in which the art market has just begun––and its occasion––the galleries inaugural exhibition––to form a celebration of the art object while aspiring to provide critical reflection on the manner by which it operates in the eyes of the art market.

All of the artists included in THE STORE have been invited to participate with works that will available to the general public. The result is an inventory comprising artwork by over 25 international artists, as well as projects curated by other people, all of which can be purchased at relatively small prices or be taken away for free. THE STORE therefore offers artworks to a mass audience usually conserved in a private gallery context for a selective few, and in doing so aims to offer a new experience not only within private commercial galleries but for exhibition going entirely. Interestingly, by making purchases from the goods on offer––selecting a pair of keys, a poster and not say a slice of a cake and/or a napkin, for example––viewers will in effect be curating their own shows for which can be taken away with them. This shifts the role of the spectator into consumer and active participant, and in response to their activity, the exhibition will be subjected to perpetual change, order and reorder–– altering both its form and meaning.

Adam Carr is an independent curator and writer currently based in London.
For further information concerning the exhibition, please contact the gallery or see in store.

TULIPS & ROSES
Gaono g. 10
LT - 01131
Vilnius
T: +37069800017
E: info@tulipsandroses.lt
W: www.tulipsandroses.lt

LEGEND, AN EXHIBITION BY ALEXIS VAILLANT, OPENS MAY 25 IN CHAMARANDE, FRANCE

(translated from french by google language tools!)
LEGEND

Un landmark voodoo-cannibal, a jean cut on the crotch of a tree, a magician who handles several millennia of human production a few minutes, sticks of salt crystals fell on the Earth, a tiny engine pendulum, the house of maggots, a hunting lodge haunted by Guerlain… welcome to LEGEND: summer exhibition designed by Alexis Vaillant for the area.

More than a hundred works by forty-seven artists are met at the castle and in factories (chapel, ice, park, lookout) for the occasion. It finds a soap bubble scheduled for eternity, five tablets of chewing gum in a piercing enserrées for language, a golf club for amateur, a priestess Asian gloved levitate, a chocolate-strawberry spider, a black swan , Sculptures quilt, a head werewolf crystallized, white jean jacket of Ian Curtis, Jack Nicholson above the coucous and many other visual fulgurances.

Marked by acceleration, our time is now immersed in a continuous way that the media imposes. At the same time, this is only through the future that he assumed ready otherwise we would not / not even feel. The mass Archives "communicating" which follows last ten years is little exploitable, history, ours would become difficult to write. We would be moving on the side of the legend.

On this assumption, in particular, that is exposure. To do this, the castle was plunged into total darkness. The windows are all covered with mirrors. The multiplicity of points of view is relayed by lighting on a measure that the device is designed by Yves Godin. Entering the castle is out. What remains visible from the interior architecture is now playing in black and white, works only run the exhibition space. Each room is made by a haiku, Japanese poetic form the shortest in the world.

The visual haiku created generate the largest floating in a minimum immediacy, a floating listening to all forms of coincidences. Why? Because the legend is everywhere.

• Artists:
David ALTMEJD, Dan ATTOE, Matthias BITZER, Shannon BOOL, Ulla von BRANDENBURG, Peter COFFIN, Anne Collier, William Daniels, Andreas DOBLER, Michaela EICHWALD, Dee FERRIS, Aurélien FROMENT, Giuseppe GABELLONE, Ellen GRONEMEYER, Uwe HENNEKEN, Roger HIORNS, Benedikt HIPP, Karl HOLMQVIST, Dorota JURCZAK, John KLECKNER, Armin KRAMER, Bernd KRAUSS, Klara KRISTALOVA, Skafte KUHN, Rannva KUNOY, Paul Lee, Chris LIPOMI, Fabian MARTI, Jason MEADOWS, Alan MICHAEL, Melvin MOTI, Carter MULL, David MUSGRAVE, MRZYK & MORICEAU, Philip NEWCOMBE, Olivia PLENDER, Karin RUGGABER, Gedi SIBONY, Matthew Smith, Tomoaki SUZUKI, Naoyuki TSUJI, Erika VERZUTTI, Laurent VICENTE, Pae White, Jordan WOLFSON, Lisa YUSKAVAGE.

> On the occasion of the exhibition, a bilingual illustrated catalogue french-English is published. It includes texts by Jean-Philippe Antoine, JG Ballard, Craig Buckley, Yoann Gourmel, Raimundas Malasauskas, Will Holder, Karl Holmqvist, Shimabuku, Alexis Vaillant, Tris Vonna-Michell.

> Commissioner invited: Alexis Vaillant
> Art Director: Judith Quentel
> Operative light: Yves Godin
> Bruiteur: Record Makers

Exhibition at the castle and in factories, 25/05/08 at 28/09/08
Open daily from 12am to 19h
Groups daily by appointment
Free admission

• Opening May 25 at 15:30

DOMINIQUE GONZALEZ FOERSTER 'NOCTURAMA*' AT MUSAC IN LEON

Jessica Morgan, Jens Hoffman and Conrad arriving to the exhibition


Rafael Doctor entering through the tropical storm of the Promenade


Tapis de Lecture


Riyo (1999) playing at Cinelandia


Cinelandia chairs


entrance to Nocturama


entrance to Solarium


seating at Solarium


Solarium


Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster and Pablo Leon de la Barra


Patio after rain


NOCTURAMA*: the exhibition
Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster

In an essay titled The Forms of Time and the Chronotope in the Novel. Essays on Historical Poetics in his work Theory and Aesthetics of the Novel, the Russian linguist Mijaíl Bajtín (1895-1975), defined “chronotopes” as the connection of the temporal and spatial relations artistically assimilated in literature; a passage of time thickened in space and vice versa where both are intercepted and become visible to the beholder and appreciable from the aesthetic point of view. Bajtín explains in his work that the «represented world» and the “creator world” are firmly linked and constantly interacting, establishing a close connection between the work—the represented world—and social discursiveness—the creator world. The perception of the real world enters literature through the chronotopes: they play the main role in the configuration of the storyline, offering the main field for the representation of events in images. According to the definition of Bajtín, for whom chronotopes are the places where the narrative cruces are set up and undone, we can say that the meaning moulding the narration belongs to them, and they end up simultaneously making manifest the interior and exterior of texts.

Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster presents NOCTURAMA*, a journey through specific times and identifiable, real places with which the French artist represents the world she tells. This new narrative consists of Promenade—a work produced with Christophe Van Huffel, an invisible piece whose film-inspired use of sound makes for a radically tropicalised place; Tapis de lecture, an invitation to rest surrounded by piles of books, a reservoir of possibilities—or the material sources of their fictions; Cinelandia, a selection of Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster’s films—some with Ange Leccia; Solarium with Nicolas Ghesquière, a space for luminous contemplation and reception; and lastly Nocturama, a new sitespecific production, a new environment. All of them are, in short, time machines capable of bringing about movement through space as if they were futurist teletransporters.

* and promenade, cinelandia, solarium…

http://www.dgf5.com/
http://www.musac.es/