Issue Nine

Cover commissioned by Selcuk Artut, 2010 Impressum: Editors: Veronika Hauer & Fatos Üstek Layout Design: Veronika Hauer Editorial comments and proofreading: James White Contributors: Sabine Bitter & Helmut Weber, Jason Coburn, Anna Gritz,Veronika Hauer, Per Hüttner & Fatos Üstek, Nicolas Jasmin, Adeena Mey, Astrid Peterle, Gaëlle Obiégly, Rana Öztürk, Haegue Yang and Didem Yazici. © of all texts with the authors © of the images lies with the contributing artists Contact: www.nowiswere.com info@nowiswere.com © nowiswere 2011

TH Poetics of Displacement..............................................4/5, 6/7 Haegue Yang CC Dress and Armor: Aleana Egan at the Drawing Room........8 Anna Gritz TH repos surface, sortie d’aire..................................................14 Nicolas Jasmin CC Colliding and Embracing Along the Fault Lines..................24 Astrid Peterle AS A Tribute to the Spire...........................................................29 Rana Öztürk TH Casa Mare: encapsulating a coming future.......................33 Sabine Bitter/Helmut Weber CC SUBSEQUENT FORMATION..............................................38 Veronika Hauer TH Poetics of Displacement.........................................42/3, 44/5 Haegue Yang THematics: hosting texts up to 1000 words or image material of up to four pages focusing on a single theme.

EF Expecting Future is a sub section of THematics, hosting texts pointing out possibilities of future and positioning the potentials of the to-come-true. As expecting future requires awareness of the present, the section will be a gathering of the today’s variety of practices, attitutes, tendencies...

AS Artist Specials: hosting evaluations on or interviews with artists.

CC Critics’ Corner: hosting reviews on current exhibitions, performances, events, happenings...

SF Special Feature

CC Untitled Tracks......................................................................46 Adeena Mey AS Where Romanticism Flirts With Criticality.........................50 Didem Yazici TH Remain in Light....................................................................53 Jason Coburn SF The Encounter - A Play in Five Acts....................................58 Per Hüttner and Fatoş Üstek TH Poetics of Displacement.........................................64/5, 66/7 Haegue Yang

Haegue Yang Poetics of Displacement 2011 Six black and white images Commissioned by Kunsthaus Bregenz, Austria TH + 4/5

town and terrain, 2008 - 2010; 16mm transferred to DVD, 4mins 12secs; Installation view at Drawing Room

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Anna Gritz TIE Aleana Egan’s works relate strongly to fashion. Like clothes, her works respond in shape to their support3 February - 13 March 2011 ing architectural structure. Her sculptures are hung from walls and ceilings, like coats from a hanger, partly taking up the shape that is suggested by the conditions of their display, partly rejecting it. The works lean against, or rest upon walls and floors, constructed in the vein of a corset – both resting and probing their The clicking of pumps on the asphalt and the polished material consistencies against the forces of gravity, immarble floors, the ruffling sounds of knee-length skirts, plying that the forming process has not yet been comwell ironed blouses and neatly folded handkerchiefs pleted. Egan’s work mimics the architecture of comtied in knots around necks, mark the uniform of the merce and its modes of display such as drawers, class working women. The fashion of women at work car- cabinets, hangers and hooks. Her recent work at the ries its very own iconography that is, although slowly Drawing Room finds itself inspired by the ideology of petering out, still very recognisable. It is an iconogra- the French department store of the late nineteenth phy that can be traced back from the shoulder pads century, particularly the one described by Emile Zola.i and starched collars of Melanie Griffith in Working Girl, It is the choreography of the gaze and the framing of 1988, to the pumps and pleated skirts of the secretar- the commercial experience that fascinate Egan. Deies in the U.S. TV series Mad Men, to the corsets and partment stores at that time functioned very similarly white gloves of the sales women in the department to art galleries as sites for people from a variety of stores of nineteenth century Paris. The dress code of social backgrounds to observe and study each other working women is an ambiguous subject, always lean- and their surroundings allowing for a range of levels ing towards androgyny yet never quite letting go of tra- and access points. The architectural challenge of the ditional indicators of femininity. The material nature of time was how to best facilitate this process of seeing such fashion is based on a similar dialectic of strength and being seen. and softness – shoulder pads, starched shirts, padded bras and boned corsets contrasting with cashmere Detailed observation is key to the process of many of sweaters and silky blouses, obscuring the principles of Egan’s works. Habitually Egan keeps notes on the physidependence and autonomy. There seems to be a con- cal appearance of people she encounters, jotting down tinuous tension between support and independence of obscurities in appearance and fancies of fashion in neat armour and décor at play, which goes hand in hand little descriptions inscribed with the date and location with the double standards of early the professionalisa- of the encounter.ii At the Drawing Room Egan included tion of women. a slide-show/film titled town and terrain 2008 – 2010 featuring a series of stills of a female figure in an assortment of every day outfits. These ‘editorial shots’, which never disclose the head of the model, are interspersed with images of vernacular architecture and photographs from the artist’s studio, capturing works and material studies.The selected outfits feel like the everyday work and leisure time wear of a mixture of different characters, as if selected to match her collection of descriptions. Egan’s observations relate to Gaston Bachelard’s concept of the suspended reading,iii the moment when the eyes of the reader get seduced of the page or subject and comprehension and interpretation meet. As a result, the reality of the reader becomes the backdrop for a narrative that moves between the story on the written pages and the occurrences that encircle him.

Here in Egan’s case her detailed observations and her 1950s Women office worker, Wisconsin literary inspirations meet in her sculptural practise.

Dress and Armor: Aleana Egan at the Drawing Room

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CAMOUFLAGE Egan masters skillfully the play between the revelation of constructional detail and the camouflage of materiality. Some of her works such as Opinion, 2010, conceal the true nature of their material profoundly. The cardboard triptych could be cast in iron or woven fabric, but only a very close observation reveals the cardboard armature that is joint and moulded with tape and filler and painted in a muted palette. The choice of colours inherent to many of Egan’s materials works here as some kind of decoy to disguise the composite nature of the piece. Reminiscent of conveyer belts or the fabric works of Franz Erhard Walther the triptych is hung from the wall on two iron hooks like the wooden panels of an altarpiece. Similar to a crucified body the material is in suspension, caught in a temporal pause – an equilibrium of tension, of a push and pull that is constantly threatening to give in to gravity and to cave in on itself. The image of the corset comes to mind, although here the material ambiguity discloses which elements support, which carry, and which rest upon.

STRAP A similar play of forces is at stake in clarity afforded, 2010, a fragile steel object at once suspended from the ceiling and propped up on the floor in a precarious balance impossible to sustain without being strapped into the architecture of the gallery space. The steel structure made of a selection of interlocking parts, which mimics architecture without being of architecture. The object resembles an iron balcony or the steel skeleton of a modernist building, like options from a catalogue of versatile building solutions, intrinsically modern yet ultimately without clear purpose.

There is something unsettling about the way Egan’s works persistently articulate their need of assistance by the architecture of the host space, despite the wellkept appearance that they are able to support themselves. Binet’s addition, 2010, named after architect René Binet, designer of the iron-framed elevator extensions for the French department stores, is constructed from a similar steel framework. The design of the cylindrical steel structure is based on a photograph of Binet’s elaborate elevator extensions. Reminiscent of a freestanding tree planter the maquette is freed from its

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former function and abstracted from the original design through a series of drawings that Egan made of the photograph.

COAT The process of simplification through drawing is for Egan a process of stripping down layers and complexities of language.The entire series on view at the Drawing Room relies heavily on its ability to be verbally descriptive. Meaning that the works can be described in simple words and in the relationships the individual shapes take with each other. Something like: There are two steel tubes, 10mm, interlocked at the ends, hanging from the ceiling on rounded metal hooks, etc., reads like a step-by-step manufacturing instruction one would call in at a factory.

Page10: Opinion, 2010; Cardboard, tape, filler, paint, varnish; 183 x 123 x 11 cm approx each; 3 parts; and clarity afforded, 2010; Steel, dimensions variable; Installation view at Drawing Room Courtesy the artist and Mary Mary Glasgow

Here the relationship of her work with the tradition of minimal and post-minimal sculpture becomes apparent especially in relation to the post-minimal use of language. Similar to sculptors like Eva Hesse, Egan’s works find their final form in language, the words for titles that Hesse would find in the study of the thesaurus Egan finds in her fascination with literature.iv Lan-

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Left: Opinion 2010; Cardboard, tape, filler, paint, varnish 183 x 123 x 11 cm approx each; 3 parts; Installation view at Drawing Room; Courtesy the artist and Mary Mary Glasgow

Right: Binet’s addition, 2010; Steel, split pins, rope; 380 x 56 x 56 cm diameter; Installation view at Drawing Room; Courtesy the artist and Mary Mary Glasgow

guage, although it may be marginal on first sight, takes on a vital role in Egan’s creative process that is reaches further than just the literal meaning of the individual words. Language goes beyond its descriptive qualities and becomes one of the materials in the sculptural process. The words and sentences Egan uses to entitle the works and the language that can be used to describe and understand its aesthetic qualities are carefully chosen and take on their own shape and weight in the minds and mouths of the viewer. Language as a physical object and a material strategy becomes at this point a central point in the process; it can be layered and chopped apart, reconfigured and rearranged like a dada poem or a collage.

For Hesse working in this manner was a strategy to get away from art as it was known: “I wanted to get to non art, non connotive, non anthropomorphic, non geometric, non, nothing, everything, but of another kind, vision, sort.”v Egan positions herself clearly in that tradition considering that her work carries traits of architecture, design, painting, and writing yet conforms to none of them.

A similar relationship of language and sculpture becomes apparent in works such as Mel Bochner’s series of portraits made of words made in 1966. In Wrap, Portrait of Eva Hesse, 1966, Bochner used language to build up a shape, compiling concentric circles of words that describe Hesse’s strategy of material manipulation. “wrap up. secrete. cloak. bury. obscure. vanish. ensconce. disguise. conceal,…etc.” a set of terms that could also be used to describe Egan’s process. Language is used here simultaneously as a means to create sculpture whilst describing it, as well as the person making it. Language becomes objectified, heavy and material.

like to position Egan’s work between these two examples from 1960s conceptualism.

It shares with Graham’s work the tendency to let go, to give up control and to give in to the formal suggestions outlined by the materials and the architectural framework. And yet Egan shares with Bochner and in that sense also with Hesse the lust for words and the acceptance of the materiality that is inscribed in them.

Consequently Egan’s works relate strongly to this tradition of written materiality.

HULL I knew something was wrong with me that summer, because all I could think about was the Rosenbergs and how stupid I’d been to buy all those uncomfortable, expensive clothes, hanging limp as fish in my closet, and how all the little successes I’d totted up so happily at college fizzled to nothing outside the slick marble and plate-glass fronts along Madison Avenue. – Silvia Plathvi Unlike Graham or Bochner Egan’s works do not give in one way or the other but choose the ambivalence between formal dependence and material autonomy, playing with the precarious tension that the attempt to balance the two attains. As if not quite comfortable in their material and formal state her works seem to be holding their breath waiting for something to happen that could sway them one way or another.

The terminology suggests a strong physical manipulation and a heavy-handed engagement from the side of the artist. Bochner’s work stands in clear juxtaposition to other language-based works of the time such as Dan Graham’s poem Schema, from 1967 that gladly gives up on the concept of material autonomy and accepts its dependency on a supporting structure, in this case the pages of the magazine or book that it is published in.

Schema is a generic arrangement of sentences outlining an inventory of its own features –dependent on the format in which the work is published, it is therefore synonymous with its mode of display. The work that first appeared on the pages of magazines like Aspen in 1967 is entirely solipsistic and condemned to mirror the details of its backdrop like a chameleon. I would CC + 12

Mel Bochner,Wrap, Portrait of Eva Hesse, 1966

Dan Graham, Schema, 1967

i Zola, Emile, Au Bonheur des Dames. (The Ladies’ Delight or The Ladies’ Paradise)1883. ii Aleanna Egan in Conversation with Dr. Sarah Lowndes at the Drawing Room Thursday 17th of February, 2011. iii Bachelard, Gaston, The Poetics of Space. Boston 1969. iv Egan often cites authors like Iris Murdoch, Henry James, and Virginia Woolf in the titles of her works. v Eva Hesse, quoted by Catherine de Zegher, “Drawing as Binding/ Bandage/Bondage: Or Eva Hesse Caught in the Triangle of Process/ Content/Materiality”, in: “Eva Hesse Drawing”, The Drawing Center, New York 2006. vi Plath, Silvia, The Bell Jar. 1963.

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Nicolas Jasmin “repos surface, sortie d’aire”, the hessian paintings 1989-2011 Text by Gaëlle Obiégly Jasmin, The Man (L’homme Jasmin.), 2011

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Jasmin, The Man His latest work is leaning against the wall by the entrance. It’s a panel, heavy like granite or like a tombstone. At the very top you can read a word, an adjective, the word “permanent.”

Jasmin, the man, stretches out in front, sleeping or dead. One needle has been left in his hair by the acupuncturist, but it doesn’t hurt. It has been the thirteenth and final session.

The television is on in Jasmin’s home, facing a beige velveteen sofa. Muhammad al-Gaddafi addresses his people from a building holed with bullets. He will always be the boss, is what he is saying, until his last drop of blood. You then see him, in black and white, when he was young, rebellious, and triumphant. A legend.

At the walls beside the escalators going down to the subway platform, a photo of Che Guevara is looming, in black and white, as always for a legend. Jasmin, the man, pointed at the legend with his finger. He said, “That’s me!” The features of his face and his hairstyle really show some similarities.

L’homme-Jasmin, (Jasmin, The Man), a book by Unica Zürn is lying at the top of one pile of French books, which you can find in one corner of the Viennese apartment where he lives. Jasmin, the man, is French. Unica Zürn is German. She killed herself in Paris on April 7, 1970. As a matter of fact, she jumped out a window.

Art demands from those who are dedicated to it, a jump into the void.

Jasmin, the man, suffers from asthma, and, as a child, after he had taken his dose of cortisone around 7 p.m. he went on drawing until he became exhausted. In the middle of the night his grandmother found him sleeping, his forehead sticking on the paper scattered over the kitchen table. She brought him to bed.

He grew up in Toulouse, which also means something in English: To lose.

The uncle of Jasmin, the man, is a singer who remained unknown. He never had a breakthrough. Left without fame, but nevertheless alive, which is essential for one’s self.

Jasmin, the man has a seven-inch record of his uncle, and hundreds of records of short-lived stars.

He often bursts into laughter. That’s how he breaks his melancholy, and also that of his uncle, who introduced him to an adventurous life. During an adventurous life, you lose more than you amass. He is laughing as if we would fly up high.

You can find a painting of Jasmin, the man, close to the window, another painting of Jasmin, the man, is leaning towards the television stand, a window to an impermanent world. There are rectangles whose monochrome surface is broken by a hole.

Beyond the surface, the great inner and outer worlds rejoin.

The hole leads to the idea of the hole.

The hole is drawn. It is naïf.

The hole is a pattern without expression.

The hole defines the surface, which it breaks.

The evocation of a life, which stretches from one date to another, keeps in itself some details, some predilections, abnormally normal, tropes, and decisions. When evocating such a life it is gratifying to become aware of its depths and voids its holes.

There are some borders on the small silver surface painted by Jasmin, the man, and there is a hole. One doesn’t go without the other. A hole cannot exist by itself.

And the small silver surface painted by Jasmin, the man, needs its hole.

L’homme Jasmin.

A l’entrée, contre un mur, se tient sa dernière œuvre. C’est une plaque, lourde, comme du granit, comme une pierre tombale. Tout en haut, on lit un mot, un adjectif. Le mot « permanent ». L’homme Jasmin étendu devant, endormi ou mort.

Une épingle oubliée par l’acupuncteur dans ses cheveux ne le touche plus. C’était la treizième séance, la dernière.

La télévision est allumée dans l’home Jasmin. Un canapé en velours beige lui fait face. Mouammar al-Gaddafi, d’un immeuble troué de balles, s’adresse à son peuple.

Il sera le chef toujours, dit-il, jusqu’à la dernière goutte de sang. Et puis on le voit jeune, rebelle et triomphant, jadis. En noir et blanc. Une légende.

Sur les murs, le long des escalators qui descendent vers les quais du U-Bahn, placardée, une photo de Che Guevara. En noir et blanc, comme toujours la légende.

L’homme Jasmin l’a pointée du doigt, la légende. Il a dit : c’est moi. Les traits du visage, en effet, et la chevelure, offrent des similitudes.

L’homme-Jasmin, livre d’Unica Zürn surplombe une pile d’ouvrages en français dans un coin de l’appartement viennois où il aura résidé. L’homme Jasmin est français.

Unica Zürn est allemande. Elle s’est suicidée à Paris, le 7 avril 1970. Elle s’est jetée par la fenêtre. Réellement.

L’art exige de celui qui s’y voue un saut dans le vide.

L’homme Jasmin souffrait d’asthme, et, enfant, ayant pris sa dose de cortisone, aux alentours de 19h00, il se mettait à dessiner jusqu’à l’épuisement. Sa grand-mère, au milieu de la nuit, le trouvait endormi, le front collé aux feuilles éparses sur la table de la cuisine. Elle le portait jusqu’au lit.

Il a grandi à Toulouse qui en anglais signifie quelque chose. To lose.

L’oncle de l’homme Jasmin est un chanteur resté inconnu. Il n’a pas percé, dit-on en français. Demeuré sans notoriété. Etre au monde, quand même. Pour soimême, essentiellement.

L’homme Jasmin possède un 45 tours de son oncle, et des centaines de disques de vedettes temporaires.

Souvent, il éclate de rire. Et perce ainsi sa mélancolie et celle de l’oncle qui l’a entraîné dans la vie aventureuse. Dans la vie aventureuse, on perd plus qu’on n’amasse. Il rie comme on s’envole.

Un tableau de l’homme Jasmin se trouve près d’une fenêtre, un autre tableau de l’homme Jasmin se tient au pied de la télévision, fenêtre sur le monde impermanent. Ce sont des rectangles dont la surface monochrome est percée.

Au-delà des surfaces se rejoignent le grand dehors et le grand dedans.

Le trou mène à l’idée du trou.

Le trou est dessiné, il est naïf.

Le trou est un tracé, sans expression.

Le trou définit la surface qu’il troue.

L’évocation d’une vie qui s’est étendue de telle date à telle date tient en quelques détails, quelques goûts, anormalement normaux, tropismes, décisions.

L’évocation d’une vie, il me plaît qu’elle rende compte de ses pleins et de ses vides. De ses trous.

Il y a les bordures de la petite surface argent peinte par l’homme Jasmin et il y a le trou. L’un ne va pas sans l’autre. Un trou, ça n’existe pas tout seul. Et la petite surface argent peinte par l’homme Jasmin a besoin de son trou.

Page 15: Nicolas Jasmin, “O.T.” (Argent Faire), acryl and spray paint on hessian, 1989-1991-1995 Foto by Marina Faust Page 18: Studio View, March 2011 Foto by Rudolf Steckholzer Page 19: 7 inch record by Michel Jasmin, 1971 Page 22: Nicolas Jasmin, “O.T.” (Oh ! Benghazi !), acryl and spray paint on hessian, 1989-2011 Foto by Rudolf Steckholzer Translation from the French by Walter Seidl.

Special Thanks to Dustin Dis

The Fault Lines, MUMOK Factory Vienna, 2011. Foto: Nina Gundlach

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Astrid Peterle

Colliding and Embracing Along the Fault Lines A Collaboration of Choreography and Visual Art: Meg Stuart, Philipp Gehmacher and Vladimir Miller Two outstanding choreographers physically collide, clash into one another. A visual artist joins in and parts the two bodies from each other by means of iridescent video projections: The Fault Lines, a performance project by choreographers Meg Stuart and Philipp Gehmacher, with visual artist Vladimir Miller was premiered in April 2010 at Springdance Festival in Utrecht and subsequently presented by the Tanzquartier Vienna at MUMOK’s Factory in Vienna this past February 2011.

The Fault Lines is Stuart’s and Gehmacher’s second collaboration, whereas Miller and Gehmacher share a history of collaborative projects.i And again with The Fault Lines, such approved coupling of artists achieved to produce another exciting and innovative performance project.

As performers and choreographers both working within the national and international dance community in the last 15 years, Meg Stuart and Philipp Gehmacher stand for different physicalities, methods and specificities of movement, and yet it was no surprise when they got together for their first performance project MAYBE FOREVER in 2007. Back then it seemed as if they where always meant to meet in a shared performance experience, experimenting with approaching and distancing in different speed, with one another’s specific movements and gestures transcribed in the other one’s body. MAYBE FOREVER revealed that Stuart and Gehmacher are actually two kindred choreographers who both subtly explore conceptual approaches to contemporary choreography. Also, MAYBE FOREVER introduced new, unfamiliar movements by each performer as they acquired one another’s specificities and thus challenged their own repertoire.

Meg Stuart is one of the most influential choreographers of the last two decades.ii Early on in her career Stuart deconstructed the classical image of the choreographer, the almighty author who exclusively controls a group of performers. She has always been interested in various versions of collaborating, in formations of collective improvisations. Her evolving desire for finding new ways of collaborating with artists from differ-

ent genres has sparked off a new wave of collaborative projects in the European dance field in the course of the last decade. But most influential are her post-existentialist choreographies that are best summarised in Stuart’s own words: “In general my work revolves around ideas or images of distortion, privacy, memories, exposure. Distortion as a way of looking at beauty.

Privacy as a way of looking at performance. Dance as a way to expose what is difficult to utter, out of embarrassment, discomfort, and unease, the failure of language.The relationship between physical and emotional states, and involuntary actions resulting from extreme situations, are often starting points for the working process.”iii The dancers in Stuart’s performances heavily shake for minutes as if they suffer a never ending seizure or restlessly run through the ghostly stage sets

by Anna Viebrock that simulate huge, empty, multi-floor buildings. The way in which Stuart creates choreographies to express the individual’s desperation in today’s frantic-paced world has inspired a whole generation of dancers and choreographers.

Philipp Gehmacher has surely left lasting effects on Austrian choreographies in the last ten years.iv The performers’ bodies in Gehmacher’s widely minimalist performances stumble, shake, stutter. That is what they share with Meg Stuart’s choreographies. But there is a

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different quality of bodily commotion in Gehmacher’s work. Whilst Stuart’s movements are often violently, high voltage driven, Gehmacher’s are uncannily constrained. There are but hints of movement, almost stillness, transgressed by sudden movements of the arms, subdued gestures that vanish before they evoke any resemblance with culturally defined signs of non-verbal communication. In the last couple of years, speech has become an essential element in Gehmacher’s performances, as for example in the performance In Their Name (2010): The three dancers tell little stories, incidentally, unflustered – a use of language that is not necessarily disturbing the impression of silence that is generally invoked by Gehmacher’s performances.

German visual artist Vladimir Miller has collaborated with Gehmacher on four projects over the course of the past few years, creating both video installations as well as object installations that function as stage settings, as in In Their Name. Together the two artists have experimented with different ways of challenging the audience’s perception. In At Arm’s Length (2010),

premiered at the Leopold Museum in Vienna, a long, bended projection wall was positioned in a big empty space. Moving in front of the video-projection-wall, the audience could observe the video of five performers trying to cross another big empty space along a white wall by finding different ways of moving together from one side to the other. Miller’s elaborate installation concepts transform Gehmacher’s choreographies into video installations. This is most obvious in Dead Reckoning, shown in the auditorium of the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna in 2009: In a cross-like object composed of four intersecting video-projection-walls, three performers move through a white room, as if they measure the empty space. The audience could move around the installation, always failing to grasp the projected “reality” as a whole.

In The Fault Lines, Miller joins Stuart and Gehmacher discretely yet insistently on stage. The stage set with dark wooden floor and a grey curtain on one of the walls (a reminiscence of MAYBE FOREVER) evokes both a gallery’s white cube and a chic apartment-loft. Miller’s

The Fault Lines, MUMOK Factory Vienna, 2011. Foto: Eva Würdinger

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The Fault Lines, MUMOK Factory Vienna, 2011. Foto: Eva Würdinger

“workspace” finds itself on the right side of the stage where he kneels amongst golden cables and a video projector, inhabiting an environment akin to a technical jewel case.

The performance kicks off with Stuart and Gehmacher colliding into violent embraces. It is only for a few seconds that one is tempted to associate the longingly embrace of two lovers, when the strong physical energy transforms the embraces into scrambling, repulsion and pinching. Similar to hockey players in the skating ring, both performers push and drag the other into the corner of the stage and onto the floor.

In between vigour, there are moments of utter vulnerability, for example when Stuart crouches on the floor.

Intimacy rises when hands slowly and gently reach out for the other, stroking skin and hair. After a while this game of intimacy and alienation, closeness and isolation played by two individuals is enhanced by a third performer. Miller’s presence on the stage first appears as that of just another spectator. His interventions to the performance start subtly, projecting the performance small scale on the walls, transforming the energetic

movement of the bodies on the left part of the stage into an intimate video-theatre on the right side of the stage. Miller does not interfere physically into Stuart’s and Gehmacher’s performance as a moving performer himself, rather his take-over is a technical one, translating the performers into images, the performance into a video installation. He is an unconventional voyeur, a spy to shift the spectators’ perception, but also a third performer who creates an additional, own performance space. As a tourneur he conducts a game that layers different levels of materiality, using the means of his technical jewel case to transgress the borders between the “real” bodies and their doubles composed of video images. By moving his video projector like a spotlight Miller produces a peephole that strobes the bodies.

A glittery foil immerses the projected bodies in polar lights. When Stuart and Gehmacher lay their bodies to rest on the floor, Miller intervenes by drawing lines on their projected image. Like energy vectors his drawn lines extend the “real” bodies. Then again his drawings cover the projection of the bodies with small, fur-like curls. The spectator’s gaze constantly shifts between

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observing the “live” performers and the spectacle of their video transformation but the marvel of Miller’s interpretation of the performers’ “dialogue” gets in the lead in the second half of the performance.

In the end Miller obscures the performers’ bodies with an iridescent video veil. Nevertheless they get one more chance to appear as Meg Stuart and Philipp Gehmacher: As if Miller posses a magnifying glass, he detaches Stuart from the pixel-covered surface, revealing her smiling face. Gehmacher steps out of the projection, toward the audience, lifting his arms, creating one of his legendary gestures that convey both vulnerability and self-verification. After a transfixing hour of merged realities, the “real” performers gain the upper hand over their virtual versions.

i They have sofar produced together four video installations, performance installations and performances: The Fault Lines (2010), In Their Name (2010), At Arm’s Length (2010) and Dead Reckoning (2009/10). ii Meg Stuart, was born in 1965 in New Orleans and moved to Brussels in 1994.There she founded her own dance company Damaged Goods. Next to her group works she also created intimate solo works and duets. She has repeatedly collaborated with visual artists, e.g. with Lawrence Malstaf, Gary Hill (Splayed Mind Out, shown at documenta X in Kassel), Ann Hamilton.

For more information see the company’s website: http://www.damagedgoods.be. iii See Stuart’s whole statement on http://www.damagedgoods.be. iv Trained at the Contemporary Dance School and the Laban Centre in London, where he lived and worked over the course of ten years, Gehmacher in 2003 moved to Vienna and continued to create internationally critically acclaimed choreographies, both group works and solos.

For more information see http://www.philippgehmacher.net.

With The Fault Lines Stuart, Gehmacher, and Miller created a masterly performance that by far exceeds the combination of choreography and video art often seen in the contemporary dance field in the past couple of years. Frequently dance and video are used as mere parallel media on stage, as reinforcements, as bold attachment. Rarely these two different art forms merge subtly in order to question each other’s precepts. In The Fault Lines, the video projection is not just a rendering of “reality”, serving as a means of documentation, or a wallpaper-like background for a dance performance. Here it appears as an integral part of the performance and the manifestation of the involvement of yet another, third performer. It is not a violent intrusion, but a subtle superimposition, a shifting of perception, back and forth between different realities. The fault lines arise in more than one sense: On a narrative level, the relation between a man and a woman is on the constant verge of collapse. Yet on another level, it is the juxtaposed representations of “liveness” and of documentation that merge and collapse. Stuart, Gehmacher and Miller achieved to inject emotionality into this challenging confrontation of differing media, thus avoiding its stake as a pure technical experiment.

They expose the stereotypical dichotomy of affective realness/unemotional technology as a fallacy. Though for some spectators the performance might be on the verge of drifting into the too beautiful, too poetical – the deployment of kitschy colours and effects overdoes an image of intimacy and thus can be perceived as ironic criticism on the spectator’s longing for romanticism.

The Fault Lines accomplishes something rare, by being both a clever reflexion of performance art’s specificities and a piece on touching and being touched.

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Rana Öztürk

Özlem Günyol & Mustafa Kunt, Painting, acryl on canvas, 200 x 300 cm

A Tribute to the Spire: A Hallelujah to a Future Yet to Come Özlem Günyol & Mustafa Kunt’s four-piece work UP! UP! UP! takes its inspiration from Dublin’s Spire, known also as the Monument of Light — the thin, 120-metre-long structure that has been standing on the city’s O’Connell Street since 2003. Claiming to be the tallest sculpture in the world, this needle-like monument is unavoidable in the middle of the city. The first encounter with it is often one of curiosity, wonder, suspicion, amazement and surprise due to its overwhelming height, highly futuristic look, and inappropriate appearance and position among the more intimate, shorter, city centre buildings. Most cities have a famous tall building, a tower, monument or a skyscraper that with time becomes a symbol for the city, a point of reference for its residents, a tourist attraction for visitors, a historical site or a place that offers the best possible views of the city. The Spire in Dublin, though, is a site of ambivalence, at least at first sight... Özlem Günyol & Mustafa Kunt, who visited Dublin as artists in residence at Temple Bar Gallery and Studios for three months, have made use of their first encounter with the Spire as the basis of the work they produced during their stay in Dublin.

UP! UP! UP! consists of four separate pieces.Two main elements of the work are two paintings, which together represent a one-to-one scale portrait of the Spire. User’s Manual, which documents a historical timeline of the monument and the song “Up Went Nelson”, is presented on the wall as reference material for the viewer. Lastly, the forth element of the work is a performance of a song based on the melody and structure of “Up Went Nelson” with new lyrics written by the artists for the Spire.

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Özlem Günyol & Mustafa Kunt, Painting, acryl on canvas, 300 x 300 cm

While the paintings play on the idea of real life representation of the monument in a gallery context using its formal qualities and size, the song represents the complex historical and political background of the monument and the symbolic significance of its site for Dublin.

Günyol & Kunt make use of the exact physical appearance and actual measurements of the Spire to translate it on to a pictorial plane. The Spire is a stainless steel conical structure that has a diameter of three metres on the ground that gradually narrows to 15 centimetres at the top. On the picture plane, it is represented as a rectangular painting of three metres in width, with all the height of the monument divided into several sections folded onto each other. The result is a monochrome abstract painting that actually depicts the whole Spire in two dimensions. The second painting, placed on the floor of the gallery space, is also very minimal in its form and complements the other one with its round shape and choice of colour. A circle in the size of the bottom part of the Spire, this painting acquires the quality of text-based works of Conceptual Art of the late 1960s and 1970s, with the words UP! UP! UP! written on it.These words somehow enhance the sculptural quality of the piece on the floor and incite the viewer to visualise the monument rising up from the painting. This, in a sense, completes the first painting, rendering a three dimensional image of the Spire.

The work culminates in a singing performance of a song written by the artists for the Spire based on the tune of an earlier song “Up Went Nelson”. This time, the words UP! UP! UP! read almost like a call to step up to the painting and sing the song. The first viewing of the piece at Temple Bar Gallery and Studios indeed turned the painting into a stage where five singers sang the song standing on. In this way the bleak image of the monument got broken up with the addition of a human element to it. Along with the traces of the singers’ footsteps left on the painting, the recording of the performance is to be included in later presentations of the work. A mocking exaltation of the Spire, this AS + 30

Özlem Günyol & Mustafa Kunt, User’s Manuel; 13 pieces, inkjet print, 20 x 30 cm each

singing represents a possible way of engaging with the Spire despite its distant, cold outlook, while also connecting it to a past that it seems not so willing to acknowledge.

The Spire, controversial in its dominating position over the city, stands in the place of another controversial monument, Nelson’s Pillar, which had been standing there from 1808 till it was blown up in 1966 by the IRA. This 40-metre-high granite pillar was put up in order to honour Horatio, Lord Nelson, an English navy hero, who was famous for his role in the Napoleonic Wars and his leadership at the Battle of Trafalgar, where he was shot dead in 1805. Soon after the erection of the pillar with a statue of Lord Nelson on its top there were debates about its removal due to many reasons. It was seen as an obstruction to the traffic; there were concerns about whether it was aesthetically good enough; and as a symbol of the troublesome colonial history of Ireland, many nationalists did not find it appropriate for the city. There were suggestions to replace the statue with statues of other Irish historical figures, which never led to any actual decision. It was only in 1966, the 50th anniversary of the Easter Rising, that these debates came to an end with the bombing of the pillar by members of the old IRA. After the blowing up of the pillar, Go Lucky Four, a group of school teachers from Belfast, wrote the song “Up Went Nelson” set to the tune of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”. The song was very popular and remained number one on the Irish music charts for eight consecutive weeks. It is also an example of how cultural forms migrate and take different meanings in different contexts. For instance, “The Battle Hymn of Republic” was a popular hymn that was written during the American Civil War, and is still very well-known as an American patriotic song. It was based on the same tune as “John Brown’s Song”, a marching song about the abolitionist John Brown who gave his life to put an end to slavery. Both songs were based on an earlier AS + 31

tune called “Say, brother, will you meet us” that goes back to the American Christian camp meeting movement of the early to mid-1800s.Therefore, the song/tune represents multiple authors and different ideologies depending on the context and time it was used.

Indeed, there have been many other versions of the song, most often composed for celebrations of different occasions, either in playful ways or in attempts at glorification.

In UP! UP! UP!, Günyol & Kunt trace the source of the song, presenting earlier songs in which the tune was used, as well as other songs written for the destruction of Nelson’s Pillar. Along with “Good Lord Nelson” by the Irish folk musician Tommy Makem and “Nelson’s Farewell” played by the band Dubliners, “Up Went Nelson” represents the mocking, witty humour of the Irish, an amusing way of engaging with an incident long awaited. With a similar gesture of appropriating an earlier tune, Günyol & Kunt make a new song that this time addresses the Spire with a humorous approach to its current state in the city. Built as part of the plans for the revival of O’Connell Street, which had been in decline since the 1970s, the Spire rises confidently above the city as a pretentious symbol of the economic boom the country experienced from the 1990s to 2000s.

In the context of the recent collapse of the Irish economy, this tall shiny monument has inadvertently become an embodiment of this period of over-indulgence.

Nelson’s Pillar remembers the past; the Spire aspires to the future. Nelson’s Pillar symbolises the colonial power; the Spire symbolises the glory of the Celtic Tiger. Nelson’s Pillar is a memorial; the Spire is a contemporary urban landmark. Nelson’s Pillar offers a view of the city to its visitors; the Spire looks over the city all by itself. Nelson’s Pillar commemorates an imperial hero; the Spire celebrates itself. Nelson’s Pillar represents a troubled history; the Spire represents nothing, but itself...

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Sabine Bitter/Helmut Weber Casa Mare: encapsulating a coming future 2011

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Sabine Bitter/ Helmut Weber Police Station, Caracas,Venezuela, 2003

Sabine Bitter/ Helmut Weber Police Station, Ciudad Bolivar,Venezuela, 2003

Sabine Bitter/ Helmut Weber Church, Caracas,Venezuela, 2009

Sabine Bitter / Helmut Weber Casa Mare: encapsulating a coming future

National Geographic Magazine, 1970s

We came across these futuristic shaped pods for the first time in Caracas in 2003 when we stayed there for a six-month research residency on the culture of the informal city.

Similar to a UFO landing in the city, it reminded us of the capsules of architectural visions of “plugged in cities” from Archigram which might have migrated, through the revisions of international modernism, to Latin America in the 1960s or 1970s. While later travelling through the table mountains in Venezuela, we found another capsule in Ciudad Bolivar, a city on the Orinoco River that has been shaped by the Venezuelan oil and petrol industries. In 2009 we learned of a pod in downtown Caracas that was occupied by a church.

Some later research revealed that these plastic capsules were designed by Venezuelan Architect Jorge Castillo as new forms of housing called “Casa Mare”.

They were also used as temporary mobile homes for construction workers at the Guri Dam on the Caroni River (which was the world’s largest power plant at the time it was built in the 1970s).Today their use value has shifted to all different purposes – from police stations to churches to storage facilities.

These capsules were produced at a time of the peak national industrialisation and urbanisation. The developmental dreams of modernisation (or at least its discourse) – of permanent and beneficial and global growth – today have been drawn into the currents of neo-liberal discourse of globalisation: yet these capsules capture a moment, perhaps within a negative space of modernisation, when architecture shifted scale and function in response to a coming future.

Veronika Hauer

SUBSEQUENT FORMATION Andreas Heller, Katarina Matiasek Galerie Stadtpark, Krems 05.03.2011 - 16.04.2011 When we were kids my brothers and I once watched Pete’s Dragoni on a Sunday afternoon, in 1992.The film’s overall narrative and plot largely escape me, but one specific scene has inscribed itself vividly into my visual and anecdotal memory.

Pete is a young orphan. He’s on the run, unprotected if it wasn’t for his friend and companion Elliot. Elliot is a big green dragon, with pink hair and a tiny pair of wings. Elliot, who is capable of making himself invisible on demand, appears monstrous only at first sight. On closer inspection he is a playful and comical character, permanently failing to behave himself: actions that result from his immense physicality that just will not fit in a human environment.

As Pete and the invisible Elliot set foot into the picturesque village they seek protection from their evil prosecutors (the film being a Disney production), Pete

advises Elliot to stay invisible not to scare anyone. But when Pete playfully picks up a stick to drum on a bright white fence, Elliott mimics his gesture and does as his human friend. While Pete’s touch only produces a soft rhythmic sound, Elliott’s causes each and every board of the fence to crash down in a knock on effect.

March 4th 2011, Galerie Stadtpark, Krems I am sitting on the window bench, my back leaning against the glass front. It’s become dark outside while I was looking inside the room and at the sculpture that stands up from the floor like the outline of a sleeping dragon. My eyes keep wandering. Only some visitors I have observed touch or step inside the irregular-sized wooden frames aligning up in the shape of a foldable screen. Only some dared to dig beneath its upper edges and walk through the empty frames, transgressing

Installation view subsequent formation, Galerie Stadtpark, Krems. Foto: Stefan Lux

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Andreas Heller, Unbetitelt (Paravent), 2009/2010; Ply wood, lacquer, door hinges, dimension variable.

Foto: Stefan Lux

the room in a see-saw of right and left, left and right, back and forth. For those who dared, the object comes into being, measuring itself and being measured in relation to the walker’s body size and pace, flexibility of movement and consciousness to choreograph their way through the installation in an attempt to make experience happen.

I hear her steps tremble in an irregular rhythm long before she comes into sight. She breaks through the adults’ legs she had been hiding behind and arrives at the centre. Everyone’s eyes rest upon her small body.

She must be about three-years-old, hair blond and curly. She spins around once before walking through the third frame that is not much taller than her. Once she has come inside the fenced-off half circle, she continues to stumble alongside the piece, straightening out her left arm to feel her fingertips occasionally touch upon wood. The girl’s upper body and head lean forward, in a way her legs have to adapt to the swift pace directed by the heavier part of her body giving into gravity. She walks a child’s walk, feet turned slightly inwards. Her left arm points towards the object.

Unbetitelt (Paravent), 2009/2010, by Andreas Heller and Split Horizon I, 2011, by Katarina Matiasek featured in the double exhibition subsequent formation, in their conceptual making, both strongly anticipate the pres-

ence of the spectator in relation to the image or object on site. At first sight if the two works seem to unite in their visual investigation of the panoramic format and its romantic depiction of landscape, they also share the attempt to break the sovereignty and totality of the panoramicii by shifting perception from the overview on to the processual exploration of the artwork.

Such a shift obviously does not come as an unexpected turning point in contemporary art production, but the invitation Heller’s and Matiasek’s works offer to their audience positions itself somewhere between the selfsufficiency of the minimalist object and the usability of the participatory object or sculpture.

The two-part photographic panorama Split Horizon I shows an empty road heading towards a cloudy sunset. Matiasek transforms the high-definition landscape photograph into ‘an ambigram using lenticular print technique.’iii As curator and art theorist David Komary describes the technical effect of Split Horizon I in the exhibition text: ‘The angles of the image segments of this ambigram are not arranged in the manner of conventional visual puzzles: one image does not transform into another as the viewing perspective changes. Instead, a substantial portion of the picture appears as white, erased.’iv Moreover, the white shimmer that resides beneath the photographic image of the landscape alters the image from every new angle and viewpoint

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Katarina Matiasek, Split Horizon I, 2011; Lenticular print, 110 x 90 cm each. Foto: Stefan Lux

inhabited. Once understood that beneath the image lies another, the technical effect incites to walk pass the image for it to unfold its variable character.

In clean distance to its opponent in the show, Heller’s Unbetitelt (Paravent) appears like a prop in a performance set-up, ready to host a body or two in an imaginary choreography. On the other, if looked at on its own, the object carries an explicit reference to the two-dimensional, supported by its formal proximity to drawing. Unbetitelt (Paravent) outlines the silhouette of an imaginary landscape, while its form also serves as a directory for a possible walkway through the exhibition space.

What both works generate is choreography of the gaze instructed by choreography of the body as a whole, that organises itself around the inhabitation of the ideal viewpoint of the artwork and its subsequent fragmentation in sidesteps. By incorporating detours (in Heller’s case the spacious installation of his sculpture in the gallery) or blind spots (in Matiasek’s case the incorporation of a white image layer beneath the photographic depiction of a landscape), the unity of the image/object and its perception collapses. Perception comes fragmented, humble and instable. Even if we understand what the image looks like in its entirety, we will not achieve to see it as such. In both Unbetitled (Paravante) and Split Horizon I, it becomes apparent that

it is not so much the subject of the work, but its formula of creation and perception that are central to its conceptualisation.v Subsequent formation is the 14th exhibition programmed

by David Komary since he started at Galerie Stadtpark in Krems near Vienna in Autumn 2008. Komary gained experience as curator and director of the selforganised and autonomous exhibition space dreizehnzwei in Vienna, which he initiated in 2003 and ran until its closure in 2007. Komary developed a precise exhibition format that combined the constellation of two contemporary artistic positions with a discursive contextualisation of the artists’ approaches in form of a small catalogue accompanying each show. Komary’s aesthetic feel for visual presentation and the creation of an environment that supportively stood back behind the individual works coined dreizehnzwei’s peculiarity as an autonomous exhibition space at that time.

When Komary became responsible for the curatorial programme at Galerie Stadtpark he continued to ‘offer constellations of two artistic approaches’, trying to avoid a mere presentation of art works, but bring about an ‘aesthetic and semantic compression, evoking another, third position.’vi Coherently, a small catalogue sets out each exhibition’s discursive context and Komary continues to organise his programme along

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three similar thematic strands already investigated with dreizehnzwei: the construction of reality in the context of the medial, theoretical questions of time and space and forms of contemporary abstraction. All fourteen exhibitions have gathered around these three thematic strands, featuring artistic positions such as those of Roman Fehr and Björn Kämmerer, Yudi Noor and Peter Sandbichler, Siegfried A. Fruhauf and Flora Watzal, Haroon Mirza and Richard Sides to name only but the most recent. A catalogue entitled Coprime, to be published in April 2011 by Schlebrügge.Editor, features a selection of six exhibitions of Komary’s current programme. Coprime intends to serve as an overarching publication giving insight into the correspondences between the individual exhibitions and the three thematic strands of Komary’s current curatorial programme at the Galerie Stadtpark.

i The German translation of the title reads Elliot das Schmunzelmonster. ii For a detailed elaboration on the panoramic in relation to Andreas Heller’s and Katarina Matiasek’s work see David Komary, subsequent formation in David Komary, Galerie Stadtpark (eds), Coprime,Vienna: Schlebrügge.Editor 2011, p. 43 ff. iii Ibid. p. 44. iv Ibid. v See David Komary. Ibid. vi David Komary, Coprime, in David Komary, Galerie Stadtpark (eds), Coprime,Vienna: Schlebrügge.Editor 2011, p. 11.

www.galeriestadtpark.at

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Adeena Mey

BOOK REVIEW - Untitled Tracks: On Alternative Music in Beirut.

Photographs by Tanya Traboulsi, Ziad Nafwal and Ghalya Saadawi (Eds.), Beirut: Amers Editions, 2009, 159 pages.

Often, when a work (of art) is left untitled or is given the title “Untitled”, the lack of an explicit name replaced by a sign marking this absence suggests a refusal to objectivise the work, or to reduce it to strict interpretations and categorisations. In short, such work might be endowed with more openness. In the case of Untitled Tracks, however, the title is nevertheless followed by the all-encompassing “alternative”. In fact, there could not be a more adequate title for a book that strives to map an emerging, ever-changing, fragmented sonic landscape in a no less fractured social-political context; that of Beirut.

Edited by DJ, music producer and critic, Ziad Nawfal and writer, academic and Nowiswere contributor Ghalya Saadawi, Untitled Tracks is organised in two parts: the first is composed of essays, the second of Tanya Traboulsi’s ongoing photographic documentation, both charting specific aspects of this seemingly rich and heterogeneous terrain.

In her introduction, Saadawi carefully attempts to formulate and ‘thematise’ the relationship between these sonic, musical practices and a certain politics, all the while warning of the shortcomings of reducing the former to the latter, or to other geographic and regional concerns. Saadawi circumscribes what the book is (not) about in the section titled “whatnot”, as well as the things the book is intended to do. Although one could be tempted to present this musical scene in a sweeping gesture akin to a comprehensive history – an ‘ideal’ the editors explicitly avoid – they opt instead to refer to these practices and the eclectic musicians as, what Saadawi calls, an “imagined community”.

The aim here also being the creation of a representational space, or a sort of visual and textual equivalent to the recorded aural manifestations.

Hence, if this community is an imagined one (and one of possibly “emancipatory moments” as well), the photographic work which captures it does not

simply represent or recomposes throughout the pages of Untitled Tracks since it is only incarnated in the latter. Rather, the photos act as a kind of visual archaeology in the present, fashioning these subjects in the encounter with the lens. As contributor Serge Abiaad puts it, “taking pictures, like documentary filmmaking, is not about externally observing and monitoring through the camera’s lens, but about being present with that which we are witnessing.”

Of Traboulsi’s photos, one can mention those of electro-acoustic/noise musician Tarek Atoui, where the physicality of his performances is rendered quasi-palpable; or rapper RGB’s dark and almost knightly poses; or The New Government’s NME cover-like attitudes. What these have or do not have in common or where they stand within the stream of alternative music in Beirut does not seem to be the driving force behind this collection of photos. If they necessarily document actors, events, gestures, objects and scenes that make up Beirut’s alternative sonorous topography, Traboulsi’s images are in fact more reminiscent of Walker Evans’s idea that “art is never a document, though it certainly can adopt that style”. They do not fall under the acknowledged genre of “documentary style” either, as neither do they produce a series as such, nor do they adopt the aesthetics of the archive. It seems, rather, that they attempt to de-encapsulate the poetics of a series of situations.

In both the photographs and texts, experimental music is given a notable part. Some of the most visible figures such as Tarek Atoui, Charbel Haber, Sharif Sehnaoui, Mazen Kerbaj and Raed Yassin can be seen performing or fiddling with their instruments and other live performance apparatuses – human-technical-sonorous assemblages exploring the silence-noise spectrum. Alongside Kaelen Wilson-Goldie’s close reading of Atoui’s Un-Drum performance (based on his partial hearing loss resulting from his arrest during the 2006 war) and Seth Ayyaz’s essay (part contextualisation of the emergence of the improvisation/experimental scene in Beirut, part written fiction as sound and an effort to recreate the sonic event of the Irtijal festival and give the reader a sense of being-there), Walid Sadek introduces the work of Lebanese music theorist Nizar Mroueh for the first

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Installation view and display at Ulises booksop, branch Lastarria, Santiago. Courtesy of the artist.

Tarek Atoui performing live. Foto: Tanya Traboulsi

time to an English-speaking audience through his translation of and commentary on The Legitimacy of Noise: A Personal Opinion, published in 1968.

Obviously influenced by the Italian Futurist Luigi Russolo’s manifesto The Art of Noises, Mroueh sketches a music history that signals a move from dominant regimes of musicality towards “the ruin of a pre-musical landscape.” Discussing some of the major musical innovations of the 20th Century – Schönberg’s dodecaphonic composing system, Cage’s indeterminacy principle and Musique Concrète pioneers Pierre Schaefer and Pierre Henry for instance – Mroueh circumscribes what he sees as a sonic territory that radically shifts away from traditional conceptions of composition, understood here as a spectrum delineated by “mathematical ordering” on the one hand, and “nihilistic chaos” on the other. Beyond the aesthetic and scholarly value of each dimension,

one of the interests in reading Mroueh is that he brings them close together – by deeming them pre-linguistic antecedents to the functionality of sound as a vector for corporeal motion (dance) – through what he deems a fundamental, human “aural sense”. Not only does this idea echoe with Adorno’s dislike for jazz or popular music as mere dance or background musical forms, it can also constitute a fertile ground to discuss ideas of aesthetic modernism. The latter, as developed by the German philosopher, re-enacts one of the tensions of modern society, namely the universal vs. the particular. Thus, broadly speaking, modernist art’s negativity lies within its internal logic of individuation, which, as Adorno writes “distances art from the universal. [Thus] the sole path of success that remains open to artworks is also that of their progressive impossibility.”i. Through an Adornian lens, Mroueh’s modernism thus comes out as one

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under which the singular is not whisked off in the name of a pre-established aesthetic universalism, but whose local eventualities might favour the path of the “progressive impossibility” stated

by Adorno. Today in Lebanon, such eventualities are often correlated to social and political events.

For instance, Mazen Kerbaj reminds us in one of his interviewsii that if the context of war produces extreme situations, they are also very fertile ones that feed creativity. From this point of view, all artists presented in Untitled Tracks bear, to a certain extent, the “aural sense”, which, according to Mroueh, “roars with anger and thunder, hums and rustles with the sounds of tenderness, and has often recorded humanity’s efforts to defend itself and survive.”

i Theodor W. Adorno (2002), Aesthetic Theory, London, New York, Continuum, 202. ii Mazen Kerbaj, Music during wartime, http://www.youtube. com/watch?v=9lcgou7kkdk

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Didem Yazici

Where Romanticism Flirts With Criticality

Composing poetry through cinematic visuals, Sara Rajaei constructs her memories of every-day life with socio-historical aspects as well as self-reflection in her video art/filmic works.i Recalling particular personal memories is an attempt to link everyday life practices to socio-political issues. What seems to be daily, refers indirectly to political landmarks. However, the first video that I’ve viewed by Rajaei is a rather sensually charged, lyrical work - independent of these categorical references, entitled Charismatic Fates & Vanishing Dates (2006). The piece gently envisages a poem written by Rajaei. It resonates as if meeting a new face or stepping into a place for the first time, it enhances a mysterious atmosphere. Sorrow, and hidden bliss drives the piece along with the irregular time line of the piece. Time exists, within all bounds of possibilities: past, present and future. Time serves as space, as gesture, or as anamnesis, yet is a decisive concept in Rajaei’s works.Time replaces a reminiscence of the past or a critical evaluation of a political encounter. These two links tend to lead a non-conflicting duality in her works. Time flows between present and eternal: Living a moment, remembering it, then folding it into diverse narratives. Rajaei refines those memories; simplifying and sharpening them whilst assigning them new meanings.What makes

her memories peculiar, is that they interact realities in various methods; ‘Time, is what we share with one another.’ii Particular conversations, specific objects and detailed portrayals refer to certain times and events in order to indicate the past in a critical point of view.

She recollects her memories, and reconstructs them; mostly colloquial ones, or so they seem.

In A Leap Year That Started on a Friday (2010) sentences appear one after another on a white screen as she voices them, illustrating a routine day slowly turning into description of an airliner crash.The background of the piece sources to 1988, towards the end of the IranIraq war, especially when the US Navy shot down an Iranian civilian aircraft. Rajaei portrays her memory of watching this incident on television in Tehran, without emphasising the national and historical backgrounds of the actors of the incident. This makes her storytelling obscure and subtle, it takes a certain amount of time to comprehend the context. Television can give you illusions, where floating bodies on the sea can actually be dead civilians. The stranger Shahrzad, who visited her home shortly before the crash was one of the passengers on that plane. However, while viewing the video, we are not given this information.The work starts with a portrait of a mysterious visitor: his thick black moustache, old-fashioned glasses, long arms and long legs.

Shahrzad was caught by a fisherman after the airliner’s shot down - with no head, no arms, no chest and no legs, only his torso. He was identified by a birthmark.iii Rajaei

Charismatic Fates & Vanishing Dates, 2006

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A Day of Amnesia, 2004

suggests to viewer to remember this incident with her.

This signification functions not only as a display of her traumatic memories, but also most notably to rethink the unlawfulness of an attack. Essentially, without the information about the victim’s background, it can only lead us to the traces of war, rather than victimising any particular side. This is exactly where non-place related approach comes in. It is a political statement to choose to deal with a covered-up incident where civilians, who had nothing to do with the war, were shot because of a so-called mistaken identification. How many people know about or remember this incident today? The question is not stated by the work itself, but perhaps by indirect references. The references still remain unclear yet there is no direct association with this incident. The work mainly deals with the memory and idea of war without any direct references or definitions.Towards the end of the video some photographic images of a building emerge; as the artist talks about her nightmares just after the incident. Through making this work, she also deals with her trauma; seeing dead people on television, and being moved by the sounds of knell belonging to the visitor’s death.

The first time I viewed the video, I immediately recalled my memories of seeing The Bosnian war (1992-1995) on television also as a child. Those who have not experienced war, often witness it via mass media that openly displays brutality. The artist’s repetitive depictions in her latest work; such as white shirts, white shorts, pair of white socks and floating in the water, derive from what she had seen on television, or what she thought

she had seen. “In the end none of those white things existed. It is even strange to me, but I have this rather calm and white memory of it. It is all because of my first impression yet its calmness and whiteness does not lighten it up, it is indeed a kind of an emptiness which touches you under your skin and makes you shiver any time you think of it or remember it.”iv She is interested in deconstructing her memories through context cues and traces. By encoding specific objects, scenes or dialogues; she interprets her memories in a socio-political context. Rather than emphasising the crucial information of incidents; her artistic method tends to hide and simplify the social background, which reflexively lifts its social effectiveness. This result refines aesthetics of political sense.

Rajaei’s obsession with particular objects and dialogues started to emerge in an early work: A Day of Amnesia (2004). We see a white background, no notion of time or space; only four people sitting on the floor as the narrator reveals an anecdote. It is about having a new carpet at home; yet just before the end of the video we understand that a war had just ended on the same day of having a new carpet. Here, war exists as an abstract concept akin to a detail of exchanging the old carpet with the new one. She is interested in the way we connect our memories to reality, how we remember things; feelings and memorable moments.

A Day of Amnesia (2004) and A Leap Year That Started on a Friday (2010) hold circular and narrative political references, as well as inventing their own way of

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remembering. Unlike these works, Forever for a while (2009) and Charismatic Fates & Vanishing Datesv (2006) suggest pure aesthetic experience of cinema. I saw Charismatic Fates & Vanishing Dates in May 2010, during my visit to Künstlerhaus Schloss Balmoral where Rajaei was in residence. Watching it for the first time, I was caught by its poetic atmosphere. I felt invited to walk around a dining room accompanied by the narrator’s poem, as the video is shot in first person, the viewers almost become characters themselves. Each object in both works embodies a persona; as furniture and accessories speak. Candlestick, cello, carpet, wig, photographs, laughs, piano tunes, dim light, all these dramatic elements complete the mystery of the narrated poem.

To her, any particular detail from the past or today is worth sharing; any intense “Deja Vu” recalling its emotion and provocation of thought. “Last week, last year, I don’t remember / Still those all remain together.vi” Time, here appears as a concept in philosophical understanding, or as a tool in order to remember the socio-political events from the past. In her early video piece Untitled (2001), the camera follows chronologically placed black and white photographs of Rajaei’s mother on the floor, as they are picked up gradually whilst the camera focuses on each. Similar to Forever for a while (2009), this work also deals with different periods of a woman’s life. However, in this one a woman appears in a chador by the last scene.The video was made a few months prior to September 11, before the image and debates on radical Islam became fetishised.

Rather than repeating social issues, which might lead to a neo-orientalist approach, the artist’s individual language leaves a critical mark. As a time traveller, poet, or a magician of durational occurrences; she reconstructs and deconstructs it by narrating. Heiddeger stated the question ‘Does time itself reveal itself as the horizon of being?’ in his cult book ‘Time and Being’. We are yet to find an answer, Sara Rajaei manifests her existence A Leap Year That Started on a Friday, 2010 through perception of time. i “My works are neither films nor videos, because I both like the aesthetics of film and the free achievement of video. I like the floating magic of poetry, the strong ties of storytelling, the touchable texture of a piece of craft and music. In my work I try to combine all these.” From artist’s statement ii Quatation from Sara Rajaei’s statement. iii Quatation from the text: ‘A Leap Year That Started On a Friday” 2010. iv Quatation from Sara Rajaei in conversation with Didem Yazici, 2010. v In the work ‘Forever for a while’ there is no poem, but only music as soundtrack. vi From the artist’s poem and video “Charismatic Fates and Vanishing Dates’ 2006.

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Jason Coburn Remain in Light 2011

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Per Hüttner and Fatos Üstek

The Encounter A Play in Five Acts This is the last part of the trilogy of texts that have been published in Nowiswere by Per Hüttner and Fatos Üstek. In the last issue, they speculated on what would happen when they went to Detroit to meet Robert Ettinger, the father of Cryonics. In this text, they recount what really took place in the U.S., including a surprising amount inconsistencies in temporality and a performative intervention at the Blago Bung 5, at Emily Harvey Foundation, New York.

Act 1 – Newark airport and Upper East Side, Manhattan.

A man and a woman stop in front of the luggage belt at the airport.They turn on their mobile phones and hear a custom-made beep. A blurry video clip of an old man pops up on both their screens in eerie synchronicity.

The man seems to be in some kind of bluish igloo.

“Dear Friends,” he says. “This is a message from Robert in Clinton Township. I am waiting for you to visit on Tuesday. I wanted to welcome you to America and hope that you have a wonderful time in New York,” he fiddles around with two red tubes and both mobile screens go dead simultaneously. The man and the woman look at each other and smile.

Their luggage arrives, the taste of jetlag and tiredness linger on their tongues.They walk through immigration and customs and catch a yellow cab into the city. The sun sets over the brownstones in a way it only can in New York City and they arrive at the flat. After a short dialogue with the uniform-clad doorman, they take the lift and step into their breathtakingly beautiful Upper East Side apartment, which has been lent to them by an absent good fairy whose spirit lingers in their minds and gives a golden hue to reality.

The following morning, they are seated at opposite ends of the large white dinner table in the spacious kitchen.They work with their respective laptops simul-

taneously and nibble at almonds. “Something is in the air,” she thinks but cannot quite put her finger on what it is. As she tries to push the thought away she receives an e-mail from Robert.

“Dear Friends,” she reads out loud. “I am writing you because something uncomfortable happened today.This morning, stepping out of the house on my way to the supermarket, I met the mailman. Nothing unusual about this, you say. But it was the mailman from my childhood and he had not aged a day. As you understand, this is quite an irregularity of an impossible kind. I eased myself into the car and drove to the mall pondering the event. At the parking lot, an old lady passes me, wearing a pink dress with small-embroidered flowers. I recognized the garment and realised that it was my mother’s hand-tailored dress from the thirties. I froze for a moment and then tried to make out her face, but she was already too far away. I did not bother to try to catch up with her, since I am not a fast runner any more. I shopped absent-mindedly, forgetting to buy what I had gone there for in the first place. When I reached the checkout counter, the girl scanning the bar codes of my shopping was my first girlfriend, whom I dated before the war. She was still 17-years-old. I gawked, but could not say anything. Is this connected to your visit?”

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Act 2 – Blago Bung, Emily Harvey Foundation, Soho The man and woman stand on the wooden floor which serves as an impromptu stage. She remains standing up while the man sits down in a chair. He is covered in several layers of winter clothes and two hats and shivers. “Welcome,” she hesitates. “I do not know where to start or how to explain this. He has always loved ice-cream, but now he won’t even open his mouth.”

She tries to serve him ice cream but he shrugs with his mouth shut. “We had a session this morning with Dolores, a past life regression therapist. It was a wonderful, enriching and beautiful experience. She visualised events that are part of our previous existences,” she smiles insecurely.

“But something unexpected happened when we were on the subway back home,” she goes on. “He acted very strangely and I couldn’t communicate with him.”

She waves her hand in front of his face. He does not react. “I assumed that it was related to the therapy, so I called Dolores. She explained that something probably triggered him to go back into a hypnotic state. He is stuck in a previous existence or in limbo between lives.

She says.” The woman does not seem convinced by her own words. “He has been shivering all day. Oh man, he has been shivering like hell, not unlike a malaria crisis.

But what he is going through is worse!”

At this point the man starts to wander around in the audience randomly touching faces of visitors with his

ice-cold wet fingers, while smiling at them awkwardly.

“He has been murmuring all day,” the woman says while she pulls him back and tries to sit the man back into his chair. “He keeps repeating that he is cold. To be honest with you I wanted to cancel the performance tonight.

But I was reassured by the fact that he responds to my gestures. When I smile at him, he smiles back. So whenever I talked about cancelling the performance he would protest loudly.” He grunts and she pulls him back because he tries to venture into the audience again to touch faces.

“The reason we came to the United States, is to go to Michigan to meet Robert Ettinger, the father of cryonics. ‘What is Cryonics?’ you ask. It is a practice of freezing people and pets after they are clinically dead, so that one day when science has advanced they will be able to resuscitate them and cure whatever ailments that caused their death.” She sits him down in the chair again, trying to get eye contact with him.

“We are less interested in Cryonics or the effects that the process have on the identity of the patients. It is rather the visionary qualities and the amazing commitment Robert Ettinger has towards his work that make us want to interview him.”

The man stands up and walks off the stage with an awkward gait.

“Per, Per would you please come back!” she shouts after him “I have to make sure that he does not get up to some mischief.” She grabs her bag and the hat that has fallen off the man’s head and runs after him.

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Act 3 - Institute of Cryonics, Clinton Township “What a drive,” she says. “It really looks like time has come to a standstill in this town.”

“Yes, if it weren’t for the modern cars on the freeway I would say that we had been teleported to the 1970s,” he replies. They drive through a dull suburban area where every building looks alike. They pull up with great anticipation at the house they have GoogleEarthed earlier. They find a note posted at the front door.

“Dear Friends, I had prepared a small reception for you and invited all my wonderful friends. I was very eager to meet you both and wanted them to do the same. It is all about sharing. But I have to face it, we are not so young anymore, we wake up early and rarely gather at social events. So my friends showed up early and we got carried away eating and drinking. We really had a lot of fun, but now I feel very tired and will have a rest. When I sleep, I sleep very deeply. Go into my bedroom (on the left at the end of the corridor) and try to wake me up. But if you cannot wake me, just go to the centre. I will join you there as soon as I wake up.

Feel free to have some coffee and cake.

Your friend Robert.”

Act 4 - From Detroit to New York City After numerous unsuccessful attempts to wake Robert, they have to drive back to the airport in order to catch their flight. When they have returned the rental car and reach the terminal, they find that their flight back to New York has been cancelled due to an unexpected tornado in Chicago.

“Tonight, you will enjoy the most electrifying sleep you have ever had. In our new and teslafied coaches you will experience the most profound sleep levels possible outside of Belgrade!” he continues.

Everyone sighs and steps onto the coaches that glimmer in the sunset. The vehicles pull out of the airport and ladies on high heels and retro-chic outfits, distribute pillows and surprisingly comfortable duvets to everyone. The extremely dexterous hostesses, also, turn seats into beds. All passengers can choose from a rich selection of high quality films to be watched on their individual screen. “This is really comfy,” she says while she immerses herself with Time Machine. “Yes,” he replies without looking up from Stalker.

He dozes off and finds himself in front of an impressive nineteenth century building. “Krunska 51” a voice says as he mounts the steps. He walks into a hall filled with displays and odd old electrical machines. The woman appears by his side and he sees a dozen other people line up next to them. He recognises them but cannot place their faces. She blindfolds him and the others do the same. He can smell the scent of freshly squeezed limes which stands in stark contrast to the dusty ambiance. “Am I alone in experiencing this?” he asks himself.

The blindfold is removed and a sculpture of Nicola Tesla as a young, handsome young man with his hair parted in the middle like an ancient clerk seems to speak to him. The Serb’s cast lips start to move: “Parks Road” they curl around the consonants. A strong wind starts to blow and without a sound he is teleported to the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford.

He walks around the glass cases enjoying the beauty and the strangeness of the exposed objects. He bends over to look at the Yoruba statue of Queen Victoria. Her But before they can reflect more on the situation, a lips move and he hears the sound of a beautiful song handful of blazing coaches arrive outside the terminal leaving her mouth. Her singing is both high pitched and building. A blonde guy with the whitest smile and the forceful. He turns and discovers that masks, dolls and most beautifully well-groomed hair, greets them. sculptures have formed a magical choir singing most “Ladies and Gentlemen, welcome, Bienvenu, Willkom- riveting songs on the relationship between music and men, Hosgeldiniz, to the American Coach Museum – an mathematics. He can see the same people as before experience from the future now!” The blondino smiles. enjoy the music with him and he realises that they are “Your luggage has now been loaded in our high-tech all traveling on the coach with him. They all hum in uniluxury coaches and you will soon find that cancelled son. With an electrifying power to his tongue, the man flight is actually a blessing.” is teleported to a grand and magical restaurant where None of the other passengers seem to be convinced a man with wild hair serves him the most divinely tastand everyone looks at reality with tired and disillu- ing titbits of unknown origin. When the woman puts a sioned eyes. large glass of Burgundy to his mouth he wakes up with SF + 60

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a jerk. The woman looks at him and they know that they have shared the same dream. They gaze across at the other passengers on the coach. Without a word spoken it becomes clear that they have participated in something special together.

As they pass Hoboken NJ, the perky hostesses serve a light breakfast. They arrive in New York at sunrise.

The woman’s phone receives a message in the morning light. “It’s Robert, he wants to speak to us.”

“How devious of you!”

“Sure,” he smiles “I have to run now. I need to take my girlfriend for a spin in my new convertible.”

“It must be freezing in Michigan.”

“No, I am down in Florida,” Robert laughs again. “Just make sure you come back soon! I really enjoyed your company. Wave to them Jenny!”

A beautiful blonde in her mid-30s waves to the man and woman, they look at each other in surprise. Robert kisses her and the screen goes black.

Act 5 – Upper East Side, Manhattan The sun is very spring-like, though it’s early November.

She sits on the fire escape smoking a cigarette. “Is he online yet?” she asks.“No,” he replies while drawing one of his elongated musical scores inside the room.“I guess we will never know,” she says. “Brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr”.

The Skype signal lights up their two computer screens simultaneously. “Hey Robert,” she says.

“Hello children,” the old man says. “Did you like what I arranged for you?”

“What do you mean?” The man and woman say in unison.

“Did you enjoy the bus ride and the dreams?”

“Yes, it was amazing,” he says.

“Good!”

“But why?” The woman says.

“First of all life is about sharing a vision. That travels across all temporal boundaries.”

“Beautiful,” the man says.

“It also seemed that you thought of me like a museum, where my ideas and thoughts have been solidified under the currencies of time and experience. Thus, I needed to show you that museums are not compatible with my outlook on life. My vision is not to be vitrified for a possible resuscitation in a future, if so I would rather write a book and bury it outside my house. I also needed to make you appreciate what true change is and that it isn’t always enjoyable.”

“But it was enjoyable,” the man says.

“We wanted to meet you,” she says.

“Well, we can meet on your next trip,” Robert says laughing.

“What do you mean next trip? You are 92-years-old,” the man replies.

“So you want me to die?”

“Of course not,” they both blush.

“Well, I have no intention of dying and anyway we met.

I was just asleep.”

“Were you?”

“Not really, I was just pretending.”

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Contributors

Anna Gritz is an Assistant Curator at the Hayward Gallery and works independently as a writer and curaSelçuk Artut tor based in London. She holds an MA in Art History lives and works in Istanbul. He has received his BSc in from the University of Cologne, Germany and an MA Mathematics from Koç University, Istanbul and his MA in Curatorial Practice from the California College for in Sonic Arts from Middlesex University, London. Cur- the Arts in San Francisco. From 2008-2010 she was the rently, he is teaching Sound and Interaction courses at Programs Director at apexart, New York. She has curatSabancı University as a full-time faculty member. His ed numerous exhibitions, including: The Blue Hour-Marie artistic activities are mainly focused on contemporary Jager at Concrete/Hayward Gallery (London), S-N-W-O media practices such as sonic arts and human com- at Drei (Cologne), An Act of Mischievous Misreading at puter interactivity.

ISCP (New York), Self Storage at Devon Self Storage Selected exhibitions and performances include: E.V.A. (San Francisco), and The White Alice Communication SysBashimi Art House Gallery, Salzburg Austria (2011); Art tem at the Wattis (San Francisco). She contributes to Stage Singapore 2011; Existrong, CDA-Projects (2011); various publications and exhibition catalogues such as Istanbul, Contemporary Istanbul (2010); Cabinet (as the- Art Agenda, Frieze, Flash Art, and Monopol. Her curater performer, video artist, sound designer at Theater rent research focuses on marginal practices and strateFreiburg-garajistanbul, 2010), Semaine du Cerveau - L’art gies of artistic refusal and disobedience. a L’Hopital Exhibition, Geneva (2010), A/B, Operation Room, Istanbul (2010), Younger Than Jesus, Newmuseum, Veronika Hauer NY, USA, NewsPaperBox, File Festival, Sao Paolo (2008), Born 1981 is a visual artist and writer based in Vienna.

Substairs, 10th Istanbul Biennial (2007), Improvhelsinki She graduated from the University of Applied Arts Vi(Helsinki, 2007), Bares do Porto (Portugal, 2006), New enna in 2006 and Goldsmiths College London in 2008.

Electronic Music, Istanbul (2006) and Aldwych London Hauer is currently lecturing at the University of Applied Transport, London (2004). Artut plays the bass guitar in Arts Vienna. Recent projects include: My life is in events, Replikas (www.replikas.com) as a professional as well people, things. Best wishes, 2010, performance in colas individual art activities. www.selcukartut.com laboration with Nicole Miltner and Nadine Puschnigg at Forum Stadtpark, Graz (2010); Contribution to the Sabine Bitter & Helmut Weber book NN (Working Titel), Edition Forum Stadtpark, Graz Since 1993, Vienna and Vancouver based artists Sabine (2010) - ISBN-13978-3-901109-27-0.

Bitter and Helmut Weber have worked on projects addressing cities, architecture, and the politics of rep- Per Hüttner is a Swedish artist who lives and works resentation and of space. Mainly working in the me- in Paris. He was trained at Konsthögskolan, Stockholm dia of photography and video their research-oriented and at Hochschule der Künste in Berlin. He has shown practice engages with specific moments and logics of extensively in Europe, North America, Australia and the global-urban change as they take shape in neigh- Asia. borhoods, architecture, and everyday life. Since 2004 Solo exhibitions include: Repetitive Time, Göteborgs members of the cultural collective Urban Subjects US konstmuseum; Xiao Yao You at Guangdong Museum of (Bitter/Derksen/Weber). Recent projects and exhibits Art in Guangzhou and I am a Curator, Chisenhale Galinclude (2011 only): We: Vancouver, Vancouver Artgal- lery in London. Selected participations took place at lery; Communitas,The Unrepresentable Community, Cam- The Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, era Austria, Graz; 602,000-works on housing with Urban ICA, London; Centro de Arte de Salamanca and the Subjects, VIVO, Vancouver, and Global Prayers, NGBK, Liverpool Biennial. Four major monographs on the artBerlin. http://www.lot.at ist’s work have been published recently.

Hüttner is the founder and director of the Vision Forum, Jason Coburn is an artist. He studied curating at the a project based and experimental research program Royal College of Art in London. His work continually without geographical location. plays with the possibilities for shared values between www.perhuttner.com creative and cultural categories. By implicating practices outside of their boundaries, he speculates on their Adeena Mey conceptual, material and cultural values. is a critic and researcher. He studied Aural and Visual www.jasoncoburn.tumblr.com Cultures at Goldsmiths College, University of London,

and Anthropology at the University of Lausanne, Switzerland. Currently, he is a Swiss Science Foundation researcher on the project Schweizer Film Experimente based at the latter and the Zurich University of the Arts and is working on a PhD thesis entitled “Archeology of the black-box”. He has written for a number of publications including Sang Bleu, Novembre and Flashartonline. His recent writings include Cosmic Diagram. On Ecke Bonk’s Exhibition and Mélanie Althaus’ Architecture (in Marcel Duchamp and the Forestay Waterfall, Stefan Banz ed., JRP-Ringier, 2010) and Christian Marclay’s Christmas Tales (Helvetic Centre Editions, 2010) and has translated texts (by Tom Gunning and Thomas Zummer) on the work of experimental filmmaker Abigail Child (in Is this what you were born for?, François Bovier, ed., Métis Press, 2011).

Nicolas Jasmin (formerly known as N.I.C.J.O.B.) is an artist working with various media. Born 1967 in France, lives in Vienna, Austria.

Selected group exhibitions include: (2010) In Between.

Austria Contemporary, c/o Beijing International Art Biennale, Beijing (2009); Flicks - The Cinematic in Art, c/o Highlanes Gallery, Drogheda (2008); Reboot: The Jim & Mary Barr Collection c/o Wellington City Gallery, Wellington (2007); Grounded c/o E:vent Gallery, London (2005); Now´s the Time c/o Kunsthaus Graz und Medienturm, Graz (2004). International c/o The Liverpool Biennial (2002); Ausgeträumt c/o Secession,Vienna (2002).

Solo Exhibitions include: F(R)ICTIONS c/o Starkwhite, Auckland (2006); N.I.C.J.O.B. c/o Kunstbuero, Vienna (2003) and N.I.C.J.O.B. c/o Artspace, Auckland (2002); Gaëlle Obiégly Born 1971 is a writer living in Paris. Her books are published by Gallimard and Verticales. Bibliography: Petite figurine en biscuit qui tourne sur elle-même dans sa boîte à musique; Le vingt et un août; Gens de Beauce; Faune; La nature; Petit éloge de la jalousie; Le musée des valeurs sentimentales

Fatos Üstek is an independent curator and art critic, based in London, UK. www.fatosustek.com Haegue Yang Born 1971 in Seoul, Yang received BFA at the Seoul National University, Korea and Meisterschueler Titel from Georg Herold at the Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main, Germany.

Yang works with various media, ranging large-scale sensorial installations to juxtaposed graphic works and semi documentary photographic pieces, from video essays to objects. Despite her use of diverse media, her work is distinguished by her continuous conceptual focus, which is mediated by abstraction even if underlying sentiment manifests rather specific narrative, such as her subjective reflection on historical figures, concrete domestic and local environments. Her particular language of abstraction is characterized often by sensoryreceptive devices, such as moving lights, scent emitters, fans and so on, which leads to a translation of narratives into physical experiences in space.

Recent group exhibitions include: The New Décor, Hayward Gallery, London, England (2010); Intro Motion Ditch, Art Sheffield, S1 Artspace, Sheffield, England (2010); Making Worlds, 53rd International Art Exhibition, Venice Biennale, Italy (2009); and Life On Mars, the 55th Carnegie International, Pittsburgh, USA (2008); Solo exhibitions include Arrivals, Kunsthaus Bregenz, Austria (2011); Voice and Wind, New Museum, New York, USA (2010); Voice over Three, Artsonje Center, Seoul, Korea (2010); and Condensation, Korean Pavilion, Venice Biennale, Italy (2009).

Yang lives and works in Seoul, Korea and Berlin, Germany.

Didem Yazici is a freelance writer, living in Frankfurt am Main. She holds a BA in Art History from Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University, Istanbul and attended the MA program in Art History in Istanbul Technical University (2008Rana Öztürk 2009) Currently she is doing Masters on Curatorial is a PhD researcher at the Graduate School of Creative and Critical Studies in Städelschule, Staatliche HochArts and Media, NCAD in Dublin. She is originally from schule für Bildende Künste and The Goethe University, Istanbul, where she completed her BA in Management Frankfurt. Her texts have been published in a book, at Bogazici University and MA in Art History at the catalogues and art magazines. She is contributing in Istanbul Technical University. Until now she has taken the Turkish daily newspaper Radikal, RES Art World / on various roles in the art field as writer, translator, World Art , Sanat Dünyamız, and Artam Global Art. curator and coordinator for different art events and organizations.