Art Woo A New Independent Magazine For Young Artists
No. 08 - February 2015
Mike Nelson
Belfast Photo Festival /The Wapping Project / Book Call /Mike Nelson / Stuttering /
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EXHIBITION
Ziad Antar Untitled Limits
Gallery Almine Rech, Bruxelles / 22 Jan - 28 Feb, 2015 FEBRUARY 2015
table of c o n t e n t s
07 / Belfast Photo Festival 09 / Somewhereto 11 / Fellowship, Vermont 12 / The Wapping Project 14 / The 03 16 / Book Call 19 / Mike Nelson 25 / Stuttering 30 / Rock Formations 33 / Groupshow
Around the Globe & blog around
EXHIBITION
Farrah Karapetian Stagecraft
Gallery Von Lintel, Los Angeles / 17 Jan - 28 Feb, 2015 FEBRUARY 2015
OPEN CALL
Belfast Photo Festival 2015 Open Submission
FEBRUARY 2015
OPEN CALL
Belfast Photo Festival is offering artist's/ photographer's the opportunity to exhibit their work in the main Festival gallery alongside some of the biggest names in the field, with a number also having the opportunity to be featured in the arts magazine Abridged. The winners will be eligible for a number of awards, including a cash prize of ÂŁ1,000. The theme has been left open to remove any restrictions; submissions must be photographic or lensbased but can include incorporations of other art forms with the photographic medium (i.e. performance, painting, sculpture, music, literature etc). Individuals and collectives are welcome to apply; individuals should select and enter between two and six photographs from a particular series or body of work AND/OR submit their Photo-book for exhibition by uploading a single PDF (no image limit). Between 20 and 40 photographers / artists will benefit from: awards and cash prizes exhibition exposure at the Festival's main city centre gallery inclusion in the special Festival issue of Abridged Magazine long term Festival representation and promotion exhibition alongside some of the biggest photographic names as part of the major photographic event publication being seen by a substantial number of visual arts professionals and the media having their work viewed by an international panel of influential experts in the field of photography
FEBRUARY 2015
Info www.belfastphotofestival Deadline March 6, 2015
OPEN CALL
Somewhereto Opportunities For Uk Based 16-25 Year Olds
FEBRUARY 2015
OPEN CALL
SOMEWHERETO_ links 16-25 year olds to space giving you opportunity to do amazing things outside formal education and or employment. Over the past couple of years, this has supported thousands of young people start their own business, get into full time employment and even secure a place at college/ university. If your a student, unemployed, in full time employment or volunteering and based in the UK we can help you find space for art exhibitions to construction work, we can help you access studio, event, meeting, desk or outdoor spaces totally free to use for your project, develop your start-up business or just to learn new skills.
Info Http://Www.Tiny.Cc
FEBRUARY 2015
 
OPEN CALL
Vermont Studio Center Fellowships
The Vermont Studio Center is thrilled to announce 56+ fellowship for artists and writers at our upcoming February 15, 2015 deadline, including: - 2 Artists Supporting Artists Fellowships for emerging visual artists, supported by the Wolf Kahn and Emily Mason Foundation, to provide a VSC residency + mentorship with artist Nari Ward - 3 James Merrill Poetry Fellowships for outstanding American poets with demonstrable financial need (includes $500 stipend) - 1 #GivingTuesday Alumni Fellowship for an artist or writer who has attended VSC in the past - 1 Voices Rising Fellowship for an African American woman fiction writer with demonstrable financial need (includes $2,000 stipend) - 1 Swan Fellowship for an interdisciplinary artist who both paints and writes - 10 Hemera Foundation Tending Space Fellowships for artists and writers with an existing contemplative practice - and 25 VSC Fellowships open to ALL! 56+ Fellowships Available at Vermont Studio Center's 2/15/15 Deadline http://www.vermontstudiocenter.org/fellowships FEBRUARY 2015
OPEN CALL
The Wappingproject Berlin
FEBRUARY 2015
OPEN CALL
The aim of the residency is to provide a period of rest, recreation and reflection for artists and practitioners in mid-career. It is a condition of the residency that NO work is produced during the ten week period of the programme. The residency provides free accommodation in a classic Berlin apartment in an Alt Bau, early 20th century building. It is a private space in an urban environment. It is located in Kreutzberg in East Berlin on Katzbachstrasse, overlooking Victoria Park. Kreutzberg is known for its concentration of artists, galleries and performance spaces; it is not yet over gentrified. It is possible for the successful applicant to be accompanied by a partner and up to two children, if the children are able to share one bedroom. Living costs and travel are NOT included in the award and applicants should ensure that they’re able to support themselves adequately during the ten week period. Following the initial residency in 2015, there will be four residencies per year, each of ten weeks� duration. The first round is open to artists from the following disciplines: FINE ART FILM / PHOTOGRAPHY CHOREOGRAPHY COMPOSITION LITERATURE, INCLUDING POETRY ARCHITECTURE
Info Thewappingprojectberlin Deadline
DESIGN (Furniture)
Feb 14, 2015
CURATION
FEBRUARY 2015
OPEN CALL
The 03 International Video Art Review
FEBRUARY 2015
OPEN CALL
The open call is open to graduated artists and students of art colleges, universities and academies. Videos made not earlier than 1 January 2012 are eligible for the application. The preferred length of video works is up to 7 minutes, although videos up to 15 minutes in length will be considered. The final deadline for submitting the application form for the first stage is 1 March 2015. Artists whose works are admitted to the final will be notified by email and the information will also be published on the organiser’s webpage. The International Video Art Review THE is at present the biggest cyclical event presenting video works in Poland. The screenings take place in 20 cities and on the Polish public TV channel dedicated to art and culture, TVP Kultura. The aim of the Video Art Review THE is to present to the wider public various forms of using the moving image in creating artistic content. The second edition of the review had a new formula including a special screening of video works by renowned artists, such as Roger Ballen and Salla Tykkä, as well as competition screening with works selected from those submitted by the contestants. Portfolios of 656 artists from all around the world have been submitted. The Jury, including Katarzyna Kozyra, Kasumi, Konrad Kuzyszyn, Casilda Sánchez, Artur Tajber and Zoran Todorović, have selected the winning video work.
Info www.thevideocommunity. Deadline March 1, 2015
FEBRUARY 2015
OPEN CALL
Matèria Gallery On Landscape #2 Book Call
FEBRUARY 2015
OPEN CALL
Matèria is pleased to announce its inaugural exhibition, On Landscape #2, featuring photographic works by Dafna Talmor, Emma Wieslander and Minna Kantonen, founders of On Landscape Project. On Landscape #2 seeks to instigate a series of discussions, raise questions and incite debate on representations of landscape. A central element of On Landscape Project consists of a library of self-published, hand-made or short run artists books relating to representations of landscape. Publications included in On Landscape #2 will be sourced from an open call and selected by a judging panel formed by Chiara Capodici and Fiorenza Pinna of 3/3, Gianpaolo Arena of Landscape Stories, Matèria’s gallery director Niccolò Fano and the On Landscape Project team. The selection of books from On Landscape #2 will add to a selection of titles stemming from the first edition of On Landscape Project, showcased in March of 2014 at Yinka Shonibare’s Guest Projects in London. Titles from both editions of the project will be showcased within Matèria’s gallery space between April 17 and May 16, 2015. The book display aims to provide a platform for wider debates around landscape whilst presenting an opportunity for a range of practitioners to showcase their work. Open to all and free to enter, the only criterion is that each book relates to the conceptual framework of the On Landscape #2 project. Info www.materiagallery.com Deadline Feb 16, 2015
FEBRUARY 2015
Insight of art in our days
INTERVIEW
Mike Nelson
FEBRUARY 2015
INTERVIEW
303 Gallery is pleased to present our second solo exhibition with Mike Nelson. On this occasion, Nelson will present Gang of Seven, a collection of sculptural assemblages made of materials from the North West Pacific Coast. The work revisits and expands upon themes and forms Nelson introduced in The Amnesiacs in 1997, in which a group of imaginary outsiders gather and wantonly sift through natural and cultural detritus, rearranging it and approaching dark phenomenological truths along the way. In Gang of Seven, Nelson’s mythical beachcomber imagines the ocean as an intelligent entity of seemingly infinite sprawl, uncovering alien clues in the flotsam and jetsam, akin to the cosmonauts’ relationship to the hallucination-inducing ocean in Stanislaw Lem’s epic Solaris. These evidences of apocryphal events exist in a disjointed space between remnant and invention, and when brought together, effect the possibility for new systems of understanding.
FEBRUARY 2015
INTERVIEW
In Being-No-One, the German post-transcendentalist philosopher Thomas Metzinger refers to a ‘virtual window of presence’ through which we experience time and imagine ourselves as autonomous beings. Nelson’s assemblages point to what we might see if we were able to look not through this window, but behind it; an envisioning of material and psychic forces that are determinate structures in human interpretation of our own cultivated landscapes. To this end, a bracingly human element of Gang of Seven is the influence of personal history; that of Nelson’s relationship to longtime friend and collaborator Erlend Williamson, who fell to his death in 1996 while climbing in the Scottish Highlands, just as Nelson was developing the ideas that would become The Amnesiacs. This is also mirrored in the title’s reference to the ‘Group of Seven’, the loose collective of landscape painters whose formation came after the death of Tom Thomson in a canoeing accident in Ontario, 1917. By introducing these elements into a space in which they exchange charges with other societies, real and imagined, absent and present, Nelson as author is simultaneously in front of and behind the window negotiating the blindness of consciousness to envision its constitution.
FEBRUARY 2015
INTERVIEW
Lorna said to me, ‘You know Riddley theres some thing in us it don't have no name.’? I said, ‘What thing is that?’ She said, ‘Its some kind of thing aint us but yet its in us. its looking out through our eye hoals... It aint you nor it don’t even know your name. Its in us lorn and loan and sheltering how it can... Tremmering it is and feart. It puts us on like we put on our cloes. Some times we don't fit. Some times it cant find the arm hoals and it tears us a part.’
FEBRUARY 2015
INTERVIEW
FEBRUARY 2015
OPEN CALL
Art Woo Magazine free your passion Art Woo Magazine invites young artists who would like to show their work to the world for an interview and presentation of their artwork to our magazine. Send us maximum five photos of your artwork here artwoosec@gmail.com and we will get in contact with you.
Personal thought in public places
EXHIBITION
Stuttering Melik Ohanian Chantal Crousel Gallery / Paris Until 16 Feb, 2015
FEBRUARY 2015
EXHIBITION
“Every situation is saturated with memory as well as perspective. Being aware of this delicate balance gives us authority over the present.” 1 The Gallery Chantal Crousel is pleased to host Melik Ohanian’s fourth personal exhibition. The starting point of the exhibition is an exhibition. Stutttering (Stut/t/te/ring, spelled with three T) extends a previous exhibition titled Stuttering (spelled with two T) featured at the CRAC in Sète, last July. Whether it be in the previous title, You are mY destinY (2003), or in the series Word(s) (2006-2014), Melik Ohanian revises the rules of typography, sharpening the ambiguity of words and expressions. Here, the notion of echo (and reverberation) that spring from repeating a single syllable characterises the interplay among his displayed works. Almost thirty works are presented at Gallery Chantal Crousel and at La Douane to demonstrate the quasi syntactic way the artist works, the various perceptions, the coexistences of different dimensions (scientific, political, social, historical) that have always undergirded his approach and that reflect, in a more collective sense, our own rapport with the contemporary, global and dematerialised world, as well as our imaginary. Stuttering is also the title of a series of photographs presented on plasma screen at La Douane. Melik Ohanian took two shots of a same subject (various varieties at the Palermo botanical garden), always the same framing, but with two different focal points. Both photos are then rhythmically animated in a loop, imbuing the image with a sort of inner life. This series of works is at the intersection of a proto-cinema or the future of photography. FEBRUARY 2015
EXHIBITION
The phenomenon of dematerialisation is pivotal to the exhibition. Pulp Off synthesises a century of work dedicated to memory. It sets the diary of Vahram Altounian, who witnessed the 1915-1919 Armenian genocide, and the analytical work of his daughter, Janine Altounian, published in 2009 ; the programmed pulping of the book, and the recent digital scan of the book suggested by the artist to perpetuate this memory today. La Douane is presenting a fourth occurrence of the installation: the remains of the book covers ripped by the artist, suspended between two temporal strata of a virtual hourglass. It’s a moment between the ante- and the post-. In contrast, the Modelling Poetry installation is the algorithmic result of a possible meeting of two galaxies, a reality as elusive in its sheer scale as in its fictional quality. The generated algorithm springs from an astronomical probability that is rooted in a continuity of movements measured in billions of years. While Pulp Off examines a continuum in history, Modelling Poetry digs into a dizzying past and kicks off a countdown of four billion years. A similar appreciation of time is evident in the work Shell, seven sculptures in concrete. The cowry shells’ ambiguity, imagined as a first trading currency or as a tribe’s divine ritual objects, is augmented by their neutral grey hue and their modified size. We could also figure them as archaeology finds representing another age. Also visible in the same room at Gallery Chantal Crousel, Transvariation, a luminous wall animation. A star-studded wall with pinpoints of varying intensity light, orchestrated by climate data from 1882-1883 registered at the first international stations in the Arctic. The two works meld figure a desert landscapes, devoid of humankind.
FEBRUARY 2015
EXHIBITION
The exhibition’s grasp of time in its multiplicity neither present nor future nor past - paves the road for inner journeying. The theme of this exploration has always been present in the artist’s work, like a primordial condition of being of the world : Island of an Island (1998-2002) is an installation inspired by an expedition near Survey Island, off the coast of Iceland, Selected Recordings (2002-2014), photos of a wanderer, deliberately lack any indication of date or place, Seven Minutes Before (2004), a seven-screen video installation features cameras shooting the same spot as it is crossed by protagonists from different continents (an Armenian kemenche player, a Japanese koto player, etc.). The presence of Red Memory in the exhibition is a new revelation. The photographs of Rajak Ohanian, the artist’s father, unveil to us how travel and cultural identities became a sensitive substance early in Melik Ohanian’s youth. The notion of displacement is linked to the political dimension of Melik Ohanian’s work. The geographic zones that attract the artist all have a particular social context : White Wall Traveling (1997), on the abandoned docks of Liverpool, or DAYS, I See what I will See (2011) in migrant workers’ camps in Sharjah. For Return from Memory, Melik Ohanian visited a closed mine in Mexico just as the last miner appeared on the suspension bridge, a blending of a phantasmagorical vision with a resurgent industrial era. On display at La Douane, the Girls of Chilwell was inspired by a little-known story of World War I, about a group of women who loaded munitions in a British factory that blew up in 1918. This time, the artist has used archival photos, shot on site, inside the factory, in order to make hyper-realistic white sculptures of the young women. The photo archives greatly helped in reproducing a part of their faces, but their bodies, hidden by the angle of the shot, had to be reconstituted. FEBRUARY 2015
EXHIBITION
In 2005, Melik Ohanian launched the Datcha Project in a house in an Armenian village that was qualified as a "Zone of Non Production". For each each session, the artist invited people from a wide range of backgrounds to share a temporality of the space with no particular goal. In exploring the Melik Ohanian’s various creative modes, we realise that the reasons for desertification (social, geographic, and geological) that are hallmarks of his work, tie in with another phenomenon, decantation : sample, wait, observe, extract. Thus, his Post-Images, for example, are a form of opposition to the news in the media. The artist only returns to the photos afterwards and only keeps a portion, a small island, a territory. The sum of the flux of data that individuals today ingest positions them in the hub of a complex network that combines politics, culture, and science. In this, Melik Ohanian questions the future of our collective memory as well as that of the individual. Will today’s society always be able to build emancipated identities, operable communities? Or will not learning about ourselves in our era wind up being so much praise for the standardisation and the modes of boxed-in thinking? The exhibition Stutttering, via a travel through time and memory, brings us to reexamine the need of the attention.
FEBRUARY 2015
EXHIBITION
Rock Formations Daniel Silver Frith Street Gallery / London 16 Jan - 28 Feb, 2015
FEBRUARY 2015
EXHIBITION
Frith Street Gallery is delighted to announce an exhibition of new work by Daniel Silver. This is the artist’s first exhibition at the gallery. Rock Formations is composed of a series of monumental sculptural works as well as a number of smaller pieces all of which display the artist’s ongoing obsession with the sculpture of the ancient world. The art of ancient Greece is particularly important in Silver’s practice and many of the works in this exhibition have evolved from the study of statues and busts in the National Archeological Museum of Athens. Such objects possess an intense clarity of purpose, a purpose largely lost to us but one which would have been instantly familiar to their contemporary audiences. Silver sees them now as the products of making and re-making; by the original artist, by the weathering of time and by their representation as a piece of history in a museum. This exhibition calls us to examine our own connection to these images of heroes, warriors and myths, and makes them recognisable once more. The central works in the exhibition are composed of couplings or collages of stone and bronze heads placed directly on large pieces of Carrara marble. The marble was found by Silver in a stone yard in the Italian town Pietrasanta, choosing pieces that had been quarried many years ago and then seemingly forgotten and left to weather in the undergrowth. A few of the stones are carved with puzzling numbers or a pattern of chisel marks, as physical objects they have a distinct attitude; a poise that somehow evokes the human body, perhaps the slope of a shoulder or the thrust of a torso. On top of these plinths/bodies rest heads which begin in the studio as interpretations of certain ancient faces, but through the artist’s handling of the original clay or stone they have evolved into objects displaying a physical precision and individuality that confronts the viewer on an almost emotional level. FEBRUARY 2015
EXHIBITION
As a counterpoint to these large pieces, the exhibition contains a number of more intimate busts made in white marble. These works began life as readymade copies of classical heads which Silver has worked on further; eye sockets are widened, noses sharpened, flaws and veins within the rock are revealed and celebrated; they have the appearance of objects in the process of being worn away. Daniel Silver was born in London in 1972, he studied at the Slade School of Fine Art and The Royal College of Art. Recent projects include: A Thousand Doors, curated by Whitechapel Gallery and NEON (Gennadius Library) Athens, Gr. 2014; Dig, Odeon Site London, curated by Artangel, 2013; Museo Carlo Zauli, Faenza, It. 2012; Coming Together, Kunsthaus Glarus, Ch. 2011 and Heads, Camden Art Centre 2007.
FEBRUARY 2015
EXHIBITION
Groupshow Christian Lethert Gallery / Cologne 16 Jan - 28 March, 2015
FEBRUARY 2015
EXHIBITION
We a r e p l e a s e d t o a n n o u n c e o u r a n n u a l GROUPSHOW including works by all artists of the gallery. This year we are happy to introduce to you three new artists we will start working together with in 2015: Frank Gerritz, Hubert Kiecol and Winston Roeth. Matrix is Kai Richter’s (*1969) latest, large-scaled wall-work made of DOKA, which is a recurring material in the work of the Düsseldorf based sculptor. Both title and form indicate the strictly constructed composition of horizontally and vertically interacting yellow wooden beams. Experimentation with metals such as copper, iron oder zinc characterises the latest body of Daniel Lergon’s (*1978) work. The exhibited zinc painting is the outcome of a chemical reaction between acidified water and powdered zinc. This brings forth an individual kind of painting, that unlocks its visual potential in the interaction of light, color and material.
FEBRUARY 2015
EXHIBITION
Imi Knoebel’s (*1940) series Anima Mundi refers to the antique concept of the world soul. Always maintaining a strict geometric structure, the artist plays with a variety of color and the surprising effects these combinations create. A small steel container seems to release a colourful mass of a certain kind from the underground. With Glimp Gereon Krebber (*1973) again humorously plays with organic and alive looking forms. With Past Perfect Irish painter Fergus Feehily (*1968) once again demonstrates his inexhaustible sensitivity for painting and material. Two delicate lines meet on a monochrome, light rose painting surface. The uncountable layers of the work are only visible from the painting’s sides.
FEBRUARY 2015
EXHIBITION
Lutz Fritsch’s (*1955) Parameter is a lathy vertical line whose segments are painted in different colours. It evokes the idea of a measuring tool, both unknown and familiar and the same time. The color segments are not based on actually calculated dimensions, they are rather intuitive decisions made by the artist. These Parameters could be associatively applied to the viewer’s own personal events. Hamburg based artist Frank Gerritz (*1964) operates in a strictly abstract manner. Four Centre Connection V, significant for his Oeuvre, is characterised by a geometric form language. The surface evolves layer by layer by applying graphite in the most precise way and develops a fascinating effect of depth. With Les Femmes d’Alger Joe Fyfe (*1954) makes use of found materials again. Small, bright and colourful balls are positioned in an old rusty metal box, whose surface structure reminds of Eugène Delacroix’s painting Femmes d’Alger dans leur appartement from 1834. Blue Angle by American artist Winston Roeth (*1945) is composed of twenty slate panels, which function as a natural painting carrier. Many thin layers of tempera are applied with a brush on each panel one by one. Painting for Winston Roeth is therefore a temporally defined process in which colour develops continuously. From this process arose a sensitive and calm palette of blue colour shades.
FEBRUARY 2015
EXHIBITION
Cologne based artist Hubert Kiecol (*1950) holds an important role in contemporary sculpture. His postminimal works are defined by basic forms and materials of architecture. Abstract and reduced form of steps, gates, fences or houses made of concrete, steel or wood characterize his work. In our GROUPSHOW we present his work Träger from 2012. The wooden block heavily rests on its concrete carrier and at the same time might fall over due to its forward-leaning position. This leads to a sensible relationship of tension. Three-dimensionality is an important aspect to Rana Begum’s (*1977) multipart wall-works that offer a vast number of possible angles from which the viewer can choose the perfect position to look at them. In our GROUPSHOW we present the latest work with the title No. 528. Shining, clear colors and two triangle shapes on a white background strongly interact while walking around them. The new folded drawings by Jill Baroff (*1954) are a reiteration of the earlier folded drawings from the 1990’s and expand on their themes of temporal and structural development. They begin by defining the edge of the paper with a border. This pair of parallel lines is filled with graphite and then the sheet of paper is folded, each time casting the border onto the surface of the receiving side of the fold (what is transferred is then erased from the border). “I’m very interested in the way these drawings describe a period of time on their surface. There is a trace left of the activity of drawing over time and this yields a description of space.”. (Jill Baroff)
FEBRUARY 2015
EXHIBITION
FEBRUARY 2015
EXHIBITION
Bergen is the latest group of work by Berlin based artist Max Sudhues (*1977). Photos of alpine landscapes are placed on semifluid plaster and treated with a cutter knife before returning this threedimensional collage back into the media of photography. The plasterblocknext to the photography merges with the image and conflates into a mountain massif itself. Nelleke Beltjens’ (*1974) constantly develops her complex drawing techniques. Large clusters of thin and subtle ink strokes are fragmented by cutting and exchanging pieces of paper within the drawing. The Dutch artist does not understand this as a process of destruction but opening, which leads to new possibilites and movement. “Contemporary life is characterized by uncertainty and complexity. Change is not only an idea, but rather felt on many levels. Nothing is solid, all is fragmented and in movement ”. (Nelleke Beltjens) From Janaury 29 to February 01, 2015 we will participate in Art Los Angeles Contemporary for the third time. Furthermore we will again exhibit at Art Cologne and Art Brussels in April 2015. On April 11, 2015 we will also open our first solo-exhibition with Hubert Kiecol.
FEBRUARY 2015
EXHIBITION
Christoph R端timann Works 1984 - 2014
Gallery Mai 36, Z端rich / 16 Jan - 07 March, 2015 FEBRUARY 2015
art woo m a g a z i n e
Edited and Designed by Haris Periorellis Columnists Louiza Vradi Calliope Chalouva Marigo Kara Virginia Komninakidou John Lesses Titika Stamouli External Contributors Nina Vore Marian Some Olga Konstantopoulou Special Thanks to Sotiris Bekas Presspad Team
FEBRUARY 2015