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sound made in ableton and final cut in adobe

field recordings from argyll and from india

both with radio static to reflect distance

the sound acts as a way of contextualizing the objects

the shelters become places of memory and place. the reflect identity and diaspora.

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Bio
Born in 1995, and raised in Plymouth (UK), Tanoa Sasraku's practice shifts between sculpture, drawing and filmmaking. Her stitched and torn newsprint works frequently harness earth pigments and garment making processes to express ideas relating to the British landscape, the human body and the artist’s familial legacy. In her practice as a filmmaker, Sasraku has engaged in retellings of traditional folklore via the medium of analogue film.

Tanoa Sasraku is based in London (UK) and is currently enrolled at the Royal Academy Schools.

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British artist, Tanoa Sasraku. Official website.

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liverpool trip

exhibition using sound and installation

sound imbedded into sculptures

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Bio

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rory macbeth grew up in Scotland and the Solomon Islands, and has subsequently lived in Edinburgh, Barcelona, Madrid, Paris, Zurich, London, Liverpool and Glasgow. He studied at the University of Edinburgh, and Central St Martin's, London, and since has shown several times in Tate Britain and Modern, initially as part of the Art Now series, and later in the No Soul for Sale show curated by Maurizio Cattalan. He has had artwork in international collections, including key work in ARoS museum Aarhus. He has exhibited at Biennials in Prague and Liverpool, Venice, and most recently in the Seychelles. He has made significant commissions for EAST International, The Economist, the Northern Gallery of Contemporary Art and Tate Britain, and had a survey show at Nassauischer Kunstverein, Wiesbaden. He has undertaken residencies in Zurich and Venice, been Writer in Residence for X Marks the Bokship, and has contributed to a number of publications and has been represented by galleries in Europe. r ory co-founded a large studio and event space in Limehouse Town Hall, London. This sparked his interest in providing large scale platforms for non-commercial and experimental art practices that led to him founding and directing PILOT:. PILOT :1 and :2 had successful iterations in London in 2004 and 2005, and the third iteration launched at the Venice Biennale in 2007 in association with the Bevilaqua Foundation.

rory has collaborated with a range of artists, as part of the 12 strong art group Twenteenth Century, with Darren Phizackerlea as The Brians Sewell, and with Laure Prouvost on The Wanderer where Laure and rory developed and produced a film adaptation of Rory's experimental Kafka translation The Wanderer.

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For 7 years, rory led the Fine Art department at LJMU Liverpool UK, running a unique programme that forefronted experimental approaches to art learning, and exhibiting as a key part of the learning process - the course averaged around 50 exhibitions a year (compared to most courses doing one). In COVID lockdown, rory had the idea to put his students on Mars for their graduate exhibition during the Covid-19 lockdown. creating a multiverse exhibition based on Matterport and gaming technology and constructed from NASA's 3D scans of the martian surface (degreeshowonmars.com) online. He has previously been a lecturer at Central St Martin's and Leeds Met, as well as a visiting lecturer at numerous universities and institutions nationally and internationally. Most recently he was Head of Sculpture and Environmental art at Glasgow School of Art, and in re ponse to his experiences there and elesewhere has set up the ghost art school , a parallel/paranormal art school that haunts other art schools.

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Bio ​ ​ rory macbeth grew up in Scotland and the Solomon Islands, and has subsequently lived in Edinburgh, Barcelona, Madrid, Paris, Zurich, London, Liverpool and Glasgow. He studied at the University of Edinburgh, and Central St Martin's, London, and since has shown several times in Tate Britain and Modern, initially as part of the Art Now series, and later in the No Soul for Sale show curated by Maurizio Cattalan.

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ROMANTIC IRELAND comprises a multi-channel video installation and an operatic soundtrack housed in an immersive sculpture. Set on the site of an unfinished earth build, the video stages soapy, dramatic encounters between character archetypes from nineteenth to twenty-first centuries. The pavilion soundtrack is an operatic work composed by Amanda Feery with a libretto by Walshe, depicting the scene of an eviction.
Eimear Walshe’s work traces the legacies of late nineteenth-century land contestation in Ireland. Made in the shadow of the ongoing housing crisis in Ireland, the Irish Pavilion becomes, variously, a building site of possibility, a wrestling ring for Ireland’s generational and class antagonisms, a space of tender care, and a structure made into a cold ruin by the social death of eviction. The exhibition forces encounters between historic moments, and draws out their parallel power dynamics and affective registers; their forms of labour, conflict and pleasure; the entangled histories of sexuality, property and the state.

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In his first major project in the UK, German artist Gregor Schneider brought his long-standing interest in domestic spaces to a very ordinary street in London's East End.

Die Familie Schneider comprised two neighbouring houses in a Victorian terrace on Walden Street in Whitechapel. The houses, numbers 14 and 16, were open by appointment. Visitors - always two at a time - collected the front door keys from a small office on the same street. One visitor entered 14 Walden Street alone, whilst the other visitor entered the neighbouring house at the same time. After a period of ten minutes, the visitors emerged, exchanged keys and entered the second house. At no time was there ever more than one visitor in each house..

It is not easy to describe the heightening of sensation and the existential anxiety which many visitors felt as they crossed the threshold from the street to go inside, making their way through the small kitchen and living room, up to the claustrophobic bathroom and bedroom with no windows on the first floor, and down to the dark spaces of the basement. The house was inhabited - by a woman washing dishes in the kitchen, by a child wrapped in a black plastic bag in the bedroom, and by a naked, middle-aged man masturbating in the shower. They were completely oblivious to the visitor, as if he or she was not there.

The claustrophobic experience was intensified when the visitor went through the second house. Everything in the second house was exactly the same as in the first - the same downbeat furniture and decor, the same marks on the carpets and walls, an identical woman washing dishes, and an identical man doing the same unseemly thing in the shower.

This video documenting the Gregor Schneider's installation at 14 and 16 Walden Street is also available to watch on Vimeo and YouTube.

Images: The identical bland magnolia and wood-pannelled bare hallways of 14 and 16 Walden Street as they appeared during Die Familie Schneider 2004. Photograph: Gregor Schneider

The Living Rooms

Andrew O'Hagan

There was a tenement flat in the Glasgow of my youth that seemed haunted to me. I'm speaking of a time before I knew how it is people not buildings which become haunted, and walking down West Princes Street three times a week I would stop at a certain corner and look up to find the yellow window at 15 Queens Terrace. I suppose I must have been nervous in those days, uncertain, to an uncertain degree, whether I'd ever cope in the adult world, but the light in the tenement flat made me frightened of ghosts. It made me realise that absence was just another presence.

On 21 December 1908, beyond the yellow window, an elderly spinster called Marion Gilchrist was murdered in her dining room and a brooch was stolen. In what was understood by Conan Doyle and others to be a case of rank anti-Semitism, a down-at-heel Jew called Oscar Slater was arrested and later convicted of the murder on circumstantial evidence. Some claimed to have seen a man 'like' Slater running from the house in a hurry at the time of the murder. In fact, people more often described seeing another man, and those who testified against Slater later admitted they were pressured to give the evidence they gave. Slater was also condemned for seeming guilty and for having a pawn ticket for a brooch about his person, though the item represented by Slater's ticket was lodged at a date before the crime was committed. Slater appeared to have some sort of doppelganger, so did his conscience, so did his belongings. The case was fascinating, but I have to say it was the house that summoned the mysteries for me: we like to think that bricks have memories, that windows are eyes or the retinas of eyes, and the flat in Queens Terrace came to seem to me like a repository of hidden truths about human nature. It was a museum of the uncanny.
Read the complete essay here
Image: A woman washes dishes in the kitchen sink at Walden Street, Die Familie Schneider, 2004. Photograph: Gregor Schneider

Selected Press

And when Schneider has succeeded in frightening the life out of you at number 14, you go next door to number 16. Now the essentially rational fear (of physical danger, of the unknown) you felt in the first house is transformed into a different kind of fear. For in the second house you find yourself in the realms of the uncanny, moving like a ghost revisiting the scene of its own murder, moving silently from room to room, experiencing a sickening sense of déjà vu. - Richard Dorment, The Telegraph, 6 October 2004

Ignoring me, the woman at the kitchen sink is taking an interminable time over a grubby plate. Perhaps we've had a row. I might as well be invisible. More likely I am dead, but don't know it yet, like Bruce Willis in The Sixth Sense. Maybe I got run over or mugged and fatally stabbed on my way round here from the nearby Artangel office where I had picked up the keys, but have yet to catch up with the fact. - Adrian Searle, The Guardian, 5 October 2004

The presence of the houses was so powerful that ever since, from time to time, I have briefly imagined myself back in their claustrophobic space. Sometimes it will be a sweet, rotten smell of the kind that impregnated the gloomy rooms that acts as a trigger. Or I have come across others who made appointments to see the houses, all of whom want to share their survivors' stories: Did you make it down into the cellar? Or: Did you see the pornography? Or: Did you hear a baby crying? There have not been many installations that so successfully isolate the viewer with his or her own fears. - Tim Adams, The Observer, 2 January 2005

By Appointment: Doors and Curtains at 14 and 16 Walden Street

James Lingwood

Walden Street in Whitechapel in London's East End is an unprepossessing row of 19th century terraced houses. Initially built for traders and artisans working close to the arteries of Commercial Street and Whitechapel High Street which pumped people and goods into the City of London, many of these streets were condemned as slums in the 1960s and 1970s and knocked down. Somehow, this enclave around Walden Street survived relatively intact. Although close to London's Square Mile, it has never been a wealthy part of town.

Die Familie Schneider was open by appointment only. Visitors - always two for each appointment - collected the front door keys for the two houses from a small office a few minutes' walk away in the same street. From the outside, 14 and 16 Walden Street looked the same, down to the white net curtains in the ground floor windows.
Read the complete essay here
A man engaged in a stark and lonely act of masturbation in a shower at one of the Walden Street houses during Die Familie Schneider, 2004. Photograph: Gregor Schneider

Gregor Schneider

Gregor Schneider is renowned for his unnerving presentation of normality, in which his chosen medium - the domestic room - becomes the site of an unrelenting existential confrontation.

Schneider's compelling and ongoing project is Haus Ur, the ever-changing construction and reproduction of the interior of his childhood home in Rheydt, Germany. Reconstructed in the German Pavilion at the 2001 Venice Biennale as Dead House Ur, this work earned Schneider the Golden Lion for sculpture. Die Familie Schneider, the artist's first major 'house' work outside Germany, was commissioned by Artangel and presented in London in the Autumn of 2004.

Schneider has referenced spaces that are well beyond the domestic sphere: including a religious centre (the Caaba in Mecca) a red-light district (Steindamm, Hamburg) and the maximum-security internment facility on Cuba (Camp V, Guantanamo Bay).

Images: A child like figure concealed by a bin bag sits in the corner of a bedroom in Walden Street during Die Familie Schneider, 2004 (above) and Gregor Schneider at the launch of the publication Die Familie Schneider, 2006 (left).

Gregor Schneider: Die Familie Schneider

From £15 at Amazon

In two unremarkable houses in London's East End, Gregor Schneider constructed a remarkable new work, Die Familie Schneider. 14 and 16 Walden Street were identical in every way. They had the same rooms and furnishings with the same cracks and stains, inhabited by the same families doing the same, unseemly things.

Amongst the visitors who made their way through the intensely claustrophobic interiors were the writers Andrew O'Hagan and Colm Tóibín. In the publication Gregor Schneider: Die Familie Schneider, their writings, presented alongside an extended series of Schneider's photographs, attest to the disturbing experience of these dark double houses.

Published by Artangel and Steidl, May 2006

The book features essays by Andrew O'Hagan and Colm Tóibín

168pp

Hardback

Black-and-white and colour photographs

178 x 241 mm

ISBN: 3865212360

Die Familie Schneider

A two channel film of Die Familie Schneider is part of The Artangel Collection, alongside 176 photographs. Since its initial presentation in 2004, the film has been installed at the Turner Contemporary Margate in 2015.

Artist: Gregor Schneider

Title: Die Familie Schneider

Date: 2004

Medium: 2 channel video, 176 black-and-white-photographs

Dimensions: Overall display dimensions variable

Duration: 13 minutes 12 seconds

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In his first major project in the UK, German artist Gregor Schneider brought his long-standing interest in domestic spaces to a very ordinary street in London's East End. Die Familie Schneider comprised two neighbouring houses in a Victorian terrace on Walden Street in Whitechapel. The houses, numbers 14 and 16, were open by appointment.

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who is the audience

why are they the audience

should people have something physical to take away from the site

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don't say 'range from'

-this work evolved from perhaps

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Semi-detached, a major site-specific installation, takes as its focus the artist’s father, a former tunnel miner incapacitated by an industrial accident twenty-five years ago. Through sculpture, video and sound Landy invokes broader questions of value and usefulness, employment and purpose. This major project is Landy’s first since Breakdown 2001, his most celebrated work to date, which took place in a former high-street department store in central London. After creating a meticulous inventory of all his possessions, Landy set about systematically destroying them over a two-week period in what he described as a consumerist experiment in identity. This followed a series of theatrically spectacular installations which examined and challenged attitudes to contemporary consumerism, often exposing the less palatable aspects of the society in which we live.

memory, home and biography run throughout. This work made me consider how I use these themes and how they can be conveyed throughout my practice. This work also deals with space and how the viewer interacts with the installtion.

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Ireland's Representation at the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale

Minister of State at the Department of Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport and Media, Patrick O'Donovan T.D. opened Ireland's Representation at the 18th International Architecture Exhibition - La Biennale di Venezia.

The exhibition, In Search of Hy-Brasil, supported by the RIAI, is curated by a team of five architects, Peter Carroll, Peter Cody, Elizabeth Hatz, Mary Laheen and Joseph Mackey. Ireland at Venice is an initiative of Culture Ireland in partnership with the Arts Council.

In Search of Hy-Brasil presents fieldwork from Ireland's remote islands, investigating their diverse cultures, communities, and experiences. The exhibition has a focus on renewable energy, ethical food production and biodiversity, capturing the islands' sustainable methods of livelihood through drawing, models, film, sound, writing and language, to raise awareness of the islanders' management of resources and their balancing of the delicate equilibrium between culture and nature. The pavilion responds to the theme, The Laboratory of the Future - selected by curator of the Biennale Architettura 2023, Lesley Lokko.

The exhibition offers an immersive experience using local materials that highlight the traditional heritage of each island; for example sea sacks woven from discarded fishers' rope, a linen tapestry mapping Ireland's maritime zone and an abstraction of Sceilg Mhichíl made from Galway sheep's wool. The installation includes large slabs of local limestone from the offshore islands of Inis Meáin (Inishmaan), UNESCO World Heritage site Sceilg Mhichíl (Skellig Michael) and Cliara (Clare Island). In doing this, In Search of Hy-Brasil shifts between the global and the local, the territorial and the intimate and gives international audiences the chance to experience connections between the social fabric, cultural landscape and ecology of these islands. The exhibition is also steeped in the Irish language through voice, writing and song.

Ireland at Venice 2023 builds on Ireland's strong presence at the International Architecture Exhibition of La biennale di Venezia. In recent years the Biennale Architettura 2018 was curated by Shelley McNamara and Yvonne Farrell of Grafton Architects. This year sees the involvement of Irish architects Emmett Scanlon, Alice Clancy and Laurence Lord on the Biennale's Curator Lesley Lokko's curatorial team. Culture Ireland is also supporting the project of BothAnd Group, which is participating in Curator's Special Projects at the 18th International Architecture Exhibition curated by Lesley Lokko. Also supported by Culture Ireland, a project by architect Miriam Dunne will be featured in Time Space Existence, running in Venice at the same time as the Biennale this year.

The exhibition will continue in Venice from May until November and will then undertake a national tour of Ireland in 2024, supported by The Arts Council. The tour will recreate elements of the installation on the islands, with the curatorial team seeking to create an enriched narrative, bringing voices from peripheral locations into mainstream conversations around our global future. The curators of the installation will publish a book of essays and contribute to a film documentary.

Catherine Martin T.D., Minister for Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport and Media, said:

"I am very pleased that Ireland in Venice 2023 has opened with the exhibition In Search of Hy-Brasil representing Ireland at the 18th Venice Architecture Biennale. In Search of Hy-Brasil in responding to the joint themes of the Biennale - decarbonisation and decolonisation - examines the relationship between the islands of Ireland and their natural environment. Irish architecture has had a strong presence at the Biennale in recent years, in particular since Grafton Architects Shelly McNamara and Yvonne Farrell were selected as the Biennale curators in 2018. I have no doubt that the Hy-Brasil team will continue the robust representation of Irish architecture in Venice."

Patrick O'Donovan T.D., Minister of State with Responsibility for the Gaeltacht and Gaeltacht Affairs, said:

"I am honoured to launch Ireland in Venice 2023. As Minister with responsibility for the Gaeltacht I am particularly pleased that the exhibition provides a unique showcase for the Irish language where people from countries around the globe will get to hear and see the Irish language spoken as part of an immersive experience."

More information on the Pavilion and curators can be found here.

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Whats On | RIAI.ie (The Royal Institute of the Architects of Ireland)

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The Royal Institute of the Architects of Ireland (RIAI) is the Regulatory and Support body for Architects in Ireland. Support services are also provided for Architectural Technologists.

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The time of endless expansion, extraction, and exploitation has passed. In order to escape the gravity of the familiar, these now redundant modalities of living, we must decolonise our minds and configure new ways of conceptualising and inhabiting the world.
Ireland’s national pavilion at the Biennale Architettura 2023 puts our islands’ diverse communities, culture, and experiences right at the centre of the discourse surrounding our shared future. To the forefront of our imagination. The installation offers an immersive experience that shifts between the local and the territorial, the micro and the macro, to make explicit the implicit intelligence of these most remarkable of places.

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I wanted to do something with a piano in a landscape of some significance and I suppose, as a Scotsman, there’s nothing more significant than the border. I thought it was beautiful to look from one country into another and I liked the idea that Hadrian’s Wall is, under a certain interpretation, a great end of civilization. . . . I was overwhelmed to be in a landscape of such beauty, and with such a huge unfathomable history.
—Douglas Gordon

Gagosian is pleased to present The End of Civilisation, a major film installation by Douglas Gordon.

Gordon is a conjurer of collective memory and perceptual surprise whose tools include the commodities and mechanisms of everyday life. Into a diverse body of work—which spans narrative video and film, sound, photographic objects, and texts both as site-specific installation and printed media—he infuses a combination of humor and trepidation to recalibrate reactions to the familiar. An early work, 24 Hour Psycho (1993), slowed down Alfred Hitchcock’s legendary film into a full day’s duration, attenuating the horror until any sensation of suspense ceased to exist. In 2006, Gordon collaborated with Philippe Parreno on the general-release feature film Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait, in which multiple cameras tracked every action and emotion of the soccer star during an important game.

In The End of Civilisation, a grand piano burns at a remote site deep in the Cumbrian landscape. This lushly green and desolate locale overlooking the boundary between England and Scotland was once the border of the Roman Empire. The grand piano, emblematic of high culture as both a finely crafted instrument and a beautiful sculptural object, is destroyed at the primeval edge of civilization. With this symbolic conflagration, Gordon re-enacts an ancient local tradition of igniting beacons as an admonition or communication. Inspired in part by the journey of the 2012 Olympic torch across the British Isles, The End of Civilisation is both a celebration and a warning—of fire as a symbol of optimism and hope, but also of risk, danger, and destruction.

The film is shown on multiple screens and with layered sound. One screen is devoted to a close recording of the burning piano, from when it is first set alight to when it has been reduced to ashes. Another presents a panning shot of the tranquil surrounding landscape—occasionally, licks of flame or wisps of smoke invade the periphery of the screen, the only indication that the seemingly serene landscape is in close proximity to a raging fire. The End of Civilisation was first screened on July 5, 2012, at the Tyne Theater, on the site of Hadrian’s Wall in Newcastle City Center as part of the London 2012 Cultural Olympiad. Commissioned by Great North Run Culture and Locus+, the film was funded by Arts Council England. It is part of the London 2012 Festival.

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I wanted to do something with a piano in a landscape of some significance and I suppose, as a Scotsman, there's nothing more significant than the border. I thought it was beautiful to look from one country into another and I liked the idea that Hadrian's Wall is, under a certain interpretation, a great end of civilization. . . . I was overwhelmed to be in a landscape of such beauty, and with such a huge unfathomable history.
-Douglas Gordon

Gagosian is pleased to present The End of Civilisation, a major film installation by Douglas Gordon.

Gordon is a conjurer of collective memory and perceptual surprise whose tools include the commodities and mechanisms of everyday life. Into a diverse body of work-which spans narrative video and film, sound, photographic objects, and texts both as site-specific installation and printed media-he infuses a combination of humor and trepidation to recalibrate reactions to the familiar. An early work, 24 Hour Psycho (1993), slowed down Alfred Hitchcock's legendary film into a full day's duration, attenuating the horror until any sensation of suspense ceased to exist. In 2006, Gordon collaborated with Philippe Parreno on the general-release feature film Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait, in which multiple cameras tracked every action and emotion of the soccer star during an important game.

In The End of Civilisation, a grand piano burns at a remote site deep in the Cumbrian landscape. This lushly green and desolate locale overlooking the boundary between England and Scotland was once the border of the Roman Empire. The grand piano, emblematic of high culture as both a finely crafted instrument and a beautiful sculptural object, is destroyed at the primeval edge of civilization. With this symbolic conflagration, Gordon re-enacts an ancient local tradition of igniting beacons as an admonition or communication. Inspired in part by the journey of the 2012 Olympic torch across the British Isles, The End of Civilisation is both a celebration and a warning-of fire as a symbol of optimism and hope, but also of risk, danger, and destruction.

The film is shown on multiple screens and with layered sound. One screen is devoted to a close recording of the burning piano, from when it is first set alight to when it has been reduced to ashes. Another presents a panning shot of the tranquil surrounding landscape-occasionally, licks of flame or wisps of smoke invade the periphery of the screen, the only indication that the seemingly serene landscape is in close proximity to a raging fire. The End of Civilisation was first screened on July 5, 2012, at the Tyne Theater, on the site of Hadrian's Wall in Newcastle City Center as part of the London 2012 Cultural Olympiad. Commissioned by Great North Run Culture and Locus+, the film was funded by Arts Council England. It is part of the London 2012 Festival.

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Douglas Gordon: The End of Civilisation, West 21st Street, New York, September 8-October 13, 2012 | Gagosian

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I wanted to do something with a piano in a landscape of some significance and I suppose, as a Scotsman, there's nothing more significant than the border. I thought it was beautiful to look from one country into another and I liked the idea that Hadrian's Wall is, under a certain interpretation, a great end of civilization.

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Some courses may be advertised at short notice because we work with self-builders who may not be able to give a long lead-in time. We will advise all trainees of course dates by email as they are confirmed.

For even more inspiration and information, check out Barbara's book. Our self builders, and the architects we advise, all say this book is invaluable as a resource to understand how to build with straw. It covers the whole building process from foundations to internal plastering. Barbara has been designing and building with straw for 25 years - this book is a distillation of all her knowledge and experience. Originally published in 2002 it has never been out of print - revised in 2009 and 2015, the last revision taking in details of how to compress straw walls and how to build the roof first when doing load-bearing buildings.

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Our Courses - School of Natural Building

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COURSE LOCATION DATES COST BOOKING Theoretical - Preparing to Build with Bales Tod College, West Yorkshire 22 September 2023 £75 Full info here Theoretical - Designing your Straw Bale Building Tod College, West Yorkshire 23 September 2023 £75 Full info here Theoretical - Technical Details Tod College, West Yorkshire 6 October 2023 £75 Full info [...]

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radio aporee ::: maps - sounds of the world

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radio aporee ::: maps is a global soundmap dedicated to field recording, phonography and the art of listening.

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About

I'm interested in the fine line between my intentions and the perceptions of others; that moment when someone encounters something and realizes that there is more to it than meets the eye.
-Douglas Gordon

Working across mediums and disciplines, Douglas Gordon investigates moral and ethical questions, mental and physical states, as well as collective memory and selfhood. Using literature, folklore, and iconic Hollywood films in addition to his own footage, drawings, and writings, he distorts time and language in order to disorient and challenge.

Gordon was born in Glasgow, Scotland, in 1966 and studied sculpture and environmental art at the Glasgow School of Art (1984-88). After graduating, he attended the Slade School of Fine Art, London (1988-90), where he began to more deeply explore his interests in cinema and film. In 1990 he returned to Glasgow and became involved with Transmission Gallery, an artist-run space that hosted exhibitions and served as a studio and social hub. Two years later Gordon presented 24 Hour Psycho; (1993) at Tramway, Glasgow. The work extends the duration of Alfred Hitchcock's film Psycho (1960) from its original 110 minutes to twenty-four hours; the manipulated footage was played on a large hanging screen in a dark room, which allowed visitors to view the projection from the front or the back.

In the mid-1990s Gordon moved to Cologne, Germany, where he developed From God to Nothing; (1996), a text piece spanning four walls; Three Inches Black (1997), a series of photographs in which three inches of a finger are tattooed black-the subtext in this case being that three inches is the vital length a blade would need to be in order to inflict a fatal wound; and Between Darkness and Light (after William Blake) (1997), a large-scale video installation that pairs a film about divine revelation with another about satanic possession, which was exhibited in an underpass as part of Skulptur Projekte Münster in 1997.

Photo: Colin Davison/Bridgeman Images

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Learn about the work and career of artist Douglas Gordon. Artworks, biography, exhibitions, editorial content, news, museum exhibitions, press, and more.

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While I know this will certainly get me in trouble but try as I might, I can't say it any other way: I hated the Whitney Museum's exhibition Rituals of Rented Island: Object Theater, Loft Performance and The New Psychodrama-Manhattan, 1970-1980. Even Smith's penguin prop Yolanda couldn't save the exhibition for me.

Although the roster of artists features some of my all-time favorite artists and performers including underground filmmaker Jack Smith, whose loft performances, which he would perform even if nobody showed up, have always been a personal aesthetic inspiration, stuffed animal auteur and John Waters' favorite artist Mike Kelley and the always influential Laurie Anderson, I cannot get past the short-sighted curation of the exhibition.

Curated by the Whitney's Curator of Performance Jay Sanders, Rituals of Rented Island, named after Jack Smith's wry comment about Lower Manhattan, celebrates a decade of experimental performance art, presented outside mainstream art institutions in lofts, studio spaces, alternative spaces and even, apartments. Taking advantage of low rents, available public funds for art (can you imagine?) and an everything-goes sense of opportunity in the urban blight of 1970s Lower Manhattan, these artists and performers created their own thoroughly independent, anti-institutional art scene.

Questioning the boundaries of sexuality, the body, linear narratives, time, politics and heralding in postmodernism, these artists and performers rejected the object-based gallery and museum system, which ironically is where these artists now find themselves with this exhibition. With an enormous range of artists, artistic concerns and voices, curating an exhibition on this period of Downtown New York art history is certainly not the easiest venture.

Rabidly anti-institutional, these loft performances and artists have often been overlooked by art historians, daunted by the complexity, contradictions and clashing voices inherent in this period. Displaying these performers works through posters, flyers, videos and occasionally stage sets and props, as well as other ephemera, Rituals of Rented Island should be commended for finally shining a major institutional light on this significant yet ignored period.

On one hand, the fact that the Whitney is having an exhibition on this period at all should be enough to make a 1970s art fan, like me, happy. I mean, these artists were never supposed to even make it into a museum, right?

However, for me, the Whitney's Rituals of Rented Island reveals the danger when the underground gets into the hands of Uptown curators as the exhibition reinforces the exact same art historical narrative these artists were fighting against.

Selecting a group of about twenty artists, Sanders divided the exhibition space into smaller sections, each featuring one artist or theatrical collective. An unimaginative and, let's be honest, lazy organization for the exhibition, this division only strengthens the dominant art historical narrative of a few "great" and "important" artists, which directly clashes with the pluralism of this artistic period.

Through this limited scope, Rituals of Rented Island overlooks other artists who had a similar impact on 1970s D-I-Y performances, particularly people of color. In the twenty or so artists highlighted in the exhibition, there were no people of color, which was certainly not due to any lack of diversity in loft performances.

For example, Sanders could have included New York-based performance artist Tehching Hsieh whose extremely physical, time-based performances ranged from locking himself inside of a cage for a year and punching a time clock every hour on the hour for an entire year.

Instead, Sanders chose to feature Mike Kelley, who despite being an influential artist, was not performing extensively in New York City. Slipping Kelley into the exhibition because he performed at The Kitchen, the choice to feature Kelley, presenting his work in one of the first rooms of the show, seemed to be an obviously calculated choice due to his concurrent major and critically acclaimed retrospective at MoMA PS1.

By separating the exhibition by artist rather than by theme or even loft space, which would have been both more interesting and educational, allowing viewers to make connections between the artists' work, Rituals of Rented Island creates a museum-ready narrative, reducing the complexity and quite frankly, the importance of these performances.

Coming from an interdisciplinary background rather than a conservative art historical one, as well as writing my Master's thesis essentially to rail against such reductive narratives, perhaps I take for granted the need to construct new narratives that allow for a greater number of voices and don't limit the understanding of a particular period just for easier viewing.

As the show's introduction describes, "Simultaneously deadpan and outrageous, cryptic and critical, frustrating and entertaining, the works in Rituals of Rented Island remain vital in part because they are so contradictory and open-ended. These works embody thinking and creating as ongoing processes, proposing many alternative ideas of what art can be."

Since these artists represented an expansion of what art could be, why couldn't the exhibition mirror this expansion rather than an oversimplification of these ideas?

And yes, Mr. Sanders, I'm the one in the leather jacket making snide remarks all through the press preview. Sorry, I'm not sorry.

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Rituals of Reductive Island: Why I Hated The Whitney's 'Rituals of Rented Island'

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While I know this will certainly get me in trouble but try as I might, I can't say it another way: I hated the Whitney Museum's exhibition Rituals of Rented Island: Object Theater, Loft Performance and The New Psychodrama-Manhattan, 1970-1980. Even its Jack Smith-coined name couldn't save the exhibition for me.

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Tehching Hsieh was born in 1950 in Nan-Chou, Taiwan. Hsieh dropped out from high school in 1967 and took up painting. After finished  compulsory military service (1970 – 73), Hsieh had his first solo show at the gallery of the American News Bureau in Taiwan. Shortly after, Hsieh stopped painting. Hsieh made a performance action, Jump, in which he broke both of his ankles. Hsieh trained as a seaman, which he then used as a means to enter the United States. In July, 1974, Hsieh arrived at a small port near Philadelphia. He was an illegal immigrant in the States for fourteen years until granted amnesty in 1988.

Starting in the late 1970s, Hsieh made five One Year Performances and a ‘Thirteen Year Plan’, inside and outside his studio in New York City. Using long durations, making art and life simultaneous, Hsieh achieved one of the most radical approaches in contemporary art. The first four One Year Performances made Hsieh a regular name in the art scene in New York; the last two pieces, intentionally retreating from the art world, set a tone of sustained invisibility. Since the millennium, released from the restriction of not showing his works during a thirteen-year period, Hsieh has exhibited his work in North and South America, Asia and Europe. His recent exhibitions Doing Time was presented by Taiwan Pavilion at 57th Venice Art Biennale 2017, One Year Performance 1980-1981 was exhibited at Tate Modern, London, in 2017-2018, and MoMa and the Guggenheim Museum, New York, in 2009.

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TEHCHING HSIEH | ONE YEAR PERFORMANCE 1980 - 1981

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ONE YEAR PERFORMANCE 1980 - 1981 (TIME CLOCK PIECE) Tehching Hsieh's second one-year performance from 11 April 1980 through 11 April 1981, Tehching Hsieh punched a time clock every hour on the hour.

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A melange of multilimbed, fertility, guardian, protector and warrior figures animate Glasgow's Tramway in an ambitious installation for the Sri Lankan-born, Australian artist in his first UK solo show

Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran. Photo: Bowen Aricò.

by VERONICA SIMPSON

Idols of Mud and Water at the Tramway, Glasgow, places the exuberant work of Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran in a whole new light. Along with a mass of the colourful ceramic and bronze figurines evoking totems, ancient deities and ritualistic practices for which he is known, for his first UK and European show, he has also produced the biggest work he has ever made - a 10 metre-tall idol moulded from Glasgow mud.

This idol looms towards the gallery visitor, half obscured by the bright spotlights on the totems around it, as well as clouds of haze that drift across the room intermittently. In a playful riff on classical statuary and display, the figure is reflected in a ramshackle pool at its base, framed by sandbags, into which various spouts dribble thin spurts of water. Contrasting with this primitive, slightly menacing scene are the brightly coloured neon cables, which drip and droop from its frame - a hint of the urban, as is the teetering structure of scaffolding that props up this idol, and also weaves across the room, linking us to another ramshackle structure: a shelter-cum-temple made from salvaged wood, scaffolding and bamboo poles (also Glasgow sourced). In here, about 100 terracotta sculptures are piled on to a charmingly DIY-tiered plinth, with blobs of gilding applied seemingly haphazardly to their earthy, unglazed features.

Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran. Multi Limbed Mud Fountain, 2023. Mud cob, straw, paint, LED rope, electrical cable. Photo courtesy Tramway.

With these and the assorted characters spotlit around the room, the artist has successfully synthesised the weird and primal attractions of his figures into a stage set that looks at once familiar and utterly alien - equal parts Apocalypse Now, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Godzilla and Nithiyendran's own imaginative cartoon-esque (and also game design-infused) universe. He calls it "a buzzing mythological playground in which queer politics, anthropomorphism, monumentality and popular culture combine". He challenges us to think about the role of rituals in our lives personally and universally.

Born in Colombo, Sri-Lanka in 1988, Nithiyendran has lived in Australia since 1989. From the University of New South Wales, he received his BA/BFA in 2011 and an MFA in 2013. He has had solo and group shows including at: Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, Delhi (2023); Sharjah Art Foundation, Sharjah (2022); Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney (2022); The Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences, New South Wales (2021); Melbourne Art Foundation, Melbourne (2020); The National Gallery of Australia, Canberra (2016); Dhaka Art Summit (2016); Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art (2016); Kuandu Biennale, Taipei (2016); and Shepparton Art Museum, Victoria (2015).
Veronica Simpson: Rethinking idols and imagery is such an interesting move, given the virtualisation of our lives and friendships that has created multiple alternative versions of ourselves - as well as making idols of those who have greatest traction on this technology. When did you start working with deities of all kinds?
After visiting the show, Studio International spoke to the artist by Zoom.

Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran: I think I've always been drawn to things that have a sense of hyperbole, imagination or speculation in their aesthetic. Even to this day when I'm looking at films, it's animations that I find the most interesting to watch. We're able to imagine reality in ways that are different.

When I was growing up, I had a very secular or atheist belief system, but I was always drawn to the imaginative potential within the religion that my father's side practised, which was Hinduism. I liked the imaginative potential that things were rising and going above to higher planes, and the Hindu suite of imagery was quite literally imaginative in that things were zoomorphic. Stories were often polymorphous and had this plurality to them. Things shape-shifted, things changed, and I think that was probably what appealed to my imaginative potential.

Installation view, Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran: Idols of Mud and Water, Tramway, Glasgow, 2023. Photo courtesy Tramway.

VS: In the short video introducing the installation, on the Tramway website, you talk about being particularly drawn to south Asian mythologies, and the fact that there would be body parts missing, and the weirdness of that.
But now what I'm interested in is types of languages, visual languages that are syncretic - things that emerge through different cultures or religions or schools of thought in lots of ways. Most types of visual representation are syncretic. But from an academic perspective, something that really inspired me as well, is that a lot of the ancient idols or iconographies have endured over thousands of years. And I think there's something to say about that. Contemporary art often goes through these very specific zeitgeist trends. That's fashionable one day isn't the next. And yet there's always been this enduring capacity to a lot of this religious iconography and sculpture, particularly from Asia. I think there's an element of wonder and specialness.

The way I was trained at university was that contemporary art was all about materials, but it was being dematerialised: it was the ideas that made the work special or captivating. I've always been interested in more intuitive, non-linear ways to look at culture. And I think looking at a lot of sculpture from Asia, especially ancient sculpture, really taps into multiple parts of me - intellectual, emotional, sentimental.
VS: For representing ancient and modern culture, Tramway is a particularly interesting site - sandwiched between a Gurdwara Temple and a giant Lidl supermarket.
RMN: It's interesting when you think about the cultural lens we impose on that kind of imagery. I think that's why I've always been drawn to gatekeeper guardians as an archetype: because they're about protection. Historically they had an important role, to protect these places of worship, to highlight that these are places of importance.
VS: The giant mud-formed figure and ramshackle structures reminded me of Raiders of the Lost Ark, amid a jumble of other references, ancient and modern. The whole installation hits that sweet spot of being alien yet familiar.

Installation view, Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran: Idols of Mud and Water, Tramway, Glasgow, 2023. Photo courtesy Tramway.

VS: Definitely. After all, that's what triggers curiosity and, hopefully, a sense of wonder. It's an extraordinary and complex and ambitious feat, conjuring all these figurines from clay and mud. Presumably you had help making the mud sculpture.
RMN: The main thing that appealed to me about Tramway initially was the architecture. It's not a museum site, it's not a white cube, it's a site that naturally maximises explorations of scale. So, it's not a place for plinths or vitrines. I think emerging from this multi-art context, which is also about theatre and sound and lighting, is where I started to think about it. Glasgow was interesting to me because of the fabrication possibilities that we could engage with. The kind of practice I have is a very material practice. I can talk a lot, but at the end of the day I'm moving materials around, I'm collapsing things together, I'm putting things under 1000s of degrees of heat. It was a post-industrial, non-museum, multi-art space, but with this interesting positioning within the UK and very multicultural, which allowed the ideas to emerge quite fluidly.

RMN: Oh, that's good. I think part of creating the work, especially at scale, is to explore those lines between ambiguity and familiarity. A foreignness and that sense of unease in locating even the narrative function of the figures allows more engagement. I think as an artist I've never created very linear narratives, though with the terracotta sculptures there's a narrative of evolution among them. About 30 of them are formless and lumpy and the last 30 are highly detailed and highly ornate and have multiple heads. I didn't want to present them in any lineage. I think that uncertainty is good for an audience, to be honest.
VS: I liked the somewhat haphazard application of gold on these small figures. VS: There are many fabulous colours on the spotlit figures placed around the room. I understand it is extremely difficult to achieve that kind of rainbow spectrum on glazed vessels.

Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran. Terracotta Figures (1-97) and Head with Many Protrusions II, 2023. Terrecota, glazed ceramic, beads, dimensions variable. Photo courtesy Tramway.

RMN: Yes, the large, ephemeral fountain sculpture was made in Glasgow. It was fabricated there with an earth building team local to the area. All the fired ceramics and bronze sculptures in the show were made in Sydney and Melbourne. The house or shelter sculpture was made with all kinds of recycled materials. Even the bamboo was sourced in the UK. There's this interesting global narrative that comes through working in that way. When I was creating that work, I thought it would be really interesting to show the labour: you could tell there was a team. But with the terracottas [figurines in the "temple"] I wanted there to be that intimate, repetitive quality: you were imagining what the artist was doing in different moods and tones.

VS: It's a real technical achievement, but the colours do give a joyful quality to those figures. There's weirdness but there's also glee.

Terracotta Figures (detail), installation view, Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran: Idols of Mud and Water, Tramway, Glasgow, 2023. Photo: Veronica Simpson.

RMN: There's gold lustre on them - it's a technique that has been in ceramics for a long time. A lot of Wedgwood porcelain used that gold lustre to create an attractive, glossy finish. For me, there was something appealing about gilding a raw material, gilding the earth - high gloss v matt. I'm trying to complicate the readings a little bit.
VS: Luckily, clay's moment in contemporary art has truly arrived. When did you start casting some of your figures in bronze, and why?

RMN: With this installation, the colours are intentional. There are three or four colourful works, but everything else has this earthy, industrial, almost apocalyptic sentiment. Working with glazed ceramics and bright colours is an alchemical process. A difference of 100 degrees can make a really bright colour go super dull. I think what it is, it's a load of building up experience with those materials over time and being able to trial and test them, but at the same time leaving room for things to be spontaneous.
VS: In the Tramway website film, in your studio you showed a mix and match approach to which head you're going to give which body. Presumably you have various scales you work to so you can play with these components.
There's this sense, when you're able to open the kiln after a few days, if you're not sure what it's going to look like, you're really excited. If you knew how they were going to turn out, I think that sense of joy would diminish.
VS: You also draw copious ideas around your sculptures before you make them. VS: Absolutely. There was a wonderful question of yours in that Tramway video when you posed the rhetorical question: "What is the level of detail you need to impress on a figure to generate a feeling of sentience?"

Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran. Multiheaded Figure in Drapery (King), 2023. Glazed ceramic beads, fabric, 159 x 63 x 63 cm. Photo courtesy Tramway.

RMN: I still get taken aback that people aren't interested in the technical aspects of ceramics. It seems that that's not cerebral enough. Very seldom do people show interest in the technical, trial and error approach. A lot of the time I'm talking about the ideas and the context, whereas the reality of the studio is interpreting moisture etc.
VS: For the giant figure and the fountain, it's very rough, very DIY. Anyone could create a sculpture like that. What was your thinking there?
I started making ceramics in 2012 when I was still at university, doing my master's. I never had training. But a lot of people projected this idea that I was breaking rules and challenging traditions. Yet the history of ceramic, figurative sculpture is as ancient as any. Sometimes I look at the terracotta structures in collections that are thousands of years old, and they make my structures look conservative - some of these things are so wild and technically ambitious and complex. So, I've never thought of myself as rewriting rules: it's just been a narrative that's been layered on me at a time when we were still grappling with what the medium would be.

RMN: I first started working with bronze in 2016 and, again, I was thinking about south Asian bronzes. Also, especially in Australia, placemaking colonial sculptures are often bronze. I was always thinking about the elements - earth, water, fire, metal. For Glasgow, I was thinking about electricity and smoke. And I think working with bronze is really interesting because the casting process, the principles of it, are so ancient - for example lost wax casting. To me, working with ceramics and bronze, you can create these really interesting dialogues with these sculptures. That's what started the process for me. And when I started making bronzes, they were like a big financial investment. I don't have a trust fund. I'm from a working-class Sri Lankan refugee family. So, I thought to myself I want to explore this medium, I'm going to save up and make some bronzes, because that's something I felt passionate about and I liked the collaboration involved - working with foundries. But now it's just part of my work.

VS: You are also interested in the idea of masks, which seems hugely resonant with how we represent ourselves on social media or through gaming avatars: these are masks, these are not our true selves. But their proliferation and normalisation mean it's harder to tell what is real and what isn't.

Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran. Guardian Figure with Shields, 2023. Glazed ceramic, 85 x 65 x 45 cm. Photo: Veronica Simpson.

VS: You were less than a year old when you came to Sydney. Do you think that sense of being displaced from somewhere with a specific aesthetic to a dramatically different one still impacted?
RMN: With ceramics there's so much guessing. Once you put on a layer of colour, even the emotional reading can change when it comes out. It can feel like a totally different thing. I like having that flexibility to morph the sculpture after it's finished, after firing, then it's a more exciting prospect to create interesting sculptures.

RMN: I love drawing. As a child, I think I always wanted to be an artist. I just didn't know it was possible. I was one of those kids who would draw all over their textbooks. I think what I loved is the fact that with drawing you can explore any style. There's something immediate when I look at drawings. If I look at one ugly drawing of a figure, I can see the potential for six sculptures at that moment. A lot of the work I do has a very expressive register. That immediacy that comes from the drawing language is quite attractive to me.

RMN: Yeah, sometimes it's very little. But it's also like they suddenly come alive at a certain angle. With the terracotta figures, I had to force myself to not make them too detailed because that whole installation is a sentence.

Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran. Multi Limbed Mud Fountain, 2023, installation view, Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran: Idols of Mud and Water, Tramway, Glasgow, 2023. Photo: Veronica Simpson.

RMN: There was a lot of romantic narrative especially in the past - earth, fire and water - also earth moving, flooding, displacement. And... this isn't didactic. It's not about climate change. But I was thinking about floods as a motif that existed in various mythologies and a phenomenon that's happened all over the world for a long time - that idea that there's a precarity when earth and water connect, and also they formed the core of life. The fountain is made with sandbags - that's what people use to stop water from moving. They were quite key. The language was somewhat about dystopia. But it's quite hard to make something that big feel precarious. There are so many decisions through the design process to make sure that reading stays consistent.
VS: Has creating this body of work inspired any ideas for new kinds of work?
There's a lot of electrical wire weaving around the figure. These elements can mix and interact. Even though it has this Asian origin, it also has an urban identity: it has risen from the earth and the cabling has come up with it.

Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran. Seated Bronze Figure with Masks, 2023. Cast bronze, beads, 136 x 104 x 95 cm. Photo courtesy Tramway.

RMN: The bronze sculpture at Tramway is holding two masks and they're like reptilian Halloween masks that you would find in a junk shop. I often think about this idea that these things can shape-shift and morph, and this is just the imaginative geekiness coming out of me. There can be multiple iterations of this same sculpture. When you're working with ceramics and playing with fired surfaces, glaze adds a 2mm skin to the surface. Even that is kind of masking this material that's been mud. I almost feel like things that have a constructed aesthetic are more truthful than things that feel plain and slick. The fact that it's wearing a mask is self-consciously showing that there's a sense of collusion, playing, whereas if something felt completely harmonious, that's more illusory. Things where you can see elements of how they've been made are more interesting to me.

RMN: Absolutely. Within the diasporic community you are very alert to that - the vernacular of your house, South Asian vernacular is polychromatic. A lot of western archetypes are about looking neat, presentable, they are more about austerity. And I think that's fed into my art. I don't do austere presentation.

Another thing that drew me to the south Asian vernacular was that, as a child, I knew I was never conventionally masculine, or anything like that. I was always drawn to South Asian women: if you are going out, there's a display - the jewels, the hair, the sari. On a taste level, that element really appealed to me. I was drawn to that sense of adornment.

Fertility Figure with Drapery (Queen), Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran, glazed ceramic beads, fabric, 2023, 165 x 65 x 39 cm. Photo courtesy Tramway.

VS: Tell me about the ways in which the different gender identities might be represented within the figurines.

RMN: I think playing with gendered symbolism, whatever that means these days, has always been core to my language as an artist. I've never tried to do these didactic things about queer art, or gendered issues, it was about finding a way to reflect these figures that had concrete links to the past, but also make them more relevant to contemporary society.

When I was just out of university, the work I made had these very phallic sentiments, and I said it's not about sex, or sexual acts, it's a rhetorical thing. We're using this imagery that is so loaded to talk about a number of issues, whether gender or racism. Now, there's this kind of naturalness: for example, some figures might have breast-like forms, or a mould with a penis sticking out of its arm. In the context of the sculpture, it's just another part. I am drawing attention to (the fact that) what our body parts mean is not natural or given. It is constructed. But within the show there are two figures that surround the big sculpture, two tall ceramic ones. One I thought of as a fertility figure. I was looking at this Madonna and child archetype because that had been etched into my brain since I was a child. But a lot of Hindu imagery of the goddess Parvati shows babies or little companions, often animals. My fertility goddess figure has wide hips, is tall, not naturalistic, and is holding an alien-like baby. I was trying to draw attention to some of the classicism, but also bring it into an almost cartoon-like, 2024 sentiment. The other figure has a kind of Grecian style torso, a reference to Gandhara Buddhist sculptures, but also has a three-pronged tiered head, with dragon, lizard, human and animal elements. Especially with those two works, I'm trying to show gendered imagery quite specifically, but not through the imagery of genitals but more to do with the function and bodies. The large sculpture is genderless in my view. I think my work has always been about imagination and the potential of that.

RMN: For me right now, I really want to push the visual language of what I'm doing. In lay terms, I want to make things that show an aesthetic progression. It's a bit like cleaning your room: it's going to look shit before it looks better. I'm gearing up for some frustration. I'll be experimenting with some new forms, textures, new colours but also what they communicate and how they can develop. Right now, in the studio, I've gone back to what it is that I love about being an artist - it's that transformation of materials to objects and ideals.

* Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran : Idols of Mud and Water is at Tramway, Glasgow, until 21 April 2024.

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Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran - interview: 'Part of creating the work is to explore those lines between ambiguity and familiarity'

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A melange of multilimbed, fertility, guardian, protector and warrior figures animate Glasgow's Tramway in an ambitious installation for the Sri Lankan-born, Australian artist in his first UK solo show

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Having made its debut as part of the Desert X biennial, Matt Johnson's 150-foot-long Sleeping Figure artwork has been relocated to west Texas - where it joins a growing collection of sculptures.

The installation was built using 12 repurposed shipping containers arranged at seemingly precarious angles to create the impression of a person lying down. Johnson described the piece as drawing on an art tradition of reclining figures and topical world events, such as the Ever Given container ship, which got stuck in the Suez Canal in 2021.

Johnson spent two years and a significant sum completing the sculpture, which, post-debut at Desert X, was facing disassembly. The artist was instead able to donate the piece to Michael Phelan, founder of the art fair Marfa Invitational, who is creating a new sculpture park just outside the city.

Sleeping Figure will appear alongside a collection of six other pieces and is set to be located close to freight train tracks outside Marfa.

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Matt Johnson's huge shipping container installation gets a permanent home in Marfa - The Spaces

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It'll be part of a new sculpture park taking shape at the art mecca

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brecht's performance documentation

'landlordism' jack smith

irrational landlordism of baghdad

intersectionality

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Udo Noll, born in 1966, is a media artist and degreed engineer for film, photography and media technology. He lives and works in Berlin and Cologne. Since the mid 1990s he has worked as an artist and media professional in numerous international projects and exhibitions.

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RESET at the height of lockdown, filming across Scotland (at Jupiter Artland and her home-town Glasgow), South Africa and Barbados and responding to the immediate context of the Black Lives Matter movement, the global pandemic and climate emergency. The moving-image work is informed by the writings of queer theorist, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, interweaving gothic imagery, fears of contagion, xenophobia and the ensuing moral panic that often follows such anxieties. Exploring timely questions relating to personal healing and the cultivation of hope in hostile environments such as the ensuing global pandemic, colonialism or xenophobia, this urgent political film there are moments of grief and reflection, but also empathy and desire.

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RESET was co-commissioned and produced by Frieze and Forma as the Frieze Artist Award 2020. Alberta produced RESET at the height of lockdown, filming across Scotland (at Jupiter Artland and her...

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transatlantic trading
social and political implications of material
entropy
politics of dicipline
anti room?

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language
pimms
metaphores of material
sound?

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UPON SUCCESSFUL COMPLETION OF

STUDIO 3, YOU SHOULD BE ABLE TO:

1.Demonstrate a critical understanding of your individual art practice

within the context of Fine Art through relevant contextual and thematic

research.

2. Develop and synthesise ideas, methods, and processes through material

enquiry and the realisation of your programme of study.

3.

Develop and realise your artwork to an advanced level reflecting a

substantial critical understanding of your self-directed art practice.

4.

Evidence your independent learning through the ability to manage your

studies in an integrated manner, meet deadlines, and engage in reflective

and critical self-evaluation.

5.

Use critical judgement to document and share your self-directed Fine

Art practice and achievements with others, and demonstrate independence

in testing artwork in a variety of contexts.

6. Work professionally and engage in your studies in a safe, ethical and

sustainable manner.

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ILO1: Demonstrate a critical understanding of your individual art practice within the context

of fine art through relevant contextual and thematic research.

•

ILO2: Develop and synthesise ideas, methods, and processes through material enquiry and

the realisation of your programme of study.

•

ILO3: Develop and realise your artwork to an advanced level reflecting a substantial critical

understanding of your self

-

dir

ected art practice.

•

ILO4: Evidence your independent learning through the ability to manage your studies in an

integrated manner, meet deadlines, and engage in reflective and critical self

-

evaluation.

•

ILO5: Use critical judgement to document and share your

self

-

directed fine art practice and

achievements with others, and demonstrate independence in testing artwork in a variety of

contexts.

•

ILO6: Work professionally and engage in your studies in a safe, ethical and sustainable

manner.

Assessment

Criteria

We assess your work using the following assessment criteria:

Research

(20%)

•

Research

:

Demonstrate your understanding of your area(s) of study through research

using contextual and thematic sources relevant to your practice.

•

Development of Ideas

: Demonstrate the evolution of your ideas through your creative

process.

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notes -
seminar room w alia syed w/ anne-marie n neha

materialism, focus on understanding, professionalisation

priya n burying film - v powerful shot without disintegrating it, aware without the camera, traditional white dress, feeling awkward, too exotic, not no longer exotic, the image disappears, problematises the exotic. nothing to be done to get rid of the image, apart from scratching it out of film, sandpaper. remembering ‘oh ppl bury films’. coming from this experimental background. paul sharets, put film into the sea, hanging film onto the wind. history of allowing natural processes to effect the celluloid. relates to glitch in digital. allowing the image to disappear. allowing the image to take over, code to take over. aware of these debates. dancers thank the earth, saluting the earth goddess, pay respect to the earth essentially. one of the reasons why she liked the twirling w the hand from her heart up, that mvmt is part of sufi, one hand to the ground to the sky, axis from earth to sky. why not just bury it? it’s a bit of a fallacy, edited the sequence so that it would flow and then buried. it was decided before the burying the whole sequence. divided more or less in half. first time i put it underground, after she washed the film with water to look at it. the film is just covered in shit n dirt. can’t put film thru machinery dirty. washing the image off of it. understanding the material, according to what was in the soil. putting it into the compost bin, thinking about eating and how that would effect it. starts ok and then cut every few weeks, even a whole year. nothing there. through a process of reduction basically

sometimes a piece of work may start from a piece of writing or an interview. w the swans there was also cranes, n those didn’t work. so it was just swans. there is a decision in when to use music but that’s rly complicated

thinking about product, knowing what you’re doing, reading around the subject. when alia was at art school, they would say look at what’s in front of u. all the ideas come from that work in front of u. what happens now is ppl say ‘i made this film n its about xyz n i read xyz about this n that, any sort of discourse, capitalism whatever. being v eloquent about it all. but what they’ve done has nothing to do w it. if you’re making a product, it’s got to satisfy ideas of the finished. sometimes a mess is good. ‘if i could say my film is about, in one sentence, if i can do that i know why i made the film’ claudia says: the marking influences this pressure of being deep and having something finished. that can almost stifle it, fusty, i just wanna make stuff. time constraints. alia: important to talk about ideas but also exploring material that can be intuitive. u do something because u want to do it. there should be joy there.

sai: looking at work slowly, not expecting to know what it’s about. audience thinking there’s a lack of research or understanding about the work. creating space that’s more mysterious. work u can sit w more - i respond w my compound work and trying to slow down

alia: doing one thing everyday that’s about work. reading or writing and that staying w u throughout the day. u need to know the relationship between the object/subject n continuing to interrogate. thinking better thru moving. reading then go into the shower. going for a walk. not banging your head literally. it’s v tricky, all these things, intuition. a work should ask a question.

priya: do u have a question before making a film or does it come after? alia: sometimes i’ll want to make a film. making a film about the south asian community. am i gonna be saying this is what the community is, lots of questions. minority belong to communities but white ppl don’t. what i want is to have this reservoir of voices from the asian communities, who are asian from diasporic. don’t want a posh old white guy about muslim women and they said such n such that’s going to represent, that’s the truth of that culture n ppl. knowledge production is content capital. can be misused. not what i’m interested or want to do. maybe i shouldn’t be doing it but i want to n i rly want to be able to take it further. how do i bring these issues along w the film along w the issues. aware of the problems are embedded within the work, it questions itself. a film is not about something, a film is a record of its own making in relatiion to that thing or its own making.

neha: tutors will not understand that, sometimes is helpful to find some other artist to find feedback outside of school.

priya: making short films about my own biography within my geocultural context

sai: how do u handle beauty in your work alia: i don’t think about beauty. this idea about what this perfect thing is. i’m rly committed to (cinema is beautiful is about being held, immersive space, taken over) not against beauty. part of my language i need to understand. i know how i’m immersing in this. in what way i’m doing that. in a way it’s beautiful n consumable. beauty is not my end goal. oh but you buried priya and ended up being more beautiful but it interrogates itself. i don’t really speak to beauty.

eleonore: growing up in this culture of beauty aren’t we all trying

me: we don’t allow this ugliness n messiness into our work because we’re scared of it n so we lie to ourselves by putting these more difficult elements away from your own work

alia: we go see something terrible and we all come out feeling terribly being rewarded for our humanity. questioning the systems that allow it to happen. i’m structural filmmaker. i made pod from a set of rules, not wanting to be free. freedom in relation to slavery. we live because other ppl don’t live how we do. needing to have a rly strong ethics. in whatever way u define that to yourself.

english is an expectation. talking about the need to have subtitles for non-white non-british work to be appreciated.

talking about dowser as an object, refusing the online version

mia: talking about language as a thing that needs to be understood. expressed in a way for ppl to have an emotional response to or see themselves in the work. alia: all of my work is ultimately translated. sometimes it’s not in the first instance. sometimes i decide not to translate something. but there is an element that remains. it’s about the balance of your work. not about rules, but finding those rules for yourself. using always my own voice. when asking other ppl to do it they act.

aurelie: not breaking out but breaking in. somebody who works at gsa, rly good friend. what’re u doing they ask? why not come here to work. - do u see any poc at gsa. there’s none. how do i do that? cat dunn visiting lecturer. why don’t they hire more ppl of colour? more than half of students are international. other non-white students had to beg to have poc to visit because white visitors couldn’t relate. alia: agitate neha: colonial histories in art school, disrupt, tell staff what they need to hear.

alia: there’s lots wrong w education. i believe in art school education. i’m a product of art school. there’s a politics there.

anne-marie: things can’t change soon enough. don’t lose yourself for the sake of the fight. speak up when u can. asks oran about language and translation

oran: about rich white guys consuming your work, do u often think about your audience before and during?

alia: a lot of ppl ask. who’s your audience? i’m my first audience. i’m not as radical as i make it to be. i find that problematic having to imagine an audience. hopefully anything u imagine will be more diverse and complicated than anything u can imagine.

anne-marie: talking about phil collins (artist) he says he would like his granny to like it, find it accessible. thats his gage

sai: thinking about audience is dangerous thinking about the consumable.

oran: the audience can be a part of the thing. the language can be a part of the film itself. in that respect i get that, but to communicate w people.

alia: if no one sees the work does the work exist? i’ve been making films for a long time. i have an audience who know n come see my work. that’s my audience. to go back to it, fatima’s letter is geared to english urdu speaking audience. if u don’t speak those langauges you’re fucked. it would be disgenious to make it in any other languages i don’t speak.

aurelie: u can still appreciate the films if u don’t speak the language, appreaciting intonation and expression

alia: there’s a limitation, work has a limitation. not reaching the widest audience. a lot of aritsts have accessibility at the forefront. i will not translate for captions. i don’t believe that’s what my work is about. my work is about written, spoken n visual. particular type of power between visual n written. do not buy everything needing to have captions. for one, it implies there is a perfect understanding and readership who’s going to understand everything. if i wanna make a piece of work n somebody says this is for a deaf audience as well as a hearing audience, that would be the criteria of the work. n i would do that in all seriousness. it alters the relationship between the spectator and the work.

oran: adding subtitles n i changed my mind

aurelie: it doesn’t feel natural to have subtitles to a language u don’t speak

ellen: creative captioning has become another aspect of and subject

alia: captions become a shield sometimes. the way they come on to the screen is meaningful. in the soft heat, i fade it in n out. if there’s no apprehension it becomes fascistic.

alia: book about my practice being published. writing is meant to be separate. if it’s not meaningful for me it’s not gonna be for the audience. what would happen w this work. thinking about this idea of failure, tentativeness. that was my premise. writing can be many different things. writing for the sake of writing not just for my film. i think it is an art work, no need for images. making makes me think differently or extends my knowledge, then it’s not interesting. i’m always reading theory i don’t fucking understand but it pushes me to think in ways i wouldn’t have.

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2019
Talwar Gallery, New York, USA

2018
LUX, London

2017
Talwar Gallery, New York, USA

2012 - 2013
Los Angeles County Museum of Contemporary Art, USA

2009
Reina Sophia Museum of Contemporary Art, Madrid, Spain

2002
The New Art Gallery, Walsall
Gallery of Modern Art, Glasgow
Selected Groups Exhibitions
2019 - 2020
Yale Centre for British Art, New Haven, USA, Migrating Worlds: The Art of the Moving Image in Britain
WKV Stuttgart Germany, Sleeping with a Vengeance, Dreaming of a life
Artefact, Belgium

2019
The Sunday Painter, Chips and Egg, London
Courtisane, Artist in focus, Belgium
Chobi Mela X Dhaka, Bangladesh

2018
KIran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi, Delirium Equilibrium

2013
Fifth Moscow Bienale, Russia

2011
Museum of Modern Art, New York, On Line: Drawing Through the Twentieth Century

2006
Biennale of Sydney, Australia

2005 - 2006
British Art Show 6, Baltic Mill Newcastle + venues in Manchester, Nottingham & Bristol

2002
Gimple Fils, London
Selected Past Screenings/Talks/Lectures
2020
Public intimacies correspondences, London short film festival, ICA cinema

2018
Winterthur Festival, Films in Dialogue: Alia Syed & Luke Fowler
Goldsmiths, London. CHASE Lecture
Chelsea School of Art, UAL. TrAIN Open Lecture The Migrating Image
Pavilion, Leeds.
Birkbeck Cinema, Alia Syed: Early Films and Influences

2017
Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, Recent work
University of Sussex. Poetics and Politics of Documentary
Close Up Cinema, London. Welcome to Britain

2016
Tate Britain, London, Co-op Dialogues
Tate Modern, London, From Reel to Real
Co-op Dialogues 1966-2016: Alia Syed & Kathryn Elkin

2011
Methods Lab, Goldsmiths University, London

2010
Conversation Pieces, Tate Britain, London

2006
Inventing Intimacy in Research Conference, Goldsmiths, London
Canberra School of Art
British Art Show, Bristol and Nottingham

2008
Research Fellow in Contemporary Art Practice, Southampton Solent University

2004
AHRC Research Fellow, Solent University, Southampton
Research Grants and Awards
2015
Jarman Award shortlisted artist
Arts Council England project grant for "Meta Incognita"

2013
Creative Scotland BBC Scotland for "Points of Departure"

2012
Arts Council England award "Panopticon Letters"

2011
Completion Award Arts Council of England "Priya"
Research Award, Southampton Solent University "Panopticon Letters"

2008
Arts Council England award "A Story Told"

2004
AHRC Research Fellow, Solent University, Southampton

2003
Completion Award, Arts Council of England "Eating Grass"

2002
London Production, Award production "Eating Grass"

1998
Completion Award, Arts Council of England for "Spoken Diary"

1995
Production Award, Arts Council of England for "Spoken Diary

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2019 Talwar Gallery, New York, USA 2018 LUX, London 2017Talwar Gallery, New York, USA 2012 - 2013 Los Angeles County Museum of Contemporary Art, USA 2009Reina Sophia Museum of Contemporary Art, Madrid, Spain 2002 The New Art Gallery, Walsall Gallery of Modern Art, Glasgow Selected Groups Exhibitions 2019 - 2020Yale

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Process and participation are central to Caycedo’s practice, bringing a collective dimension through performances, photographs and videos. Her work contributes to the construction of environmental memory as a fundamental space for climate and social justice. It challenges us to understand nature not as a resource to be exploited, but as a living and spiritual entity that unites people beyond borders.

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Carolina Caycedo makes work that addresses the commons, environmental justice, just energy transition and cultural and environmental biodiversity. Through her studio practice and fieldwork with communities impacted by large-scale infrastructure and other extraction projects, she invites viewers to consider the unsustainable pace of growth under capitalism and how we might embrace resistance and solidarity.

Process and participation are central to Caycedo's practice, bringing a collective dimension through performances, photographs and videos. Her work contributes to the construction of environmental memory as a fundamental space for climate and social justice. It challenges us to understand nature not as a resource to be exploited, but as a living and spiritual entity that unites people beyond borders.

For Caycedo's first survey exhibition in Europe, BALTIC presents an overview of her artistic practice over the past twenty years, alongside a new commission inspired by the River Tyne, which expands her ongoing River Book series. The exhibition will feature works from major series including Be Dammed (2012-ongoing), a multimedia project that examines the impact of hydroelectric dams and other major infrastructure projects on communities and the environment.

Caycedo was born in London to Colombian parents. She lives in Los Angeles. Her recent solo exhibitions include: Ballroom Marfa, Texas (with David de Rozas) (2021); MCA Chicago (2020); Art Gallery of Guelph, Ontario, Canada (2020); ICA Boston (2020); Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź (2019); Orange County Museum of Art, California (2019). She has participatd in numerous group exhibitions including 15 Bienal de Cuenca, Ecuador (2021), We Are History, Somerset House, London (2021); LA TRIENAL 20/21, El Museo de Barrio, New York (2021); the Chicago Architecture Biennial (2019; the 45 Salón Nacional de Artistas in Colombia (2019). Caycedo is the 2020 Inaugural Borderlands Fellow at the Center for Imagination in the Borderlands-Arizona State University and the Vera List Center for Art and Politics; and the 2021 Inaugural Latinx Artists Fellow. U.S Latinx Art Forum, Ford Foundation, Andrew W. Mellow Foundation.

Get involved

Carolina Caycedo invites you to contribute to her work Museo de la Calle / Street Museum (1998/2022) by bringing in a hand-made object to BALTIC between 20 July-28 August, which will be displayed as part of the work. Objects will be on display until January 2023, when their owners will be able to exchange them for different objects brought in by someone else. Find out more here.

Accessibility

We are committed to making our exhibitions as accessible and inclusive as possible. Below are resources and alternative ways to explore Carolina Caycedo: Land of Friends. You can find out more about accessibility at BALTIC here.
Visual Story
Find out what to expect when visiting Carolina Caycedo: Land of Friends with this Visual Story guide - a guide with words and pictures. It is sometimes called a Social Narrative.
Website
You can use Recite Me, a web accessibility and language toolbar, across BALTIC's website to make web pages, text and documents more accessible for you. The Recite Me toolbar includes text read aloud or translated into 35 different languages. You can find Recite Me on the top left corner of the page, click the 'Accessibility Tools' button.
Exhibition guides
Download the exhibition guide here

Download a Large Print version of the exhibition guide as PDF here or Word document here
Audio Descriptive Text
You can download the Audio Descriptive Text document here. You can play the text aloud by clicking the green play button in the top left hand corner, or the grey play button that appears in the 'Recite me' pop up when hovering over the text. Here you can also play the text translated into 35 different languages.

If you need any help while visiting the exhibition, please talk to one of our friendly and knowledgeable Crew team. They will be present in the exhibition room near the entrance.

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Housed in a landmark industrial building on the south bank of the River Tyne in Gateshead, BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art is a major international centre for contemporary art. BALTIC has no permanent collection, providing instead an ever-changing calendar of exhibitions and events that give a unique and compelling insight into contemporary artistic practice.

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Carolina Caycedo makes work that addresses the commons, environmental justice, just energy transition and cultural and environmental biodiversity. Through her studio practice and fieldwork with communities impacted by large-scale infrastructure and other extraction projects, she invites viewers to consider the unsustainable pace of growth under capitalism and how we might embrace resistance and solidarity.

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view of work after final install, showing the film and the installation

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Marlene Dumas born 1953

Marlene Dumas was born in Cape Town, South Africa. From 1972 to 1975 she attended Cape Town University, where she studied for a BA in Visual Arts. She then completed her studies in Haarlem, in the Netherlands.

She has lived and worked in Amsterdam since 1976. From 1978 she has exhibited internationally, and is one of Holland's most widely admired artists. In 1995 she represented Holland in the Venice Biennale, and in 1996 the Tate Gallery exhibited a selection of her works on paper.

In the past Dumas produced paintings, collages, drawings, prints and installations. She now works mainly with oil on canvas and ink on paper. The sources she uses for her imagery are diverse and include newspaper and magazine cuttings, personal memorabilia, Flemish paintings, and Polaroid photographs. The majority of her works may be categorised as 'portraits', but they are not portraits in the traditional sense. Rather than representing an actual person, they represent an emotion or a state of mind. Themes central to Dumas' work include race and sexuality, guilt and innocence, violence and tenderness.

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Artist page for Marlene Dumas (born 1953)

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being able to see through the installation, this allows the viewer to view the relationship between the multiple figures depicted.

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why do I, as a woman feel so compelled to assert dominance in my landscape

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Inside That Tracey Emin Tent of Everyone She Ever Slept With | Widewalls

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In 1995, the British artist Tracey Emin made one of her seminal works called Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963-1995 which is better known as The Tent.

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This artists use of found objects has been executed in a successful way. playing with the boundaries between sculpture, painting and architecture.

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Sarah Sze – ‘You Mark Time Through Objects’ | Artist Interview | TateShots

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In this intriguing sculptural series spanning 2005 to 2014, LA-based artist Walead Beshty packaged his artworks in FedEx boxes and shipped them across the country to exhibitions and galleries.

But unlike most artists who utilize every bit of care to protect and pad their artwork from the inevitable rough handling of mail carriers, Beshty designed his pieces to break.

For his famous FedEx works he constructed laminate glass objects that fit seamlessly within the dimensions of standard size shipping boxes.

Through the “normal” handling the objects would inevitably crack and shatter and it was up to curators and gallerists to carefully remove each piece for display.

The fragile volumes were then given titles that specifically mention the date, tracking number, and box size of shipment.

Not only was Beshty fascinated by obtaining a “fingerprint” of sorts that documented the journey of each package to its destination, but he also found it curious that a corporation has the ability to copyright the exact dimensions of a box, essentially owning an empty shape.

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In this intriguing sculptural series spanning 2005 to 2014, LA-based artist Walead Beshty packaged his artworks in FedEx boxes and shipped them across the country to exhibitions and galleries. But unlike most artists who utilize every bit of care to protect and pad their artwork from the inevitable rough handling of mail carriers, Beshty designed his pieces to break. For his famous FedEx works he constructed laminate glass objects that fit seamlessly within the dimensions of standard size shipping boxes. Through the "normal" handling the objects would inevitably crack and shatter and it was up to curators and gallerists to carefully remove each piece for display. The fragile volumes were then given titles that specifically mention the date, tracking number, and box size of shipment.

Not only was Beshty fascinated by obtaining a "fingerprint" of sorts that documented the journey of each package to its destination, but he also found it curious that a corporation has the ability to copyright the exact dimensions of a box, essentially owning an empty shape. He shares in a 2011 interview with Mikkel Carl:

The FedEx works [...] initially interested me because they're defined by a corporate entity in legal terms. There's a copyright designating the design of each FedEx box, but there's also the corporate ownership over that very shape. It's a proprietary volume of space, distinct from the design of the box, which is identified through what's called a SSCC #, a Serial Shipping Container Code. I considered this volume as my starting point; the
perversity of a corporation owning a shape-not just the design of the object-and
also the fact that the volume is actually separate from the box. They're owned
independently from one another.

Furthermore, I was interested in how art objects acquire meaning through their context and through travel, what Buren called, something like, "the unbearable compromise of the portable work of art". So, I wanted to make a work that was specifically organized around its traffic, becoming materially manifest through its movement from one place to another.

Here's a brief video of Beshty explaining the project during the 2008 Whitney Biennial. (via BoingBoing)

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Artist Walead Beshty Shipped Glass Boxes Inside FedEx Boxes to Produce Shattered Sculptures - Colossal

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In this intriguing sculptural series spanning 2005 to 2014, LA-based artist Walead Beshty packaged his artworks in FedEx boxes and shipped them across the country to exhibitions and galleries. But unlike most artists who utilize every bit of care to protect and pad their artwork from the inevitable rough handling of mail carriers, Beshty designed his pieces to break.

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Gifford plays with the idea of canvas and paint, Blurring the lines between them both.

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Lydia Gifford, Born 1979,United Kingdom. Lives and works in London. Graduated from MA Fine Art (Painting), Royal College of Art, London in 2008. Exhibitions include: Midsection, solo, Micky Schubert, Berlin (2016), I am vertical, solo, Centre International d'Art et du Paysage, Ile de Vassiviere (2016), Valerie Beston Artists' Trust, Marlborough Fine Art, London (2016), To. For. With, solo, Laura Bartlett Gallery, London (2015) , Drawn, BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead (2014). Awards include: Valerie Beston Young Artists' Prize (2008).

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Lydia Gifford, Born 1979,United Kingdom. Lives and works in London. Graduated from MA Fine Art (Painting), Royal College of Art, London in 2008. Exhibitions include: Midsection, solo, Micky Schubert, Berlin (2016), I am vertical, solo, Centre International d'Art et du Paysage, Ile de Vassiviere (2016), Valerie Beston Artists' Trust, Marlborough Fine Art, London (2016), To.

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this work was produced by mounting sheer fabric in an off-white tone, onto a painted white stretcher. I decided to leave areas of the fabric unstretched to expose the stretcher bars. The stretcher bars had text painted around the entire circumference. This text read the directions from my flat to OCAD. This work revolved round the subject of my journey to OCAD and my commute, during this project I was thinking about my conscious and subconscious and my place within a geographical context and a social context. These marks where initially derivative of drawings I had made at the beginning stages of my research; I had made these drawings and marks intuitively while listening to sound samples I had collected while commuting. During my commute I had collected small parts of tar and gravel that had broken free from the roadside. I melted this with wax to enhance the viscosity. I poured this medium into the stretched fabric to create my composition. ​

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Oleva
At the performance entitled `Walking Home, while the participants will be walking towards the place where they describe as “home” in Istanbul, the artist will accompany each partner within one-to-one sessions from London by connecting via phones without the presence of an audience. In order to designate the starting point of the walking, a map that reads the city through the locations of historical and forensic figures, artefacts and events related to women will guide the participants. In these traces there are such as; the Sultanahmet Square in the remembrance of Halide Edip Adıvar’s  activist and political speech in 1919, Yıldız Park in memory of Gürdal Duyar’s sculpture that represents Istanbul in the form of a woman’s body,  Fındıklı park where Füsun Onur’s 50thyear sculpture that got removed by the city hall crew during the organisation as well as selected places such as Süreyya Opera.

With the following questions; “If I ask you to walk me home, where would you take me? Does home mean feeling safe? What makes you feel like at home? Is it where you live now or a different place? Or is it not even a place? Now, it is time to walk and find home!", the artist is searching for the answer of what could be the meaning of the notion of “home”. She invites women* living in Istanbul to share her footsteps within that journey. The notion of “home”, that may refer to different meanings such as the nest, safe space, family, escape, indefensible area, self-reflection, is at the centre of the Walking Home performance. The artist will ask several questions to the participants in order to get a response to the meanings of “home”, as a result it could lead to various descriptions such as an actual home; a park, a seaside, a library or a place which reflects that feeling or a person and an object. On the other hand, her questions could also  remain unanswered...

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For women* living in Istanbul

Performistanbul'dan performans sanatçılarına özel

misafir sanatçı programı (2020):

Sanatsal Gelişim Programı:

İlk edisyonun teması "Ev"

Performistanbul, 2020'in Şubat ayında, British Council'ın #KültürdeKadınGücü Destek Programı sayesinde Live Art Development Agency (LADA) iş birliği ile başlattığı performans sanatçılarına özel yapılan açık çağrı aracılığıyla, dört haftalık sanatsal gelişim ve proje geliştirme atölyesi (Londra, 2020) ile on günlük misafir sanatçı programını (PCSAA - Istanbul, 2020) kapsayan sanatsal gelişim programını hayata geçirdi. Açık çağrı, Birleşik Krallık'ta ikamet eden ve kadın*/kendini kadın olarak tanımlayan performans sanatçılarını, canlı sanat pratiğine bir limit koymadan, "ev" kavramını bir oluşum ve yaratma mekânı olarak geniş bir çerçeveden araştırmaya davet etti. Programın ilk edisyonunda yapılacak çalışmanın kavramsal çerçevesi; "ev" kavramına dair, ait olma hissi, yer değiştirme, kimlik, cinsiyet, umut, aşk, göçmenlik gibi nosyonları ele alıyordu. Açık çağrı, LADA, Performistanbul ve Türk sanat sahnesini temsil eden bağımsız üyelerden oluşan dokuz kişilik bir jüri aracılığı ile yürütüldü. Geliştirme projesi her iki şehirde sanatçının çalışmasını sergileme/sunma fırsatı ve birçok alanda sanatsal pratiği ilerletmek odaklı imkân sağlamayı amaçlıyordu. Programın Londra'da gerçekleşen ilk kısmı, açık çağrıyı kazanan sanatçıya özel buluşmalar, proje geliştirme seansları, LADA'nın arşivine erişim ve araştırma desteğini kapsayan bir mentorluk sürecinden oluştu. Programının ikinci kısmında sanatçı, Türkiye'de 10 gün boyunca PCSAA binasında konaklama ve araştırma imkânlarından yararlanarak projesini geliştirip sunmak adına davetliydi. Covid-19 nedeniyle dönüştürülen program kapsamında açık çağrıyı kazananı sanatçı Alisa Oleva, ilk olarak 11 Mayıs'ta Evde CANLI Kal (Stay LIVE at Home) kapsamında "Tracing the Inside, A collective action" adlı çevrim içi bir performans gerçekleştirdi. Üç aylık çevrim içi sanatsal gelişim programı kapsamında zamana ve çeşitli mekânlara yayılarak devam eden süreçte sanatçının geliştirdiği Walking Home projesi ise Ekim ayında katılımcılarla gerçekleştirilerek Kasım (2020) ayında izleyiciye sunulacak.

Sanatçı Hakkında

Alesa Oleva (Moskova, 1989), Londra'da çalışmakta ve yaşamaktadır. Goldsmiths Üniversitesi Performans Sanatı Yüksek Lisansı'na sahip sanatçı; kentsel koreografi ve kentsel arkeolojiyi, şehirdeki izleri ve yüzeyleri, sınırları ve şehre ait nesneleri, aralıkları ve sessizlikleri, pasajları ve çatlakları ele almak için kenti stüdyo ve kentsel yaşamı da madde olarak ele alır. Çalışmaları; etkileşimli durumlar, hareket serileri, birebir ve samimi karşılaşmalar, yürüyüş parkurları ve atölyeleri ile sesli rehberli yürüyüş serileri hâlinde / formatında ortaya çıkmaktadır. Şimdiye kadar birçok farklı şehirde mekâna/şehre özel çalışmalar yapmıştır, bu şehirlerin arasında Londra, Manchester, Leeds, Berlin, Belgrad, Pori, Minsk, Kiev, Dnipro, Moskova ve Norilsk bulunmaktadır.

Alisa Oleva hakkında bilgi almak için lütfen tıklayınız.

​

​

Fore more information about Alisa Oleva press link

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For women* living in Istanbul Performistanbul'dan performans sanatçılarına özel misafir sanatçı programı (2020): Sanatsal Gelişim Programı: İlk edisyonun teması "Ev" Performistanbul, 2020'in Şubat ayında, British Council'ın #KültürdeKadınGücü Destek Programı sayesinde Live Art Development Agency (LADA) iş birliği ile başlattığı performans sanatçılarına özel yapılan açık çağrı aracılığıyla, dört haftalık sanatsal gelişim ve proje geliştirme atölyesi (Londra, 2020) ile on günlük misafir sanatçı programını (PCSAA - Istanbul, 2020) kapsayan sanatsal gelişim programını hayata geçirdi.

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Having a tutorial with carl was very informative at this stage of my work, discussing my final works and the context.

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A statue of Queen Cynethryth made of daub containing shredded King Offa Junior Academy school uniform, sea water and liquid soap. The cracks in the daub are sealed with Christmas pudding, itself mixed with seawater and microwaved. Where Cynethryth's crown would be sits a POS receipt printer, out of which falls a scroll printed with details of the lives and exploits of Queen Cynethryth and nineteenth-century nurse, missionary and explorer Kate Marsden. On its rear face hangs an oil painting of Kate Marsden, itself a replica of a photographic portrait that was donated to Bexhill Museum in the 1930s and subsequently refused. This replica was painted by James Arguile a fellow Bexhillian artist and childhood classmate of Carl Gent.

Daub, dried grand wormwood (Artemisia absinthium), fuchsia petals, soil, coal dust, liquid soap, sea water, Christmas pudding, King Offa Primary Academy school uniform, receipt POS printer, thermal print on receipt roll, oil portrait of Kate Marsden on board, gilt frame

Photography by Susan Jane Dunford and Rob Harris, courtesy of the De La Warr Pavilion

Commissioned by the De La Warr Pavilion for Still I Rise: Feminisms, Gender, Resistence, Act II

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A statue of Queen Cynethryth made of daub containing shredded King Offa Junior Academy school uniform, sea water and liquid soap. The cracks in the daub are sealed with Christmas pudding, itself mixed with seawater and microwaved.

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Tara Donovan at Pace, 534 West 25th Street, New York, from May 10 to August 15, 2014
Pace Gallery is pleased to present new work by Tara Donovan on view at 534 West 25th Street.

In this exhibition, Donovan presents two new large scale sculptures. With these works, the artist continues to explore the phenomenological effect of work created through the accumulation of identical objects. Untitled (index cards), the first such work created by Donovan, is a 13' x 25' x 30' sculpture in eight parts comprised of several million 3x5" white cards stacked and glued into scores of interweaving columnar forms combining to reach a summit on each element.

Pace's exhibition will also feature a newly completed untitled sculpture made with thousands of acrylic rods, a technique the artist developed in 2010. Similar acrylic works were recently exhibited in Donovan's international retrospective at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark and Arp Museum Bahnhof in Germany. This will be the first such work shown at the gallery. Comprised of tens of thousands of clear plastic rods of varying length, the works are formed from roughly spherical units of radiating rods. These elements intermingle, entangling the arrays and seemingly distorting the forms while accelerating the directionality of the rods like visible lines of force.

As in all of her work, Donovan spends months or even years searching for a method of assembly that allows the simple and immutable characteristics of the chosen material to generate complex, emergent phenomena which keep the viewer cycling between perception of the parts and the whole between the forms themselves and the light that surrounds and divides them. The work draws on both Minimalist and formalist histories, while creating a radically new form which embraces complexity and iterative processing.

For the last 20 years, Tara Donovan has used simple, mass produced materials and objects to explore the transformative effect of the accumulation and aggregation. The result has been a body of work known for its otherworldly environments, hazy topographies and organic structures. This is the first of two Tara Donovan exhibitions at Pace this spring. From May 22 to June 30, Pace Menlo Park will present Tara Donovan: Untitled featuring a selection of seminal works by the artist completed over the past 15 years.

Tara Donovan (b. 1969, Flushing, New York) received a B.F.A. from the Corcoran College of Art and Design, Washington, D.C. (1991) and an M.F.A. in sculpture from Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond (1999). Donovan received the prestigious MacArthur Foundation "Genius" Award in 2008. Other awards include the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Willard L. Metcalf Award, New York; the National Academy Museum, Helen Foster Barnett Prize, New York; the Women's Caucus for Art, Presidential Award, New York (all in 2004), and the first annual Calder Prize, which was granted by the Calder Foundation in 2005. She was an Augustus Saint-Gaudens Memorial Sculpture Fellow, Cornish, New Hampshire (2003) and received grants from the New York Foundation for the Arts (2003); the Pollock-Krasner Foundation (2003); and the Joan Mitchell Foundation (1999). Donovan's work was also selected for the 2000 Biennial Exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

Donovan has been the subject of solo exhibitions and installations at numerous museums. Among them: Tara Donovan, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, Denmark and Arp Museum Bahnhof Rolandseck, Remagen, Germany (2013-2014); Currents 35: Tara Donovan, Milwaukee Art Museum, Wisconsin (2012); Tara Donovan: Untitled, Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indiana, (2010); Tara Donovan, Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, (2008-2009) which traveled to: Lois & Richard Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art, Cincinnati; Des Moines Art Center, Iowa; Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego. Tara Donovan at the Met, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York was on view from 2008-2009.

Concurrent with the ICA, Boston survey, the artist's first monograph, with an interview by Lawrence Weschler, was published by the Monacelli Press.

Tara Donovan's work is held in numerous important private and public collections, including Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo; Brooklyn Museum of Art; Dallas Museum of Art; Indianapolis Museum of Art; The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Milwaukee Art Museum; Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; St. Louis Art Museum; Wadsworth Athenaeum Museum of Art and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among others. Tara Donovan lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

all images © the gallery and the artist(s)

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contemporary art in new york with installation views – tara donovan at pace

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Tara Donovan at Pace, 534 West 25th Street, New York

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Tara Donovan at Pace, 534 West 25th Street, New York, from May 10 to August 15, 2014 Pace Gallery is pleased to present new work by Tara Donovan on view at 534 West 25th Street. In this exhibition, Donovan presents two new large scale sculptures.

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In 2016, a tiny, almost transparent fish was ‘discovered’ in the waters of an underground cave network in Germany. The fish have adapted to survive in their new deep, profoundly dark surroundings; their eyes have almost disappeared, their form has elongated, and they have developed highly sensitive pressure sensors all over their skin. The divers and researchers soon came to understand that the fish had been there all along, navigating in their own way for 20,000 years, swimming and sensing their way through the hairline cracks and interstices of the underwater cave network; spaces only a very small number of humans will ever see, and that extend further away beyond their imagination.

The first encounter between diver and fish, and the dynamics of the wet-suited body within the cave network, was the beginning of a conversation between writer-performer, Lindiwe Matshikiza, and visual artist, Flora Parrott. An email sent by Flora from a cafe in Konstanz (near to the Biology department in which specimens of the fish now live) began an entirely virtual collaboration about physical and sensed understanding. Over the past two years, the two artists have built a process that is surprisingly intimate and close despite the geographical distance between England and South Africa.

The resulting show was an installation at Well Projects in Margate called ‘I’m In The Bath On All Fours’, now showing as part of Sonia Boyce’s touring exhibition ‘In The Castle of My Skin’. The work sits underneath the main structure in an immersive hollow consisting of Flora’s sculptures and images together with audio recordings of Lindiwe’s spoken texts.

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I’m In The Bath On All Fours — Flora Parrott

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Tuan Andrew Nguyen’s practice explores the power of memory and its potential to act as a form of political resistance. His work is fueled by research and a commitment to communities that have faced traumas caused by colonialism, war, and displacement.

This exhibition centres on Tuan’s 2019 film, The Specter of Ancestors Becoming made in collaboration with Raw Material Company in Dakar, Senegal. The work envisions the memories and desires of the descendants of the tirailleurs sénégalais, West African colonial
soldiers who were among the French forces sent to combat Vietnamese liberation uprisings in the 1940s. Though the stories told through the film and its surrounding archive and material appear to reflect a geographically and culturally specific history, it is actually an example of what Koyo Kouoh describes as the micro-story within the macro-story of the colonial project and its legacies of forced migration and displaced bodies. Through this work we experience generational memory, bound to place and time through individual bodies, while simultaneously hearing the echoes of these memories and histories as they form connections beyond the framing of spaces, geographies and borders that have been delineated by the legacies of colonial empires.

The installation itself surrounds the viewer with simultaneous yet different perspectives moving forward in time. In its embrace, we experience fragments of this installation rather than a whole. We have access to a meaning, a feeling. Not a story, but a memory, and sometimes, a memory of something that has never been seen.

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All That We Are Is What We Hold In Our Outstretched Hands

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CCA: Centre for Contemporary Arts is Glasgow's hub for the arts, hosting exhibitions, films, music, literature, workshops, festivals and performances.

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The physical coastline becomes a metaphor for a ruptured piece of skin barely holding together a volatile state of being ready to explode.

Filmed in the dark of the night during religious festivities in a village in South India, the margin between land and water becomes a point of release beyond which characters experience fear, surprise, anger, sadness, trust, anticipation, excitement, contempt but also rapture as they wash off the masquerade.

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The physical coastline becomes a metaphor for a ruptured piece of skin barely holding together a volatile state of being ready to explode.

Filmed in the dark of the night during religious festivities in a village in South India, the margin between land and water becomes a point of release beyond which characters experience fear, surprise, anger, sadness, trust, anticipation, excitement, contempt but also rapture as they wash off the masquerade.

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The physical coastline becomes a metaphor for a ruptured piece of skin barely holding together a volatile state of being ready to explode. Filmed in the dark of the night during religious festivities in a village in South India, the margin between land and water becomes a point of release beyond which characters experience fear, surprise, anger, sadness, trust, anticipation, excitement, contempt but also rapture as they wash off the masquerade.

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Throughout this project I explored my own identity through nostalgia and memory. This project explores the intersections between self-realisation and self-destruction, this theme has manifested into an installation work. My use of a tent refers to my memories of adolescenceandchildhood.UsingmemoryandimageryfrommyhomeinScotland.Thisworkexploresmychallengesgrowingupon a farm as a mixed-race queer woman. I explored my identity within the Anthropocene beckoning the question, 'where do I belong?' Th e fabric consists mainly of recycled curtains. I used a semi-transparent material to allow the viewer to see inside the tent, this refers to memory. This also allows the paintings to be viewed from either side, each painting playing off one another, this refers to the concept of the moving image and the dualities these contain. I aimed to produce a work that the audience can interact with and obtain a level of intimacy when viewing the work to further enhance the intimacy the viewer obtains by watching the personal footage, convey ing my personal memories and experiences. A black sheep was used to symbolise my alienation within my community and family.Outcast from my white family for being brown and from my Indian family for being queer. This work illustrates the discourse within my own biography.There are many connotations that refer to the ritualistic practice of sheep shearing with along history tied to Scotland,I would like to explore this further throughout this work. References to animals area reoccurring theme in my work as it refers to my Hindu background, this is something that has regularly informed my work.

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feeling temporary and making myself perminent part of the landscape 

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feeling temporary and making myself perminent part of the landscape 

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NUKA NAYU & ALEJANDRO VILLA DURANIN CONVERSATION.  

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NUKA NAYU & ALEJANDRO VILLA DURANIN CONVERSATION.  

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Alejandro villa Duran​

'When I speak about wildness I try to reconstruct the idea of what the self can be or let itself be in an environment that has been domesticated by heterosexuality, so wildness can often in my work show as a process of unlearning, this intimate process often comes not as a resistance but as way to navigate a terrain with an honest attitude towards sexuality. ​

​

For me the word wild is often difficult to grasp as we have the idea that wild is that inhabited place, that is full of plants and animals, a dangerous environment as it hasn't been touched by humans, but i often think that this environment can happen anywhere.  i believe also for queer people this wild environments happen in habited places cities, these cities can be hostile and difficult to navigate, an environment that can feel unsuitable and challenging. In an imaginative plane I like to think of cities as this environment full of animalistic humans trying to eat/attack each other than doesn't fit into the norm, but this attacks are often in a mind/spiritual level as society has this shield of political correctness where people behave rationally but can hurt each other in different subtle hidden ways.​

​

This is the reason why in my work I often try to find places to escape, so part of my practice is finding safe and honest spaces where my body can thrive. And this is where the ecological element develops in my practice, where I often find landscapes of mutual respect and the order of things can work in disaccordance of the precondition of hetero norms. Where is home for the queer? Whilst navigating a hostile terrain, there are spaces where acceptance vibrates in a high frequency, for this reason I perform solitarily in natural landscapes, where I am exposed in a space and there is no bouncing judgement there is the true essence of grasping your own wilderness.' (queercircle)​

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In some way, the economy of poor images corresponds to the description of imperfect cinema, while the description of perfect cinema represents rather the concept of cinema as a flagship store. But the real and contemporary imperfect cinema is also much more ambivalent and affective than Espinosa had anticipated. On the one hand, the economy of poor images, with its immediate possibility of worldwide distribution and its ethics of remix and appropriation, enables the participation of a much larger group of producers than ever before. But this does not mean that these opportunities are only used for progressive ends. Hate speech, spam, and other rubbish make their way through digital connections as well. Digital communication has also become one of the most contested markets—a zone that has long been subjected to an ongoing original accumulation and to massive (and, to a certain extent, successful) attempts at privatization.

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The poor image is a copy in motion. Its quality is bad, its resolution substandard. As it accelerates, it deteriorates. It is a ghost of an image, a preview, a thumbnail, an errant idea, an itinerant image distributed for free, squeezed through slow digital connections, compressed, reproduced, ripped, remixed, as well as copied and pasted into other channels of distribution.

The poor image is a rag or a rip; an AVI or a JPEG, a lumpen proletarian in the class society of appearances, ranked and valued according to its resolution. The poor image has been uploaded, downloaded, shared, reformatted, and reedited. It transforms quality into accessibility, exhibition value into cult value, films into clips, contemplation into distraction. The image is liberated from the vaults of cinemas and archives and thrust into digital uncertainty, at the expense of its own substance. The poor image tends towards abstraction: it is a visual idea in its very becoming.

The poor image is an illicit fifth-generation bastard of an original image. Its genealogy is dubious. Its filenames are deliberately misspelled. It often defies patrimony, national culture, or indeed copyright. It is passed on as a lure, a decoy, an index, or as a reminder of its former visual self. It mocks the promises of digital technology. Not only is it often degraded to the point of being just a hurried blur, one even doubts whether it could be called an image at all. Only digital technology could produce such a dilapidated image in the first place.

Poor images are the contemporary Wretched of the Screen, the debris of audiovisual production, the trash that washes up on the digital economies' shores. They testify to the violent dislocation, transferrals, and displacement of images-their acceleration and circulation within the vicious cycles of audiovisual capitalism. Poor images are dragged around the globe as commodities or their effigies, as gifts or as bounty. They spread pleasure or death threats, conspiracy theories or bootlegs, resistance or stultification. Poor images show the rare, the obvious, and the unbelievable-that is, if we can still manage to decipher it.

1. Low Resolutions

In one of Woody Allen's films the main character is out of focus. It's not a technical problem but some sort of disease that has befallen him: his image is consistently blurred. Since Allen's character is an actor, this becomes a major problem: he is unable to find work. His lack of definition turns into a material problem. Focus is identified as a class position, a position of ease and privilege, while being out of focus lowers one's value as an image.

The contemporary hierarchy of images, however, is not only based on sharpness, but also and primarily on resolution. Just look at any electronics store and this system, described by Harun Farocki in a notable 2007 interview, becomes immediately apparent.In the class society of images, cinema takes on the role of a flagship store. In flagship stores high-end products are marketed in an upscale environment. More affordable derivatives of the same images circulate as DVDs, on broadcast television or online, as poor images.

Obviously, a high-resolution image looks more brilliant and impressive, more mimetic and magic, more scary and seductive than a poor one. It is more rich, so to speak. Now, even consumer formats are increasingly adapting to the tastes of cineastes and esthetes, who insisted on 35 mm film as a guarantee of pristine visuality. The insistence upon analog film as the sole medium of visual importance resounded throughout discourses on cinema, almost regardless of their ideological inflection. It never mattered that these high-end economies of film production were (and still are) firmly anchored in systems of national culture, capitalist studio production, the cult of mostly male genius, and the original version, and thus are often conservative in their very structure. Resolution was fetishized as if its lack amounted to castration of the author. The cult of film gauge dominated even independent film production. The rich image established its own set of hierarchies, with new technologies offering more and more possibilities to creatively degrade it.

2. Resurrection (as Poor Images)

But insisting on rich images also had more serious consequences. A speaker at a recent conference on the film essay refused to show clips from a piece by Humphrey Jennings because no proper film projection was available. Although there was at the speaker's disposal a perfectly standard DVD player and video projector, the audience was left to imagine what those images might have looked like.

In this case the invisibility of the image was more or less voluntary and based on aesthetic premises. But it has a much more general equivalent based on the consequences of neoliberal policies. Twenty or even thirty years ago, the neoliberal restructuring of media production began slowly obscuring non-commercial imagery, to the point where experimental and essayistic cinema became almost invisible. As it became prohibitively expensive to keep these works circulating in cinemas, so were they also deemed too marginal to be broadcast on television. Thus they slowly disappeared not just from cinemas, but from the public sphere as well. Video essays and experimental films remained for the most part unseen save for some rare screenings in metropolitan film museums or film clubs, projected in their original resolution before disappearing again into the darkness of the archive.

This development was of course connected to the neoliberal radicalization of the concept of culture as commodity, to the commercialization of cinema, its dispersion into multiplexes, and the marginalization of independent filmmaking. It was also connected to the restructuring of global media industries and the establishment of monopolies over the audiovisual in certain countries or territories. In this way, resistant or non-conformist visual matter disappeared from the surface into an underground of alternative archives and collections, kept alive only by a network of committed organizations and individuals, who would circulate bootlegged VHS copies amongst themselves. Sources for these were extremely rare-tapes moved from hand to hand, depending on word of mouth, within circles of friends and colleagues. With the possibility to stream video online, this condition started to dramatically change. An increasing number of rare materials reappeared on publicly accessible platforms, some of them carefully curated (Ubuweb) and some just a pile of stuff (YouTube).

At present, there are at least twenty torrents of Chris Marker's film essays available online. If you want a retrospective, you can have it. But the economy of poor images is about more than just downloads: you can keep the files, watch them again, even reedit or improve them if you think it necessary. And the results circulate. Blurred AVI files of half-forgotten masterpieces are exchanged on semi-secret P2P platforms. Clandestine cell-phone videos smuggled out of museums are broadcast on YouTube. DVDs of artists' viewing copies are bartered. Many works of avant-garde, essayistic, and non-commercial cinema have been resurrected as poor images. Whether they like it or not.

3. Privatization and Piracy

That rare prints of militant, experimental, and classical works of cinema as well as video art reappear as poor images is significant on another level. Their situation reveals much more than the content or appearance of the images themselves: it also reveals the conditions of their marginalization, the constellation of social forces leading to their online circulation as poor images. Poor images are poor because they are not assigned any value within the class society of images-their status as illicit or degraded grants them exemption from its criteria. Their lack of resolution attests to their appropriation and displacement.

Obviously, this condition is not only connected to the neoliberal restructuring of media production and digital technology; it also has to do with the post-socialist and postcolonial restructuring of nation states, their cultures, and their archives. While some nation states are dismantled or fall apart, new cultures and traditions are invented and new histories created. This obviously also affects film archives-in many cases, a whole heritage of film prints is left without its supporting framework of national culture. As I once observed in the case of a film museum in Sarajevo, the national archive can find its next life in the form of a video-rental store. Pirate copies seep out of such archives through disorganized privatization. On the other hand, even the British Library sells off its contents online at astronomical prices.

As Kodwo Eshun has noted, poor images circulate partly in the void left by state-cinema organizations who find it too difficult to operate as a 16/35-mm archive or to maintain any kind of distribution infrastructure in the contemporary era. From this perspective, the poor image reveals the decline and degradation of the film essay, or indeed any experimental and non-commercial cinema, which in many places was made possible because the production of culture was considered a task of the state. Privatization of media production gradually grew more important than state controlled/sponsored media production. But, on the other hand, the rampant privatization of intellectual content, along with online marketing and commodification, also enable piracy and appropriation; it gives rise to the circulation of poor images.

4. Imperfect Cinema

The emergence of poor images reminds one of a classic Third Cinema manifesto, For an Imperfect Cinema, by Juan García Espinosa, written in Cuba in the late 1960s. Espinosa argues for an imperfect cinema because, in his words, "perfect cinema-technically and artistically masterful-is almost always reactionary cinema." The imperfect cinema is one that strives to overcome the divisions of labor within class society. It merges art with life and science, blurring the distinction between consumer and producer, audience and author. It insists upon its own imperfection, is popular but not consumerist, committed without becoming bureaucratic.

In his manifesto, Espinosa also reflects on the promises of new media. He clearly predicts that the development of video technology will jeopardize the elitist position of traditional filmmakers and enable some sort of mass film production: an art of the people. Like the economy of poor images, imperfect cinema diminishes the distinctions between author and audience and merges life and art. Most of all, its visuality is resolutely compromised: blurred, amateurish, and full of artifacts.

In some way, the economy of poor images corresponds to the description of imperfect cinema, while the description of perfect cinema represents rather the concept of cinema as a flagship store. But the real and contemporary imperfect cinema is also much more ambivalent and affective than Espinosa had anticipated. On the one hand, the economy of poor images, with its immediate possibility of worldwide distribution and its ethics of remix and appropriation, enables the participation of a much larger group of producers than ever before. But this does not mean that these opportunities are only used for progressive ends. Hate speech, spam, and other rubbish make their way through digital connections as well. Digital communication has also become one of the most contested markets-a zone that has long been subjected to an ongoing original accumulation and to massive (and, to a certain extent, successful) attempts at privatization.

The networks in which poor images circulate thus constitute both a platform for a fragile new common interest and a battleground for commercial and national agendas. They contain experimental and artistic material, but also incredible amounts of porn and paranoia. While the territory of poor images allows access to excluded imagery, it is also permeated by the most advanced commodification techniques. While it enables the users' active participation in the creation and distribution of content, it also drafts them into production. Users become the editors, critics, translators, and (co-)authors of poor images.

Poor images are thus popular images-images that can be made and seen by the many. They express all the contradictions of the contemporary crowd: its opportunism, narcissism, desire for autonomy and creation, its inability to focus or make up its mind, its constant readiness for transgression and simultaneous submission. Altogether, poor images present a snapshot of the affective condition of the crowd, its neurosis, paranoia, and fear, as well as its craving for intensity, fun, and distraction. The condition of the images speaks not only of countless transfers and reformattings, but also of the countless people who cared enough about them to convert them over and over again, to add subtitles, reedit, or upload them.

In this light, perhaps one has to redefine the value of the image, or, more precisely, to create a new perspective for it. Apart from resolution and exchange value, one might imagine another form of value defined by velocity, intensity, and spread. Poor images are poor because they are heavily compressed and travel quickly. They lose matter and gain speed. But they also express a condition of dematerialization, shared not only with the legacy of conceptual art but above all with contemporary modes of semiotic production. Capital's semiotic turn, as described by Felix Guattari, plays in favor of the creation and dissemination of compressed and flexible data packages that can be integrated into ever-newer combinations and sequences.

This flattening-out of visual content-the concept-in-becoming of the images-positions them within a general informational turn, within economies of knowledge that tear images and their captions out of context into the swirl of permanent capitalist deterritorialization. The history of conceptual art describes this dematerialization of the art object first as a resistant move against the fetish value of visibility. Then, however, the dematerialized art object turns out to be perfectly adapted to the semioticization of capital, and thus to the conceptual turn of capitalism. In a way, the poor image is subject to a similar tension. On the one hand, it operates against the fetish value of high resolution. On the other hand, this is precisely why it also ends up being perfectly integrated into an information capitalism thriving on compressed attention spans, on impression rather than immersion, on intensity rather than contemplation, on previews rather than screenings.

5. Comrade, what is your visual bond today?

But, simultaneously, a paradoxical reversal happens. The circulation of poor images creates a circuit, which fulfills the original ambitions of militant and (some) essayistic and experimental cinema-to create an alternative economy of images, an imperfect cinema existing inside as well as beyond and under commercial media streams. In the age of file-sharing, even marginalized content circulates again and reconnects dispersed worldwide audiences.

The poor image thus constructs anonymous global networks just as it creates a shared history. It builds alliances as it travels, provokes translation or mistranslation, and creates new publics and debates. By losing its visual substance it recovers some of its political punch and creates a new aura around it. This aura is no longer based on the permanence of the "original," but on the transience of the copy. It is no longer anchored within a classical public sphere mediated and supported by the frame of the nation state or corporation, but floats on the surface of temporary and dubious data pools. By drifting away from the vaults of cinema, it is propelled onto new and ephemeral screens stitched together by the desires of dispersed spectators.

The circulation of poor images thus creates "visual bonds," as Dziga Vertov once called them. This "visual bond" was, according to Vertov, supposed to link the workers of the world with each other. He imagined a sort of communist, visual, Adamic language that could not only inform or entertain, but also organize its viewers. In a sense, his dream has come true, if mostly under the rule of a global information capitalism whose audiences are linked almost in a physical sense by mutual excitement, affective attunement, and anxiety.

But there is also the circulation and production of poor images based on cell phone cameras, home computers, and unconventional forms of distribution. Its optical connections-collective editing, file sharing, or grassroots distribution circuits-reveal erratic and coincidental links between producers everywhere, which simultaneously constitute dispersed audiences.

The circulation of poor images feeds into both capitalist media assembly lines and alternative audiovisual economies. In addition to a lot of confusion and stupefaction, it also possibly creates disruptive movements of thought and affect. The circulation of poor images thus initiates another chapter in the historical genealogy of nonconformist information circuits: Vertov's "visual bonds," the internationalist workers pedagogies that Peter Weiss described in The Aesthetics of Resistance, the circuits of Third Cinema and Tricontinentalism, of non-aligned filmmaking and thinking. The poor image-ambivalent as its status may be-thus takes its place in the genealogy of carbon-copied pamphlets, cine-train agit-prop films, underground video magazines and other nonconformist materials, which aesthetically often used poor materials. Moreover, it reactualizes many of the historical ideas associated with these circuits, among others Vertov's idea of the visual bond.

Imagine somebody from the past with a beret asking you, "Comrade, what is your visual bond today?"

You might answer: it is this link to the present.

6. Now!

The poor image embodies the afterlife of many former masterpieces of cinema and video art. It has been expelled from the sheltered paradise that cinema seems to have once been. After being kicked out of the protected and often protectionist arena of national culture, discarded from commercial circulation, these works have become travelers in a digital no-man's land, constantly shifting their resolution and format, speed and media, sometimes even losing names and credits along the way.

Now many of these works are back-as poor images, I admit. One could of course argue that this is not the real thing, but then-please, anybody-show me this real thing.

The poor image is no longer about the real thing-the originary original. Instead, it is about its own real conditions of existence: about swarm circulation, digital dispersion, fractured and flexible temporalities. It is about defiance and appropriation just as it is about conformism and exploitation.

In short: it is about reality.

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In Defense of the Poor Image - Journal #10

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How Don Cherry Employed the Metaphysical Body-Space to Inspire Communal Creativity

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Don Cherry, sitting with donso n’goni between legs, is explaining the spatiotemporal confluence his body-space affords. It’s a provisional perspective, subject to change, a now-then, here-there, th…

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Spicy Pink Tea | Glasgow Short Film Festival

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JASLEEN KAUR
DOWSER 3: Jugalbandi2020
Jasleen Kaur and Alia Syed

DOWSER Issue 3 features artist-filmmakers Jasleen Kaur and Alia Syed's "Jugalbandi." A special tête-bêche double issue, two entwined texts respond to the shared experience of growing up Scottish and South Asian in Glasgow. Departing from each other's moving image practice, they express the pain of desiring to find oneself in a culture whose colonial campaign has sought to flatten and petrify. Rhythm, lyric and voice are offered as tools for private resistance, for spell-breaking.

DOWSER, notes on artists moving image in Scotland is a series of newly commissioned essays, interview transcripts and archival materials which makes available, for the first time, a collated set of resources from which we might begin to plot a history of artists' moving image in Scotland. Conceived as the necessary groundwork for a critically underreported field, this series hopes to share fragments, positions and testimonies that articulate the development of a now ubiquitous artform with a vivid and unique history in Scotland.

DOWSER is a non-profit project. Each chapbook is released as an open access online PDF and in a limited print edition. The sale of each print issue is inclusive of a minimum £2.00 donation to the Scottish Refugee Council.
made with Lay Theme

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JASLEEN KAUR DOWSER 3: Jugalbandi2020Jasleen Kaur and Alia Syed DOWSER Issue 3 features artist-filmmakers Jasleen Kaur and Alia Syed's "Jugalbandi." A special tête-bêche double issue, two entwined texts respond to the shared experience of growing up Scottish and South Asian in Glasgow.

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Asuf Ishaq
2 - 22 February 2023

Preview: Wednesday 1 February, 5 - 7pm (Book on Eventbrite)
Exhibition: *Mon - Sat, 10am - 4.30pm

‘Articles of Home’ is the first solo exhibition in Glasgow by Birmingham-based artist Asuf Ishaq. His wide range of practice encompasses sculpture, video and sound which unravels personal narratives, emotions, sacrifices and adventure.

Ishaq draws on his experience of migration as a child and the stories of his parents of migration. He unfolds the geographical and cultural dislocation, by revisiting personal archives and reimagining the experience, weaving memories and imagined time, place and relationships. He incorporates land and soil, recognising the symbolic significance as both the beginning and endpoint; a transtemporal portal, an archive of migration. Articles of Home explores Ishaq’s personal journey of becoming, inventing and re-inventing himself, through film and installation. The exhibition is an entanglement of displacement, fragmented narratives and technologies, and a weaving of fiction and non-fiction to unravel and reimagine experience.

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intrinsic

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make photopolymer etchings of from stills

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The project 'Black Sheep' refers to the discourse within my own biography, this project explores my dual cultural identity and my feelings of displacement within the rural Scottish landscape.

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shaving childs head
MUNDAN

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Notes From Tutorial

Mike Stubbs

- Utilitarianism
- found objects
- relationship w/ subject + media
- identity
- biography
- place and time
- Anthroposcene

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'My practice is concerned with themes of embodiment, fragmentation, displacement, migration, post-colonialism and memory, often presenting the physical diasporic body as an evolving archive that transmits experience with cultural and political meaning. My work unravels across spaces and narratives to reveal new meanings and draw out personal histories. Working with narration, words, sound and images, I deploy fiction, non-fiction, archival material, storytelling and personal memories in works that manifests as sculpture, moving image, installation, sound and photography.'

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My practice is concerned with themes of embodiment, fragmentation, displacement, migration, post-colonialism and memory, often presenting the physical diasporic…

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!!!!!

A disorientating and absurd world, where the boundaries between fact and fiction blur, and the undercurrents of hysteria, rage, euphoria and violence lurk beneath the surface, erupting in ever more frequent outbursts. The Lost Head & The Bird explores a frighteningly fast-changing, post-truth world where actions are fuelled by appeals to emotions and facts are increasingly ignored.

I think of the work as a balloon into which I keep blowing air. What one sees is just the skin of the balloon that keeps stretching. But at some point if I don't stop blowing air into it, that balloon will burst. What I want to do with the work is to take you to that point right before, from where you might start to anticipate the bursting of the balloon.

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A disorientating and absurd world, where the boundaries between fact and fiction blur, and the undercurrents of hysteria, rage, euphoria and violence lurk beneath the surface, erupting in ever more frequent outbursts. The Lost Head & The Bird explores a frighteningly fast-changing, post-truth world where actions are fuelled by appeals to emotions and facts are increasingly ignored.

I think of the work as a balloon into which I keep blowing air. What one sees is just the skin of the balloon that keeps stretching. But at some point if I don't stop blowing air into it, that balloon will burst. What I want to do with the work is to take you to that point right before, from where you might start to anticipate the bursting of the balloon.

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A disorientating and absurd world, where the boundaries between fact and fiction blur, and the undercurrents of hysteria, rage, euphoria and violence lurk beneath the surface, erupting in ever more frequent outbursts. The Lost Head & The Bird explores a frighteningly fast-changing, post-truth world where actions are fuelled by appeals to emotions and facts are increasingly ignored.

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intersections between self realisation and self destruction

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Charlotte Prodger | Turner Prize Winner 2018 | TateShots

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sweater curse

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I explored the concept of my own personal representation through symbolism. exploring my own identity through nostalgia and memory. This project explores the intersections between self-realisation and self-destruction. This work explores my challenges growing up on a farm as a mixed-race queer woman. I explored my identity within the Anthropocene beckoning the question, where do I belong?

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ecology

simianization

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dry point etching,
experimenting with ink application

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'Thinking thought usually amounts to withdrawing into a
dimensionless place in which the idea of thought alone
persists. But thought in reality spaces itself out into the world.
It informs the imaginary of peoPles, their varied poetics, which
it then transforms, meaning, in them its risk becomes realised.
Culture is the precaution of those who claim to think thought
but who steer clear of its chaotic journey. Evolving cultures
infer Relation, the overstepping that grounds their unity diversity.
Thought draws the imaginary of the past: a knowledge
becoming. One cannot stop it to assess it nor isolate it to
transmit it. It is sharing one can never not retain, nor ever, in
standing still, boast about. '

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stills from film

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What kind of clothes am i wearing, what is my relationship with these items, What is associated with my identity through clothing.

What kind of clothing is associated with my identity.
what is the relationship the , material has with the land and my identity.