I Use Perfume to Occupy
More Space

October 7 – January 3
Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil
Av. Revolución 1608
San Ángel
01000, México, D.F
55 50 62 60
55 50 39 83 ext. 120
http://www.museodeartecarrillogil.com

I Use Perfume to Occupy More Space at Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil

This approaches the institutional space in a self-critical manner. With the purpose of reviewing the social mechanisms that generate the belief in the value of artistic creation, I Use Perfume to Occupy More Space intersperses commercial products, theoretical and literature tomes, films, cartoons, works from the MACG collection, and other contemporary artworks. Such a grouping reveals the use of artistic references in advertising to endorse and characterize commercial products and insert these in the worlds of fashion, politics, and social life in general. These records are scrutinized through artistic projects that question such a legitimization mechanism, as well as the inherent vanity of the art-world system. Continue reading »

 

Thu, October 22 , 2009 – Mon, April 5 , 2010

FEEDFORWARD – The Angel of History addresses the current moment in history where the wreckage of political conflict and economic inequality is piling up, while globalized forces—largely enabled by the “progress” of digital information technologies—inexorably feed us forward. The title references Paul Klee’s painting Angelus Novus, which Walter Benjamin famously interpreted as an “angel of history” transfixed by the wreckage of the past that is piling up in front of him while being propelled backwards into the uncertain future by a storm from paradise (progress).

The exhibition, curated by (Artistic Director of the 01SJ Biennial) and (Director of the Media Studies Graduate Program, New School, NY; Adjunct of New Media Arts, Whitney Museum of American Art) features 29 artworks by 27 artists and artist teams. The projects are presented, as if in the rear view mirror of progress, in sections relating to five themes: the “wreckage” of the 20th century created by wars and conflict; the countermeasures of surveillance and repression that the state as well as global capital set up in an to attempt to maintain control; the aesthetics and symbolic language of the media of our times; the forces of economic globalization such as outsourcing and migration; and the possibilities of reconstruction and agency. Continue reading »

 

Media Links

http://founder.china.cn/art/zixun/2009-07/25/content_3038757.htm

http://finance.sina.com.cn/stock/t/20090725/01226527262.shtml

http://exhibit.artron.net/zl.php?zlid=8554
http://gallery.artron.net/index.php

http://exhibit.artron.net/zl.php?zlid=8554

http://cul.sohu.com/20090622/n264680901.shtml

http://www.u2lux.com/2009/0622/12368_2.html

http://www.ionly.com.cn/nbo/zhanlan/zhanlaninfo.aspx?id=2345

http://www.art-ba-ba.com/blog/U/Show.asp?/_articleid/26199.html

http://www.art218.com/bbs/thread-51998-1-1.html

http://news.99ys.com/20090726/article–090726–27910_1.shtml

http://www.cafa.com.cn/news/?N=313

http://art-here.net/html/av/7969.html

http://www.artlinkart.com/exhibition/overview/795auCmo

http://www.artcalendr.com/index.cfm/events/calendar.eventDetail/title_id/5947786300/event/Postcapital%20-%20Archive%201989%20-%202001

http://www.soitu.es/soitu/2009/07/25/info/1248522828_378928.html

http://www.cpanet.cn/cms/html/zixun/yingzhan/20090723/38313.html

http://www.youthchina.org/?action-viewnews-itemid-2155

http://gallery.artxun.com/32/3163-news-8361.shtml

http://www.thebeijinger.com/events/2009/Jul/POSTCAPITAL-ARCHIVE-1989-2001

http://www.cityweekend.com.cn/beijing/events/48892/

 

Sophie MacKinnon, City Week

Time, as Albert Einstein famously pointed out, is relative. And so too are our perceptions, a point that artist Daniel Garcia Andújar highlights in his exhibit “ 1989-2001.” The ambitious seeks to document the opposition of political, ideological and social forces over a volatile 13-year period.

For Andújar the post-capital era began with the fall of the Berlin Wall in ‘89 and ended with the falling of the Twin Towers in 2001 (note the exhibition title). Attempting to archive those years with over 250,000 documents, he juxtaposes key issues and the agendas that created them against our perspectives.

You will find a visual media “timeline” of clever advertising and journalism pairings circling the room. An oil tanker spillage, leaking waste and devastating a shoreline, is matched with an ad for clothing company Diesel, in which a leggy model balanced at the helm of a speedboat tears through the ocean towards you. A post-capital archive it might be, but it feels like a record of human fear in different guises.

Everything in the exhibition was gathered from the Internet and definitions supplementing each area are sourced from Wikipedia. This is a comment on the nature of archives, media and information itself–accessible now in overwhelming quantity but without a voice to explain.

Postcapital is more a provocative media onslaught than insightful reflection on recent times—much like the Internet itself. Go armed with a robust familiarity of key ‘90s political figures, events and issues, not a hangover.


Where: Iberia Center for Contemporary Art When: Through Aug 30 Web: www.iberiart.org

 

The project – lines of work

Despite being presented as a unitary project, La comunitat inconfessable has three different lines of action:

1. An presenting the ideas generated by each of the participants (Sitesize/Joan Vila-Puig and Elvira Pujol, Technolo­gies To The People/Daniel G. Andújar and Archivo F.X./Pedro G. Romero) using the metaphor of a library as a reference point or visual interface. Thus, each intervention constitutes a “deconstructed” approach -i.e., distorted, unconstructed, destroyed or under construction- to this space of knowledge, learning and theatricality that is Borges’ interminable library, which functions here as a sort of meeting point of the “community of readers” urged by Blanchot.

2. A book constituting a kind of polyphony of essays using texts by Maurice Blanchot, Giorgio Agamben, Jean Luc Nancy, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Lars Iyer, Peter Pál Pelbart and Marina Garcés that were published in different contexts, periods and media, but which, never the less, pose shared questions such as: What is the common? In which political or mental space is the notion of community developed? With which elements is it confronted? On which does it feed?

Interrupting this speculative drift around the question about the communal, there appear three insertions by each of the participants in the project – Sitesize, Technologies To The People and Archivo F.X. These insertion points include a written presentation of their respective artistic ideas, a visual work specifically conceived for the book, linked to the themes presented in museographic format, and a conversation between each artist and various philosophers, anthropologists, historians, geographers and curators (Gerard Horta, Francesc Muñoz, Eduard Masjuan, Iris Dressler, Jacob Lillemose, the Todoazen collective, Juan José Lahuerta and Manuel Delgado) with whom they share the same ideological and conceptual concerns.

3. La comunitat inconfessable project is completed by a website that will document it visually and textually, and operate as a vast archival collection around the notion of the communal from the perspective of philosophy, anthropology, the social sciences and art, among other disciplines.

The (1989-2001), www.postcapital.org, was presented for the first time in 2006 at the La Virreina Centre de la Imatge in Barcelona as part of the Postcapital. Politics, the city, money project, together with the work of artist Carlos Garaicoa and essayist Iván de la Nuez. Since then this multimedia proposal in process—that not only allows user consultations but also copying and even modification—has gone on expanding in successive exhibitions, workshops and interventions in public space carried out in Oslo, Santiago de Chile, Bremen, Montreal, Istanbul, Dortmund and, more recently, at the Württembergischer Kunstvereinin Stuttgart as an anthology.

In its current configuration, the archive contains more than 250,000 documents compiled from the Internet by Daniel G. Andújar over nearly a decade of creative work. These materials, among which publications, video and audio clips and image banks are to be found, sketch out a vast examination of the geopolitical transformations and the state of the communist and capitalist ideologies in the period spanning from the fall of the Berlin Wall to the attack on the Twin Towers in New York. Continue reading »

 
 

1969–1979:

Subversive Practices
Art under Conditions of Political Repression
60s–80s / South America / Europe

Württembergischer Kunstverein Stuttgart
May 30 – August 2, 2009

Curators: Valentín Roma, Daniel García Andújar

Ricardo Bofill/Taller de Arquitectura, Eugeni Bonet (), COAC Archiv, Enric Franch (), Antoni Muntadas, Pere Portabella, Grup de Treball, Sala Vinçon ()

This project sets out to reconstruct the aesthetic and political dimension acquired by conceptual practices in Catalonia during the nineteen-seventies. With this in view, the analysis has been oriented toward a set of proposals developed in a variety of areas—art, architecture, design, film, and education—which nevertheless all shared the same circuits of visibility, closely related language and attitudes, and certain ideological positions that were characterized by their spirit of protest and antagonism. The core of the project consists of five pieces by the Grup de Treball that in some sense point to the disciplines mentioned above. In order to contextualize these, a heterogeneous archive has been put together, drawn from the documentary holdings of (amongst others) the COAC (Association of Architects of Catalonia), the Sala Vinçon gallery, the FAD decorative arts association, and the Elisava and Eina design schools, along with a number of art projects—the film Esquizo (Schizo) by the Taller de Arquitectura and Reflexões sobre a morte (Reflections on Death) by Antoni Muntadas, among others—and also a selection of visual and bibliographical documents from those years. (Valentín Roma, Daniel García Andújar) Continue reading »

Jun 112009
 

Wealth of Nations
(6–14th June, Trg Slobode, )
Conference (7th and 8th June, SNP, kamerna scena)

Wealth of Nations is a part of the Cinema City festival and consists of an exhibition and a conference. The term ‘Wealth of Nations’ is the title of the seminal book by the Scottish economist Adam Smith, in which he establishes and defends the basics of Liberal Economic Policy. Liberal Economics experienced its peak in the 1990s after the concept of Real Socialism had failed and the global free market had been established. This economy, however, has entered a period of deep crisis in the past few months and it might, for a shorter or longer period, affect the stability of societies all over the planet. The topic of ‘Wealth of Nations’ this year will delve into the influences that the Economic and Financial sectors have on society and consequently, on cultural production.

The aim of both the exhibition and the conference ‘Wealth of Nations’ is to bring together Art, Theory, Social Sciences and Economics, Cultural Studies and Finance in order to discuss the phenomenon of money within different social and historical contexts and meanings. According to its definition money is : a) a measure of value b) a medium of exchange and c) a medium of capital accumulation. The fact is that money is never solely money as a measure of economic value. It is a measure of value that participates in the constitution, and the control and regulation of both the material and nonmaterial (irrational or imaginary) social body/subject and its relations. From such a position, money can be viewed as the basis of social power, as the main element or measure of value, or as a symbolic or numerical abstraction. Continue reading »
 

Başak Şenova’s project, “Lapses,” which is going to be showcased in the Turkish Pavilion during this year’s Venice Biennial, was introduced to the press this week by Şenova and artists of the Ahmet Öğüt and Banu Cennetoğlu.

Şenova explained that the word “lapse” connotes numerous verbs and nouns in English, yet there is no one word that corresponds to it in Turkish. “A lapse in the linear and continuous flow of time implies either a sense of disorientation or a disconnection with our personal surroundings. Only by recognizing such a lapse do we realize our ability to restructure memory in the space and time continuum through an uninterrupted flow, with afterimages that recur by narrations and our senses,” she said, adding that the whole project is based on reconstructing the memory again and again by remembering the past. Continue reading »

May 232009
 

May 23, 2009


La comunitat inconfessable (The Unavowable Community) A project by Valentín Roma with:

Joan Vila-Puig and Elvira Pujol/Sitesize

Daniel G. Andújar/
Pedro G. Romero/Archivo F.X.

http://www.lacomunitatinconfessable.cat Share this announcement on:  Facebook | Delicious | Twitter
Based on the book of the same name by Maurice Blanchot, The Unavowable Community is a proposal that explores the types of social intervention adopted by various artistic practices that are developed around the idea of the communal.

Three different projects have been selected to form part of this project: Sitesize by Joan Vila-Puig and Elvira Pujol, Technologies To The People by Daniel G. Andújar, and Arxiu F.X. by Pedro G. Romero. These projects share communal strategies of transversality and antagonism, in a territory that is difficult to chart, found in the cracks in both the institution of art and models of cultural productivity. (100) Continue reading »