June 5th - August 28th, 2010

 

 

 

1 July - 29 August 2010

 

Calvert22 is delighted to present an exhibition of work by Russian artist Olga Chernysheva. This will be the largest exhibition of Chernysheva's work to date in the UK and will feature a selection of her video works, photographic series and watercolours.

 

Olga Chernysheva captures everyday life in post-Communist Russia and her subjects are the ordinary people of Moscow. Her works investigate the relationship between figure and landscape and the place of artist and viewer in regarding the documented image. Moving away from the tradition of Soviet Realism, Chernysheva seeks to play games with visual culture, often critiquing and satirizing the power relations that were represented in the official art of the Soviet Union. Chernysheva observes closely to uncover and chronicle the humour and contradictions that underpin Russian society as it goes through a long period of upheaval.

 

In two black and white photographic series, Chernysheva documents moments in the lives of ordinary Russians, escalator attendants on the Moscow underground network, (On Duty, 2007) or Russian security personnel (Guards, 2009). Through the objective and dispassionate nature of her portraiture Chernysheva exposes the fact that behind each expressionless face lies the depth and complexity of the human mind. She uncovers the hidden human potential within figures isolated in a monotonous world governed by minor responsibility, over which they have little control.

 

An important part of Chernysheva's practice remains drawing and painting. Her series of watercolours Blue-Yellow, 2009 depicts market traders alongside their stalls and wares. These works record a way of life still prevalent in Moscow today and refer back to Soviet times overtaken by the advance of aggressive capitalism that keeps many Muscovites marginalized and impoverished.

 

This exhibition will also include two video works: Russian Museum, 2003 and Intermissions of the Heart, 2009. The latter draws direct inspiration from the poetic melancholy of 19th century Russian artist Pavel Fedotov's painting Encore, More Encore!

 

Olga Chernysheva (b. 1962) lives and works in Moscow. In 2001 she represented Russia at the 49th Venice Biennale and has been shortlisted for this year's Artes Mundi Prize. Her work is held in major international museum collections, as well as in private and corporate collections.

 

Recent solo exhibitions include: 'Inner Dialog', Bank Austria Kunstforum, Vienna; 'Present Past', 3rd Moscow Biennale, Baibakova Art Projects, Moscow; 'Adventure Istiklal', Istanbul Biennial, Yapi Kredi Kazim Taskent Art Gallery; 'Caesuras', Galerie Volker Diehl, Berlin(all 2009); 'Acquaintances', White Space Gallery, London; 'After Eisenstein' with Boris Mikhailov, Lunds Konsthall, Sweden; 'New Works', Foxy Production, New York (all 2008); 'Involutions', Catherine Bastide Gallery, Brussels (both 2007); 'Panorama', Stella Art Gallery, Moscow; 'Sites', Biennale of Sydney, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney (both 2006); 'Fields', Moscow Multimedia Complex for Contemporary Arts, Moscow (2005); 'The Happiness Zone', The State Russian Museum, Saint Petersburg (2004).

 

Recent group exhibitions include: 'Futurologia', Garage: Center for Contemporary Culture, Moscow (2010); 'Dress Codes', Third ICP Triennial of Photography and Video. International Centre of Photography Triennial, New York; 'Future depends on you. New Rules', Moscow Museum of Modern Art, Moscow; 'Moving Stills', Musée d'Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean, Luxembourg; 'A Letter Concerning Enthusiasm', AR/GE Kunst, Bolzano, Italy; 'On the Line', Centre for Contemporary Photography, Melbourne (all 2009); 'Russian Dreams', Bass Museum of Art, Miami Beach; 'Emergency Drawings', ETIS_NL, Amsterdam (both 2008).

 

Image:
OLGA CHERNYSHEVA
GUARD, 2009
Gelatin silver fibre print, 150 x 100cm
Courtesy: Galerie Volker Diehl, Berlin; Foxy Production, New York
© Olga Chernysheva

 

 

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JULY 2 - 31, 2010

 

Guy Ben-Ner, born 1969 at Ramat Gan, showed 2005 at the Israeli Pavilion at Venice Biennial. His award-winning shortfilms have been introduced at ArtFilmBiennial Cologne, at International Short Film Festival Oberhausen (2005), at Skulptur Projekte Münster (2007) and at Biennials in Liverpool and Shanghai (2008).

 

Together with his family, the artist produces ideosyncratic and comical short films - partly shot at home in his kitchen or in the nursery, partly in public parks in New York City or even at IKEA stores.

 

Konrad Fischer Galerie proudly presents Ben-Ner's latest films: If only it was as easy to banish hunger by rubbing the belly as it is to masturbate and Drop the Monkey. The road movie If only it was... (2009) - commissioned by the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art - tells about a somewhat absurd relationship between the two protagonists - the artist and the museum director. Almost incidentally, famous couples in literature are quoted: Don Quixote and Sancho Pansa, Wladimir and Estragon, Dante and Virgil from the Divine Comedy.

 

Drop the Monkey (2009) has been commissioned by the New York performance festival PERFORMA. The "film performance" is a dialogue of the artist with himself. But between speech and answer there is a real distance - the return flights back and forth from Berlin to Tel Aviv. The film has been continuously shot without any cuts. The script is written in form of a poem in Hebrew language (with English subtitles). The borderlines between public and private, between life and art are impressively debated in this short film.

 

Parallel to the show the Düsseldorf movie theatre BAMBI, Klosterstraße 38, 40211 Düsseldorf, Tel. 0211-356335 presents on Saturday, July 3, 2010, 4:30 pm a Mini-Retrospective of early Guy Ben-Ner films (1999 - 2003). Guy Ben-Ner's video installation Wild Boy (2004) will be on show at Museum Ludwig, Cologne, until the end of October 2010. Kunsthalle Mainz will start a solo show of Guy Ben-Ner's works on August 20, 2010.

 

 

 

June 24 - August 6, 2010

 

Almost Romantic brings together two young artists from completely different backgrounds. Cecilia Nygren hails from Sweden, while Gianfranco Foschino was born and raised in Chile. Their video works included in this exhibition resonate with each other by virtue of an aesthetic that is neither geo-political nor cultural, but is nonetheless felt in the works selected for this project; yet this correspondence doesn't derive from their artist processes, for each artist works in a substantively different way.

 

Nygren, for instance, makes what could be called experimental if not impressionistic narratives. Sometimes elements of a work are projected as a single channel piece as in Tom (2010), included in this exhibition. Sometimes segments are projected in screens positioned in different spaces altogether. Foschino on the other hand makes single channel videos in a manner that echoes certain Structuralist or concept-based films of the sixties, although the result looks nothing like these antecedents. In his work, shoot locations are sought for their aesthetic and potential for on-screen activity. (In the case of Home, the village where it was filmed was destroyed in the earthquake of February.) Foschino then leaves the place where he set up the camera, leaving the camera still running. After what may be several hours, he returns with his footage to the editing suite, saving what is for him the best section. The final piece contains no edits; there is no pretense that the author of this work is somehow absent, yet we are left with the result of a partial, chance operation.

 

Nygren's Tom derives from her interest in the Nordic Romantic tradition of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Her choice of subject matter, however, evinces today's more global context. Her hero(ine), Tom, is taken from a true-to-life story of Tom Thompson, an early Canadian pleine air painter of the 1920s, who exists, still, as legend after his untimely disappearance in the wilds of Algonquin Park, a place that had been a source for so much of his art.

 

The Romantic tradition is also inherent in Foschino's works included here with their snapshots of life in various villages of central and southern Chile. The subtlety of the movement of the hens in Home (2009) and the seemingly choreographed action in Q.E.P.D. (2010) and La Fenétre (2008) along with the environment in Nygren's Tom are as sublime as what the practitioners of historical Romanticism had hoped to achieve in their work.

 

Gianfranco Foschino was born in Santiago, Chile in 1983. He was educated at UBA University, Buenos Aires, Argentina, and received a degree in cinema in 2008 from UNIACC University, Santiago. Group shows and screenings of his work include "Still Moving," curated by Pedro Torres, Stuffinablank (2010) "Home," The 23rd Images Festival, Toronto (2010); "Less Time Than Space" at the Oi Futuro, Rio de Janeiro and the Palais de Glace, Buenos Aires (2010); "La Espera, Home, Barbie and La Fenetra," 7th Les Inattendus Film Festival, Lyon, France (2010); "Le Espera," 6th Cinema Iliteraires, Brussels (2009); and the 4th International Streaming Festival, The Hague (2009).

 

Cecilia Nygren was born in 1980 in Skurtrask, Sweden, and was educated at the Royal University College of Fine Arts in Stockholm. Her work was recently included in "Girls! Girls! Girls - Through the lens of the female gaze," La Central, Montral (2010); and "One-Minute-Academy," Bastard, Stockholm (2009). She currently is in the residency program at the Banff Centre, Alberta.

 

Image:
Gianfranco Foschino and Cecilia Nygren 2010
Almost Romantic, installation view

 

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