11 April 2007

Photography / Film & Video April 2007

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Max Protetch, New York BrotfabrikGalerie, Berlin YANCEY RICHARDSON, New York Foxy Production, New York Caprice Horn, Berlin BUNKIER SZTUKI, Krakow, Poland Next from re-title.com         sign up!

Max Protetch, New York CHEN QIULIN Max Protetch gallery is pleased to announce Chen Qulin's first solo exhibition outside of China. Chen Qiulin is a young Chinese artist whose performances, photographs, and videos incorporate sculptural elements and a dramatic, intuitive approach to the changing Chinese landscape. Her work addresses the urbanization of developing China, and deals both with its rapidly changing geographical and urban conditions and the psychological impact these changes effect on its culture. The exhibition includes a survey of work made in the last several years and a series of new photographs and sculptures that center on the idea of the city as a magnet for the dreams of a displaced culture. Over the past four years, Chen Qiulin's work has documented and recorded changes resulting from the Three Gorges Project. Ranging from a series of photographs set in her demolished family home to a monumental effort that resulted in a 16 ton structure being transplanted from Sichuan Province before its flooding to a gallery in Beijing, Chen Qiulin's works have created, in her words, a focused record of "this period in history which I have experienced." The exhibition utilizes two motifs that symbolize the effect rapid urban development has had on contemporary Chinese culture. She memorializes the common brick balcony, a site which once served as the locus for communal dreams of the future, but has virtually disappeared due to high-rise construction. Also prominent in the show are cheap plastic flowers, a ubiquitous means in China to beautify one's home, which here remind us that even dreams for a better life in China are simulated. The exhibit re-imagines the forces that are transforming modern China: personal, local, mythic, and grand all at once. Image: Chen Qiulin Garden No. 4 (2007) 50x59.8 inches edition of 8 33.1x39.4 inches edition of 10. Courtesy of Max Protetch, New York Gallery website Read on... Max Protetch, New York

BrotfabrikGalerie, Berlin Stefan Heyne : Echolot Stefan Heyne’s pictures are far from creating projections by simply reproducing reality or from authentically documenting something “that was there” (Roland Barthes). In his delicately balanced studies of space, the relationship between image and reality is rendered highly questionable and the source of the image is often attenuated to the point of unrecognizability. Heyne seeks sites, spaces, and objects that fit his idea for an image and that lie beyond narrative situations. Fragments of seemingly simple drawers blur somewhere in a painterly distance; their vagueness and monochromatic stock create an uncanny atmosphere devoid of space and site. A crude, basic tone of melancholy permeates everything. The radical reduction of compositional means and the consistent use of vagueness tempts the viewer to inspect the seductive surfaces closely. Heyne alters the accustomed regime of perception. The interplay between the visible and the invisible leads to an almost abstract, timeless image. Heyne crosses the boundaries between photography and painting, materiality and immateriality, the strange and the familiar by surveying spaces of memory. Interiors imperceptibly turn into exteriors and vice versa. In this exploration, art-historical relationships to Minimalism and Surrealism play a strong role. Starting from an especially sharpened perception, Heyne traces the stereotypes, norms, and conventions of the medium of photography, undermining them with his contour-dissolving spatial configurations. He thereby sets his marked and lasting visual signs against the visual avalanche of the mass media. Image: Stefan Heyne LAGER - store 2006 130x120cm (c) Stefan Heyne VG BildKunst Bonn Courtesy Galerie Blickensdorff Artist's website Gallery website Read on...BrotfabrikGalerie, Berlin

YANCEY RICHARDSON, New York Lisa Kereszi : Cheap Thrills Yancey Richardson Gallery is pleased to present Cheap Thrills, an exhibition of photographs by Lisa Kereszi. In this, her second exhibition at the gallery, Kereszi addresses our need for fantasy, glamour and escape. Photographing in movie theatres, haunted houses, strip joints and nightclub lounges, she explores venues of cheap popular entertainment which offer an escape into a realm of sensory fantasy and satisfy our desire to be transported, hoodwinked or tantalized. With a detective's coolly observant eye for the telling detail, Kereszi peels back the illusionism of such spaces to reveal the cheap materials, crude construction and pedestrian theatrics that are the simple ingredients of illusion and shows us how very little we require to buy into the fantasy. The daughter of a junkyard proprietor and a one-time antique dealer, Kereszi relishes the mundane details of the American cultural landscape, transforming them into "semi-abstract images of transcendent beauty" (Art on Paper, May/June 2005). Kereszi was awarded the Baum Award for the Best Emerging American Photographer in 2005 and was featured on the cover of Artnews March 2006 issue. In 2003 the Public Art Fund of New York commissioned her to photograph Governor's Island, resulting in a show at the Municipal Art Society and Mayor Bloomberg's offices. A book on the Governor's Island commission is available through the gallery or D.A.P. Kereszi’s photographs have been exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Berkeley Art Museum, the New Museum, the Aldrich Museum and the Brooklyn Museum of Art. Image: Lisa Kereszi DJ Booth, South Beach, 2002 Chromogenic Print available in 20 x 24, 30 x 40 and 40 x 50 inches editions of 5. Courtesy of Yancey Richardson gallery, New York Gallery website Read on...YANCEY RICHARDSON, New York

Foxy Production, New York OLGA CHERNYSHEVA : ISLE OF SPARKS Isle of Sparks is Moscow-based Olga Chernysheva’s inaugural New York solo exhibition. Chernysheva uses a range of media to produce expressive, penetrating artworks that take contemporary Russian experience as their theme. Her often unwitting subjects are observed negotiating a society in turbulence, where a common sense of a shared future has disintegrated. Her films and photographs transcend their documentary function to lyrically investigate the very fabric of individuality and self- sufficiency, and to expansively meditate on the role of the artist in a time of flux. The exhibition, comprising videos and selections from a number of photographic series, presents a broad range of work produced by Chernysheva in recent years. The Train (2003) is a remarkable video journey through the carriages of a Russian intercity train that recalls the early Realist cinema of Vertov. The stoic passengers and staff seem largely oblivious to the camera-person passing by them, walking toward the back of the train. The video is both an affecting window on contemporary Russia and a shrewd re-working of conventional film-making: the movement through the train and the encounters with different individuals mimic dramatic narrative structure. On Duty (2007) is a group of large black and white photographic portraits on matte paper of uniformed functionaries, who spend their time watching or, perhaps more to the point, solemnly doing nothing. Rather than merely satirizing them and their roles, Chernysheva is interested in capturing their ambivalent and ambiguous gazes. Waiting for the Miracle (2000) is a startling set of photographs of women’s woolen hats taken from behind. Appearing like sea anemones or alien life- forms, these mundane objects are transformed into wondrous beings. As Chernysheva writes, “Usual, familiar images become mysterious and magnetic’; here the prosaic becomes magical. The Anabiosis (2000) photographic series documents people and plants completely wrapped up so they can survive outside in the depths of winter. Ice fishermen, covered totally in plastic to lock out the perilous cold, resemble frozen shrouds or incubators of pod-people. These initially disturbing images have a stark yet expressive quality that stylizes the human form. Windows (2007) is a multi-channel video work, comprising a series of screens of people videotaped through their apartment windows. We voyeuristically and compulsively watch as the inhabitants, oblivious to the camera observing them, iron underwear, argue, party, or feed their cats. These mini-dramas of everyday life, at times resembling soap opera, disturb our notions of how reality should “really” look. Anonymous (2004) is a two channel video work that captures two people outdoors in summertime. In Part I a middle-aged woman changes into her bathing suit in a crowded park to the voice-over of a instructor guiding women in sexual self-massage. In Part II a partly obscured, very drunken man attempts a life and death struggle to open a bottle of vodka. In both videos passersby seem largely oblivious to the main character, even though they are publicly exposing themselves in their different ways. Both videos end with an extreme zoom back, putting into perspective the microscopic size of the slice of life being witnessed. Image : OLGA CHERNYSHEVA ON DUTY (series) 2007 Optical silver gelatin fiber print 135 x 90 cm. / 53.1 x 35.4 in. Edition of 5 + 2AP Courtesy of Foxy Production, New York Gallery website Read on... Foxy Production, New York

Caprice Horn, Berlin GROUP SHOW : ‘Reality Bites’ Roger Ballen, Robert Gligorov, Sandy Skoglund, Andres Serrano, Erwin Olaf, Pierre Crocquet, Democracia, Tae-Hun Kang, Daniel & Geo Fuchs, Martin Heinig, Lukas Maximilian Hüller, Maslen & Mehra, Joel Peter Witkin, Florian Schulz, Nadine Rennert, Stehn Raupach and Nadine Klein SOLO SHOW : Sveinn Fannar Johannsson 'The Decision Has Been Taken’ The latest works of the Art Cologne New Talent from Europe’s Far North Berlin’s Kochstraße is renowned as the city’s traditional media quarter. This is where daily current news and affairs are registered, filtered and edited. As a result of this process, various newspapers are published every morning, giving us fragmented insight into our present reality. The images produced by the media are often provocative and shocking, but also provide orientation in an ever increasingly complex world. At this media-orientated hub, the opening exhibition ‚Reality Bites’ tackles the topic of ´reality’ and perceptions of it. The gallery presents international artworks which likewise reflect contemporary society – however in an aesthetic manner. Reality is often brutal, banal and leads to disillusionment: ‘Reality bites’! Yet, art adds a different dimension, thereby creating a distance, allowing the observer to reflect upon the aesthetics of ugliness. The exhibition shows artworks which do not attempt to evoke pity, nor do they belong to the genre of socio- critical documentary photography. The artists – Andres Serrano, Robert Gligorov, Erwin Olaf, Tae-Hun Kang and Roger Ballen, to name only a few – deal with reality how they see or experience it with their very own, unique interpretation. The work often relies on symbolic use of everyday objects ie a water faucet in Tae-Hun Kang’s installations, or it plays with allegory like Lukas Maximilian Hüller’s contemporary version of the Seven Deadly Sins (exemplified by ‘Wrath’). Roger Ballen and Pierre Crocquet portray people on the fringes of post-apartheid South African society. Democracia, who recently exhibited at Moscow Biennale, portray a socio-critical view of society in their projects ‘Charity’ and ‘All things will come to pass’. The viewer is forced to participate in this surreal, `real` world! Parallel to ‚Reality Bites’, the gallery is also presenting the very latest works of the Icelandic artist Sveinn Fannar Johannson in the exhibition ‚The Decision Has Been Taken’. In this show the upcoming artist, selected as ART COLOGNE NEW TALENT 2007, deals with statements of ‘nature’. He questions common clichés regarding the perception of landscape photography by reducing landscape to only one object, a tree, and by asking us: Is what we see natural or is it constructed? Images : Nadine Rennert Fallschirm 2007 Maslen & Mehra Lynx - Lehderstrasse 32 - Berlin I 2007 Courtesy Galerie Caprice Horn, Berlin Gallery website Read on... Caprice Horn, Berlin

BUNKIER SZTUKI, Krakow, Poland Wael Shawky : The Forty Days Road. Wet Culture – Dry Culture Wael Shawky’s exhibition is the third part of the Transculture project. This time Bunkier Sztuki will present an artist who, being from Egypt, does not belong to European culture circle. What is more, he did not experience emigration, which was typical of other artists invited to take part in Transculture. Shawky leads a nomadic type of life, he travels a lot – which is an experience popular in the artistic world, but despite this fact he is deeply bound with his country. He was on a scholarship in Turkey, the Unites States, Greece and Switzerland. Thanks to his numerous journeys, specific character of different cultures is familiar to him, especially the character of Western culture. But he can also observe these cultures from the outside, remembering about his own identity. As an Egyptian, a Muslim, and as an artist educated in Egypt and in the US he can see Europe from the outside, he has never lived here permanently – in contrast to other artists taking part in Transculture cycle. According to Wael Shawky, the artist’s function is that of a ‘translator’. He is then ‘translating’ to visual language his observations concerning social changes that his homeland is undergoing. He creates a portrait of contemporary Egyptian society, which is characterized by unclear divisions, where new lifestyles clash with tradition. This society can be called ‘hybrid’ because it consists of both old, often very archaic cultures (pastoral, agricultural) and globalized world’s cultures, especially Western popular culture. In one of his works, called Green Land Circus, Shawky constructed a model of a several- storey block of flats being inspired by traditional look of tribal cottages that one can still see in Northern Africa, for which he used concrete – a material symbolizing modernity. However, it should be emphasized that using the stereotypes through which cultures are perceived as a basis for his works, Wael Shawky negates evaluating them in a simple way; noticing differences in their stage of development he questions this sort of approach which considers some cultures superior to others. At the exhibition at Bunkier Sztuki the artist presents three films arranged in big-size multi-screen projections. The title of the exhibition was inspired by the work called Darb el Arbaeen which will also be shown. This film refers to a trade route which exists since antiquity and links Egypt and Sudan. It is a story that takes place somewhere inbetween reality and dream, the main theme being a journey through a desert. Wael Shawky confronts two Egyptian cultures co-existing since ages: the culture of nomadic people and that of farmers. The film refers to the process of annexation of this nomadic culture by the other. The artist undermines the popular view according to which the latter is considered ‘higher’, superior. Image: Wael Shawky Digital Church film still 2007 Courtesy of the artist Gallery website Read on...BUNKIER SZTUKI, Krakow, Poland

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