June 2010 Archives

LUMEN
Curated by Ginger Shulick
Atlantic Salt
June 26, 2010
4 - 10 pm

ARTISTS
Alex Villar; Lena Thüring; Tattfoo Tan; Sweatshoppe; Grace Exhibition Space; Katja Loher; Ali Hossaini, Ph.D.; Man Bartlett/Flux Factory; Steven Lapcevic and Brendan Coyle.

The Council on the Arts & Humanities for Staten Island (COAHSI) is proud to present Staten Island's first ever cutting-edge video art festival -- LUMEN. LUMEN celebrates video artists from around the world, showcasing work by both established and emerging artists. LUMEN will take place on June 26th, 2010 from 4pm to 12am at Atlantic Salt, 561 Richmond Terrace, Staten Island, NY.

Long thought of as the "forgotten borough," Staten Island is fast becoming a fertile playground for innovative art production and unique artistic collaborations like LUMEN. LUMEN will feature site-specific video installations, 3D-video technology, new media projections, animation, sound-based performances, and art interventions by artists from Staten Island and beyond. LUMEN aims to highlight a diversity of artists at the forefront of their media in an industrial landscape on Staten Island's waterfront. The festival will include performances throughout the day, raffles featuring artists' work, as well as an open bar sponsored by Brooklyn Brewery from 9pm-11pm for ticketed attendees.

About COAHSI
The mission of COAHSI is to cultivate a sustainable and diverse cultural community for the people of Staten Island by: 1) making the arts accessible to every member of the community; 2) supporting and building recognition for artistic achievement; 3) providing artists and organizations technical, financial, and social resources to encourage the creation of new work. COAHSI does extensive outreach to communities that are underserved geographically, ethnically, and economically. The organization works hard to impact the arts across all borders.

Directions

Guided art walks (an approximate 15 minutes walk) from the Ferry Terminal to Atlantic Salt will occur from 4pm-10:30pm to correspond with each in-coming ferry. We are looking for more volunteers and artists who would be interested in leading these artistic processions to the site, please use the Volunteer contact form on the website to apply!

Biking/Driving: Head west on Richmond Terrace from the Staten Island Ferry past the Richmond County Ballpark towards Jersey Street. 561 Richmond Terrace will be on your right, the intersection is with Lafayette Avenue.

Public Transportation: 1,R and W trains stop at Whitehall/South Ferry station in Manhattan and the 4 and 5 stop nearby at Bowling Green station. Take the FREE Staten Island Ferry and transfer to the S40 Bus on Ramp D, which will take you down Richmond Terrace to Lafayette Ave.

Staten Island Ferry Schedule

LUMEN
Atlantic Salt 561 Richmond Terrace
Staten Island, NY 10301
www.lumenfest.org
gshulick@statenislandarts.org

CITY BEATS
Curated by Berit Fischer
BankArt
June 25 - July 15, 2010

ARTISTS
Laura Bruce, Rainer Ganahl, Dryden Goodwin, Alexander Heim, Ben Judd, Stephan Pascher, Jeff Preiss, and Alex Villar

The urbanscape can best be understood as a site in which multiple spaces, temporalities and webs of relations are co-present, and in which local sites and subjects are tied into globalising economic, social and political systems.

Similar to the implications of rhythm, the pulse of a metropolis is pervaded by regulated recurring patterns and repetitions of behaviors, habits and urban rituals. Prescriptive codes that define daily life correlate with micro geographies in which the human body defines the social and biological rhythm.

The artists in City Beats respond to both physical architecture as well as sociopolitical and psychogeographical environments and structures. They apply their own sets of codes to decompose and re-configure general frameworks.

While interrogating the ways our daily actions are conditioned and controlled, the constructed mechanisations of life and belief systems of the socially-produced space, homogeneity and collective discipline are scrutinized, fostering the development of a critical attitude towards what otherwise might often be ignored or taken for granted.
City Beats employs video to compile a cacophony of glances at non-events within the urban commonplace and offers new ways of looking at the structured relationships between time and place, private and public, framework and content; it creates a temporal look at urban space and the human condition within it.

BANKART 1929
3-9 Kaigan-dori, Naka-ku, Yokohama 231-0002
Tel: 045.663-2812 info@bankart1929.com
www.bankart1929.com

EXPERIMENTAL GEOGRAPHY
Curated by Nato Thompson
The James Gallery
June 24-August 27, 2010
No opening (upcoming panel discussion noted below)

ARTISTS
Francis Alys, AREA Chicago, The Center for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI), Center for Urban Pedagogy (CUP), kanarninka (Catherine D'lgnazio), e-Xplo, Ilana Halperin, Julia Meltzer and David Thorne, Lize Mogel, Multiplicity, Trevor Paglen, Raqs Media Collective, Ellen Rothenberg, Spurse, Deborah Stratman, Daniel Tucker (project organizer), Alex Villar, and Yin Xiuzhen.

Experimental Geography presents a panoptic view of this new practice through a wide range of mediums including interactive computer units, sound and video installations, photography, sculpture, and experimental cartography created by 18 artists or artist teams from six countries as well as the United States.

Geography can involve the study of specific histories, sites, and memories. Every estuary, landfill, and cul-de-sac has a story to tell. The task of the geographer is to alert us to what is directly in front of us, while the task of the experimental geographer -- an amalgam of scientist, artist, and explorer -- is to do so in a manner that deploys aesthetics, ambiguity, poetry, and a dash of empiricism.

The manifestations of "experimental geography" (a term coined by geographer Trevor Paglen in 2002) run the gamut of contemporary art practice: sewn cloth cities that spill out of suitcases, bus tours through water treatment centers, performers climbing up the sides of buildings, and sound art of the breaths exhaled in running the evacuation route of Boston. In the hands of contemporary artists, the study of humanity's engagement with the earth's topography becomes a riddle best solved in experimental fashion.

The approaches used by the artists featured in Experimental Geography range from a poetic conflation of humanity and the earth to more empirical studies of our planet. Ilana Halperin melds immediate physical and personal actions with geologic contexts; she offers poetic conflations of differing fields of interest. Creating projects that are more empirically minded, The Center for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI), a research organization, explores the nature and extent of human interaction with the earth's surface, embracing a multidisciplinary approach to fulfilling its mission. Using skill sets culled from the toolbox of geography, the work re-familiarizes the viewer with the overlooked American landscape, including man-made islands, submerged cities, traffic in Los Angeles, and the broadcast antennas in the San Gabriel Mountains, and other details drawn from everyday experience.

Panel Discussion
This panel discussion features Experimental Geography exhibition curator Nato Thompson, artists Lize Mogel and Trevor Paglen, and David Harvey, social theorist and Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the Graduate Center, CUNY. This event is free and open to the public, though reservations are required. You may RSVP by phone at 212-817-7295.
Panel date: Tuesday, July 20, 6-7:15 pm
The Graduate Center, CUNY
365 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10016

Catalog
The exhibition is accompanied by an illustrated catalogue co-published by iCI and Melville House Publishing. The catalogue includes essays by curator Nato Thompson, art historian Jeffrey Kastner, and artist Trevor Paglen; artist's statements; and brief texts on forms of artistic practice.

Experimental Geography is a traveling exhibition organized and circulated by iCI (Independent Curators International), New York. The guest curator for the exhibition is Nato Thompson. The exhibition, tour, and catalogue are made possible, in part, by the Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation, the iCI Advocates and the iCI Partners, Gerrit L. and Sydie Lansing, and Barbara and John Robinson. Its presentation at DePauw University has been generously funded by the Richard D. and Barbara Dixon Harrison Exhibition Fund.

Nato Thompson is a curator at Creative Time, New York, as well as a writer and activist. Among his public projects for Creative Time are Waiting for Godot in New Orleans, a project by Paul Chan in collaboration with The Classical Theatre of Harlem, and Mike Nelson: A Psychic Vacuum. Thompson was formerly a curator at MASS MoCA, where his exhibitions included The Interventionists: Art in the Social Sphere and Ahistoric Occasion: Artists Making History.

Founded in 1975, iCI is a non-profit organization dedicated to enhancing the understanding and appreciation of contemporary art through traveling exhibitions and other activities that reach a diverse national and international audience. Collaborating with a wide range of eminent curators, iCI develops innovative traveling exhibitions, accompanied by catalogues and other educational materials, to introduce and document challenging new work in all mediums by younger as well as more established artists from the United States and abroad.

THE JAMES GALLERY
The Graduate Center, CUNY
365 Fifth Avenue
New York City
www.gc.cuny.edu

THE PHILOSOPHY OF MONEY
Curated by Miguel Amado
Museu da Cidade, Lisbon
Opening: June 22, 10 pm
June 23 through September 5

ARTISTS
Works by Alejandro Vidal, Alfredo Jaar, Carey Young, Carolina Caycedo, Cildo Meireles, Danica Phelps, Henrik Plenge Jakobsen, Joana Bastos, Liam Gillick, Lotte Lindner & Till Steinbrenner, Mads Lynnerup, Mariana Silva, Melanie Gilligan, Michael Elmgreen & Ingar Dragset, Michael Mandiberg, Nika Oblak & Primoz Novak, Raymond Pettibon, Regina José Galindo, Rita GT, Runo Lagomarsino, Ruth Ewan, Sara & André, Sparring Partners, Superflex, Triiibe, Hakan Topal + Alex Villar, Yonamine e Zanny Begg + Oliver Ressler

Lisbon City Council and Miguel Amado Projects are presenting the exhibition "The Philosophy of Money", which opens on June 22 at 10 pm at the Pavilhão Branco of the Museu da Cidade in Lisbon. This exhibition brings together works by 28 artists who, in the light of the current financial crisis, examine money as the "God of the modern age".

This exhibition is inspired by the theses of German philosopher Georg Simmel in the book "The Philosophy of the Money", published in 1900. The exhibition examines the capitalist system as a way of life in contemporary times, as well as the renewed critique one of its basis generated by the current financial crisis. The works that are presented in this exhibition, several of which were commissioned, explore money in its multiple symbolic facets - from means of exchange to icon - and address the present economic recession, illustrating art's answers to such reality.

Simmel studied the psychological dimension of the monetarization of Western societies, considering money as the "God of the modern age". For Simmel, the replacing of the traditional bonds existing between the individuals by money implied the depersonalization of social relations, the origin of the paradigm of the free initiative, one of the features of capitalism along with private property. This theoretical legacy characterizes, through a critical perspective, the vision of the world of the artists who are participating in this exhibition. Among other topics, the works on view redesign paper-currency, quote political manifestos and movements marked by the resistance to dominant thinking, question the predominance of the corporative ideology and ironize about the commodification of the artistic object.

MUSEU DA CIDADE
Campo Grande, 245
1700-91 Lisboa, Portugal
T. 21 751 32 00
F. 21 757 18 58
www.museudacidade.pt