Unholly Alliance between Microsoft and Murdoch?
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AGLAYACAGIM SIMDI
anti emperyalizm insani nasil da demokrat karsiti yapabiliyor, yaziklar olsun...
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Aperture Foundation | Village Fair, 2005 - Default Store View
Aperture Foundation | Village Fair, 2005 - Default Store View
description"I reconstructed images that followed me since I was a child," says Ventura. "Of an Italy that I would have liked to have seen, but that no longer exists and perhaps never existed except in my own fantasy." —-Paolo Ventura Village Fair (Festa di paese), 2005, is from Paolo Ventura's War Souvenirs, his series of fictional World War II tableaux. Each image in the series features a detailed construction, meticulously designed and built by the artist. Some of the characters that inhabit the stage-like settings are toy action figures, others are made from fired clay; all are roughly the same size as Barbie dolls. Each setting takes about a week or longer to build, and is destroyed after Ventura photographs it. When Ventura was a boy in Italy, he spent time with his grandmother listening to stories and looking at family photographs from both World Wars. According to Ventura, 90% of the photographs sent home by European soldiers during WWII were taken in photographic studios, as most of the soldiers were too poor to own their own cameras. Ventura expressed the desire to enter these studio photographs and then exit out into the real context of the soldiers' lives. And so he places these wartime figures into his constructed streets and alleys; into death, loneliness, amusement, war, and desperate love-all in reduced, but realistic scale. Ventura seeks to deceive and create confusion between what we see and what we think we see. As Francine Prose notes, the end result is "an evocative mix of vagueness and precision that constitutes the simultaneously skewed and accurate truth of a child's understanding of war and loss and death, an imagined vision (assembled from relics and fragments of family narrative) of a distant and vanished past." |
7.10.09
brian holmes on imaginative protest (art) - via cigadam
October 2, 2009
To whom it may concern,
I am an art critic, internationally recognized by invitations to speak across the world, notably at venues such as the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, the Netherlands, on the occasion of the major survey exhibition “Forms of Resistance” in 2007, or at the 11th Istanbul Biennial in 2009, entitled “What Keeps Mankind Alive?” I have published essays in the catalogues of both these events, as in numerous others; and the Van Abbemuseum in collaboration with the WHW curatorial group is now releasing my latest book entitled Escape the Overcode: Activist Art in the Control Society. I state the above to establish my credentials as an expert in the domain of socially engaged art, which is of increasing import to public museums and universities through the world.
Because of this interest in socially responsive forms of art, I was curious to see in the British newspapers on April 1, 2009, what I immediately considered to be one of the most striking, innovative and successful pieces of public performance art to be realized anywhere in the world this year, namely the performance of the “Space Hijackers” group in their obviously fake and deliberately satirical armored vehicle during the G20 summit in London. By offering distorted and, it must be said, hilariously comical imitations of real institutional practices, groups such as the Space Hijackers carry out the vital democratic function of holding up a mirror to society and asking everyone to judge as to the beauty and desirability of our collective reflection. Indeed, this is an instance of what sociologists such as Ulrich Beck or Anthony Giddens call “social reflexivity,” whereby the members of a society represent the state of its institutions, stimulate debate on those institutions among their fellow men and women, and attempt in this way to increase awareness of current developments, in order to fortify the sense of responsibility to the present which defines citizenship in a democracy.
To whom it may concern,
I am an art critic, internationally recognized by invitations to speak across the world, notably at venues such as the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, the Netherlands, on the occasion of the major survey exhibition “Forms of Resistance” in 2007, or at the 11th Istanbul Biennial in 2009, entitled “What Keeps Mankind Alive?” I have published essays in the catalogues of both these events, as in numerous others; and the Van Abbemuseum in collaboration with the WHW curatorial group is now releasing my latest book entitled Escape the Overcode: Activist Art in the Control Society. I state the above to establish my credentials as an expert in the domain of socially engaged art, which is of increasing import to public museums and universities through the world.
Because of this interest in socially responsive forms of art, I was curious to see in the British newspapers on April 1, 2009, what I immediately considered to be one of the most striking, innovative and successful pieces of public performance art to be realized anywhere in the world this year, namely the performance of the “Space Hijackers” group in their obviously fake and deliberately satirical armored vehicle during the G20 summit in London. By offering distorted and, it must be said, hilariously comical imitations of real institutional practices, groups such as the Space Hijackers carry out the vital democratic function of holding up a mirror to society and asking everyone to judge as to the beauty and desirability of our collective reflection. Indeed, this is an instance of what sociologists such as Ulrich Beck or Anthony Giddens call “social reflexivity,” whereby the members of a society represent the state of its institutions, stimulate debate on those institutions among their fellow men and women, and attempt in this way to increase awareness of current developments, in order to fortify the sense of responsibility to the present which defines citizenship in a democracy.
6.10.09
5.10.09
44 days in iran
2.10.09
30.9.09
Bianet :: Basbug'un Siyasete Müdahalesini Sikayet Edenlere Ölüm Tehdidi - Bianet
Bianet :: Ba?bu?'un Siyasete Müdahalesini ?ikayet Edenlere Ölüm Tehdidi - Bianet
Shared via AddThis
Shared via AddThis
28.9.09
26.9.09
NEXT
time to move on. i deem "transcendentalworkout" unsufficient as i enter a new stage. so feel free to discover my second blog: http://frontispiece.tumblr.com/
23.9.09
from haluk akakce to death squares
what unites these two works are the circumstances: the beginning of the 11. istanbul biennale two weeks ago. the distance between these two looks self-evident, so let me just add some explanatory remarks.
haluk akace's psychedelic-cum-living room collectible paintings are shown in a joint tabanlioglu/galerist exhibition, dedicated to the artist. supposedly due to the artist's - rather than the gallery owners - travails, the fabulous nomi ruiz (for the uninitiated: she is of @hercules and love affair@ renown) was flown in to give a concert at the exclusive but badly staffed bosphorus hotel "les ottomans", to delight mr. akakce and an accidental crowd of young semi-hipsters (moi and a few) and lastly, to entertain the local happy few - those who actually have the money to buy and the hunger to aquire cultural capital that can be shown off. [click for my pictures]
the concert was enjoyable, i.e. danceable. the finger food was good, the drink serving mechanism (meaning service) patchy, the view beautiful but the crowd boring, as could be expected. i am still shocked by the magnitude of uncultured jadedness that a large part of this sosyete transpired during the night. call me naive if you want. and a snob, of müstehzi renown, i assure you...
the opening at the gallery felt quite similar. exposed was the vanity of the potential buyer, it pretty much covered up the potential benefits of akakce's works. not unexpected, one could say, as openings are much less about the art then the crowd that is gathered to celebrate something, and be it itself.
in this, the opening of the biennale the same evening was a grander, more festive, thus less vain event. though i was unable to go to the opening party afterwards, i was at that time happily zigzagging between different crowds, form the critically europhile istanbulites to the cheery new yorkers, there was definitely buzz, abounding. the one, put-you-back-into-the-real dissonant chord in this happy concerto was the alleged beating of a local artist by security guards after he tried to enter the event without the appropriate accreditation or invitation. having been drawn back so soon to the harsh realities of the local, the gently uplifting excitement of the biennale bubble proved to be oh so evanescent. i have to resist digressing on this, but i will come back to share with you how the quick evaporation of a shared feeling of liberty translates into the everyday happy lives of those who have been infested by the disease of the possible (or its fantasy) - it makes a hard life, all the more heroic if sustained without drugs or delusions. end of digression. discipline and punishment are acute and explicit here, so i will come back on this.
the second picture was taken from one of the main exponents at the official biennale (antrepo 3), hrair sarkissian. it is of a series called execution squares (2008), a series of photographs which depict central squares in syrian cities on which public executions of civil criminals are carried out. putting people to death publicly can seem anachronistic, but it is made eerily palpable with these sober but superb images. so we are back to discipline and punishment. from the archaic to the sophisticated. the motto of the biennale (what keeps mankind alive, from brecht, no less) seems almost crude in this respect, as it shows a willingness to go past the post, or ante-post, though not ante-modern such as the vapid and fuzzy motto of the late tate modern expo a few years back. modernism, with its progressist promise certainly is alluring these days, with the renaissance of marx as the financial crisis unfolded. for me it smells of naphtaline, or to put it more gently - nostalgia. the good old times when there was a mission for a class, called proletariat and an universal destiny, to be depicted by the intellectual (self-sovereign, selfimposed, selfimportant, alas). does good art come out of this? i think it might emerge from the cracks of this curatorial concept, the latter in its simplicity having a certain palpable quality but is also quite anti-kunst as brecht himself intended his oeuvre to be.
so what are the values that people want to hold onto again... nation? class? culture? religion? money (though discredited a bit lately). lets find it out, maybe in this biennial, but more importantly in the narratives that are being produced daily (radio, tv, film, you name it) to be consumed, modified, twisted and hopefully deconstructed not only by the few academics that stick to acidity rather then the terror of universalist sugarcoating or particularist fearmongering. stop fascism redux (and to begen-al: time to grow up !)
22.9.09
now its a book
DD: It must be satisfying to see your pictures in a gallery or in a book – giving it a sense of permanence the internet maybe does not?
Scott Schuman: The funny part is that the internet will give it not only a permanence, once it’s out there it’s totally out of my control. Once they’re on the internet, they take on a life of their own but I think that technology that it is now like no other time that we’ve had before, the permanence will come from the fact that I can take a picture today and my contemporaries can make a comment on those pictures and we can capture their thoughts. Someone like Lartigue who shot a lot of people around the streets in the 1900s or even Bill Cunningham, people can look at those pictures but we don’t know what those people were thinking at that time. But with the blog now you know, I’m working to archive and save these comments so that in say a 100 years, people can not only look at these pictures but also know what we were thinking at that time, what those issues were. So I really like that part. I take the pictures and capture what people are thinking right now but I also think about what this is going to mean historically.
21.9.09
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