on the Last Day of 2012

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newsfromnevereverland

A country for old men to go and died

on Christmas Day

on Christmas Day

with Family and Friends.
A sacred bound in our lifeway!
The number is 13,
the number of important cycles of fortune shends:
Birthdays, Marriages, Home, Life Cycles.

Iman Issa wins the Ist FHN MACBA Award

Press Release: Barcelona, 18 December – This morning the winner of the first edition of the Han Nefkens Foundation-MACBA Award was announced. The Egyptian artist Iman Issa was unanimously selected by the jury. During 2013 the artist will work on a project that will be presented in a public space in Barcelona.

Unanimously. This has been the conclusive decision of the jury of the Fundació HAN NEFKENS MACBA Contemporary Art Award upon granting it to the Egyptian artist Iman Issa (Cairo, 1979). “We are sure that the granting of this award will very positively impinge on a key moment of her career. It also entails a challenge for her artistic practice in terms of rigour and objectiveness”, its members have said. This is precisely the aim of the new award established by the Fundació Han Nefkens (FHN) and the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA): to help to consolidate the career of artists with many years’ experience in this field but needing a definitive backing from the international artistic community.

With this new award, addressed to artists of any age group, sex or citizenship, the Fundació Han Nefkens and the MACBA also wish to foster international artistic contemporary creation, establish complicities and networks to exchange ideas across the five continents, as well as favour the production of new works of art in Barcelona. In this regard, one of the unique aspects of this award is the defining role played by the ten scouts from all over the world. Each one of them selects three artists from their geographical area. Based on this first proposal, including about thirty candidates, the Award Committee chooses between five and ten finalists, out of which the jury chooses the final winner. The award, a biennial one, is worth a total amount of 50,000 Euros for the winner: 20,000 as emoluments and 30,000 devoted to the production of a new project in Barcelona. Iman Issa will carry out a new work in our city in 2013.

The international jury is made up of five contemporary art experts. In this first edition, two of them are permanent: Han Nefkens, a Dutch writer and collector who lives in Barcelona, and Bartomeu Marí, acting as MACBA’s Director; the other three members (renewable) are: Iwona Blazwik (London), Director of the Whitechapel Art Gallery; Adriano Pedrosa (São Paulo), an independent curator, writer and art critic, and Christine Tohmé (Beirut), a curator and cultural activist.

Furthermore, in this first edition of the award, the group of the ten scouts was made up of: Defne Ayas (Asia), Zdvenka Badovinac (Slovenia), Abdellah Karroum (Morocco), Sylvia Koubali (Turkey), Gabi Ngcobo (South Africa), Victoria Noorthoorn (Argentina), Manu Park (Korea), Beatriz Pérez (Colombia), Christoph Storz (India) and Barthélémy Toguo (Cameroon and Paris).

The reasons for the jury’s decision

There are three reasons that the jury has pointed out as being crucial in granting this award to Iman Issa unanimously:
1. She is an artist that has been able to provide her works with a critical and visual maturity, which is not so common in the artists of her generation.
2. She has been the prolific author of rich works, and has been very skilful in making use of different means and techniques with a much elaborated formal sense.
3. Her artistic and intellectual career is in full development. Her imagination is very fruitful and she has a great capacity to attract, question and challenge the viewer.

Iman Issa lives and works in Cairo and New York. She has recently taken part in the collective or solo exhibitions The Ungovernables (New Museum, New York, 2012), Seeing is Believing (KW, Berlin, 2011), Material, Rodeo (Istanbul, 2011), Short Stories (Sculpture Center, New York, 2011) and Propaganda by Monuments (Contemporary Image Collective, Cairo, 2011). Her video works have been screened at several venues, such as Transmediale (Berlin), Tate Modern (London), Spacex (Exeter), Open Eye Gallery (Liverpool) and Bidoun Artists Cinema, Art Dubai (Dubai).

newsfromnevereverland

On the Epiphany day

On the Epiphany day, My true love gave to me: a return ticket to the land where Time walks slowly sixteen times; fifteen red seas of Santas with empty cans of beer as Christmas gifts; more than fourteen reasons to love her; thirteen primal rhythms reuniting the celestial with the terrestrial; nine times twenty minutes earlier; eight sentences to read by Lawrence Weiner; seven days of encounters and discussions; my six interview, with Peles Empire, after Mara Castilho interview; over than five good news on gallery visits, art books, Murano glass and exhibitions, and coffee beans; more than four sculptures from Tony Cragg; three exhibitions to see; two places to sleep: a set of impressions and feelings.

On the Twelfth day of Christmas

On the Twelfth day of Christmas, My true love gave to me: twelve red seas of Santas with empty cans of beer as Christmas gifts; more than eleven reasons to love her; ten primal rhythms reuniting the celestial with the terrestrial; nine times twenty minutes earlier; eight sentences to read by Lawrence Weiner; seven days of encounters and discussions; my six interview, with Peles Empire, after Mara Castilho interview; over than five good news on gallery visits, art books, Murano glass and exhibitions, and coffee beans; more than four sculptures from Tony Cragg; three exhibitions to see; two places to sleep: a set of impressions and feelings.

On the Eleventh day of Christmas

On the Eleventh day of Christmas, My true love gave to me: more than eleven reasons to love her; ten primal rhythms reuniting the celestial with the terrestrial; nine times twenty minutes earlier; eight sentences to read by Lawrence Weiner; seven days of encounters and discussions; my six interview, with Peles Empire, after Mara Castilho interview; over than five good news on gallery visits, art books, Murano glass and exhibitions, and coffee beans; more than four sculptures from Tony Cragg; three exhibitions to see; two places to sleep: a set of impressions and feelings.

On the Tenth day of Christmas

On the Tenth day of Christmas, My true love gave to me: ten primal rhythms reuniting the celestial with the terrestrial; nine times twenty minutes earlier; eight sentences to read by Lawrence Weiner; seven days of encounters and discussions; my six interview, with Peles Empire, after Mara Castilho interview; over than five good news on gallery visits, art books, Murano glass and exhibitions, and coffee beans; more than four sculptures from Tony Cragg; three exhibitions to see; two places to sleep: a set of impressions and feelings.

On the Ninth day of Christmas

On the Ninth day of Christmas, My true love gave to me: nine times twenty minutes earlier; eight sentences to read by Lawrence Weiner; seven days of encounters and discussions; my six interview, with Peles Empire, after Mara Castilho interview; over than five good news on gallery visits, art books, Murano glass and exhibitions, and coffee beans; more than four sculptures from Tony Cragg; three exhibitions to see; two places to sleep: a set of impressions and feelings.

On the Eighth day of Christmas

On the Eighth day of Christmas, My true love gave to me: Eight sentences to read by Lawrence Weiner; seven days of encounters and discussions; my six interview, with Peles Empire, after Mara Castilho interview; over than five good news on gallery visits, art books, Murano glass and exhibitions, and coffee beans; more than four sculptures from Tony Cragg; three exhibitions to see; two places to sleep: a set of impressions and feelings.

"Weiner has spent the last five decades deconstructing artistic practices into various concepts of language and idea. In his new show, Weiner focuses on the concept of truncation, a mathematical term referring to the discarding of unnecessary digits, as an inherent meaning and material reality. ... Weiner is primarily a sculpture working with language." in Lisson Gallery Lawrence Weiner: Be That As It May Press Release.

On the Seventh day of Christmas

On the Seventh day of Christmas, My true love gave to me: seven days of encounters and discussions; my six interview, with Peles Empire, after Mara Castilho interview; over than five good news on gallery visits, art books, Murano glass and exhibitions, and coffee beans; more than four sculptures from Tony Cragg; three exhibitions to see; two places to sleep: a set of impressions and feelings.

To mark the close of Art Basel Miami Beach 2012, Boetzelaer|Nispen presents a series of one-to-one encounters devised by artist Christopher Kulendran Thomas specifically for the fair’s trans-geographic non-site.

THIS IS THE END (Part One)
 

Camp Red Haven, British military intelligence monitoring post, near Tripoli, 1st September 1969: A thick fog hangs low over the ground, swelling around the bases of palm trees that sway in the hot breeze. Mice scurry for shelter as the ominous sound of the advancing hordes builds with the fury of God’s own thunder:
“Our massed enemies are gathering against us. Virtuous anger is our right. Yesterday, today, tomorrow, forever: victory or death.”

As the economic rationale for the neoliberal project collapses – with its austerity programme failing in Europe and with the fastest-growing new super-economies around the world employing massive state intervention – could we be seeing the end of the social order that produced Contemporary Art? The word ‘contemporary’ was used in the past simply to describe the art of the time but it has perhaps come to refer now to a particular ideological formation forged through the deregulation of financial services by Reagan and Thatcher in the 1980s and the collapse of communism as a mainstream political alternative at the end of that decade. The ‘contemporary’ era’s ideology of non-ideology has prioritised a fantasy of the liberated, autonomous individual but could this be coming to an end with the fall from dominance of the West? Might Contemporary Art in fact be a limited art historical period that we will look back on as the art of neoliberalism? And what could the art of the next phase of globalisation be for?

Through a discursive encounter based on a historical misunderstanding over intelligence information from Libya following Colonel Gaddafi’s Socialist Revolution, Christopher Kulendran Thomas will take participants literally to the end of the road to consider the direction in which a new path might be forged.

Appointments are free and available throughout Sunday 9th December from 10am to 8pm but must be booked in advance by emailing thisistheend2012miami@gmail.com. Please indicate your preferred time and await confirmation. Meetings will begin at The Raleigh, 1775 Collins Avenue, Miami Beach.

//

Christopher Kulendran Thomas (b. 1979, London, UK) works though collaboration and/or exploitation, manipulating the processes through which contemporary art is distributed in order to set in motion the mechanisms of social change. Thomas completed his MFA in Fine Art at Goldsmiths (University of London) in 2012. His ongoing enterprise When Platitudes Become Form can be seen at Banner Repeater (London) until December 16th. In February he will be making a two-person presentation with Jamie Shovlin at Art Rotterdam 2013 for Boetzelaer|Nispen and opening his solo show at the gallery in Amsterdam.

More information on Boetzelaer|Nispen can be found on www.boetzelaernispen.com.

On the Sixth day of Christmas

On the Sixth day of Christmas, My true love gave to me: my six interview, with Peles Empire, after Mara Castilho interview; over than five good news on gallery visits, art books, Murano glass and exhibitions, and coffee beans; more than four sculptures from Tony Cragg; three exhibitions to see; two places to sleep: a set of impressions and feelings.

O conjunto de entrevistas apresentado pelo programa Molduras - Antena 2, RTP, centra-se no campo da prática artística contemporânea neste período da globalização e nos dilemas do paradigma actual. Esta série de entrevistas consiste numa única questão, colocada a artistas contemporâneos, nacionais e internacionais, sobre como estes testam as condições políticas, em particular as estruturas económicas. Ou seja, de que forma é que a prática artística corrente informa sobre os processos de globalização, e durante o processo transforma e faz visível as condições políticas da sociedade contemporânea.

RGC: de que forma é que na tua prática controlas e informas sobre a noção de 'Corpo' e 'Confronto'?

Mara Castilho: Num tempo, onde os sistemas de crenças chocam uns com os outros, provocando, frequentemente, conflitos violentos, o meu trabalho explora questões em torno dos sentimentos e comportamentos humanos implicados pelo conflito. O vazio e o corpo são temas sempre presentes nos meus trabalhos. Navegando entre o corpo, a solidão, o sofrimento, a perda, vida e morte, os meus trabalhos são "sets" que convidam-nos a pensar sobre a complexidade e dualidade da condição humana. O confronto está sempre presente no meu olhar e no espectador. É um confronto direto.

O 'Corpo' é sempre apresentado como um confronto com o mudo que nos rodeia, seja ele físico ou mental. O 'Confronto' é direto entre este corpo e o que o rodeia; entre o corpo, a sua ausência, e o olhar do espectador. As portas estão abertas a diversas interpretações, mas o confronto é direto. Cabe a cada um colocar as suas próprias interrogações e retirar as suas próprias interpretações.

Mara Castilho (19??). Vive e trabalha em Lisboa. Exposições Individuais: 2012, Arquivos Secretos, Arquivos da Câmara Municipal de Lisboa; 2010, Untitled Galeria Nuno Centeno, Porto (Portugal); 2009, Trapped Inside my Head, Galeria 111, Lisboa (Portugal). Exposições colectivas (selecção): 2012, Os Culturofagistas, Fabrica ASA - Guimarães European Capital of Culture (Portugal); 2011, Silencio, Galeria Zipper, Sao Paulo (Brazil), Attraction of the Opposites, HB Gallery, Rotherdam (Holanda).

On the Sixth day of Christmas

On the Sixth day of Christmas, My true love gave to me: my six interview, with Peles Empire, after Mara Castilho interview; over than five good news on gallery visits, art books, Murano glass and exhibitions, and coffee beans; more than four sculptures from Tony Cragg; three exhibitions to see; two places to sleep: a set of impressions and feelings.

O conjunto de entrevistas apresentado pelo programa Molduras - Antena 2, RTP, centra-se no campo da prática artística contemporânea neste período da globalização e nos dilemas do paradigma actual. Esta série de entrevistas consiste numa única questão, colocada a artistas contemporâneos, nacionais e internacionais, sobre como estes testam as condições políticas, em particular as estruturas económicas. Ou seja, de que forma é que a prática artística corrente informa sobre os processos de globalização, e durante o processo transforma e faz visível as condições políticas da sociedade contemporânea.

RGC: de que forma é que na tua prática controlas e informas sobre a noção de 'Corpo' e 'Confronto'?

Mara Castilho: Num tempo, onde os sistemas de crenças chocam uns com os outros, provocando, frequentemente, conflitos violentos, o meu trabalho explora questões em torno dos sentimentos e comportamentos humanos implicados pelo conflito. O vazio e o corpo são temas sempre presentes nos meus trabalhos. Navegando entre o corpo, a solidão, o sofrimento, a perda, vida e morte, os meus trabalhos são "sets" que convidam-nos a pensar sobre a complexidade e dualidade da condição humana. O confronto está sempre presente no meu olhar e no espectador. É um confronto direto.

O 'Corpo' é sempre apresentado como um confronto com o mudo que nos rodeia, seja ele físico ou mental. O 'Confronto' é direto entre este corpo e o que o rodeia; entre o corpo, a sua ausência, e o olhar do espectador. As portas estão abertas a diversas interpretações, mas o confronto é direto. Cabe a cada um colocar as suas próprias interrogações e retirar as suas próprias interpretações.

Mara Castilho (19??). Vive e trabalha em Lisboa. Exposições Individuais: 2012, Arquivos Secretos, Arquivos da Câmara Municipal de Lisboa; 2010, Untitled Galeria Nuno Centeno, Porto (Portugal); 2009, Trapped Inside my Head, Galeria 111, Lisboa (Portugal). Exposições colectivas (selecção): 2012, Os Culturofagistas, Fabrica ASA - Guimarães European Capital of Culture (Portugal); 2011, Silencio, Galeria Zipper, Sao Paulo (Brazil), Attraction of the Opposites, HB Gallery, Rotherdam (Holanda).

On the Fifth day of Christmas

On the Fifth day of Christmas, My true love gave to me: over than five good news on gallery visits, art books, Murano glass and exhibitions, and coffee beans; more than four sculptures from Tony Cragg; three exhibitions to see; two places to sleep: a set of impressions and feelings.

Good news never come alone! they are preceded by and come in disguise between gallery visits, news about where we came from, books and presents, art works in Murano glass, pastries, toasted coffee beans and fried chillies in the morning with eggs, people with conspicuous behaviour and reestablished conversations with old friends and loved ones.

Good news never come alone! they are preceded by recollections of a time already gone, reflections of that that is, and judgements about the one that might become, they come in disguise between awesome symphonies composed by colours, noises and silence, by a text written and finish with embedded videos and sound, by an invitation to continue to attend a knowledge' seminar.

Good news never come alone! they are preceded by something and someone, by an investigation in to your success, and by freezing wind, a cold weather and a long beard, they come in disguise between a realization that time should never been shortened but lived in full blossom, love what you have not what you don't have "ten twenty years ago".

On the Fourth day of Christmas

On the Fourth day of Christmas, My true love gave to me: more than four sculptures from Tony Cragg; three exhibitions to see; two places to sleep: a set of impressions and feelings.

Tony Cragg, Group (wood, 325x23x386cm) & Orb (marble, 119x139x139cm), 2012

On the Third day of Christmas

On the Third day of Christmas, My true love gave to me: three exhibitions to see; two places to sleep: a set of impressions and feelings.

The Modern Language Experiment will hold the second part of their lecture programme 'sudo document' at Angus-Hughes Gallery. Cathy Lomax, Colin Perry & Jon Cairns will each give a lecture about their current research.


SATURDAY 8TH DECEMBER 2012, 3 - 4.30pm
CATHY LOMAX
Is an artist and Director of Transition Gallery based in east London. Transition is an independent and innovative gallery/publisher founded in October 2002. The gallery shows work by both emerging and established contemporary artists as well as producing publications and periodicals. Cathy's lecture will be about:

The traditional gallery system is distasteful – gentleman gallerists carousing with oligarchs to flog overpriced artworks by artists who often profess to have a social conscience. The alternative is working within the subsidised arts where securing funding is a prize only awarded to those who know how to play the game.
The whole system is full of contradictions and being an artist is as hard as it always has been. Artists need to take control and devise new models – stop the researching and the empty words and start doing. The way forward is not to compartmentalise but to integrate the making, showing, working and watching.


SUNDAY 9TH DECEMBER 1 - 2.30PM
COLIN PERRY
Is a freelance art writer based in London, UK. Colin writes reviews and profiles for Art Monthly, Frieze, ArtReview, Art in America, Modern Painters, Catalogue magazine, MAP, and catalogue texts. Currently he is working part-time as an editor at Phaidon and has presented talks with artists and academics, organised film screenings, and collaborated with artists on texts and performances. For his lecture Colin will be discussing:

Into the mainstream: Experimental film and video on TV
In recent years, there has been a growing interest in artistic strategies for intervening in broadcast television. At the same time, there has also been a expanding fascination with typologies of documentary film and video, with essay-film formats appearing in galleries across the global art network. These forms have an entwined history that is rarely discussed; their existence has important implications for how we produce and consume artistic forms and for how artistic production is funded.
There is a long history of experimental documentary in Britain, from the GPO to Channel Four’s investment in experimental film and video. But these changes have not taken place ‘top-down’. Rather, artists to have been able to win funding by forming pressure groups and collectives and combining across sectarian divides. This history shows that – even in a recession – the power of combination and collectivity can create opportunities for art beyond the commercial sphere. The talk will explore these concerns, using the works of Stuart Marshall and Marc Karlin as an example.


SUNDAY 9TH DECEMBER 3 - 4.30PM
JON CAIRNS
Is Co-ordinator of Critical Studies for BA Fine Art at Central St. Martins. Jon's work in the last few years has engaged with queer historiography and the ambivalence of interpretation, hinging on the mobile relationships between photography and performance, and between ‘fact’ and ‘fiction’. For his lecture Jon will be discussing:

Feeling Your Way: art, affect and value in times of recession
There has been a renewed urgency to questions of value in the context of cultural retrenchment (brought on by cuts to arts funding, education spending etc) and the consequent threat of a return to old hierarchies of class and access when it comes to the production of fine art. In the course of my research for a special issue of Visual Culture in Britain, I have come into contact with numerous small and independent artist-run initiatives, who have repeatedly stressed the value and importance of collaboration, informality and surprise. I note a frequent prioritisation of ‘content’ and the critical encounter with art over the usual exigencies of commerce and funding.
The significance of the intuitive, the experiential, the quality and range of audience response may be perennial concerns, but I wonder whether this emphasis on the ‘affective’ structures of art – its display, how we interact with it and come to understand it – has a particular resonance right now. What kind of affective communities does art solicit and construct today? What might affect’s political value be in a moment of cultural crisis?


This weekend will be the final series in the programme and we would like to thank all the contributers in giving over their time to the project and allowing us an insight into their important research. We would also like to warmly thank Goldsmiths, Univeristy of London's Annual Fund for their kind support for 'sudo document'.

contact@modernlanguageexperiment.org
www.modernlanguageexperiment.org

Angus-Hughes Gallery
www.angus-hughes.com
26 Lower Clapton Rd (at the junction of Urswick Rd)
London E5 0PD

On the Second day of Christmas

On the Second day of Christmas, My true love gave to me: two places to sleep: a set of impressions and feelings.

On the First day of Christmas

On the First day of Christmas, My true love gave to me: a set of impressions and feelings.