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.

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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.

newsfromlondon201210

Christopher Kulendran Thomas

 

CHRISTOPHER KULENDRAN THOMAS

WHEN PLATITUDES BECOME FORM

Curated by Tom Trevatt

Opening 4-7pm Sunday 7^th October

Exhibition continues until 16th December

"In August 1940 Gilbert Renault, more famously known by his pseudonym, Colonel Rémy, returned to occupied France to volunteer as an agent in the French Résistance. During his time working for the British Government and the Free French Government in Exile, headed by Charles de Gaulle, Rémy became the most effective agent amongst almost 2000 volunteers. Working for the Bureau Central de Renseignements et d’Action (BCRA) Rémy organised one of the most active resistance networks (an organisation created specifically for military purposes; intelligence gathering, sabotage, espionage), the Confrérie de Notre Dame (Brotherhood of Our Lady). The express purposes of this network were the gathering of information, maps and photographs that aided the Allied armies in their incursions into both occupied France and German territory. Alongside the high profile resistance fighters as many as 400,000 French adults (by some estimates) partook in some form of resistance, be it producing, distributing or consuming resistance literature, committing acts of sabotage, gathering intelligence, housing spies, engaging in guerilla warfare. These activities, the networks created, the espionage, the clandestine publications, the economic resistance, people, relationships, weapons, forged documents, lies, secrets, loyalties made, loyalties broken, lives lost, loves formed, these things, these objects, these contingent materials of the Résistance are what the liberation movement colluded with." 
-  Excerpt from The Allure Of Collusion by Tom Trevatt

Not dissimilarly, a contingent ecological conception of the work of art is central to When Platitudes Become Form, an ongoing enterprise that exploits both the aesthetic and financial differences between centres of art power and their margins to pursue political affects that are not confined to the relation between artwork and viewer. Itself a target for marketisation, Christopher Kulendran Thomas' work takes as its materials the whole system by which art is distributed, including but not limited to the market, the state and global art imperial power, utilising the tools of distribution in the continual evisceration of the formation of the contemporary.

Tuesday November 6th, 7-9pm : To launch The Allure of Collusion, a new publication by Tom Trevatt to accompany the exhibition: When Platitudes Become Form, curator and writer Tom Trevatt will be in conversation with Christopher Kulendran Thomas, all welcome.

 

Tuesday November 20th, 7-9pm : Conversation with Simon Sheikh, curator, critic and Senior Lecturer in Curating, Goldsmiths University of London.

Interview : Christopher Kulendran Thomas

O conjunto de entrevistas agora iniciado, para o 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: In which way do you think 'conflict' is controlled and informs in your work?

CKT: Well this work was borne out of an incredibly conflicted situation, as was I for that matter. I was born in London in 1979 after my parents fled escalating conflict within Sri Lanka. The ensuing civil war ended brutally in 2009 as the Sri Lankan government leveraged international interests to comprehensively defeat the Tamil Tigers. Now, as the North and East of the island is about to be sold off to the international backers of Sri Lanka’s genocide, the economy is booming and with it a new context of Contemporary Art has emerged. The capital Colombo’s first Western-style commercial galleries have very quickly established Contemporary Art – as in the West – as the highest benchmark of connoisseurial consumerism in what is now one of the world’s fastest growing small economies. My response to this is the ongoing enterprise When Platitudes Become Form, whereby I reconfigure, for the Western art market, artworks by some of Sri Lanka’s most celebrated young artists. This radical re-marketing of the island’s contemporary art raises funds to resist the oppression of communities displaced by civil war, channelling resources that are not under government control to the formerly Tamil-occupied territories of the North and East of the country.

Christopher Kulendran Thomas

This is an acoustic sculpture playing for itself in a permanent loop, which becomes like a living organism through the use of mechanical and acoustic properties