The Candidate

Project for an Unidentified Political Object (2014-15) is a participatory artistic proposal brought recently by the English artist Gordon Shrigley. The MP Candidate - a project realised during the 2015 General Elections in the UK - had a total of 28 votes, i.e. participatory spectators. The 27 + 1 votes, which expressed a political decision, are the moment when participation as an act became visible for everyone, although, at the end, even if being expressed within a political frame-work and set, it was an art project, not a political proposal. Congratulations to the Candidate Candidature - that's one choice! that's greater freedom!

Christian Jankowski: Heavy Weight History

Christian Jankowski
Heavy Weight History
Lisson Gallery

PRESS RELEASE:

Last year the German artist Christian Jankowski travelled to Poland to produce Heavy Weight History, which consists of an installation, a 25-minute film and a series of photographs. Jankowski invited a group of burly weightlifters to try and pick up a number of massive public sculptures in the Polish capital of Warsaw, including more than one Communist-era memorial, a statue of Ronald Reagan and the figure of Syrenka the Mermaid, a famous, often vandalised symbol of the city, first erected in 1859. Wearing their national colours, the Polish champion powerlifters and bench-pressers struggle and strain to elevate these hefty bronze and brick monuments, metaphorically attempting to lift the very burden of history on to their shoulders.

Simultaneously disturbing and stimulating debates surrounding the still-raw history of Polish occupation by the Nazis, as well as the country’s protracted period of Soviet rule after WWII, Jankowski’s film conversely posits a light-hearted and socially-inclusive aspect to his controversial undertaking – that of reinvigorating locals’ relationships to oft-neglected bits of Varsovian public statuary. This questioning of the continued relevance and future siting of public sculpture continues a line of enquiry by Jankowski that has previously seen him create numerous life-size bronze Living Statues (2007) – simulacra of street performers posing as Julius Caesar and Che Guevara in Barcelona – as well as a giant socialist-realist sculpture based on an anachronistically luxurious photograph by one of the Mexican Muralists, entitled Monument to the Bourgeois Working Class (2012).

As with other films of Jankowski’s, such as Casting Jesus of 2011, the live, performative elements of Heavy Weight History have been documented in the style of scripted reality television, or specifically in this case as a convincing piece of outside broadcast coverage of a competitive sport, with a well-known Polish commentator on hand to describe the action. For his fourth solo show with Lisson Gallery in ten years, Jankowski is also presenting another recent film, Crying for the March of Humanity of 2012, in which an entire episode of a Mexican telenovela has been remade, except that the lines of dialogue have been replaced by actors sobbing and crying rather than speaking – extending the dramatic, climactic soap opera moment into something more like hysteria. Photo-realistic canvases from The China Painters series (2007-08), produced by copyists from the notorious ‘oil painting village’ of Dafen, complete Jankowski’s exhibition, while similarly highlighting the potentially serious ramifications of staging or altering reality, whether that manipulation happens through translation via mass-media or as a by-product of an inherent flaw in man’s nature.

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André Romão exhibition, The Winter of (our) Discontent, in 2010, at Kunsthalle Lissabon (Lisbon), deals with the imposition of political ideologies throughout history in the public space.

Diango Hernández: The New Man and the New Woman

Diango Hernández
The New Man and the New Woman
Marlborough Contemporary

Diango Hernández's work is an explosion of energy on a black graphite canvas. His language oscillate between "personal and collective memory, blurring the line between conflicting poetic and political points of view. [...] Hernández believes that all art is autobiographical but also incorporates the collective organised structures that give shape to history." [PR]

«It is very early in the morning. The grass is covered with cold, dense dew. We haven’t even moved a hundred metres and my boots and trousers are already drenched and cold. The morning mist has turned my legs into two moving blades of grass. I try to walk as fast as I can and not to shiver, and I long for the sun to come up and make everything evaporate. An hour later, like we do every morning, we are all standing to attention like soldiers, each one of us facing an infinite furrow of exuberant tobacco plants. With our hoes in our left hands, we all shout in unison: ‘We will be like Che.’ The tobacco plants and the weeds around them remain inert; our cry does not even move one leaf. Our voices quickly dissolve. It is worse each morning to work in silence.

However, today I hear the same instruction, like a continuous, infinite echo that refuses to leave its cave. Throughout all those years I learnt how to differentiate the voices of my companions and today I manage to break the unity. I hear each voice separately and I am able to recognise each one of our faces as well as our minuscule bodies.

Who amongst us is like Che? No-one!

Who wants to be like Che? No-one!

Who would have wanted to be like Che? No-one!

Diango Hernández, 2013» [PR]

«The New Man and the New Woman at Marlborough Contemporary is Diango Hernández’s first solo exhibition in the UK. Diango Hernández (1970, Cuba. Now lives in Düsseldorf, Germany) will have solo shows at Mostyn, Llandudno and at Kunstverein Nürnberg in 2014. He has participated in many group shows in international institutions, such as MOMA in New York and the Hayward Gallery in London. His work has been presented at the 2005 Venice Biennale, the 2006 Biennales in São Paulo and Sydney and the 2010 Liverpool Biennial. A major solo exhibition was held at MART, Roveretto, in 2012.» [PR]