Whats' ##### with the Art Book Fair?

Book Launch: What is an Art book?

«An Art Book today can be seen to occupy various different positions including that of a piece of theory, a catalogue, a printed exhibition, a piece of art in itself, a supplement to a pre-existing piece. It can be a proposal for the future or an examination of the present or what has passed. “What is an Art Book?” will be an investigation of what an Art Book is in terms of material and conceptual concerns. This is an on going collaborative project that will be produced during the Artist Books Weekend held every year at The Mews Project Space. Artists, writers, curators, designers and other practitioners are invited to respond to the title of the project by contributing their interpretation of what an Art book means to them and their practice. Each contributor can propose text, drawings, photographs, sculpture, performance, audio recordings, video or any other concept/theory as long as it can ultimately be realised in A4 paper format and in black and white.

Adrianna Palazzolo / Alan Magee / Alice Bain / Aukje Dekker / Begona Morea Roy / Briony Anderson / Carlos Noronha Feio / Craig Cooper / D J Roberts / Dominic Paterson & Neil Celements / Gary Colclough / Gayle Meike / Hanane Ech-Charif / Imogen O'Rorke / James Brooks / Jeremy Akerman / Jo Ying Ping / Joanna Greenhill / Kate Janes / Kate Terry / Keh Ng / Kirsty Buchanan / Kristian De La Riva / Lecasdarte / Lewis Biggs / Lee Maelzer / Liane Lang / Lizzy Whirrity / Maria Fusco / Mark Jackson / Martha Sophie / Mary Yacoob / Mashu Ru / Matthew Stock / Mikael Larsson / Neil Coombs / Nicole Wassall / Olga Raciborska / Paul O'Kane / Pure Evil / Sarah Ludemann / Satu Jokinen / Shane T Hall / Thibaut DeWolf / Tina Hage / Vera Tollmann / Waldemer Pranckiwicz / Warren Garland / Wassink Lundgren»

A dialogue on the whole

The last show at The Mews Project Space has marked a particular moment in the space sill brief but prolific history. It is an epitome for a phase that has started two years ago by two artists and an art dealer. The exhibition, which was curate by Aldo Rinaldi and FIlipa Oliviera, as an affective sensorial event, marks a transition from an experimental dive into a new phase in the project that, maybe, would start to become interesting to see to be confronted with a more institutional approach.

Anyhow, more than a dialogue between Yonamine’s (1975, Angola) Dipoló and Charlotte Moth’s (1978, UK) Untitled slide projection, this is an exhibition about Whole, and having the whole completely full. Yonamine’s everyday imagery, from popular consumer goods from Angolan and African mythologies juxtaposing Western narrative, printed onto newspaper pages looks like it is a virus infecting the space; transforming a white box into a communication devise. While Moth’s enquire into “the physical context from which [objects] emerge, and are presented within”, accumulates in one single bright spot all the blackness surrounding it. But more importantly, is when I saw The Agony of Water, by William Cobbing (1974, UK). The video projection just transformed the exhibition concept brought by the works on the two first rooms. In this case, a woman takes out and put in clay around her naked body. Her form, in constant mutation, re-submerges through the life in her.

That is why this exhibition projects’ The Mews Project Space into a new paradigm at the contemporary art scene from London. Going from being a noisy generator powered space (in an alley behind the Whitechapel Art Gallery) in to becoming a space with its own distinctive heard voice. Without being overwritten by some sound caused by a generator feed by fuel fossil. The Gradiva Project serves as a testimony for a systemic recreation of new forms through the act. It incorporates, or, instead, opens a new addendum to the whole project, just make it to have more sense. The new ‘Common Room’ has helped to close the first intrinsic extension, developed by the two founding artists since 2009; it brings a new individual condition in to the whole through its completeness. As if a new beginning-continuation is emerging from now on.

newsfromlondon201106

Não é que não goste de poesia, pelo contrário! pois, nas palavras de Hölderlin, «O que permanece, é fundado pelos Poetas». Na realidade sou e sempre foi mais pragmático em relação às coisas da vida. No entanto, quando o assunto é a Fotografia é óbvio que tenho de deixar a poética desabrochar pois é um mundo em si mesmo. Sugestionado por uma realidade captada por Mårten Lange (1984, Mölndal, Sweden), a exposição de nove imagens (laser prints de múltiplas proporções) no The Mews Project Space (Londres), até ao dia 2 de Julho, sob o título A Language in Itself, transporta-nos e permite-nos absorver a existência de modos idiossincráticos sobre a noção da originalidade, autenticidade e presença individual, por um lado, e questionar, por outro, o aliciamento, a democratização e a saturação visual provocada pelo apogeu da ligação virtual essencial para o discurso da era digital.