PAIN AND SYMPATHY, BY WILLIAM KENTRIDGE

Episode #100: With his video "History of the Main Complaint" (1996) serving as a backdrop, William Kentridge discusses how artists draw upon tragedy as subject matter for their work and how drawing itself can be a compassionate act.

Having witnessed first-hand one of the twentieth centurys most contentious struggles—the dissolution of apartheid—William Kentridge brings the ambiguity and subtlety of personal experience to public subjects most often framed in narrowly defined terms. Using film, drawing, sculpture, animation, and performance, he transmutes sobering political events into powerful poetic allegories. Aware of myriad ways in which we construct the world by looking, Kentridge often uses optical illusions to extend his drawings-in-time into three dimensions.

Born in 1955 in Johannesburg, where he continues to live and work, Kentridge has earned international acclaim for his interdisciplinary practice, which often fuses drawing, film, and theater. Known for engaging with the social landscape and political background of his native South Africa, he has produced a searing body of work that explores themes of colonial oppression and social conflict, loss and reconciliation, and the ephemeral nature of both personal and cultural memory.

23:20 - By Unknown 0

ART 4 HUMAN RIGHTS CATALOGUE

The catalogue of the final exhibition of the project is available online. It displays the most remarkable art works with resources to bring art and human rights closer to public of all ages, both in English and Spanish.

13:53 - By Unknown 1

AN OPEN HOUSE, BY LEONOR ANTUNES

Two weeks after the election of Donald Trump, I held a small event in Amsterdam in a place called the Hubertus House, which was designed by the architect Aldo van Eyck in 1959. I called it An Open House. I have been working on this project for quite a long time; I was invited to do it by the curating collective If I Can’t Dance I Don’t Want to Be Part of Your Revolution. Van Eyck designed two interconnected buildings to host single mothers and their children in a private foundation that provided day care, as well as other support. Initially, I didn’t plan to work on this project in the way that I did but after the shock of the election, I couldn’t think of anything else apart from reacting somehow. 

The project included 12 women, myself included, from different backgrounds and origins – we all look very different from each other. Tess van Eyck, the architect’s daughter, joined us, sitting on a sofa reading her newspaper. For one hour, we all stood on the balconies of the building and behind the windows. The public was told nothing about what they might see; they were allowed access to one of the two buildings, but not the one we were occupying. We were all dressed in the 12 different colours that Van Eyck used.

(Text published on frieze.com) 

23:16 - By Unknown 0

LANGUAGE (PROPERTY), BY DANIEL ANDÚJAR

Daniel García Andújar – the Spanish media artist better known by his company name Technologies To The People — almost ten years ago created with Language (property) a work addressing the increasing privatization and commodification of language. A plain HTML page presents a list of sentences that have become registered trademarks and thus the property of their corporate owners. Examples include »Where do you want to go today?™« (Microsoft), »A better return on information ™« (SAP), »Moving at the speed of business™« (UPS), »What you never thought possible™« (Motorola). By giving his project the title Remember, language is not free™, Andújar anticipated the disputes surrounding ›intellectual property‹ in the following years (and increasingly evident in the second half of the 1990s with the ruthless scramble for domain names in the World Wide Web). While on the website the individual sentences are linked to the copyright notices of the relevant companies, a large-format, almost ›immersive‹, wall has been chosen for the exhibition.

Daniel Andújar's website

13:52 - By Unknown 0

AUTHORS OF DEVASTATION, BY VERNON AH KEE

Vernon Ah Kee’s conceptual text pieces, videos, photographs and drawings form a critique of Australian culture from the perspective of the Aboriginal experience of contemporary life. Ah Kee’s works respond to the history of the romantic and exoticised portraiture of ‘primitives’, and effectively reposition the Aboriginal in Australia from an ‘othered thing’, anchored in museum and scientific records to a contemporary people inhabiting real and current spaces and time. 

Information about Vernon Ah Kee on Milani Gallery's website.

23:19 - By Enrique Veganzones 0

THEME FOR THE MEETING IN SAN JAVIER

This time we ask all students to share a more personal contribution to the exhibition.
In these two years we have been working on diverse art projects on human rights. It is time now to share what each one of us has learnt and show to others a picture, an object, a drawing (not necessarily made by you...) that witnesses this experience. We are asking for something that relates this issue to your daily life or local community: maybe you volunteer in an organisation devoted to help children in distress, or spend some time with elderly people who live alone or in a nursing home... Attach a few statement to let others understand what your picture, object, drawing, etc. represents.
All contributions will be displayed during the last exhibition in San Javier.

23:43 - By Unknown 1

HI GENTLEMAN, BY ROZHGAR MUSTAFA

A Kurdish artist who lives in Sulaimani where she graduated from the university of fine arts in 2004, she teaches art in secondary school.

In her own words, Rozhgar Mustafa describes this artwork: "I used to produce my own bra when I was a teenager, because I couldn’t deal with my adulthood, my relatives told me that it is impossible to go out and play with my friends as because I passed my age twelve. Therefore I was thinking of hiding my breast to appear like a boy, and I usually had my hair cut by my brother as exactly as a boy for next four years. Since I had passed that period I always found myself under an extremely difficult social and political condition, which takes a decision based on my gender, from then I have been demanding the position of being a girl or a boy."

Rozhgar Mustafa's website.

13:25 - By Unknown 0