RETURN OF THE ASHES, BY JAMISON CHAS BANKS

Known as “America’s favorite pastime,” baseball is the dominant metaphor for issues of contested territory in Retour des Cendres Vol. 1 (Return of the Ashes Vol. 1). In 1803 Napoleon sold the Louisiana Territory to the U.S., including the present-day state of Oklahoma as well as parts of fourteen other states, comprising the U.S.’s single largest acquisition of land. In this work the artist demonstrates a concern with interrelationship between the Louisiana Purchase, the exile of the Cherokee in Oklahoma, and Napoleon’s own later exile to the island of St. Helena.We encounter just a few elements—a scoreboard with a map of the United States, a vintage French flag, and a baseball with Napoleon’s signature—presented as artifacts of a game played between the “Exiles” and the “Purchasers.”

Artist's website

Jamison Chas Banks from SITE Santa Fe on Vimeo.

08:13 - By Unknown 0

HETEROTOPIA, BY ŞENER ÖZMEN

Şener Özmen questions whether there are certainties in current circumstances and situations, authoritarian structures and taboos that reign in our lives, through his wit and sense of humor, a lucid aesthetics and his critical, provocative style. Özmen's refined and lyrical works directs our attention to the perception of and changes in the context of art, and throws a critical glance at the social reality issues that the artist reacts against through his artistic attitude.

Şener Özmen at Pilot Gallery

10:00 - By Enrique Veganzones 0

THE PRISON OF SANTO STEFANO, BY ROSELLA BISCOTTI

In The Prison of Santo Stefano (2011-2013), her work exhibited in the 13th Istanbul Biennial, Biscotti reflects on the general condition experienced by detainees and the psychological effects of isolation, which destroy physical and intellectual abilities and annul the convicts’ identities.

The Santo Stefano Prison is located on a small island on the Mediterranean Sea. It was the first prison built for life imprisonment in Italy and the first one to use a panoptic structure, taking as reference the San Carlo Opera Theater in Naples. Contemporary to Jeremy Bentham’s designs of the Panopticon, this structure renders all cells visible from a central point, thus creating a permanent feeling of surveillance. Santo Stefano opened its doors as a modern prison in 1793 and was operational until 1965. Many political figures in Italy—mostly anarchists and communist leaders— were imprisoned at this location.

In The Prison of Santo Stefano Biscotti produced imprints of spatial segments of the prison’s floors with lead sheets and filmed the process with 8 mm footage. This process —the carrying of the raw material to the island by hand, hammering and reshaping it, and taking it back to the mainland— symbolizes the prison’s existential conditions on many levels: it recalls the hard physical labour involved, represents the permanent marks the prison could leave on the body, and evokes a concrete sensation of the prison’s spatial restrictions through the sculptures shown as full-scale maps of one cell and a fragment of the courtyard. Biscotti is after the traces of the bodies who lived inside and capturing their resistance through fragility. In the film, the making of the sculptures is accompanied by a political action (‘Bringing flowers to the cemetery of the detainees that died in life imprisonment’) that was initiated by the artist and Nicola Valentino—former political prisoner with a life sentence—and supported by detainees of different Italian prisons. During 2012 and 2013, the unmarked graves of the island’s cemetery were named thanks to a map drawn by an anarchist that had visited the island shortly after the prison’s closure, and the action grew into the movement Liberi dall’ergastolo (‘Free from life imprisonment’).

Javier Villa and Övül Durmuşoğlu

10:00 - By Enrique Veganzones 0

SPOTS OF TIME, BY ROB JOHANNESMA

2013 / Refugees, Spots Of Time

The tension between the desire for radical change and the seeming intransigence of certain institutions that led artist Johannesma to create Spots of Time (2013). The work is a multichannel digital slide show that presents a compilation of newspaper pages and photographs from 2008 to the present that capture this phenomenon. As re-photographed by the artist multiple times and transferred to a different medium, each image guides our view beyond its immediate take as news to a more abstract reading of information. Although the language of the archive might seem incompatible with the spectacular nature of revolutions, Johannesma uses his role as an artist who understands and appreciates the complexities of image-making to create a compendium of the architecture, the objects, and the issues of freedom and citizenship embroiled in such occurrences. His conservation of moments of these ongoing struggles stands as an example of what playwright Bertolt Brecht called ermattungstaktik (‘tactics of attrition’), and the creative efforts of imagination and dedication, through which, however short the duration, the challenges of this world will eventually give way.

Clare Butcher

Rob Johannesma's website

10:00 - By Unknown 0

PROYECTO SECUNDARIO LILIANA MARESCA

After the violent uprisings in Argentina in 2001, a group of artists (who later assumed the name Liliana Maresca Secondary School Project) initiated various social and artistic endeavours in La Cava de Villa Fiorito, a shantytown in Lomas de Zamora. Since 2007 they have focused their efforts on developing an educational programme with a visual arts focus for the public secondary school no. 349 in the neighbourhood. The Ministry of Education approved the programme in 2009.

The project is an independent collective engaged with the socio-economically deprived Fiorito community. The collective works to empower community members through an educational proposal of contemporary art strategies derived from the neighbourhood’s identity and particular—and very immediate— problems such as discrimination, domestic violence, child labour and the absence of public services. Firmly grounded in the grassroots and employing local cultural elements and participatory methods, they prioritize being inclusive. The collective’s current members—Lorena Bossi, Florencia Cabeza, Ariel Cusnir, and Leandro Tartaglia—operate not merely as pedagogical advisors to the school’s authorities, but also as practitioners and educators, integrating visual-arts methodologies into the general curriculum. These methodologies seek to develop the students’ perceptions both as spectators and producers of visual culture, and foster critical thinking and creative solutions for difficult everyday situations. The artists generate relationships with artistic institutions and alternative art spaces; organizes visits to museums, art centres, and art fairs for children who have almost never left the neighbourhood; invites artists and art professionals to lecture at the school. The collective also organizes art exhibitions featuring renowned artists in hallways and class­rooms, using their work as pedagogical material for academic subjects: Leon Ferrari’s Heliografías series for teaching mathematics and geometry; Guillermo Faivovich & Nicolás Goldberg’s Camp del Cielo meteorite project for science and history...

Blog of the Proyecto Secundario Liliana Maresca.

10:00 - By Enrique Veganzones 0

LIKE EVERY DAY LIFE, BY SHADI GHADIRIAN

Challenging the international preconceptions of women’s roles within an Islamic state, Tehran-based artist Shadi Ghadirian’s photographs draw from her own experiences as a modern woman living within the ancient codes of Shariah law. Her images describe a positive and holistic female identity, humorously taking issue with the traditional roles by which women – both in the Middle East and universally – have been defined.

The title of Ghadirian’s Like Everyday Series refers both to the materials she uses in her photos and the derogatory social perceptions that women regularly face. Her cast of crudely rendered women cleverly reinvents the sources of negative stereotyping as attributes of empowerment. A grater-faced wife, the dreaded prototype of mother-in-law jokes everywhere, radiates a steely and abrasive determination.

Replacing the expected monotone of the black chador with vibrantly patterned fabrics, each portrait suggests a vivacious individuality and character, belying the limitations of stereotype. Similarly, the mundane objects, when transformed into faces, become highly poised and charismatic caricatures, embodying individual personalities.

(Saatchi Gallery, London)

Shadi Ghadirian's website

09:00 - By Enrique Veganzones 0

STANDING MAN, BY ERDEM GÜNDÜZ

Erdem Gündüz is a Turkish dancer, actor, performance artist, choreographer, and teacher who, as a result of his actions during the 2013–14 protests in Turkey, has become "the face of the protest movement against the Turkish government." He became internationally known as "The Standing Man" in June 2013 when he stood quietly in Istanbul's Taksim Square as a protest against the Islamist government of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.

14:01 - By Enrique Veganzones 0