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 2

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

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

REFUGEE STREET STUDIO PROJECT, BY ALEXIA WEBSTER

The ‘Refugee Street Studio’ project involves creating photographic portrait studios on the streets of refugee and IDP camps around the world. We invite anyone to come have their family and individual portraits taken. The portraits are then printed on site for free with a portable photo printer for people to take home for their family album.

In March 2014 I began the first ‘Refugee Street Studio’ in the Bulengo IDP camp just outside of the city of Goma in the D.R. Congo. The camp has over 50 000 residents who have fled fighting and violence in the north eastern regions of the country.

Refugee camps are spaces of uncertainty and transience. Many people arrive in the camps, deeply traumatized, having lost not only their homes but also most of their possessions, including family photographs, when they escaped the violence. Exiled from ones home, facing an uncertain future and a lost past, a family photo can be a powerful and precious object which can help support a sense of connectedness and belonging. Over 700 people took part in the Bulengo Studios and received their own printed photograph to take way with them. Many arrived dressed up for the occasion with their children or loved ones and patiently waited for their portraits.

Alexia's Webster's website

19:07 - By Unknown 0

2487, BY LUZ MARÍA SÁNCHEZ

2487 speaks the names of two thousand four hundred eighty-seven persons who were found dead throughout the border region of Mexico and the United States. Effectually giving voice to diaspora, Sanchez’s eight-channel sound piece evolves into an audible terrain where names are generated from various positions marking the varying directions of movement across the border. Each death, that was recorded and filed, has been audibly re-recorded and re-filed by the artist as individual sound files composed to play randomly, initiating organic patterns much like migration patterns themselves. Interspersed with varying periods of silence, some names are heard in isolation while others sound like links in a chain, and many overlap. As two thousand four hundred eighty-seven names are spoken the changing pace that speaks them disrupts any sense of repetition allowing the piece to extend beyond the serial monotony of name-calling. The random pattern employed in the voicing of these persons, these deaths, offers both moments of contemplation and anxiety with periods of doubt in between. That one can’t actually hear all the names, as some merge into others or are overlaid, underscores the immensity and gravity of what is being called for, not just called out—the intractability of 2487… and 2488, and 2489, and 2490 and… . More than just enunciating the sounds of each identity 2487 annunciates a calculated instability, a tension that quietly resonates throughout the piece.

A PDF with information about the individuals featured in 2487 is available for download here. For more information about Sánchez’s ongoing project on the Mexican diaspora, visit diaspora2487.org.

Luz María Sánchez's website

19:04 - By Unknown 0

DE VLUCHT, BY WOUTER OSTERHOLT

The sugar sculpture is a copy of an existing monument, titled ‘De Vlucht’ (The Refuge) made by the Dutch sculptor Hein Koreman, located in the Valkenberg Park in the city center of Breda. Every year on the 4th of May this monument is used to commemorate the casualties of the Second World War, but in particular it reminds us of the so-called ‘Vlucht van Breda’. On the 12th of May 1940 the citizens of Breda fled their city due to the impending war.

Wouter Osterholt's website

09:00 - By Unknown 0

FOLLOW HIM, BY WANG QINGSONG

Follow Him (2010) and Follow You (2013) take their title from the popular English-language-teaching program introduced by China State Television (CCTV) in 1982. These were the early days of economic reconstruction, and many Chinese citizens glimpsed the Western lifestyle through the program— how Westerners ate, dressed, and lived. During the 1980s, Qingsong explains, ‘The English teaching TV program’s significance went far beyond learning English. It helped Chinese people learn about the West and the world, just after China emerged from its closed-door policy.’ Mischievously critiquing China’s development and perhaps the Western discourse of development itself, Qingsong constructed a huge blackboard on which he scribbled Chinese and English slogans with words mainly taken from China-based English-training textbooks and manuals.

Follow Him speaks of the issue of education in China. Things are taught but not learnt, according to Qingsong. Facts are transferred by teachers and regurgitated by pupils and many people fail to understand the real meaning of things. Qingsong’s work depicts a vast amount of discarded textbooks, placing a lonely figure in the middle overcome by the material.

Wang Qingsong's website

14:11 - 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

LUZ NAS VIELAS, BY BOA MISTURA

We had the opportunity to live in a favela with the Gonçalves family. 

During the first few days, we realized of the possible framework made by the narrow and winding passageways that connect the up and low urban areas, known as “vielas". The project aims to respond to this characteristic spatial complexity. Flattening the perspective from a point (anamorphism), the words "BELEZA", "FIRMEZA”, "LOVE", “DOÇURA" and "ORGULHO" are read and framed by a flat color, equally covering all the construction materials, democratizing the space. For us, these words are the best portrait of the favela.
Boa Mistura's website.

23:46 - By Unknown 0

ESTRECHO ADVENTURE, BY VALERIANO LÓPEZ

Computer games taken to the limit.

The situations we see in a computer game are always fictitious, there's no man capable to do some of the things we see in them. Invading an enemy installation with a machine gun, or fighting many expert fighters without resting, etc. But maybe reality goes far away, even more than fiction. What about crossing the strait of Gibraltar (which is for the Moroccan like crossing through Mexican frontier to reach the United States for the Mexican) trying to get money to pay the Arab Mafia, crossing the sea with a poor boat avoiding the police, getting a job that can consist on many hard tasks, fighting the 'Guardia civil', a very hard police corps in Spain... It's a reflection on the reality that makes us think in the deep problems that affect our neighbouring countries in such way that people who lives in them is pushed to abandon their home places in search for a better life. A masterpiece in the short films little world.

Pedro Luis Azcárraga. IMDb, 12 January 2000

Artist's website

18:34 - By Unknown 0

ARCHIVE, BY ARKADI ZAIDES

Arkadi Zaides is an independent choreographer. He was born in the Soviet Union in 1979, and immigrated to Israel in 1990. Today he lives and works in Tel Aviv.

Archive, a solo by Arkadi Zaides, derives its source from the video archives of B’Tselem, a human rights information centre that gives cameras to Palestinians so that they can film their day-to-day lives in the occupied territories. On stage, the dancer and choreographer parades images of everyday violence between Palestinians and the settlers. He faces them and, as if looking for his place among them, reproduces the postures of the figures on screen. He glides from one body to the next, becoming a teenager throwing stones, a soldier firing teargas, an injured person being carried away… He extends certain movements, repeats others on a loop and, like an insane conductor, constructs a dance filled with gestures of violence. In turn playing a filter, a magnifying glass or a frame or hiding it altogether, Zaides continually moves around, shifting what we are seeing. He creates a maelstrom of sensations, a body-archive for us to delve into.

Arkadi Zaides's website.

 

13:07 - By Unknown 0

THE FLOWERS FAIR, BY NÚRIA GÜELL

The Flowers Fair Colombia, 2015-2016 The Flowers Fair has consisted in organizing and conducting a series of guided tours through the works of the Colombian artist par excellence, Fernando Botero, at the permanent collection of the Museum of Antioquia in Medellin. The visits are peculiar because are carried out by minors exploited by the growing business of sex tourism in Medellin. The young girls guide the visitors through Botero’s works in which the artist used prostitutes as models to represent the female body; Thus, these atypical modern art guides rely on their personal experiences around child sexual exploitation, the deshumanization of the female body as well as on the catalogs selling virginity that circulate on city streets and through which tourists -mostly from the U.S, Spain, Israel, Germany and Mexico- select the girl or boy whose virginity want to buy.

Medellín is defined as a progressive, cosmopolitan, innovative and cultural city, known as “Medellin Miracle”. Despite several social achievements, one of its worst consequences is hidden under this lucrative “face-lift”: child’s sexual exploitation in the growing sex tourism industry. From the "encounter" as an exhibition display and by using the symbolic power of the art institution, I seek to expose the problem and to confront the social acceptance of this form of contemporary slavery. Approaching to a critical review of the narrative that Art History draws up, I intend to reflect on the structural nature of this phenomenon.

Núria Güell's website.

10:03 - By Unknown 1

LOOKING FOR A HUSBAND WITH EU PASSPORT, BY TANIA OSTOJIĆ

In August 2000 Tanja Ostojić launched her project Looking for a Husband with EU Passport in which she published an online advertisement with the same title. Over the next few months the artist received numerous offers from men from around the world, and exchanged more than 500 letters with them. One of them was Klemens G. from Germany. Ostojić met him in 2001, as part of a publicly staged performance on the lawn in front of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Belgrade. One month later the two were wed in Belgrade, and then—with the international marriage certificate and other necessary documents in hand—Ostojić applied for a German visa. With her first three-month visa she moved to Düsseldorf, where she registered officially with the authorities and received additional visa extensions over the next three-and-a-half years. In the spring of 2005 her temporary residence permit expired and, instead of receiving a permanent residence permit, Ostojić was only granted an extension for an additional two years. Subsequently, she and Klemens G. divorced, and on July 1 the installation Integration Project Office was launched in the project room of Galerie 35 in Berlin, with a divorce celebration.

With her project Looking for a Husband with EU Passport Ostojić addresses the political injustices, exclusions, and delimitations that still exist in Europe beyond the global digital realm. Ostojić made use of the World Wide Web to shed light on the plight of immigrants and the limitations imposed on lifestyles, through artistic self-exploration.

Tanja Ostojić's website.

06:55 - By Unknown 1

LOCATING SOCIAL (UN) AWARENESS, BY ANDREJA KULUNČIĆ

Technology is often just another tool for leaving others behind, and above all in favour for those who are skilled, equipped and able. That is why, when thinking about technology as a symbolic 'gate/passage', I could not avoid the question of social awareness. How to (conceptually, and in somewhat cynical gesture) into the 'discourse of mapping' the reality around us, introduce the reflection of attitudes toward the others, and the issue of social vulnerability? In fact, mapping in itself with its military and invading symbolism denies the 'awareness' towards the society, underlines the cynical, if not absurd idea of monitoring, locating, mapping and using thus in the name of freedom and democracy.
Do we want to know what people currently surrounding us think about the issue of asylum seekers, homosexual relationships, women's rights? Whether the people with whom we are in the same room are racist, sexist, homophobic? Wether our neighbours want equal payment for both sexes, and whether they would agree that all Russians living in Estonia receive Estonian citizenship?
Technology is here used to monitor not our actions, but our thoughts and attitudes. This method of 'thought-policing' is not used to separate the acceptable from unacceptable but first of all to question how important it is for us to share our social (un)awareness with others? Does it even matter?
The work starts from this last question. It should matter, and then with time we might correct our social (un)awareness and tacit acceptance of (un)awareness of our fellow citizens, politicians, and written laws.

Andreja Kulunčić's website.

22:29 - By Unknown 0

REFUGEE REPUBLIC, BY INGO GÜNTHER

Ingo Günther was born in 1957. He lives and works in New York. His early sculptural works with video led him to news media projects, where he played a crucial role in the evaluation, interpretation, and publication of satellite data taken from crises zones. Since 1989 Günther uses illuminated globes as a medium for his artistic and journalistic interests. His project Refugee Republic of 1995 was also the first site dealing with refugees on the internet.

Refugee Republic is a concept based on the ever increasing number of refugees, displaced persons and migrants. Refugee Republic is attempting to address the problem associated with this condition. Refugee Republic maintains that refugees are essentially unrealized capital and that their involuntary fate of an international avantgarde can be turned into productive assets.
Refugee Republic proposes a supranational and supraterritorial refugee state that might become a model for the rest of the world.

Refugee Republic website.

Ingo Günther's website.

22:16 - By Unknown 0

SHORT STORIES ABOUT TROUBLED SOCIETIES, BY ZIYAH GAFIĆ

Ziyah Gafić was born in 1980 in Sarajevo, in former Yugoslavia, now Bosnia and Herzegovina. He lives and works in Sarajevo.

Gafić is considered one of the most talented, prolific, and engaged of the younger generation photojournalists. Although he was too young to have taken an active part in the Balkan war, the Bosnian documentary photographer Ziyah Gafić personally experienced the impact of the conflict. His aunt died in her burning house, his grandfather committed suicide and a niece was a victim of rape. Out of frustration at his enforced passivity, Gafić was determined to photograph the aftermath of the war in Bosnia. Very quickly he expanded his field to include countries that have been involved in similar sorts of conflicts, such as Palestine, Afghanistan and Chechnya, travelling extensively to document social and political conflict. Here too Muslim communities are seeking restoration after the violence of war, and must continue to live in a divided society.

Ziyah Gafić's website.

18:18 - By Unknown 0

AFRICAN REFUGEES PROJECT, BY GHANA THINKTANK

Ghana ThinkTank is an international collective that “develops the first world” by flipping traditional power dynamics, allowing the “third world” to intervene into the lives of the people living in the so-called “developed” world.

They collect problems from communities throughout the USA and Europe, and send them to think tanks we created in “developing” communities. The think tanks – which include a group of bike mechanics in Ghana, a rural radio station in El Salvador, Sudanese refugees seeking asylum in Israel, an artist collective in Iran, and a group of incarcerated girls in the Boston penal system, among others – propose solutions, which are then implemented in the “first world”.

Ghana ThinkTank’s innovative approach to public art reveals blind spots between otherwise disconnected cultures, challenges assumptions about who is “needy,” and turns the idea of expertise on its head by asking people in the “third world” to solve problems of people in the “first world.” This process helps people overcome their own stereotypes while being exposed to the stereotypes that other cultures have about them.

Ghana ThinkTank was founded in 2006 by Christopher Robbins, John Ewing and Matey Odonkor. Maria Del Carmen Montoya joined in 2009. The project began with think tanks in Ghana, Cuba, and El Salvador, and has since expanded to include Mexico, Iran, Serbia, Indonesia, Sudan and Morocco.

The African Refugee is one of the Ghana ThinkTank projects. It focuses on facilitating contact between groups that are historically or politically polarized in the Middle East.

In 2014, Ghana ThinkTank was invited by ArtPort Gallery in Tel Aviv to create an interchange between African refugees seeking asylum in Israel, and local residents who resented their presence.

Working with Sudanese and Eritrean asylum seekers along with local Israelis, they organized think tanks that collected problems from residents of the neglected neighborhood of South Tel Aviv as well as African refugees living in that same neighborhood. They asked each group to solve the problems of the other. Community members, the organized think tanks, and local organizations created plans to implement the proposed solutions. Solutions included an all female civilian patrol outfitted in uniforms of African cloth (image).

This effort to create constructive contact between groups was featured as part of a Tel Aviv-based art show “The Infiltrators.”

Ghana Thinktank's website.

22:10 - By Unknown 0

fbFACES, BY JOERN ROEDER AND JONATHAN PIRNAY

"fbFaces" is a project by Joern Roeder and Jonathan Pirnay, who study "New Media" at the University of Visual Arts and Design Kassel, Germany. The project deals with the issue of data accessibility on the Internet, a topic that is gaining more and more importance and actuality -especially in our times of privacy protection and social networks.
"On the one hand "Internet giants" like Google, etc. are coming under criticism for unsolicitedly collecting any information accessible, on the other hand it is surprising how many intimacies we reveal voluntarily, especially in social networks like facebook. What is normal, what is exaggerated? How are we dealing with that flood of information and in which ways is it changing us? How important is image cultivation on the Internet and how important becomes my "facebook-me"?
"fbFaces" is a fecabook crawler, built using JavaScript & PHP, that starts at the public profile of any fb-user, saving profile image, facebook-ID and name, and afterwards continuing its way to the public profiles of the user's friends. And so on...
An unimaginable flood of images with self-projection as its only purpose, 100.000 of these profile images were used (via Processing) to print a wallpaper for an entire room. In our living space, a wallpaper is omnipresent, it surrounds us day and night until after a while it is no longer noticed.
fbFaces is an attempt to visualize the incredible amount of data and images that we are daily overwhelmed by, so that we can neither realize our own selectivity nor consider the amount of data perceived.
The wallpaper transforms the room itself into a flood of information. It surrounds us, cannot be estimated from distance; details can only be caught through determined selection. But then they vanish again -in a cloud of information." (Joern Roeder and Jonathan Pirnay).

00:17 - By Unknown 0

MEMOPOL-II, BY TIMO TOOTS

Memopol-II is a social machine that maps the visitor’s information field. By inserting an identification document such as a national ID card or EU passport into the machine, it starts collecting information about the visitor from (inter)national databases and the Internet. The data is then visualized on a large‐scale custom display. The collection panel also shows the portraits of the visitors from their ID card.

The Cyrillic spelling of the installation’s name refers to George Orwell's concept of Big Brother from his 1949 dystopian novel 1984. Over the past decades, technological means have transformed the surveillance of society. When surfing on the Internet, paying with an ATM card, or using an ID card, people leave their digital traces everywhere. Internet and social networks gather and provide a great deal of personal information, and a person’s profile is no longer constituted by his or her physical being alone, but also by the person’s digital information, over which he or she sometimes has little control. Background checks through Internet search engines and social network sites have become routine when we meet somebody new or apply for a job. Memopol-II enables us to make a thorough background check of ourselves, mirroring back to us all the data about us that is accessible via the Internet.

Estonia is well ahead of other countries in governmental data collecting, storing citizen information online and making it accessible to different degrees to an individual person and to government agencies. It is a convenient means for electronic identification and for making various transactions by inserting it in to the different ID‐card readers. The harmless looking electronic card readers seldom bring to mind thoughts about malevolent third parties who might have unauthorized access to the protected information. By means of Memopol-II, Timo Toots tests either our trust or paranoia toward the machines that read the information.
Timo Toots's website

23:54 - By Unknown 0