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

THE BIG SHOW, BY TRAVIS SOMERVILLE

The tumultuous history of race relations in the South has been, in large part, buried and left to fester in the years since the Civil War. While culture is intangible and abstract, its artifacts are available as evidence of its existence. Born in Atlanta, Georgia and raised throughout the South, Travis Somerville unapologetically picks at these old wounds by exposing the popular objects and iconography of Southern culture. Somerville’s use of imagery is complex and shaped significantly by his personal relationship to it. His critical eye works in the shadow of his own nostalgia and consequently attempts to reconcile the idealism of his religious upbringing with the racial and political turmoil of his past.

Travis Somerville's website

22:04 - By Unknown 0

EL SILUETAZO, BY EDUARDO GIL

"The realisation of silhouettes is the most memorable of the artistic-political practices that lent a powerful visuality to the public space of Buenos Aires and many other cities of the country on the demands of the argentinian human rights movements in the early 1980s. This consist of a simple design in the form of the outline of a man-sized body on paper, later pasted on the city walls as a way of representing the 'presence of an absence' of the thousands of prisioners who 'disappeared' during the last military dictatorship" (text by Ana Longoni).

This video by Marcelo Expósito includes interviews with the art historian and researcher Ana Longoni, and Guillermo Kexel (one of the three artists who originally conceived 'El Siluetazo', before this practice was adopted and pushed forward by Madres de Plaza de Mayo in 1983), as well as original photographs by Guillermo Kexel and Eduardo Gil. This video is part of the collective research project: "Images of 'El Siluetazo' and other creative strategies of the human rights movement in Argentina", carried out by Fernanda Carvajal, Marcelo Expósito, Cora Gamarnik, Ana Longoni and Jaime Vindel, within the framework of the Red Conceptualismos del Sur / Southern Conceptualisms Network, produced by Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid (2010-2011).

19:58 - By Unknown 0

INTERNACIONAL, BY PACO POMET

Paco Pomet's artwork exhibited at Banksy's Dismaland.

17:52 - By Unknown 0

IF THERE WERE WATER WE SHOULD STOP AND DRINK, BY ADAM CALDWELL

The eclectic nature of my work reflects my wide range of interests and influences. My figurative painting and drawing has been influenced by the realistic yet expressive work of Odd Nerdrum, Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, Antonio López García, Jenny Saville, and Barron Storey, whom I studied under at CCAC. Theories of consciousness by philosophers such as Gilles Deleuze have also informed my art work. I am inspired by my grandfather, author Erskine Caldwell, and his commitment to representing the unseen and marginalized members of our society. I am also heavily influenced by music, movies, and comics, all of which have shaped my identity. I am an accomplished guitarist and martial artist, and these disciplines also inform my artistic perspective.

http://www.adamhuntercaldwell.com/

17:34 - By Unknown 0

WE ARE NOT THE LAST, BY ZORAN MUŽIČ

Zoran Mušič (12 February 1909 – 25 May 2005) was a Slovene painter, graphic artist and draughtsman.

In October 1944, he was arrested by the Nazi German forces and a month later sent to Dachau concentration camp, where he made more than 100 sketches of life in the camp, some under extremely difficult circumstances. From the drawings, mainly executed in May 1945, he managed to save around seventy. After liberation by Americans in April 29, 1945, Mušič returned to Ljubljana. There, he was subjected to the pressures by the newly established Communist regime and moved to Gorizia at the end of July 1945. In October 1945 he settled in Venice.

Excerpt from a conversation between Zoran Music and art historian and critic Jean Clair (source: La barbarie ordinaire, 2001):

What was your first impression of Dachau?

Corpses everywhere. You couldn’t count them. It was a hallucinating world, a kind of landscape with mountains of corpses. (…)

You often speak of “landscapes of corpses”…

Yes, it became a landscape because, when one saw hundreds, thousands of corpses, this was something indescribable. A painter expresses himself in these terms, he sees a landscape. (…) An artist can draw anything. More or less, better or worse. But when one sees a landscape of dead, it is quite different from the drawing of a leg at the Institute of Medicine. There, it is like a still life. But the camp was like a landscape, a forest of dead bodies. A virgin forest, if you may say so. You cannot describe it, you cannot imagine it. Those things were hallucinatory, unreal.

17:55 - By Unknown 0

SURREALIST EXECUTION, BY ANDRZEJ WRÓBLEWSKI

Andrzej Wróblewski was one of Poland's most outstanding and most independent post-war artists. He created his own individual, highly suggestive, and prolific formula of figurative painting that continued to inspire and became a reference point for several generations of artists who came after him.

His series Rozstrzelania / Executions, dating from the end of the 1940s, provides some good examples of this type of composition. These scenes of events during the German occupation of Poland are exceptional for the intensity of feeling they provoke. The artist accomplishes this by depicting brutally deformed human figures torn into pieces; at the same time the canvasses are maintained in cold, blue-green, cadaver-like hues. Around this period the artist produced other paintings in which he used the symbolism of blue as denoting non-materiality (Syn i zabita matka / Son and Dead Mother, Matka z zabitym synem / Mother and Dead Son, Zabity maz / Dead Husband).

Fundacja Andrzeja Wróblewskiego

Culture.pl

17:44 - By Unknown 0

THE PROBLEM WE ALL LIVE WITH, BY NORMAN ROCKWELL

The Problem We All Live With is a 1964 painting by Norman Rockwell. An iconic image of the Civil Rights Movement in the United States,it depicts Ruby Bridges, a six-year-old African-American girl, on her way into an all-white public school in New Orleans on November 14, 1960 during the process of racial desegregation. Because of threats and violence against her, she is escorted by four deputy U.S. marshals; the painting is framed such that the marshals' heads are cropped at the shoulders.On the wall behind her is written the racial slur "nigger" and the letters "KKK"; a smashed tomato thrown at Bridges is also visible. The white crowd is not visible, as the viewer is looking at the scene from their point of view.The painting is oil on canvas and measures 36 inches high by 58 inches wide.

22:52 - By Unknown 0

RESPONSES TO AN IMMIGRATION REQUEST FROM 194 GOVERNMENTS, BY RAAFAT ISHAK

"A formal request to immigrate was sent to 194 governments, 97 of whom provided a response, varying from congratulatory notes to outright suspicious interrogations of motive. What was evident, was that inherent laws and regulations, particular to each state, were in fact a conglomeration of sameness: race, language and religion, as well as economic and professional qualifications were key criteria. Unsurprisingly, 97 states chose not to respond at all.

Responses to an immigration request from one hundred and ninety four governments (2006–09) constitutes 194 painted panels, depicting the faded flag of each state superimposed with a summary of each response, or no response, in stylised and phonetic Arabic text. What on the surface seems like an unprecedented opportunity to reclaim the world by self and citizen is obstructed by an inherent lack of freedom, in particular the freedom to cross borders and migrate from one distinct place to another. This work constitutes a polemic veneration towards otherness whilst engaging in a reconsideration of self and citizen as a contrivance of nation states mired in economic, social, political and historical relevance."

16:53 - By Unknown 0