My Biennial is better than yours

Mybiennialisbetterthanyours

Mybiennialisbetterthanyours an online project curated by Tolga Taluy for the X Biennale de Lyon

“The works displayed on mybiennialisbetterthanyours.com are not subversive because they are trying to deconstruct established systems of dot.capitalism. They are subversive because they are referring to these systems through the use of amateur “original” content production standards set up by meta-producers of online containers, which are radical in their mass popularity and ease of use.”

[via manystuff]

The Tree

Sebastian Errazuriz, The Tree
The Tree (2006), is an artwork by Sebastian Errazuriz:

“A 10-meter high, real magnolia tree planted in the center of Chile’s National Stadium where dictator Pinochet tortured political prisoners 30 years ago. For a week the stadium was open to the public as a park. A soccer match played before 15,000 people, with the tree in the middle, was the closure of the piece.”

[via iheartmyart]

Golden Aliens

Common Task

Common Task is a project by Pawel Althamer.

“Common Task is a documented group activity, a social sculpture, realised within the science – fiction formula. The artistic project is a combination of an activity performed in public spaces with the social aspects such as exclusion related to the systemic transformation process, self-organisation and bottom-up initiatives which may change the world and shape the future. In broader terms, the Project alludes to the ideals of freedom and solidarity.

[via new art]

The Fox in the Museum

Francis Alys, Nightwatch

In 2004, Francis Alÿs collaborated with the National Portrait Gallery to create a piece generated by the gallery’s state-of-the-art internal CCTV system. Surveillance cameras observe a fox exploring the Tudor and Georgian rooms of the Gallery at night…

This Title is an Artwork of Mine

Pind

This is the first thing I saw arriving in Copenhagen. We were just strolling around the city, when I saw the Overgaden Gallery sign and decided to take a look. Established in 1986 by a group of local artists, Overgaden is a really interesting no-profit space for contemporary art, with a program of ten exhibition per year. Currently they are working on the new one, but last week I managed to see an amazing solo show by Pind, a young danish artist. His works plays tricks on the visitor’s mind, calling into question our sense of consciousness, perception, and reality itself…

I create you – you create me. I recognise myself in your thoughts, and you recognise yourself in mine. In this way, we mutually confirm our existence towards each other. (Pind)

press realease and photos
exhibition folder (pdf)

The Nine Eyes of Google Street View

Google Street View Camera

This is a must-read. Artist Jon Rafman has written a wonderful essay on Google Street View for Art Fag City:

“One year ago, I started collecting screen captures of Google Street Views from a range of Street View blogs and through my own hunting. This essay illustrates how my Street View collections reflect the excitement of exploring this new, virtual world. The world captured by Google appears to be more truthful and more transparent because of the weight accorded to external reality, the perception of a neutral, unbiased recording, and even the vastness of the project. At the same time, I acknowledge that this way of photographing creates a cultural text like any other, a structured and structuring space whose codes and meaning the artist and the curator of the images can assist in constructing or deciphering.”

read more here
full project here

A structural conceit

Mike Nelson

I’m back in Rome after a short trip to Denmark and Sweden (here you can find the full photo album). I saw a lot of interesting stuff that I’m gonna report in the next few posts. Starting with the best of course: Mike Nelson‘s exhibition at Statens Museum for Kunst in Copenhagen. The installation occupies a whole floor of the museum with a labyrinthine and replicating series of rooms. The experience of walking through this work is really hard to explain: it begins with curiosity and fun, than leads to disorientation and anxiety, ending in total amazement. Nelson explains the project in a series of video-interviews you can watch here. And this is an effective description of the work:

Mike Nelson

“Two rooms exactly the same, connected by one long rectangular one in the middle. The structure I’m building is then flipped onto the other side and mirrored with a big curved 120-foot-long corridor in the middle. In a sense you see the back of a structure, the falsity of what you’re walking into, almost like you’ve come to the back of a show when you shouldn’t have done. Initially you’re feeling kind of pleased with yourself because you spoiled the artist’s trick. This however is a double bluff of sorts as it relaxes you for the main feature which is your passage through the curved corridor back to the same space where everything is reversed. It looks kind of the same but you know it’s not, so there’s an uncanniness, an unease about it. It’s like an investigation of your own recent history, a device to reinvent that sense of deja-vu the first time you ever experienced it as a child, an existential moment of confusion.”
(Mike Nelson interviewed by Michele Robecchi)

Pseudo-Documentary

Glass

You look at the photos and think “wow, what a spectacular installation”, maybe a little too crafty, but beautiful nonetheless. Then you realize something is missing. And slowly understand that it’s reality itself…
Pseudo-documentary is a photo series by David DiMichele, and depicts fantasy installations in monumental exhibition spaces. As we read in his gallery website: “DiMichele creates this work by first building scale models of exhibition spaces, and producing original artworks in drawing, painting and sculpture mediums, which are sited in the spaces and then photographed to create the final works.”

Doorbell with inbuilt visitor statistics display « Variations on normal by Dominic Wilcox

Source: variationsonnormal.com
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