THE HANDSTAND |
DECEMBER
2005
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Shirana Shahbazi (on the left, here with two
volonteers)
working at her wall painting for PRAGUE BIENNALE 2,
Karlin Hall, Prague 2005
Before the big show, Karlin Hall, Prague 2005
IT ALL HAPPENS IN PRAGUE
Political art in Latin
America and painting drive the program of Prague Biennale
2
Just a few years ago, Prague may have seemed an unlikely place to hold a
biennial of international contemporary art, but the first
Prague Biennale, which took place in 2003, brought artists, curators and
critics to the city in droves.
The second edition, again organized by Flash Art publisher Giancarlo
Politi and editor Helena Kontova, begins on May 26/27/28 and runs through
September 15. One major change this time around is the new venue, Karlin
Hall, a spacious post-industral building adapted expressly for
the exhibition. With its dual focus on painting and on art as political
action, the Biennale comes with a host of themed exhibitions organized
by a diverse group of curators.
The members of the curatorial team behind Expanded Painting - headed up
by Politi and Kontova - are, Andrea Bellini, Patricia Ellis,
Power Ekroth, Jacob Fabricius, Anda Klavina, Pablo Lafuente, Francesco
Manacorda, Chus Martinez, Neil Mulholland and Eva Wittocx.
The curators are bringing together work by over 100 artists, illustrating
the relationship between painting and other mediums such as
photography and video.
Today painting can be called an expanded field not only in terms of how
the medium interacts with other mediums, but also in
terms of its geographical breadth. Intriguing new painters hail from cities
the world over, but two points of greatest interest
recently have been the former East Germany and China.
At the Prague Biennale 2, Johannes Schmidt curates New German Painting -
The Leipzig and Dresden schools, featuring
more than 20 artists from the new generation of German painters.
Milan-based gallerist Primo Marella and Francesca Jordan present CHINA -
New Perspectives in Chinese Painting. Curator Luca Beatrice
lends a historical (and locally relevant) angle with a show dedicated to
the Normal Group, founded in the 1980s by Czech
painters Milan Kunc and Jan Knap with the German Peter Angermann.
There will also be a tribute to the Italian painter Gian Marco Montesano.
Besides painting, the Biennales other major focus is the relationship
between art production and political action in Latin America.
Acción Directa, curated by Marco Scotini, presents interventions and
political actions by artists and dissidents from
countries including Peru, Bolivia, Colombia and Nicaragua.
Hanna Wróblewska and Anna Jagiello take an in-depth look at the current
Polish art scene in Poland Overview and Jirí David
and Juraj Carný bring the Prague Biennale closer to home with the Czech
and Slovak sections.
Other exhibitions filling out the Biennales packed roster are Definition
of Everyday curated by Vit Havránek, Karel Císar and
Jan Mancuka; Street Art, a project by Christian Schmidt-Rasmussen;
Playstation, which includes Eric Doeringers
bootlegs of well-known artists works; Outsider Art, a gathering of
British aritsts curated by James Colman; and
Kinetic Art, a historical show curated by Getulio Alviani.
The following artists have
contributed tracks to the "Brain Scan
Movies" Fibre Culture Press Release
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A QUESTION
Is Rachel Whiteread's exhibition of white boxes in Tate Modern a comment
on the Berlin Holocaust Memorial?
http://www.abcnorio.org/againstthewall/
Three Cities Against the Wall
Ramallah, Tel Aviv, New York
www.3citiesagainstthewall.net
OPENING:
Wednesday November 9 at 7:00pm
VIEWING HOURS:
Sundays noon - 3:00pm
Tues, Thurs & Fri 4:00 - 7:00pm
Through December 8
IN NEW YORK
ABC No Rio
156 Rivington Street
(between Clinton & Suffolk)
and
6th Street Community Center
638 East 6th Street
(between Avenues B & C)
IN RAMALLAH:
Al-Hallaj Gallery
IN TEL AVIV:
Beit Ha'omanim
(Artist House)
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ARTISTS RESPOND TO THE WALL:
Thursday November 10 at 7:30pm
ABC No Rio
and
Tuesday November 15 at 7:30pm
VoxPop
1022 Cortelyou Road
Brooklyn
REPORTBACK:
Tuesday November 22 at 7:30pm
ABC No Rio
"Three Cities" artists Sara Danielle Frank
and Tom Lewis will discuss the exhibition
following their return from Ramallah
and Tel Aviv.
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Three Cities Against the Wall
Ramallah, Tel Aviv, New York Art has the possibility
to unite different cultures into harmony and to
create new options for individuals, in order to
live and work together for justice, equality and
peace.
Three Cities
Against the Wall is an exhibition protesting the
Separation Wall under construction by Israel in
the Occupied Territories of Palestine. This
project involves groups of artists in Ramallah, Palestine;
Tel Aviv, Israel; and New York City. The show
will be held simultaneously in all three cities
in November 2005.
Through this
collaborative exhibition, the organizers and
participating artists will draw attention to the
reality of the Wall and its disastrous impact on
the daily lives of hundreds of thousands of
Palestinians by the separation of Palestinian
communities from each other and from their
fertile lands, water resources, schools,
hospitals and work places; thereby
"contributing to the departure of
Palestinian populations," as the
International Court of Justice (ICJ) has warned.
The wall also
robs and destroys the human spirit. Spiritual and
cultural life cannot survive under these
conditions, and we, as artists, find it necessary
to fight this crime with the means which we
posses.
This illegal Wall
prevents the possibility of a just solution to
the Palestinian-Israeli conflict as based on the
universal principles of equality and
self-determination. It prolongs this conflict and
the suffering that results from it. Therefore we
Israeli, Palestinian and American artists resist
this wall and its devastating impact, and aim to
call attention to the urgency of dismantling the
Wall which threatens any peaceful future in both Israel
and Palestine for all.
The Separation
Wall was found to be illegal by an advisory
opinion given by the International Court of
Justice (ICJ) at The Hague on July 9, 2004. In
its ruling, the ICJ stated: "The
construction of the wall being built by Israel,
the occupying power, in the Occupied Palestinian Territory,
including in and around East Jerusalem, and its
associated regime, [is] contrary to international
law."
WHO WE
ARE
Curatorial and organizing committees for Three
Cities Against the Wall, comprised of local
artists and activists, have been established in
each of the three participating cities. These
committees have each invited the participation of
numerous artists, each of whom has been asked to
provide three works to be exhibited in all three
locations.
In Palestine,
Tayseer Barakat, founder of the League of
Palestinian Artists and curator of Gallery
Barakat, and Sliman Mansour are organizing the
exhibition. The organizations involved are the
League of Palestinian Artists and the Palestinian
Association of Contemporary Art (PACA).
In Israel the
project is organized by a group of artists and
activists that came together to resist the wall
through art and culture. Members of the group are
also associated with the Israeli Coalition
Against the Wall; Taayush; and Anarchists Against
the Wall. These groups are very active in
protests and projects, both in Israel and Palestine,
against the construction of the Wall and the
occupation, including protests where there have
been many victims, Palestinian, Israeli, and
international.
In New York,
Three Cities Against the Wall is organized
through the arts center ABC No Rio by a committee
of artists and activists, a number of them
associated with the radical comic magazine World
War 3 Illustrated. World War 3 Illustrated was
founded in 1979 to oppose the right-wing policies
of Ronald Reagan. It has been publishing art and
articles in support of the rights of the
Palestinian people since 1988, when it published
an interview with Naji-Ali. ABC No Rio is a
community center for the arts that grew out of
the housing struggles on New York's Lower East
Side. Many of the organizers in New York
participate in the International Solidarity
Movement, Women In Black, SUSTAIN (Stop U.S.
Tax-funded Aid to Israel Now), International
Women's Peace Service, Jewish Alliance Against
the Occupation, and other groups opposed to
Israel's unjust occupation.
OUR
VISION: A WORLD WITHOUT BORDERS
In the process of creating Three Cities Against
the Wall, the organizers and participating
artists are building networks and creating
relationships between their respective
communities to oppose both Israel's oppression of
the Palestinian people and the Wall as a symbol
of that oppression.
Yet while
American, Palestinian, and Israeli artists are
showing their work together in this exhibition,
we understand that the relationship amongst them
is not one of equality. The relationship between
Palestinians and Israelis has been compared to
that between prisoners and guards, with U.S.
cittizens as the patrons of this prison.
Americans finance Israel through their tax
dollars; some also finance Israel through
contributions to Zionist organizations. The Wall
is horrifying because it casts these
relationships in concrete, making Palestinian
imprisonment more thorough and more permanent.
Ironically, there
is also an opportunity created by the Wall: this
physical barrier makes the oppression of
Palestinians more visible. Artists can use the
Wall as a metaphor to educate the public. We are
working together because we understand that, by
uniting our voices, we are more likely to be
heard and will therefore be better able to inform
the public of the true nature of this
catastrophic situation. We also want to
demonstrate that within the Israeli and the
American public there is opposition to the Wall.
We are laying the
foundation for building a community of artists
across borders, and will demonstrate, through
combined effort, our opposition to injustice and
oppression on moral and ethical grounds, and
because injustice and oppression engender a
separation between peoples, preventing normal
human communication between them.
We believe that
the world of the future is a world without
borders. We support the right of a Turk to work
in Germany, of a Haitian to seek refuge in the United
States, of a Croat to live peacefully in Serbia.
Thus we also support the right of a Palestinian,
a Jew, or anyone else to live in the city of
their choice, to enjoy all the privileges of
citizenship there, and to travel freely to and
from their chosen place of residence. This is not
a radical demand but a natural human expectation.
The attempts of 20th century governments to
control demographics through genocide, forced
transfer and other coercive means have been a
disaster and such policies must be discarded. It
is tragic that at a time when governments in Europe
are discussing the possibility of open borders, Israel
is building a border of cement and steel. We
oppose the Wall because it is a wall against the
future.
Three Cities Against
the Wall is funded, in part, through funds from
the Wallace Global Fund, the Dedalus Foundation,
the AJ Muste Memorial Fund, and the New York
State Council on the Arts.
Exhibition
catalogue published by VoxPop Press.
|
the cloud
appreciation society
manifesto of the day- quote: At the cloud
appreciation society we believe that clouds are
unjustly maligned and that life would be immeasurably
poorer without them. We pledge to fight blue-sky
thinking wheresoever we find it. Life would be dull
if we had to look up at monotonous blue every day. We
acknowledge that the clouds are the most egalitarian of
Natures displays since everyone has an equally
fantastic view of them. We fear that they are so everyday
as to be in danger of being overlooked. And so we seek to
remind people that the clouds are expressions of the
atmospheres moods that can be read like those of a
persons countenance. Were in danger of
becoming meteorologically autistic of becoming
ignorant of the meanings of these expressions. They are
the Rorschach images of the sky, and if you consider the
shapes you see in them you will save on psychoanalysis
bills.
posted by jmorrison
www.cloudappreciationsociety.org
|
A tuba is when a cloud extends a
finger towards Earth. Young children often
yearn to reach up and touch the soft mounds
of a fair-weather Cumulus. So who can blame a
cloud for wanting to know what the ground
feels like?
It does have to get worked
up into a vigorous spin, however, before it
can summon the energy to do so. In and around
the intense downdrafts associated with large
Cumulonimbus and Cumulus congestus clouds, a
vortex of swirling air can develop
like that of water draining down a plughole.
The air in the center drops in pressure as a
result of all the spinning, which can make it
cool enough for some of its water vapour to
combine into droplets.
Like the swirling digit
forming above, tuba are columns or cones of
cloud extending down the middle of these
vortices. They do not always end up reaching
the surface, however. More often than not,
the cloud loses heart before touching terra
firma. Maybe it knows that, in another
guise on a different day it
will return as fog or mist, only to hug the
ground until it is heartily sick of it.
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