Julienne Schaer, Overview of Photoville, 2012. Courtesy and copyright Julienne Schaer. www.julienneschaer.com

“Welcome to our little town in the shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge. What once thrived as a bustling harbor has been reborn as the glorious Brooklyn Bridge Park, and the temporary home of Brooklyn’s newest settlement: Photoville. A photographic “village” built entirely out of freight containers, in homage to the Brooklyn waterfront’s storied past, Photoville was born out of a simple question: how to create a large-scale, mobile, photographic showcase, that challenges the role of visitor as a passive visual consumer.”

This is the introduction to the small catalog accompanying the latest “destination” in New York photography, which runs from June 22 to July 1, 2012. A grass roots effort, made with love and a lot of volunteers, Photoville (www.photovillenyc.org) represents the kind of funky, local and alternative event that New Yorkers like to create and can’t wait to attend. Organized by United Photo Industries with the help of a number of sponsors and friends, the “pop-up village” consists of a 1,000 foot long “fence” (covered with pictures printed on photographic mesh by Duggal), a plethora of solo exhibitions in freight containers on the uplands of Pier 3 by artists like Wyatt Gallery, Bruce Gilden, Sim Chi Yin and Li Hao as well as shows curated by the New York Times, Magnum, Conveyor Arts, and local art schools like SVA and the Parsons School of Design (among others).  A beer garden, lectures, nighttime projections, workshops, food trucks and even a dog run round out the list of “delights to suit all tastes and dispositions” at this unique photo venue in the midst of what has to be one of the most beautiful parks in the Big Apple. The weather was gorgeous this weekend, so we spent a lot of time looking at images, hanging out with friends and just enjoying the sights on the East River. 

Lorie Novak, my friend and colleague in the Photography and Imaging Department at New York University, is presenting an installation called “Random Interference” in one of the freight containers. Consisting of front sections of the New York Times collected over many years as well as a live randomized sequence of projected images, hers is a complex, thought-provoking and timely contribution to the exhibition. Making an attempt to translate a 3-dimensional installation into the virtual world of this blog, we are here presenting her artist’s statement, an installation photo and a video from “Random Interference.”

SR

Lorie Novak, Installation View of Random Interference at Photoville, 2012, Courtesy and copyright Lorie Novak. www.lorienovak.com

Lorie Novak: Artist statement

Random Interference explores the afterlife of images and the experience of looking at photographs as a disruptive encounter. Image fragments from my Photographic Interference project are randomly juxtaposed in a continuously changing sequence mimicking our experience of encountering photographs both online and offline.

In all my projects, I use different technologies of representation to recontextualize, recycle, and reuse media imagery, historical photographs, family snapshots (my own and those of others), self-portraits, travel photographs, and audio recordings. Pulling from these archives, I explore memory and transmission, how to visualize absence, and the socio-political meanings of photographs. I question how photographs affect how we know what we know, how personal remembrances and cultural recall intersect, and how photographs influence storytelling and history. These issues have been at the core of my photographs, installations, and web work since the late 1980s. In my constructed photographs and installations, I use scanned newspaper and magazine images. I grab other photos from the Internet. Folders in file cabinets and folders in my computer contain hundreds of images. The images play like filmstrips in my mind.

In the late 1990s, I was clipping more photographs from the newspapers than usual. As it became clear in March 1999 that NATO was going to bomb Serbia, I decided to save the front section of The New York Times once the bombing started. My idea was to have a stack of newspapers that signified a war. When the cease-fire was signed, a true resolution had not been reached, so I kept collecting. The World Trade Center was attacked, and I kept collecting. I have not stopped.

Temporarily relocated from my studio to a shipping container at Photoville are close to 5,000 sections of The New York Times. Photographs of atrocity are everywhere. It is hard to look and hard to look away. Images get under my skin. In making artworks that use and reference this media landscape, I want to cause a rupture in our expectations and speak to our difficult, confusing, and dangerous times where media and photography have simultaneously lost and gained credibility.  I am both image-maker and consumer.

Lorie Novak, Video documentation of Random Interference projection. Courtesy and copyright Lorie Novak, 2012.

L’article Welcome to Photoville! By Shelley Rice and Lorie Novak est apparu en premier sur Shelley Rice.

Serge Alain Nitegeka, "Obstacle 1", 2012; © the artist and courtesy Michael Stevenson Gallery, Cape Town/Johannesburg, South Africa and l'Institut Français, Dakar, Senegal

Once again, my friend and colleague Rob Perrée, editor of Kunstbeeld in Amsterdam, has stepped up to the plate. He’s been on the road recently, and he’s sending us Blog Post-cards to report on what he has seen: in this case, Dak’Art 2012: Biennale de l’Art Africain Contemporain in Dakar, Senegal.

SR

« After four days of Dak’Art I can’t deny it any longer: in its present form, the African Bienniale is outdated. It has outlived its usefulness, it lacks urgency, it needs a thorough revision — the sooner the better.

Dak’Art began in 1990 as a literary event. Four years later, it was changed into a meeting place for contemporary African artists and other professionals like critics, curators, theorists etc. The participants – only African artists, living and working on the continent or abroad – were selected out of the hundreds of applications by so-called commissioners. There was no artistic director who was responsible for the quality of the selected works and for the way they were installed and presented to the public. Dak’Art was not independent, it was a state event. Clerks at the Ministry of Culture had more influence than anybody else.

At that time contemporary African art was hardly visible and was just beginning its emergence into the global art scene. There was not much theory about it. African art critics and other art professionals were rare. Therefore it is understandable that this ambivalent and controversial concept was chosen. You have to start somewhere, somehow.

Especially after the year 2000, contemporary African art made its way around the world through biennials and a few big exhibitions (such as Africa Remix at the Centre Pompidou in Paris). Its visibility grew fast. Perhaps there are still people – viewers and professionals – who have trouble accepting the importance of African expression, but not many. By now there is broad recognition of the quality and significance of contemporary art from this continent. Many articles and books are published about it. Several museums have hired African curators, including the Tate Modern in London. Especially through the professionalized infrastructure of South Africa, many artists ‘made it’ internationally: among them William Kentridge, Guy Tillem, Veleko, Malick Sidibé, Samuel Fosso, Tracey Rose, Youssef Nabil and Zwelethu Mthethwa.

Dak’Art seems to be blind to all this. The concept and organization of the Biennale are still the same. The government is using the same script as 20 years ago. The result is a rather small, poor, loveless exhibition installed in a building that has seen far better days. Of course, there were some nice touches: an extra invitational show dedicated to three known artists (Peter Clarke, Goddy Leye and Berni Searle) and an exhibit highlighting the work of female architects (though only in two dimensional, photographic version), a photographer and sculptor added some interest. But these extras hardly changed my opinion about Dak’Art as a whole.

I reserved at least part of every viewing day to the OFF program. At more than a hundred locations, solo shows, group shows, performances and other events were organized. They were both good and bad, predictable and surprising. Sometimes the location was more interesting than the show. Outright amazing was the exhibition curated by the Institut Français. Le Manège was taken over by an installation of Serge Alain Nitegeka entitled Obstacle 1. Black painted planks barricaded the whole space and made it into a kind of claustrophobic prison. On the other hand the structure looked far from solid, it seemed even vulnerable. Escape seemed possible. In the garden, on the walls of an artificial photo studio, hung a selection Antoine Tempé’s portraits of more or less known people from the world of art and culture. Glamorous, decadent and personal, the pictures were sometimes moving.

Africa: See You, See Me: L’Influence Africaine sur la Photographie Contemporaine was to be seen at The Goethe Institute. Although the space was too small, most works survived that problem easily. Absolutely stunning were the portraits of Maïmouna Patrizia Guerresi. Technically perfect, they blended irony with a refined mixture of tradition and modernity.

Maïmouna Patrizia Guerresi, "Untitled", 2008; © the artist and courtesy The Goethe Institute, Dakar, Senegal

The next Dak’Art needs to be accessible to Africans and non-Africans. Confrontation is necessary for a healthy development. There has to be an artistic director who makes aesthetic quality his priority and who fights outdated nationalism and regionalism. And, very important, Dak’Art needs to be independent from the government. The new Minister of Culture, the singer Youssou N’Dour, knows how successful it can be to run your own business independently. »

© Rob Perrée
Dakar, May 2012

L’article « Dak’art needs a new face » by Rob Perrée est apparu en premier sur Shelley Rice.

Invisible Borders Trans-African Photography Project (Exhibition view). Courtesy Invisible Borders Trans-African Photographers Organization, Lagos, Nigeria. Photo : Shelley Rice

On view at the New Museum in Manhattan this spring is the 2012 Triennial, billed as the only recurring exhibition in the United States devoted to presenting young artists from around the globe. Curated by Eungie Joo, the show features 34 artists, artist groups and temporary collectives. Entitled “The Ungovernables,” the exhibition highlights artists born between the mid 1970s and the mid 1980s in countries as widespread as India, Brazil, Lebanon, China, Thailand, Mexico, Egypt and Korea as well as North America; many of the 50 participants have never before exhibited in the United States. The curator wanted to emphasize the resilience and hopefulness of a generation marked by local and global political, economic, religious and military crises, and signal the museum’s interest in cultural production outside of the usual Western centers. There’s a big range of work, some of it good and some of it bad, in this show; “The Ungovernables” is a sprawling and, yes, unruly affair. Rather than cover the entire exhibit, I asked my friends Jennifer Bajorek and Erin Haney, scholars of African photography and archives, to focus on a particular collective they first encountered in Mali in 2009; the group is represented by photographs, videos, and a blog on the first floor of the museum. Centering, as the wall text announces, on annual road trips taken by 10-12 photographers and writers traveling by land across the “invisible” barriers that separate nationals and people on the continent, this Trans-African project is “an attempt to disrupt the randomness of the borders as they exist and acquire a more realistic sense of the similarities and differences between peoples suggested by cultural and geographic divides.”
SR

Invisible Borders Collective (Founded 2009, Lagos)
Nike Adesuyi-Ojeikere, Kemi Akin-Nibosun, Lucy Azubuike, Unoma Giese, Emmanuel Iduma, Uche James-Iroha, Ala Khier, Chidinma Nnorom, Nana Oforiatta-Ayim, Amaize Ojeikere, Charles Okereke, Emeka Okereke, Ray-Daniels Okeugo, Uche Okpa-Iroha, Tom Saater and Jumoke Sanwo

«  We met up with the group of Nigerian photographers at the Bla-Bla in Bamako in November 2009. Exhausted from the Rencontres, they faced a long journey back to Lagos on public transport the next day. Lucy (Azubuike) and Unoma (Giese) recounted outrageous bits of their trip from Lagos; Emeka (Okereke) filled us in as the stars came out overhead.
The inconveniences and indignities presented at each national frontier were the main theme, and performance, of Invisible Borders at Bamako that year. A broken-down van, Accra’s car parts markets (unfortunately closed by 3 am), endless bribes paid, language barriers, all needled the Lagosians, known for their can-do attitude. They were anticipating some discord, not to mention more expenditures, come morning.
They were, of course, going to be snapping pictures the whole time.

Invisible Borders Trans-African Photography Project (Detail). Courtesy Invisible Borders Trans-African Photographers Organization, Lagos, Nigeria. Photo : Shelley Rice

Ala Kheir, Choices, Khartoum, Sudan, Alsiteen Road © Ala Kheir

Copyright 2012 Jennifer Bajorek and Erin Haney

L’article “Invisible Borders: Trans-African Photography Project” by Jennifer Bajorek and Erin Haney est apparu en premier sur Shelley Rice.

Left to right, the panelists on the Interactive Panel “Is Our Photo Mania Creating Magic or Mediocrity?” at the South by Southwest Conference: Kevin Systrom, Verna Curtis and Richard Koci Hernandez. Photo by Kristen Joy Watts.

Looking out at the Gathering Audience before the panel, photo by Verna Curtis, March 11, 2012.

L’article “Digital Images: The Short and the Long View” by Verna Curtis est apparu en premier sur Shelley Rice.

Wu Tsang (b. 1982), Production still from WILDNESS, 2012 (in progress). High-definition video, color, sound. © Wu Tsang; courtesy the artist

I invited my friend Rob Perrée, in New York for this month’s exhibitions and fairs, to write his assessments of the Whitney Biennial for this Blog. Though he saw some good works and some positive aspects of the exhibition, in general Perrée feels that the incorporation of time-based arts – performance, film, video – into the fabric of the show weakens the curators’ statement. This opinion is not shared by our colleague Roberta Smith, whose review in the New York Times Weekend Arts section on Friday, March 2 found this aspect of the exhibition challenging and exciting. My own feelings, I must admit, are closer to Smith’s than Perrée’s; but I’m delighted that they both highlighted certain stand-out works – Werner Herzog’s, Forrest Bess’ and Wu Tsang’s – that particularly struck a chord with me. And, perhaps not surprisingly, both critics noticed that one of the strengths of this year’s exhibition is that it is not top heavy with famous, “blue chip” (most often male) artists, who have tended to steal the spotlight from younger, lesser known participants in some recent shows. Instead, famous artists are there, but discretely, integrated into the installation with no special fanfare. Marsden Hartley has a few lesser-known paintings scattered throughout the show, and Warhol has a terrific but very low-key photomontage of a bicyclist tucked away on a side wall. This allows the exhibition to be less of a circus and more of a learning experience, offering invaluable information about the intergenerational nature of artistic creation in the United States. When Garry Winogrand shares the space with a young talent like LaToya Ruby Frazier, who contributed a documentary project about economic crises in New Jersey, we learn not only about “stars” but also about those who follow in (or resist) their footsteps.

Shelley Rice (© 2012)

LaToya Ruby Frazier (b. 1982), Corporate Exploitation and Economic Inequality!, 2011. Digital photograph, dimensions variable. © LaToya Ruby Frazier; courtesy the artist. Photograph by Abigail DeVille

A GOOD CONCEPT WORKS OUT BADLY

By Rob Perrée (© 2012)

The curators of the 76th Whitney Biennial have set themselves a very challenging task, to organize an exhibition based on an inspiring concept. They want to redefine what an artist can be at this moment, and they do this in two key ways within the show. In the first place they emphasize the connecting points between the visual arts, performance, dance, music and film. Secondly, they highlight the resonances between artists. Not only did they invite a few artists to curate parts of the biennial, but and they also included a number of people who use, or who quote the work of, other artists within their own expressions.

This second part of the exhibition concept works out well. Robert Gober, among others, curated an interesting small show of the rather unknown Texas artist Forrest Bess (1911-1971). His visionary abstract paintings are based on the theory that male and female can be united in one body, and the display includes notebooks, sketches and photos from his personal surgeries. Richard Hawkins uses fragments of reproductions of the work of other artists in his collages. Nicole Eisenman quotes many colleagues in her 45 expressionistic portraits on view — among them Marsden Hartley, present elsewhere in the show with a beautiful portrait from 1940.

With the exception of a stunning film installation by Werner Herzog, which combines landscape images by the 17th century Dutch artist Hercules Seghers and the music of contemporary composer Ernst Reijseger, in such a way that sound and image become one, the first part of the concept fails completely. This is due to highly underestimated practical circumstances. Film, performance, dance and music are time-based disciplines. They need to be presented at certain times and in certain locations. To make that happen, the curators earmarked the 4th floor as a theatrical setting for the various dancers and performers taking part in the show, and they organized a film/video program in a separate room. The consequence is that the 4th floor is an empty, useless space (at least as far as the more traditional, static visual arts are concerned) for 80% of the exhibition time. The film program, in itself very diverse and interesting, relates in many different ways to the artworks on view and has, for that reason, a comparable problem. The objects in the exhibition can be seen every day, but the viewer can only watch that special, related film or video one month later. However wonderful the program connections may seem on paper, the average visitor will never experience many of them.

There is another side effect. Because all the works are so connected, and need each other in a way, the exhibition itself is not strong enough to ‘live’ on its own. There are good visual images and objects presented, but also weaker ones. They depend on their relationship with the time-based works within the context of the show. When the viewer cannot see them on the same day, they lose ground. And the overall exhibition loses quality.

To end on a more positive note, it is refreshing that the curators of this year’s Whitney Biennial did not go overboard for big names and big works. Young, old, known, unknown, deceased or alive, there is no difference in the way the participants are presented or treated in the show. That is a relief. The overblown Jeff Koonses and Anish Kapoors are already everywhere to be seen.

Rob Perrée
Editor of Kunstbeeld Magazine
Amsterdam
March 1, 2012.

External Links:
Roberta Smith Article
Slide Show

L’article “A Good Concept Works Out Badly” by Rob Perrée est apparu en premier sur Shelley Rice.