Aleksandra Domanović

Aleksandra Domanović, Portrait, 2011, 3d model, 50 x 70 cm, inkjet-print in frame

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Benjamin Valenza

27 January 2012

Magazine Contemporary Culture

Benjamin Valenza at Salon 94 Freemans, New York, 2009 and Residue 01, 2011

Art Since the Summer of ’69 is proud to present Twice upon a Time, Benjamin Valenza’s first solo show in New York City. A large L- shaped yellow metal plate, deeply corroded by acid at four points, performs as an abstract panther in the show, or simply as an abstract painting. The work is the result of Valenza’s experiments with materials and carelessness, or rather of his love of ‘heavy duty’ materials.

One could describe Valenza’s method as working ‘ Hardcore Brancusi – ish’. From heavy duty, hardcore gestures to painstaking etching, Valenza will take his ‘trademark’ stones on legs to a new level, presenting a large black stone, engraved with a mysterious poem. The fifty-five pound heavy black alabaster rock will be presented on a large round pine tabletop and act as the center of the exhibition. Less anthropomorphic than the other stones Valenza has made, the black rock pays homage to Constantin Brancusi in its use of carving. Although Valenza does not carve the stone to let a form take shape and reveal the essence of an object or an idea. He simply carves words and leaves the shape of the stone intact.

Benjamin Valenza (b.1980 in Marseille, France) works and lives in Lausanne, Switzerland. He is a founding member of Galerie 1m3. He has exhibited at Fluxia Gallery in Milan, Castillo-Coralles in Paris, Hayward Gallery in London, Jan Winkelmann Gallery in Berlin, and Musee Cantonal Des Beaux Arts in Lausanne, among others.

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Hood By Air Menswear Spring 2017, Paris

4 August 2016

Magazine Contemporary Culture

Fashion No Comments

Hood By Air Menswear Spring 2017, Paris

Hood By Air makes things difficult. These images were shot days after its Spring 2017 show in Paris, a frenzied cruise in semi-darkness through a gay sauna in a seedy part of the Marais that culminated in a synchronized swim in the hammam’s subterranean pool (don’t think: Busby Berkeley). The clothes were glimpsed only in passing, as models pressed against bystanders and then moved along. “We revisit things that people know about HBA here, like logo placement. Because it’s recognizable in the dark,” said Shayne Oliver postshow. “We push newer ideas forward in the light.”

The light he’s talking about is Hood By Air’s biannual shows that are part of New York women’s Fashion Week, staged with increasingly polished production values (and, indeed, lots of lights). While Oliver himself is loath to put labels like menswear or womenswear on his garments, he understands the demands of presenting collections with those market restrictions. Hence the fact his Paris “shows” boycott the runway in favor of atmospheric locales and unconventional formats. “We just want to celebrate Hood By Air in the men’s market,” said Oliver. “When people are reviewing it against something that is very tailored, it feels weird . . . we’re not competing with them.”

So what are these January and July shows all about for Oliver? Research and development, it seems; he talked about the garments acting as the reference for the show to be staged in September, also acknowledging the very real business behind this creativity—that these clothes will drop earlier, satisfying retailers with an advance delivery. Almost like a Hood By Air recollection then, although the ingenious complexity of Oliver’s work couldn’t be further from bland commercialism. There’s something unsettling about what Oliver shows, often with implications of violence in the slicing, mutilated pieces distorting perceptions of the body within. But he saw these looks as a kind of “positive utilitarianism,” also linking to the military theme that ran through the season. Although Oliver’s utility wound up in hospital garb: Rather than garments slicing apart the body in attack, the outfits were centered around healing, with their trusses, bandages, and even built-in leg braces. What was bandage and what was bondage? The contrast between flesh strapped for pleasure and flesh strapped to cure pain was never quite clear. Oliver said these spaces were about relaxation, about a relaxed attitude to sexuality, and an ease with the body. It wound up like a Netflix-and-chill session watching The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, helped by a decibel-shattering soundtrack. It was uncomfortable, but it also pushed us out of our comfort zone.

What Oliver does is exciting because it speaks to people. His fashion seems progressive, difficult even, due to its odd proportions and strange slogans. Do you know where your children are read one, mimicking scare mongering that preoccupied previous generations and hasn’t entirely been shaken off by our own. These clothes are arresting because they’re a product of our times, of a designer plugged into groundswell movements in culture, rejecting the hierarchy and elitism and creating something that resonates. It also satisfies fashion critics who want to be excited, annoyed, and generally provoked by clothes that challenge. Which means that you don’t mind being crammed into a sweaty bathhouse and barely glimpsing fabric and flesh in the gloom. It’s an experience—inconvenient, but interesting.

At least it feels like Oliver is trying to say something new, to find his own voice rather than join the conversation about the tired language of luxury. That doesn’t even feel relevant when you’re talking about these clothes. They’re something else. And in a world where otherness is rapidly co-opted by a voracious fashion system and forced into its pigeonholes, Hood By Air’s steadfast refusal to kowtow to the system is worthy of plaudits.

Source: Vogue.com.
Text: Alexander Fury, Vogue.com.
All images belongs to the respective artist and management.

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Patrizio Di Massimo: Col Sole in Fronte (With The Sun In Front Of Me)

23 May 2015

Magazine Contemporary Culture

Art Exhibitions Main No Comments

Patrizio Di Massimo, Col Sole in Fronte (With The Sun In Front Of Me), 2010

Col Sole in Fronte (With The Sun In Front Of Me) begins on the ground floor of the gallery with the video Duets for Cannibals. This work was commisioned by Milan City Council and Sandretto Re Rebaudengo Foundation in order to make a portrait of an African boy, Abdullay Kadal Traore, who has been living in Italy for several years. I accepted that request but not standing behind the camera and filming Abdullay as an exotic subject. The video becomes thus a dialogue or a duet in which we reason together about staging my proposal for the commission that he initially accepts and then rejects, revealing the intrinsic limit that we are not disposed to go beyond although we are both paid.

On the first floor, the exhibition continues with a double video installation Faccetta Nera, Faccetta Bianca (Italian, Little Black Face, Little White Face). The drawing that I showed to Abdullay in Duets for Cannibals becomes an image through the use of two actors and a photography study. The video installation examines the problem of difference with a dichotomic and literal attitude, and it gains its real meaning when is combined with the mistaken interpretation in the songs in question. In fact, Faccetta Nera was composed in order to attribute a noble motivation to the Ethiopia’s colonial invasion (1935) encouraging the Italian and the Abyssinian to unite; while Faccetta Bianca was the subsequent request of the regime that didn’t relish the first song. Facceta Bianca attempted to overturn it, however it did not gain a general acceptance among those who still sing Faccetta Nera identifying that “Black” as the ideology colour. Faccetta Nera, Faccetta Bianca:

If you look at the sea from the hills/Young negro slave amongst slaves/Like in a dream you will see many ships/And a tricolour waving for you/Little black face, beautiful Abyssinian/Wait and see the hour coming!/When we will be with you/We will give you another law and another king/Little black face, beautiful Abyssinian/Our law is slavery of love/We will take you to Rome freed/YOU WILL BE KISSED BY OUR SUN/and a black shirt you will be too/Little black face, you will be Roman/Your only flag will be Italian!/We will march together with you/and parade in front of the Duce and the king

Little white face, when I left you/That day on the pier in the steam/With the legionnaires I embarked/And your black eye gazing at the heart/It was equally moved as mine/While your hand was saying goodbye to me/Little white face, my love/Goodbye little, pale, tired face!/Little white face, one goes where one’s already been/in the trench, already on my mind again/among so many misty faces/IS YOUR LITTLE FACE, BRIGHTER THAN THE SUN/Nearly contrasting these black faces/your sharpshooter is a flame and a light/Little white face, my only passion/The day the sharpshooter will clasp you tightly to his chest with emotion/will come/Little white face, one goes where one’s already been/And your little, beautiful, white face/Will rest on a tired medal!

The exhibition pertains to the sun, that is said to be Italy’s petroleum, to our heads and faces, to the intensive dialogue between the Italian contemporary society and its specific colonial past. The Italian song, through its use and quotation, interweaves all the works in the show and expresses historical, cultural and image ties. The exhibition also includes a rich selection of drawings made in 2009.

Col Sole in Fronte is then this press release that explains itself as an artwork within the exhibition. It explains and extends itself all around looking for that place in the sun which is Italy, which should be Italy, but has never been.

Go…my heart, from flower to flower/with sweetness and with love/go you for me…./Go…since my happiness/WITH THE SUN IN FRONT (OF ME)/and happy I sing/blissfully…/I wanna live and enjoy/the air of the mountain/’cause this enchantment/costs nothing!/Ah, ah! Today I ardently love/that impertinent creek, minstrel of love/Ah, ah! The blossoming of the trees/keeps in feast this heart/do you know why?/I wanna live like this/with the sun in front (of me)/and happy I sing/I sing for me!/Ah, ah! Today I ardently love/that impertinent creek, minstrel of love/Ah, ah! The blossoming of the trees/keeps in feast this heart /do you know why?/I wanna live like this/ with the sun in front (of me)/and happy I sing/I sing for me!/

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Viviane Sassen: Pikin Slee

20 February 2015

Magazine Contemporary Culture

Exhibitions Main Photography No Comments

Viviane Sassen: Pikin Slee, 3 February 2015 – 12 April 2015
Institute of Contemporary Arts, London

The content of the exhibition focuses predominantly on a body of work that Sassen made in Pikin Slee, Suriname in 2013. Pikin Slee is the second-largest village on the Upper Suriname River, deep within the Surinamese rainforest. The exhibition consists of black and white and colour works shot on an analogue camera.

In her first visit to Pikin Slee in the summer of 2012, Sassen was intrigued by the village and its inhabitants. Her eye was caught by the overwhelming natural beauty and the Saramacca’s very traditional way of living, combined with the more mundane objects which seemed to seep through daily life. The Saramacca community are isolated from the outside world, living without running water, electricity, roads or the internet. The only way to access the village is by canoe, a journey of about three hours up-river. They grow their food on small agricultural plots, producing cassava bread, pressed maripa palm oil and dried coconut.

Shot mainly in black and white and of contained format, Sassen’s series of abstract compositions and elusive subjects are an exploration of the beauty of the everyday, an investigation of the sculptural qualities of the ordinary.

“My memories of Africa have always played a major role in my life and in my work. I guess that’s because they filled my very first consciousness. It’s in my spine, my blue-print so to speak… When I returned back from Kenya, all I knew was my life there, so Holland seemed very strange and new to me… Now that I’ve travelled so much in Africa over the past 12 years, my ideas about the continent and about myself in relation to it, have changed of course. But it’s a continuous journey, both in the inside world and the outside world. My work is a reflection of that journey.”

Sassen was born in 1972 in Amsterdam, where she now lives. She first studied fashion design, followed by photography at the Utrecht School of the Arts (HKU) and Ateliers Arnhem. Her work was first published in avant-garde fashion magazines and is regularly commissioned by prominent designers. Sassen was included in the main exhibition of the 55th Venice Biennale, The Encyclopedic Palace, in 2013. A retrospective of 17 years of her fashion work, In and Out of Fashion, opened at Huis Marseille Museum for Photography, Amsterdam, in 2012, accompanied by a book published by Prestel (Munich); the exhibition travelled to the Rencontres d’Arles festival and then the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh. The book won the Kees Scherer prize for best Dutch photography book of 2011/2.

She was awarded the Dutch art prize, the Prix de Rome, in 2007, and in 2011 won the International Center of Photography in New York’s Infinity Award for Applied/Fashion/Advertising Photography. She was one of six artists selected for the 2011 New Photography exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Solo exhibitions have taken place at FORMA in Milan (2009) and FOAM in Amsterdam (2008), among other venues.

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Ditte Haarløv Johnsen, Maputo Diary

11 December 2011

Magazine Contemporary Culture

Art Main Photography No Comments

Ditte Haarløv Johnsen, Maputo Diary, 2000-2009

Mozambique gained its independence in 1975. It was ruled by the socialist Frelimo Party. My parents decidedto relocate to help the government rebuild the country. We arrived in Maputo on the 11 of January 1982. I was ﬁve years old.

In 2000, I spent another summer in Maputo. This time I helped out at the photo school and got to use thedarkroom for free. One day walking home from the school I met Ingracia and Antonieta. They stood out fromthe crowd as they strolled down the streets of Maputo, hips swaying. They were openly gay and for Maputo this was truly outrageous.
I approached them and we spent an afternoon together. Gradually they allowed me to get a glimpse into their lives. Stigmatised and yet inhibited by such a crazy and stubborn will to survive. And with a fearlessness I admired – there was not much left to lose. Antonieta worked the streets and Ingracia survived by entertaining in the bars of the Shanty Towns and getting people to buy him beer and food.
They introduced me to their circle of gay friends: “The Sisters”. I photographed the Sisters and got the feeling of a story that was so much deeper than what a few picturescould convey. That was the beginning of Maputo Diary.

One and a half years later, I returned. I went to look for Ingracia at the apartment where he used to live. His mother had passed away and Ingracias older sister, Carla, had taken over the place. She had kicked out Ingracia who was now living with an auntie. Ingracia showed me the way to Antonietas new place. Antonietta was more tired than when we ﬁrst met. Tired of walking the street every night.
Maputo gets cold in the winter. I would walk the streets with Antonieta – attracted to that dark and secret side of life.
Antonieta was the only man in Maputo that dared wear womens clothes in public. He had worked the streets since he ran away from home at the age of 13.
Whenever he managed to make a little money, he would spend it right away. He said: “Save money for what if tomorrow I might be dead?” And he lied a lot. It annoyed me when he also lied to people about me, bragging about the big money I had spent on buying us drinks at an imaginary bar the evening before. I told him off and he said: “Ditte; When I meet a man I tell him my nameis Isabel and that I have two children, Carla and Nito. My whole life is built on lies”.
On New Years day we travelled to Xinavane, the village where he was born. There, with the family, Antonieta was Antonio. Antonieta died the 11th of January 2004. He was 29 years old. I always felt it as a special conﬁrmation of the bond between us that he died on my birthday.

Ingracia’s brother Zito was in jail. Zito had been using hard drugs for a long time and was now doing time at the “Central Prison”. Marcelo, a Sister, had been accused of stealing a pair of pants off a clothesline and was also at the Central Prison. Ingracia had been inside for a while. He sold his stove back home and used the money to pay an ofﬁcer to sign his release papers.
The prison was overcrowded. There was one water tap for the 2000 inmates and no latrines. A plate of foodwas served once a day and always the same – rice with a watery sauce. Inmates survived by trading food which family brought on the visit that was allowed every two weeks. Sex was traded too.
Marcelo was found innocent and released, having spent eight months in the Central Prison. He returned to his home province and lived there for two years until he passed away. Soraia, the owner of the bar where we usedto hang out, said: “He should have played safe”.

Rui rented a room in the outskirts of Maputo. He also belonged to the group of Sisters. As a teenager, Ruiwent to Eastern Germany, where he worked on a power plant and came out as a gay man. When East and WestGermany reunited, all Mozambicans were sent home. Coming back was tough. Jobs were hard to ﬁnd and Rui moved around a lot. Wherever he moved to he would bring with him his pot of orange ﬂowers. Last time we met he said: ”There are so many feelings in my life. I think a lot about love and the work that I don’t have -and sickness.” And I asked him what he meant by sickness. “You know, any kind of sickness… And I’m afraid because I’m alone…”

Twenty percent of the Mozambican population are HIV positive. Yet it is still a taboo to talk of the disease.Rui passed away in 2004. He was 32 years old

http://www.dihajo.com/content/ABOUT/maputo_diary.pdf

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