Playlist January 2016, World Pop Fest

Howl – Rival Consoles
Sgoraet (Burning Down) – Kedr Livanskiy
Everywhere You Go – Mari Kvien Brunvoll
Zvichapera – Chiwoniso Maraire
Muévelo Negro – Quantic, Nidia Gongora
Melt! – Flying Lotus
Shipwreck – feat. Thom Yorke – Modeselektor, Thom Yorke
Yarada Lij – Mikael Seifu
In Another Room (Original Mix) – Pional

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From the Archive

Heidrun Holzfeind

28 May 2012

Magazine Contemporary Culture

Heidrun Holzfeind, Carpet (after Erna Lederer) Wool, 230×420 cm, 2012

Created for Holzfeind solo show at BAWAG Contemporary in Vienna as part of a larger group of works about the Austrian architect and designer Ernst Schwadron (1896-1979). Schwadron’s penthouse apartment was located on the top floor of Franz Josefs Kai 3, in the building owned by his family. Today BAWAG’s exhibition spaces occupy the ground floor of the same building (the former showrooms of the ceramics company Brüder Schwadron.)

In an interior design magazine published in 1930, a carpet designed by the painter Erna Lederer, Schwadron’s first wife is shown. According to the description in the accompanying article, the carpet was handwoven in white, grey and brown wool. For the exhibition the carpet was reproduced following the logic of the black and white photograph in white, grey and a dark (brownish) grey. During the exhibition the carpet lay exacty five floors below its original position in Schwadron’s penthouse apartment, 82 years after the photograph of the “great hall” was published.

The carpet raises questions concerning the whereabouts of the furnishings of the apartment Schwadron left in 1938 when he was forced to emigrate. (The Vienna Gestapo seized the entire property on January 24, 1941.) Did Schwadron sell or give away the furniture and carpets before his escape, did he ship them to New York, or did he leave them behind.

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Iman Issa

11 December 2011

Magazine Contemporary Culture

Art Main No Comments

Triptych #6, 2009. Photographs, Text, Dimensions Variable

Issa’s Triptych series (#1, #2, #3, #4, #5, #6) from 2009, is a group of six beautiful wall installations comprised of photography, video objects and texts. They are images of places she collected in New York and restaged; settings that occurred through a personal psychological process in order to reveal personal associations. As Issa says “At one point I realized that what might have attracted me to these spaces was that they reminded me of others…. In trying to be as precise as possible, I realized that the certainty with which I was able to construct and produce these images did not translate to my final photographs, that I no longer recognized my constructions.”

In an attempt to articulate the content of memories and associations, Iman Issa decided to start constructing settings that corresponded to them, settings which she would then photograph. The resulting images ended up constituting the second element in each of these triptychs.

In trying to be as precise as possible, the artist realized that the certainty with which she was able to construct and produce these images did not translate to her final photographs, that she no longer recognized her constructions, nor was she certain of their sources. This brought about the idea to approach these photographs in a removed manner – as if they were found or produced by someone else – and use them as a point of departure for another artwork, one which eventually became what is presented here as the third and final element in each of these triptychs.

http://imanissa.com/

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Central Saint Martins MA 2011, Myrza de Muynck

3 January 2012

Magazine Contemporary Culture

Fashion Main No Comments

Myrza de Muynck, Central Saint Martins MA, 2011

Myrza de Muynck is a Dutch designer who graduated from the MA Fashion programme at Central Saint Martins London. Myrza de Muynck is based in London and was chosen as Vauxhall Fashion Scout’s One’s to Watch AW12-13. This enabled Muynck to have both a catwalk show and an exhibition space at the organisation’s prestigious Covent Garden venue of Freemasons’ Hall and also to be part of their Paris showroom. Her work has been featured in many magazine’s and blogs such as Vouge, Elle, Wallpaper, ID-online and POP magazine.

”Elsewhere, it was the very clever overhaul of a classic shell suit that caught our eye” – Says Myrza De Muynck. The womenswear designer added floral beading just beneath its knees and on to its blouson jackets – which came in pink, azure, lemon and plaid – to transform the humble sportswear attire like we’ve never seen. You could imagine wearing these and what’s more you could imagine wanting to – “striking the balance as they did between elegant, cool and casual’.’

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Hauser & Wirth, Art Gallery

22 March 2015

Magazine Contemporary Culture

Galleries Main 1 Comment

Hauser & Wirth is a gallery of contemporary art and modern masters, with locations in Zurich, London, New York, Somerset and Los Angeles.

Hauser & Wirth was founded in Zurich in 1992 by Iwan Wirth, Manuela Wirth and Ursula Hauser. In 1996, the gallery’s first permanent location, Hauser & Wirth Zürich, opened in the former Löwenbräu brewery building, along with other contemporary art galleries, the Kunsthalle Zürich, and the Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst Zürich.

Hauser & Wirth opened its first London gallery on Piccadilly in 2003 with an installation by Los Angeles-based artist Paul McCarthy and, in 2010, the gallery opened a second permanent space on London’s Savile Row.

In 2006, Hauser & Wirth opened a new space at the historic premises of 15 Old Bond Street, shared with the UK’s leading old master dealer, Colnaghi. The gallery hosted two to three twentieth century and contemporary shows each year, including exhibitions of works by Louise Bourgeois, Berlinde de Bruyckere, Subodh Gupta, Henry Moore and Francis Picabia, before the space closed in 2010. Hauser & Wirth also opened an enormous temporary project space in London’s East End in 2005. Hauser & Wirth Coppermill showed exhibitions by Martin Kippenberger and Dieter and Björn Roth, Christoph Büchel and Martin Creed before it closed in July 2007.

In September 2009, the gallery inaugurated its outdoor sculpture programme in Southwood Garden, St James’s Church, London, with an exhibition by Swiss artist Josephsohn. Also in September, Hauser & Wirth opened a New York gallery in the Upper East Side of Manhattan with ‘Allan Kaprow: Yard’, an Environment first made in 1961 by Allan Kaprow, the American artist known as the inventor of ‘Happenings.’

In October 2010, Hauser & Wirth London opened their new gallery, designed by Selldorf Architects, at 23 Savile Row with the exhibition, ‘Louise Bourgeois: The Fabric Works’. In December 2013, Hauser & Wirth closed their Piccadilly gallery permanently.

In 2013, Hauser & Wirth opened their second New York gallery at 511 West 18th Street, in what used to be the Roxy. Located on the second level of a Chelsea garage, the gallery draws visitors up a long, sweeping stairway before revealing the 10,000 square feet exhibition space. Several artists contributed to the project including Björn Roth, who designed the gallery’s Roth Bar as a tribute to his father Dieter Roth; and Martin Creed, who created a custom installation for the entrance stair hall.

In July 2014, Hauser & Wirth Somerset opened on the outskirts of Bruton in Somerset. Hauser & Wirth Somerset is a gallery and arts centre focused on a core belief in conservation, education and sustainability, and is designed around several renovated Grade II-listed historical buildings as well as two new purpose built galleries on the site of Durslade Farm. Accompanied by an extensive education programme and regular artists-in-residence, the gallery aims to share contemporary art with new audiences and to engage the public with art, the countryside and the local community. In September 2014, a landscaped garden designed for the gallery by internationally renowned landscape architect Piet Oudolf was launched, including a perennial meadow that sits behind the gallery buildings.

http://www.hauserwirth.com

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Nasan Tur, Political Supporters, 2016

25 January 2017

Magazine Contemporary Culture

Culture Main Photography Politics No Comments

Nasan Tur, Political Supporters, 2016

Nasan Tur’s works reflect the political and social conditions of our time. In his works the artist thematises symbols of power and affiliation, which are omnipresent both in the cityscape and the media. He investigates the individual options ranging between acting in public space and doing nothing, between distance and affiliation. Nasan Tur succeeds in articulating his close observation of social phenomena and concrete social conditions both incisively and poetically in installations, photographs, objects and participatory projects. At the Garage and the Galerie of Kunst Haus Wien he presents photographs from his latest series as well a new video for the first time.

Works from Nasan Tur’s series “Political Supporters” (2016) are on view for the first time at the Galerie of Kunst Haus Wien. Ten selected photographs show close-ups of human faces. What all the persons portrayed in the photos have in common is their strong, almost exalted facial expression. The photographs show people who support political ideas or campaigning politicians to an almost extreme extent, people who strongly identify with the leading political figure or ideology.

For his portrait series Nasan Tur used found footage from newspapers and magazines. From pictures published with reports on the outcome of elections the artist extracts single faces and focusses on the individual – larger than life. He shows people who feel to belong to a (political) group, who define themselves through their membership to a specific group and distance themselves from others. In his portraits, however, Nasan Tur eliminates the environment, the context, which are of no importance here. The dynamism of the mass, the collective experience of emotion that is generated and activated in political contexts, presents itself at the same time as a both universal and specific phenomenon.

The focus on situations originally captured for press purposes that Nasan Tur chooses, allows to study facial expressions and the physiognomic state of the portrayed persons. They remind of Franz Xaver Messerschmidt’s “Character Heads”, although Nasan Tur does not offer any artistic interpretations in this “studies”. The pictures present photographically captured moments of a real event, extracts from narratives, fractals of a collective emotion. They show eyes and mouths wide open as well as closed eyelids and tears, furrowed brows, a face covered by hands. We use our cognitive empathy to understand what the person feels and try to grasp the emotional state, the political passion of someone we do not know via his or her exalted facial expression. The size of the portraits and the close-up view eliminate any distance. The unknown strangers are exposed to our inquisitorial view; we can study the emotions they show in public.

Nasan Tur stages ten such portraits at the Galerie of Kunst Haus Wien. The portrayed persons are given much room – they stand alone, they are isolated and are thrown back upon themselves. The black and white faces are framed in cyan, magenta and yellow (CMYK is the standard colour model for four-colour printing) – the artist uses this as a means of abstraction in order to reduce any geographic or temporal references. All emotions portraits are dramatically lighted, which lends them an aura and demonstrates in an almost pushy and unpleasant way the emotional dimension of politics.

Source: Kunstforum International
Text: Art Daily, http://artdaily.com.
All images belongs to the respective artist and management.

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