Aleksandra Domanović

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

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Dave Hullfish Bailey, Nils Norman, Surrounded by Squares

25 February 2012

Magazine Contemporary Culture

Nils Norman, Exhibition view, Surrounded by Squares, 2009

For ‘Surrounded by Squares’ Dave Hullfish Bailey and Nils Norman have each constructed elaborate sculptural installations. Both relate to education and ecology, design theory and the creative industries, as well as to the site of Raven Row.

Dave Hullfish Bailey has generated polygonal sculptural forms by feeding patterns of information about Spitalfields’ history of dissidence into 3-D design software used by contemporary architects to model high-rises. Under the shadow of the encroaching financial district, Bailey suggests that alternative models may exist for the ordering of space and information.

Nils Norman is interested in the way corporate culture absorbs what is outside itself, aping innovations from the ecological movement and the playscapes of alternative education, and transforming ideas about collectivism and sustainability into those about management of people and quick profit. For his installation, Norman has designed ‘a prototype workspace for the creative classes’, a hybrid object using amongst other things, aquatic filtering systems, a rocket oven and an arid garden.

Dave Hullfish Bailey (1963, living in LA) has had solo exhibitions at Secession, Vienna in 2006 and CASCO, Utrecht in 2007, as well as at Mesler & Hug Gallery in LA, where he also teaches at Art Center.

Nils Norman (1966, living in London) has exhibited in major museums internationally including Tate Modern and Kunsthalle Zurich. He is Professor at the Royal Danish Academy in Copenhagen and currently has an exhibition at SculptureCenter, New York.

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Sculpture: John Kleckner and Patrick Tuttofuoco, Those Ghosts, 2011

12 December 2011

Magazine Contemporary Culture

Art Artists Main No Comments

John Kleckner and Patrick Tuttofuoco, Those Ghosts, 2011

The works in this exhibition are about human figures dissipating into voids, into abstractions, and shape-shifting into solid structures. Transformation, transcendence, and transience are the core concepts fixed into 2- and 3-dimensional material permanence in each of the exhibited artworks.

In his newest works one can see John Kleckner transitioning from meticulously rendered rotting noses and metamorphosing cavemen, to poetic allusions/illusions of infinite (contemplative) space. Figures do still appear and certainly inform the works on view, but with this new direction and some new techniques, Kleckner has opened his practice to fully embrace abstraction. These works of ink on paper are a meditative union of carefully planned accidents and haphazard intentions.

Patrick Tuttofuoco’s practice initiates a dialogue between individuals and their environment, exploring notions of community and social integration. Tuttofuoco’s sculptures study this concept, relating it to solitary individuals and their ability to transform external reality. Tuttofuoco melds Modernism and Pop; he presses figuration into abstraction, using man as the paradigm of existence, as the matrix and measuring unit of reality. From this interpretative and cognitive process, infinite versions of man and the context of his existence are produced, from which shapes able to animate the sculptures are generated.

John Kleckner’s (b.1978) work is included the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, NY (The Judith Rothschild Collection of Contemporary Drawings); The Saatchi Gallery, London; Magasin 3, Stockholm, Sweden; and The Deste Foundation Athens, Greece.
Patrick Tuttofuoco (b. 1974) has exhibited in: 10th Biennial of Havana, Kunstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin; 50th Venice Biennale; Magasine, Grenoble; Manifesta 5; MAXXI, Rome; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; Fondazione Nicola Trussardi, Milan; Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo,Turin.

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Curiosity Rover: Finds Biologically Useful Nitrogen on Mars

24 March 2015

Magazine Contemporary Culture

Culture Main Science No Comments

View from the Mars Hand Lens Imager camera on the arm of NASA’s Curiosity Mars Rover and Curiosity Self-Portrait at Mojave Site on Mount Sharp, Mars, 2015

A team using the Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) instrument suite aboard NASA’s Curiosity rover has made the first detection of nitrogen on the surface of Mars from release during heating of Martian sediments. The nitrogen was detected in the form of nitric oxide, and could be released from the breakdown of nitrates during heating. Nitrates are a class of molecules that contain nitrogen in a form that can be used by living organisms. The discovery adds to the evidence that ancient Mars was habitable for life.

Nitrogen is essential for all known forms of life, since it is used in the building blocks of larger molecules like DNA and RNA, which encode the genetic instructions for life, and proteins, which are used to build structures like hair and nails, and to speed up or regulate chemical reactions.
However, on Earth and Mars, atmospheric nitrogen is locked up as nitrogen gas (N2) – two atoms of nitrogen bound together so strongly that they do not react easily with other molecules. The nitrogen atoms have to be separated or “fixed” so they can participate in the chemical reactions needed for life. On Earth, certain organisms are capable of fixing atmospheric nitrogen and this process is critical for metabolic activity. However, smaller amounts of nitrogen are also fixed by energetic events like lightning strikes.

Features resembling dry riverbeds and the discovery of minerals that only form in the presence of liquid water suggest that Mars was more hospitable in the remote past. The Curiosity team has found evidence that other ingredients needed for life, such as liquid water and organic matter, were present on Mars at the Curiosity site in Gale Crater billions of years ago.

“Finding a biochemically accessible form of nitrogen is more support for the ancient Martian environment at Gale Crater being habitable,” said Jennifer Stern of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. Stern is lead author of a paper on this research published online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science March 23.

“Scientists have long thought that nitrates would be produced on Mars from the energy released in meteorite impacts, and the amounts we found agree well with estimates from this process,” said Stern.

The team found evidence for nitrates in scooped samples of windblown sand and dust at the “Rocknest” site, and in samples drilled from mudstone at the “John Klein” and “Cumberland” drill sites in Yellowknife Bay. Since the Rocknest sample is a combination of dust blown in from distant regions on Mars and more locally sourced materials, the nitrates are likely to be widespread across Mars, according to Stern.

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Dance: Xavier Le Roy, Nudity Has Been Around From Prehistoric Times

7 December 2015

Magazine Contemporary Culture

Art Artists Culture No Comments

Xavier Le Roy and Eszter Salamon, Gisxelle, 2001

For Le Roy, nakedness is not a shock tactic but a quest for the sculptural and the sublime. “Nudity has been around from prehistoric times,” says John Kaldor. From 35,000-year-old figurines of Venus to the pursuit of male bodily perfection in Greek and Roman marble statues, Temporary Title is following a long artistic tradition. “Everybody is the same but is different,” says Le Roy, “The skin is great at showing that.”

For two decades, Le Roy has been tearing contemporary dance away from its conventional home in the theatre and placing it firmly into the art museum (appearing everywhere from London’s Tate Modern to the Museum of Modern Art in New York). His work is an “exhibition”, a moving landscape if you will, a space where visitors can stroll in and out as they see fit, spending 10 minutes or six hours consuming the art.

Xavier Le Roy holds a doctorate in molecular biology from the University of Montpellier, France, and has worked as a dancer and choreographer since 1991. He has performed with diverse companies and choreographers and produces his work since 1994.

His most famous composition to date, Self Unfinished (1988), sees Le Roy use an elasticated black jumper and trousers to divulge, and then cover up, parts of his body, before peeling off his clothes altogether. In the process he becomes barely human. He is a robot, a raw plucked chicken carcass, a series of shapes and curves, his anatomy a ball of clay to mould.

When he performs Self Unfinished around the world, he is still struck by the “density of concentration” between himself and viewers, so thick it’s “like you can almost touch it”, he murmurs, rubbing his fingers together. Le Roy’s art is in his audience’s hands too (hence the open rehearsals and feedback sessions). He recalls one onlooker who was asked a question in a practice run of Temporary Title. Faced with the nakedness, he answered honestly, later telling the artist he could no longer “dress up” his answer.

But if being nude is being vulnerable, so, ironically, is putting back on clothes. Temporary Title’s performers work in shifts, dressing and undressing in front of the watchful eyes of the crowd. In the process they become “coloured in”, observes Christopher Quyen. Clothes act as identity: a conscious, carefully chosen image.

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Timur Si-Qin

25 January 2012

Magazine Contemporary Culture

Artists Main No Comments

Timur Si-Qin, Untitled, and Installation view of Legend, 2011

Timur Si-Qin speaks about his work in the 2014 Taipei Biennial.

I try to make work that doesn’t believe in the separation between culture and biology. To view humans as occupying a special role in the universe—and therefore as outside of nature and separate from other animals—is a theological belief that has no evidence. There never has been nor will there ever be anything “outside” of nature. Of course, just saying that something is natural doesn’t mean that it is morally correct or that we shouldn’t work to change it. Nature is inherently dynamic and chaotic, and life has always been about a two-way interaction with the environment. The environment changes life, and life changes the environment. The universe is a dance between entropy and complexity. Fortunately, and mysteriously, matter has a tendency to self-organize and determine its own being.

I’m interested in the way commercial images reveal the processes by which humans interpret and respond to the world around them—these are the fingerprints of our cultural image-search algorithms. The interesting question is no longer whether or not the image is a construction, but rather in what ways this process is structured. Common and repeated “solutions” to commercial imagery—cheesy stock photos, pop music, and formulaic Hollywood movies—are all ingrained modes of culture that can tell us something about its materiality and tendencies. When one understands the tendencies of a material—like a blacksmith who grasps the tendencies of metals—one can use that knowledge to activate the item’s capacities. In that way, a greater understanding of the materiality of culture may lead us toward unlocking its unrealized capacities.

Nicolas Bourriaud’s book The Radicant (2009) probably falls closest to the context he’s laid out for the biennial. In both, he emphasizes the importance of a globalized network, and it’s an idea that others often miss when they focus on the impact of technology. The digital-native generation is different from previous generations because of the exponential access and confrontation with other cultures that the Internet allows, which facilitates a deprogramming or reverse engineering of one’s own culture.

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