Dhātu, 2010

James Turrell presents two new installations along with other work at the Gagosian Gallery in London until 10th December 2010. Although Bindu Shards, Turrell’s immersive relaxation pod, has now been fully booked for the duration of the exhibition, Dhātu is well worth a visit. Here Turrell, plays with our instinct in finding physical points of reference amongst our surroundings, gently disabling our layers of perception.

More info from the Gagosian Gallery’s website below:

Roden Crater (sunset), 2010

Through light, space can be formed without physical material like concrete or steel. We can actually stop the penetration of vision with where light is and where it isn’t. Like the atmosphere, we can’t see through it to the stars that are there during the day. But as soon as that light is dimmed around the self, then this penetration of vision goes out. So I’m very interested in this feeling, using the eyes to penetrate the space.
–James Turrell

Gagosian Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of new installations, light works, sculptures and prints by James Turrell. This is his first exhibition with the gallery.

For more than forty-five years, Turrell has explored the myriad possibilities of using light as a medium of perception. His formally simple works draw attention to the limits of seeing while seeking to expand the wordless thought that they provoke. Throughout these permutations, the light that is normally used to illuminate other things is assigned form and structure, making it the subject of the revelation. Since pursuing studies in perceptual psychology during the 1960s, Turrell has been exploring a variety of perceptual phenomena, ranging from sensory deprivation to intense optical effects. Early works such as Afrum-Proto (1966) and the Mendota Stoppages (1969-1974), which employed planes of light in relation to architecture, became the basis for ongoing investigations. He continues to use light as his primary subject and material, with its inherent allusions to painting and sculpture.

Since the early 1970s, Turrell has worked to transform the Roden Crater in Arizona into a naked-eye observatory that reconceives the landscape as a multisensory experience. This epic project is represented in the exhibition by a series of eight carbon prints that utilize the earliest of nineteenth-century color-photographic methods. Composed of powdered pigment, the prints depict various details and perspectives of the Roden Crater project. Two bronze and plaster models representing the “North Moon Space” area of the observatory will also be on view.

Recent installations from the Ganzfeld series map a new landscape that takes form using light projected into space. This new landscape without horizons is one that is increasingly explored in navigation through clouds and fog, scuba diving, skiing in whiteout conditions, flight in space, and the technical dimensions of though, such as Boolean logic, which can also be encountered in meditation. The imageless and formless landscape of Dhatu (2010) yields an emptiness filled with light that allows the viewer to feel its physicality. Light like this is seen rarely with the eyes open, yet it is familiar to that which can be apprehended with the eyes closed in lucid dream, deep meditation, and near-death experiences.

The relation of exterior light to interior light is explored further in the work Bindu Shards (2010), a fully immersive visual and auditory work to be experienced by one person at a time. Part of the ongoing Perceptual Cells series, Bindu Shards possesses the same invasive qualities of “behind-the-eyes” seeing as could be experienced in Gasworks (1993) which was first shown at the Henry Moore Sculpture Trust in Halifax, and then at the ICA, London in 1996. In the late 1980s, Turrell resumed work on the Perceptual Cells, which stemmed from his university studies, then continued from 1968 through 1970 as a collaboration with the artist Robert Irwin and two psychologists. Each cell stimulates an experience in which there is no object of perception; the light which is presented is light “not seen.” This produces the “Purkinje effect,” a transitional patterning that is perceived uniquely during the transition from light to dark. Together with the Dark Space series begun in 1983, Shards shares this dissolving of the juncture between the light outside and the light inside. During the eight to twelve minutes required for the eyes to adapt to darkness, the realm where the difference between “in-front” and “back-of-the-eyes” seeing dissolves and allows the iris to open.

Turrell’s holographic works further blur the theoretical properties of light by creating the illusion of tangibility. In a series of holographic works — two reflective and two transmissive — planes of light are manipulated in the same manner as the earliest Projection series from the 1960s where light first became Turrell’s primary medium.

James Turrell was born in 1943 in Los Angeles. He received a Bachelor of Arts degree in experimental psychology at Pomona College at Claremont, California in 1965, followed by a Master’s degree in Art from Claremont Graduate School in 1973. His work is represented in numerous public collections including the Tate Modern, London; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York and the Israel Museum Jerusalem. The James Turrell Museum opened in Colomé, Argentina in 2009. His solo exhibitions include Stedlijk Museum (1976); Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (1980); Israel Museum (1982); Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (1984); MAK, Vienna (1998-1999); Mattress Factory, Pittsburgh (2002-2003); and “The Wolfsburg Project” (2009-2010), Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Germany. A major retrospective will open at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York in 2012, traveling to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, among other venues.

For further inquiries please contact the gallery at london@gagosian.com or at +44.207.841.9960.

It’s in it’s early stages but it will be interesting to see how long it is there for and which items are exchanged and distributed amongst residents.

(image via Wallpaper Magazine)

More info from Amanda Levete Architects/ Kite Related Design press release below:

Move: Choreographing You

Wednesday 13 October – Saturday 9 January
Move: Choreographing you is an exhibition of visual and performance art curated and hosted by the Hayward Gallery on Londonʼs Southbank. The theme of the exhibition focuses on sculptures and installations which invite the visitor to become both participant and performer through interaction with performers, visitors, and the pieces themselves.   AL_A was commissioned by the Hayward Gallery to do the interior spatial design and planning of the exhibition, as well as develop a multi-media archive in collaboration with interactive designers Unit 9.

The exhibition design was driven by the relationships between choreography and geometry, movement and form. Inspired by the photographic motion studies of the human body of Etienne-Jules Marey and Eadweard Muybridge, we have created a collection of spatial dividers which are defined by a serial transformation of a single material: a sequence of folded oscillations of Dupont Tyvek. The resulting translucent paper-like fabric ribbons, a counterpoint to the brutality of the building, rise and fall with undulating folds which simultaneously define themselves as way finding devices, partitions, suspended ceilings, and portals. These fluid spatial and formal transformations choreograph the movement of the visitor through areas of sculpture, film, archive and performance.

The spatial configurations defined by our dividers are intended to embody two types of performative experience: public and private. In the public experience, the ribbons frame views, carve space, and lead visitors to a fluid and communal experience of the interactive objects and installations of Bruce Nauman, Robert Morris, Franz West, Franz E. Walther, William Forsythe, Christian Jankowski, and others. In the private experience, the ribbons are used to enclose and define smaller more intimate spaces for introspective and singular experiences with the works of Isaac Julien, Dan Graham, Simone Forti, Tanya Bruguera, Lygia Clark and others.

While the expressive form of the ribbons was conceived as a choreography of material inspired by origami, the structure and bespoke detailing of the paper-like ribbons was inspired by those found in kites and was developed in close collaboration with Kite Related Design.

Mike Ballard (via Rebelart.net)

When I first heard about this exhibition, I couldn’t quite believe it. Here’s a funny article from The Guardian below -

Ever had your coat nicked? Well, you might just find it in this artist’s new show

Mike Ballard, you could argue, is an artist who is either contemptible, or brave, or both. Either way, by the time you read this, there’s a good chance he will have been punched on the nose or run in by the police – both things that happen less often to artists than, in an ideal world, they would. He has just opened an exhibition – Whose Coat Is That Jacket You’re Wearing? – consisting of 200-odd coats (or jackets) that Ballard has stolen in a decade-long kleptomaniac spree kicked off, he says, by his own favourite coat being nicked from a pub shortly after he came to live in London.

Now that he has run out of space to store his collection of hooky menswear, Ballard is exhibiting them as art, at a tailor’s shop in London. Some people will think this is rather old hat – there has, after all, been a rotating exhibition of stolen bicycles in London’s Brick Lane market for years. But I find it intriguing. It seems to raise interesting questions – although not the rather humdrum one the artist thinks he’s raising (“What is art?”).

No, the main question it raises in my mind is: how can we be so sure these things really are stolen? What a swizz to attend the exhibition suspecting that, actually, he’s just picked up a bunch of crappy old coats from charity shops and claimed to have nicked them. When I asked Ballard about this (the show not being open at the time of writing), he said: “Because I’m telling you so. Come to the exhibition and see. There’s more than 200 coats there.” He sounds persuasive, though he says he hasn’t stolen a coat since 2009, having sought treatment for what he calls an “obsession”. His victims are now invited to present themselves to reclaim their coats: “That’s it. I want them out of my life.”

If Ballard had real cojones, he would present proof – what curators call “provenance” and the police call “evidence” – that the items really don’t belong to him. Then, if the second part of the exhibition became a site-specific performance at Bow Street magistrates’ court, everyone would be happy.

The connection between art and criminality goes way back – Caravaggio was a bit stabby, Jean Genet a bit stealy. But criminality as art itself? There’s a difference. There was a certain swagger to the Brink’s-Mat heist, but having your coat nicked is deeply annoying: even more annoying than most conceptual art. Ballard explains his work by quoting Picasso: “Good artists copy; great artists steal.” But Picasso didn’t say: “Good artists copy; great artists steal other people’s coats from the pub.” TS Eliot said something similar: “Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.” If he’d added “hubcaps”, Seamus Heaney’s career would have looked altogether different.

Referencing his background in hip-hop, which has its own history of appropriation and collage, Ballard sees the coats as having been “sampled from the population of London”, which is one way of putting it. The exhibition is subtitled “a commentary on consumerism, appropriation and art history”, inspired by Duchamp, Emin, Manzoni, Marshall McLuhan and the Situationists. Not only is this guy a thieving bastard, he’s a pretentious thieving bastard.

But the project does at least bear witness to the transformative power of art. Time and again over the last decade, Ballard has transformed coat owners into angry former coat owners, and ruined countless journeys home in the rain. Now he claims he’s “seeking redemption”, not by handing his stash and himself into the Old Bill, but by using these stolen coats in the furtherance of his career. Among the pocket contents trailed on Ballard’s website are credit cards and mobile phones – so some owners, at least, might be easy to trace. Yet, he still requires the poor sod whose coat he stole to come along and get it back, thereby swelling the numbers at his show, which doesn’t sound like a very earnest apology.

Ballard says he’s already had emails “calling me all sorts”. Furthermore, he’ll only return the coats if owners can provide proof they belong to them. That’s just the sort of fusty curatorial control freakery that transgressive shows like this seek to undermine.

So the obvious riposte is for everyone who has ever had their coat stolen to go en masse and nick Ballard’s exhibition in its entirety. Then we could mount a counter-exhibition called Whose Exhibition Is That Idea We’ve Seen Before? Maybe see you there. No jacket required.

Sam Leith

1. Banner Repeater, London.

(Info and images via project website)

Banner Repeater is an artist led contemporary art space, curatorially run and initiated by Ami Clarke in 2009, it is located on Hackney Downs Network Rail, platform 1.

It has a reading room and project space with a programme of exhibitions, events, and performance.

Banner Repeater will publish an on-going series of pamphlets and posters, in tandem with the arts programme, as well as events, performance and lectures commissioned from the project space.

The reading room holds a collection of artist’s books and other printed material, for both browsing and purchase. The permanent collection is home to Publish and be Damned’s public library.

Kindly supported for the first year by Hackney Council’s Empty Shop Fund, and Arts Council England, the project will run for 3 years.

Banner Repeater is one of a series of projects supported by Hackney Council intended to bring empty shops and premises back to life. The projects are financed by central government funding awarded to the Council, and are to provide activities that will benefit Hackney ‘s residents and visitors.

opening hours:

8 – 10am, 4 – 7pm tues – thurs
8 – 6pm fri
12 – 6pm sat
12 – 6pm sun (during exhibitions)

address:
banner repeater

platform 1
Hackney Downs Network Rail
Dalston Lane
E8

2. Jason Bruges artwork, Sunderland

(Image and text via Jason Bruges Studio website)

An artwork was unveiled at Sunderland Station yesterday, the final phase of a £7m transformation that has seen it dubbed The Station of Light.

Running the length of the platform wall, the screen – made from more than 10,000 LED-lit glass blocks shows shadowy figures which are set in motion when a train arrives.

3. Movement by Yoke and Zoom, Worcester.

From project website:

Current Show: THE ULTIMATE PAINTING: 2nd Oct 2010-6th November 2010

We are very pleased to announce that following four and a half years of development; research into artist-led projects, fund-raising, and project-managing renovations, MOVEMENT, a new artist-led gallery and project space is finally open on Platform 2, Worcester Foregate Street Railway Station from the 2nd October 2010 MOVEMENT is showing ‘The Ultimate Painting’ featuring 10 paintings connected by direct drawings onto the gallery wall by Jacob Feige and the previously unseen archive film ‘Drop City’ filmed in 1965 by Gene Bernofsky.

With a peppercorn lease secured from our dual landlords Network Rail and  London Midland, we have renovated MOVEMENT from its former use, a redundant toilet, empty for over twenty years and used as a storeroom by station staff into an exciting new artist led gallery. Fronting directly onto  the station platform, and built onto of a viaduct above street level.

To find MOVEMENT: From street level, Go up the stairs to platform 2, at the top of the stairs, turn left onto the platform and MOVEMENT is the last door on the platform (after the information office).

The station opened on the 17th May 1860. Worcester Foregate Street is in the City Center and is served by two train operating companies: London Midland (who manage the station) and First Great Western. Regular Services via Worcester Foregate Street Station include: To Birmingham via two different routes, either direct to Birmingham New Street (via Bromsgrove), or via Kidderminster to Birmingham Snow Hill. To London Paddington via the Cotswold Line and Oxford . To Malvern Link and Great Malvern, and on to Hereford. To Bristol Temple Meads via Gloucester and Cheltenham. To Southampton Central and to Brighton. Please see national rail enquiries for details of timetable to and from the station.

join the movement facebook group:

Contributors photographed the structures once they had been moved and sent images to the project organisers. You can see them here.

More info from project website below..

KRD Research Lab launched its first project this year during the 2010 Milan furniture fair.

Initiating a guerrilla design installation game, simple lightweight tensioned structures were seductively distributed across the city.

Visitors were challenged in their usual role as design observers to participate by moving the structures to a place where they could serve a better purpose. The structures were photographed in various locations around Milan; from Zona Tortona to the surroundings of Droog, near industrial facilities in Lambrate and at Foodmarketo, placed as add-on elements to existing structures, highlighting the way to sustainable design events and even providing shelter from sun or rain.

Exploiting the tensions and barriers between objects, systems and people within the framework of the modern urban landscape, the design hack was intended to inspire civic engagement and creativity.

Each structure was handmade in the Kite Related Design Ltd. studio using reclaimed fabrics supplied by LMB Recycling Ltd.

KRD Research Lab

A new innovation platform enabling pre-design testing via low-fi research methods for London-based design studio Kite Related Design Ltd.

http://www.krdresearchlab.com

Kite Related Design Ltd

Kites are at the heart of the multi-disciplinary design studio, practicing the philosophy of ‘lightweight solutions to heavyweight ideas’ in a wide range of creative endeavours including event and performance structures, installations, product design and architectural design. http://www.kiterelateddesign.com

LMB Textiles

Textile Recycling business based in East London.

http://www.lmb.co.uk

Design-hacking

“Hacking is about overcoming the limitations of an existing object, service or system which was set for one purpose, and finding an access point, intellectually or physically, where its original function can be expanded, altered, or improved to serve a new purpose or solve a problem”

- Scott Burnham, Finding the truth in systems: in praise of design-hacking.

In The Pit (En El Hoyo)
28 September 2009 6.30pm

In The Pit (En El Hoyo)

Winner of Best International Documentary at the Sundance Film Festival, this intimate and affecting look at the construction crew behind Mexico City’s Periferico Freeway charts the social reality at the core of over 10 miles of soaring reinforced concrete. Through objectively compassionate portaits of a miscellaeny of characters such as the wolf-whistling El Voyeur and the brusquely realist El Grande, the film charts the coarse life and camaraderie of the workers involved in the creation of a huge slab of the city, both floating in the air and submerged in the pit. The private life of urban infrastructure envisioned through a uniquely personal take on direct cinema, full of humour and grace.

Mexico 2006, Dir Juan Carlos Rulfo, 84 min

Trailer:

This screening will be introduced by Gareth Jones, Senior Lecturer at the London School of Economics and an Associate Fellow at the Institute for the Study of the Americas.

Tickets

£7.50 online
(£9.50 full price)

AF Members
£6.50 online
(£7.50 full price)

Concessions £7.50

Book online

Telephone
020 7638 8891
(9am-8.00pm)

Venue

Screen 2,
Barbican Centre

(via The Architecture Foundation)

Photo: Courtesy Corvi-Mora, London

SEIZURE, sculptor Roger Hiorns’s brilliant blue crystal cave within a low-rise modernist development re-opens this summer on a housing estate near the Elephant & Castle. Over the course of several weeks, Hiorns encouraged the total crystal takeover of a one bedroom council flat. Blue copper sulphate crystals have grown over every surface of the space – walls, ceilings, floor and bath – to create a strange and compelling new world. SEIZURE, Hiorns’ first major sculptural project in an urban site, has earned him a nomination for this year’s Turner Prize.

Thursday – Saturday 11am – 7pm

Sundays 11am – 5pm

Closed Monday – Wednesday

FREE ADMISSION

For further information see artangel.org.uk SEIZURE is commissioned by Artangel and the Jerwood Charitable Foundation

Went to the opening last night – well worth checking out!

Look out for Celine Condorelli & Alexandre Bettler‘s contributions. More info from Barbican below.

Barbican Takes Radical Nature to Hackney

Part of Barbican Art Gallery’s current exhibition Radical Nature – Art and Architecture for a Changing Planet 1969–2009, the experimental architectural collective EXYZT has created The Dalston Mill, turning a disused railway line and waste ground in Dalston into a vibrant rural retreat for the people of the area and beyond.

The fully-functioning, 16 metre mill is accompanied by a 20 metre long wheat field, a restaging of environmental artist Agnes Denes’ original 1982 pioneering piece.

Come and participate in one of the events or workshops, from theatre performances and bread-making to pedal-powered music and tea-time talks with artists.

DALSTON MILL EVENTS
Events are free and open to all unless otherwise stated
Capacity is limited to 20– 30, on a first come basis

Thu 16–Sat 18 July / 7pm and 8pm
Arcola Academy present: Kontakt
A series of one to one performances between 12 young actors and 12 audience members, Kontakt presents a unique opportunity to have an encounter with someone you’ve never met before and will never meet again. Tickets £5 available from the Arcola Theatre box office on 020 7503 1646.

Sat 18 July / 3pm
The Dalston Slice – Bread Currency
Come along and bake local currency made of bread, which you can spend only in a small selection of local restaurants, cafes, cinemas and theatres in Dalston. Join artisan baker Dan Lepard and the Collaborator’s Guide collective for this unique local event.
Free

Sun 19–Fri 24 July / 3–8pm
Dalton Talking
A series of Urban Psychoanalysis sessions, using a Talking Mill, by the emergency urban psychoanalysis commando unit, UPIA. This investigation into the urban unconscious of Dalston will be the first step in an extensive analysis of the city of London.
Free

Sun 19 July / 3–4.30pm
Feral Trade Tea Service
A talk and tea afternoon with Kate Rich featuring delights such as hand-traded tea from Bangladesh and sweets from Montenegro, accompanied by a travel report tracking these products from their source.
Free

Sun 19 July / 5–10pm
Magnificent Revolution
Pedal-powered music performance by Barbora Patkova. Bring your own iPod to eco-share your favourite tunes.
Free

Mon 20 July / 7pm
Elioth + Encore Heureux
Presentation by the Paris-based engineers and architectural collective who devised Wind-it, a project in which vertical wind generators are used in place of large horizontal windmills. Wind-it presents two solutions: either grafting the generators on to the electrical network or setting up new electricity pylons integrated with a renewable production unit.
Free

Thu 23 July / 2–5pm
Gahu Dramatic Arts
Dalston-based artists, Gahu, in association with the Trinity Centre Summer School and Tenants of the nearby Rhodes Estate, will use the Dalston Mill to create delicious African dishes followed by performances of African dancing, drumming, acrobatics and fire eating.
Free

Fri 24 July / 9pm
Dalton Talking presentation
A lecture about London’s unconscious based on the results of recent sessions at The Dalston Mill by UPIA, the emergency urban psychoanalysis commando unit.
Free

Tue 28–Thu 30 July and Mon 3–Wed 5 August / 2–5pm
Hackney Young Carers workshop
A series of creative workshops and events with members of Hackney Young Carers investigating issues surrounding sustainability, the natural world and the Radical Nature exhibition at Barbican Art Gallery. The event is closed to the general public.

Sat 1 August / 3pm
Full Dinner Design
Participants in this workshop by Alexandre Bettler (www.aalex.info) will be able to design everything from the cutlery to the baking trays which will then be used at a dinner cooked and served that evening.
Free

Sun 2 August / 3–5pm
Cake Decorating workshop
Jagdish Patel from the shop ‘Party Party’ on Ridley Road will lead a cake decoration masterclass. Participants need to bring their own cake.
Free

Sun 2 August / 6.30pm
EXYZT in Conversation
Nicolas Henninger (EXYZT) and architect/artist Celine Condorelli will discuss ‘pirate architecture’ as the practice of occupying a site, and how the inhabitation of space is a response to existing conditions.
Free

Thu 6 August / 5pm
muf architecture/art
Value what’s there, nurture the possible, define what’s missing. What is the role of public space in Dalston’s cultural life? An evening of celebration and debate.
Free

The Dalston Mill
Entrance by the Peace Mural on Dalston Lane, between Ashwin Street and Hartwell Street, E8
Bus: 30, 38, 56, 67, 76, 149, 236, 242, 243, 277
Rail: Dalston Kingsland

See some of EXYZT’s visuals on Flickr here

If you cant make it to the Radical Nature exhibition before 19th October you can see some of the exhibition in the video below:

www.danishcrafts.org/visArtikel.uk.asp?artikelID=2504

(text below from Danish Crafts website)

Ole Jensen

Born in 1958, ceramist/designer. He graduated as a ceramic designer from the Kolding College of Danish Design in 1985 and from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in 1990.

Hot Water Bottle is a soft container that can be filled with hot water and placed on or near the body. It is typically used to ease stomach or muscle pain. “Or if you just feel under the weather and need some warmth,” says Ole Jensen, adding that the product is probably “particularly relevant in cold climates and difficult times.”

The product is made in natural rubber and metal by repeatedly dipping a clay shape into liquid rubber. The rubber is treated with a thin layer of silicone for durability. The stopper is handmade in gold-plated brass with a screw thread closure. The hot water bottles are made in five different shapes in brown or red.

Hot Water Bottles are produced by Latex One and Lars Glad in collaboration with Rasha Sager & Saxenfelt Natural Rubber Products.

Since then, Ole Jensen has exhibited in a number of places, including the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and the Danish Museum of Art & Design in Copenhagen. At last year’s Mindcraft, Ole Jensen presented The Rubber Tub – an oversize version of his rubber washing-up bowl, which is manufactured by Normann Copenhagen, and which is in use in the restaurant at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, among many other places.

The long list of manufacturers that Ole has worked with over the years, in addition to Normann Copenhagen, includes Muuto and Royal Copenhagen.

The main source of inspiration for Ole Jensen’s products is his attention to everyday life and his close surroundings. This is reflected, among other things, in his preference for working with practical objects that relate to everyday life and the body. He develops these things almost as if they were craft objects: by hand, in clay and other readily available materials. Always mindful of whether the process gives rise to a rationale or a phenomenon that might later be transformed with a view to serial production.