22/03/2012

ZegnArt – Lucy + Jorge Orta: Fabulae Romanae

ZegnArt – Lucy + Jorge Orta: Fabulae Romanae

At the intersection of creativity, art once again meets fashion. After the fantastic and fruitful adventures of a number of its countrymen in the fashion system, Zegna has joined the field of contemporary visual art. The first initiative by ZegnArt – a space where interdisciplinary art, fashion, design, architecture and poetry coexist and inform one another – is an exhibition of the international artists Lucy (b. Sutton Coldfield, UK in 1966) & Jorge Orta (b. Rosario, Argentina in 1953) entitled Fabulae Romanae.

The show, curated by Maria Luisa Frisa, and conceived by Ermenegildo Zegna in collaboration with MAXXI, the artists, the company and the support of the Centre for Sustainable Fashion, is devoted to Italy’s fabulous capital city and has emerged from a common code of ethics and principles of sustainability which bind together the people involved.

ZegnArt is a project made up of three main areas: Public, a programme of commissions and residencies for contemporary artists, Special Projects, a container for remarkable artistic events, and Art in Global Store, a project to commission site specific artworks, conceived to be hosted inside Ermenegildo Zegna’s Global Stores, with the aim of driving people towards the languages of art.


In Rome Lucy + Jorge Orta are presenting their works, which are connected to a number of pressing ecological and social issues of our time. Through drawing, sculpture, installation, video and performance, the couple’s aim is to provoke reaction and reflection on important topics of the contemporary world. Central to the exhibition is the installation of tents (or domes), which represent a fundamental way human beings produce spatial definition and condition and their fragility and precariousness –‘a nomadic form of shelter’ which are here made with signature Zegna textiles. Also prominent is a video performance called Spirits, marked by ethereal characters who interact with the city accompanied by a piece of poetry by Mario Petrucci.

Fabulae Romanae will run until the 23rd of September this year within the larger project Tridimensionale (Three-dimensional), the latest arrangement of the MAXXI Arte collection. We’ll be looking forward to see what comes next from their well-tailored sleeve.

Monica Lombardi – Images Studio Orta, G. Caccamo, Matteo Cherubino 

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20/03/2012

White Zinfandel

White Zinfandel

When speaking about White Zinfandel, the last thing that would come to your mind is that the name was the first random thing its founders came up with. Fortunately, the casually chosen name was a too special foreplay to be wasted on a sloppy project.

White Zinfandel is a New York based magazine founded by Jiminie Ho (the mind behind W/– project space) and Dominic and Chris Leong (of Leong Leong Architecture), after a series of fortunate coincidences, of which the first one was obviously the name itself. This self-styled magazine explores the visual manifestation of food and culture produced within the lives of creative individuals through a variety of media and means of expression. Each number is based on a culturally or historically relevant menu interpreted by various creatives.


To underline the boldness of their intentions, the editors dedicated the first number of White Zinf to Food, the SOHO restaurant from the 70s founded by Gordon Matta-Clark, Caroline Goodden and Tina Girouard.

The second number, issued past december, was called “TV Dinners”, paying a hommage to the simplest and most common American dining habit. As combining high and low profile content is one of White Zinf‘s stronger sides, the apparently simple subject evolves in a surprising product. Therefore some of the articles are “Searching for Rirkrit” by Pete Deevakul that feature the artist Rirkrit Tiravanija‘s portraits made out of food or abstract compositions made with steaks by Ruby Sky Stiler. Besides the witty articles and enviable artists’ collaborations, each issue of White Zinfandel is comprises an equally important dinner party, that celebrates the menu the magazine itself was based on.

After Gordon Matta-Clark’s “Food” and “TV-Dinners”, two themes that couldn’t be more different, we can’t but eagerly expect what will the threesome produce in their next issue. Just another reason why we can’t wait for summer to come!


Rujana Rebernjak

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16/03/2012

Frank Selby: Some Things Never Change

Frank Selby: Some Things Never Change

This weekend, American artist Frank Selby (not to be confused photographer The Selby, Todd Selby) is opening his second exhibition at Paris’ Jeanrochdard gallery, ”Some Things Never Change”.

The works to be shown are in his usually meticulous style and are drawn from recent press photography. All reframe photographs from conflicts over the past two years as drawings to systematically demonstrate the distance between the photo – taken commonly as objective truth – and the actual event. Selby, through this work “raises the idea that our interpretation of these photographs – which are the cornerstone of our understanding of these historical facts – is changing and becomes more distorted over time.”

The exhibition harkens back to the fierce debates surrounding the effect of wartime photography during the Vietnam War and, more recently, Desert Storm. We remember through photos, and especially in press photography, there is a common assumption that the photographic image is a slice of objective truth. Public opinion surrounding conflicts are inevitably driven by these images, but Selby brilliantly draws our attention to the fact that even these ostensibly objective records can have an agenda: they’re telling one version of a story. Add to this a heavy peppering of symbolism throughout–hints of communism and the anonymity of the policeman’s helmet, for example–and the artist gives a beautifully illustrated sense of the photo’s potential inobjectivity as a record.

If you happen to find yourself in Paris over the weekend (or anytime before April 20th), the show really is a must-see. Opening tomorrow, March 17, from 5-9pm and running until the 20th of April at Jeanrochdard at 13 Rue des Arquebusiers.

Tag Christof

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15/03/2012

Luigi Ghirri – An adventure in thinking and looking

Luigi Ghirri – An adventure in thinking and looking

Thoughts, deeds, actions, visions, sounds, words, objects, ethic groups and echoes that come from everywhere in an evident and overwhelming fashion, transform and mark modernity. In our existence, this sense of alienation, this having continuously to relocate the common denominator, to unravel the billions of little physical and mental junctions and crossroads, a continuous re-finding ourselves only to get lost once again becomes the dominant feature of our era.

Luigi Ghirri, Lo sguardo inquieto, un’antologia di sentimenti (The restless daze, an anthology of feelings), 1988



What is photography? Luigi Ghirri – one of the most influencing photographers ever, and a milestone of contemporary history of the medium – answered to this question defining it as an adventure in thinking and looking. Ghirri’s adventure lasted 20 years, from 1970 to 1992, when he died prematurely, and left us an amazing collection of images, which reflects his personal and intimate dimension in a sort of anthropological research.

An important exhibition dedicated to this master of photography has just closed at Castello di Rivoli, and we couldn’t have avoid visiting the show – just in time before the finissage – to report our impressions and share them with our readers, giving inputs to all the photography lovers that unfortunately didn’t have the opportunity to live this experience. It’s no accident that in a time when sensationalism and ostentation seem to be inapt, places and people devoted to art re-discover the work of Luigi Ghirri, sunk into the oblivion for many years.



Ghirri’s approach to the act of taking pictures is comparable to an exercise of memory and soul. His pictures, depicting landscapes, working activities, diverse apparently meaningless objects or normal people – photographed from the back or afar, during their everyday life –, underline the photographer’s will of experimenting and probing all the possibilities and specificities of the medium. But the camera is much more than this for Luigi Ghirri, who used it to create his unique journal made of places and individuals interpreted without harking back to any previous model. The Artist’s project prints – the first contact prints, produced to visualize his work – shows that he rarely made changes in the framing in the darkroom, while his interventions were mainly related to chromatic control.

Through the research of the perfect colour intensity – unsaturated and delicate colours, a quality that allows to make the shots lighter – Ghirri was able to create his typical chromatic effect, which gives to the observers the feeling of going outside the images, beyond the appearance. Thanks to photography the artist introduced the possibility of representing the landscape as an anthropized environments dominated by an almost metaphysical silence that allow people to see the obvious from another point of view, measuring it slowly to reveal its details.


Monica Lombardi – Images from the archives of Luigi Ghirri

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13/03/2012

Studio Formafantasma at Designs of the Year

Studio Formafantasma at Designs of the Year

Every year around April the global design community freaks out. As Salone del Mobile approaches steadily and inevitably, we can’t avoid asking ourselves a few questions. Are these hundreds of fairs taking place each year, where Salone is the most prestigious one, really necessary? If one of design’s fundamental premisses is sustainability, how can these fairs be justified?

While the Salone fever is getting wilder and wilder in Milan, Design Museum in London is hosting quite a different event. During the first week of February the nominees of the annual “Designs of the Year” award have been shyly presented. Sorted up in seven categories (architecture, digital, fashion, furniture, graphics, product, transport) this year’s nominees have all an extremely socially aware and technologically experimental character in common, which differs considerably form designs appraised each year during the Salone.


Among the other eighteen nominees in ‘product’ category you can find a name that may ring a bell: Studio Formafantasma.

Formafantasma is an Italian design duo, Andrea Trimarchi and Simone Farresin, that was formed and is currently based in Eindhoven, Netherlands. Formafantasma has been nominated for the award for their project “Botanica” developed in 2011. “Botanica” is only the latest creation in a series of projects, developed after their graduation from Eindhoven in 2009, that address the following issues: “the role of design in folk craft, the relationship between tradition and local culture, a critical approach to sustainability and the significance of objects as cultural vectors”.

Hence, “Botanica” explores the possibility of producing natural polymers extracted from plants, as if the oil era has never existed; “Autarchy” proposes a series of objects made from a bio-material composed of flour, agricultural waste and natural limestone, further developing their previous project “Baked”; “Moulding Tradition” explores the importance of craft in witnessing the past.

MoMA‘s senior curator Paola Antonelli has already declared Studio Formafantasma one of the most important designers of the 21st century. Hopefully someone will take note for this year’s Salone. We’re keeping our fingers crossed!

Rujana Rebernjak – Images courtesy of Formafantasma

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08/03/2012

A Generation in Motion: The Ungovernables

A Generation in Motion: The Ungovernables


“The Ungovernables” does its best to define the intentions of a generation (X) that, for all intents and purposes, grew up in the shadow of its baby-booming parents. That this new showcase comes while Gen X is in the midst of paying for the baby-boomers’ missteps is no small irony, and the mood here captures the sentiment well: The whole giant heap of mismatched work on display can be seen as an effort to blow-up that looming shadow. The results are fun to watch in a oh-my-god-did-you-see-that-crash! kind of way, but would you expect anything less from a group that brought you Nirvana, the Macarena, and Cher’s first number one hit in 24 years? Me neither.

Being the doomed/undervalued generation they are, the works on display largely box around the concept of decay (most notably Adrián Villar Rojas’ sculpting work, which takes up nearly an entire floor), with a calculated optimism―one that doesn’t seem quite ready to take itself seriously―splashed on top for good measure. The only common thread here is a shared sense of confusion, and “The Ungovernables” has plenty of identity crises to latch onto. Danh Võ’s “We The People” strips the Statue of Liberty of its history and its symbolism, focusing instead on recreating the copper panels that gave it shape. Jonathas de Andrade’s “Ressaca Tropical” (Tropical Hangover) uses a found diary to paint a strangely intimate picture of a conflicted youth, so much so that you fail to notice the voyeuristic overtones that run through the work.

But it’s Brian Bress’ “Status Report”, a short film that finds the artist struggling to do everyday tasks while dressed in absurd outfits that beg for attention, that best sums up the current universal sigh: “Because it’s the depression.” His film is a brilliant piece of black comedy, an obvious highlight (the curators must of known: It nearly takes up the entire basement), but he’s not certainly alone in his disassociation with the world around him. In this day and age you’d have to be deaf and dumb not to relate.

Cinthia Marcelle’s “O Sécula” (The Century) features trash―tires, fluorescent bulbs, barrels―being methodically thrown on the street for five minutes. Anyone who lives in New York knows this is a significant part of one’s daily routine. Hassan Khan’s “Jewel” was one of the few things that had an actual pulse, mixing paranoid Cairene music against a backdrop of flashing black-and-white images. You could hear the frantic drumming from deep in the stairwell; by the time you got to the room you could barely control your own body. I got stuck in there against my own better judgment for 20 minutes, until one of my friends came in and slapped me back to my senses. “The exhibit’s closing in fifteen minutes,” he told me. “We have to leave.” I shook my head in agreement, though more confused than ever―a fitting epitaph for our generations’ ramshackle statement of intent.

A Generation in Motion: “The Ungovernables” at New Museum, through April 22nd

Lane Koivu – Images courtesy of Benoit Pailley

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06/03/2012

Zak Kyes working with…

Zak Kyes working with…

Since becoming art director of Architectural Association at the age of twenty-four, Zak Kyes has done so many incredible works and won so many prizes that counting them might give you a headache. And if you think that having a major retrospective means being at least forty, you are wrong. As the doors of “Zak Kyes working with…” exhibition open, he is still in his twenties. The head spinning show is being hosted by Galerie Für Zeitgenössische Kunst in Leipzig as part of the annual “Inform Award” given to prominent designers that develop work within the context of applied and contemporary art. Zak, who was rewarded with the prize in 2010, has developed the exhibition together with curator Barbara Steiner and a long list of artists and designers. 

More interested in editorial, curatorial and publishing activities, Zak uses graphic design as a medium, a conveyor of content. The type of content Zak is interested in is arising from collaborations between disciplines and practitioners – artist, designers, architects, theoreticians. Citing Zak’s declaration: “The studio’s approach is defined by its active collaborations in ever-changing constellations. The studio is engaged in complex projects that integrate graphic design, publishing, research, strategy and architecture.”


This approach should emerge clearly in the exhibition in course in Leipzig. Conceived as a participatory event, the exhibitions sees involved Can Altay, Charles Arsène-Henry, Shumon Basar, Richard Birkett, Andrew Blauvelt, Edward Bottoms, Wayne Daly, Jesko Fezer, Joseph Grigely, Nikolaus Hirsch, Maria Lind, Markus Miessen, Michel Müller, Radim Peško and Barbara Steiner in production of site specific work, as well as in a series of talks and lectures. The exhibition and the following catalogue (published by Sternberg Press) didn’t only show examples of incredible graphic design work from one of its most interesting practitioners, but also shed light on new kinds of collaborative and highly critical working methods that have become central for contemporary design practice.


Rujana Rebernjak

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01/03/2012

Sometimes She Disappears: Cindy Sherman @ MoMA

Sometimes She Disappears: Cindy Sherman

Cindy Sherman has played many parts over the years, Hitchcock lady, horror victim, Madonna, Monroe, low-brow actress, ageing socialite, and sun-burnt Beverly Hills do-nothings among them. A lot of what she deals with identity and gender, but a lot of it is also deliberately abstract and multi-faceted, which is why it’s always been somewhat difficult to keep Sherman pigeonholed in one camp or another for too long. She simply refuses to be pinned to one thing or another. It’s also why she’s so popular.

What has never been revealed is the real Cindy Sherman, and you’re certainly not going to find her here. Her expansive, brilliant retrospective at MoMA should instead be viewed in part as an exercise in mass identity contortion. Though you can see that iconic face in nearly every shot, at 58 she remains an elusive figure as ever.


Sherman has long been in the business of deception and illusion, ever since she blew up with her Untitled Film Still, a brilliant 69-picture series from the late 70s that showcased many of the themes she would spend the next four decades exploring: gender roles, identity, voyeurism, exploitation, and consumerism. She executes in one frame what most filmmakers couldn’t dream up with three hours worth of tape. It’s impossible to tell exactly what you’re looking at. If born 100 years ago she probably would’ve been a rabbit-wielding magician in competition with Houdini, but in an era where media images are cropped and manipulated beyond recognition she is instead a modern trickster who utilizes photography as a way to showcase the unreliability of identity. Contrary to popular belief, the camera does lie―hers does, anyway―and often does so with an eye winking in the audience’s direction. The first thing you see off the escalator at MoMA are four 18 foot pictures of women dressed in what look like homemade Viking costumes, their facial features photoshopped just enough to make you cock your head. It’s funny, but not in a laugh-out-loud kind of way.

Artifice and irony have always bled through even her most serious portraits, though a large chunk of the opening afternoon crowd seemed to miss the inherent humor in her work. “That is disgusting!” remarked one young woman, notebook in hand, when she saw one of Sherman’s “LA women” staring at her, her tanned and sagging breasts all but dripping out onto the floor. Others could hardly stomach her late 80s work, one of the rare times Sherman stepped out of the frame and instead filled it with raw meat, cookies, vomit, and sunglasses to make some sort of comment on the AIDS epidemic (Untitled #175). A few people laughed when they saw Sherman playing Caravaggio playing Bacchus, wryly eyeing the camera with fresh grapes between her fingers.

How could you not?

Lane Koivu – Images courtesy of MoMA 

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27/02/2012

Deconstructing The Thing

Deconstructing The Thing

The Thing Quarterly is, in the words of the founders, a periodical in the form of an object. The object is typically functional and designed by celebrities and people otherwise notable in their line of work. Contributors in the past have included writer Jonathan Lethem, media artist Anne Walsh, and experimental geographer Trevor Paglen. They make things like military mugs, blank books with shoelaces sewn into them, and flags embedded with instructions on how to fold a flag.

It’s called art, and it’s brilliant.

It works like this: You pay them money ($65 an issue, or $200 a year), and at the dawn of each season you’ll receive a Dominos-shaped cardboard box with the contributors name stamped boldly in Helvetica. It’s clean and would look nice on top of a coffee table. It’s also minimal, as much as an offshoot of the absurd humor of Marcel Duchamp as it is with the craft aesthetic of something like Ready-Made, a crafty monthly rag that tells its readers how to build their own living spaces without having to go to Ikea. But where Ready-Made tells you how to build things, The Thing has celebrities build things, and you pay money to have their objects sent to you. The thing is, you don’t know what they’re going to put in the box until it arrives. One publication described what they do as part MacGuffin, and part… something else. The MacGuffin is the only part I can remember now that I’m thinking it over.

But it’s what’s inside that counts, right?


It depends on who’s putting what inside, and why. The most recent issue is an original Dave Eggers short story printed on a shower curtain. From the perspective of a shower curtain, too. If you’re a die-hard shower curtain fan, you can’t live without it. But James Franco’s tribute to Brad Renfro is downright ridiculous, arriving complete with lipstick, mirror, and a photo book of Franco getting “Brad” carved into his shoulder. If you want a piece of glass that has the words (written by Franco himself) “Brad Forever” smeared on glass in front of a neatly-tucked pocket photo of Renfro, Issue 14 is for you. It’s tacky, vain, and wildly pretentious even for a project where pretentious and indulgence are entry requirements.

But The Thing is heady like that. The people who produce it, visual artists Jonn Herschend and Will Rogan, promote the project as a surprise of sorts, something fun, like finding an object you weren’t looking for in the leftover bin at the local thrift store. Maybe a wolf t-shirt, maybe a set of hand-made wine glasses with a message inscribed on the bottom, maybe a Brad Renfro knife or something. Brad forever.

Wait, that knife exists and costs $650? These guys are full of surprises!

At least it seems like the contributors are having quite the time. Who wouldn’t want to, like Starlee Kine did in Issue 10 (sold out), write a short story about an onion on a cutting board designed for cutting onions? Or silk-screen a post-it-note on a functional shade says, “If this shade is down I’m begging your forgiveness on bended knee with tears streaming down my face,” like Miranda July did in the inaugural issue? This, too, is sold out, though I can’t imagine those words having the same kick the second time the shade is drawn.

But like Duchamp’s urinals, it’s the idea of The Thing is more important than what’s inside the box. And the objects sometimes are surprising, at least in the degree of incompetence they assume of their subscribers. But hey, it’s not like you’re forced to buy into this thing. I mean, if you’re the type of person who thinks it’s cool to spend $65 on a Dave Eggers shower curtain, I’m certainly not going to stop you.

Lane Koivu – Images courtesy of The Thing & Lenny Gonzalez

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16/02/2012

A Silent Choir

A Silent Choir

Everybody knows that matter is made of particles and these particles can be split in many other micro-particles going to smaller and smaller. But what people very often omit to consider is the importance of lack, the emptiness, which is among all the molecules and is a part of every inanimate object or a living being. Emptiness is not only a formal concept, but also a generating element that creates balance. “There is no sound without silence, there is no silence without sound”, says Jacopo Mazzonelli (b. 1983, Trento), who recently opened his solo show entitled Coro (Choir), curated by Marco Tagliafierro.

The young Italian artist -with a musical education and a keen interest in alchemy- plays with full and empty spaces, pause and action, sound and silence.

In Petit (2011) Mazzonelli, using two plumb lines hanging from the ceiling and the pedals of an old tricycle running on a neon tube, recreates the suggestion and tension of the morning of the 7th of August 1974, the day in which Philippe Petit walked a tightrope between the Twin Towers.

No sounds can be heard from the mouths trapped in geometrical shapes cut on the covers of the five volumes of Coro (2011). Each shape and each mouth – which cry, laugh, scream or declare – belong to a character: circle/crying baby, cross/Martin Luther King, triangle/Marilyn Monroe, square/Adolf Hitler, pentagon/John Fitzgerald Kennedy. The tomes, resting on five iron lecterns, are carved from inside and they treasure small screens that project video fragments of the characters.

In Limbo (2011), in which an hourglass seems to be resting, hanging horizontally on the remains of a broken light bulb, the artist suspended a stream of time, creating a feeling of calmness accompanied by a latent and unexplainable tension. Just before closing, the exhibition path Inner (2011) catches my attention. By putting funnels on large candles (bought from an old rectory) Mazzonelli turns them into the pipes of an organ, which seems to be about to let the sound out.

Minimalism permeates all the exhibited works, but the minimalism of this young artist is not just a matter of aesthetics. All the installations are not only well defined works arranged in a clear (and sometimes ‘cold’) manner. They are the results of pondered thoughts along with a solid knowledge… not so common in the young – and even in the ‘not so young’ – artists.

The exhibition will run until March 16 at Federico Bianchi Contemporary Art in Milan.

Monica Lombardi – Images courtesy of Jacopo Mazzonelli & Federico Bianchi Contemporary Art

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