13/10/2014

Sixteen Years of Roma Publications

What is the relationship between publishing and art? A publication is usually considered the final point of an artistic process: a document of what has been done, a sort of a portable archive and a reminder of a long period of research and inquiry, rather than being the subject of a research process itself. Nevertheless, artistic activity tied to the form of a book has been developing for more than half a century, with a resilient and ever-expanding niche of artists and publishing houses exploring the printed medium. Roma Publications, founded by graphic designer Roger Willems and artist Mark Manders in 1998, has been a part of this world for the past sixteen years and a new exhibition, which opened this Saturday at Fondazione Giuliani, narrates its complex and intriguing oeuvre.

“Roma Publications 1998-2014”, curated by Lorenzo Benedetti and Roger Willems, aims to present the form of the book as an extended media that can involve the exhibition space, evolving from a communication tool to an authentic form of artistic practice. Presenting more than 230 books and editions from the publishing house’s rich catalogue, the exhibition showcases artists who have contributed to the fading of the distinction between paper and space, image and material, original and reproduction (the print run of Roma Publications’ issues varies between 2 and 150.000 copies). Books, newspapers, posters and other printed matter are combined with artworks and installations relating to the publisher’s identity inside an exhibition dimension. The informal way of bringing art and publications together in a carefully composed exhibition gives clear insight into the working process of Roma Publications, which is based on a collaborative relationship to the artists.

“Roma Publications 1998-2014” runs until December 13th 2014 at Fondazione Giuliani in Rome.

Rujana Rebernjak 
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09/10/2014

Never Modern: 6a Teach Good Architecture

In, “Never Modern”, an exceptional book on the London based studio 6a architects, critic Irénée Scalbert looks at the role of narrative, history, appropriation and craft in the work of Tom Emerson and Stephanie Macdonald. The book is based on a dialogue with the two partners of the office, yet it’s not a book written in the first person by the designers, it is not an interview or a dialogue between a critic and a group of architects. Rather, “Never Modern” is a strange book, hard to classify. The tone is different from a classic essay. It is very well written, with a style, or better, with a rhythm that changes and transforms continuously.

Maybe it’s a story, or a collection of poetic fragments of spaces, objects, atmospheres and built artifacts, which follows, in a sense, the approach that the architect duo applies to their work. Structured around notions of situation, intervention, making, comedy, bricolage, chance and anthropology, the text is mirrored in a visual essay of archive photographs, artworks, film stills and recent projects by the studio. For 6a, the project is the result of a slow narrative, seemingly trivial, the kind of process that can be considered as fragments of existence that are manipulated and re-presented in a modern way, despite its title apparently stating the contrary.

The story of a building is its future form, the gesture is replaced with listening, making architecture as the only solution to finding a poetic form. Irénée Scalbert defines it as a DIY attitude more than conceptual, theoretical operation. The fragments constitute the entire script of what can and should be regarded as the structure of an idea of architecture that communicates not so much with the past, but mainly with the layers deposited on the space and time. Emerson and MacDonald do not deny the past, do not try to be modern at all costs, but they need to understand an environment, before rewriting the space according to a narrative form. Their work fits with the poetics of architects such as Tony Fretton, Caruso St John and Sergison Bates who, in the work of Alison and Peter Smithson, find their point of reference.

The book traces an architectural approach avoiding style, signature, theory and even concept in favor of metis, an ancient form of intelligence combining “flair, wisdom, forethought, subtlety of mind, deception, resourcefulness, vigilance, opportunism, varied skills, and experience.” 6a architects escape from easy reprogramming of the buildings, trying to understand and read the hidden stories, not trying to prolong the life of these buildings through a simple makeover, or by repurposing it into a coffee shop or an exhibition space. The architecture should not accept its physical decline, it must turn over the crisis of a system, or the production of housing, in a new starting point; the architecture should go back to be a living space. The notion of space is in fact much more important than the architecture that contains it, and this is not an easy subject to teach, in a world where schools often repackage a style instead of giving the tools of imagining the future.

Giulio Ghirardi 
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08/10/2014

Constructing Worlds at the Barbican

Since the very first photograph, architecture has proved to be an enduring subject matter for photographers. “Constructing Worlds: Photography and Architecture in the Modern Age”, a new exhibition recently opened at the Barbican looks beyond the medium’s ability to simply document the built world and explores the power of photography to reveal wider truths about society. The exhibition brings together over 250 works – some rarely seen and many shown in the UK for the first time – by 18 leading photographers from the 1930s to now, who have changed the way we view architecture and think about the world in which we live.

Constructing Worlds takes the visitor on a global journey of 20th and 21st century architecture, with highlights such as Berenice Abbott’s ground-breaking photographs charting the birth of the skyscraper in New York; Lucien Hervé’s subtle evocations of modernity as found in Chandigarh by Le Corbusier; the luxury lifestyle of Julius Shulman’s images of California’s residences; the moving nature of Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum as seen by London based photographer Hélène Binet; the recent dramatic growth of Chinese urbanisation recorded by Nadav Kander and the devastating effects of war in Afghanistan as expressed in the poignant images of Simon Norfolk.

Rujana Rebernjak – Images courtesy of the Barbican 
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26/09/2014

New York Art Book Fair 2014

Within the endless universe of book publishing, art books are a unique, particularly characteristic yet highly elusive niche: it can encompass objects as varied as xeroxed zines, art catalogues, illustrated manuscripts, unique, hand-made books, as well as artists’ editions. It is a world in constant flux whose boundaries are constantly re-defined by developments in technology and conceptual negotiation. It is, thus, fairly easy to imagine how an art book fair held in Bologna, Italy would be imbued with history and a more traditional approach to book-making, while the one held in New York would focus on emerging practices and contemporary spheres of artistic production.

The New York Art Book Fair, in its ninth edition, opening today at MoMA PS1 in Queens, represents the most innovative and experimental approaches to art publishing: from artists’ books and catalogs,to monographs, periodicals, and zines, the fair features over 350 booksellers, antiquarians, artists, institutions and independent publishers from twenty-eight countries. Organized by Printed Matter, an established institution dedicated to preserving and promoting books as a central medium of artistic production, the fair features a rich series of events, talks, performances and presentations.

Now in its sixth year, The Classroom has become a classic element of the fair, comprising a curated series of informal conversations, workshops, readings and other artist-led programs, organized by David Senior, the librarian of the Museum of Modern Art. This year’s talks sport titles like: Performance as Publishing, OHO and the Korean Avant-Garde Association, How to Hack an Abstraction: Google Warhol, Check Your Vernacular or Publishing as Research & Development. The series of exhibitions celebrating artist’s books this year include, an showcase of books by Dorothy Iannone, the American-born, Berlin-based artist famous for her whimsical, colorful and, perhaps most importantly, explicit depictions of female sexuality – which have, since the 1960s, often fell prey to censorship; an exhibition celebrating 10 Years of Nieves Zines, showing all 200 zines produced by Nieves since 2004 together for the first time; as well as a site-specific installation by Iván Navarro and Hueso Records showing the work of non-musicians who maintain an audio practice as an extension of their body of work.

On the other hand, the fair also includes XE(ROX) & PAPER + SCISSORS and The Small Press Dome, a lively selection of international artists, zinesters, and small presses representing independent publishing at its most innovative and affordable in the MoMA PS1 courtyard, while a special section of the fair is dedicated to contemporary book publishing in Norway as well as to books which focus on photography. If you’re in New York this weekend, join the celebration of books, art and culture at MoMA PS1 in Queens, open from today until Sunday from 11 AM to 7 PM.

Rujana Rebernjak 
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25/09/2014

Artelibro: Festival of Books and of Art History in Bologna

At a time when the conversion of media and communication to digital rather than material platforms seems interminable, Bologna launches a celebration of books as cultural heritage and design object. Open last weekend in the old town centre of Bologna, the 11th edition of Artelibro Festival was based at Palazzo di Re Enzo e del Podestà. Involving antiquarian booksellers, contemporary publishers and printers, scholars and visual art professionals, artists and art lovers, it took the theme Italy: Land of Treasures – a theme that highlights an imperative to promote the value of local culture, as well as the need to preserve an incomparable heritage.

A number of infrequently exhibited masterpieces from Italian museums and libraries was put on display for visitors to the Festival. For example, an outstanding exhibition entitled The Shining Writing – Manuscript Treasures from Italian Libraries is held in the Hall of the Stabat Mater of the Archiginnasio Municipal Library of Bologna, featuring some of the best preserved books of antiquity. These include the Bible of Borso d’Este, the ancient Bible of Marco Polo from the Laurentian Library in Florence, the manuscript known as Vita Christi written by the ascetic and biblical exegete Ludolphus de Saxonia, and a digital copy – made by the Department for the Cultural Heritage of the Region of Calabria – of the Codex Purpureus Rossanensis, an extraordinary fifth century codex written in silver ink on purple-dyed parchment pages. Antiquity is partnered with modernity, with a multi-touch interactive board allowing visitors to virtually leaf through these rare and precious books.

The festival included a calendar of events that expands throughout the city centre and lasting beyond the three-day festival, taking place at venues including the Biblioteche di Bologna, Istituzione Bologna Musei and the Fondazione Cineteca di Bologna. A highlight of these satellite events is an exhibition called Get it right the first time! a competition for the best book covers of 2013-2014, which will be exhibited until the 12th October 2014 at Biblioteca San Giorgio in Poggiale. A group of 15 specialists in editorial graphics have selected 45 Italian covers published between September 2013 to September 2014, a range that encompasses fiction, non-fiction, illustrated manuals, travel guides, illustrated books and exhibition catalogues. Visitors to the exhibition will be given the opportunity to vote for their favourite cover. The result is an exhibition that does not show a series of abstract editorial graphics, but which treats books as concrete objects, to see how they work, how to build with them, and how they interact with the users, while paying some heed to their salience as objects and potential for commercial yield.

In this Festival of Books and Art History, the book is finally considered a work of art in its own right, judged by its quality as a physical object, not solely in terms of beauty or aesthetics, but as a building material, a real object, with both historic importance and lasting cultural value.

Philippa Nicole Barr 
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12/09/2014

The Silent Art of Tomaso Buzzi

Between 1932 and 1933 the Milanese architect Tomaso Buzzi began a fruitful collaboration with the Venini glassware company, which would continue, albeit episodically, in later years. The architect’s creative contribution was evident both in the glass forms and in their innovative manufacturing technique. When Buzzi arrived at the Venini company in Murano, in 1932, he brought with him a remarkable cultural baggage and a thorough knowledge of ancient art, in particular of the Etruscan period, where he looked for inspiration with the aim of creating new and original artefacts. This was achieved through the experimentation with a new glass material, the “vetro incamiciato”, with several layers of colour and gold leaf.

This technique radically changed the appearance of the glass produced at Venini, contributing to the drive for innovation of the Murano-based glassware company, and re-asserting its vocation for producing elegant and refined glass. The exhibition Tomaso Buzzi at Venini, curated by Marino Barovier for Le Stanze del Vetro at San Giorgio Island in Venice, retraces this brief but fruitful collaboration, documented through the selected works (approximately 200), the original drawings preserved in the Venini’s archive, and a previously undisplayed collection of drawings preserved at the Scarzuola in Montegabbione (near Terni).

Furthermore, for this third exhibition dedicated to the Venini glassware company at Le Stanze del Vetro, film director Gian Luigi Calderone has made a documentary film entitled “Tomaso Buzzi. Memories of my Guardian Angel”, which tells the story of the Milanese architect through the unpublished notes for his autobiography, narrated from the point of view of his “Guardian Angel”. The exhibition Tomaso Buzzi at Venini at Le Stanze del Vetro in Venice will open on the 14th of September 2014 and will run until 11th of November 2014.

Rujana Rebernjak 
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04/09/2014

Soft power at 71st Venice Biennale of Cinema

The 71st International Biennale of Cinema is a calm exercise of soft power at a time when the world is slipping into conflict. Balanced curation by Alberto Barbera has resulted in a festival which allows us to see every side, while sharing our suffering with others past, present and elsewhere. Foreshadowed by official discussions such as today’s conference on ‘Cultural Diplomacy And The Role Of Cinema’ at Lido, there are perspectives and characters from all over the world, such as with Ya Shagayu Po Moskve (Walking the Streets of Moscow) by Georgij Daneljia, a 60s film about a mixed group of Russians and Ukrainians meeting and hanging out in Moscow.

This entails a dangerous proposition, if we can identify with people we have never understood, that do not share our language or history, then perhaps we are all much more unified than our simplistic identifications with ethnicity, age and gender lead us to believe. This is not too far away from the theme revealed in Ghesseha (Tales) by Persian filmmaker Rakhshan Banietemad, who presents a variety of characters from the Iranian city, office workers, cleaners, intellectuals, illustrating their mutual drive toward romantic love. The festival format puts together movies from anywhere, exposing us to unfamiliar voices, in a way that is safe, but still essentially moving, because in the emotions we share with the characters and their circumstances we are never completely alone or separate. And perhaps we can even coexist with the multiple, contradictory ideas and ways of doing things presented to us in these stories.

The Venice Biennale includes a variety of initiatives to support young filmmakers and to find new voices from parts of the world that do not have a robust film industry. This year is the second edition of the Final Cut in Venice workshop, to support the postproduction of films from Africa, Lebanon, Palestine, Syria and Jordan. Rollaball by Eddie Edwards is a film made in Ghana about a team of soccer players who have been disabled by polio but still manage to play on old skateboards, their elation tempered by the reality of homelessness that most of them share. The point is to humanise the characters that so rarely get to add their voices to images rather than have them viewed as tragic and therefore inevitable. Other collaborations include a conference with UK Trade and Investment to encourage co-production between Italy and the UK as well as a meeting to look at various joint ventures between Italy and China.

The American film Good Kill by Andrew Niccol shows us the banality of evil from the perspective of a soldier who has turned fighting into a 9-5 job through the weird world of drone warfare. German director Fatih Akin premieres his film, The Cut which is about a man trying to find his family in the wake of the Armenian genocide, while Naji Abu Nowar’s Theeb represents the historical importance of notions of hospitality, asking what may happen if you treat your worst enemy as your most cherished guest. Closing the event is Hong Kong filmmaker Ann Hui’s Huangjin Shidai (The Golden Era), a historical biography of one of China’s most famous female writers, Xiao Hong, an artist who moved from city to city, ultimately dying young. For Hui, the deconstructive style of narrative reveals the disjointed path of a genius confronting her fate.

The 71st Venice Biennale of Cinema is an opportunity to be unmindful of social, geographical and political boundaries. Middle Eastern director Suha Arraf’s film Villa Touma received Israeli government film financing but later listed her country as Palestine, leading to some controversy. Her film and name are now listed in the online program without a country of origin. Unable to identify with one home for fear of offending the other, she has been left with no identification at all. But what this edition of the Biennale teaches us is that simultaneity is possible, if not durable. That we can in fact identify with a perspective a million miles away from our own. That film is a safe yet powerful means to show us the emotions of the other side and make us share in them – thus reducing the distance between us. Even if the experience is only momentary, the power in this gesture is lasting, we then know that we have cared about and felt for and cannot choose between diverse sides of conflict, but must find a way through differences to some kind of unity.

The 71st International Venice Biennale of Cinema closes this Saturday, the 6th of September 2014.

Philippa Nicole Barr 
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02/09/2014

Somebody, a New Project by Miranda July

Do you remember those awful moments that required an enormous amount of willpower or, even worse, liquid courage to tell someone what you really meant? Well, those days seem to be over now thanks to a simple, yet unlikely very useful, app that could help you avoid saying you didn’t love someone anymore straight to their face.

The discrepancy between means of communication available and the quality of what we communicate is subtly overturned in Miranda July’s new project, “Somebody”. The project consists of an app, a new messaging service, that works by sending a message you want to deliver through the nearest Somebody user, allowing you to avoid difficult conversations and awkward, gladly avoided situations. July says about the app: “Half-app/half-human, Somebody is a far-reaching public art project that incites performance and twists our love of avatars and outsourcing — every relationship becomes a three-way. The antithesis of the utilitarian efficiency that tech promises, here, finally, is an app that makes us nervous, giddy, and alert to the people around us.”

Somebody was created as the eighth commission in Miu Miu’s Womens’ Tales project, a short-film series by women directors who critically celebrate femininity in the 21st century, which includes contributions by Zoe Cassavetes, Giada Colagrande, Hiam Abbass, Ava Du Vernay, Massy Tadjedin, Lucrecia Martel and So Yong Kim. The Somebody short-film shows how the app works in a delightfully bittersweet and subtly ironic way, while it also displays Miranda July’s unique ability to capture the strange tenderness of contemporary relationships: “Jessica wants to tell Caleb she can’t be his girlfriend anymore. She opens up Somebody, types in the heartbreaking message, and selects Paul from a list. Paul is in the park. Paul’s phone dings. He eyes Caleb having a picnic. Paul delivers the bad news—as Jessica. Eyes bawling. Arms flapping. Caleb is devastated. The Somebody app then totally saves Yolanda and Blanca’s friendship, makes Jeffy’s marriage proposal to lonely Victoria, and initiates a curious ménage-a-trois between two prison workers and a parched potted plant named Anthony.”

Rujana Rebernjak 
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19/08/2014

Cité Radieuse with Daniel Buren on Top

Four years ago, the French designer Ora-Ïto worked on the terrace of the Cité Radieuse in Marseille, the first Unité d’Habitation and one of the best examples of brutalist architecture, completed by Le Corbusier in 1952, with the aim of converting what was once a gymnasium into an art space. The roof of the giant ‘urban steamer’ was subjected to a lengthy restoration that brought it back to the original plan and converted into a contemporary art center of 600 m². A year after its opening, the project titled “Défini, Fini, Infini” by French artist Daniel Buren took over the open-air museum with seven works of monumental art, subverting the prospects through reflection and visual fractures generated by contrasting colors and mirroring surfaces. The French artist spent five months working on the project specifically for the space of Cité Radieuse, proposing an in situ work that plays with Le Corbusier’s architecture. Playing with a work of Le Corbusier was a big gamble, but it seems that Daniel Buren has succeeded.

The intervention – with a strong aesthetic outcome – uses different sculptural blocks of pure, well defined color and angled mirrored panels that alternate along one edge of the roof, reflecting slices of heaven and beton brut. On the small outdoor theatre, on the long side wall and on the bottom of the vent stack, a combination of mirrors and color panels rebuild the space, deconstructing it ad infinitum, and defining a new vision of this iconic architecture of the Modern Movement. This game in space, the reflections of lights and parts of the landscape are building a contemporary unit, a graphic proposal where the body is the center of this three-dimensional game.

Works created by Daniel Buren are composed of mirrors and frames with bright colors on Dibond panels (aluminum composite panels). These extremely smooth surfaces also play with rough surfaces of the raw concrete or cement. The contrast is striking and spot-on, and this combination of different ‘skins’ invites the hand to caress both the work of Buren, as well as Le Corbusier’s rough concrete. Buren neglects the humors of painting in favor of the synthesis of perceptual phenomenon, by using visual tools that modulate space and guide the visitor beyond the limits of recognizable. The light, which reflects on the mirrors, acts as a third eye, allowing you to see what’s in front and behind, leading the viewer in a kaleidoscopic revelation of events. This can also be seen at night when the light passes through the large window, covered with translucent multicolor sheets, doubling the chromatic effects on the surfaces of the surrounding elements.

In the old gym, Buren plays with colors and mirrors: the floor is a carpet of mirrors, the interior facade becomes a window. The visitor feels like facing a television test pattern. At night, the play of light on the vent stack and the cuboid concrete of the kiosk lifts complement the work of Buren and give the whole terrace a truly dreamlike feeling. Daniel Buren therefore proposed the work with the idea of a real contemporary architectural project, a journey where landmarks in space are diverted to infinity, where the sheets of his works bring into contrast those of Le Corbusier’s and the landscape of Cité Radieuse’s rooftop ended in a new visual definition.

Giulio Ghirardi 
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07/08/2014

Rebels Rebel: AIDS, Art and Activism in New York

In the introduction to his book, Tommaso Speretta writes that “artists often prove remarkably sensitive to the wider social and political themes of their day”, while art itself “can play a crucial role in social and political change”. And yet, while many believe that creative practices can provide a crucial spin for social change, 21st century has offered little or no examples that cross the boundaries of creative speculation or naïve idealism, reaching the harshness of real life. This genuinely visionary, yet out-of-touch approach, may be emblematic of a wider social condition, where much of the energy that guided social movements of the past century appears to have dissipated.

“Rebels Rebel: AIDS, Art and Activism in New York, 1979-1989” serves as a reminder of how collective energy channelled through the means of art, can play a crucial role in driving social change. Starting from late 1970s, Tommaso Speretta traces the origins and development of activist art, namely through the work of collectives like Group Material, Gran Fury, Silence=Deat project, COLAB or PAD/D, through a search for a possible definition of public art and its role in wider context of our society. “Rebels Rebel” is a powerful book as it showcases how, in a dire and dark decade when AIDS and social inequality conditioned much of New York public sphere, artists found an individual and independent voice that helped shape the future of US society.

From using visually bold posters, stickers and banners in their angry protests against AIDS across New York City to exploitation of sophisticated media techniques and shock value of artworks, from direct involvement of citizens as artists to conceptual examination of the meaning of democracy, these collectives have shown great maturity and awareness in using the language of art and design as tool for social change. The work of these activist artists has since been unparalleled in its capability of “subverting an institutionalized system, self-identifying as as a tool for social change”, thereby “affirming itself as a preeminent expression of public art” and a leading example for future artists and citizens alike.

Tommaso Speretta’s “Rebels Rebel: AIDS, Art and Activism in New York, 1979-1989” is published by MER. Paper Kunsthalle, available from August 31st 2014.

Rujana Rebernjak 
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