www.art-omma.org -Issue n.10 - Archiving: Theory and Practice

Monument to Now: THE DAKIS JOANNOU COLLECTION
DESTE Foundation for Contemporary Art, Athens, Greece
22 June - 31 December 2004.

Monument to Now, an exhibition of global trends in contemporary art, will be presented in Athens, starting the summer of 2004, within the Visual Arts section of "ATHENS 2004 Culture" and remaining open until after the completion of the Olympic Games. The exhibition will showcase the works of the most influential international artists of the past decade and will attempt to articulate the most important recent artistic innovations.

The works in the exhibition will be drawn from the Dakis Joannou Collection, one of the leading collections of new international art. The exhibition will take place in a building, specially renovated for the occasion, located near the "ATHENS 2004" headquarters and at the DESTE Foundation´s permanent space.

An influential group of curators has been assembled to organize the exhibition and edit the accompanying book. The group includes Dan Cameron, Senior Curator of the New Museum of Contemporary Art and Curator of the 2003 Istanbul Biennial; Alison M. Gingeras, Curator at the Musee National d' Art Moderne, Centre Pompidou; Massimiliano Gioni, Curator of The Zone, a section of the 2003 Venice Biennial and Curator of the 2004 Manifesta; Nancy Spector, Curator of Contemporary Art at the Guggenheim Museum; and Jeffrey Deitch, who has worked with the Deste Foundation on numerous exhibition projects including Artificial Nature and Post Human. Marina Fokidis, who has been the commissioner of the Greek Pavilion in the 50th Venice Biennial, will act in the role of project-coordinator and curator of special projects.

The exhibition will feature outstanding new works by some of the leading artists who have emerged since the last major Athens exhibition of the Dakis Joannou Collection in 1996. The artists, many of whom are represented by ambitious installations and large groups of works include: Franz Ackermann, Maurizio Cattelan, Rineke Dijkstra, Olafur Eliasson, Urs Fischer, Johan Grimonprez, Liza Lou, Mariko Mori, Tim Noble and Sue Webster, Chris Ofili, Matthew Ritchie, Tom Sachs, Gregor Schneider, Kara Walker and Nari Ward.

The exhibition will also feature new acquisitions of major works by Robert Gober, Jeff Koons, Charles Ray, Christopher Wool, and other artists to whom the Dakis Joannou Collection has been committed since the 1980s.

Participating artists:
Franz Ackermann, Amy Adler, Ghada Amer, Laurie Anderson, Janine Antoni, Kutlug Ataman, Matthew Barney, Vanessa Beecroft, Michael Bevilacqua, Ashley Bickerton, Maurizio Cattelan, Nigel Cooke, Verne Dawson, Rineke Dijkstra, Olafur Eliasson, Urs Fischer, Peter Fischli & David Weiss, Anna Gaskell, Gilbert & George, Robert Gober, Jack Goldstein, Douglas Gordon, Johan Grimonprez, Andreas Gursky, Zhang Huan, Brad Kahlhamer, Kurt Kauper, Mike Kelley, William Kentridge, Martin Kippenberger, Jeff Koons, George Lappas, Liza Lou, Paul McCarthy, Mariko Mori, Takashi Murakami, Nikos Navridis, Shirin Neshat, Tim Noble & Sue Webster, Cady Noland, Chris Ofili, Gabriel Orozco, Charles Ray, Pipilotti Rist, Matthew Ritchie, Tom Sachs, Gregor Schneider, Cindy Sherman, Andreas Slominski, Kiki Smith, Lina Theodorou, Wolfgang Tillmans, Fred Tomaselli, Kara Walker, Nari Ward, Gillian Wearing, Clare Woods, Christopher Wool, Chen Zhen.

http://www.monument-to-now.gr

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Athens-Beijing , an interactive installation by Harris Kondosphyris, curated by Irini Savvani, The official representation of Greece @ the 26th Biennale of Sao Paolo, Sep. 25 - Dec. 19

Artist Harris Kondosphyris will represent Greece at the 26th Biennale of Sao Paulo, Brazil. The interactive installation entitled Athens-Beijing, and curated by Irini Savvani, will be shown at the Ciccillo Matarazzo Pavilion from September 25-December 19, 2004. The theme of this year's Biennale of Sao Paulo is "Image Smugglers in a Free Territory."
Athens-Beijing is a two-part installation investigating basic issues in human communication and self-knowledge by exploring the theme of migration. To create this multi-sensory work, the artist, himself an emigrant to Central Africa and later a repatriate to his homeland, collaborated with the Hellenic-German musician Vassilis Kokkas, the Hellenic-American poet Panagiotis Bosnakis and the Hellenic-Austrian botanist Orestes Davias. The two parts of the work, Migrants' Ark and Heart of Darkness, suggest a different way of perceiving reality, one that not only mobilizes the cognitive machinery of the mind, but also activates the viewer's imagination through its sensory approach to the physical world.
The first part of the installation, Migrant's Ark, is an architectural landscape made up of light, shadow, scent, and sound. The interaction between the structure of the Ark and the light that falls on it create shadows of different depths and sizes in three-dimensional space, while the total effect of the shadows brings faintly to mind the vague archetypal shape of a traditional Chinese pagoda.
Vassilis Kokkas' electroacoustic music structures the environment with the architecture of sound, alluding to primeval memory and overseas journeys. Also contributing to this feeling are the fragrances of botanist Orestes Davias, who uses mixtures chiefly of myrrh and mastic, which, according to the therapeutic methods of the East, revitalize the spirit and enhance the energy reserves within us. The whispered poetic words of Panagiotis Bosnakis, taken from his series of poems on the theme of migration entitled Emigraphs, create a new dialect based on the corruption and recombination of the English language, the main lingua franca of modern communication, while still remaining open to influences from other linguistic cultures. On the walls flanking the work, words are written in low relief in this new but somehow familiar poetic language.
If the Migrant's Ark activates the viewer's imagination by supplying his/her mind with associations of ideas, then the second part, Heart of Darkness obliges him/her to take an active part in the landscape and to become aware that he/she is part of a larger whole. In this part of the work, portraits of multicultural human figures are standing on a sidewalk in downtown Athens, although it could just as well be any other modern metropolis. The reflective sheets of stainless steel from which the portraits are made have dents, rips and scars so that through light and reflection the figures are projected like shadows in space, where they meet the viewers' physical presence.
The real protagonist of the piece is the viewer, who becomes part of the work because his movements change his/her reflection and his place in the composition. The viewer depicts and is depicted by his distorted image; he/she sees his own "foreign" reflection among figures that are foreign to him/her. Through this mirroring, the existence of the "other" is immediately perceived, while at the same time an unexpected opportunity is provided to transcend the ego, as subject becomes object and the viewer becomes the viewed.
In the increasingly multicultural societies of the 21st century, the issue of co-existence with the "foreigner" occupies a primary position. It is a challenge that transcends geographic origin and cultural identity, since the acceptance of diversity and the understanding of otherness can be accomplished only through the recognition that each of us is a foreigner within himself or herself. In this context, in which there is an urgent need to find other means of perceiving and understanding the world around us, the need for synthesis through art seems more timely than ever. In his work, Athens-Beijing, Harris Kondosphyris and his collaborators remind us that art can be a synergic way of experiencing reality by opening passageways so that we may perhaps have an opportunity, like Alice, to enter other realities through the looking-glass.
I.S

www.bienalsaopaulo.org.br, www.harriskondosphyris.com

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Channel Zero @ Netherlands Media Art Institute Montevideo/Time Based Arts, Amsterdam, 28 Aug. - 23 Oct. 2004, Curated by Katerina Gregos

We live within a culture marked by violence, both real and simulated. In the society of the spectacle where the image exercises an all-pervasive power and everything tends to be reduced to mere representation, images of violence have become commonplace, yet another product for consumption.
In the wake of the recent war in Iraq, the international 'war against terrorism' and the continuing Israeli-Palestinian conflict, this culture of violence seems to be heightened. As a result, it appears we increasingly exist in a state of (almost) constant alert; post-1989 euphoria and optimism have given way to cynicism, pessimism and the return of fear as a very real issue. Invisible walls of terror, ignorance and hate have replaced the walls of the cold war. Within this expanding culture of violence, the relationship between fact and fiction has been conflated, as it is often difficult to distinguish between the two. Real life events involving explicit violence have become the basis of a perverse sort of entertainment in television and the entertainment industry; on the other hand, news casting and journalism have become increasingly formulaic, sensational and less 'neutral' and 'objective'. The barrage and repetition of a specific kind of media-related violent imagery in many cases causes detachment and indifference. The fact is, that calamity (of any kind) remains largely ungraspable and un-representable as we, the audience, increasingly experience the world through the filter of the media.

The artists participating in Channel Zero make art that responds to the culture of violence that surrounds us and explore representations of violence in the media, entertainment industry or society in general to analyze, undermine, deconstruct or simply critique them. They examine the social, political, and cultural as well as the personal aspects of violence through film, video, photography, digital media and the Internet. In many ways, this is an exhibition about media using new media.
However, apart from being fixated with images of violence and catastrophe Channel Zero will also aim to offer a redemptive alternative, which reflects the ever-increasing desire for a culture of peace and a critique of war-mongering. Through their works, the comment on, counter, and transform the conventions of the mass media which frequently objectifies violence. Sifting through the often-deceptive images created by the media, they point to the heavily mediated perceptual field of the representation of violence and offer alternative readings of them.

Participating Artists: Sergei Bugaev Afrika (RU), Maja Bajevic (FR/BA), Marc Bijl (NL), Heather Burnett (UK), Ritsaert Ten Cate (NL), Nikos Charalambidis (CY), David Claerbout (BE), Christophe Draeger (CH), Rainer Ganahl (AT), Kendell Geers (SA), Kostas Ioannidis (GR), Katarzyna Kozyra (PL), Boris Mikhailov (RU), Elahe Massumi (IR), Personal Cinema (International), Francesco Simeti (IT), Eliezer Sonnenschein (IL), Lina Theodorou (GR), Palle Torsson (SE), Simone Zaugg (CH)
http://www.montevideo.nl

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Shrinking Cities @ KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin-Mitte
4 Sept. - 7 Nov. 2004

The situation is dramatic: 1.3 million apartments in eastern Germany are untenanted. In the year 2030, the figure is expected to increase to 2 million. The unemployment rate is 20 percent. More than a million residents have left the new states of the former East Germany. Young, well-educated people in particular are turning their backs on their home regions for the West in pursuit of jobs or apprenticeships, which are currently rare even there. The prognosis is that the population of eastern Germany will be halved by 2050 - also because of demographic trends.

Eastern Germany is not a unique case. Along with several shrinking regions in western Germany, all over the world there are about 400 cities with populations over 100,000 that have lastingly shrunk in the last fifty years. The population in the old industrial states is beginning to decline; the process of urbanization has reached or past its zenith; the economy is still growing slightly, but employment has steadily fallen for quite some time. It is the end of a 200-year epoch in which the industrial countries' population, economy, affluence, and cities grew almost continuously and usually rapidly.

The Exhibition Shrinking Cities of the initiative project of Germany's Federal Cultural Foundation, the Kulturstiftung des Bundes, explores for the first time from an international perspective an urban development that has long since become a global phenomenon. Since Fall 2002, local teams have been commissioned in the four shrinking cities, Detroit (USA), Manchester/Liverpool (Britain), Ivanovo (Russia) and Halle/Leipzig (Germany) to investigate and document processes of urban shrinking. In more than sixty exhibition contributions, artists, architects, filmmakers, journalists, culture experts, and social scientists reveal the changed reality of these cities. The topics the teams address range from the neglect and appropriation of spaces through changed practices of everyday life and new forms of work to the development of innovative subcultures and criticism of established planning cultures.

http://www.shrinkingcities.com

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Guantanamo Initiative@Centre Culturel Suisse de Paris, a project by Christoph Buchel and Gianni Mott,i 12Sep. - 31Oct. 2004.

Guantanamo Initiative consists in immersing oneself in a geopolitical problem which, in principle, falls into a domain normally reserved for the State.
Christoph Buchel's and Gianni Motti's project consists in modifying the practices that regulate this kind of disagreement. […]
In order to arrive at a global solution that would be applicable to other specific cases, strategies founded on a traditional mode of thinking must be redefined or approached from a different angle, one that inscribes itself in a field of permanent experimentation with perception. This necessitates a radical modification of our intellectual models.

Michel Ritter, Director of the Centre culturel suisse de Paris

The point of departure of Guantanamo Initiative is a geopolitical and juridical problem concerning Guantanamo Bay, located on south-eastern coast of Cuba.
In 1898, the end of the Spanish-American War and the Treaty of Paris left Cuba in a state of quasi-colonial dependence vis-a-vis the United States.
In 1903, the American government forceably obtained the ratification of the Platt amendment (1901), which granted the United States absolute right to interfere in Cuban affairs.
With this accord, and then with the Treaty of 1934 (signalling the end of the protectorate), the United States obtained a perpetual lease on the 117.6 square kilometres area of Guantanamo Bay for 2000 US dollars annually (4, 085 dollars today).
The Vienna Convention on the Laws of Treaties specifies that a treaty obtained through threat or use of force is null and void. The international legal community also stipulates that perpetual contracts are invalid and that one cannot require a party to assent to perpetual engagements.
In 1959, the new Cuban government requested that the lease be cancelled and the United States refused.
As a means of protest, the Republic of Cuba has ceased cashing the annual checks sent for payment of the lease and has continued to demand the restitution of Guantanamo Bay.
This zone enables the United States to avoid applying American law. According to their argument, this territory is subject to Cuban rule. While Cuba does effectively govern the territory of Guantanamo Bay, the United States has jurisdiction and total control there, thus creating an unregulated extra-territorial zone that flouts the fundamental principles of international law.
The United States is currently using Guantanamo Bay as an internment and detention center for "illegal combatants". This is in total contradiction with the original lease, which provided for the establishment of "coal trade or naval stations exclusively, to the exclusion of any other object".
The original function assigned to this territory no longer exists and has been replaced by another: the creation of an unregulated extra-territorial base, a new order in which the US does not have to answer to anyone.
This politico-juridical situation has attracted our attention and, given that the current lease between the two countries in null and void, we have undertaken negotiations with the Cuban government to rent Guantanamo Bay.
A pragmatic and peaceful solution to the problem of this lease would be to allow a third party to enter into a new contract with the government.
As new tenants, we would have to take necessary action against this illegal occupation.
In contrast with its current function, we propose to transform Guantanamo into a site dedicated to the promotion of culture. We envisage the creation of a laboratory in which would situate culture at the heart of contemporary debates, a space for culture, based on exchange and dialogue.
This project would enable a transition towards the political and cultural integration of Guantanamo Bay into the Republic of Cuba.
In parallel to the exhibition, from 9/11 to 10/31, an office will be open for the rental of the Bay and the future creation of the cultural base. All ideas and proposals are welcome: contact@guantanamo-initiative.com

http://www.ccsparis.com