Documenta XI, M. Kataga reports.

Sleep Matters at Cheap Art, Athens, Greece

Being in the Germanic city of Kassel, with the sole mission to experience the fifth platform of Documenta 11, one realizes that although one is being physically in the heart of Europe, when entering, the feeling of entering one is witnessing an unknown, intermingling terrain; the global arena of the everyday, a world of suffering and activism. The ideological agenda of the curator of Documenta 11, Okwui Enwezor and his team results in a sincere overview of the political and ethical issues that are at stake across the globe today. The four platforms that preceded the final one in Kassel, dealt with the heavy task of constructing debate forums and workshops, in relation to crucial issues of global democracy and capitalism (Platform 1, in Vienna), global justice (Platform 2, in New Delhi), the concept of creolness and creolization (Platform 3, New York) and issues of globalisation as those emerge in four main cities of the continent of Africa (Platform 4, in Lagos). The polemical points of migration, globalisation and the aftermath of colonization are acquiring a sheer form if expression in the hands of the 116 artists in Platform 5 in Kassel. And never since it's inauguration in 1955, has the title of the international art event 'Documenta', found justice than in the present Documenta of 2002. As Enwezor, points out in the exhibition's lavish catalogue " The exhibition project of the fifth platform is less a receptacle of commodity-objects than a container of plurality of voices, a material reflection on a series of disparate and interconnected actions and processes".
Whether the show runs the risk of simply describing human existence conditions, favoring content as opposed to a grand narrative is not an issue at stake. It succeeds in being a coherent manifestation in which the most effective aesthetic strategies emerge from reality itself.

A lot of works by artists in the show appear as true to life documentations of the outcome of massive emigration and the developing urban conditions around the globe, mostly through the prevailing means of video and photography, in the forms of reportage. True images of living are documented in the photos of beggar children in New Delhi by Ravi Agarwai, in Olumuyiwa Osifuye's still images of crowded streets of Lagos, as well as in David Golblatt's scenes of shantytowns, staged in the Kulturbahnhof venue. In the question of whether art should appear as an alternative to realistic representations I quote Susan Sontag, who claims that there isn't going to be 'an ecology of images'. 'Seeing reality in the form of an image cannot be more than an invitation to pay attention, to reflect to learn, to examine the rationalizations of mass suffering offered by established powers"(Five, 2002, Rebirth Issue, Permanent Gold City, p.5)

Platform 5 of Documenta 11 proclaims through genuine gestures, such an issue not only through photography, but also through cinematographic realities. Moldavian artist Pavel Braila, in his film project Shoes of Europe, shoots the night-time three-hour labor process that takes place in the Moldavian -Romanian borders, where trains full of passengers change wheels when moving from the east to west border. The film is commenting on the extra-territoriality, and the differences between the world of the east and that of the west. Extra-territoriality and the blurring of the boundaries when it comes to the human diaspora is monumentally staged in the extended project of the Palestinian artist Fareed Armaly, From/To 2002, a collaboration with filmmaker Rashid Masharawi, which presents the effects the reshaping of territories have on the people of Palestine.
As if to barrage the plethora of images devastation, wreckage and political incarceration, scattered in the show are works of utopian, futuristic idealization such as Bodys Isek Kingelez's opulent, Disneyland-like sculptural installation of fictitious cities, Carlos Caraicoa's virtual architectural models of unfinished cities, and Isa and Constant's project of Babylon. They all come across as ironic statements of modernist utopias.
Other works in the Documenta allude to the collective process of archiving realities referring to socially engaged practices of the 70's. Milan-based group Multiplicity, unravels the way the Italian government treated the shipwreckage of a ship full of refugees in the Mediterranean sea, through a selection of data and interviews. It stands out as a melancholic appearance of loss and failure. The Lebanese Atlas Group, makes allusions to the country's history of war through archiving elements that appear and form part in the populations everyday life and which deal with their emotions, rather that presenting pure historical facts. And the historical Black Audio Film Collective, an archive compiled on the riots that developed in the last 20 years across the U.K. for the issue of racism, acquires a dominant presence in the show.
A meta-Beuysian impression surpasses some of the installations on the show. The primordial importance of nature linked to nostalgia and memory, is evident in the huge installation, of jars, trunks and charcoal crates of the Iranian artist Cohreh Feyzdjou, as well as in the installation of an ephemeral nature, of Brazilian artist Artur Barrio. Grains of coffee scattered all over a large room, allude to the temporal qualities of transactions in the artistic world.
Cultural and social instabilities are also marked in works that examine the individual's rather that the group's human identity, and how this is surveyed in a media saturated world. Impressive is the home staged filmic drama, which takes place on a three-screen installation by Elja-Liisa Ahtila, of a woman who has to define her domestic space according to her ever-growing psychoses, while Kutlug Ataman's video projection of an interview with a London woman who obsessively builts up a collection of flower bulbs at home is a hilarious and bitter examination of contemporary, urban frustrations. Lorna Simpson simultaneous screenings of the daily life of a young, professional black woman in the city of New York, is presented as an intrusion in the daily occupations of a 'westerner'.
Political impulse, the exanimation of territories and the constantly unraveling consequences of transculturality, are taken as a given in this year's Documenta. Taking is as a starting point the curators managed to combine works of a diverse nature, from a wide cultural and social field. As Enwezor himself claims: ' ..there is no need to make a polemic of globalism, multiculturalism, and difference; the wider scope of the project assumes them as already a part of a complex weave of tongues , the tide voices that will activate the final meaning of its dramatization.'
Within such a framework, works of a poetic and subliminal (such a Shirin Neshat's romantic and theological film praise on motherhood, Seifollah Samadian's dramatic shooting of the struggle of a woman within a snow storm in Tehran and I &S Kopystiansky's allegorical documenation of traces, of plastic bags floating from the unknown to the unknown again, co-exist and relate with loud political provocations, such as Leon Golub's canvases themed on the abuse of power today or Chantal Akerman's recording in multiple screens of the dangerous area between the borders of Mexico and the U.S., which imply the consequences any sort of trespassing from the one side to the other, will produce)
The list of works is exhaustive and since the Documenta is set to question primarily post-colonial, transnational as well as transgenerational concerns, it comes as no surprise that next to a wide selection of artists from various part of the globe (with the presence of African artists being quite prevalent), come the historical stars and those who have acquired a definitive place in the art scene of the west today.
Although this year's Documenta expanded its periphery across the globe, Platform 5 limited itself in terms of execution, in the exhibition spaces of Kulturbahnhof, the Museum Fridericianum, the documenta-Halle, the Binding Brauerie and the Orangeri/Karlsaue which hosts discreetly a few works of art in its outdoors premises. One would expect that a project of such a scope would resist or at least subvert slightly any tested exhibition models, and would live and breathe in the city of Kassel and the world. Apart from Thomas Hirschhorn's Monument to Bataille, an installation of cardboard huts installed in a Turkish minority district of the city of Kassel, city involvement appeared fairly non-existent. A true monument to Bataille, compiled with whatever a shrine of adoration to a figure might contain, acquired also the function of a leisure center, a social and gathering shrine for the inhabitants of the community.
This year's Documenta fulfilled bravely the task of handling the project as a site of discourse, far beyond the limits of aestheticization, in the name of post-colonial thinking and social questioning. Still no matter how pure the intentions tend to be, it still is a model which has to abide to the current historical, economic, as well as the state rules of the system. It is certainly a great media and marketing event that has to prove a high standard of professionalism. Documenta11 does come across as a special tribute to humankind, as an open space between the world and its masses, between the familiar and the Other. Yet, it is still a tribute to be sponsored by Wolkswagen…

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20 Milliom Mexicans can't be wrong

In the last decade a significant community of Mexican and international artists has developed and is beginning to thrive in Mexico City, in spite of relatively scarce commercial or institutional support for the production and exhibition of contemporary art. 20 Million Mexicans Can't Be Wrong brings together new and recent works which explore the social and political tensions in Mexico City, the presence and conditions of production of 'art' within that context, and the multi-layered aesthetic of the megalopolis. Curated by the highly-regarded Mexican curator, writer and art critic, Cuauhtémoc Medina, the show also tackles the risks involved in artistic or cultural exportation, by emphasising the structures underlying artistic practice, rather than isolated works. All the artists in the show are either Mexican or live in Mexico City and until now, with the exception of Francis Al's and Santiago Sierra, most have had limited, if any, exposure in London.

Vicente Razo's Salinas Museum, originally established in the toilet of his flat in Mexico City, is an extraordinary collection of hundreds of popular parodic representations of former Mexican president Carlos Salinas, which Razo collected in the mid-1990s. Shown here for the first time in Europe, the collection includes chocolate figures, metre-high effigies based on Judas dolls and images and figures of Salinas as the devil or a vampire. Melanie Smith, who has been living in Mexico City since the 1980s, returns to her native Britain to exhibit an installation of video and paintings born of her interest in the tensions between abstraction, contemporary beauty and the visual economy of the third world. In sharp contrast, a sculpture by Teresa Margolles represents the way in which she has tested the limits of art-making over the past ten years by using human remains and forensic material as a critique of the selective disregard of burial rights and the failure to systematically! register deaths in Mexico.

Belgian born artist Francis Al's presents a new sound piece from his Rehearsal series which subtly creates the illusion of displacement, whereas the artist-curator Pedro Reyes launches his Psychoforum, an ongoing project in which conversations with architects, theoreticians and artists are markers in this ever-expanding investigation into the intersection between architecture, invention, research and the production of knowledge. Finally, two artists in the show have placed audience participation at the centre of their work. Carlos Amorales's production line requires the audience to become unpaid workers in the fabrication of trainer shoes for wrestlers, whereas an 'action' organised by Santiago Sierra to take place simultaneously in London, Frankfurt, Geneva, Madrid, New York and Vienna on 7th September exports back to Europe and the USA the political turmoil produced in Latin America by the current process of economic globalization.

Cuauhtémoc Medina is an art critic, curator and art historian. He studied for his PhD at the University of Essex and since 1992 has been full time researcher at the National University of Mexico. Formerly he was Contemporary Art Curator at the Carrillo Gil Museum of INBA in Mexico City (1989-92) and from 1992 to '98 he was a member of 'Curare', a group of critics and curators that developed an independent intellectual and curatorial policy from that of the Mexican State. Most recently, he has become an advisor to Tate on Latin American Art.

The exhibition will tour to the John Hansard Gallery, Southampton in January 2003, more at http://www.southlondongallery.org

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from 26/10/002 to- 2/3/003, Landesmuseum Joanneum, Graz, Austria, www.latentutopias.at

Every time needs its utopia(s). A society that does no longer reflect its development is uncanny, a monstrosity. However, utopian speculation is rather dubious today. The unpredictability of emergent socio-economic patterns spells the impossibility of straightforward goal orientation in planning and design. This necessitates a strategic retreat from the immediate program of progress. A phase of pure mutation is launched. The exhibition focuses on current experiments with radically new concepts of space that are proliferating on the back of the new digital design media available today. This explosion of possibilities requires the profession to ”play” and experiment. In this respect the mode of production of the architect is assimilated to artistic processes. The final purpose, meaning and fulfillment of these artistic experiments lies beyond the scope of the architect/artist and requires the creative appropriation through ist audiences. We believe that this kind of proto-architecture requires engaging exhibitions as testing ground.

The exhibition is curated by Zaha Hadid and Patrik Schumacher and it is a coproduction of steirischer herbst and Graz 2003 - Cultural Capital of Europe

Architects
AA-DRL (GB), Angelil/Graham/Pfenninger/Scholl Architecture (CH), ASYMPTOTE (USA), branson coates architects (GB), COOP Himmelb(l)au (A), dECOi (F), Foreign Office Architects (GB), Greg Lynn FORM (USA), Zaha Hadid Architects (GB), Kolatan/Mac Donald (USA), Ross Lovegrove (GB), MVRDV (NL), NOX (NL), ocean D (GB), OCEAN NORTH (FIN), Pichler & Traupmann (A), propeller z (A), Karim Rashid (USA), Reiser+Umemoto (USA), Sadar Vuga Arhitekti/The Designers Republic (SLO), servo (S/CH/USA), Softroom (GB), Andreas Thaler (A), the next ENTERprise (A), UN Studio (NL), veech.media.architecture. (A)

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The National Museum of Contemporary Art organised an exhibition entitled "Synopsis II - Theologies". The aim of the exhibition, sequel of the previous one, entitled "Synopsis I - Communicatios ", is to highlight, in a synoptic way, the essential aspects of modern art bypresenting works of the recent greek and world production.
The first "Synopsis" examines the influence of the technology of new media (video, computer and the Internet) the communicative function of electronic art during the production of the work and its reception by the viewer.
The second "Synopsis" deals with the relations between modern art, the celestial - with its wide meaning - and the religious phenomenon - as special biome, doctrine, worship and power. Excluding the limited and formalist interest of some historian, such as Malevich, Kadinsky, Matis and posteriorly Rothko), in religious spirituality and art, it is the first time that artists are attracted by the anthropologic depth, the intercultural width and the transcendental, secret and erotic experience of religions.
This interest is appreciated in the vista of globalization and consists its positive aspect as it involves the richness of religions, common for humanity. It is served by the dominant comparative religious study, it extirpates contrariness and hatred between different religious practices or heresies and concilliates peak technology with profound religious experience. Most importantly, it critisizes, often sharply, the social and political power of religious hierarchies.
The multiplicity of the artistic approaches is reflected in the use of the term "theologies" - the title of the exhibition. The adoptation of a pure religious term of greek-christian origins, used in plural (theologies instead of theology), indicates the numerous and different Logos on God or gods. Which god or gods do these works - indirectly and insinuatively - talk about and which exactly concepts, metaphors and experiences they invest on are two of the questions to be answered.
The exhibition includes 12 works (installations, video-installations, sculptures) of 13 artists, such as Dimitris Alithinos, Marios Spiliopoulos, Ghada Amer, Diane Gromala and Yacov Sharir, Mariko Mori, Shirin Neshat, Egle Rakauskaite, Bill Viola, Maaria Wirkkala, Sergei Shutov, Jalal Toufic and Vadim Zakharov. The work entitled "Saint John of the Cross" (1983) by Bill Viola, that gives the feeling of the Sublime and expresses the secret erotic experience, can be considered as divinatory. The rest of the works, created during the last years or on the spot for the needs of the exhibition, answer to the previous questions through four main ways: the mystic-spiritual (Viola, Mori, Spiliopoulos, Gromala and Sharir), the sociological (Amer, Neshat, Rakauskaite), the inter-cultural (Wirkkala, Shutov, Alithinos) and the critic-philosophical (Zakharov, Toufic).

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ISEA 2002 ,Nagoya, Japan

ISEA 2002, 11th International Symposium on Electronic Art,Nagoya, Japan. From October 27 to 31.
[Orai]

[Orai] is a Japanese word, meaning comings and goings, communication, and contact, as well as streets and traffic.
About 180 years ago, a book titled Nagoya Orai was compiled and published in Nagoya and it was used as a kind of textbook for teaching and writing. Through arguments around art and its interdisciplinary studies, ISEA2002 NAGOYA [Orai] hopes to provide an opportunity to create a new text in this electronically networked society.
The first ISEA in Asia, ISEA2002 expects about 1500 participants
including artists, scholars, researchers, engineers and students. There will be over 200 presentations of research works and artworks from more than 30 countries and regions across the world. The MEDIASELECT Programs such as exhibitions, symposium, social events, and related programs will be held, open to the public, during the symposia.more at www.isea.jp

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from 13 to 24 November 2002 at Cheap Art, Athens

During the art history there are countless stories of insomniacs terrorised by the thought to disappear or to be seriously threatened by unknown forces as they lie sleeping. This exhibition focuses on the privacy of bedrooms and specifically beds proposing sleep within its architectural frame as a merely continuation of the household 's life.

Knowing that most people get less sleep than they should, because of the metropolitan habitudes (see the 24/7hrs work culture, television-internet, caffeine-attitudes), this group show focuses on the experience of sleep in our daily life. For that reason, artists position differs from the mythological and historical patterns that usually represent nymphs unveiled by lewd satyrs. They react also to the heroic days of modernity, avoiding the private emotional connotations and emphasising to the confrontations between the subjective experience of sleep and its public aspect. The exhibition is curated by Kostis Velonis.

Hilde Aagaard, Kostas Bassanos, Nial McClelland, David Cuesta, Dimitris Foutris, Leda Lycouriotis, Guido Maranzana, Nayia Yiakoumaki, Kostis Velonis, Panagiotis Tsagaris, Yiannis Theodoropoulos

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----- Original Message -----
From: doit@e-flux.com
To: editors@art-omma.org
Sent: Friday, October 11, 2002 3:26 PM
Subject: do it

Hi!

We are very pleased to present a new installment of Do It, an online
project curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist at our site: http://www.e-flux.com

This new edition includes more than 30 artists' instructions on many
useful subjects ranging from how to "Bring About Regime Change in the
United States by January 5, 2003", or "How to build a polycarbonate house.
(16 square meters. kitchen/living, patio, sleeping room, toilet.)", to
"How to obtain one kilogram of high quality cocaine in twenty steps with
the best economy of materials)", as well as many other works by 23
artists, including:
Inaki Bonillas, Jay Chung, Ulises Carrion, Chicks on Speed, Tacita Dean,
Wilson Diaz, Trisha Donnelly, Heri Dono, Tim Etchells/Forced
Entertainment, Julius Koller, Hassan Khan, Soo Ja Kim, Erik van Lieshout,
Jorge Macchi, Feng Mengbo, Valerie Mrejen, Robert MacPherson, Lygia Pape,
Xavier Le Roy, Tobias Rehberger, Joe Scanlan & Co., Tino Sehgal, and
Brigata Tognazzi.

In the Notes section of the Do It site we are pleased to present new
interviews with Yoko Ono and Mel Bochner, and a special feature on Ulises
Carrion, a Mexican artist whose restrospective exhibition is currently on
view at the Museo Carrillo Gil.

If you happen to be reading this month's Artforum, don't miss a special
feature about Do It at e-flux: Try This at Home, by Sarah K. Rich

PS. Visit the site again next week to see many new interpretations of the
instructions by our audience!


Electronic Flux Corporation
http://www.e-flux.com

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----- Original Message -----
From: juleslj@hotmail.com
To: news@art-omma.org
Sent: Friday, October 18, 2002 11:38 PM
Subject: Bolivia In all senses: multi-sensory art expo

"I’d like to own a portable gadget that could take and play back multi-sensory snapshots..." said Julia Lloyd-Jones in relation to her forthcoming exhibition Bolivia In all senses, "...it would make life a lot easier!"

Normally, 4 stills cameras, a DV camera and a MiniDisc recorder would be more than adequate to document a trip to an unfamiliar place, but Julia finally realised in Bolivia that it could need even more than that. She was certainly seeing and hearing amazing things, but she realised how inextricably linked these were to the often pungent aromas she inhaled, dubious delights she consumed, under-familiar textures she touched and giddy way she felt in the highest country in the world. She started to formulate the concept that would indeed allow her to share all this with everyone back home – as ful

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Andreas Thaler, Liquid Lounge,
© Andreas Thaler