15th Tallinn Print Triennale

15th Tallinn Print Triennial
For Love Not Money
20 January - 8 May 2011
at Kumu Art Museum
Tallin, Estonia
http://www.triennial.ee/

Curatorial Note (VideoZone V)

You and I, We’ve Never Been So Far Apart: Works from Asia Program 1

Positioning Asia, in particular Southeast Asia, beyond geographical borders, is more often than not a self-conscious exercise in constituting a unified field of practice characterised by commonalities that are held in opposition to a similarly constituted ‘other‘ – the ‘west’, or the rest of Asia (such as China, Japan, Korea and India for instance), that has as its purpose, the marking of difference. Given the sense of peripherality that Southeast Asia is associated with, culturally and economically, an obliging exoticism is generally seen as the least painful of routes. However, nonspecific differences bracketed into an imaginary category of ‘Asian-ness’ of the region, implies a fundamental unity that is simultaneously made contradictory with assertions of the cultural specificity of each nation state, where both the shared and distinguishable are if not non-existent at the level of its individuals and member states, are at least deeply problematic. Yet that is not to say the regional and nation state paradigms and narratives are not useful and efficacious in navigating within a global setting such as an international exhibition that expects it. It is thus with a certain disquiet that a few recent video works have been selected, less for their representativeness, and more for their ambiguous and inflected modes of expression within their own contexts. Nevertheless, such an undertaking is not without potential conflict of its own, as a selection is made of video artworks by artists who live and work in this ‘region’, with little effort given to expanding the category (as it would not challenge the form of mapping) – with an artist each from Hong Kong, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, Myanmar, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam, and it is likely that casual readings will inevitably slip into formulations of ‘nation’ and ‘Asia’. While appearing to acquiesce to, and perhaps unable to escape from, this familiar mapping, an attempt is made to complicate a predictable conclusion: not all nation states of Southeast Asia are included; a couple – Vietnam and Myanmar, are deliberately privileged given their relatively less prominent cultural and economic visibility; the work of the Japanese artist is by virtue of collaboration with the Vietnamese artist; and Hong Kong, as a Special Administrative Region of China, is not of the Southeast region, yet it has a certain affinity with other parts of Southeast Asia given its colonial past. The desire for juxtaposing these artworks thus is to allow for other readings to emerge, to create a condition for reading, and not the reading itself.

In a witty re-staging of a previous work The River of Ink (2008) at The Future of Exhibition: It Feels Like I’ve Been Here Before presented at the Institute of Contemporary Arts Singapore, July 2010, Shubigi Rao’s de-gendered and de-ethicised alter-ego, S. Raoul, is killed in a most banal fashion – “In what appears to be a tragic accident, S. Raoul tripped and broke his neck while attempting to negotiate space in a cultural context. The obstacle responsible for the fall is believed to be a collection of artefacts, survivors of violent acts of cultural genocide, collectively fished out of the River of Ink (also known as the Dustbins of History).”^[1] Rao’s pithy summary of the mortal dangers of immutable cultural contexts highlights the perennial problem citing ‘Asia’ as teleological defence for presentation, if not its explanation. The question that needs to be asked is therefore less ‘what are artists doing’ in Asia, but ‘what else are artists doing?’ Ambiguous manifestations of cultural context, a burden alleviated by increasing reflexivity (a burden curatorial texts have a tendency to exacerbate), mark the video artworks selected. Deliberately loose, curatorially speaking, these artworks play on notions of distance, separation and proximity of assumed cultural contexts, in an attempt to produce aesthetics of dialogue, of shared yet individual subjectivity, exchange and influence.

Broadly, and briefly, the curatorial intent is for the selected video works to present as a whole a less trenchant view of the artists’ national and regional contexts than they could be made to seem to have, thus allowing the works to demonstrate with subtlety, sensitivity and humour, the true condition of the artists’ practice. Another conscious deliberation was for the video artworks to have a certain purposive employment of sound, music or ambient noise, though more to create an audience experience that would be highly sensitive to non-visual suggestion. In terms of subject, a few loose themes emerge, a sense of space (and time) in Hayati Moktar’s Penawar’s unhurried and muted observation of the clearing and closure of a family estate in Penang, that stirs with its sense of loss and longing. The home of multiple generations that has been the setting for family weddings, parties and social gatherings which various prominent public figures of the time attended, in Moktar’s hands, seems almost impossible to be emptied out; and Universe Just a Fathom by Tin Win Aung and Wah Nu, a reflection on Buddhist ontology that is inspired by invasive medical technologies, creates a compelling journey that escapes its simple visual aesthetic. Likewise, the collaboration of Japanese artist Takayuki Yamamoto and Vietnamese artist Hoang Duong Cam, On Each Milestone, fuses a fictional quest for an unspecified object with documentary research on an ethnic group, the Raglai of the Kingdom of Aman, now part of Vietnam, focusing on a Raglai musician’s performance not only of Raglai’s tradition tunes but also popular international tunes at a naturally preserved park.

Two video artworks explore notions of influence, drawing attention to the assimilation of cultures rather than resistance: Ho Tzu Nyen’s EARTH (((radio))) borrows from French post-Revolution aesthetics while sampling music popularised by the expanding American music culture and industry in the 80s and 90s, its far-reaching effects felt by his generation growing-up in Singapore; and Thai artist Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook’s The Two Planets series presents conversations and observations of Thai villagers encountering paintings by Jean-François Millet, Vincent Van Gogh and Édouard Manet, with the villagers themselves the subject of Rasdjarmrearnsook’s own monumentalization of rural folk.

Finally, on a lighter note but still on the topic of the blending of cultures, methods and imagination are Kwan Sheung Chi’s doing it with Chi… making an Exit Bag that caricaturises instructional home television programs popularised by global media with a more dire recipe; and Indonesian collective Tromarama’s Happy Hour, reminiscent of children’s fiction where objects come to life, depicts money on holiday, cheerfully forgetting their other more solemn role. While the banknotes are Indonesian, the tune they sing to is traceable to other historical and cultural trade and influence, that illustrates how economies in Southeast Asia are dependent on larger more powerful markets.

The selection of video works by these artists collectively defy reductive and simplified evaluation, and it is hoped that as the title suggests, beyond stock cultural characterizations and bland universals, different readings will surface that then serve to indicate that cliché differences and similarities aside, the distance between audience and artist (and between artists) isn’t so far, and perhaps did not require the artifice of mediation, of nation and Asian-ness, after all.

Curated by June Yap

Independent curator and write based in Singapore, previously with the Singapore Art Museum and the Institute of Contemporary Arts Singapore. Her curatorial work and research focuses on contemporary art practices in Asia.

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^[1] In Passing: Visionary Felled by Tragic Misstep – Tragic death of Author, Thinker and Inventor S. Raoul allegedly caused by tripping over cultural artefact, Time Machine takes you to September 2006, Shubigi Rao “No Cover no Color” (2006) and “The River of Ink” (2008).

**This curatorial was taken from here.

Review on Philadelphia City Paper

Another review for our video works "Happy Hour" at Philagrafika 2010. Enjoy.

Last Chance
Catch it or regret it

by Holly Otterbein

After Philagrafika ends on April 11, will the city's galleries, curators, artists and art allies ever again be as harmonious? For the past two months, the inaugural fête celebrating all things print has pervaded seemingly every venue — and medium — in town. It's as if we've all been part of one giant, heretical, ink-stained collective consciousness — a nice change for a community that can feel disjointed and even, occasionally, at odds with itself.

Post-Philagrafika, Philly's arts scene should have more swagger: We know the city can host a print-themed triennial, so why can't it host something like the Whitney Biennial? Additionally, Philagrafika has given us a broader, more easygoing definition of print: Not only is digital photography "print," but so is video, confetti and performance art. It's these little things that should hold us over until the fest returns in three years ("unless it's back in two," says artistic director José Roca).

Of course, Philagrafika 2010's time of death hasn't been called just yet. Consider scurrying to the following shows — exemplars of the festival's Apollonian vibes — before it is.

Temple Gallery

Speaking of prematurely called deaths: Barthélémy Toguo's Heart Beat and Francesc Ruiz's Newsstand (pictured) both cast an eye on print journalism. Copies of the Inquirer, which Toguo scribbled over with a Sharpie, line Temple Gallery's walls, giving viewers a visceral sense of being silenced. Meanwhile, Ruiz constructed a life-size, Philly-style newsstand, complete with original Philly-style newspapers, magazines and Lotto tickets — things he believes are already relics. "Newsstands are the closest thing we had to Internet before it existed," he says. "They are places where you can access all kinds of information, and they are also places of exchange. I think it is necessary to begin to preserve them. Maybe we should create a Museum of the Newsstand." Ends April 11, Tyler School of Art, 2001 N. 13th St., 215-777-9000, temple.edu/tyler/exhibitions.

Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts

Faced with a society too wrapped up with money, Indonesian-based collective Tromarama bravely resisted making art about its cash-hungry brethren that was pedantic or atrabilious. Instead, Happy Hour is a lighthearted video imagining that money — long the impetus behind unhappiness, suicide and war — has tired of carrying the weight of the world on its shoulders, and enjoys some much-needed R&R. Likewise, urban detritus king Mark Bradford's Untitled (Dementia) pokes fun at a makeshift ad for Alzheimer's sufferers in L.A., but doesn't dwell on its sadness. Ends April 11, Samuel M.V. Hamilton Building, 128 N. Broad St., 215-972-7600, pafa.org.

Print Center

In the Print Center, Space 1026's artwork looks vastly different than it does in the collective's Chinatown digs. The yurt it constructed for Philagrafika (pictured) lacks the abrasive, overstimulating qualities that can sometimes hamper the collective — and not because the Space trashed its tried-and-true eyeball, pyramid and intestine motifs, but rather because the yurt is alone, isolated from a barrage of other wacky Space 1026 works. Additionally, this piece speaks best to the fest's congruency: An exhibit by the Argentinian group Eloisa Cartonera is inside of Space 1026's yurt, like two Russian nesting dolls tucked into one another. Ends April 11, 1614 Latimer St., 215-735-6090, printcenter.org.

The article taken from here. Published: Mar 23, 2010

Review on The New York Times

Philagrafika 2010 and our new works "Happy Hour" video being review by The New York Times. Here's the article. Enjoy.

What Is Printmaking Today?

Philadelphia Dares to Ask

by Ken Johnson

PHILADELPHIA — The fine art of printmaking is not what it used to be. To produce printed images using tools more sophisticated than potatoes and rubber stamps once required the esoteric knowledge of an alchemist and the manual skills of a surgeon. Today anyone with the right software and a good color printer can make infinitely reproducible images that are hard to distinguish from professionally made drawings, paintings, montages, commercial illustrations and other sorts of pictures. Which raises the question: What should a major, international exhibition devoted to contemporary printmaking entail?

Going by “Philagrafika 2010,” the first in what its organizers hope will become a triennial citywide festival here devoted to the print in contemporary art, the technical possibilities are unbounded. “Philagrafika” includes etchings and woodcuts, vinyl graphics, comic books, videos and complicated, conceptually driven projects intended to raise social consciousness.

Philosophical questions remain. As new mediums proliferate and lines between genres dissolve, you may wonder if there is any value in maintaining printmaking as a separate artistic category. The festival’s chief overseer, José Roca, an independent curator from Colombia, does not equivocate about what he sees as the demise of the traditional print. In his introductory essay in the festival guidebook he asserts, “Fixated on defining the realm of printmaking based on technique, some printmakers have printed themselves into a corner, away from the center of contemporary artistic trends.”

Mr. Roca’s mission is to expand — indeed to explode — received definitions: “Exposing the print component in sculptural, environmental, performance, pictorial and video works and highlighting their relevance to contemporary art” is his goal.

With exhibitions taking place in almost 90 galleries and other sites around the city and works by more than 300 artists on view, “Philagrafika 2010” presents viewers with a daunting challenge. But the core of the event, titled “The Graphic Unconscious,” is doable for day trippers. It consists of five exhibitions at five different institutions and collectively includes 35 artists.

Those most connected to traditional craftsmanship are at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Here, in a handsome show organized by Julien Robson, curator of contemporary art at the academy, Kiki Smith’s sensitive, etched portraits of young men in big hats would be no surprise to Rembrandt. But he might be confounded by her large, sloppy collages incorporating passages of etching, glued-on paper scraps and glitter depicting, for example, a woman fighting big snakes.

A huge woodcut by the German artist Christiane Baumgartner presents an image of bombers from a World War II propaganda film. Its fine, horizontal lines indicate that the image was copied from a television screen. If Gerhard Richter made prints, they might look similarly moody and ominous.

An enormous composition of carved-wood panels and large prints by Orit Hofshi, an Israeli, pictures a shadowy figure walking into a desolate, rocky landscape punctuated by architectural fragments, while the Philadelphia artist Pepón Osorio offers a celebration of life and death in the form of an image of his mother’s X-rayed head ink-jet printed onto a thick bed of glued-together confetti.

Two artists, one American and one Chinese, riff on different kinds of verbal signage. Mark Bradford’s thickly layered works reproduce signs advertising help for people with Alzheimer’s disease; faded and disappearing letters visually pun on memory loss. And Qiu Zhijie’s rubbings of Chinese characters quote sayings of rulers like Mao Zedong and Chiang Kai-shek to politically subversive ends.

Here the most technically tricky and entertaining work is by an Indonesian group called Tromarama. Using its own finely etched copies of Indonesian currency, Tromarama created a short stop-action music video in which the leaders portrayed on various bills lip-sync to a bouncy tune called “Happy Hour.”

Works in an exhibition organized by Lorie Mertes, chief curator at Moore College of Art and Design, stray further from fine-art traditions. Made by a stenciling technique, a 40-foot-wide, black-and-white outdoor mural on a wall of the Moore’s main building by the British artist Paul Morrison pictures a fantastic, montaged landscape of trees and flowers lifted from a variety of fine-art and popular sources. Gunilla Klingberg, of Stockholm, has created a vast, Neo-Pop mandala in orange vinyl whose pattern consists of familiar commercial logos — Target, Kmart and others. It has been applied to the front windows of the college’s facade to form a radiating, see-through screen.

In an indoor gallery, Virgil Marti, a Philadelphia artist, has covered the walls with silver paper bearing an ornate, floral pattern that turns out, on closer scrutiny, to be made up of skulls and bones, to create a gleaming, environmental memento mori.

In another gallery the Brazilian artist Regina Silveira has flooded the walls and floors with gigantically enlarged, black vinyl images of insects. It is an eye-boggling, walk-in nightmare. And in a connecting corridor Betsabeé Romero who works in Mexico City, presents prints made by rolling inked old tires that she retreaded with images of birds onto yardslong lengths of paper.

Projects at the Tyler School of Art’s Temple Gallery in a show organized by Sheryl Conkelton, an independent curator, do more still to stretch the definition of printmaking. A Danish team called Superflex has set up a workstation where students are assembling cube-shaped hanging lamps whose paper sides, spit out by an online printer, bear photographic images of copyrighted lights by famous designers. It is a provocative comment on theft and intellectual property rights.

Making points about information overload, Francesc Ruiz, of Barcelona, Spain, has recreated an outdoor newsstand and stocked its shelves with satiric fake magazines, while Barthélémy Toguo, of Cameroon, has covered the walls of a separate space with newspaper pages that have all their words blacked out. In a dark room a hypnotic video by the South Korean Web-art group Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries uses big, block letters appearing in infectiously punchy rhythms to tell a violent story of three young misfits visiting the border between North and South Korea.

At the Philadelphia Museum of Art politics meets surrealistic fantasy in a two-artist show organized by Shelley R. Langdale, an associate curator of prints and drawings at the museum. In one gallery Óscar Muñoz, of Colombia, shows a quartet of floor-projected videos in which photo-silk-screened pictures of people from newspaper obituaries float on the surface of water in a white sink. As the water runs out, the images become distorted and go down the drain; then the process reverses and the anonymous faces recohere. The videos poignantly symbolize the tragically ephemeral quality of life in some parts of the world.

In a gallery next door a short animated film by the Japanese artist Tabaimo explores psychoanalytic territory. Called “dolefulhouse,” it shows giant hands installing miniature pieces of antique furniture in a dollhouse. Then octopuses start coming in through the windows, tentacles proliferate like vines, and the house fills with water. Normal consciousness is swamped by previously repressed psychic energies.

The longstanding tradition of populist printmaking is updated at the Print Center in a show of 14 artists and collectives organized by the center’s curator of prints and photographs, John Caperton. Eric Avery, a Texas psychiatrist as well as an artist, has wallpapered the lavatory with small, cartoonish prints illustrating how to use male and female condoms. Woodcuts by Sue Coe illustrate and protest against cruelty to animals. A Chicago collective called Temporary Services presents cheaply produced booklets containing miscellaneous information, including one about illegal devices concocted by prison inmates using legal materials. Upstairs, the Philadelphia collective Space 1026 has constructed a yurt using its own printed fabrics within which people may read, converse and lounge.

The upshot of all this is intellectually stimulating but inconclusive. Is printmaking dead, or is it reborn? Is it a meaningful category at all anymore for contemporary artists who revel in mechanically produced imagery of all kinds and fearlessly use and misuse whatever tools are at hand? If you think these questions matter — and there are good reasons to think they do — you need to plan a trip to Philadelphia.

“Philagrafika 2010” runs through April 11 at various galleries and museums across Philadelphia.

philagrafika2010.org

The article taken from here. Published: February 4, 2010

Inaugural Exhibition of Lawangwangi

January 22nd 2010 - February 22nd 2010

HALIMUN, the mist

Sebuah refleksi perkembangan seni rupa kontemporer Indonesia

Gemuruh perayaan kapital dan sosial seni rupa kontemporer sejak tiga tahun belakangan ini, menciptakan wajah seni rupa Indonesia sangat dinamis sekaligus menjadi pengalaman baru dalam sejarah perkembangan. Untuk pertama kalinya terjadi kolaborasi berbagai elemen dunia seni dalam memproduksi identitas seni rupa Indonesia, menambah kegairahan dan kedinamisannya. Gravitasi medan sosial-kapital seni rupa saat ini, secara langsung dan tak-langsung menciptakan iklim dan arah perubahan yang mempengaruhi praktek seninya.

Salah satu gejala yang jelas adalah munculnya mannerism, atau suatu bentuk dan gaya artistik yang dianggap paling mapan, terjadi dikalangan para perupa dengan kuatnya pusaran pasar. Suasana ini menciptakan suatu lapisan tanda-tanda yang merabunkan, mengecoh dan mengganggu pengamatan kita terhadap kualitas karya , apakah terhadap totalitas makna, jelajah artistik dan wacana filosofisnya. Suasana ini seperti membentuk lapisan kabut yang menyelubungi suatu tempat- atau dalam istilah sunda; halimun - yang menyelimuti, menyelubungi dan menghalangi pandangan, namun kita masih bisa melihat sesuatu dengan batasan jarak pandang tertentu, tergantung dari tebal dan tipisnya lapisan kabut tersebut. Halimun menjadi metafor untuk menjelaskan gejala medan sosial-kapital seni rupa Indonesia saat ini.

Pameran HALIMUN muncul untuk mengajak kembali melihat perkembangan seni rupa didalam suatu pusaran lapisan nilai. Dari karya-karya 50 perupa Indonesia, baik generasi muda maupun seniornya. Perkembangan secara individual maupun kelompok-kelompok seniman. Ada beberapa lapisan atau bagian besar pengelompokan dalam pameran inagurasi Lawang Wangi ini. Pertama karya-karya dengan komisi khusus yang dipesan oleh Andonowati, sang pemilik Lawang Wangi. Karya - karya perupa seperti Mella jaarsma, Teguh Oestenrik dan juga karya-karya yang site-spesifik untuk merespon ruang dan arsitektur dari galeri.

Kelompok karya para perupa dengan watak realisme baru dan foto-realisme tiba-tiba mendapatkan tempat yang khusus dalam perkembangan terakhir. Kelompok perupa seperti TAXU - Denpasar dan Abstraks - X Bandung yang berawal dari sebuah semangat dan kesadaran perbedaan dari suatu praktek dominan. Begitupun dengan munculnya karya-karya berbasis objek dan medium keramik serta media baru, yang menjadi gejala dalam praktek seni rupa saat ini.

Rifky Effendi
Curator

*curatorial text taken from here

Participating artist:
Yogie Achmad Ginanjar, Cecep M.T., Guntur Timur, Dikdik Sayahdikumullah, Willy Himawan, Radi Arwinda, Wiyoga Muhardanto, Beatrix, Tromarama, Dadan Setiawan, R.E. Hartanto, Tisna Sanjaya, Cinanti ‘kenny’ Johansyah, Prilla Tania, Nurdian Ichsan, Nadia Savitri, Tisa Gracinia, Albert Yonathan, Desziana, Monika Ary Kartika, Hari Cahaya, Herra Pahlasari, Arin Dwihartanto, Tommy A.P., Iman Sapari, Yusuf Ismail, Isa Perkasa, Deden Sambas, Adhya Ranadhireksa, Irman, Faisal Habibi, John Martono, Hilman Hendarsyah, Anggara, Mella Jaarsma (Commissioned), Made Widya Diputra (Commissioned), Kadek Agus Mediana, Suklu, Gde Mahendra Yasa, Ketut Moniarta, Dodit Artawan, Agus Sumiantara, Teguh Ostenrik (Commissioned)

JAKARTA CONTEMPORARY CERAMICS BIENNALE #1

Ceramic Art: In Between

North Art Space, Ancol , Jakarta
19 December 2009 - 20 January 2010

Curated by: Asmudjo J. Irianto and Rifky Effendi

For further information about the exhibition here

OK VIDEO COMEDY, Jakarta

OPENING:

Selasa, 28 Juli 2009 / 19.00 wib

Galeri Nasional Indonesia

Jl. Medan Merdeka Timur 14, Jakarta Pusat

FESTIVAL:

29 Juli - 9 Agustus 2009

Jam buka: 10.00 - 20.00

Kurator: Aminudin TH Siregar

PRESS CONFRENCE:

Friday, 24 July 2009 / 15.00 WIB

Galeri Nasional Indonesia

Further information here

A Window to the World, Hiroshima

Video screening at Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art, Japan
From 18 July 2009 - 13 September 2009

Further information (japanese only) here

REFRESH: new strategies in Indonesian contemporary art , Valentine Willie Fine Arts Singapore

An article of the exhibition can be read here, 

posted by Ng Yi-Sheng

Tromarama , Singapore Biennale 2008 : Wonder @ Universes in Universe

check it here