Barbatuques - Too far west is east (clip)

never been to tehran

http://www.neverbeentotehran.com

EXHIBITION VENUES: Parkingallery, Tehran, Iran; Caravansarai, Istanbul, Turkey; San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery, San Francisco, USA; Media and Interdisciplinary Arts Center, Auckland, New Zealand; Koh-I-Noor, Copenhagen, Denmark; Mess Hall, Chicago, USA; Pittsburgh Cultural Trust (Downtown Electronic Jumbotron), Pittsburgh, USA; Embryosalon, Berlin, Germany; and on the web at http://www.NeverBeenToTehran.com NEVER BEEN TO TEHRAN, organized by artist Jon Rubin and curator Andrea Grover, is a worldwide exhibition with 29 international participants who, for one month, are contributing photographs of what they imagine the city of Tehran to look like, to a universal photo-sharing website. The photographs are streamed to each participating exhibition venue as an evolving projected slideshow, with additional images uploaded daily throughout the exhibition. Exhibition Description: Imagine a city that you’ve only seen in reproductions or perhaps have merely heard about. A place, like many others, that only exists for you through indirect sources–the nightly news, hearsay, literature, magazines, movies, and the Internet. Using these secondhand clues as firsthand research materials, invited worldwide participants–who have Never Been to Tehran–take photographs (from their home base) of what they imagine Tehran to look like. Anything that anyone might take a photograph of is fair game, just as long as it feels like Tehran. As Tehran’s image is regularly depicted in the dominant media, it is a compelling challenge for the participants in this exhibition to sift through the glut of pictures and information to cull out a personally constructed version of an unfamiliar place. For viewers in Tehran, the exhibition presents a chance to witness an unusual mirroring of their globally projected image, taken from the daily lives and environs of outsiders. Collectively, the artists and viewers of Never Been to Tehran will be charting a liminal space stuck somewhere between here andthere that in our contemporary existence just might be home. “The challenge for each participant in this exhibition is to look for a common ground between their city and someone else’s–to blend fact with fiction. It’s a bit like after you read a great book. There is a period of time when the story of the book bleeds into your own life. This daydreaming, in-between state, to which the contributors to this exhibition periodically submit themselves, is an important way of looking at the after-effects of an accelerated information culture.”– Jon Rubin and Andrea Grover 

renzo martens: enjoy poverty

Issues of representation come to the fore in Renzo Martens' Episode 3 - Enjoy Poverty.

In this 90-minute self-reflexive documentary, Martens travels throughout the Congo. As he witnesses dire humanitarian conditions, he keeps the camera trained on his own face, registering shock, anger, sorrow, and perhaps a touch of madness.

Martens continually links the micro and the macro, the personal encounter and the workings of global capitalism. His great innovation is to see poverty itself as a resource - a resource that is mined both by foreign aid workers (who profit from the generosity that poverty motivates) and journalists (who make images of the poverty, and sell these images).

In one encounter with a foreign journalist, Martens asks whether the photographic subjects retain any portion of the copyright or royalties of an image; they are, after all, the authors of the 'situation.' The journalist objects, saying that his subjects may have made the situation, but he is the sole author of the image.

Martens effectively wants to nationalize the poverty industry. He gathers together a group of Congolese photographers and convinces them that they would make more money if they make images of misery rather than photographing weddings and babies for a few cents a picture. It's really quite difficult to watch as Martens pushes the photographers toward the most miserable people in poverty-stricken areas and the sickest children in the hospital.

Soon, Martens comes to a disheartening realization: the images made by his local aspiring journalists are simply not good enough for Western audiences. He concludes that the effort will fail. It turns out that authoring the situation is not, in fact, enough. the image itself does have its own authority and its own authorship, quite separate from the underlying situation that it represents.

Such debates about the politics of representation are old hat; what makes Enjoy Poverty truly compelling is in the end the artist's own performance. He appears to be totally willing to open himself up to an absolutely desperate situation, to become emotionally involved and to be transformed by it. Enjoy Poverty is less a portrait of the Congolese situation than a self-portrait by a Westerner attempting to come to terms with the dire inequities of the world we live in. It is a portrait of the transformation of one Renzo Martens.

discussion (2 hours)

criticism (frieze)

The first thing that struck me about Renzo Martens’ new film Episode III – Enjoy Poverty (2008) – confusingly, the second in a trilogy – is the artist’s resemblance to the young Klaus Kinski. The numerous close-ups of his sweaty, troubled face (filmed by the artist himself on a hand-held digital camera) echo those of Kinski in Werner Herzog’s Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972), Fitzcarraldo (1982) and Cobra Verde (1987). The second thing that struck me, despite its supposed exploration of the exploitation of third world poverty by aid organizations and news agencies, is how the film rehearses themes present in Herzog’s films. Each depicts a European living outside their comfort zone struggling to assert themselves in harsh, unfamiliar terrain, and ultimately realizing the futility of their endeavours. The third thing that struck me, after sitting through 90 minutes of Martens meeting aid agencies, photographers, plantation workers, guerrilla fighters, singing Neil Young songs to himself and attempting to convince the residents of a small village to let him set up a neon sign flashing the message ‘Enjoy Poverty Please’ – was how contradictory the film was.

Episode III… follows Episode 1, in which Martens visited refugees from the war in Chechnya, asking them deliberately insensitive questions such as ‘Am I handsome?’ in order to elicit a response that would, supposedly, give the viewer a sense of their individuality rather than see them as generic representations of suffering. Martens’ latest film repeats this gonzo strategy, with him playing the same narcissistic character. His central idea is that not only are the people of the Democratic Republic of the Congo unable to benefit from the wealth of their country’s natural resources, but that they are also being exploited by Western media organizations who, in cahoots with aid organizations such as Médecins Sans Frontières (a claim unsupported by anything like evidence), make money from images of poverty and violence. Martens persuades a small group of Congolese photographers, who make a living from photographing weddings or formal portraits, to try and sell images of suffering to Western news agencies, in order to take control over their media representation. Martens’ slogan for his doomed project is ‘enjoy poverty’ – the neon billboard that he takes with him on his journey.

Martens’ thesis is elementary stuff for anyone with half an interest in media studies. Its deliberately crass expression – the ‘art’ bit of what is essentially an average artist-plays-news-reporter film – is incoherent rather than revelatory, not least because Episode III… attempts to do too much at the same time. In its first half, for example, there is the unsubstantiated suggestion that Médecins Sans Frontières is complicit in the exploitation by Western corporations and UN-led forces. Unfortunately, Martens is too caught up playing the self-obsessed artist to really dig deep which results in very little actually being revealed.

Aside from questions of exploitation that are closer to home – the film’s presentation in a commercial gallery, for one – the most tiresome aspect of the work is the way it perpetuates the very things it is critiquing, such as the vicarious pleasures of watching other people in dangerous situations (it features images of rotting corpses and desperate malnourishment), and, in its quasi-Conradian narrative, a fascination with an exotic ‘other’. In not showing any aspects of their lives other than those necessary to advance his thesis, Martens’ portrayal of Congolese plantation workers or local photographers performs the same reductive stereotyping that the film supposedly criticizes. Martens’ knowingly gauche persona does not alter the fact that Episode III… exploits art audiences’ desires for work that demonstrates ‘authentic’ political engagement. By acknowledging his own complicity Martens does not legitimize it.

Dan Fox

Phil Collins: Marxism Today (prologue) at BFI

Artist Phil Collins talks about his installation marxism today, at BFI Southbank's Gallery from 3 February - 10 April 2011. The work features Collins' short film marxism today (prologue) (2010), first shown at the 6th Berlin Biennale, and a new companion video, use! value! exchange! (2010), which together explore through archive footage and contemporary interviews what became of Marxist Leninist teachers' expertise after the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989. Collins suggests that Westerners today are lucky, as we have a sense of ownership of our culture, whereas in Berlin, there is a sense of embarrassment as regards the past and subsequently memories of childhood school groups and songs have fallen away. Collins further describes why he has centred his research on the impact that the loss of this heritage has had on the German people.


VIDEO

Adrian Paci, Centro di Permanenza Temporanea (Temporary Detention Centre), 2007

"Iraqi Kid is singing Sad Song"

ruth ewan (damnatio memoriae)

Damnatio Memoriae

installation, slide projection, audio, archival material, 2010

DAMNATIO MEMORIAE (the damnation of memory), refers to a punishment issued by the Roman Senate following a person’s death in an attempt to remove the person in question from cultural memory. Items such as coins, statues, paintings and documents were thought to be destroyed, names erased and property seized. Shown at Arthur Boskamp-Stiftung in Hohenlockstedt, Germany, Damnatio Memoriae was made up of a series of interconnected installations, mapping relations between seemingly disparate historic events.

A crop of Russian-Siberian heritage tomatoes, named after American actor and singer Paul Robeson (1898—1976), made up the installation, Them that plants them is soon forgotten. As the tomatoes ripened they were incorporated into the café menu at the Arthur Boskamp Foundation. Included in the installation was archive material relating to Robeson’s political activism and surveillance by both US and UK governments.

A slideshow with narration, The Brank, functioned as a loop of connecting information and backdrop to the works, making links between a scold’s bridle,damnatio memoriae, a missing sculpture of Paul Robeson by artist Antonio Salemme, MK ULTRA, Paul Robeson’s activism, anarchism, Ralph Chaplin, black cats, the European witch-hunts and an obsolete law of England and Wales known as the Common Scold Act.

Other works in the exhibition included a collection of inner record sleeves from Paul Robeson albums, The New Idealism, a giant witch’s hat, a collection of overturned images of witches and Black Cat Cross my Path, I Think Every Day’s Gonna Be My Last, where a local black cat was befriended and fed by gallery staff.

website

Regen, Joris Ivens 1929

Akram Zaatari, The Uneasy Subject / MUAC Mexico

The Uneasy Subject / MUAC Mexico from akram zaatari on Vimeo.

walid raad, lecture, Beirut 2005

Simon Critchley: 'There's no justice without terror' - video

Lines of Control

More than forty works of video, prints, photographs, paintings, sculpture, and installation by international artists delve into the past and explore the present to expose the seductive simplicity of drawing lines as a substitute for learning how to live with each other. Living within and across these lines can be a messy, bloody business but also offers a productive space where new nations, identities, languages, and relationships are forged.

At its core, Lines of Control: Partition as a Productive Space investigates the historic upheaval of the 1947 partition of India that spawned the nations of Pakistan and later Bangladesh. The exhibition is part of an ongoing project initiated in 2005 by Green Cardamom, a London-based nonprofit arts organization. Expanding on the significance of partition in South Asia, Lines of Control at the Johnson Museum also addresses physical and psychological borders, trauma, and the reconfiguration of memory in other partitioned areas: North and South Korea, Sudan and South Sudan, Israel and Palestine, Ireland and Northern Ireland, Armenia and its diaspora, and questions of indigenous sovereignty in the United States. The exhibition explores the products and remainders of partition and borders characteristic of the modern nation-state, and includes the continued impact of colonization, the physical and psychic violence of displacement, dilemmas of identity and belonging, and questions of commemoration.

Artists represented in the exhibition are Bani Abidi, Francis Alÿs, Sarnath Banerjee, Farida Batool, Adam Broomberg & Oliver Chanarin, Muhanned Cader, Duncan Campbell, Iftikhar Dadi, DAAR, Anita Dube, Taghreed Elsanhouri, Sophie Ernst, Gauri Gill, Shilpa Gupta, Zarina Hashmi, Emily Jacir, Ahsan Jamal, Nadia Kaabi-Linke, Amar Kanwar, Noa Lidor, Mario Mabor, Nalini Malani, Naeem Mohaiemen, Tom Molloy, Rashid Rana, Raqs Media Collective, Jolene Rickard, Hrair Sarkissian, Seher Shah, Surekha, Hajra Waheed, Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries, and Muhammad Zeeshan.

Learned Homeland

1996, installation, public space

A project by Martin Krenn & Oliver Ressler for Neue Galerie, Graz

In Austria, the concept of homeland is implemented not only regionally but also on a supra-regional and state level. This is meant to facilitate and force the citizens’ emotional attachment to the state. This type of manipulation already takes place in the school institution “Learned Homeland”/”Gelernte Heimat” attempts to illustrate these “nativizing strategies” with Austrian school books. The construction of “homeland” is particularly vivid in school books.

In creating collective identities through the concept of homeland, the “own” is always valued against the “other” and in this way demarcated from it. The “own” history is glorified, or even falsified. “Natural beauty” is pulled in for symbolization and concretization of the “Austria homeland” and used to produce a sense of the citizens’ ties to the “homeland.”

Through the early influence of the state school institution on the pupils, equating Austria with homeland is deemed natural. This leads to a situation in which an obviously constructed sense of homeland is seen as a natural fundamental human necessity and is hardly ever questioned.

Poster object at the main square:

Two school book pages expanded with blocks of text and an announcement of the exhibition in the Neue Galerie animated observers to confront the construction of a homeland-concept using their own school experiences. Interviews with passers-by reading the texts on the posters were carried out and recorded on video.

Exhibition in the Neue Galerie:

In the first room of the exhibition, the video documentation of the reactions of those passing by and reading the posters was shown. On display in the next two rooms were twelve Bubblejet prints, which thematized further examples of homeland constitution found in the school textbooks.

Presented in the fourth room was the video “Learned Homeland – Working Talks”/”Gelernte Heimat – Arbeitsgespräche”. This video includes theorists from Austria and Germany who have published texts on racism and homeland.

Interviews were carried out with: Jost Müller, Nora Räthzel, Juliane Rebentisch, Mark Terkessidis, Vera Kockot, Herbert Nikitsch/Bernhard Tschofen and Walter Manoschek.

The conversations expand the content of the theme by pointing out the relationship between homeland and racism in Austria and Germany.

Four Moors (Sardinia) by Melanie Manchot

‘Four Moors Sardinia’ is a video work made in response to an invitation to participate in an interventionist exhibition at the Ministry of Culture in Cagliari, Sardinia. While researching towards this commission, I became aware of the complicated and conflicted nature of a ‘Sardinian sense of identity’. While now autonomous after decades of struggle over its status, the island is far from united, its many dialects as well as the many variations in the design of its flag pointing to this complexity. For my commission, I invited employees from the ministry to sing a traditional Sardinian song to camera, acappella in an impromptu studio set up in one of the ministry’s office rooms. The film presents the four singers in profile in direct reference to the Sardinian flag, which shows four moors’ heads divided by a red cross. The four songs range from a nursery rhyme, a love song, a call to arms and a political song against the tyranny of Sardinia’s oppressors. The work was installed in the lobby of this modernist building as if greeting visitors into the exhibition.

Four Moors (Sardinia) from melanie manchot on Vimeo.

Call the Witness - Migration

MIGRATION from Milutin Jovanovic on Vimeo.

Call the Witness - Migration

macdermott's war song (project)

Jingo Karaoke
Multimedia Performance
We don't want to fight but by Jingo if we do ...
We've got the ships, we've got the men, we've got the money too!

It was 1878 when in the United States Edison patented the phonograph that later was developed into gramophone and was the most common device for playing recorded sound until the 1980s.
In the same year across the ocean the music-hall singer G. H. Macdermott (aka "the Great Macdermott") introduced in London Pavilion his song By Jingo (means By God in Old English).
This is one of the very first examples of modern propaganda since Macdermott was commissioned to change the public opinion in Britain with a popular song in the middle of the political crisis between the British Empire and Russia, after the war with Turkey in the Balkans and Caucasus.
The crisis ended with a diplomatic triumph of Britain's Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli and after the song a politician from the opposition Laborist Party invented the term jingoism that now is used for describing "extreme chauvinism or nationalism marked especially by a belligerent foreign policy".
It is amazing how political life changed forever since audiovisual mass media and propaganda charged pop culture were invented and eventually became an intrinsic part of the public life. In 2008 exactly one hundred and thirty years after, we can celebrate an anniversary of audiovisual industry and jingoism, with Russia becoming again the world's Evil, with the US presidential campaign in which a remote war that can be seen as a perfect example of jingoism was described as "God's Plan" and the Blue Ray (probably the last hard copy media) becoming world standard.
To remind for all these events media artist Petko Dourmana invited in his Chain Reaction Pavilion everybody who wanted to sing Macdermott's war song By Jingo with a karaoke set that uses a New Edison-Style Cup Phonograph.
In the plastic cups used as recording media visitors got free beer after singing.
By Jingo Karaoke performance was presented from September 11-14th, 2008 at Macedonia Square in Skopje, Macedonia as part of Upgrade International

jayce salloum at canadian cultural centre, paris

Glasgow International Let's Get Lyrical Event

Glasgow International Let's Get Lyrical Event from GI Festival on Vimeo.