Sharjah Biennial 2013

The Call - from the city into the Biennial from Universes in Universe on Vimeo.

Variations for 10 drummers and an electronic musician fortissimo (ff). Sharjah Biennial programme of sound compositions, conceived by Tarek Atoui.

Jumana Manna & Sille Storihle: The Goodness Regime. 2013 from Universes in Universe on Vimeo.

Magdi Mostafa - sound cells: FRIDAYS. 2010 from Universes in Universe on Vimeo.

Wael Shawky: Dictums 10:120. 2011–13 from Universes in Universe on Vimeo.

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

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

Akram Zaatari, The Uneasy Subject / MUAC Mexico

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

jayce salloum at canadian cultural centre, paris

ICA Boston: exhibition

http://www.icaboston.org/exhibitions/exhibit/acting-out/

marxism today: Phil Collins

marxism today

Phil Collins

Phil Collins’ work in film, video and photography often provides a platform for the overlooked or the disenfranchised. Shining a light on what is generally perceived as the losing side in the political and social upheavals of the past two decades, ‘marxism today’ is an ongoing project that began by following the fortunes of former teachers of Marxism-Leninism in Communist East Germany. Collins’ short film ‘marxism today (prologue)’ (2010) mixes contemporary interviews with the ex-teachers alongside archive material, to form the centrepiece of this exhibition, which also includes a new video in which a number of concepts central to Marxist economic analysis are introduced to a new generation of students. Relocating from the start of this school year to Manchester, where Engels wrote ‘The Condition of the Working Class in England’, Collins’ project prompts a wider reflection on the city’s formative place in the history of radical thinking. Initiating a series of interactions with nearby schools and the local public, it also enquires into the continuing relevance of Marxist ideas in the present day.

‘marxism today’ is co-commissioned by Film and Video Umbrella, Cornerhouse, Abandon Normal Devices, Berliner Künstlerprogramm/DAAD, Berlin Biennale and Shady Lane Productions.

SEEKING FORMER
TEACHERS OF
MARXISM

Did you teach Marxist-Leninist philosophy at school or university before 1989?

How did your life and career change as a result of perestroika?

Did you have to give up your profession forever?

Find a new subject to teach?

Or find a new career?

Documentary filmmaker Phil Collins is looking for people willing to share their story.

Get in touch with us by email
info@shadylaneproductions.co.uk

Or leave your name and contact information HERE.

Confidentiality guaranteed.

Susan Philipsz

Commissioned by GI, Susan Philipsz presented a site-specific outdoor sound work combining three versions of the same song, ‘Lowlands’, as sung by the artist, and offering an extra-ordinary connection with this hidden and little used space.

Adrian Piper

'safe'
(1990; mixed-media installation: 4 enlarged magazine photographs with silkscreened texts mounted in four corners of room plus endless loop audio soundtrack)

What It’s Like, What It Is #3

1991; constructed environment video installation for the Museum of Modern Art, N.Y.: lights, mirrors, four video disks with music soundtrack

lucy gunning

lucy gunning

frieze article

Tangentially: The Archive and the Bathroom(tate papers)

Art Now: Lucy Gunning: Intermediate II

Carey Young/Richard Long

A Line Made by Walking 1967

Photograph and pencil on board
image: 375 x 324 mm
on paper, print

Purchased 1976

P07149
This formative piece was made on one of Long’s journeys to St Martin’s from his home in Bristol. Between hitchhiking lifts, he stopped in a field in Wiltshire where he walked backwards and forwards until the flattened turf caught the sunlight and became visible as a line. He photographed this work, and recorded his physical interventions within the landscape.
Although this artwork underplays the artist’s corporeal presence, it anticipates a widespread interest in performative art practice. This piece demonstrates how Long had already found a visual language for his lifelong concerns with impermanence, motion and relativity.


CAREY YOUNG's

Lines Made by Walking
Louise Menzies

First published in Scape Biennial catalogue , 2006

Experienced as a series of projected 35mm slides unfolding at automated one-second intervals, Lines Made By Walking (2003) reveals the certain actions of an individual amidst a crowd. More specifically, these are the actions of the artist herself walking back and forth as she attempts to crave a line within the space of a crowded strip of commuters in central London. Intentionally recalling Richard Long’s 1967 piece A Line Made By Walking, Young inserts in our memories the politicised acts of the neo avant-garde, while suggesting how such actions of an individual can still offer a negotiation of space within our late capitalist situation.

Performed in public space, Young’s work sharply sketches the globalised daily reality of the worker and suggests an attempt at updating contemporary relationships between corporate and cultural politics. Dressed in a suit like those around her, in many ways Young is a nameless face in the crowd; collapsing the distances of artist, worker and audience. Over time however, her self-directed and purposeful walking offers us a form of resistance drawn from the very structures it seeks to resist. In place of Long’s flattened grass, we are left with negative urban space.



© Copyright Louise Menzies and Scape Biennial Trust, 2006

richard wilson '20:50'

richard wilson

'20:50'

guardian interview

Carey Young

carey young

A small stall was set up in a marketplace, close to other market stalls and in sight of the facades of multinational businesses. At the stall, the services of a local professional ‘arbitrator’ was made available, without charge, to the public for the period of one day. Arbitration is the process in which disputes are settled by the use of a professional mediator. Arbitrators are primarily used in commercial situations in which conventional discussion processes have broken down, but in which peace must be created. The process may be familiar to anyone who recalls the clashes between trade unions and their often-corporate employers in the days before the globalised erosion of union power.

The arbitration service was on offer for the period of one day for two (or more) people who had a dispute – any dispute - to resolve. The arbitrator was situated at an office-style table, with two office-style chairs for members of the public to sit down. Prior to launch, the service was advertised in the local media and signs were also placed next to the stall.

The piece also made reference to larger questions of conflict. Arbitration is inherently concerned with the attempt to create peace. Thus this tiny site, almost as small as a picnic table, alluded to notions of a peaceful Utopia, whilst it nevertheless seemed vulnerable, dwarfed by the size and architecture of the surrounding environment. The site offered a tiny and temporary peace zone that was gone all too soon.