Category: art

April 14, 2020

Social distancing – Week 3: “Stay at Home” & [The Art Happens Here] by Annka Kultys Gallery

screenshot of Surface Collider (23032020), 2020, by James Irwin. Featured in week 1 of “Stay at Home” at AKG

At the beginning of April, Annka Kultys Gallery – a commercial gallery based in East London founded by Annka Kultys in 2015 which represents artists working in the digital sphere – launched a new online platform, [The Art Happens Here]. The platform will showcase “Stay at Home”, a new exhibition of digital art made in response to the Coronavirus pandemic. As with many other galleries, soon after the lockdown announcement in March, AKG switched its exhibition programme to a digital viewing room. However, [The Art Happens Here] is an online project on its own which extends beyond the existing gallery programme. The new platform opens up, as written in AKG newsletter, to “online projects of any artist interested in the internet as place of production and distribution.”

[The art happens here] is an important development in the gallery’s evolution, one that not insignificantly mirrors the evolution of artists’ practices and indeed art itself.

Every Sunday during the lockdown, “Stay at Home” showcases a new artist who investigates the pandemic situation. The artists are selected through an open call, and the exhibition is free and open to everyone (you can access through [The Art Happens Here]). Over the weeks, new posts are added so that, through solo presentations, “Stay at Home” becomes a group show. The idea is not new to AKG. In fact, presenting collective exhibitions through one-week solo shows is a familiar format to Annka Kultys who, the past winter, opened “Cacotopia 04” (11^th Jan – 15^th Feb 2020), the fourth edition of the gallery’s annual survey of leading emerging artists in the contemporary art space. Like “Stay at Home”, also “Cacotopia” four editions are group exhibitions presented in the format of solo shows allocated to a single artist every week.

week 3 AKG Instagram story 1 of 2 – Open Call

Whereas the two projects are similar, they are not identical. In fact, “Cacotopia” lasts four weeks and consequently showcases four artists only. While “Stay at Home” will present a new artist each week the lockdown goes on. Hopefully, these will be just a handful of weeks, but as we can see from other countries, the lockdown could last 10 weeks or more (i.e., Italy is in its 7^th week and the lockdown has just been extended for another month. Now planned to end early May 2020). Therefore, by continuing over time and presenting more artists, there is potential that “Stay at Home” will become a much bigger and more articulated project than its older brother “Cacotopia” and could even serve as new digital art database.

screenshot of Social Distancing Portraits, 2020, by Adad Hannah. features in week 2 of “Stay at Home” at AKG

On one side, the group exhibition format of single-artist-presentations allows “Stay at Home” to be identified as a creature of Annka Kultys Gallery progressively establishing the gallery signature. On the other side, the gallery is not only doing a great act of gallantry by giving a chance to ‘any’ artist to be exhibited by a commercial gallery but also providing a platform, namely [The Art Happens Here], where art made during the quarantine can be seen by the people.

Ah! and if this is not enough, all the gallery benefits of the sold works will be donated for Coronavirus research!

week 3 AKG Instagram story 2 of 2 – Open Call

April 7, 2020

Social distancing – week 2: How Chalton Gallery strengthens its role of art ambassador during the Coronavirus pandemic.

In the past two weeks, I have been following art institutions and galleries on Instagram, listening to Art Tactic podcasts, and reading articles in Artnet news and Frieze. It seems to me that the general feeling switched from optimistic to realist. Optimistic because, initially, the imposed work-from-home to reduce the spread of the virus, together with the increased use of digital platforms were seen as ways to cost-cutting in the overly expensive art industry. Optimism quickly passed its sceptre to a more realist view by unveiling a widespread lack of digital strategies among medium and small art galleries. It seems that many galleries are unprepared to make the best out of their online businesses. Another pitfall of the digital system is its inability to engage audiences by failing to offer memorable experiences to the public. Despite galleries accepting the challenge of keeping businesses going and engaging their public, they are struggling to succeed in this difficult time. The truth is that we are spending a lot of time in front of a screen without experiencing any physical event at all. Is this the right way to get through COVID-19 pandemic and establish a better future? Maybe not. With this question in mind, Chalton Gallery is promoting an alternative way with a call for a period of reflection and introspection.

Chalton Gallery in London & Chalton Projects is a not-for-profit art organisation that operates in Mexico and the UK connecting Mexican artists and cultural institutions with the British art scene. On Sunday 19^th March, the gallery announced its temporary closure to prevent the spread of Coronavirus. Soon, what was planned to be their June show, launched as the online programme by artist Christina Ochoa (Colombian based in Mexico), “Pharakon: Garden of Psychotropical Hope” (the first session is available at https://vimeo.com/399380478 with a contribution of £5 to support the artist’s practice).

Pharmakon is part of Ochoa’s educational and aesthetic ongoing research, in which she investigates the relationship between traditional pharmacy, based on the use of plants as medicinal, and contemporary mode of consumerism. In “Pharakon: Garden of Psychotropical Hope”, the artist will lead a series of online workshops in which she will teach natural recipes that help to relieve us from stress and heal our anxiety. As Ochoa wrote in the workshop page: “this workshop is intended to take us in to the kitchen and find there in a DIY way the poetics of herbaria.”

Tuned with Ochoa’s work, Chalton appeals to a period of meditation and introspection, questioning the race to creating new and more online content in such an uncertain time.

https://www.instagram.com/p/B-EZjJnlZPw/?utm_source=ig_web_button_share_sheet

“We the Art ambassadors have the obligation to respond by restoring order or by creating a new order. We can’t keep calling anything Art and calling ourselves artists if we do not understand the Present and connect back to our selves, our societies, our Mother Earth and to our deep Cosmos.”

https://www.instagram.com/p/B-fr6jlFXlA/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link

The message from Chalton Gallery is a plea for humans to reconnect with nature and asks us to use this time to re-balance through introspection and meditation. At the same time, the gallery is spreading public art by sticking messages in the shop windows that are shut as the effect of the lockdown.

https://www.instagram.com/p/B-oukzAlTf3/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link

In my opinion, behind what at first sight seems to be a call for non-action (indeed meditation), lays a strong commitment to take action and make more art by using public spaces. In fact, Chalton is using closed shops which, until before the lockdown, were the very places where the everyday social interaction lived. With these messages, empty stores still provide their services to society. Even in the era of social distancing, social interaction can still happen in the physical world, and Chalton Gallery is proving this.

March 31, 2020

Social distancing – Week 1: How König Gallery tackles COVID-19

While art galleries and museums around the world were announcing their temporary closure due to the Coronavirus outbreak, on Friday 13th March 2020, I visited my last exhibition before the lockdown. I live in London – officially, the UK was still ‘business as usual’ at that time and until Tuesday 22^nd March – and the show was “Among the Trees” at Hayward Gallery, a group exhibition about nature and trees showcasing the works of thirty-eight contemporary artists. On that same day, König Gallery (Koenig Galerie), founded in Germany in 2002, announced the temporary closure of their venues in Berlin and London. Now, with its physical spaces shut, how is the gallery managing to keep its audience engaged? Almost instantly after the announcement, the Gallery started leading online tours of their shows in Instagram which quickly developed into the 10am Series.

The 10am Series is open to everyone to join via Instagram on @koeniggalerie and take place twice a day at 10am CEST and 10am EST, which is 3pm CEST. These are live conference calls between the Berlin gallery owner, Johann König, and artists worldwide. At the end of each session, there is the Q&A section through which the public can interact. There are two types of sessions. In the early session, Johann König speaks with the gallery represented artists, discussing their practices, and sharing thoughts on how the future could be when the situation resumes to normal life. While the later session is an open call in which the gallery owner leads random studio visits of artists who join the call in real-time. The style is informal, allowing conversations to be spontaneous and, at times, even funny (after all, who wants to experience art and cry?).

After having watched a few LIVE sessions, I had the fortune to speak with Johann König over the phone and discuss the idea behind the project. He explained to me how the gallery closed its spaces and opened up in social media to keep reaching its audience and fulfil the need for connection, now felt stronger than ever. Clearly though, with the 10am Series, König Gallery is doing something more than just keeping its Instagram profile active with news about their artists and exhibitions. In fact, and as König explained to me, starting from the proposition that art is about the physical experience, the Gallery is committing to offer that sought after experience to its public allowing people to participate in the direct communication. The 10am Series facilitates an open dialogue between not only the gallerist and the artist on call but also with the public who can interact during the Q&A section.

As galleries and cultural organisations around the world had to shut their physical spaces, they have turned to their digital presence. This unprecedented situation allows them to break the standard rules and test new grounds by experimenting with the full potential of social media. What König Gallery is doing with Instagram demonstrates a robust civic commitment towards both its audience and represented artists. In my opinion, aside this being a great way to kick off the day with some art and ideas, the 10am Series should be a source of inspiration for the whole art world and its future.

As Instagram is offering the videos for 24 Hours only, you can watch older sessions on König Gallery YouTube-Channel.

March 23, 2020

What’s happening?

Coronavirus – screenshot taken from BBC on 23-03-2020

Image taken from Google search on 23-03-2020

“May you live in interesting times” is the title of the 58th Venice Biennale (11th May – 24th November 2019) curated by Ralph Rugoff. Like a prophecy, this title seems to have revealed divine truth, and in fact we are now living in the most interesting of all times. Art Basel Hong Kong has been cancelled, the Biennale Architettura 2020 has been postponed, Frieze NY cancelled and so 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair, Art Night London postponed to 2021, and all art galleries and museums shut down until ‘further notice’ to prevent the spread of the Coronavirus pandemic.

As the virus is bringing an unprecedented time in the history of contemporary society (and in my own life time as it took away my job!) and all seems to be tried anew, we are urged to think creatively and test new paths and methods of survival.

The slate is blank and is for us to be resilient.

In the immediate, I decided to come back to my blog and document what I read, listen, and see happening in the art world right now through the internet filter.

Stay safe! Stay tuned!