Tag: #artworld

Social distancing – Week 10: Days of Protests

On Monday 25th May in Minneapolis, Minnesota, the policeman Derek Chauvin, held his knee to George Floyd’s neck for nearly nine minutes. Floyd kept repeating “Please, I can’t breathe”, but Chauvin did not listen to the imploring man. By the time the paramedics arrived, it was too late. George Floyd, a 46-year-old black man, was dead.

The murder has been filmed, and its video went viral straight away, stirring the anger of thousands. Soon, enraged protests sparked in Minneapolis and in response, president Trump threatened black American citizens with barbaric murdering by tweeting: “When the looting starts, the shooting starts.” As a result, protests took place all over the country, also counting several episodes of violence. In an attempt to counteract violence in the streets, on Monday 1st June, NY Mayor De Blasio, announced a citywide curfew (the last curfew was put in place in 1943). Since the curfew announcement, protesters got together against police brutality and systemic racism worldwide.

The makeshift memorial outside Cup Foods where George Floyd was murdered by a Minneapolis police officer
MINNEAPOLIS , MINNESOTA – MAY 31: The mural and makeshift memorial outside Cup Foods where George Floyd was murdered by a Minneapolis police officer on Sunday, May 31, 2020 in Minneapolis , Minnesota. (Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)

The art world rose its voice in solidarity with rioters too. Alongside joining demonstrations, artists have been painting murals in Floyd’s memory in the US, Europe, Syria, and elsewhere. Email inboxes flooded with newsletters stating the organisation’s support to the Black Lives Matter movement. Emails which often include tips on how to safely protest amidst the threat of Coronavirus.

In Minnesota, the Walker art Centre and the Minneapolis Institute of Art have pledged to cut ties with the Minneapolis Police Department by stopping hiring police at their events. Collecteurs – the collective museum of private collections based in NYC – converted its Instagram profile into a live archive of the BLM movement. Their Instagram page showcases historical images related to black people long-lasting fight for their rights as well as real-time footage of current protests. Cultural organisations from around the world are campaigning in support of BLM. These vastly share bail funds and reading lists to inform their audience while providing the tools to help protesters.

All these are just some example of an overall soft contribution. However, hopefully these small actions will lead to a more radical change within an industry which is still predominantly white.

Raised fist – black power symbol – image taken from Pinterest

 

Social distancing – Week 7: Home Cooking – “Collective Intelligence” a collectively owned artwork

Home Cooking, “a digest of new artworks, scores, events, and actions started during this time of suspension.” Its first post on Instagram is dated 22nd March 2020, the day the lockdown started in London. The project was kicked off by the British artist Marianna Simnett together with peer artists and friends. Home Cooking is a platform where artists, creatives, and thinkers from around the world share their ideas and projects. How? Through Instagram posts and takeovers, Livestream interventions, conversations, and interviews on Instagram, Twitch, and Zoom. Art is the beating heart of the project.

It is though Home Cooking that I learnt about the new typeface, “Emergence”, created by artist Agnieszka Kurant in collaboration with designer and typographer Radim Pesko. The font is the result of a couple of years of work during time which the duo has been collecting and analysing 26 different typefaces. Like in a puzzle, “Emergence” has been made by assembling small parts obtained by breaking down the structure of the 26 fonts. On Friday 24th April, during the project presentation in Home Cooking, Kurant and Pesko unveiled the first version of “Emergence.”  They explained that the font could take on different shapes and change by diversifying the assembling combinations. After the initial presentation, Kurant launched an open call inviting artists, writers, and thinkers to participate by submitting a sentence that reflects on the Coronacene. The gathered sentences will form a collectively owned artwork, “Collective Intelligence.”  The open call announces that the collectively made work would be auctioned so to generate revenue to be shared among the artwork’s authors.

From Home Cooking – 12th May 2020:

Dear friends and friends of friends,
A few days ago on Home Cooking, we launched a collective-intelligence artwork that I developed together with the typographer Radim Pesko — the typeface we called “Emergence.”
A video of the presentation and discussion we had for Home Cooking with the sociologist Janek Sowa and the theorist Stephen Wright around the concepts behind Emergence can be found here:
https://vimeo.com/414483803
We are kindly inviting artists, writers, and thinkers to send us a single phrase or sentence, reflecting on the ways in which today, especially during the Coronacene, both the self and the crowd have mutated into new, unexpected forms. Let’s think and talk about collective intelligence, the evolution and plasticity of the social brain and social bonds, self-organization, solidarity, the multitude, the self as polyphony, and the future of singular versus hybrid/collective authorship and sympoiesis/collective creativity. Please send us single phrases or sentences around these questions and we will turn them into individual posters using the Emergence typeface. This collection of posters will form Collective Intelligence: an artwork based on collective authorship, collective ownership, and profit sharing. Our goal is for this artwork/collection to be exhibited as a whole and collectively owned by many “shareholders,” both institutions and individuals. We hope to auction the poster collection’s “shares” several times and each time redistribute the profits among participating artists, writers, and thinkers who need it most these days. It could develop into many interesting directions. Please send your contributions (a single sentence or phrase) to Radim Peško mail@radimpesko.com or myself info@kurantstudio.com. Please share this freely with other artists, writers, and thinkers.

The investigative aspect of “Collective Intelligence” dominates the whole project. The resulting artwork and its potential sales and profit will test not only the possibility to generate income for a group but also the concepts of collective ownership and authorship. Whereas, it is no doubt that thinking about Universal  Basic Income and testing its feasibility is crucial in the age of Coronacene. As the project requires the mental switch from individual to a collective mind-set with the subsequent knockdown of capitalistic ideas, I expect this to generate extensive debate. So, let’s stay tuned and follow the project on #collectiveintelligence and  @____homecooking____

Stay Home Instagram

Social distancing – Week 6: “2 Lizards” by Meriem Bennani and Orian Barki

Have you ever read “The Best and The Worst of The Art World” which Artnet publishes every Friday? It is a bullet point list of news divided into two categories, predictably “Best” and “Worst”. Reading it is for fun. It is like taking a quiz in which one can also learn by reading just the news in capsules. Often, while going through the list, I become curious about something and decide to go deeper by clicking on the article links. It was in this way that I found out about the popular video series, “2 Lizards”. The project was launched on Instagram IGTV in early March by artist Meriem Bennani, in collaboration with documentary filmmaker Orian Barki (both millennials and based in New York).

The series is presented in 2-minute episodes mixing 3D-renderings of animals set against real footage. The main characters are two lizards living in Brooklyn during the lockdown sharing their thoughts, concerns, and feelings of isolation. The neighbours are animals of other species. Since the first episode (there are five to date), the artist duo has been contacted by creatives willing to contribute to the project. So, they opened up and started remote collaborations with friends and peers, adding soundtracks and voices to the films.

Episode 1 went viral getting more than 154k views at the time of writing. How comes that these short videos are so popular??? They are comforting. We can easily identify with the animated characters as they express our own feelings perfectly. In fact, both plots and dialogues are taken from everyday situations we are all living through in this strange time of social distancing. In the first chapter, the 2 lizards snoop at their neighbourhood from a terrace while conversing on the quarantine optimistically. “In a fucked up way, I’m loving this,” says one. The other answers back: “That is such a quarantine week one thing to say.” 

Episode 4 is about a feline nurse’s day-to-day life who talks with the two reptiles. The cat-nurse reports one heart-breaking event that happened during one of her shifts at the hospital. A patient connected to a ventilator, telephones his wife. The nurse, who was holding the mobile to the patient’s ear, explains how bad she felt as all the wife could hear was a ventilator. The video ends with the ubiquitous clapping for carers from balconies, and the nurse asserting “this pandemic has made me way cooler than I really am.”

Episode 5 is probably the most iconic of the series until now. The 2 reptiles go out for a stroll in a deserted New York City. They discuss how the city has changed and how, after all, still looks normal if not for the frozen economy. At a certain point, one of the lizards gets a call from her French mother. The mother-daughter chat reveals a condition familiar to many living in big cities, living overseas from their families while having news updates from home countries. When the phone call ends, the other companion needs to pee. Soon the buddies realise nothing is really the same during the lockdown. Starbucks is closed, and the lizard answers the call of nature in Time Square, pointing out that there is nobody around.

Bennani and Barki cunningly translate what we hear and see on TV and social media onto these witty micro-videos. What I felt from watching the episodes is that I am a person like many others. I find in these short animations something that belongs to me too, hope and anxiety. The reptiles’ lives and their dialogues perfectly embody our current ordinary in the uncertainty of the pandemic.

Stay Home Instagram

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

screenshot of Surface Collider (23032020) by James Irwin. available at AKG - the art happens here - week 1
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” (11th Jan – 15th 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
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 7th 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 Disstancing Portraits, 2020, by Adad Hannah. available at AKG - the art happens here - week 2
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
week 3 AKG Instagram story 2 of 2 – Open Call

 

Stay Home Instagram

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 19th 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.

Stay Home Instagram

What’s happening?

Coronavirus image taken from Google search on 23-03-2020
Coronavirus – screenshot taken from BBC on 23-03-2020

 

May you live in interesting times - taken from Google search 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!