You are invited to UNBOUND !
03 NOVEMBER – DECEMBER 13 2007
Curated by Predrag Pajdic, with:
Justin Allen/Switch Theatre, Yasmeen Al Awadi, Oreet Ashery, Barney Ashton, Tim Blake, Nemanja Cvijanovic, Martin Effert, Wendy Faucheaux Dolan, Sagi Groner, Emily Jacir, Vesna Milicevic, Jean Gabriel Periot, Michael Petry, Nada Prlja, Santiago Sierra, Penny Siopis, Emily Stainer & Judith Witteman
Contemporary Art Platform 1 Thane Villas
London N7 7PH
United Kingdom
Tel +44(0)77 344 340 66
Free admission
Opening hours: Wednesday – Sunday, 12.00 – 17.00
The nearest tube station: Finsbury Park (Victoria & Piccadilly lines)
Buses: 4, 19, 29, 153, 253, 254, 259
Supported by:
Contemporary Art Platform
Inspired by:
FREEDOM
* the power or right to act, speak, or think as one wants without hindrance or restraint
* the state of not being imprisoned or enslaved
* the state of being physically unrestricted and able to move easily
* absence of subjection to foreign domination or despotic government
* unrestricted use of something
* familiarity or openness in speech or behavior
* the state of not being subject to or affected by (a particular undesirable thing)
* the power of self-determination attributed to the will; the quality of being independent of fate or necessity
“Gluttony is not a secret vice.â€
Orson Welles
All wonderful and liberated souls, free of any judgment and preconceptions as well as those ready to UNBOUND !
“There are more ideas on earth than intellectuals imagine. And these ideas are more active, stronger, more resistant, more passionate than ''politicians'' think. We have to be there at the birth of ideas, the bursting outward of their force: not in books expressing them, but in events manifesting this force, in struggles carried on around ideas, for or against them. Ideas do not rule the world. But it is because the world has ideas... that it is not passively ruled by those who are its leaders or those who would like to teach it, once and for all, what it must think.â€
Michel Foucault
“History, history! We fools, what do we know or care? History begins for us with murder and enslavement, not with discovery.â€
William Carlos Williams
A R T I S T S
JUSTIN ALLEN/SWITCH THEATRE
SWITCH THEATRE, Playing the Victim, Live performance, 02/11/07
Courtesy of the Switch Theatre
In his work JUSTIN ALLEN explores the transgressive, the queer and the kinky. Sexually "asleep" until the age of 30, he woke up to find the world infinitely stranger and more wonderful than he could have ever dreamed it. His work reflects the passion and bewildered joy he feels as a result.
He is the Founder of Switch Theatre, London and a creator, producer, performer and promoter working at the crossroads of theatre, cabaret and live art. Recently he produced and curated Spirit + Flesh UK (www.fakirtour.com)
PLAYING THE VICTIM
For the opening of UNBOUND on Friday the 2nd of November, from 6 – 9pm Switch Theatre performed live Playing the Victim, a new challenging work created specially for the project.
Pleasure or pain? Would you like to try?
On the 11th of November at 2pm at Contemporary Art Platform, Justin Allen & Ewelina Kolaczek will talk about the Switch Theatre's work, their individual creative practices and recent collaborations. The talk will be accompanied by images and video clips from recent projects including my site | in space and Spirit + Flesh UK. The artists will also answer questions about Playing the Victim, their recent collaboration created (site-)specifically for UNBOUND.
YASMEEN AL AWADI
YASMEEN AL AWADI, Innocence, archival slide installation, 2007
Courtesy of the artist
Yasmeen Al Awadi has lived much of her early life between the UK and the Middle East she returned to London and graduated from Central Saint Martins with an MA in Fine Art. Her work has been shown at the Blackwater Film Festival, Dublin, 2006; Nicolaj Copenhagen Contemporary Art Center, Denmark, 2006; This Day, Tate Modern, London, 2007; Undo, Dazed Gallery, London 2007; Recognise, Contemporary Art Platform, London, 2007 and BOUND, Open Eye Gallery, Liverpool, 2007.
Innocence
YASMEEN AL AWADI, Innocence, archival slide installation, 2007, detail
Courtesy of the artist
The artwork has been motivated by an article by Jemima Lewis “Pictures of innocence, destroyed by paranoia†published in The Independent on 11 August 2007. The text investigated how “taking snaps in public places [in the UK] is now widely perceived to be a dubious, if not illegal, activity.†The reporter further explained: “Everyone is so busy thinking the worst of each other - all strangers are paedophiles; all politicians are out to destroy our rights - that a crisis has been concocted out of thin air. It is not central government that is eroding this particular freedom, but our own paranoia.
It is often said of terrorists that we must not let them change the way we lead our lives. Yet a tiny minority of perverts has succeeded in tainting the most blameless of pursuits, and destroying the assumption of trust that keeps healthy communities ticking over.
Better safe than sorry, some would say. But paranoia does not make us safer - only more suspicious. The determined pederast will find his dirty pictures, one way or another. The rest of us can best resist his corrupting influence by pushing him out of our imaginations; by defiantly snapping away at christenings and sports days; by remembering that innocence is a habit of mind, as well as deed.â€
For Innocence 2007, the artist Yasmeen Al Awadi asked her close friends to donate images of themselves when they were children: swimming, playing in the park, climbing the trees… A number of old-fashioned slides, slide viewers and magnifying glasses have been left on a table for everyone to have a look and take a memory trip into their own childhood.
OREET ASHERY
OREET ASHERY, Treatment, 2min, video still, 2003
Courtesy of the artist
Oreet Ashery is a London based, context responsive artist working with live and performance art, video, 2-D image making, objects, text, research and the Internet.Ashery's work considers cultural and personal politics and their complex relationship to social realities. The experimental and conceptual aspects of the practice operate on the axis between every-day life and art. Ashery's work has been shown extensively in the UK and internationally in museums, galleries, art centers, performance spaces, cinemas, and site-specific locations. Most recently: Brooklyn Museum (NYC), Freud Museum (London) Tate Modern (London), ICA, (London), De-Balie ( Amsterdam), OK Centre for Contemporary Art (Linz), Foxy Production (NYC), Arnolfini (Bristol), Liverpool Biennial, Kapelica Gallery (Ljubljana), Kontejner (Zagreb), KKV (Oslo), FABO (Toronto), Galeria de Arte Mexicano (Mexico City), Kuenstlerhaus Bethanien (Berlin), Centre of Attention (London), Khoj, (Delhi)...
Recently she received a prestigious AHRC project award, commencing in October 2007 at the Drama and English Department at Queen Mary University of London.
Treatment
The work is a collage of seven films (Bent, Alien, The Magdalene Sisters, Hiroshima mon amour, Full Metal jacket, and Performance) depicting violent hair shaving or cutting, all within different contexts; joining the army, prisoners in a concentration camp, punishment of women for sleeping with Nazis, as a criminal threat, and as a disciplinary act in a convent. The film reflects the historical and cultural cross referencing embedded in forced hair cutting and shaving and where a shaved head signifies punishment, otherness, humiliation and loss.
OREET ASHERY, 100% Human, 2007
Courtesy of the asrtist
The work is a rug made of 100% human hair
BARNEY ASHTON
BARNEY ASHTON, Schema/Stasis, part II, live performance & 2 channel video installation, video still
Courtesy of the artist
Towards A Biography: Born in Dorset in 1970, among my current labels are verse dramatist, documentary producer and visual artist. All of these disciplines fused in my first film-poem performance Schema/Stasis which is exhibited as part of this Bound exhibition. I graduated from Goldsmith’s College in 1993 and went on to represent England twice as a young playwright through the Royal Court Young People’s Theatre, in Interplay Europe in Berlin and as part of the internationally co-written ‘Storming The Net’ drama. I have enjoyed Prince’s Trust Fund, European Union and local council funding for theatre works and have had 12 fringe theatre plays performed to date. In theatrical reviews of these works I have been variously referred to as ‘post-Berkoff’ ‘fuckfuhrer’, ‘shagmeister’, as ‘providing a refreshing jab of social realism’ and as being the ‘future of European theatre’ by Jason Boko in Croatia. That was when I thought I should try to fuck my way through the map of Europe that I was supposed to be the theatrical future of and, so, I am currently working on a psycho-geographical film-poem about Europe called ‘The Excursions Of A Lonely Poof’ using the film I shot on those self-same excursions. Might I recommend Romania? Recent achievements have included curating the Imperial War Museum’s Official DVD Collection, curating an archive weekend on Discovery Wings, curating an evening ‘Into The Jet Age’ at the National Film Theatre. I DJ in a central London fetish club and have recently completed a sensory deprivation experiment for BBC’s ‘Horizon’ programme for September 2007 transmission.
Peformed Works Textography:
2007 : Schema / Stasis; 2003 : Torsten The Bareback Saint; 2000 : Queer Dorset Bastard; 1999 : The Pump Room; 1998 : Threnody; 1997 : Born Angry (New Version); 1996 : The Bacchae; 1993 : Born Angry; 1990 : Rupert Drinks Vodka; 1989 : Volte-Face; 1988 : Culture And Anarchy; 1987 : Boy Changes; 1986 : Church At Llanbadrig…
Schema / Stasis – An Insight
When Predrag Pajdic started to talk in some detail about his plans for this project, I started to think in some lurid detail about how our reality is bound in ever so many ways; how, in fact, our identity is highly constructed at any one moment in time by several variables. Enslavement, for me, exists in the conditioning we are all subject to; it is implicit in the labels we apply to ourselves and have applied by others that constrict and blinker the index of possible means of self-awareness. We can be hindered through the inculcation of doubts both imposed on us or self-generated: the embarkation on the destruction of these constraints that short-circuit our thoughts and cauterise our potential seems to me to be the most admirable mission of any life. The nurturing of positive self-esteem is a veritable survival skill that should ideally be a birthright. In many ways, it seems to me patently obvious that a number of social conventions and social mores, not at all disassociated from the vested interest of power and the Establishment, can conspire to define who we are. Furthermore, the explicit Victorian assertion that “one should know one’s place†is alive and well although its guise mutates in line with the new control possibilities presented by successive developments in the new ecumenical omnipotence of our time, information technology: Information technology that is and its bastard children of profiled targeted advertising, untargeted spam, identity theft and surveillance. We drown in the incessant babble of our age and celebrate it as democracy, when it is quite possible that it also provides the glue that arraigns us in a subject position of thwartedness in that our participation in the babbling blinds us to the power relationships that control the distribution and use of those technologies. It also dovetails neatly with the requirements of capitalism to keep us all suitably consumptive, that we should all feel we are lacking something that the transformation implicitly promised in the purchase of a desired item or membership could cure.
Our relationship with control cultures whether interpersonal or imposed by laws are often tempered and mediated by our familial bonds, in our domestic sphere and in networks of friends. These all contain us and position us in terms of our awareness of ourselves and often function as a mutually supportive enclaves in a heartless world. If to be bound is to be human, to resist it seems is equally so.
My artwork Schema/Stasis visually represents the chaos of the existence of both people and cities, both of which have a life cycle to which different stages are ascribed with different graded valuations of worth. In Schema/Stasis, decadence and decay are mirrored betwixt and between people and the urban environments that they create. We shape cities and they shape us. Against this psycho-geographical montage, the words of a sequence of performance poems dealing with different aspects of intrapersonal imprisonment are read. The topics dealt with are as diverse as Memory, Loss, Paedophilia, Ageing, Fear Of The ‘Other’ and Sexual Fetish.
Bound : Memory (Autumn Again)
Petals fall parched in variegated sienna hues
As just so many burnt pieces of me
Now punch-drunk by the ‘truth’
And punctured by the proof
That you’ve ‘moved on’.
Unlike my coiled, circuitous thoughts of you
That you were, somehow, the only one.
You’ve eschewed every vestige and year of my hurt
And all the bloody altercations
Spewed of a real red raw frustration
That I never loved anyone ever
As much as I did you.
Late spring and early summer of, when was it?
1982?
And somewhere the thinnest of smiles rises and falls
At one corner of a dinner party table
As a former friend, by chance in your earshot
Mentions, in passing, my name.
TIM BLAKE
TIM BLAKE, Murder, multi-channel video installation, 2007
Courtesy of the artist
Tim Blake lives and works in London. He is an interdisciplinary artist, working with video, film, photography and paint. Blake graduated from Manchester Anatomy and Psychology BSc. His work has been shown internationally in various solo and group exhibitions.Blake explores and documents changes in the emotional zeitgeist concentrating on the politics of global dominance, globalisation, and world order, he looks at the mechanisms used to achieve power and control it's effects on ethnic groups, radicalization and cultural identity. Blake explores these issues through the informed and involved, from retired gangsters to the founding member of the Bilderberg Group to Renegade MP George Galloway.
MURDER
CAN YOU HELP US?
SERIOUS SEXUAL ASSAULT
ON THURS 12TH APRIL 07 AT ABOUT 3AM A FEMALE WAS SEXUALLY ASSAULTED BY TWO MALES ON BICYCLES. CALL OPERATION SAPPHIRE BELOW
In strictest confidence, please phone
020 7232 6182
CAN YOU HELP US?
INCIDENT
ON TUES 26TH JUNE 07 DURING THE EVENING AN ALTERCATION OCCURRED IN WITTINGTON PARK BETWEEN TWO GROUPS OF YOUTHS. SOME WERE ON BICYCLES
In strictest confidence, please phone
020 8345 3715
CAN YOU HELP US?
ARMED ROBBERY
ON TUES 28TH AUG 07 AT ABOUT 4:30AM A WHITE MALE THREATENED STAFF AT THIS BP GARAGE WITH A KNIFE AND BLACK HANDGUN BEFORE STEALING CASH AND FLEEING TOWARDS THE A3
In strictest confidence, please phone 020 8247 7940
CAN YOU HELP US?
MURDER
ON WED 24TH JAN 07 AT ABOUT 7:50 AN 18 YEAR OLD MALE WAS ATTACKED IN THE CAR PARK OUTSIDE HORWOOD HOUSE, PAVELEY STREET. HE LATER DIED OF HIS INJURIES
In strictest confidence, please phone
020 8358 0100
CAN YOU HELP US?...
NEMANJA CVIJANOVIC
NEMANJA CVIJANOVIC, The Sweetest Dream, flag, 2005
Courtesy of the artist
Nemanja Cvijanovic was born in 1972 in Rijeka, Croatia. He lives and works between Rijeka and Venice. His work conceptually explores socialist histories and constantly reconsiders the relationship between economics and politics sometimes to the extent of being censored. Past works include ‘Pago la luce (Satisfied Light)’, 2005, a large marble tomb stone of Josip Broz Tito which also acts as a radiator and ‘Here the future begins now’, 2004 a series of aluminium trays with symbols of modern life such as a BMW car cut-out of them. Displayed at the Erste Bank in Rijeka, Croatia, ‘Here the future begins now’ raised questions about loans offered to Croatian residents to help them meet their expectations of capitalist lifestyles. The work was removed after two days by the bank because it was apparently contributing to loss of clients.
‘The European ‘second empire’ or ‘sub empire’ is united by dreams and symbols. Its boundaries are open to the circulation of goods but waterproof to the circulation of people. Near customhouses there are CPT (temporary permanence centres, along all the Mediterranean coast: from Gorizia to Italian coast, to French coast, to Spanish coast. They look like concentration camps, from an age not so far, where people have no freedom, no justice and no culture). CTP are managed by a shameful society, that lives of wars, exploited countries’ misery (they are its new ‘colonies’). My point of view is from outside the EU, as Croatian citizen. EU approves without any problems the co-exhistence of ‘first and second degree (level/class)’ citizens within the community, and if we wanted to we could name even a group of ‘third’ degree invisible citizens. I hope that everyone who sees The Sweetest Dream, when observing the EU flag next time, would reflect on what is become of this EU ‘anti-fascist’ dream of equality and economic sharing.’ Nemanja Cvijanovic
MARTIN EFFERT
MARTIN EFFERT, Bound by History, a series of 11 photographic works & diary notes, 2007
Courtesy of Ron Mandos Gallery Amsterdam and the artists
Martin Effert was born in Germany in 1965. He graduated in 1995 from the Academie Beeldende Kunsten in Maastricht and currently lives and works in Amsterdam.
Bound by History
For the project Martin Effert was commissioned to produce a series of works relating to concentration and work camps during the Second World War. About his work Bound by History he explaines: “The Nazi horrors happened not so long ago. Having German roots myself I always felt ashamed about its past. Going to school in the 80’ the third Reich was discussed thoroughly. Usually Nazi crimes would be brought up, followed by rational explanations of how this horrifying part of the history could possible happen. What I didn’t learn was how victims, perpetrators and next generations could possibly deal with this dirty past. How could people cope as repercussion to fascistic Nazi horrors, how does a nation cope? Why is there no system of some sort installed in Germany to help? Why is a reliving ability to mourn in Germany still lacking?
Kaarst, the town in Germany where I come from is a sleep-town near Düsseldorf. In terms of history, it is a vacuum. Düsseldorf itself is rebuilt after the war with typical 50’ architecture. When I studied in Maastricht I was happy to discover sites and cities in Belgium and the Netherlands that are saturated with history. A lot of history in Germany is either hidden or vanished without any trace. The feeling of not being properly rooted or grounded has had its significant influence on my work, which amongst other things, is about the search to find a meaningful relationship with places. My project Bound by History will at the same time further broaden and deepen my focus to questions my origins and identity. One could call this, a journey or pilgrimage, but one that has no religious character, but other similarities with the tradition. People made pilgrimages not only as trial of faith, or to ask for supernatural aid. Some see it as a ritual for cleansing, transformation and meditation. Because of the strains and inconveniences it was an accepted means to redeem sins and even punish crimes.
In past, my work on the Night Series involved long searches for the right spot, with long waiting hours because of needed exposure times, as well as my fear of the darkness. These conditions or restraints, as I have discovered are essential for the way I accustom myself with places where I live and work. Perhaps this is why the intensity is reflected in my work. My search though Germany and Poland will have its own specific obstacles, challenging but also in a long term rewarding. The contrast between formal aesthetics and hidden tension is one of my main interests for making work. How could an artist/photographer become conductor of a charge or tension that is not instantly detectable? With this project I am going to investigate for the first time, places that had witnessed some horrifying past. I am very curious and sincerely hope that I will be able to capture it and make it tangible again.“
WENDY FAUCHEAUX DOLAN
Wendy Faucheaux Dolan is a recent graduate of Goldsmiths College, University of London with a degree in Fine Art and History of Art. Originally from the USA, she now lives and works in London.
Informed by trends of media and communication, Dolan’s practice is increasingly concerned with the perception of the virtual self, particularly within the growing populations of online social networking sites. Underscoring this concern is a keen interest in human interaction and an understanding of the internet as an infinitely vast and complex new frontier over which an intense struggle for colonisation had already begun.
The increasingly commonplace invention of image-based virtual personas incites the need for an investigation into both the impetus for self-representation and the pool of media images which serve as a reference base for online self imaging. It is this ever growing pool of images which traps the masses into a cycle of tautologies, and bestows more value on representations than on the represented. Dolan’s video work seeks to acknowledge the potential which online personas have to fetter the represented to a cycle of prefabricated popular representations.
Land of Milk and Honey
Taken from an actual chat room conversation, the script of Land of Milk n Honey is simultaneously salacious and banal. The characters, immersed in darkness and flickering in and out of the screen, resemble emoticons and allude to the tendency to represent the online self with an oversimplified icon. The two main characters admit to visiting a chat room because they are disillusioned with dating in the physical world, but as they communicate with each other, each stays steadfastly fixed to their own area of the screen and seems unaware of the presence of the other. The video attempts to illustrate the humour in online interactions whilst identifying the internet as a sort of mask which allows its participants to diverge from their normal behavioural patterns.
Fragments
The cyber theorist Sherry Turkle refers to the internet a social laboratory. By this she means to suggest that separation from the physical body in the virtual realm allows people the opportunity to investigate the different components of their personality. Fragments, 3-channel video installation, attempts to illustrate this concept by introducing three distinctly contrasting versions of the same character as revealed through three different online conversations. Because each of the conversations are displayed synchronously on their individual screens, the installation is a cacophony of voices mingling and competing with one another. This discordancy is reflective of the masses of netizens all struggling to be recognised.
SAGI GRONER
SAGI GRONER, Genesis Chapter 4 & The Crop, 2007
Multimedia installation in 2 parts consisting of: Genesis Chapter 4, 2007 (2 plastic male models, blue screen, rotating device, lights) & The Crop, 2007 (video installation)
Courtesy of the artist
Groner works with film, video and moving images from the internet. This imagery is both source and end product of his work. Out of sampled footage of films, documentairies, and historic archival material, he searches, finds and shapes new images and storylines. These stories are often sociological or political in their content. He lives and works in Amsterdam.
EMILY JACIR
EMILY JACIR, Crossing Surda, A record of going to and from work, 2002, 2 channel video installation, 132 min projection, 32.45 min monitor
Courtesy of Alexander and Bonin, New York and the artist
Emily Jacir is an artist currently living and working between Brooklyn, New York and Ramallah, Palestine. Her work focuses on issues of movement (both forced and voluntary), dislocation, radical displacement and resistance. It also addresses the unconscious markers of borders (both real and imagined) between territories, places, countries and states. She employs a variety of media in her practice including film, video, photography, performance, installation and sculpture.
Emily Jacir has shown extensively throughout the world. The most recent solo exhibitions include: Kunstmuseum, St.Gallen, Switzerland and Villa Merkel, Esslingen, Germany 2007/08; Alberto Peola Arte Contemporanea, Torino, Italy, 2007; Anthony Reynolds Gallery, London, UK 2005. Selected Group exhibitions include: 52nd Venice Biennale, Padiglione Italia, 2007; System Error, Palazzo delle Papesse, Centro Arte Contemporanea, Sienna, Italy, 2007; Global Feminisms, Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York, 2007; Altered, Stiched, and Gathered, P.S.1 MOMA, NY, 2006; 15th Biennale of Sydney, Australia, 2006; Without Boundary: Seventeen Ways of Looking, Museum of Modern Art, NY, 2006; Darat aL Funun in Amman, Jordan, 2006; 51st Venice Biennale, Always a little further, Arsenale, Italy, 2005; Belonging, Sharjah Biennial 7, Sharjah, United Arab Emirates 2005. Jacir also conceived of and co-curated the first Palestine International Video Festival in 2002.
Crossing Surda (a record of going to and from work)
Since March 2001, the Ramallah-Birzeit Road has been disrupted by a checkpoint manned by Israeli soldiers, APCs and sometimes tanks. This road was the last remaining open road connecting Ramallah with Birzeit University and approximately thirty Palestinian villages.
On December 9th, 2002, I decided to record my daily walk to work across the Surda checkpoint to Birzeit University. When the Israeli Occupation Army saw me filming my feet with my video camera, they stopped me and asked for my I.D. I gave them my American passport, and they threw it in the mud. They told me that this was “Israel†and that it was a military zone and that no filming was allowed. They detained me at gunpoint in the winter rain next to their tank. After three hours, they confiscated my videotape and then released me. I watched the soldier slip my videotape into the pocket of his army pants. That night when I returned home, I cut a hole in my bag and put my video camera in the bag. I recorded my daily walk across Surda checkpoint, to and from work, for eight days.
All people including the disabled, elderly, and children must walk distances as far as two kilometers depending on the decisions of the Israeli army at any given time. When Israeli soldiers decide that there should be no movement on the road, they shoot live ammunition, tear gas, and sound bombs to disperse people from the checkpoint.
Emily Jacir, 2002
VESNA MILICEVIC
VESNA MILICEVIC, Somebody Else’s Daughters, video still, 2006
Courtesy of the artist
Vesna Milicevic lives and works in Belgrade, Serbia. She graduated from the Faculty of Fine Arts in Belgrade in 1998 where she also received her MA. Among others her work has been exhibited in: This Day, Tate Modern, London, 2007; UNDO, Dazed Gallery, London, 2007; Paranoia, The Freud Museum, London, 2007; FemFest, SC Gallery, Zagreb, Croatia, 2006; VideoMedeja, 10th International Video Festival, Museum of Vojvodina, Novi Sad, Serbia 2006; Conspiracy, prog:ME, Centro Cultural Telemar, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 2005…
As an interdisciplinary artist, her recent work investigates the relationship between intimate and social facts, as well as questioning national and personal identity and the paradox of contemporary living.
Somebody Else’s Daughters
Commissioned for UNBOUND Somebody Else’s Daughters, 2006 is a gloomy, chilling and disturbing testimony of a woman sold as a sex slave to a Bosnian man.
JEAN GABRIEL PERIOT
Even If She Had Been a Criminal... (EUT-ELLE ETE CRIMINELLE...), 35mm, video, 10 minutes, 2006, video still
Courtesy of the artist
France, summer 1944. The public punishment of womem accused of having affairs with Germans during the war…
Awards:
- Grand Prix / Tampere international film festival
- Best international short / Cork film festival
- Grand Prix / International Odensee film festival
- Grand Prix parallel competition / Pris de courts Paris
- Special Prize of the Jury / off-courts Trouville
- Special Prize of the Jury / Chronograph international documentary festival Chisinau
- Best short / flEXiff Auburn
- Jury's prize and festival's prize / Videofestival, Bochum
- Best international short / Prends ça court ! Montreal
- Prix Artfilm Documentary / Artfilm international film festival, Trencin
- Best short Documentary / International documentary film festival Punto de vista, Pamplona
- Best short Documentary / International Human Rights documentary film festival One World, Prague
- Best short documentary / Aarhus festival of independent arts
- Jacek Kuron Award for best short documentary / Watch Doc, Human rights in film Warsaw
- Best short / Les écrans documentaires Arcueil
- Best Documentary / Sapporo short festival
- Best Documentary / Kratkofilm international short film festival Banja Luka
- Best Documentary / MFA international film festival
- Best Documentary / Euroshorts Warsaw
- Best Documentary / Limoges short film festival
- Innovation prize / Chicago international documentary festival
- Best Director, Best Editing, Best Sound / Festival Internacional de Curtas de Belo Horizonte
- 3rd prize media forum / Moscow international film festival
- Special Mention / Leeds international film festival
- Special Mention / Regensburg Kurzfilmwoche
- Special Mention / Almeria en corto
- Special Mention / Contact Ukrainian internation documentary film festival
- Special Mention / Dakino international film festival Bucarest
- Special Mention / Tabor film festival, Zabok
- Special Mention / L'avis de Château, Château-Chinon
MICHAEL PETRY
MICHAEL PETRY, Monument to the Unknown Soldier: portrait of an American Patriot, 2006, flag, pearls
Courtesy of the artist
Michael Petry was born in El Paso, Texas (1960) and has lived in London since 1981. He received a BA at Rice University (Houston), an MA at London Guildhall University, and is finishing his PhD at Middlesex University. He is an internationally exhibited multi-media artist, and co-founder of the Museum of Installation. He lectures part time at the Royal College of Art and the Royal Academy Schools and was the Curator at the KunstAkademi, Oslo, and Research Fellow at the University of Wolverhampton. Petry co-authored Installation Art (1994), and Installation in the New Millennium (2003), and authored Abstract Eroticism (1996) and A Thing of Beauty is...(1997). The Trouble with Michael, a monograph of his recent artistic practice was published by Art Media Press in 2001. Petry’s book Hidden Histories: 20th century male same sex lovers in the visual arts (2004) is the first comprehensive survey of its kind, and accompanied the exhibition Hidden Histories he curated for The New Art Gallery Walsall. Petry is the Director of the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) London, and the curator of the Royal Academy Schools Gallery. He is represented by the Sundaram Tagore Gallery in New York, the Westbrook Gallery, London and the Devin Borden Hiram Butler Gallery, Houston.
Monument to the Unknown Soldier: portrait of an American Patriot, 2006
The work features a real American flag embroidered with pearls in what appears to be a completely random or abstract pattern. Yet it is a real portrait of a gay American soldier who served in Iraq. Petry asked the veteran to provide a cum shot, which would act as the template for the embroidery, a portrait of a sexual man at arms. The soldier must remain unknown or face expulsion from an Army that was happy to see him serve, and possibly lose his life, yet not love nor make that love known. The object is extremely beautiful and can be seen as an erotic version of Jasper Johns’ Flags. The flag used flew over the United States Capitol on April 5, 1985 at the request of the Bob Dole, United States Senator. A certificate of authenticity accompanies the work.
NADA PRLJA
NADA PRLJA, SLAV.E, Site-specific installation, 2007, wood
Courtesy of the artist
Nada Prlja was born in Sarajevo, moving at an early age to Skopje, Macedonia. Since 1999 she has been living and working in London.
Prlja’s work deals with the complex situations of inequality and injustice in societies in transition, ranging from political and economic to religious issues.
The project ‘Advanced Science of Morphology’ (2006), consisting of 26 combinations of the national flags of the states that once made up Yugoslavia, replaced (in June 2006) the flags of the EU member states in Marble Arch Park, London, posing questions about the possibility of the existence of any Union. This project has provoked highly charged reactions in the media and the public, every time it has been displayed in any country within Europe.
In a similarly provocative manner, the project ‘One City, Two Voices’ (2007) questions issues related to religious propaganda. In Skopje, Macedonia, Prlja visually juxtaposes a monumental, illuminated cross of the Orthodox religion (raised on the apex of Skopje’s mount Vodno), with an illuminated object consisting of her own initials NP (positioned on the roof of the Macedonian National Gallery). As a continuation of the same project, she questions the religious propaganda implied by the ever growing number of mosques in the city, by broadcasting a voice singing opera from a series of loud speakers positioned within the Muslim community to coincide with the Muslim ‘call for prayer’.
SLAV Dictionary
Slav |släv| noun a member of a group of peoples in central and eastern Europe speaking Slavic languages.
adjective another term for Slavic.
ORIGIN from medieval Latin Sclavus, late Greek Sklabos, later also from medieval Latin Slavus.
SLAVE
Slave
|sl,,v| noun chiefly historical a person who is the legal property of another and is forced to obey them. • a person who works very hard without proper remuneration or appreciation : by the time I was ten, I had become her slave, doing all the housework. • a person who is excessively dependent upon or controlled by something : the poorest people of the world are slaves to the banks | she was no slave to fashion • a device, or part of one, directly controlled by another : [as adj. ] a slave cassette deck. ?Compare with MASTER. • an ant captured in its pupal state by an ant of another species, for which it becomes a worker.
verb [ intrans. ] work excessively hard : after slaving away for fourteen years, all he gets is two thousand • [ trans. ] subject (a device) to control by another : should the need arise, the two channels can be slaved together.
ORIGIN Middle English : shortening of Old French esclave, equivalent of medieval Latin sclava (feminine) ‘Slavic (captive)’ : some South Slavic peoples had been reduced to a servile state by conquest in the 9th cent.
SANTIAGO SIERRA
SANTIAGO SIERRA, The Corridor of People’s House, People’s House, Bucarest, Romania. October 2005.
Courtesy of GalerÃa Helga de Alvear, Madrid, Lisson Gallery, London and the artist
A black corridor, 240 meters of longitude, 120 centimeters wide and 2 meters height was built inside the house currently occupied by the National Museum of Contemporary Art, the area was previously devoted to the personal rooms of dictator N. Ceausescu (1918/1989). The corridor crosses through the 3 stories assigned to expositions in the building, but it crosses on the shortest possible way: going from the entrance to the stairs and then to the exit. 396 adult women were convoked to fill that space during two hours in the midnight of the 14th day of the month. Placed on both sides of the corridor, the women were ordered to repeat the phrase “Give me moneyâ€, literally and in Rumanian language. For that work each woman received 20 leis, about 6 Euros, also allowing them to keep the earnings obtained through the beggary. The access to the public was one by one, passing through a weapon detector placed on the buildings entrance. The detector, the schedule
For more information on this one and other projects by the artist please visit:
www.santiago-sierra.com
PENNY SIOPIS
PENNY SIOPIS, My Lovely Day, video, 1997, video still
Courtesy of the artist
Penny Siopis lives in Johannesburg where she works as a professional artist and a lecturer in fine arts at the University of the Witwatersrand. She studied art at Rhodes University in Grahamstown and at Portsmouth Polytechnic in the UK. Siopis works in a range of media and while her work covers different focuses her interest in what she calls the “poetics of vulnerability†characterizes all her explorations, from her earlier engagements in history, memory and migration, to her later concerns with shame, violence and sexuality.
Siopis has exhibited widely in South Africa and internationally. International exhibitions include: Art From South Africa, Museum of Modern Art, Oxford, 1990; Incroci Del Sud Affinities: Contemporary South African Art, XLV Venice Biennale, 1993. Havana Biennials 1994, 1997; Kwangju Biennale, Korea, 1995; Earth and Everything, Arnolfini, Bristol 1996; 1st and 2nd Johannesburg Biennales, 1995, 1997; Liberated Voices: Contemporary Art from South Africa, Museum for African Art, New York, 1999; La Mémoire, Villa Medici, Rome, 1999; Africas: The Artist and the City, Centre de Cultura Contemporania de Barcelona, 2001; New Identities: Contemporary South African Art, Museum Bochum, 2004; Arts Unlimited, Art Basel, 2004; Migrations, Belfast Exposed, Belfast, 2006. Her most recent solo exhibitions include, Passions and Panics, Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg, 2005; Shame, Kappatos Gallery, Athens, 2003 and Three Essays on Shame, Freud Museum, London.
EMILY STAINER
EMILY STAINER, Menagerie Revisited, installation, ongoing.
Wood, metal, porcelain, paper, fabric, lights, birds, video...
Courtesy of the artist
Emily Stainer is a South African artist and art historian, working in mixed media and installation. Stainer is interested in the politics of display and the gaze. Her work is structured to display elements of contradiction, to suggest variety, and comic contrast, ambiguous shifts: the world of childhood games and fantasy play versus the domain of adult knowledge and sexual corruption, the security of the domestic space versus the uncertainty of public scrutiny, the aesthetics of intricacy and detail versus the grotesque.
Stainer was educated at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg and the Courtauld Institute of Art, London. Exhibitions include MENAGERIE, The Sub Station, Johannesburg, 2003; 20:20 MAPPING TRAJECTORIES, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 2003; SEX & KULTUUR, Community Arts Project Complex, Cape Town, 2003; MENAGERIE, The Standard Bank Gallery, Johannesburg, 2005; BOUND, The Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool.
Menagerie Revisited
The collection of parts that comprises Menagerie includes found and made components, caged creatures, stuffed birds, boxed peepshows, toy-like theatres, mechanised jumping-jacks, gyrating doll parts, miniature worlds, indicators of domesticity and devices of display. These all contribute to an all-encompassing, multi-sensory experience; intensified in a confined space of display.
It is possible to read the installation that constitutes the boxed-theatres and caged arrangements of Menagerie in various – and sometimes contradictory – ways. The term ‘menagerie’ derives from the French word ménages, meaning a domestic environment or the management of a household. In the seventeenth century, however, the dictionary of the Académie Française (1684) defined ‘a menagerie’ as a site where princes ‘keep rare and foreign animals’. These contradictions form part of this installation. From our historical perspective it seems bizarre that slaves once formed an acceptable part of many a household. This installation seeks to convey the elements of the strange and fantastic that coexist with the familiar and domestic.
Historical menageries emerged in seventeenth-century Europe as a result of the burgeoning cult of the curiosity. Included amongst the collections of botanical specimens, mineral artefacts, paintings, medals and automata, housed in royal cabinets of curiosities, were often menageries of live exotic animals. Human beings with remarkable physical peculiarities too were exhibited. Freaks and black ‘savages’ littered eighteenth-century London’s show scene; indicators of man’s enduring fascination with and exploitation of ‘the Other’. Saartjie Baartman, a young woman of Khoisan descent, was exhibited as a ‘museum piece’ in early nineteenth-century London. She was displayed naked to expose her exotic and erotic differences. The same sentiments that were to prompt a disgust with the practice of slavery were behind widespread protests on the part of the British public against her inhumane treatment.
Menagerie deals ostensibly with the politics of the gaze. On the one hand, the gorgeousness of velvet, varnish and gilt provide the temptation of spectacle and pageantry that pave the way for a public pleasure show. On the other hand, the voyeuristic nature of the work confronts the viewer with his or her involvement in the insalubrious act of looking.
A paper theatre speaks of the impermanent and transient world of childhood games, but the display boxes that constitute this menagerie collection, have moved from the safe domain of the nursery. My theatres shift from the toy playhouse to the modern cinematic experience and from mythical worlds to erotic ‘Red Light District’ window displays. My cages are copies of elaborate, ‘gilded’ birdcages, meant to house exotic and charming feathered creatures, birdcages belonging to the Victorian drawing room or nursery. And yet they are also strongly reminiscent of the barred enclosures found in nightclubs and strip joints, containing gyrating women, women quintessentially on display to titillate the opposite sex. These boundaries, between theatre, birdcage and sexual advertisement, are easily blurred; they all rest on established practices of display, spectacle and pageantry, where dialectic relations are set up between audience and participant, viewer and scrutinised object.
It is sometimes difficult, in Menagerie, to determine whether the animated dolls’ limbs are those of an adult or a child, causing a merging of an uncomfortable binary. The uneasy act of watching a child’s pair of disembodied legs, opening and closing, resonates strongly with the taboos of infant sexuality. This disturbing image is reinforced by various shadowed images.
Menagerie was not conceptualised as a critique of the sex trade or indeed of the slave trade, but at the same time, South Africa has an appalling record of sexual violence committed against women and children. This permeates my work. Various statistics draw attention to the vulnerable and unbalanced status of women and female children in developing countries and Africa. Next to drugs and weapons, trafficking in humans is the third most lucrative crime in South Africa. Many individuals are forced into working as sexual slaves.
In a country with such elevated levels of HIV-infection, sexual exploitation has become a death sentence. Children orphaned by HIV/Aids are particularly susceptible to abuse. Since the beginning of this year over 900 children have disappeared in South Africa. Triptych I was made at a time when the South African media was focusing on child kidnappings and infant rape. Forming part of the structure of the piece, partly hidden amongst Victorian paper cuttings, are newspaper transcripts alluding to these atrocities.
In Menagerie, the boxed theatres foreground the ‘doll’, trapped in a never-ending cycle of movement, doomed forever to be on display in her underwear. She is impaled on the strings that make this mechanical violation possible. She stands outside time and defies death, in a way that is the antithesis to ourselves, who are subject to time and must face the inevitability of mortality.
The potential inertness of the boxed collection is counteracted by the mechanised workings and hum of automata, inducing the idea of the mechanical timepiece in an allusion to time and mortality. A veritable memento mori, designed to suggest an atmosphere of brooding menace.
The caged items – stuffed birds and mechanised body pieces – exude an aura of enigma, as the decorative becomes the bizarre. During the Victorian period, the embalmed animal conjured up various associations, Celeste Olalquiage writes how, ‘time is presented (in Victorian interiors) in the form of death: dried flowers, stuffed animals, the claustrophobic clutter of a place where there is no space for movement nor windows for light or air.’
The Victorian drawing room is also an index of British Colonialism. Although slavery as an accepted practice was largely outlawed by the British Colonialists, in effect the practice of Apartheid meant its de facto continuation for much of the twentieth century in South Africa. While Menagerie is permeated by many historical allusions, its major concern is with the hidden practices of human bondage that still exist today.
Emily Stainer, 2007
JUDITH WITTEMAN
JUDITH WITTEMAN, Sugarblind, live art performance, 2nd November, 2007.
Courtesy of the artist
Judith Witteman was born in 1971 in the Netherlands where she lives and work. In 2001 she graduated from Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten, Amsterdam. Her work has been shown internationaly, among others including: Tell Me A Story, Amsterdam, 2007; O Lugar aonde os Carros não Vão, Sao Paolo, Brazil, 2007; Straal, De Balie, Amsterdam, 2006; Sugarfree, Netwerk, Aalst, Belgium, 2005; Trobades Fugaces, La Bisbal d’Emporda, Girona, Spain, 2005…
For UNBOUND Judith Witteman has been commissioned to produce a new work relating to obesity. A live art performance took place during the opening of the exhibition on the 2nd of November 2007. She also worked in collaboration with Sagi Groner on a site-specific installation made entirely of sugar cubes (the same title).
SAGI GRONER & JUDITH WITTEMAN
Sugarblind, site-specific installation, 2007, sugar cubes
Courtesy of the artists
The number of overweight or obese people in the world now exceeds the number of undernourished, and there are no signs that the spread of obesity and its associated diseases such as diabetes are slowing. The number of overweight people is increasing at over 1 per cent per year in many countries. In England alone about 46% of men and 32% of women are overweight, and an additional 17% of men and 21% of women are obese. Studies at the University of Sunderland show the number of youngsters classified as obese - some as young as six - has doubled since 1996.
PREDRAG PAJDIC Curator
Predrag Pajdic is a London based artist, art historian and curator, who has been exhibiting and curating in the UK and internationally, as well as writing and lecturing on contemporary art.
Recent curatorial works include PARANOIA, a critically acclaimed touring group exhibition with 42 international artists, Freud Museum, London, 2006/07; THIS DAY, 9 screening programmes and live performances with short film and videos relating to the Middle East, Tate Modern, London, 2007; UNDO, group exhibition about conflict, tension and bereavement with international artists, Dazed Gallery, London, 2007; RECOGNISE, a group exhibition with more than 40 international artists examining misunderstandings and preconceptions about the Middle East, Contemporary Art Platform, London, 2007; CRIMES & SPLENDORS, a group exhibition, Ron Mandos Gallery, Amsterdam, 2007. This year he will be one of the judges for the prestigious South African contemporary art award Spier Contemporary 2007 and a guest curator with five solo projects for NOVA PARANOIA, Artneuland, Berlin, 2008.
While curating an exhibition entitled BOUND in Liverpool, which examined enslavement from historical references to present, a number of questions were raised about the celebration that is taking place this year in the UK (marking the abolition of slavery). Some forms of slavery may have been abolished, but unfortunately the power to control, abuse and deny freedom to others has lingered and is still present in many sophisticated forms.
With this in mind UNBOUND has been created, to challenge and revise outdated definition of slavery and the ground to celebrate its abolition.
Pajdic is currently researching contemporary art and its place in a time of crises. Future projects will include ON TOLERANCE, an exhibition questioning racism, bigotry and fear of the other, DISPOSABLES on abuse, betrayal and neglect of elderly, and A-PART-HATE examining policies and systems of segregation or discrimination in contemporary world.
For more information please visit:
http://www.myspace.com/predrag_pajdic
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