New Beginnings - Open house at Iaspis

Welcome to the first Open house of the year at Iaspis. 15 artists will participate, all of whom have held residencies of various durations, at Iaspis in Stockholm. Guest producer is Sinziana Ravini (Paris), curator and writer.

PROGRAMME:

Prologue
Friday, 15:00

Welcome by Cecilia Widenheim, Director, Iaspis and Sinziana Ravini, guest producer and moderator.

Act 1
Friday 15.15 – 16.15, The project room.
Theatrum Mundi, the world as a stage – on reality production.
Invited guest: Cecilia Parsberg
Artists: Hans Rosenström, Carl Palm, Jesper Nordahl, Can Altay, Mako Ishizuka, Daniel Eatock

Act 2
Friday 18:30-19:30, The project room.
The text as an act – on performative writing and storytelling.
Invited guest: Cecilia Sjöholm
Artist: Lina Issa

Act 3
Friday, 19:30
The party

Act 4
Saturday, 14.00 – 16.00, The project room
New Beginnings – on the aesthetics and philosophies of new beginnings.
Invited guests: Nicolas Bourriaud, Marcia Sá Cavalcante Schuback, Sven-Olov Wallenstein
Artists: Tom McCarthy, Meike Schalk, Ingo Vetter

The choir enters, sings and lamentates – what will happen?

Act 5
Produced by each and every one of us, actors and emancipated spectators alike. It is up to us all to decide how the story goes, and whether we have taken part in a tragedy or a comedy.

THE CONCEPT:

Michel de Montaigne once said: “The births of all things are weak and tender and therefore we should have our eyes intent on beginnings”. As fragile as they might be, beginnings have great impact on the course of things. In the beginning was the word. But Goethe’s Faust says that in the beginning was the act, overturning the entire history of logo centrism. Nowadays we tend to convince ourselves that acts are stronger than words. But what if the word was an act? What if writing is the principal action? If so, what would a collective writing experience be?

New Beginnings is an exhibition organised for Iapsis open house event on the 26 and 27 of March 2010. The exhibition will display the work of 15 artists working with theatralisation, staged realities, performative writing and storytelling. The common denominator between them is the quest for different kinds of temporality. New Beginnings is also the title of a collective writing experience – a manuscript containing a prologue, 10 monologues, a dialogical manifesto and an epilogue.

The prologue is a search after new beginnings; the monologues, and the dialogical manifesto is written by the 13 artists in response to the prologue. Finally, there is a summarizing epilogue.

The Open House event itself is structured as a theatre play in 5 acts where the artists and invited guests play the role of actors, the curator the role of the theatre director, the staff at Iaspis play the role of prompters that help the ensemble to stick to the script, and you - the audience, are the emancipated spectators.

If the world, as Shakespeare says is nothing but a stage, and life nothing but a tale signifying nothing – then it is up to each and every one of us to decide whether New Beginnings is a tragedy or a comedy.

Participating artists: Can Altay (Istanbul), Lina Bjerneld (Stockholm), Daniel Eatock (London), Fatale: Katarina Bonnevier + Meike Schalk (Stockholm), Sönke Hallmann (Berlin), Mako Ishizuka (Kobe/Stockholm), Lina Issa (Beirut/Amsterdam), Armando Lulaj (Bologna), Tom McCarthy (London), Jesper Nordahl (Stockholm), Carl Palm (Stockholm), Christodoulos Panayiotou (Limassol), Hans Rosenström (Helsinki), Ingo Vetter (Stockholm)

Publication design: Byggstudio (Stockholm)

For more information please contact Iaspis project manager
Jonatan Habib Engqvist, jhe@iaspis.se or +46 8 5065 5094.

March 25, Nicosia

Cimitero Monumentale di Milano

Nicolas and Louli in the snow

At the Pinacoteca de Brera a painting is missing

Girlfriends

Milano - Parco Sempione

Little Constallation - Milano

A view on contemporary art in geo-cultural micro-areas and small States of Europe
9 March – 8 April 2010

Exhibition area_ Sala delle Colonne
Video documentary_ DOCVA
Performance_ Careof

Fabbrica del Vapore
Via Procaccini, 4
Milan, Italy

Albani & Mussoni, Danil Akimov & sound art lab, Sigtryggur Berg Sigmarsson, Barbara Bühler Canarezza & Coro, Nina Danino, Oppy De Bernardo, Sandrine Flury, Barbara Geyer, Irena Lagator Ingibjörg Magnadóttir, Mark Mangion, Christodoulos Panayiotou, Paradise Consumer Group Pierre Portelli, Quino & Juanjo Oliva, Matteo Terzaghi & Marco Zürcher, Axsinja Uranova, Martin Walch, Trixi Weis

Opening: Tuesday, March 9, 2010
Preview: 7 p.m.
Public opening: 8 p.m. – midnight

Curator, Roberto Daolio
Assistant curator, Alessandro Castiglioni

Edition Mousse

How is the practice of making art experienced today in certain geo-cultural micro-areas and small States of Europe? "Little Constellation" began in 2004 as a research project focused on contemporary art, but not with the attempt to answer this question by finding a label that could be attached to "small states", or to provide a full, systematic picture of the art that can be found today in Andorra, Cyprus, Iceland, Luxembourg, Liechtenstein, Malta, Monaco, Montenegro, San Marino and in other significant cultural micro-areas such as Canton Ticino, Ceuta, Gibraltar or Kaliningrad.

Instead, the project has developed and taken shape—through the story of many different relationships, ideas, experiences—through the diffusion of information, placed in a continuous current that generates possibilities for interaction, and as a device shared by artists, curators, institutional representatives from museums, centers, and research collectives; the projects has stimulated proposals and the development of a platform of knowledge focused on contemporary artistic practice in these countries, within the sphere of the international artistic debate.

Born as international network for contemporary art from the idea of Rita Canarezza & Pier Paolo Coro, /little constellation/ from research project, also thanks to this show, become an international platform of exchange and spread of information, with the purpose to create co-productions and collaborations for new projects.

More than twenty artists of /little constellation/ meet for the first time in a unique and inedited exhibition that will present at Fabbrica del Vapore di Milano the more interesting projects of a vision on contemporary art in micro geo-cultural areas and small European States. Artists born e working in those small geographical realities, with a population of less than a million inhabitants, where the idea of border and identity become distinctive and essential, although realized through different languages.

Live and work in a "micro-state" force the inevitable comparison on one side with the macro social and political reality that include it, that is Europe, and on the other side with the sense of identity and the permeable idea of border that often in the work of artists become an idea of interior and emotional geography, where the knowledge of the world become knowledge of themselves.

Also if the title suggest it, there's no a limited thematic direction that associates all the artistic proposals. It's more a "constellation" of ideas that involve many directions, each performing on its own way. Paradoxically what associates and approaches these artists it's the perception and the sense of distance of living in these symbolic areas, as a garish result, tent to read these places (clear or not, judge or accomplice) in the continue process of systemic self-reorganization and autopoietic observation, that characterized the complexity of western societies.

Supported from the beginning, it was 2004, from Foundation San Marino and Social and Cultural Activities Office then joint by Ente Cassa of Faetano of Republic of San Marino, the project has created a real network of relationship with many authorities, associations, museums, artists of small states of Europe, Andorra, Cyprus, Iceland, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Malta, Monaco, Montenegro, San Marino and some micro geo-cultural realities of the European markets including Canton Ticino (CH), Ceuta (ES), Gibraltar (UK), Kaliningrad (RUS).

Contact
http://www.littleconstellation.org
nua@omniway.com

Press
METAMUSA arte ed eventi culturali
Gallarate (Italy) /Tel + 39 0331 777472
press@littleconstellation.org

Fabbrica del Vapore
via Procaccini, 4
Milan, Italy

Monday to Saturday 15.00-19.00
morning appointment
info +39 0331 777472

Nua new arts and contemporary research
str. lamaticcie, 54 rsm-47899 serravalle, republic of san marino
ph +378 0549904128 / mob +39 3356509052, +39 3381935637
nua@littleconstellation.org / http://www.littleconstellation.org

Roundabout

FANTASY & ISLAND - FRAC Corse

FANTASY & ISLAND, An exhibition about "somewhere only we know"

Curated by Celenk Bafra, Adnan Yildiz, Anne Alessandri

Artists: : Can Altay, Asli Cavusoglu, Verana Costa, Elie Cristiani, Hakima El Djoudi, Leyla Gediz, Liam Gillick, Dan Graham, Gabriel Orozco, Sener Özmen & Cenzig Tekin, Christodoulos Panayiotou, Gael Peltier, David Raffini.

05.03.2010-31.05.2010

FRAC Corse

The island is what the sea surrounds and what we travel around. It
is like an egg. An egg of the sea, it is round. It is as though the island had
pushed its desert outside. What is deserted is the ocean around it.
Gilles Deleuze

The country is first of all the space of a land considered from a certain corner or angle, a corner delimited by some natural or cultural feature (as one says when one thinks one can tell the difference): a row of trees or a road, a river or a ridge, a pass, a glacial constriction, a formation of alluvial deposits, a passing herd or an armed horde, an encampment.
Jean-Luc Nancy

“Fantasy & Island” is triggered by an institutional dialogue between Istanbul and Corsica on the occasion of the Cultural Season of Turkey in France. Initiated by a collective curatorial approach, the project is designed as a process based exhibition, which transforms some contemporary forms of artistic organizations such as residency, collection and exhibition on a Mediterranean island. Conceptually, it departs from the reality of its location, and the physicality of being based on an island as a psychological, social, cultural, literal and metaphorical levels of discussion, and brings a selection of works that reflects the diverse dimensions of island as a “ground for image.” Referring to Jean-Luc Nancy’s recent work, “The Ground of the Image”, which focuses on the split between image, imagination, and uncanny landscape, the exhibition project aims to transform its venue, Frac Corse into an experience of island as a conceptual entity.
The artist residencies in Istanbul and Corsica have operated as pilot studies of an intercultural dialogue; four artists have bridged these two different contexts through their body of work and approach of study. As resident artists for Istanbul; Gael Peltier‘s performative work investigates the borders of stage and stage-personality through different narrative forms, and his focus on the context of this exhibition brings an insider-outsider’s gaze into a transparent dialogue with the audience, whereas Hakima el Djoudi creates a monument as a critical form of political representation linking the militarist regimes with the economical structures, also specifically developing a new version for the Corsica show with Turkish Liras. Istanbul based painter Leyla Gediz’s drawings and a painting –products of her residency at Ajaccio- compose an installation that narrates a triangle for a happily ever after story; a personal attachment with a kid size shoe, a flashback memory of an interior landscape from the island, and a conceptual joke with a found object. Another resident artist in Ajaccio, Can Altay reconstructs social forms of life for developing conceptual relationships between the architectural and structural elements of mobility and communication, and translating them into specific forms of imaginative island(s) that floats on the ground of the space.

In order to relate the conception of the project to the institutional heritage of its institution, the curatorial strategy invites several art works from the collection of Frac Corse, such as Şener Özmen & Cengiz Tekin’s “Bonjour Monsieur Courbet”, a collaborative video work as parody of an art historical representation, Liam Gillick’s “Discussion Island Platform”, an abstracted form of a critical discourse about discussion platforms, Gabriel Orozco’s image of a parachute landing on Iceland, and Dan Graham’s sculpture that crystallizes a conceptual abstraction of the relation between inside and outside.

Is island a piece of land that is surrounded by water or is it surrounded by itself as reflection of its epistemological/ontological entity? Is it reflected on itself or is it reflexive itself?

In order to respond to some of these questions, with the first hand experience through a form of life on an island as an inhabitant, witness or storyteller, more artists contribute to the exhibition process. Christodoulos Panayiotou displays a selection of images from the historical archives of Limassol, Cyprus from Disney Parades since 70’s. As an outcome of Aslı Çavuşoğlu’s collaboration with a Turkish rapper the audience is confronted by an installation of the official documents, LP, and a sound system that plays the song titled “191/205” -written with 191 (including “revolution”, “equal”, “whole”) of in total 205 words that were censored by the national TV channel, TRT (Turkish National TV & Radio) –right after the coup d’état (1980). A young Corsican artist Verana Costa’s video work is a resistance against constraint; in the video the repetition of interrupted breathing creates a sensation of oppression as well as a concentrated energy, whereas David Raffini’s paintings can be considered as artistic expressions that redefine the psychological territory of his presence on the island. Ajaccio based artist Elie Cristiani reverses the perspective of a passerby –upside down, and ironically frames how everyday life is publicly circulated on an island.

Bringing together a selection of art works, which are produced at some islands such as Corsica, Iceland and Cyprus, or related with contexts such as Diyarbakır or Istanbul -in association with the island metaphor, “Fantasy & Island” deals with the physical conditions of living on an island; forms of isolation, mobility and attachment, which are decoding the physicality of an island, besides political and cultural connotations of closed systems of ideological control and repressive regulation -such as censorship issue and Turkey in the 80’s or 70’s isolated Cyprus under global attacks.

Ending up at an island brings endless possibilities that could happen at the same time with an unbalanced form of co-existence; joy or tension, imprisonment and emancipation, isolation or intimacy, farewell or arrival… As a ground for the images of today’s islanders, “Fantasy &Island” is an exhibition about the territorial power and limits of control; what surrounds us, and what we are surrounded with; and somewhere only we know…

Walking with Nicolas in Limassol

Chained together