Allora and Calzadilla at the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma
The Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma in Helsinki, Finland celebrates its 10-year anniversary with the exhibition Fluid Street-Alone, Together. Art21 artists Jennifer Allora & Guillermo Calzadilla (Season 4) are included along with fifteen other artists who use the streets of Madrid, Istanbul, Vienna, São Paulo, Copenhagen, New York, Berlin and other locations as subject, backdrop, material and/or live setting. Read the complete list of participating artists here.
Kiasma’s anniversary year aims to provide the public with personal experiences. In Kiasma Magazine, Director Berndt Arell, says:
“People always experience art on a personal level even though in some fields of art, it is possible to arrange for several people to have the experience simultaneously. Since we can’t build individual exhibitions for each single visitor, we endeavour to build a wider ranging exhibition so that as many people as possible find something that touches them personally.”
Performances, events and interventions will take place in the Museum’s theatre, on surrounding streets, and elsewhere in the city over the course of the exhibition. Fluid Street closes on September 21, 2008.
Explore Flickr’s most interesting photographs of the Steven Holl designed Museum. Read more about MCA Kiasma in an article translated to English from Finnish Wikipedia.
Allora & Calzadilla | Form
EXCLUSIVE: Allora & Calzadilla’s Ruin (2006) installed at Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris.
Jennifer Allora & Guillermo Calzadilla approach visual art as a set of experiments that test whether ideas such as authorship, nationality, borders, and democracy adequately describe today’s increasingly global and consumerist society. Their hybridized works—often a unique mix of sculpture, photography, performance, sound and video—explore the physical and conceptual act of mark making and its survival through traces. By drawing historical, cultural, and political metaphors out of basic materials, their works explore the complex associations between an object and its meaning.
SEE: More images, videos, and news for Allora & Calzadilla.
LEARN: Allora & Calzadilla are featured in the Season 4 (2007) episode Paradox of the Art:21—Art in the Twenty-First Century television series on PBS.
DISCUSS: What do you think about this video? Leave a comment!
PHOTO | Allora & Calzadilla, Ruin, 2006. Courtesy the artists and Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris.
VIDEO | Producer: Susan Sollins & Nick Ravich. Camera: Bob Elfstrom & Miguel Sanchez-Martin. Sound: Ray Day. Editor: Monte Matteotti. Artwork courtesy: Allora & Calzadilla. Thanks: Galerie Chantal Crousel.
Beyond Green at Hartford Art School
The traveling exhibition Beyond Green: Toward a Sustainable Art makes its way to the Joseloff Gallery at the Hartford Art School from April 4 - June 10. Eighteen artists and collectives are represented, including Allora and Calzadilla (Season 4) and Andrea Zittel (Season 1).
From the official press release:
Balancing environmental, social, economic, and aesthetic concerns, sustainable design has the potential to transform everyday life and is reshaping the fields of architecture and product design. Beyond Green: Toward a Sustainable Art explores the influence of this design philosophy on artists who combine a fresh aesthetic sensibility with a constructively critical approach to the production, dissemination, and display of art. The exhibition includes existing works, commissions, and previously presented work that has been “recycled,” spotlighting ways in which artists are building paths to new forms of practice. Many of the artists work collaboratively and leaven serious social aims with playful, off-the-grid spark, updating the Bauhaus notion of form following function or more recent Beuysian social sculpture. Their approaches range from the metaphorical to the pragmatic, sometimes serving as models for audience activism.
An extensive, accompanying catalogue is also available, with artists’ texts, interviews, and a podcast. For gallery hours and further information, please visit the Hartford Art School website.
Allora & Calzadilla in MASS MoCA’s Eastern Standard
MASS MoCa’s exhibition Eastern Standard: Western Artists in China, which opened February 2 and will be up for a full year, features a video by Art21 artists Allora & Calzadilla (Season 4). Often considered to be the next rising superpower, China is currently undergoing radical changes in industry and urban development, and the show offers artists’ reactions to this phenomenon. Artworks examine issues like the changing conception of a city, the enviromental impact of industrialization, and the cultural osmosis between east and west.
Allora & Calzadilla’s video piece Amphibious (Login-Logout) (2005) is one of several works examining the Three Gorges Dam’s impact on the landscape. The artists focus their attention on the changes happening in the Pearl River Delta, a central manufacturing site witnessed ¬≠ through the eyes of a group of turtles floating on a log as they drift toward the sea.
Read more information about the exhibition here.
Martian Museum show at Barbican features real Art21 artists
Examining contemporary art from the perspective of an extraterrestrial, the group show Martian Museum of Terrestrial Art, which opens this week at the Barbican Art Gallery in London, features the work of Art21 artists Bruce Nauman (Season 1), Eleanor Antin (Season 2), Mike Kelley, Cai Guo-Qiang (both Season 3), Jenny Holzer, and Jennifer Allora & Guillermo Calzadilla (both Season 4). This unusual exhibition’s starting point is the fantasy of an alien anthropologist attempting to understand and explain human culture solely from contemporary art, and it builds from there to offer a quirky look at recent art practices. The curators invent a humorously imprecise classification system designed to raise questions about the practice of anthropology, as well as the role misunderstanding plays in the understanding of contemporary art. Interested patrons will also want to download mp3’s of the the exhibition’s audio guide, narrated by the director of the Martian Museum of Terrestrial Art, the “esteemed” Dr. Klaatu.
The show is open until May 18. Find more information, images, and the audio guide here.
Prospect.1 New Orleans Coming in November
Slated as the largest biennial of international contemporary art ever organized in the United States, Prospect.1 New Orleans will open November 1, 2008 and run through January 18, 2009. Founding director and chief curator of this new biennial, Dan Cameron (former Senior Curator of the New Museum and recently appointed Director of Visual Arts of the Contemporary Arts Center (CAC) in New Orleans) was inspired to organize an exhibition in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina in 2005. The recently announced list of 75+ artists from around the globe includes Art21 artists Allora & Calzadilla, Mark Bradford (both Season 4), Cai Guo-Qiang, Arturo Herrera (both Season 3), Janine Antoni, and Trenton Doyle Hancock (Season 2).
Calling for a total of 100,000 square feet of exhibition space, Prospect.1 New Orleans will be divided among several buildings in various historic New Orleans neighborhoods, including the Warehouse District, the Bywater, French Quarter, the Marigny, and the Treme. A number of existing institutions and halls - CAC, New Orleans Museum of Art, and Ogden Museum of Southern Art - will be used, along with converted warehouses, commercial structures and other public spaces and found sites throughout the city.
How will Prospect.1 New Orleans help the damaged city? “[It] will contribute to the cultural rebuilding of New Orleans by creating an entirely new narrative about the city, its architecture, and its history. By re-branding the city as a place where the visual arts can thrive, the long-term aim of Prospect.1 New Orleans is to create an entirely new category of cultural tourism for the city, and to broaden its image overall.”
While the Prospect.1 website is good for answers to logistical questions, and briefly addresses the terms “global art” and “biennial,” what is perhaps most important here (as demonstrated in the above excerpt) is attention to the city’s predicament and progress-Prospect.1 tells us the state of things in New Orleans.
For further information and updates, please go to the Prospect.1 New Orleans website.
Allora & Calzadilla: Nongovernmental Politics
The book Nongovernmental Politics, published in April 2007, contains a collection of scholarly essays that are centered on the challenges and importance of nongovernmental activism in contemporary society.
The cover image for the book features a video still from the work Under Discussion by artists Jennifer Allora & Guillermo Calzadilla, who were featured in Art21’s latest season, in the Paradox episode.
The practice of these two artists is rooted in ideas of nongovernmental politics because they examine problems inherent to authorship, nationalism, borders, and democracy among other issues. The collaborative duo approaches these ideas through a mixture of photography, video, sculpture, performance and sound.
Never Mind That Noise You Heard: Allora & Calzadilla in Amsterdam
Last Friday, February 8, Never Mind That Noise You Heard, the first solo exhibition in the Netherlands by Season 4 featured artists Jennifer Allora & Guillermo Calzadilla, opened at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam.
Never Mind That Noise You Heard displays recent installations and videos that consider the continuum between noise and music as a tool through which cultural, social, and political relationships can be considered. Many works in the exhibition are the outcome of Allora & Calzadilla’s investigations into militarism, war, and the inscriptions of power encoded in and through sound.
One of these pieces is Sediments Sentiments (Figures of Speech) (2007), an amorphous sculptures that consists of two white truncated forms with tunnel-like passageways. From the tunnels come the voices of opera singers performing fragments of speeches by key actors in recent political history, from Martin Luther King and the Dalai Lama to George Bush and Saddam Hussein. You can see a video of this work and fragments of the video Returning a Sound (2003) here.
Made in Vieques, Puerto Rico, Returning a Sound is the genesis of the central work of this show, a monumental sound and light installation entitled Wake Up (2007). For this piece, the artists asked trumpet players from around the world to interpret
Other featured works include: Unrealizable Goals (2007), There Is More Than One Way to Skin a Sheep (2007), and Sweat Glands, Sweat Lands (2006).
Allora & Calzadilla - Never Mind That Noise You Heard is on view through May 5, 2008 at the Stedelijk Museum. Download the show’s brochure here.
Photos from Apocalypse Now at CCA Wattis Institute
Art21 curatorial intern Mary Cook recently visited Apocalypse Now: The Theater of War, currently on view at the California College of the Arts’ Wattis Institute. The show was curated by Season 4 artists Allora & Calzadilla, in collaboration with Jens Hoffmann, director of the Wattis. It also features work by Art21 artists Richard Serra and Bruce Nauman. View more photos from the exhibition on Art21’s Flickr site here. Apocalypse Now runs through January 28.
Allora & Calzadilla’s Apocalypse Now opens Friday at CCA Wattis Institute
The CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts in San Francisco presents the exhibition Apocalypse Now: The Theater of War beginning Friday through January 26, 2008. The show is inspired by the Bay Area’s history of antiwar activism and by Francis Ford Coppola’s 1979 film of the same name. It is co-curated by Wattis Institute Director Jens Hoffmann and Season 4 featured artists Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla. An opening reception takes place this Thursday from 6‚Äì8 p.m.
Apocalypse Now responds to wars around the globe, both past and present, but it also addresses how the language and iconography of war are embedded in everyday life and our broader social consciousness. The show includes works by a number of international contemporary artists as well as a diverse range of cultural artifacts, not all of which are directly related to war per se, but which do, within the exhibition environment, function as tools or even weapons of attack. The show is at war with itself, examining how struggle, conflict, and resistance can be built into each element of an installation. The viewer sees the unpalatable side of humanity, and scenes and situations that repel, while examining how exhibitions can test not only visual but also personal boundaries.
Participating artists: Antonin Artaud, Max Beckmann, Margaret Bourke-White, Mathew Brady, Jacques Callot, Bruce Conner, Leonardo da Vinci, Otto Dix, Ernst Friedrich, Francisco de Goya, George Grosz, John Heartfield, Ernst Jünger, Jon Kessler, Käthe Kollwitz, Lewis Milestone, Bruce Nauman, Pino Pascali, Pablo Picasso, Alain Resnais, Alexander Rodchenko, Martha Rosler, Luigi Russolo, Kurt Schwitters, Richard Serra, and Mark Twain.
Apocalypse Now is presented concurrently with Allora & Calzadilla’s solo exhibition Sediments, Sentiments (Figures of Speech) at the San Francisco Art Institute, on view through December 15.
Read the full press release and view additional images here.
