TOP:Colours of Ostrava ist ein Musikfestival, das jährlich im ehemaligen Industriegebiet von Ostrava in der Tschechischen Republik stattfindet, inmitten von Hochöfen, Koksereien und einem zur Musikhalle umgebauten Gasometer. In diesem Jahr begleitete eine von Galerist Zdeněk Sklenař initiierte Ausstellung mit jungen tschechischen Künstlern (u. a. Chrištof Kintera, Adam Vačkař und Marek Čihal), die mit ihren Installationen, Filmen, Objekten und Performances den rohen Räumen unter einem der Hochöfen zu trotzen versuchten. Täglich besuchten, diskutierten, fotografierten Hunderte von jungen Besuchern die Ausstellung. So einen Andrang habe ich in einer herkömmlichen Ausstellung mit zeitgenössischer Kunst noch nie erlebt.
Das Ende der Faulheit – Ortsspezifik 2013 Zu den Fragen, die 2013 angerissen, aber nicht ausdiskutiert wurden gehört diejenige, ob sich ortsspezifische Kunst temporär aussetzen lässt. Anlass dazu gab der Umgang mit der ortsspezifischen Installation The Right to be Lazy von John Knight am Berliner Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart: Nach dem Willen des Künstlers verwilderte seit 2008 ein kreisförmiges Rasenstück auf dem gartenartigen Vorplatz der Institution, während die Hecken rundherum jedoch weiterhin gärtnerisch gepflegt wurden.
My artistic and literary crushes this year were numerous, and despite being exhausted by best of lists by early December, here are a few things that blew my mind/heart/etc. in 2013:
Massimilano Gioni, The Encyclopedic Palace, 55. Biennale von Venedig Jahrelang hat das Museum, dieser Apparat zur Klassifizierung und Hierarchisierung der Welt, den Blick auf sich selbst gewendet und sich in knöchernem Neokonzeptualismus und 16-mm-Projektionen als Problem beleuchtet. Und im „Enzyklopädischen Palast“, der Hauptausstellung der 55. Biennale von Venedig, war das Problem plötzlich weg. Stattdessen: Leichtigkeit, Offenheit und trotzdem Trennschärfe. Und nebenbei noch die Anerkennung des Internets. Das Museum als alter Freund, als Outsider unter anderen.
The philosopher Achille Mbembe once called Johannesburg the ‘elusive metropolis’. From emerging project spaces to women’s labour issues, Sean O’Toole and Gabi Ngcobo report on this constantly changing city of 4.5 million inhabitants, in which a strong photographic tradition — that includes David Goldblatt, Zanele Muholi and Santu Mofokeng — provides something of an anchor
A whistle-stop tour of three shows at the Hamburger Bahnhof and Museum für Fotografie by Mohammad alQaq, a Jordanian blogger and artist currently on the Goethe-Institut Art and Cultural Journalism residency programme.
When crisis becomes the norm, what is there for the art world to resort to but its capacity for spectacle? In Rome this involves maintaining confidence in the capacity for the contemporary art scene to continue to grow – a contemporary art scene is nothing if it remains static. Here, a difficulty is presented in that the word ‘contemporary’ implies newness and newness implies change. Yet change requires energy and energy requires the input of resources at least equal to the output gained by a given action. In an economic recession, output begins to recede, and in an economic depression, worse still, output is continually lower than input. Our current economic crisis is somehow unique in that its scale is unprecedented post World War II, and yet it is not classified as a depression. Whether this is due to the manipulation of economic figures or to the complexity of the financial model, which is multi-layered, abstract and difficult to chart is unclear. Indeed, a lack of clarity has become a central facet of Crisis era living. The proverbial wheels have come off the European economy, and yet in much of Western Europe the wagon keeps on rolling.
In 1968, Robert Irwin entered the Art and Technology Program, established by Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s curator Maurice Tuchman. The project, which ran from 1967 to 1971, put him in contact with Caltech’s Nobel-winning physicist Richard Feynman, with whom he toured IBM’s San Jose facilities and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. The same year, Irwin also met Dr. Ed Wortz, head of the laboratory at Garrett Aerospace Corporation, who was working on the physiology for NASA’s moonwalks. They started a fruitfully open interdisciplinary research project on perception (which also involved a young James Turrell before he left the project in 1969), that resulted in a lifelong friendship and changed Irwin’s perception of reality at large and of art in particular. Their repeated tests on sensory deprivation in anechoic chambers convinced Irwin that it is crucial to remove everything from the visual frame of an art work and to instead position the viewer at its core, so that he / she could experience ‘all the marvel inherent in our perceiving ourselves perceiving.’
Last Saturday, a demonstration on immigration took place in front of the Kunstraum Kreuzberg Bethanien in Berlin. A woman on stage cried while recounting the hard conditions of a refugee neighbour. A man was endeavouring to calm her down: ‘don’t cry, be strong sister, I’m here for you.’ Even if the EU controls freedom of movement – one need only summon the long and suffocating visa procedures – authorities still gave permission for the demonstration to take place. This scene called to mind the vigorous, beautiful protestors in Turkey who have been striving – and being physically assaulted – in the pursuit of another freedom: the freedom of speech.
