Sorry to hear that Mark Sladen is to leave the ICA. Sladen has been the ICA’s Director of Exhibitions since the beginning of 2007, and has been responsible for solo shows from Enrico David, Rosalind Nashashibi, Loris Gréaud and Billy Childish (which is currently showing), and group shows including ‘Poor.Old.Tired.Horse’, ‘Double Agent’ and ‘Nought to Sixty’, an ambitious survey of emerging artists in the UK.
According to yesterday’s press release: ‘His position has been made redundant within a review of the ICA’s organisational structure’ – David Thorp, who has been working with the institution as an external consultant since last year, will be advising on the ICA’s artistic programme until further notice.
According to a piece just posted by Charlotte Higgins on the Guardian website, Sladen told bosses that he would only reapply for his position if the ICA’s director, Ekow Eshun, resigned. ICA staff have apparently taken a vote of no confidence in the director. According to an unnamed staff member: ‘The results of the vote were suppressed, and whatever the official line on this, this is manipulation. Ekow Eshun made it clear that to reveal the results of the vote would be an act of sabotage, that the ICA would suffer from such information being out there.’
This restructuring is unfortunately timed, given that the ICA has just received 1.2 million from Sustain, an emergency fund organized by Arts Council England to help arts organisations affected by the recession. For more, read JJ Charlesworth’s detailed (and prescient) analysis of the ICA’s finances, posted on the Mute website three weeks ago.
The future isn’t what it used to be – no one seems to talk about it so much these days. Of course, this wasn’t always the case: in the 1960s Eastern Bloc, artists, scientists, engineers and architects were conscripted to realize the Utopia of full-blown Communism. And the future meant space travel.
This is the subject of Star City, a smart new group show at Nottingham Contemporary curated by director Alex Farquharson and Lukasz Ronduda, which looks back at Communism’s visions of the future. (Martin Herbert’s review of Notts Contemporary’s opening show, David Hockney/Frances Stark, is here.) The subject of a 2000 film by Jane and Louise Wilson, Star City is also the USSR’s once-secret cosmonaut training facility just outside of Moscow (which, sweetly, actually translates closer to something like ‘Starry Town’).
Jane and Louise Wilson, Star City (2000), installation view
As frieze contributor Owen Hatherley noted in Militant Modernism (2009), ‘A history of the Soviet avant-garde could be written through its aspirations of the interstellar.’ This was one of the many subjects of last Friday’s rangy ‘Futurological Congress’ in Nottingham. Named for the 1971 Stanisław Lem novel, the day-long event looked at the fictional and political implications of the space race, and saw enlightening contributions from Cold War Modern curator David Crowley, ‘Star City’ co-curator Ronduda (on Julius Koller), The Otolith Group’s Kodwo Eshun and Russian Studies professor Rolf Hellebust, among others.
Other highlights included Otolith’s performance–lecture Communists Like Us (look out for Nina Power’s monograph on Otolith in the March issue of frieze, out next week), a guided bus tour led by Pawel Althamer and great documentation of Aleksandra Mir’s 2007 Gravity project at the Roundhouse, for which she fabricated a spaceship – watch it below:
Established in Reykjavik in 2006, Sequences is an independent annual arts festival that was founded by four of the city’s many artist-run galleries: The Living Art Museum (which has been active for more than 30 years); Kling & Bang (established by a group of ten artists in 2003); Dwarf Gallery (a tiny space open several months a year); and the now-defunct Bananananas, along with the support of The Center for Icelandic Art (CIA.IS). With a focus on performance, though also incorporating a programme of seminars, lectures and screenings, Sequences remains the only festival in Iceland dedicated to contemporary art – an important position given the harsh recession that followed last October’s economic collapse.
When I visited Reykjavik last month, the headline on the cover of the Grapevine, the city’s listings guide, read: ‘ROCK BOTTOM PRICES! NO CREDIT? NO PROBLEM!’ – a pointed reference to the selling-off of energy resources to international corporations at kreppa rates. Many artists and musicians I met who had been abroad in October last year talked about the realization that their cards had stopped working or else that their money was worth half practically overnight. A year after the crash it’s perhaps still too soon to say exactly what has changed. Some said that the (officially bankrupt) oligarchs still control the industry, while one of the two daily papers is owned by the architect of the collapse, former PM (and central bank manager) Davið Oddsson. With this backdrop, Sequences’ ten-day programme looked something like a small-scale miracle.
The festival directors change every year: this year it was organized by the young duo Kristin Dagmar Johannesdóttir and Klara Dorhallsdóttir. On the opening night was a premiere of Tadskegglingar (apparently difficult to translate, it means something along the lines of ‘men who have horse manure in their beards’) at the Reykjavik Art Museum, a performance by the festival’s honorary artist Magnús Pálsson. Long and baffling, with some elements based (as far as I could work out) on elements of the sagas, Pálsson’s surreal performance – which incorporated around 30 performers from The Icelandic Sound-Poetry Choir – was oddly mesmerizing. Now 80, Pálsson founded the experimental theatre group Grima in 1962 and was also part of the SUM group – along with Dieter Roth, who lived in the city between 1957–64 – and represented Iceland in the 1980 Venice Biennale. SUM started as an exhibition in 1965 – it’s other founder was Hreinn Fridfinnsson, one of the best-known Icelandic Conceptual artists from this period (in the UK at least) thanks to a Serpentine survey in 2007.
Aside from big international successes such as Sigur Rós and Björk, my first contact with the unusually interdisciplinary Icelandic arts scene came about eight years ago, encountering the band Slowblow through the film they directed and scored, Noi Albinoi 2003, which led me to Bedroom Community / Kitchen Motors affiliates such as Jóhann Jóhannsson and Nico Muhly. This fertile relationship between art and music is being continued still by Egill Sæbjörnsson (whose quirky, interesting show – titled ‘Spirit of Place and Narrative’ – is at the Reykjavik Art Museum) and Ragnar Kjartansson (who represented Iceland at Venice this year), though goes back to Roth’s period. In 1965 he organized a concert inviting Nam June Paik and Charlotte Moorman. (Indeed, the Kitchen in New York was founded by an Icelandic couple in 1971.)
For a first-time visitor, one of Sequences’ virtues was that it sprawled across the tiny city centre, using public spaces as well as galleries. Later in the evening I stumbled across a crowd of people gathered in an outdoor car-park, with two vast projections – of a marching knight and a woman – being beamed onto the enclosing walls, while a metal band jammed in a small wooden cabin accompanied by men sitting on the floor breaking rocks with hammers. I thought that this was a standard Friday night fare, but it was actually artist Sigurður Guðjónsson’s contribution to the festival.
The footage was being projected from across the road, from a large studio space by the harbour called the House of Ideas. The complex includes designers, artists and students and has been running for around a year (a positive outcome of the crisis has been that such spaces are being turned over into similar projects). At the party were performances by Finnish artist Maurice Blok and a film, This dumb region of the heart, by Páll Haukur Björnsson (who was, I think, the model from Ragnar Kjartansson’s Venice pavilion). The latter was only shown on two portable DVD players at a time, playing in the back of a car while an uncommunicative driver sped around the harbour area.
That evening also saw the premiere of a new work by Spartacus Chetwynd and her Mime Troupe (a revolving cast of friends), who put on an inspired puppet show called Feminism, Little Tales of Misogyny. Dense with references, and influenced by the four-part structure of D. W. Griffith’s Intolerance (1916), the piece traced the history of modern feminism and women’s involvement with the early civil rights movement, from Mary Wollstonecraft to the Suffragettes, Ida Bell Wells-Barnett and Patricia Highsmith.
Other highlights were German duo Prinz Gholam’s calm, solemn performance Air, which comprised a 20-minute series of held poses from dance, statuary and pietas.
Odder was SCOURGE, pictured above, by Melkorka Huldudóttir at Dwarf Gallery (so-called because it’s a basement with a five-foot ceiling). At Lost Horse was an exhibition titled ‘(made up and let down)’, which included ‘I-Projector’ by Line Ellegard and Imagined Death by Anita Wenstrom. Lost Horse is a tiny wooden house near the old Sirkus, the artist hang-out that was transported to Frieze Art Fair last year as part of Frieze Projects. Kling and Bang, who ran the bar, have one of the better-known galleries, and currently have a show – titled ‘Black Swans’ – by The Icelandic Love Corporation.
‘I’m playing the role of a little old lady telling her life story.’ So begins The Beaches of Agnès, Agnès Varda’s whimsical and lovely autobiographical documentary, which is released in the UK on 2 October. (Varda will be talking about her life and work at 5.00pm on Saturday 17 October as part of Frieze Talks 2009.)
Addressing the camera or watching on while childhood scenes are playfully re-enacted, the 80-year-old filmmaker visits locations from her life – both filmed and private – as the memoir shifts between archival footage (unfinished early projects as well as her better-known films) and gentle flights of fancy involving family and friends.
Though roughly chronological, The Beaches of Agnès proceeds via these loose associations, circling around the several beaches that Varda sees her life as returning to – from the Belgian seaside of her childhood (Varda was christened Arlette after Arles, the town in which she was conceived, though changed her name at 18); Venice Beach, California where she lived with her husband, the director Jacques Demy, between 1967 and 1977; and Paris, where a streetside beach is fabricated in lieu of an actual coastline. One of the film’s many joys is the way in which the films of her contemporaries are interspersed – Demy (who is a palpable though largely silent presence throughout), Jean-Luc Godard, Alain Resnais and Varda’s ‘friend and interlocutor’ Chris Marker. The latter, whose preoccupations with time and the lure of images is the clearest equivalent for the film’s technique, is represented by an orange cartoon cat – I’m guessing an in-joke about his 2004 film The Case of the Grinning Cat.
In a Q&A following a screening of the film in London on Monday evening, Varda discussed how she has always seen memory as a process of slow fragmentation. Though playful in approach – props are often little more than cardboard cut-outs – the film’s retrospective gaze deals with both the horror of forgetting and living on through celluloid. ‘While I live, I remember’, Varda states simply, towards the end of the film. Wise and uninhibited, she’s also an entertaining speaker – when asked why, exactly, she changed her name, Varda said: ‘All names that end with “-ette” I think are ridiculous. If I had been conceived in London I’d have been called Londonette or something…’
Varda showed at the Venice Biennale in 2003 and, more recently, at the Fondation Cartier; though she refers to herself as ‘a young artist and an old filmmaker’, presenting work in an exhibition context is a kind of return for Varda, who spent her 20s more involved with art than with film (after having studied art history at the Louvre, an early job was photographing and retouching Rodin sculptures). However, when asked whether she now considers herself more artist than filmmaker, she responded drily: ‘My first film was in 1954. I’ve been making films for 55 years – I think I’m a filmmaker, non?’
With contributions from Jennifer Higgie, Dan Fox and Barbara Casavecchia, a full report from the 53rd Venice Biennale is included in the September issue of frieze and is also available to read in full online. It’s worth also adding that Galeria Fortes Vilaça recently added films by João Maria Gusmão and Pedro Paiva – whose Portugese pavilion was one of my highlights – to YouTube.
The 16 mm films, presented as part of the exhibition ‘Experiments and Observations on Different Kinds of Air’ at Venice, lose a little when shown online but they’re definitely worth a look.
Meteorítica (2008)
Pedras Rolantes (Rolling Stones, 2007)
O Oculto (The Occult, 2007)
Heráclito 1 (Heraclitus 1, 2007)
Read frieze‘s A-Z of the Venice Biennale here and Chris Sharp’s review of Gusmão and Paiva’s 2008 exhibition at Cordoaria, Lisbon here.
The shortlist for the second annual Jarman Award has been announced. Launched last year, the winner of the inaugural award was Luke Fowler. The 2009 shortlisted artists are below; follow the links for more about each of them from the frieze archives:
Aside from a useful £10,000 cash prize, the winner of the 2009 award will be commissioned to make four films for Channel 4’s ‘Three Minute Wonder’ series, which will be screened next spring. (Luke Fowler’s can be watched here.)
Included in the recent group exhibition ‘Against Interpretation’ at Studio Voltaire, as well as Nought to Sixty at the ICA last year, Sutcliffe is perhaps the least known of the artists on the list – athough he has a solo show at Cubitt coming up later this year. Seers’ work was included in Altermodern and had a recent show at Matt’s Gallery, while Kirschner & Panos and Martin have had exhibitions at the Chisenhale in the past year.
The winner of the 2009 Jarman Award (coordinated by Film London) will be announced at the Whitechapel Gallery on 22 September, following a short series of screenings at the CCA, Glasgow (10 September), Picture This, Bristol (16 September) and Whitechapel Gallery (19 September).
