URBAN INSTRUCTIONS is a partecipative intervention in public space and consists in a series of stickers placed around the 20th district. These islands propose different ways of interacting with other people and with the surrounding environment. Passers-by are invited to do small actions, imagine new possibilities, consider other points of view, refocus on the sense of neighbourhood and living-together. This could change, even for a moment, the community we are living in.
a project by BUUUUUUUUU, backed by SHIFT in the 20th district of Vienna.
'Project 22, 7 forms measuring 600 x 60 x 60 cm constructed to be held horizontal to a wall' by Santiago Sierra.
The work creates a new variation of Santiago Sierra’s most poetic and elemental work, unifying sculpture and performance to create a physical portrait of the labour economy. Hired for the minimum wage, the employees hold monolithic structures on their shoulders for the duration of a working day. They recall the caryatid or atlas figures whose sculpted forms stand as pillars to support the weight of classical architecture.
'The Column' (trailer of the video installation) by Adrian Paci.
The Column is a video installation by Albanian artist Adrian Paci, tracing the epic journey of an immense length of marble, extracted from the ground and taken to sea. En route from China to Italy and over the course of a grand voyage, workers toil to chisel and carve the block of marble into the shape of a classical column.
“The concept for The Column was born from this exasperated economic strategy, whereby time must be condensed to the point in which delivery coincides with production… The Column has its roots in a poetic intuition: an idea in search of form will only be able to develop at a distance from its origins, much like commercial goods are increasingly conceived in one place and manufactured in another through the elaborate and methodical exploitation of cheap labour, seen, in this case, on-board sweatshop ships”. —Adrian Paci
'Eating Money – An Auction' by Cesare Pietroiusti and Paul Griffiths, 2005-2007
A public auction is held. Participants make offers in amounts of money corresponding to the sum of two bank-notes in euros. The successful bidder gives the two bank-notes to the artists who eat them publicly and promise that, once evacuated, they will be returned to the bidder.
KUNST = KAPITAL, by Joseph Beuys, 1979. 1000 lire banknotes with handwritten text
'Hammer and sickle | quarantaquattro valutazioni (44 evaluations in wood)' by Enzo Mari, 1973. The exhibition 'Enzo Mari Falce e martello. Tre dei modi con cui un artista può contribuire alla lotta di classe' is currently running at the Galleria Milano.
'Karl Marx light' by Hannes Langeder. Inflatable imitation of the 40 ton bust of Karl Marx.
After standing on Lenin´s former pedestal in for the work Hello Lenin, in 2003, I visited the statue at its current place. Since people in my hometown in Russe, Bulgaria, don´t know, where to put these Communist monuments, Lenin lies down in the area of ones of the City´s plant nurseries.
'karl marx – das kapital/arbeit-geld' by Jochen Höller
a cut out collage of the words "work" and "money" from the Capital by Karl Marx
'WORKS FALL TRUE!' by Ryts Monet, neon sculpture, electrical materials, metal structures, scaffolding, neon size: 300 x 70 cm, 2020
Installed on scaffolding seven metres above from the ground, against the backdrop of the ruins of one of the circular ramparts of Faganga Castle, the red neon sign echoes the famous phrase by Karl Marx and Frederich Engels taken from the Communist Party poster: WORKERS FROM ALL THE WORLD, UNITE!
During the night or in low light conditions, only a few letters of the inscription light up and the slogan is transformed, bringing out a new meaning on two lines: WORK S F ALL T R U E!
This is the first artwork exhibited in a public space by the artist after the first European lock down period March-May 2020, due to COVID-19. The site-specific work was presented in August 2020 on the top of the hill in the medieval village of Fagagna (UD), in Northeast Italy, 50 km from the border with former Yugoslavia.
Lorenzo Balbi is director of the MAMBO in Bologna. After his graduation in Cultural Heritage at Ca' Foscari in Venice, he specializes in Contemporary Art at the University of Turin. He collaborates with Il Giornale dell'Arte and Il Giornale dell'Architettura and he was the Artistic Director of Verso Artecontemporanea Gallery, Turin. Since 2007 at Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo he has been dealing with the organisation and development of exhibition projects. He was one of the coordinator of CAMPO, the young Italian curators program.
The artist Pleurad Xhafa in his first collaboration with MAPS - Museum of art in public space, donates Tirana a monument dedicated to one of the most controversial events in Albanian modern history. The “Gerdec” suit.
The Albanian government in cooperation with the United States of America and some private companies, were responsible for the dismantling of Russian-Chinese ammunition from the communist era inside the expressly dedicated factory in Gerdec a village in the municipality of Vora, Albania. In breach of contract and through false documents by the parties, at the factory, the ammunition were removed in miserable conditions by the inhabitants of Gerdec, unqualified people, women and children who lived near the factory.
As a consequence of all this at noon local time on Saturday, March 15, 2008, 14 kilometers from the city center, a large explosion caused the death of 26 people and injuring over 300 people. Nearly five years later, the Supreme Court of Albania classified the case of the explosion in the factory in Gerdec as a “technological accident”.
It was indeed a technological accident considering the conditions in which it was carried out the dismantling of ammunition? Or maybe the problem exceeds the authority of a fragile justice?!
Following in the footsteps of this accident the work “Monument to failure”, embodied on the basis of a cut tree, in itself a dead object with long roots hidden under the asphalt of the Deshmoret e Kombit Boulevard, 15 km from the crater of Gerdec. Pleurad Xhafa brings attention back on the avenue where the most important institutions of the Country are located and where are consumed some of the most emblematic events of the Albanian history. Only raised a few centimeters from the sidewalk in front of the Presidency Building, the trunk, once witness of the past, with the addition of the bronze plaque turns into a monument, a symbol of the failure. In front of this monument the viewer is unprepared as unprepared were the families of Gerdec victims, facing the final blow of the hammer of justice.
Presented on a row of monitors, this cacophonic video installation could also be understood as a series of individual, documentary videos. Zmijewski is exploring the free, public expression of opinion in the form of gatherings and crowds in different places in Europe. With this project, Zmijewski moves his work out of his typical sphere of staged social experiments into a more public realm of events.
For the “Democracies” (2009) project at the daadgalerie, Zmijewski departs from his work using recruited volunteers. In a series of short documentary films, he looks into the different symbols of nationalist and other movements visible in a variety of public spaces. All the clips depict public (and political) fervour in different places around Europe, Israel and the Westbank, like demonstrations, parades or re-enactments of historical battles. They include for example material from the European Football Championships in Berlin and Jörg Haider’s funeral in Klagenfurt. As in all of his work, also in these images of ordered and disordered crowds, Zmijewski places the human body at the focal point of his observations.
Nine guys decided to change their behavoir, their way of dressing and their houses, to undo the distance that keep them and their ideology apart. They decided to spit into groups - according to thir political creed - and found a village in disused countryside, where their need of emulation is perpetrated by looting, fighting and destroying. YDV is about fanaticism, loss of control, irrationality, destruction. Fanaticism relegated them to the fringe of society and of system, putting them into a condition based on violence and anarchy.
The 16mm film Shadow For A While (2007), which shows the shadow of a slowly burning flag, could be read as a farewell to political symbols. The black rectangle on a white ground is gradually broken down by invisible flames, creating a mood that is more elegiac than revolutionary. As a shadow, it is impossible to identify the symbols or colours of any particular state on the flag; it could equally be a white flag of peace.
"3bisbis" by Xuanhe Wang, 2010
An installation based on a sick Plane Tree in wich the artist create a place with a post box in order to provoke the mail system and its rules. The artist sent mails to this address from all over the world without receiving any of his letters. Before the tree was cut by the municipality he received a letter from a passer by address to the "inhabitant of the Plane tree".
As
a curator these days I am actually at a loss how one can react to the
humanitarian crisis we are currently facing. Nevertheless I still
believe in the political strength and energy artistic practice can
unleash not only in the field of art. I am most interested in those
moments where art penetrates into other social fields, where it
shakes people up from their daily routine, if only for a second, or
where it works to empower people who cannot or do not want to be part
of the artistic field (which in many ways often still is very elite
and disconnected from those who do not posses the
knowledge/education/resources to engage with it). I
picked a few projects that either directly react to the current
situations or which I discovered a longer time ago but fit into a
reflection of the many things going wrong theses days.
A
feminist project that deals with self empowerment of young Muslim
women, promoting a positive feeling of their identities in opposition
to the negative definition of being Muslim which is constantly
constructed by media and right wing politics in Europe and the USA.
The MigrationLab is a project that is active all across Europe to bring together migrants, refugees and host communities with means of art and non-formal education. One form of events they initiate was also established in Vienna during the last Vienna Design Week in 2015: Welcome to The Living Room is a public living room co-created by migrants, refugees and locals in cities across Europe, where these communities share stories and reflections on migration using artistic expression.
'True
Finn – Tosi suomalainen', by Yael Bartana, 2014
One
artist whose work I admire a lot is Yael Bartana. For the Finnish
IHMW Art Festival Bartana created a kind of utopian community of
people living in Finland with different religious, ethical and
political backgrounds, thus questioning what a national identity, in
this case Finnishness, actually constitutes.
I
have followedJanez
Janša’s work for many years, dating back from when he worked as a
choreographer and director under the name of Emil Hrvatin. Together
with two fellow artists from Slovenia and Italy he created a
politically very challenging project by officially renaming
themselves with the name of the then ruling Slovenian prime minister
Janez Janša. To this day I find it thought-provoking in regard to
the issues of identity, nationality, and the relation between the
individual human being and society.
The
Austrian performance art collective God’s Entertainment has
recently produced a project for Kampnagel in Hamburg that they had
previously developed for Wiener Festwochen in 2012. The term
“Intergrationsfähigkeit” (ability/skill to integrate) is now
more topical as ever and all around us in the media and especially in
right winged political debates. After the collective had inquired the
Austrians passing by their “camp” about their will to integrate,
they now asked similar questions in Hamburg.
Gerald Straub is an applied cultural theorist/ artist/
curator/ cultural producer. His work interconnects spatial settings and
site-specific behaviours – examining how certain real or staged
situations relate to one another under various socio-political
conditions. Performative interventions as artistic pratctice are applied
in order to explore in/formal knowledge productions. Lives and works
again in Vienna www.geraldstraub.wordpress.com
In a Mediterranean geopolitical perspective, the positions of the Turkish Government are unclear on
the Islamic terrorism conflict, although Turkey plays an important role due to its geographical position.
This is not the right and proper place to discuss these topics. However, the interest of the artists
focused on the new communication strategies of terrorist movements, especially IS’ communication,
which increasingly make use of social networks, of viral videos, the hacked computer systems,
film techniques and so on. The intervention of artists, probably the most provocative, is titled “Next
opening,” as if the terrorist cell expansion into new territories was paradoxically announced through
advertisements on billboards. In this case the two elements, the orange t-shirt - also used by guantanamo
prisoners- and the knife, are the two symbols of the victim and the victimizer.
On October 4, 2010, a US drone struck a home in the town of Mir Ali,
North Waziristan, in Pakistan, killing five people. One of the surviving
witnesses to this attack is a German woman, who lived in the house at
the time with her two-year-old boy and her husband. Together with
Forensic Architecture, this witness built a digital model of her home,
which no longer exists. During a day-long process of computer modeling,
the witness slowly reconstructed every architectural element of her
house. Placed virtually within the space and time of the attack, the
witness was able to recollect and recount the events around the strike.
Jankowski invited a group of burly weightlifters to try and pick up a number of massive public sculptures in the Polish capital of Warsaw, including more than one Communist-era memorial, a statue of Ronald Reagan and the figure of Syrenka the Mermaid, a famous, often vandalised symbol of the city,
"Statue of Lord Napier wrapped in red tape" by Eleonora Aguiari, 2004
"Survival", 2008 an installation with oceanic life jackets on 16 monuments throughout the city of São Paulo by Eduardo Srur
Vandalization of the Soviet Army monument Sofia, Bulgaria
"1700" is an online game based on Pizza Punks scandal in Vienna in wich 1700 Policemen "set free" a building occupied by 30 people. (read more on this)