Showing posts with label buuuuuuuuu curated by. Show all posts
Showing posts with label buuuuuuuuu curated by. Show all posts

Buuuuuuuuu curated by Lorenzo Balbi

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.




"A Monument to Failure" by Pleurad Xhafa, 2015

 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.



"Democracies" by Artur Zmijewski (video still), 2009

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.






"Young Dictator's Village" by Paolo Chiasera, 2004

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.



"Shadow for a while" by Mircea Cantor, 2007

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".


Buuuuuuuuu curated by Astrid Peterle


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.



'Weaponise the internet'  by One of My Kind (OOMK)
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.





  'My Name Is Janez Janša' by Janez Janša, 2013

I have followed Janez 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. 




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Buuuuuuuuu curated by Gerald Straub

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




"The Jean-Monnet-Bridge" by the Center for Political Beauty.

A bridge from North Africa to Europe in cooperation with construction company STRABAG and the Center for Political Beauty.























 "Intelexit" by Peng!

An online exit  platform for secret service employees.





Hervé Falciani is responsible for one of the largest leaks of banking data






Example for future artistic intervention and performative productions of space