Palais de Tokyo Young Curators Season 2013

In the summer of 2013 the Palais de Tokyo, Paris will entrust its entire program  schedule to young curators. The contemporary art centre has put out an open call for its Young Curators Season 2013. Selected on the basis of the proposals they submit, the winners will be expected to dream up new ways of relating to art, and explore the ever-changing issues and contexts involved in curating an exhibition.

The proposed project must clearly demonstrate innovative thinking about exhibition formats. Whether it relates to a solo or a group exhibition, it must envisage occupying a surface area that can be as large as 250 sq. m. It must be capable of evolving  in accordance with the technical constraints and the diversity of spaces that apply  at the Palais de Tokyo. The selection will be made primarily on the basis of the inventiveness of the project, its curatorial boldness, and its relevance in the current field of creative work. Applicants can indicate a preference as regards the typology of space best suited to their proposal. Applicants can be curators and/or artists.

Cinderella Residency

The Institute for the Art and Practice of Dissent at Home has put out a call for expressions of interests for a Cinderella Residency.

A family of five are tired of cleaning up the house. The whole domestic labour malarky is getting too much. They know that all the work that’s done will soon be undone. The mother and father work full time as university lecturers, artists and cultural dissenters. The children are busy with schoolwork, homework, extra-curricula activity and Xbox. Nobody wants to spend their precious time cleaning! Therefore the house is a bit of a mess despite the fact that onerous maintenance tasks (washing up, laundry, sweeping and dish washing) are done on a daily basis. 

The family are off on a well-deserved holiday in August. The family are very lucky and very privileged. They will spend the whole of August in Dubrovnik, Croatia. This means that their house in Everton, Liverpool will be empty.  The family have expressed a desire to return to a clean house post-August holiday. 

You/artists/cultural workers/performance practitioners/activists/feminists/labourers/ performers/cleaners are therefore invited to come and clean the house. The family want to know how you did it so you will also need to document your labour performance.

Document it in any way you want. 

What do you get? You will get a three bedroom house with front and back gardens to live in for the whole of August. The house is situated in Everton, Liverpool and is within walking distance from the city centre (20 minutes at 3.5 miles per hour). You will get ‘Organic Direct’ fruit and veg delivery to your door every Thursday. You will get a fridge full of food upon arrival. You will get £425 cash (10% of family’s monthly income). You will get to work at your own pace over August. Clean for a couple of days and leave or stay for the month and clean everyday all day long. Anything in between the two is fine with us. 

What do the family get? The family get a clean house upon their return. 

What do we both get? We both get to consider the performance of domestic labour. We both get to have a conversation about the whole thing. We both get a record of cleaning. 

To apply please send one A4 outlining why you are the right person or the right collective for the job.

You might want to emphasize your cleaning experience. Deadline: 15th July 2012. Email: theinstitute@twoaddthree.org

Natascha Sadr Haghighian

In a radical departure from her usual practice of site-specific projects, Natascha Sadr Haghighian’s first solo exhibition in London is a selection of works from the last fifteen years. By placing the works alongside each other for the first time, Sadr Haghighian draws out new perspectives and connects the various debates and questions raised by them over the years. Her richly detailed, collaborative investigations utilise a wide variety of media, such as video, slide projection, sound, websites, photography and actions to explore issues as diverse as the control and manipulation of the world’s scarce resources; consumerism and corporatism; identity, power and class; and the structures and rituals of the professional art world.

Her research-based projects constantly find ways to emancipate themselves from their prescribed - often site-specific - formats. By exploring different ways to approach an issue and allowing for divergent ideas, her works attempt to uncover and reclaim subjugated or alternative knowledge and devise a basis to induce political agency. Through sound, video, installation, online interventions, interviews or writing, Haghighian’s work questions and seeks to move beyond the dominating representational formats and the visual discourse inherited from the Enlightenment.

At Artissima and Armory art fairs, her wall installation, I can’t work like this (2007), took the form of a text-based piece outlined in nails hammered into the wall, from which emerges an ironic comment on the lack of creative freedom within a commercial art context. Her contribution to Manifesta 4 – Present but not yet active (2002) – took the shape of a dialogue between Haghighian and the biennale curators at Frankfurt Zoo, in which they discussed the issues of authenticity and visibility created by display architectures. The conversation was filmed from three different perspectives and edited into a single video that was given to the curators as documentation of the shared experience.

Haghighian’s critique of institutionalised systems of production – which in the art world are illustrated by the competitive and totalising nature of CVs and biographies – is reflected in the ongoing online platform www.bioswop.net. The site was released in 2004 for art professionals to borrow, exchange and compile biographies.

‘The impossibility of escaping the rules of representation creates the desire to defrock them, slander, offend, destabilize them, and make them lose their authority and power. I guess you could see that as my main focus. At the same time I try to eat, drink, sleep, meet and collaborate with other people. I guess a lot of the impulses come from that as well.’ (Natascha Sadr Haghighian interviewed by Solvej Helweg Ovesen)

PARLIAMENT – AN INSTALLATION, TIM SHAW

Jam, 32 High Street, Falmouth

11^th – 25^th May 2012

Preview – 11^th May, 7-9pm

A mischievous Parliament of rooks will be running amok in the shabby chic lower room of Jam, an esoteric record in Falmouth, from 11^th May 2012, where they will be in residence for a fortnight of mayhem.

Parliament is an installation created by the renowned sculptor Tim Shaw; it consists of twenty five rooks constructed from black polythene, straw and wire.  The room in Jam is filled with the menacing cries of the birds merged with political debates recorded from within the House of Commons.

After two days sitting uninspired, during a residency in the west of Ireland, 2006, Shaw looked out the window at the cold and barren landscape surrounding him only to see dark flickering shapes in the corner of his eyes.  Black plastic snagged on barbed wire and the surrounding trees began to conjure shapes, playful and sinister, taking the form of windswept crows and rooks.

Shaw commented ‘Having observed the behaviour and nature of these birds, I made the comparison with those in a position of power’; he therefore felt it was appropriate that the birds’ calls should combine with discussions from within the theatre of flock mayhem - the chattering of Parliamentarians. 

Curated by Olivia Gray.

Scattered Plots & Routes We Take

A solo exhibition by international artist Katja Davar

The enigmatic work of Katja Davar combines traditional and digital techniques to create surreal hand drawn worlds.  This exhibition will include drawings on paper, works on canvas and projected animations that take us on a visual journey through scientific data and mythological themes.

Davar has been commissioned to make a new animated drawing for the exhibition using selected and abstracted data from the Newlyn Tidal Observatory, from where UK sea level is measured.

For Davar, drawing always comes first. As she has commented: “Drawing is about interpreting the world at a pace determined by oneself. It’s about deciding which truth to believe.”

Born in London, in 1968, Davar studied painting at Central Saint Martins School of Art. She lives and works in Cologne, Germany.

Curated by students from MA Curatorial Practice, University College Falmouth in partnership with Newlyn Art Gallery & The Exchange.

Interview with Jeffrey Shaw

Interview with Jeffrey Shaw (Part 1) from Yuk Hui on Vimeo.

Yuk Hui interviews new media artist, Jeffrey Shaw, about his artwork and the computing industry, and about concepts such as embodiment, augmented space (relationship between real and virtual), interactive architecture, data and the functionality of metadata.

http://theoryculturesociety.blogspot.com/2011/04/interview-with-jeffrey-shaw-on-new.html