Month: May 2017

Axel Straschnoy’s film Etsivä (The Detective) premieres on May 26 at Kiasma, Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki.

Etsivä (The Detective)
Axel Straschnoy
360° 3D Film
Commissioned by Kiasma, Museum of Contemporary Art
For ARS17+ Online Art arsplus.fi
Premiere on 26 May at 14:00 at
Kiasma, Museum of Contemporary Art
Mannerheiminaukio 2
00100 Helsinki
kiasma.fi

Commissioned by Kiasma for ARS17, Etsivä is both a part of and a film on ARS17. Taking at face value Virtual Reality’s promise to reproduce the world, the film plays with the tension between the experience of the exhibition and its representation in virtual reality. The soundtrack, inspired in Sigfried Kracauer’s Der Detektiv-Roman, highlights virtual reality’s positivist roots. The film will be available as part of ARS17+—the exhibition’s online section—creating a distance between the experience of the show at the museum and its experience on the film. Once the show has ended, Etsivä will remain as the most realistic documentation of what it was.

Milja Liimatainen writes in the ARS17 catalogue: “Straschnoy considers what happens when our physical contact with material objects decreases or ceases altogether. What happens to the work’s aura if the viewer only ever encounters its representation(s)?”

Etsivä will be available for preview between 24 and 27 May at arteBA, Buenos Aires at Del Infinito (Booth C4). It will premiere on May 26 at 14:00 at the Art & Virtual Reality seminar in Kiasma, Helsinki, after which it will be available to be downloaded from its website arsplus.fi or to be watched at the Museum’s library. Between 30 May and 2 June, it will be presented at Inter Arts Center, Malmö . In October,  it will be part of Immersive Worlds, Straschnoy’s first solo exhibition in Italy, at ECCENTRIC Art & Research, Milan.

Axel Straschnoy (born 1978) is a visual artist from Buenos Aires, based in Helsinki. His long-term and research focused projects include Kilpisjärvellä (2011-12), a planetarium film on exploration in northern Lapland under the Northern Lights, La Figure de la Terre (2014), a short film based on the book The Figure of the Earth by 18th century French mathematician and explorer Pierre Louis  Moreau de Maupertuis, the lecture-performance series Notes on the Double Agent (ongoing), and Le rappel àl’ordre (2016), a film on the packing and shipping of artworks. For Neomylodon Listai Ameghino (2015), he has followed the Neomylodon’s trail back to its cave in Last Hope Sound, Southern Chilean Patagonia, and is in the midst of a multi-part, traveling exhibition to bring the Neomylodon’s remains back together one hundred and twenty years since its discovery. Straschnoy has participated in Le Pavillon residency at Palais de Tokyo (2008-09) and trained in Art History at University of Buenos Aires.

Etsivä is narrated by Pekka Strang and its soundtrack was designed by Karri Niinivaara. The camera operator was Iddo Soskolne and the graphic design was by Geraldine de San Bruno. A mobile application was built by Quadion Technologies to make the film available worldwide.

Etsivä is produced by Kolme Perunaa with support from the Finnish Cultural Foundation, Oskar Öflunds Stiftelse, AVEK, Quadion Technologies and the Arts Promotion Center, Finland. It has been commissioned by Kiasma, Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki and it is in the collection of Kiasma / Finnish National Gallery.

For more information on Axel Straschnoy please click here.

Baptiste Debombourg’s solo exhibition “RAGING DREAMS over the horizon” opens on May 19th at S12 Open Access Studio and Gallery, Bergen.

RAGING DREAMS over the horizon
Baptiste Debombourg 19.05-16.07.17
Vernissage 19.05.17 at 7 p.m.

S12 Open Access Studio and Gallery is celebrating its 10th anniversary with the opening of the exhibition RAGING DREAMS over the horizon by the French artist Baptiste Debombourg.

Debombourg has received international acclaim for his monumental installations. Waves of broken glass are breaking into and flooding rooms and structures, taking over and transforming buildings and areas. The work can be experienced as both threatening and beautiful as the artist both destroys and rebuilds. The broken and reconstructed material conveys many stories and is often interpreted as a critique of the world we live in – of consumerism or a world in the process of falling apart.

In S12’s Gallery Baptiste Debombourg has made a new installation– Raging Dreams where the energy and power of dreams is a central theme, and where the main material is laminated glass. Debombourg does work with a variety of materials and techniques, but prefers to use materials we are surrounded with in our daily life. In this installation, the remodeled sheets of broken laminated glass, remind us of the destructive abilities of natural forces, as they take over the the gallery, parallel with the silhouette horizon in the background. Through his unique and eye catching artwork he makes the viewer experience his/hers surroundings in a new and unexpected way.

Baptiste Debombourg is an innovative artist who pushes boundaries, explores various media and collaborates with artists from other fields, be it artists, architects or fashion designers. He lives and works in Paris. Debombourg has studied sculpture at Ecole Nationale des Beaux-Arts in Lyon and did his post-graduate work at Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris. In France he is one of the most outstanding artists of his generation
with numerous public presentations at home and abroad to his merit. He has built installations in cities such as Paris, Strasbourgh, Miami, Québec and Sarajevo, and will in May ´17 present a new public installation in Le Havre on the occasion of the city’s 500th anniversary.

For more information on Baptiste Debombourg please click here.

To download an interview on the project with Bergljót Jónsdóttir, Director of S12, Bergen, please follow this link:  NG 2 2017, S12 Baptiste Debombourg, S, 28 – 31.

Carlo Gamibirasio partecipa a EXI SHAPES presso Morel, Lugano.

EXI SHAPES è una mostra di arte contemporanea che riflette sul concetto di “demolizione”. Ospitata nell’edificio Morel (Lugano) che presto verrà smantellato, apre le porte del suo “hangar” per la prima volta a sei giovani artisti e al duo curatoriale 3/12.

Artisti presenti in mostra: Carmine Agosto, Byron Gago , Carlo Gambirasio, Edoardo Manzoni , Tomas Øvrelid, Flavia Sciré.

A cura di 3/12.

Vernissage: Giovedì 11 maggio 2017, ore 18:00.

MOREL, Via Antonio Adamini 4, 6900 Lugano Ticino, Svizzera.

Per maggiori informazioni sulla mostra si prega di cliccare qui.

Per maggiori informazioni su Carlo Gambirasio si prega di cliccare qui.

The volume Renewable Futures. Art, Science and Society in Post-Media Age is out

The volume “Renewable Futures. Art, Science and Society in Post-Media Age” is out, edited by Rasa Smite, Raitis Smits and Armin Medosch with contributions by Domenico Quaranta, Martha Buskirk, Miško Šuvaković, Dieter Daniels, Andreas Broeckmann, Geoff Cox, Jacob Lund, Ieva Astahovska, Karla Brunet, Oksana Chepelyk, Edith Doove, Gabriela Galati, Julian Hanna, Lisa Jevbratt, Normunds Kozlovs, AnneMarie Maes, Conor McGarrigle, Armin Medosch, Jennifer no.e Parker, Daniela de Paulis, Helena Sederholm, Ilva Skulte, Rasa Smite, Raitis Smits, Vygandas “Vegas” Šimbelis, Isidora Todorović, Polona Tratnik and Fields exhibition artists.

RIXC comes out with the newest book in Acoustic Space edition – Renewable Futures. Art, Science and Society in Post-Media Age. With this Renewable Futures volume, RIXC begins a new series of Acoustic Space, that will focus on exploring the transformative potential of art in the post-media age.

Book will be presented on April 28, in Eindhoven, during second Renewable Future conference and on May 3 in Riga, during the opening of the new RIXC gallery, in Lencu iela 2.

Acoustic Space comes out as an international peer-reviewed journal for transdisciplinary research on art, science, technology and society.

Acoustic Space Nr. 16. Renewable Futures. Art, Science and Society in Post-Media Age.

With this Renewable Futures volume, we begin a new series of Acoustic Space, that will focus on exploring the transformative potential of art in the post-media age. Our book presents the research and practices that aim to invent new avenues for more sustainable and imaginative future developments. The papers from the 1st Renewable Futures Conference selected in this volume are aimed at shaping new contact zones between traditionally separated domains – art and science, academic research and independent creative practices, sustainable businesses and social engagement in the 21st century.

The first chapter highlights the role of technology, considering “technopolitics” as a very profound perspective for the contextualisation of an art practice in the current phase of society. The second chapter introduces the notion of “contemporary conditions” and discusses theories and practices of “post-media”, “post-internet” and other “posts”. The third chapter looks at artistic engagement with different fields of science, ecological issues and interspecies relations, while the fourth chapter discusses yet another role which artists have been active in – partaking in collecting and coding, manipulating and retransmitting processes. The closing section includes an overview of the Fields exhibition (Riga 2014), a large-scale post-media manifestation, jointly curated by Armin Medosch, Rasa Smite and Raitis Smits.

For more information on the book, please click here.