Category: museum

Axel Straschnoy at Perm Regional Museum

The Permian Projects

The Natural History Museum is a place where life and death mingle, where to celebrate life, we kill, a place where the variety of life can only be appreciated dead. The Permian was one of the most biodiverse periods in the history of Earth but ended with the worst mass extinction. In the regional museum in Perm, even more than in any other museum of natural history, life and death coexist.

These projects are conceived as artistic interventions into the existing museum practices, drawing ways of working, aesthetics and conceptual frameworks from the institution itself.

The Permian Collection

The Permian Collection is a collection of the insects exterminated as part of Perm Regional Museum’s conservation efforts.

These are regularly exterminated and disposed of without much afterthought. Focused on the nature-out-there, the Museum fails to consider itself as a place overrun by living beings, some of which might work against its stated mission of heritage conservation.

At artist’s request, the Museum began collecting the insect it kills, rounding up in half a year over 200 from 35 different families of Arthropoda. The new collection includes butterflies, mosquitos but also spiders and woodlice. The collected insects have been scientifically defined with the support of entomologists of Perm University, catalogued, photographed and placed in custom-made boxes, becoming the first new entomology collection since 2008.

The Dioramas of the Permian Museum

The Dioramas of the Permian Museum is a tridimensional photo series portraying the zoological collection’s animals in their new habitat: the museum storage.

Since the 1960s, the Perm Regional Museum used to have several dioramas in its displays. After moving venue in 2007, these were dismantled and their parts put into storage. The taxidermied animals that were part of them currently inhabit a former office, crowded in unlikely combinations that span biotopes and predator-prey relationships.

Many of these animals, collected when they were typical for the region, have become endangered. Some have gone extinct. The biotopes that the dioramas’ painted backgrounds depicted have in many cases ceased to exist. For many of the animals in the Museum’s Zoological collection, the storage itself has become their natural habitat, the only place they can still be found.

Axel Straschnoy’s work has been supported by a State Grant for Artists from the Arts Promotion Centre Finland. His residency at the museum was supported by the Vladimir Potanin Foundation. The projects were co-produced by the Perm Regional Museum and Kolme Perunaa.

For further information on Axel Straschnoy, please click here.

Tomislav Brajnović’s solo exhibition Direct Link at the Museum of Contemporary Art Zagreb will be on view until June 10.

Tomislav Brajnović: Direct Link

MSU Gallery, Thursday, 24th May 2018 at 8:00 pm

Curator of the exhibition: Nataša Ivančević, Deputy Director & Museum Advisor

For Tomislav Brajnović, art is more than the exploration of the form, visual artistic means, production, and presentation of the work of art. The radicalism of the artistic idea is more important to him than the radicalism of the artistic form. His works as well as his worldview are concerned with the issues of ethics, social justice, and are a critical reflection of the times we live in. Art and life are interfused without limitation. His methodology is focused on asking questions, analyzing and criticizing the social moment, the polemics with proponents of opposing views, and the disagreement with generalized answers. The range of his themes spans from social to religious to political to economic controversies, and is present in the works created from the beginnings of his artistic activity in the 1990s to this day.

He easily moves from medium to medium, and uses video, installation, sound, performance, readymade, and other means that best serve to transfer ideas at a specific point in time. More recently, he has been using social networks as a medium of artistic activity, as they provide the possibility to quickly spread information and personal views, as well as to express the opinions of a large number of users. At his first larger solo exhibition in Zagreb, “Direct Link”, he presents installations, documentation, video works, FB comments, and texts taken from the Internet, in which he reveals the social inequality that is reflected in the unequal distribution of wealth, power and influence, in the manipulation and abuse of advanced technology, which becomes a means of controlling free will and possible consequences of such action.

Brajnović takes the concept of Direct Link (Direktna veza) by the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek for the title of his exhibition. The term implies a direct link between the human brain and digital space. Technology and scientific research bring progress, and the insertion of implants brings health benefits. What is a threat to the loss of autonomy of human thought and action and, ultimately, to freedom, is the possibility of managing the human mind through chip implants and digital links. According to Žižek, for an individual, the possibility of separating from the outside world and the possibility of withdrawal into one’s inner worlds thus disappears, which raises the ultimate question: “Who will control it?” On the other hand, Elon Musk thinks that humans already possess the characteristics of cyborgs, given the connection with digital devices, clouds and space. In the worst scenario, this can lead to the abolition of free will and of the space of freedom, and to the introduction of art censorship at the level of thought and idea. In this exhibition, Brajnović therefore issues a manifesto on the death of the audience as a result of the abolition of the artist, the audience and art.

After MSU, the exhibition will be presented at the Gallery of Fine Arts, Split, albeit on a lesser scale. Curator of the Split exhibition: Jasminka Babić, Senior Curator

Tomislav Brajnović was born in Zagreb in 1965. He completed his first year of studies at the Royal Academy of Art (KABK) in The Hague. He graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb in 1999, where his mentor was Professor Đuro Seder, and completed postgraduate studies in Fine Art at Central Saint Martins College of Art & Design in London in 2003. He works and exhibits intensively both in Croatia and abroad. He is a recipient of several awards, scholarships and recognitions, and has taken part in several residence projects. He teaches New Media, City Mapping, and Recontextualization at the Academy of Applied Arts in Rijeka. Since 2007, he has been running the Studio Golo Brdo Project/Gallery. He is the author of the Supper with the Artist project.

For more information on the exhibition please click here.

For more information on Tomislav Brajnović please click here.

Responsorio Meccanico by Massimiliano Viel: Ensemble Sinestesia (GMI) vs Reihe Laptop ensemble.

On Sunday June 11, Massimiliano Viel’s Responsorio Meccanico has been executed at the Museo della Scienza e la Tecnologia in Milan.

On the video you can see some excerpts.

Responsorio Meccanico
By Massimiliano Viel

Reihe Laptop Ensemble
Ensemble Sinestesia GMI

Soprano
Alice Rossi

Direction
Francesco Bossaglia

Coordination Reihe Laptop Ensemble
Giorgio Sancristoforo

For more information on the artist, please click here.

Museo Nazionale della Scienza e della Tecnologia Leonardo da Vinci

Via San Vittore, 21, 20123 Milano

Massimiliano Viel esegue Responsorio Meccanico, domenica 11 giugno Museo della Scienza e della Tecnologia, Milano.

Domenica 11 giugno il RESPONSORIO MECCANICO verrà eseguito tre volte, alle 15, alle 16 e alle 17, nel Salone Areonavale del Museo della Scienza a Milano.

Responsorio Meccanico
Per Voce, 7 Ottoni e 7 Computers
Di Massimiliano Viel

Reihe Laptop Ensemble
Ensemble Sinestesia GMI

Soprano
Alice Rossi

direzione
Francesco Bossaglia

Coordinamento Reihe Laptop Ensemble
Giorgio Sancristoforo

L’accesso per assistere alla PRIMA ASSOLUTA del “Responsorio Meccanico” è libero previo acquisto del biglietto del Museo (intero € 10, ridotto € 7,5).

Dalle 15 in poi l’11 giugno al Padiglione Aeronavale del Museo della Scienza e della Tecnologia Leonardo da Vinci di Milano!

Con Gioventù Musicale d’Italia AGON

Museo Nazionale della Scienza e della Tecnologia Leonardo da Vinci

Via San Vittore, 21, 20123 Milano

Per maggiori informazioni su Massimiliano Viel si prega di cliccare qui.

Tomislav Brajnović solo exhibition The Crawling Armageddon opens November 4 at the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Rijeka.

The Crawling Armageddon by Tomislav Brajnović (Zagreb, 1965), offers a cross section of works created from the end of the 1990s onwards. Many of these works have rarely been presented in public. This kaleidoscopic display gathers approximately twenty works, including installations, objects, ready-made series, videos and acoustic compositions. It represents a relatively short, turbulent history of the new millennium, in which totalitarian elements of the past century return to us like timed bombs. From Odyssey (2004), to The Law of Love, to Soldier in Ripe Wheat (2015), these works reflect on the consequences of frenetic production and exploitation of material resources. Sometimes they express a sound of transcendence, a transcendence that seems elusive in the agony of everydayness, where the clashes of reality are conveyed into the anxious feeling of time flow, moving from silence to turbulence. Hence, the need for reversing the dictate of time and finding a better future becomes crucial, but there is an open question of how to attain this. The author says: The only (im)possible revolution is the revolution of consciousness. Human consciousness today does not differ much from the consciousness that existed before or after the French or October Revolution. Nothing has changed here; the only progress that has been made is the progress in HD broadcast of the never-ending revolution… The idea of Earth as Eden and the question of who (if anyone) can reach it and how, represents the core of my artistic personality.

Curated by: Ksenija Orelj

The exhibition and the accompanying catalogue will be presented in the Istria Museum of Contemporary Art in 2017.
Acknowledgements: Muzej – Museo Lapidarium, Novigrad; the Rovinj Heritage Museum
Support: The Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Croatia, The County of Istria, The City of Rijeka, The City of Rovinj

Photo: Tomislav Brajnović, Wooden Angel , video, 2005.

For more information on the exhibition please click here.

For more information on Tomislav Brajnović please click here.