(AFP) – 22
hours ago
ZAGREB — US
three-time Oscar-winning filmmaker Oliver Stone has received a lifetime
achievement award at a film festival in Croatia that hosts debate on social
issues.
[…]
Tuesday, May 14, 2013
Sunday, May 12, 2013
Enough is enough!
Ludwig
Museum, Budapest, Hungary
MAY 12, 2013
More than 30
artists occupied the Ludwig Museum on Thursday, May 9th 2013, to demand
complete transparency in the selection process for a new director and the
institution’s autonomy from right-wing ruling party Fidesz. The Ludwig’s
current director, Barnabás Bencsik, endorsed by the Ludwig Foundation for
his outstanding work, is competing against
Fidesz-backed Júlia Fabényi for the position. Read more here.
PRESS RELEASE
Enough is
enough!
Ludwig Museum
Budapest, 10 May 2013, 1 pm
From this day
on, United for Contemporary Art keeps the building of the Ludwig Museum open 24
hours a day. We are present, and we will work here, hold forums here, and sleep
here, until our demands have been granted.
We have come
to this decision as the State Secretariat for Culture of the Ministry of Human
Resources has ceased to operate as a competent maintainer and resource manager.
For months, it has not been capable of appointing a professionally competent
and responsible new leadership to the museum. To this day, it has not made
available the withheld part of the bursary granted to independent performing
art groups in 2012, despite repeated promises.
The examples
of the Ludwig and the independents are symptomatic of the system’s
malfunctioning. The functioning of Hungarian public administration lacks
transparency and, for this reason, does not serve the needs of its citizens.
[…]
Enough is
enough!
Events
leading to today’s press conference:
We awaited Mr Zoltán Balog, Minister of Human Resources, until 11 am on 10 May 2013, to negotiate our professional demands and to call for transparency in cultural decisions. Minister Balog did not attend the forum, nor did he react to our invitation in any way.
We awaited Mr Zoltán Balog, Minister of Human Resources, until 11 am on 10 May 2013, to negotiate our professional demands and to call for transparency in cultural decisions. Minister Balog did not attend the forum, nor did he react to our invitation in any way.
We consider the practice of cultural decision-makers overriding the
professional scene and refusing dialogue to be unacceptable.
United for Contemporary Art continues to await the Minister’s appearance at the Ludwig Museum, and for his worthy reaction to our demands!
United for Contemporary Art continues to await the Minister’s appearance at the Ludwig Museum, and for his worthy reaction to our demands!
What do we
demand?
- Transparency in cultural governance!
- Institutional and professional autonomy!
- Cessation of resource withdrawal, compensation for abstract resources, and consideration for public interest and public benefit with respect to the distribution of support!
- Undertaking responsibility, and consideration for professionality in cultural decisions!
- Dialogue between Hungarian culture and the decision-makers of cultural policy!
- The dissolution of concealment with respect to the tender for director of the Ludwig Museum, and a new, transparent tender, facilitating social and professional control, dialogue, and debate!
- Transparency in cultural governance!
- Institutional and professional autonomy!
- Cessation of resource withdrawal, compensation for abstract resources, and consideration for public interest and public benefit with respect to the distribution of support!
- Undertaking responsibility, and consideration for professionality in cultural decisions!
- Dialogue between Hungarian culture and the decision-makers of cultural policy!
- The dissolution of concealment with respect to the tender for director of the Ludwig Museum, and a new, transparent tender, facilitating social and professional control, dialogue, and debate!
Whom do we
await?
All those, who are unsatisfied with processes that are not transparent on the cultural scene, and who take a stand behind cultural autonomy with their presence, and all those, who, as citizens, are unsatisfied with state autocracy, and demand an open relationship based on dialogue with the current leaders of the state!
All those, who are unsatisfied with processes that are not transparent on the cultural scene, and who take a stand behind cultural autonomy with their presence, and all those, who, as citizens, are unsatisfied with state autocracy, and demand an open relationship based on dialogue with the current leaders of the state!
Those who
have already joined and continue their work here during the coming days:
- This
afternoon Humán Platform will hold their current plenary assembly
- Saturday morning, the Association of the Independent Performing Arts (FESZ) will hold its regular general assembly before the Ludwig
- Monday morning: Art and Activism seminar
- Tuesday morning: tranzit. hu working discussion
- Wednesday: Fotokontakt – Photography and Activism workshop
- Saturday morning, the Association of the Independent Performing Arts (FESZ) will hold its regular general assembly before the Ludwig
- Monday morning: Art and Activism seminar
- Tuesday morning: tranzit. hu working discussion
- Wednesday: Fotokontakt – Photography and Activism workshop
Further
programmes are currently under planning stages.
When and
where?
At the Ludwig
Museum, from today, 24 hours a day, until our demands have been granted.
Let’s be present together!
Let’s be present together!
Enough is
enough!
United for
Contemporary Art (FB)
[…]
Lost in Translation, MMOMA
Collateral
Event of the 55th International Art Exhibition — la Biennale di Venezia
Curated by Antonio Geusa
Curated by Antonio Geusa
[…]
Opening: May
29 at 5 p. m.
Press-preview: May 29 at 11 a. m.
Press-preview: May 29 at 11 a. m.
Opening
hours: daily, except Tuesdays, 10 a. m. to 6 p.m.
In Russia
a poet is more than a poet
Yevgeny Yevtushenko
Yevgeny Yevtushenko
As part
of the Collateral Events of the 55th International Art
Exhibition — La Biennale di Venezia — Moscow Museum
of Modern Art presents «Lost in Translation», a large-scale
exhibition of contemporary Russian art exploring the inherent
untranslatability of culture-and context-dependent works in times
of globalization. The exhibition brings together over one hundred works
made in the past forty years from the collection of MMOMA and other
public and private collections.
Since its
formulation about half a century ago, the concept of global village has
evolved from theoretical potentiality into practical reality. Technological
development has made international communication simpler and faster. The wide
web the world has become today has strongly curtailed the power
of geographic, political, and economic borders to isolate. Although
the village is global, it is clearly not homogeneous.
Communicating has become easier, but its effectiveness is still dependent
upon clear understanding between communicators. To achieve clarity, the
main factor is the accuracy of translation from one language into
another. Art is not immune to the need of being translated.
A process of transfer is in act each time a work
of art is exhibited to the audience which is not familiar
with the context it comes from. Historical and political differences,
cultural diversities, the language barrier, or even dissimilar approaches
in theoretical analysis are some of the causes that can induce lack
of intelligibility and the need of further explanation.
Contemporary
history proves that, despite the fall of the Iron Curtain in December
1991 and the consequent end of the isolation and immediate entrance
of Russia into the global village, translation is still
a fundamental element to trigger proper understanding
of individual artworks and the layers of meaning they carry.
In many cases, this is a complex procedure requiring, besides
the plain translation of the verbal meaning of a message, the
addition of an explanatory account shedding light upon the given
historical, cultural, political, social, and economical environment the work
is motivated by and refers to. Artist Oleg Kulik gained
worldwide popularity after doing a series of his «man-dog» performance
in the 1990s. It would be easier to grasp his outrageous
artistic disguise should one interpret it in the context of the
radical economic reforms launched by Russia’s first president Boris Yeltsin;
the reforms described as «shock therapy,» which was aimed
at converting the whole country from socialism to capitalism.
Likewise, the context would make it easier to understand why the
popular Soviet TV series The Seventeen Moments of Spring (1973) was
a source of inspiration for several Russian modern artists while
meaning virtually nothing to the Western viewer.
Lost
in Translation draws together works executed in various media —
paintings, drawings, photographs, sculptures, videos, installations,
performances — by established Russian artists with international
acclaim as well as emerging young artists. Carefully selected
by the curator on the basis of their resistance
to translatability, these artworks are particularly difficult
to decipher without the basic knowledge of the «Russian context» they
were born in. They will be displayed together with their «expanded
translation» — a concise verbal account with essential references,
a thesaurus article of sorts, which facilitates readability and help
the viewers grasp the meaning of the work and relate
it to international contemporary art discourse. The exhibition
is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue with entries on
each exhibit, and is complemented with film screenings, talks,
performances, and a multidisciplinary conference.
The
exhibition is held at Ca’ Foscari University, an established
center for Slavic Studies in Italy, and the home of the CSAR Centre
for Studies on the Arts of Russia aimed at researching the historical
and cultural heritage of Russia and promoting exchanges with major Russian
cultural institutions.
PARTICIPATING
ARTISTS
Yuri Albert |
Nikita Alekseev | Sergey Anufriev | Bluesoup |Sergey Bratkov | Alexander
Brodsky | Erik Bulatov | Vladimir Dubossarsky and Alexander Vinogradov | Elena
Elagina | Semen Faybisovich | Andrey Filippov | Rimma and Valery Gerlovin |
Lyudmila Gorlova | Iced Architects | Dmitry Gutov | Anna Jermolaewa | Alisa
Joffe | Ilya Kabakov | Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid | Irina Korina |
Valery Koshlyakov | Alexander Kosolapov | Oleg Kulik | Sergey Leontiev | Anton
Litvin | Vladimir Logutov | Igor Makarevich | Vladislav Mamyshev-Monroe |
Andrei Monastyrsky | Semen Motolyanets | Vladimir Nemukhin | Timur Novikov |
Boris Orlov | Peppers | Pavel Peppershtein | Viktor Pivovarov | Alexander
Ponomarev | Gia Rigvava | Mikhail Roginsky | Yuri Shabelnikov | Sergey Shutov |
Leonid Sokov | Alena Tereshko | Avdey Ter-Oganyan | Vadim Zakharov | Konstantin
Zvezdochetov | and others
ANTONIO GEUSA
CURATOR
CURATOR
Dr. Antonio
Geusa is an independent curator, art critic, and lecturer;
he is an expert in new media art and a key researcher
of Russian video art. He holds an MA in philology
(University of Bari, Italy), and a PhD in media arts (London
University, U. K.). Dr. Geusa is the author of numerous
publications, including «The History of Russian Video Art. Volumes 3-2-1»
published on the occasion of a three-part exhibition under the
same name organized by MMOMA in 2007-2010. He lives and works
in Moscow, Russia.
[…]
Saturday, May 11, 2013
Tuesday, May 7, 2013
Monday, May 6, 2013
Žižek – “The Event: Politics, Art, Ontology”
Event Date: 9 May 2013
Room B34
Birkbeck Main Building
Birkbeck, University of London
Malet Street
London WC1E 7HX
The Department of
Psychosocial Studies presents:
Professor Slavoj
Žižek – “The Event: Politics, Art, Ontology”
‘The Debris Field’ by Simon Barraclough, Isobel Dixon and Chris McCabe
Reviewed by David
Clarke
The Atlantic
liner Titanic, which sank on its maiden voyage in April 1912 with the loss
of more than 1,500 people, has achieved a remarkable status in western culture.
It has become a persistent moral metaphor, serving to illustrate everything
from the hubris of humanity (as in Thomas Hardy’s ‘The Convergence of the
Twain’), to the failings of the class system (as in Roy Baker’s still harrowing
1958 film A Night to Remember) and the dangers of a misplaced confidence
in progress (as in Hans Magnus Enzenberger’s poem sequence The Sinking of
the Titanic of 1978). In the Second World War, the story even served
Joseph Goebbels as a symbol of the evils of British capitalism, the theme of a
1943 film drama he commissioned on the disaster (see The Titanic in Myth
and Memory: Representations in Visual and Literary Culture for more on
this). Slavoj Žižek has aptly described the Titanic as a symptom of
modern culture in the psychoanalytic sense, a ‘knot of meanings’ occupying a
space in our collective imagination that somehow pre-existed the actual
disaster itself: as
Žižek points out, one popular novel from 1898 had already described the
sinking of a ship called Titan in uncannily similar circumstances.
It is this
‘knot of meanings’ that The Debris Field sets
out to explore. Here the Titanic is described as a ‘double ship’,
ghosted by its own myth. The pamphlet results from a multimedia project to mark
the centenary of the Titanic that poets Simon Barraclough, Isobel
Dixon and Chris McCabe developed in collaboration with filmmaker Jack Wake-Walker
and composer Oli Barrett. The complete film is scheduled for release on DVD,
but the publication of the pamphlet stakes a claim for the words to have an
independent existence beyond the original project.
[…]
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