Wednesday, 13 May 2009
Tuesday, 12 May 2009
Collected Books - Emma Astner and Louise O'Hare
(click to enlarge image)
A temporary library containing the favourite books of a selection of artists involved with Contested Ground. Each artist was invited to contribute a book list of 5-10 favourite books from their personal library.
“Favourite” is an awkward word, it means most liked, or preferred, it doesn’t mean the best. The nature of the question means the answer will always be subjective. The request for a favourite may seem pointless but it permits an unencumbered answer- a selection with no discernible thrust or order. The response is always current, the favourite is contemporary and it is expected to change.
Here, the artists personal collection was presented in a space that is used to make public a private collection. A declaration of taste - both collections exhibit a desire to own the intellectual property of another and to visibly and tangibly associate oneself with this ownership.
“Favourite” is an awkward word, it means most liked, or preferred, it doesn’t mean the best. The nature of the question means the answer will always be subjective. The request for a favourite may seem pointless but it permits an unencumbered answer- a selection with no discernible thrust or order. The response is always current, the favourite is contemporary and it is expected to change.
Here, the artists personal collection was presented in a space that is used to make public a private collection. A declaration of taste - both collections exhibit a desire to own the intellectual property of another and to visibly and tangibly associate oneself with this ownership.
Thursday, 7 May 2009
The Edge of the City - Mona Schieren
The Edge of the City
30 min 48 sec, Video, 2007
The film The edge of the city (2007) shows the search for the outskirts and the encounter with the phantasm „Zona Metropolitana de la Ciudad de Mexico“ (ZMVM). Urban interest merges with the curiosity of a tourist in a video collage that shows a „trip through the urban (un) reality of one of the biggest cities of the world“. From a bird’s-eye view the sea of light of the mega city in the night is a magic moment. After this opening scene the film becomes a mixture of a heroic epic, a news channel program and a travel diary. Instead of hearing a typical documentary voice over the artist’s very personal comments make one aware of the construction of the narration. This suggests various stories and makes one doubt the truth of them at the same time. Members of the youth gang the „Cacos“ (thieves) talk about the rules in the streets of Neza, a place where the roads aren’t paved. „As if God forgot to come ‘round here to pave the roads,” one guy comments. The gang members’ dreams are focused on a border that is further away than the city boundary: the USA. An ostensible edge of the city is the urban highway, which runs straight for miles from Neza to Ciudad Azteka. However, behind it a gated community was being constructed at the time the film was made – with walls around it and uniformed security guards in order to dissociate oneself from the rest. In the north, a wall that was built to stop the city from growing has already been overwhelmed by new settlements. In the south traditional Christian feasts are being celebrated in modest dwellings, whereas in the rich west the skyscrapers of Santa Fé, an international business headquarter, stretch towards the horizon. Gratefully the travelers reject an offer to film a kidnapping. However, in the initial scene a man with a mask „saves“ a woman: a scene, that alludes to the cliché of the legendary Mexican toghter Santo and comments on his heroic performance in Mexican films. In suggestive scenes the storytelling is demonstrated and maintained at the same time. Presenting personal experiences of the artists, the narrative perspective shows how subjective a point of view can be but how one nevertheless tends to look out for the unreal. The relation between the supposed real and the unreal, the present and the virtual is constantly being reorganized, while differing facets of experience are demonstrated. Like a music piece The edge of the city jumps from one rhythm to another making the „report“ somehow unreal and fantastic.
30 min 48 sec, Video, 2007
The film The edge of the city (2007) shows the search for the outskirts and the encounter with the phantasm „Zona Metropolitana de la Ciudad de Mexico“ (ZMVM). Urban interest merges with the curiosity of a tourist in a video collage that shows a „trip through the urban (un) reality of one of the biggest cities of the world“. From a bird’s-eye view the sea of light of the mega city in the night is a magic moment. After this opening scene the film becomes a mixture of a heroic epic, a news channel program and a travel diary. Instead of hearing a typical documentary voice over the artist’s very personal comments make one aware of the construction of the narration. This suggests various stories and makes one doubt the truth of them at the same time. Members of the youth gang the „Cacos“ (thieves) talk about the rules in the streets of Neza, a place where the roads aren’t paved. „As if God forgot to come ‘round here to pave the roads,” one guy comments. The gang members’ dreams are focused on a border that is further away than the city boundary: the USA. An ostensible edge of the city is the urban highway, which runs straight for miles from Neza to Ciudad Azteka. However, behind it a gated community was being constructed at the time the film was made – with walls around it and uniformed security guards in order to dissociate oneself from the rest. In the north, a wall that was built to stop the city from growing has already been overwhelmed by new settlements. In the south traditional Christian feasts are being celebrated in modest dwellings, whereas in the rich west the skyscrapers of Santa Fé, an international business headquarter, stretch towards the horizon. Gratefully the travelers reject an offer to film a kidnapping. However, in the initial scene a man with a mask „saves“ a woman: a scene, that alludes to the cliché of the legendary Mexican toghter Santo and comments on his heroic performance in Mexican films. In suggestive scenes the storytelling is demonstrated and maintained at the same time. Presenting personal experiences of the artists, the narrative perspective shows how subjective a point of view can be but how one nevertheless tends to look out for the unreal. The relation between the supposed real and the unreal, the present and the virtual is constantly being reorganized, while differing facets of experience are demonstrated. Like a music piece The edge of the city jumps from one rhythm to another making the „report“ somehow unreal and fantastic.
Stefan Demming - Carmen Billows
“As if God forgot to come ‘round here to pave the roads.”
After watching The Edge of The City, a film by artist Stefan Demming this particular sentence, said by one of the gang members caught on camera, sticks in my mind. Both documentary and fiction, Demming’s film investigates the limitations of urban space and human endeavour at the margins of visibility.
A charismatic narrator guides us to the different edges of the world’s biggest Metropolis, Mexico City. He draws us into the two protagonists’ mission; the relentless search for mental and factual borders, so that we become witnesses of random encounters and unexpected adventures along the fine line between the last signs of human inhabitation and the desert. The camera focuses on the forgotten and neglected by urban politics and on the daily struggle of a population usually hidden from media representation, on youth gangs and ‘heroes’ in criminal scenarios.
The film’s narrative is ambivalent and at the same time both humorous but troubling. We can never be sure about it’s intention, leaving us suspending belief somewhere between amusement and disturbance. In their encounter with different cultures and ways of living the two European anti-heroes are humanitarian friend and distanced observer acting beyond our expected mode of representation familiar in documentaries. By exaggerating and persistently imposing their western perspective onto what they discover they can clearly pinpoint ordinarily neglected and ignored issues of injustice. Their naïve, clown-like behaviour paradoxically encourages trust and confessions from the people they meet, dismantling inconsistencies making them partners in kidnap and crime activities.
The dwellers that they meet during their travel through the lines of urban confinement seem to have found a specific way of inhabiting the contested reality of their modest territories. With menace the film persistently circles around one main issue: Who will win within this uneven battle between civilisation and an inhuman environment? Will the city finally give in and allow nature to regain territory and ease where there is nothing but poverty, crime, injustice, violence, dirt and heat?
After watching The Edge of The City, a film by artist Stefan Demming this particular sentence, said by one of the gang members caught on camera, sticks in my mind. Both documentary and fiction, Demming’s film investigates the limitations of urban space and human endeavour at the margins of visibility.
A charismatic narrator guides us to the different edges of the world’s biggest Metropolis, Mexico City. He draws us into the two protagonists’ mission; the relentless search for mental and factual borders, so that we become witnesses of random encounters and unexpected adventures along the fine line between the last signs of human inhabitation and the desert. The camera focuses on the forgotten and neglected by urban politics and on the daily struggle of a population usually hidden from media representation, on youth gangs and ‘heroes’ in criminal scenarios.
The film’s narrative is ambivalent and at the same time both humorous but troubling. We can never be sure about it’s intention, leaving us suspending belief somewhere between amusement and disturbance. In their encounter with different cultures and ways of living the two European anti-heroes are humanitarian friend and distanced observer acting beyond our expected mode of representation familiar in documentaries. By exaggerating and persistently imposing their western perspective onto what they discover they can clearly pinpoint ordinarily neglected and ignored issues of injustice. Their naïve, clown-like behaviour paradoxically encourages trust and confessions from the people they meet, dismantling inconsistencies making them partners in kidnap and crime activities.
The dwellers that they meet during their travel through the lines of urban confinement seem to have found a specific way of inhabiting the contested reality of their modest territories. With menace the film persistently circles around one main issue: Who will win within this uneven battle between civilisation and an inhuman environment? Will the city finally give in and allow nature to regain territory and ease where there is nothing but poverty, crime, injustice, violence, dirt and heat?
Introduction by Ellen Mara De Wachter - Exhibition Curator, 176
Contested Ground took place at 176 over two days in January 2009 as part of Testing Ground: Curating. This month-long experiment sought to engage with the practice of curating in three specific artistic registers: the performing arts, curatorial training programmes and the secondary school teaching of photography, textiles and graphics. These projects resulted in the intensive production and presentation of three public events at 176 over the course of three weeks. The Magic, an evening of music, dance and live film curated by singer-songwriter Lail Arad, tested the boundaries between the performing arts and performance art. Deconstruct/Reconstruct was the culmination of a process that involved the curators at 176 mentoring a group of year 12 secondary school students through the production and exhibition of new works, and introduced a generation of young art students to the practice of curating.
In the narrative arc of Contested Ground, what began as a modest proposal to students on the two most established curatorial training programmes in London – the MA in Curating Contemporary Art at the Royal College of Art and the MFA in Curating at Goldsmiths College – rapidly took on a life of its own as the forces of ambition and competition came into play. The resulting two days of exhibitions, performances and events were attended by more than 800 people. The initial brief to the students of the two courses was to programme a public event – for example an artist’s talk or screening – during the weekend of January 17/18. We extended that initial invitation in late October 2008, and in the 12 weeks between that time and the public presentation of Contested Ground, the project grew, well beyond our initial expectations, to involve 30 curating students and more than 35 artists and collectives in some 17 discrete events and over 10 different curated displays. In terms of resources, the students were offered the building at 176, a former Methodist chapel with 1,000 square metres of exhibition space; curatorial support from the team at the gallery; and a promotional campaign for the event, conducted through the press and marketing channels used by 176. One caveat in the brief was that the event would in no way be funded by 176, hence the modesty of our initial proposal. The curators of Testing Ground were invited to figure out the event’s economics and budget for themselves.
Contested Ground was not simply an exercise in fulfilling lavish ambitions with frugal means; its underlying pedagogical motivation was to introduce the students to the practice of curating in an active and independent institution; one which operates within its own unique set of circumstances and provides an unusual institutional framework. As a privately funded public space, linked to the Zabludowicz Collection of contemporary art, 176 enjoys a relative freedom in terms of its programming. In other words, its independence from public sources of funding allows it to take on projects at short notice, sidestepping time-consuming bureaucratic procedures, and to take risks in producing large-scale artworks and exhibitions. This freedom lends the process of exhibition-making at 176 an intuitive air and allows for an open-ended approach to projects. However, it also demands a sustained critical and analytical stance from the curatorial team at 176 with regard to its own programming and status in relation to other types of public and private art institutions.
During the debrief for Contested Ground, the most common comment from the students involved in the project was a retroactive wish to have received a more stringent brief for the project. But delivering an overall vision for the event from the outset would have risked hindering the open-ended and experimental nature of the project, which in many ways enabled its ambitious scope to emerge and contributed to its eventual success. Paradoxically, the fact that Contested Ground teetered on the edge of being overprogrammed, or of repelling audiences with an excess of options, is one of the things that made it so successful. Post hoc publications such as this zine, which has come out of the printed material generated during and after the weekend, allow an engagement with the tangled legacy of such an intensive moment of production. They allow us to eke out the strands that made it such a success, and to reel in those that threatened to lead it astray.
In the narrative arc of Contested Ground, what began as a modest proposal to students on the two most established curatorial training programmes in London – the MA in Curating Contemporary Art at the Royal College of Art and the MFA in Curating at Goldsmiths College – rapidly took on a life of its own as the forces of ambition and competition came into play. The resulting two days of exhibitions, performances and events were attended by more than 800 people. The initial brief to the students of the two courses was to programme a public event – for example an artist’s talk or screening – during the weekend of January 17/18. We extended that initial invitation in late October 2008, and in the 12 weeks between that time and the public presentation of Contested Ground, the project grew, well beyond our initial expectations, to involve 30 curating students and more than 35 artists and collectives in some 17 discrete events and over 10 different curated displays. In terms of resources, the students were offered the building at 176, a former Methodist chapel with 1,000 square metres of exhibition space; curatorial support from the team at the gallery; and a promotional campaign for the event, conducted through the press and marketing channels used by 176. One caveat in the brief was that the event would in no way be funded by 176, hence the modesty of our initial proposal. The curators of Testing Ground were invited to figure out the event’s economics and budget for themselves.
Contested Ground was not simply an exercise in fulfilling lavish ambitions with frugal means; its underlying pedagogical motivation was to introduce the students to the practice of curating in an active and independent institution; one which operates within its own unique set of circumstances and provides an unusual institutional framework. As a privately funded public space, linked to the Zabludowicz Collection of contemporary art, 176 enjoys a relative freedom in terms of its programming. In other words, its independence from public sources of funding allows it to take on projects at short notice, sidestepping time-consuming bureaucratic procedures, and to take risks in producing large-scale artworks and exhibitions. This freedom lends the process of exhibition-making at 176 an intuitive air and allows for an open-ended approach to projects. However, it also demands a sustained critical and analytical stance from the curatorial team at 176 with regard to its own programming and status in relation to other types of public and private art institutions.
During the debrief for Contested Ground, the most common comment from the students involved in the project was a retroactive wish to have received a more stringent brief for the project. But delivering an overall vision for the event from the outset would have risked hindering the open-ended and experimental nature of the project, which in many ways enabled its ambitious scope to emerge and contributed to its eventual success. Paradoxically, the fact that Contested Ground teetered on the edge of being overprogrammed, or of repelling audiences with an excess of options, is one of the things that made it so successful. Post hoc publications such as this zine, which has come out of the printed material generated during and after the weekend, allow an engagement with the tangled legacy of such an intensive moment of production. They allow us to eke out the strands that made it such a success, and to reel in those that threatened to lead it astray.
Curating Ecologies - Robert Dingle
A concern brought to our attention when asking such awkward questions as, what is at the centre of contemporary curatorial practice? Or what can we identify as particular to the field of curating?, becomes a problem as soon as we attempt to address these questions in ways which try to define a singular attribute or tendency that satisfactorily appeases both questions.
At the same time there is a necessity, which all curators posses that can be recognised as the identification of a particular concern in relation to the field of cultural production. Or, to put it another way, is not the notion of a curatorial practice underlined by a particular and developed curatorial ‘sensibility’ or engagement with a precise set of ideas that are perceived, by the curator, to be in relation to specific modes of cultural production? Is it possible to say that although we are unable to define the field of curatorial production around the terms of a singular attribute, attitude or model of practice, may we instead say that the field is composed from a multitude of particular, overlapping and variable concerns that take form of practices and attempt to address modes of cultural production in both numerous and variegated ways?
Putting this to one side, what I would argue to be considered as a fundamental aspect of any understanding of curatorial production is an apparent and joined concern, not particular to the field of curating at all, but rather, shared with that of ecology. If we are able to understand ecology (outside the vernacular usage of the term), to mean a particular method or process for addressing the relations within and between an identified system, then it is possible to consider an ecology of curatorial production as a method that holds essential the apprehension of relations between individual agents, agents and objects and objects and objects.
In particular, with regard to the latter, to what extent are we able to manage, understand and interpret the relations and encounters between objects? To what extent is this concern the role of the curator? How do objects (re) act in relation with one another? And to what extent can this allow for a productive encounter with cultural production?
Contested Ground takes these questions as a basis for its position in relation to modes of cultural production, as the exhibition proposes to establish a micro field of simultaneous practices (on both curatorial and artistic levels). The contested ground formulates itself around the specific territory of relations, both physical and symbolic, that are discernable through the artwork and the work of the curators. The exhibition formally establishes itself as the result of a process of continuous affect, as each micro field comes into relation with one another to form a disjointed but formally constituted whole.
But, to what extent are we able to pull apart individual vectors at work within the exhibition and consider them in relation to one another? What are the precise terms being proposed as constitutive of a state of contestation and are we only able to consider these as physiological incursions within the space where objects impose, or are imposed, spatially or physically upon one another? Are we able to imagine a more productive encounter between objects that does not necessarily result in a homogenised or consensual approach, but rather demands us to address a more considered series of questions?
At the same time there is a necessity, which all curators posses that can be recognised as the identification of a particular concern in relation to the field of cultural production. Or, to put it another way, is not the notion of a curatorial practice underlined by a particular and developed curatorial ‘sensibility’ or engagement with a precise set of ideas that are perceived, by the curator, to be in relation to specific modes of cultural production? Is it possible to say that although we are unable to define the field of curatorial production around the terms of a singular attribute, attitude or model of practice, may we instead say that the field is composed from a multitude of particular, overlapping and variable concerns that take form of practices and attempt to address modes of cultural production in both numerous and variegated ways?
Putting this to one side, what I would argue to be considered as a fundamental aspect of any understanding of curatorial production is an apparent and joined concern, not particular to the field of curating at all, but rather, shared with that of ecology. If we are able to understand ecology (outside the vernacular usage of the term), to mean a particular method or process for addressing the relations within and between an identified system, then it is possible to consider an ecology of curatorial production as a method that holds essential the apprehension of relations between individual agents, agents and objects and objects and objects.
In particular, with regard to the latter, to what extent are we able to manage, understand and interpret the relations and encounters between objects? To what extent is this concern the role of the curator? How do objects (re) act in relation with one another? And to what extent can this allow for a productive encounter with cultural production?
Contested Ground takes these questions as a basis for its position in relation to modes of cultural production, as the exhibition proposes to establish a micro field of simultaneous practices (on both curatorial and artistic levels). The contested ground formulates itself around the specific territory of relations, both physical and symbolic, that are discernable through the artwork and the work of the curators. The exhibition formally establishes itself as the result of a process of continuous affect, as each micro field comes into relation with one another to form a disjointed but formally constituted whole.
But, to what extent are we able to pull apart individual vectors at work within the exhibition and consider them in relation to one another? What are the precise terms being proposed as constitutive of a state of contestation and are we only able to consider these as physiological incursions within the space where objects impose, or are imposed, spatially or physically upon one another? Are we able to imagine a more productive encounter between objects that does not necessarily result in a homogenised or consensual approach, but rather demands us to address a more considered series of questions?
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