Sarah Abu Abdallah, The Salad Zone, 2013, Saudi Automobil, 2012 and Video Still from The Salad Zone, 2013

Sarah Abu Abdallah works primarily with video and film as a medium. She grew up in Qatif, Saudi Arabia has an MFA in Digital Media at the Rhode Island School of Design. Recent participations include include Prospectif Cinema Filter Bubble in Centre Pompidou, Paris, Private Settings in the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, Arab Contemporary in the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark, Migrating Forms in NYC, the Serpentine Galleries 89plus Marathon in London, the 11th Sharjah Biennial 2013, Rhizoma in the 55th Venice biennale 2013. Contributed to Arts and Culture in Transformative Times Festival by ArteEast, NYC and the Moving image panel on Video + Film in Palazzo Grassi, Venice. See her catalogue of work on Vimeo here.

Sarah Abu Abdallah studied art in the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia’s more liberal neighbour, making her return to the strictures of life in Saudi Arabia hard. Her film Saudi Automobile tells of her frustration at the ban on women driving. It features a car she found crashed by the side of a road, which she painted pink. ‘This wishful gesture was the only way I could get myself a car,’ she says. “Painting a wrecked car like icing a cake, as if beautifying the exterior would help fix the lack of functionality within the car. This wishful gesture was the only way I could get myself a car – cold comfort for the current impossibility of my dream that I, as an independent person, can drive myself to work one day.”

Saudi Automobil, 2012 depicts Sarah Abu Abdallah painting the shell of a wrecked car with light pink paint, a gesture of defiance against Saudi Arabia’s prohibition on women drivers, which makes mobility the exclusive privilege of men. After sweltering in her abaya under the hot sun, Abdallah finally retreats to the passenger seat, reflecting her place in Saudi society. For the exhibition ‘Soft Power’ Abu Abdallah installed the painted car in the gallery space, further emphasising the limits of her rights to vehicle ownership.

‘I don’t call for extreme freedom,’ she says. ‘But we grow up at a very young age here and the more you grow up the more you realise you will never have full custody of your life.’ Her work, it seems, is Abu Abdallah’s lifeline. She reads about it rapaciously, ordering massive tomes from abroad about abstract expressionism and performance art. ‘Being a woman in Saudi may be really restricting,’ she says, ‘but being a female Saudi artist is very good at the moment. I want to join that wave.’

Sifting through the absolute, the predefined, constructs of anxiety, and the absurdity of the agreed-upon in a time of excess, in her work The Salad Zone, 2013. How does one place one’s coordinates in the physical, metaphysical, and the digital citizenry? It is said that the gravitational forces exerted by the planets affect the circulation of human bodies and emotions as much as they affect the oceans. Youtube and google image search help to assemble an uncomfortable space for a question spanning practices of compulsion and purification. Continuing on a previous question of how in a hyper-connected world, does one place one’s coordinates in the physical, metaphysical, and the digital citizenry. Sarah Abu Abdallah’s series q-VR, draws a mental collage using the everyday, references to virtual reality and old photos of the artist’s father in his youth to make up a fictional world through images.

In her work The Turbulence of Sea and Blood, 2015, we see disarrayed glimpses of multiple narratives such as that of: familial domestic tensions, a juvenile dream of going to Japan, the tendency to smash TVs in moments of anger, and eating fish. While using scenes from the artist’s surroundings and life in Saudi Arabia, like streets or malls, it never attempts to provide the whole picture, but takes a rhizomatic approach to tell a story of the everyday life.

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Lars Laumann

18 February 2016

Magazine Contemporary Culture

Art Exhibitions Main No Comments

Lars Laumann, Season of Migration to the North, 2015, Kari & Knut, 2009-2010 and Duett (Med styrken i vår tro i en sang, i en sang), 2010

The exhibition Kompendium with the Norwegian artist Lars Laumann features a selection of video works from 2006 until today. By filming, editing, and juxtaposing a mix of appropriated materials and subjectively experienced narratives, Laumann creates virtuoso, visual film collages that feature an extensive cast of characters. His collaborations with artists, filmmakers, and musicians clearly influence the final result. The artist seeks inspiration from the margins of pop culture and explores people and phenomena on the outskirts of society. With a global perspective on both pop culture icons and contemporary political events, Laumann sheds light on the more complex forces of our culture.

‘Kompendium’ is small in scale but broad in scope. The span of Lars Laumann’s works takes in the fishing industries in Somalia and Northern Norway; Morrissey conspiracy theories; migrating puffins and marching bands; and Nico’s last days in Ibiza. This survey of his work – the first time much of it has been shown in his native Norway – comprises six films on small screens or monitors in the upstairs exhibition halls of Kunstnernes Hus, while the newest piece, Seasons of Migration to the North (2015), is projected inside a scaffolding rig that fills up a whole ground floor room.

The earliest piece on show is Morrissey Foretelling the Death of Diana (2006), in which Laumann deconstructs the lyrics of The Smiths’ 1985 album Meat is Murder, track by track, to reveal a dizzying litany of references that appear to predict the death of Princess Diana, an analysis that teeters between being convincing and absurd. Five adjacent monitors play the same film, each one spoken in a different language (one for each country where the piece has been shown to date) and each in a conspicuous, regional accent (the English version is spoken in thick Mancunian). Against a looped background refrain by The Smiths, montaged clips from French New Wave, Kitchen Sink Drama or Carry Onfilms obliquely illustrate the monologue’s rollercoaster of incident. Truth and paranoia lie back to back in what is both an homage to Laumann’s own early Smiths obsession, as well as the obscure lines of research facilitated by the internet.

Laumann is attracted to stories that occur on the margins, or even the margins of the margins. His best known work, Berlinmuren(2008), tells the tale of a Swedish woman, Eija-Riita Eklöf Berlinermauer, who is ‘objecto-sexual’ and has fallen in love with and married the Berlin Wall. The outlandish story, narrated in deadpan fashion by the Swedish woman herself, evacuates the Berlin Wall of its usual symbolic political content and meaning: ‘My love for the Berlin Wall has nothing to do with politics’, she says. Without Laumann’s own presence in the film, it’s difficult to determine if the story is real or fabricated, creating an unsettling viewing experience that brings our own prejudices to the fore.

Laumann’s most recent work, Season of Migration to the North, takes on more topical territory. The film is a refugee story, told from the perspective of a young, gay Sudanese asylum-seeker, doubly ostracized through homophobia and Islamophobia. Again, the narration is in the first person – the protagonist Eddie Ismael reads his diary entries from just before his arrest in Khartoum to his departure for Norway, where he was sent to a refugee camp in the North before moving to Oslo. Eddie’s arrest occurs at a fashion show in Khartoum that he helped organize and took part in. The police raided the event, arresting all of ‘the boys who they thought looked gay’ as well as the girls that ‘looked immoral’. Original footage from this fashion show provides the visual backdrop – handsome, barefoot models parade on a carpeted catwalk, styled in casual designer clothes. The work draws its power from the gulf between the benign images and their role in the narrator’s exile. At one point Ismael brings in a historical parallel, mentioning the diaries of Ruth Maier, an Austrian girl who came to Norway as a refugee from World War II, and fell in love with a Norwegian girl. History repeats itself, and the struggles faced by Jewish homosexuals during mid-20th-century fascism now find their echo in the experiences of Muslim homosexuals – minorities within a minority group.

The first-person narration in both of these films is direct and disarming, while the artist’s own presence is reduced to the point of invisibility. Laumann’s works are never documentary as such: the intense identification of artist and subject dissolves critical distance, rendering the relationship between them ambiguous. Voices, scripts and images are often borrowed, while several works are collaborations with artist friends. Just as Morrissey told his own story through a montage of quotes lifted from literature and films, so each of Laumann’s works becomes an inhabitation of others’ lives. ‘My mind and my life are two different things’, says Nico in the film You Can’t Pretend to be Somebody Else – You Already Are (2009–11), in which a trio of transvestites are called upon to perform the story of Nico’s life: ‘My life follows me around.’

Source: Magazine Contemporary Culture.
Text: Kirsty Bell, Frieze Magazine and Press Release, Kunstnernes Hus.
All images belongs to the respective artist and managment.

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Nordeste, 2005 by Juan Diego Solanas

17 February 2016

Magazine Contemporary Culture

Film No Comments

Nordeste film is a 2005 Argentina-French drama-thriller film directed by Juan Diego Solanas. It was screened in the Un Certain Regard section at the 2005 Cannes Film Festival. Felix Monti’s widescreen cinematography shows drop-dead views of the misty green countryside that seems to stretch out endlessly.

This is a story about a childless Frenchwoman who travels to a remote region of Argentina in search of a baby to adopt, Nordeste film convincingly brings together the harsh reality themes from new Argentine cinema and a Western style of dramatic storytelling. On his feature directing bow, award-winning short filmmaker Juan Solanas shows a talent for compelling female characters, aided by an impassioned Carole Bouquet in the lead role.

Helene (Bouquet) leads a sales meeting for her pharmaceutical company before traveling to Argentina to adopt a child. Her journey is intercut with the tribulations of Juana (Aymara Rovero), a young single mother living in the Argentine countryside, who ekes out a precarious living for herself and her 13-year-old son Martin (Ignacio Ramon Jimenez).

When Helene’s adoption arrangements fall through in Buenos Aires, she hears about the possibility of finding a child in the country’s poverty-stricken Northeast. Young lawyer Gustavo (Juan Pablo Domench) warns her, however, it will be necessary to cut an illegal deal with child traffickers there.In her desperation, Helene is ready for anything: Much later, however, she will learn this area is infamous for its traffic in children: selling them for adoption, child prostitution or even organ traffic.

Meanwhile, Juana is pregnant again and is being evicted from her hovel. She struggles with the option of giving Martin up for adoption abroad, but she loves him too much to let him go.Inevitably, Helene and Juana meet. Juana has tried to abort her baby and comes to Helene for help. At the same time, Helene is given an opportunity to buy a newborn infant for $45,000. The film shows how cheap children’s lives are to men who have no qualms about what happens to them and has a lot of points to make.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0398664/

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Painting: Max Schmidtlein

17 February 2016

Magazine Contemporary Culture

Art Main No Comments

Max Schmidtlein, Hallo, 2014 and Head and Shoulders, 2015

Max Schmidtlein’s solo exhibition Detox Plus is a highly contemporary painting exhibition. ‘Not another “contemporary” painting show’, you might say. Yet more painting that wants to do everything differently. Painting that acts oh so aware of media issues and its own implication in the mechanisms of both on- and offline circulation – but in the end turns out to be just that: implicated. While these grumbles may be warranted, perhaps this exhibition is different.

Detox Plus not only looks cheap, it is: made, in fact, on a shoe-string budget. Nine works are on view, eight of them almost the same size and similar in appearance. The longish canvases of thin black fabric (bought on sale at Karstadt, apparently) are used sometimes vertically, sometimes horizontally; all are painted using products from the pharmacy chain dm. The only work that’s not a painting is a deceptively real light box bearing the dm logo, installed outside the gallery (dm, as all works from 2015).

The titles of the works are derived from the respective products used in their manufacture, for example Head and Shoulders, the exhibition’s most representational painting. True to its punning title, the work depicts the head and shoulders of a human figure on a black background, while the body for the most part disappears beneath a white, nearly rectangular spot of colour (made of shampoo and conditioner from the corresponding brand, together with chalk, oil, and acrylic paint). Contrastingly, Balea is almost abstract. The hint of a hand can be made out and one can’t help but search the glittery, slippery-looking splotch for traces of lotions and bath products from the eponymous personal hygiene brand. For Profissimo, a cleaning product from the dm in-store household range was used. The work depicts a kitchen knife and a pack of cigarettes. And in The Beauty Effect, one detects a reclining figure stretching its arms over a head resembling an irregular square on which a mixture of anti-acne cream, essential oils, and perfumed wax has been applied. If you get up close to the canvases, you can even smell the products.

While this might sound like a sequence of cheap one-liners, the target quickly becomes clear. The focus is less the craze for wellness and detox than the current ubiquity of what is largely, ostensibly, conceptual (and for the most part abstract) meta-painting. In other words, the joke works despite the collision of cheap material and cheap concept, not through it. It’s a form of meta-meta-painting, if you like. Perhaps in a similar vein to what the Reena Spaulings pranksters have come up with for their concurrent Later Seascapes show on view at Berlin’s Galerie Neu – four ‘Zombie Formalist’ abstract canvases painted by robot vacuum cleaners. These works, too, are one-liners: a commentary on painting through painting. Whereas by now Reena Spaulings’ project might come across as the self-reflexive one-upmanship of cynical jokes – their subversive aspect lost largely due to the position of power they’ve achieved at the heart of the art establishment – Schmidtlein’s exhibition feels quite different: more the stunt of a mischievous court jester than a grimly nihilistic gesture by the sovereign.

Schmidtlein might make use of the prevailing short-circuit between material and concept, but he intersects it at the formal level by using deliberately sloppy figuration. Rather than a slick, decorative abstraction based on a tired conceptual superstructure – the automatization of a painting process whose insistence on expressivity has long since ceased to be anything more than appearance – here are helpless, sad, ghostly figures that attempt, apparently without much success, to breathe new life into their tired, dirty bodies with cheap synthetic hygiene products. At the same time, and in the midst of all this dreariness, Schmidtlein’s paintings are also far removed from the colourful canvases in which today’s painters have tried to restore figuration through comic form, using googly eyes and cute monsters to poke fun at conveyer-belt abstraction.

Ultimately, Schmidtlein’s show too is a grinning meta-commentary on the ubiquitous genre of conceptual painting. One, however, that doesn’t cynically turn itself into a robo-cleaner messing around with the dirt on the gallery floor, only then to sell that same dirt. Instead these paintings use the mud of a €1.99 face-mask: a kind of fresh-cell therapy in a low-grade drugstore spirit. Lo and behold, beneath it all a young and tender skin actually does appear. What’s the dm slogan that puts it so well? ‘This is where I’m a person, this is where I shop.’ And that’s miles away from painting bots.

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Artist: Carl Mannov, Low Man on the Totem Pole

6 February 2016

Magazine Contemporary Culture

Art Artists Main No Comments

Carl Mannov ,Motorcycles and flames 7, 2015 and i’m_too_sad_to_tell_you.fla, 2015

Carl Mannov is a trolley. C-A-R-L-M-A-N-N-O-V. The letters are sprayed in black. Wooden floor. Metal frame. Sturdy wheels. It would be disappointed if merely left with the task of wheeling paintings around. This trolley has other talents. This trolley is able to carry that weight. This trolley makes it possible to remain curious. Whatever object found or made, whatever needing to go somewhere or elsewhere, or whenever missing a seat to sit down for a cigarette and a sense of overview of the studio. The objects going on top, it appears, are always centred. You can tell because the one R and the two Ns are about to get scratched out. It makes the letters appear more or less the same. But there still is no doubt: this trolley is Carl Mannov.

Carl Mannov is a tool. Carl Mannov is a desk with a wheelie chair. Carl Mannov is a graph on a whiteboard. Carl Mannov is a doodle drawing on a post-it note (now crumpled and tossed into the paper basket). An absent-minded rendering of the objects that surround that multi-coloured cube on the office desk but that you don’t have to draw to remember: the coffee cup, the phone, the computer screen, the keycard holder. A lazy line is capturing the icon of incoming mail, a thumbs up, a mobile phone with a smile on its screen. A lazy start to the day starts with water cooler conversations. “Small talk comes from small bones”, if you can trust Ezra Pound. Carl Mannov makes paintings of chitchat.

Carl Mannov is a plinth that is made without the necessary skills, tools and materials at hand. A mosaic of decisions, hesitations and transitions. A crooked line bending around a crooked corner. Carl Mannov is the box that never really fits the floor, whether concrete, tiles, wood or a linoleum cover that should have long since been removed. Carl Mannov tried by painting it grey. Carl Mannov can not change the architecture he is part of. Carl Mannov is the low man on the totem pole.

Carl Mannov (born 1990, Copenhagen) is an MA student of the Oslo National Academy of the Arts. Former exhibitions include “Conflicting Evidence” at 1857, Oslo, “No buddy but our shelves” at Oslo Prosjektrom, Oslo, and “Rambuk” at kazachenko’s apartment, Oslo.

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Sculpture: Zuzanna Czebatu

5 February 2016

Magazine Contemporary Culture

Art Artists Main No Comments

Zuzanna Czebatu, Happy-Go-Lucky-No I â€“ III, 2016 and Within Meadows And Rolling Hills, 2016

Zuzanna Czebatul (born in 1986, Miedzyszecz) lives and works in New York. She graduated from the Städelschule, Frankfurt/Main in 2013. She is currently working towards her MFA at Hunter College, New York, as Fulbright Fellow. She is also a recipient of the 2015 SOMA Scholarship, Mexico City. Czebatul works as a sculptor, producing her own materials, and creating works that merge the differentiation between commercial product and artistic production. Her work is influenced by the aesthetics of ancient sculptures, modern forms of display and presentation, as well as the club culture of the 1990s.

“I grew up with rave culture and DJ a little bit today. Clubbing is a density of so much, the epitome of desire, break-out, expression, positioning. The way music leads the crowd in a certain direction, the side effects of reaching borders, the club itself is a place with it’s own set-up of rules: all this is like a micro map of what we’re looking for and it’s diversity. Techno is symptomatic for this, an endless loop suggesting the possibility of salvation kicks for every weekend.”

Working between media and place, Zuzanna Czebatul extends cognitive possibilities and relational aesthetics through the sculptural architectures of her installations. Reconfiguring spatial representations, Czebatul maps environments that read as site-specific studies from an aerial perspective.

“I’ve been always interested in the relationships between recipient and object, their context and the mechanisms of their display. There are hierarchies and power structures but in the end the viewer generates the value which makes all participating elements arbitrary. At the moment I am working on a six meter long plush sculpture in form of an broken obelisk, shattered on the floor. Quite the opposite of concrete and steel— a giant symbol of power, making space for something new in it’s collapse, availing the positive aspects of destruction and ability to see ‘chance’ even in subjective moments of personal failure.”

Czebatul has had solo exhibitions at Gillmeier Rech, Berlin; Opelvillen Rüsselsheim; and 1822-Forum, Frankfurt/Main. Her work has been presented in group exhibitions at Center, Berlin; 1m3, Lausanne; Heidelberger Kunstverein; and Villa Romana, Florence.

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Rosetta, 1999 by Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne

3 February 2016

Magazine Contemporary Culture

Film No Comments

Rosetta is a 1999 French-Belgian film written and directed by the Dardenne brothers. It is about a seventeen-year-old girl (played by Émilie Dequenne) who lives in a trailer park with her alcoholic mother. Trying to survive and to escape her situation, she makes numerous attempts towards securing a job allowing her to move away from the caravan and her dysfunctional mother in order to reach a stable life.

When her probationary employment ends, Rosetta (Émilie Dequenne) causes a violent struggle against her manager and the policemen when she refuses to leave the premises. She returns home to “The Grand Canyon”, the trailer park shared with her alcoholic mother who mends worn clothes for her to sell. Rosetta is also seen laying out traps to catch trout for food. Unable to receive unemployment pay and desperate for work, Rosetta goes around to ask about vacancies until she happens upon a waffle stand. She befriends the worker, Riquet (Fabrizio Rongione), after an inquiry. Rosetta questionably treats her unexplained stomach pains with pain relievers and a hairdryer massaging the area.

Riquet makes an unexpected visit to the trailer park, startling Rosetta. He informs her a coworker was fired and thus she will be able to have a job. Her mother’s promiscuity resulting from alcoholism prompts Rosetta to encourage her to seek a rehabilitation clinic so they can finally have a better life. However, her persistent denial causes her mother to run away. Rosetta decides to stay with Riquet for the night. During the awkward evening, she discovers a waffle iron in his possession. As she lies in bed, she tries to convince herself that her life has started to function normally.

At work, she is replaced after three days by the owner (Olivier Gourmet) because his son failed school, leading to another violent confrontation. Rosetta is moderately pacified when he tells her she will be contacted if an opportunity arises. She begins a new search for employment while keeping Riquet company during work. Riquet falls into the water when he helps Rosetta with her traps. She watches him thrashing in the muddy water and hesitates before helping him out. Later she discovers Riquet has been selling his own waffles during business hours from his offer of an under the table job helping him mix the batter. After some contemplation, she tells the owner. Rosetta looks on as Riquet is thrown out of the stand and is handed his apron. Betrayed and hurt, Riquet chases Rosetta on his moped as she attempts to evade him. Eventually he catches up to her and demands her motive. She states she wanted a job and had no intention of saving him.

Rosetta encounters Riquet as a customer when she begins her first day in his stead. She returns home to find her mother barely conscious and inebriated in front, dragging her inside and putting her to bed. She calls her boss and tells him she will not be at work the next day. She then turn on the gas, and goes to bed, in an attempt to slowly kill herself and her mother. The gas runs out. She goes to the landlord to ask for another one. As she hauls the canister of gas with great difficulty, Riquet on his moped appears to circle around her. Rosetta walks a short distance before collapsing to the ground and cries. Riquet grabs her by the arm to pick her up. She turns around to gaze at him as she slowly regains her composure.

In Belgium the film inspired a new law prohibiting employers from paying teen workers less than the minimum wage and other labor reforms for youth.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0200071/

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Offside, 2006 by Jafar Panahi

3 February 2016

Magazine Contemporary Culture

Film No Comments

Offside (Persian: آفساید ‎‎) is a 2006 Iranian film directed by Jafar Panahi, about girls who try to watch a World Cup qualifying match but are forbidden by law because of their sex. Female fans are not allowed to enter football stadiums in Iran on the grounds that there will be a high risk of violence or verbal abuse against them.

A girl disguises herself as a boy to go attend the 2006 World Cup qualifying match between Iran and Bahrain. She travels by bus with a group of male fans, some of whom notice her gender, but do not tell anyone. At the stadium, she persuades a reluctant ticket tout to sell her a ticket; he only agrees to do so at an inflated price. The girl tries to slip through security, but she is spotted and arrested. She is put in a holding pen on the stadium roof with several other women who have also been caught; the pen is frustratingly close to a window onto the match, but the women are at the wrong angle to see it.

The women are guarded by several soldiers, all of whom are just doing their national service; one in particular is a country boy from Tabriz who just wants to return to his farm. The soldiers are bored and do not particularly care whether women should be allowed to attend football matches; however, they guard the women carefully for fear of their “chief”, who could come by at any moment. They occasionally give commentary on the match to the women.

One of the younger girls needs to go to the toilet, but of course there is no women’s toilet in the stadium. A soldier is deputed to escort her to the men’s toilet, which he does by an increasingly farcical process: first disguising her face with a poster of a football star, then throwing a number of angry men out of the toilet and blockading any more from entering. During the chaos, the girl escapes into the stadium, although she returns to the holding pen shortly after as she is worried about the soldier from Tabriz getting into trouble.

Part of the way through the second half of the game, the women are bundled into a bus, along with a boy arrested for carrying fireworks, and the soldiers ordered to drive them to the Vice Squad headquarters. As the bus travels through Tehran, the soldier from Tabriz plays the radio commentary on the match as it concludes. Iran defeats Bahrain 1-0 with a goal from Nosrati just after half time and wild celebrations erupt within the bus as the women and the soldiers cheer and sing with joy. The girl whose story began the film is the only one not happy. When asked why, she explains that she is not really interested in football; she wanted to attend the match because a friend of hers was one of seven people killed in a scuffle during the recent Iran-Japan match, and she wanted to see the match in his memory.

The city of Tehran explodes with festivity, and the bus becomes caught in a traffic jam as a spontaneous street party begins. Borrowing seven sparklers from the boy with the fireworks, the women and the soldiers leave the bus and join the party, holding the sparklers above them.

The film was filmed at an actual stadium during a qualifying match for the Iranian National team. Panahi had two separate outcomes to the film depending on the turnout of the match.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0499537/

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