Sanja Iveković

Sanja Iveković, Practice Makes a Master, Performance, 16:38 min, 1982/2009

Sanja Iveković, born 1949 in Zagreb, is a Croatian photographer, sculptor and installation artist. Considered to be one of the leading artists from the former Yugoslavia. Since the beginning of her artistic career, Iveković has always been interested in the representation of women in society.

Among her early works are Double Life, 1975, where she pairs 66 photographs of her private life with similar shots of models in magazine advertisements, Make Up-Make Down, 1978, with filmed or photographed self-portraits, and General Alert: Soap Opera, 1995, produced for television. Figure & Ground, 2006, depicts collages of female models looking like armed terrorists covered in blood and wearing military-inspired clothing from top designers.

Iveković has also been effective in her sculptures. In 2001, she copied Luxembourg’s national symbol Gëlle Fra (Golden Lady) but making the woman look visibly pregnant. Topping an obelisk which for some time was placed in the vicinity of the original, her Rosa Luxembourg caused considerable consternation. Women’s House, an ongoing project since 1998, displays plaster casts of the faces of abused women arranged in a semicircle.

At the 2010 Gwangju Biennale, Iveković’s On the Barricades was a living memorial commemorating the Gwangju people’s uprising of 18 May 1980. Based on her Rohrbach Living Memorial, 2005, depicting the fate of the Roma victims of the holocaust, the new presentation was enacted by volunteers representing statues of the victims. They were surrounded by 10 monitors presenting slideshows of photos of the 545 victims, whose eyes were intentionally closed by the artist.

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From the Archive

Ida Ekblad, Diary of a Madam, Exhibition Kunsthaus Hamburg

24 February 2017

Magazine Contemporary Culture

Art Artists Main No Comments

Ida Ekblad, Installation view, Diary of a Madam, Kunsthaus Hamburg, 7 Februar – 26. March 2017

The Kunsthaus Hamburg is hosting Ida Ekblad’s first institutional solo-exhibition in Germany. The artist is showing large-format paintings created for the exhibition. New sculptures will be presented in the context of a performance by the singer Nils Bech at the opening reception.

Ida Ekblad’s paintings and sculptures are like vehement acts of liberation. Gestural brushstrokes, dolphins, airbrush technique, aliens, junk, icons of Expressionism, puff effects recalling 3-D prints on sweatshirts of the eighties – Ida Ekblad’s process-oriented art production embodies an anarchic spirit that does not hesitate to appropriate styles, subjects, and materials of western culture that are deemed outdated or tasteless. This non-hierarchical aesthetic approach to the visual repertory of the recent past – often derived from contexts of popular culture and everyday life – may be understood in the sense of an ‘open source’ mentality which is devoid of the intention of consciously seeking to quote or to comment.

Teetering on the edge of good taste, the artist’s works have a strongly affective impact. While, on the one hand, ambivalent materials and aesthetic concepts are obviously being celebrated, on the other hand, a struggle with and between these very materials and concepts also clearly manifests itself. This also applies to Ida Ekblad’s latest large-format paintings, which she has assembled into a wall frieze of 20 meters length at the Kunsthaus Hamburg. Here, pubertal graffiti tags and Murano vases formed by the artist with puff paste are conflated on a two-dimensional surface. Relief-like surface structures as well as Ida Ekblad’s visibly obsessive delight in pure materiality reveal a sculptural spirit that does not call painting itself into question. The artist claims: “Painting to me combines expressions of rhythm, poetry, scent, emotion… It offers ways to articulate the spaces between words, and I cannot be concerned with its death, when working at it makes me feel so alive. Canvas can be attacked, copulated with and played like an instrument. I believe in painting like I believe in music. Gore grind music has been invented and can be reinvented forever, and no two raindrops are alike… no two gobs of paint, etc. etc.“ (Ida Ekblad, Mousse Magazine, Issue 22, 2010)

Ida Ekblad not only often refers to music and poetry, but the latter also concretely play a major role in many of her energetic, rhythmical works. In some of the paintings she has incorporated words or short sentences, while her exhibitions are generally accompanied by entire poems. Among other things, the titles of her works and presentations play with ambiguity: Diary of a Madam, the title of her presentation at the Kunsthaus Hamburg, not only makes reference to a biographical context – which, incidentally, is only pseudo-biographical since the multiply recurring portraits of a small Scandinavian-looking girl only appear to represent the young Ida Ekblad. It also phonetically alludes to ‘madman’ – a further recurring theme in the artist’s work: “Writing poetry becomes part of the struggle to stay sane, or the struggle to stay insane, I forget!”

In cooperation with Ida Ekblad, a performance by the Norwegian singer Nils Bech will take place at the opening reception. The performance will also be presented at the KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin, and the ICA Institute for Contemporary Art in London.

Text: Press Release, http://kunsthaushamburg.de//.
All images belongs to the respective artist and management.

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Iman Issa

11 December 2011

Magazine Contemporary Culture

Art Main No Comments

Triptych #6, 2009. Photographs, Text, Dimensions Variable

Issa’s Triptych series (#1, #2, #3, #4, #5, #6) from 2009, is a group of six beautiful wall installations comprised of photography, video objects and texts. They are images of places she collected in New York and restaged; settings that occurred through a personal psychological process in order to reveal personal associations. As Issa says “At one point I realized that what might have attracted me to these spaces was that they reminded me of others…. In trying to be as precise as possible, I realized that the certainty with which I was able to construct and produce these images did not translate to my final photographs, that I no longer recognized my constructions.”

In an attempt to articulate the content of memories and associations, Iman Issa decided to start constructing settings that corresponded to them, settings which she would then photograph. The resulting images ended up constituting the second element in each of these triptychs.

In trying to be as precise as possible, the artist realized that the certainty with which she was able to construct and produce these images did not translate to her final photographs, that she no longer recognized her constructions, nor was she certain of their sources. This brought about the idea to approach these photographs in a removed manner – as if they were found or produced by someone else – and use them as a point of departure for another artwork, one which eventually became what is presented here as the third and final element in each of these triptychs.

http://imanissa.com/

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Thomas Tait Spring Summer 2016

22 January 2016

Magazine Contemporary Culture

Fashion Main No Comments

Thomas Tait Spring Summer 2016

Thomas Tait’s show this afternoon was one of those odd outings that don’t seem at first to be up to much, but then accrue in force as the looks accumulate. The impact of Tait’s latest collection generated from the ways the clothes forced your engagement, whether via the play of light on assertive, multicolor crystal embellishment, or the sound made by the jewelry that dangled off of certain pieces, jangling like cat bells. The most intriguing of Tait’s stratagems to command your attention were the porthole-like openings that decorated all manner of his garments—they were like little windows for Peeping Toms to peer through, and the more Tait reiterated the motif, the more you keyed into the collection’s compelling voyeuristic tone. Tait intended that reaction: As he explained backstage after the show, he wanted these clothes to create a sense of “awkward intimacy.” Job done.

Others of Tait’s engaging effects were more subtle. He was playing quite a lot with texture here, notably in his ribbed knits and his terrific jeans, with their patches of super-shiny black patent leather; other looks pulled you in with their wabi-sabi appeal, like the frayed quilted jacket and coat, or a leather A-line skirt made from antique calfskin. Tait also used the skin in his strangest look, a heavy jumpsuit featuring a monumental pattern and exaggerated perforation down the sides. The piece was interesting on its own, but something of an outlier in the context of the rest of the show, which emphasized rather accessible silhouettes. Tait’s stovepipe skinny knit flares, for instance, ought to excite widespread demand. Ditto his ribbed knits, and the cuffed jeans and denim jacket. If Tait’s goal was to create intimacy, he nailed it in those most straightforward looks: The best way to be intimate with clothes, after all, is by wearing them.

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Michael Schmidt, Lebensmittel (Food)

9 February 2013

Magazine Contemporary Culture

Art Main No Comments

Michael Schmidt, From the series, Lebensmittel, 2006 – 2010

Michael Schmidt is one of Germany’s most important social-documentary photographers. Although he works in series, each photograph stands as an autonomous work in its own right. When the photographs are seen together in a book or an exhibition, connections between two pictures give rise to a third, as Schmidt explained in an interview with Dietmar Elger in his book Irgendwo.

In his Lebensmittel series (2006–10), Schmidt confronts photography with its painterly qualities in 177 photographs. The work’s all-too-perfect patterning makes it look like a naturalistic painting and manifests an immaculate production process. While using the documentary form of investigative journalism, Schmidt succeeds in capturing the social reality, hybridity and poverty of the food industry in a way that is neither accusatory nor dismissive. Schmidt is not concerned with finding a clear, self-sufficient aesthetic form. He opts neither for pure confrontation with the monstrosity of reality, nor for escapist visions based on abstraction. Instead, in his work, the aestheticized landscape becomes a mere region, a building is just architecture, a still life is simply an arrangement of objects.

Schmidt was born in east Berlin, but his family crossed to the west before the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961. He trained as a policeman, at his parents’ insistence, before taking up the camera in 1965 to document the streets, buildings and people of west Berlin. He later told an interviewer: “I could also make photos somewhere else; I just wouldn’t know why.” Schmidt was self-taught, and his early series, including Stadtlandschaft (Urban Landscapes) (1974-75) and Berlin, Stadtbilder (Berlin, Urban Images) (1976-80) mapped out the city in which he lived in a semi-documentary way. In 1976, he founded the Werkstatt für Fotografie (Workshop for Photography) in Berlin, and invited several leading American photographers, including William Eggleston and John Gossage, to teach there.

In the following decades, his approach became more impressionistic. He would shoot thousands of frames for each project without thinking too much about the end result, which would emerge later out of rigorous editing. Increasingly, he was drawn to series over single images, atmosphere over documentary representation.

http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/may/28/michael-schmidt

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Benjamin Valenza

27 January 2012

Magazine Contemporary Culture

Art Main No Comments

Benjamin Valenza at Salon 94 Freemans, New York, 2009 and Residue 01, 2011

Art Since the Summer of ’69 is proud to present Twice upon a Time, Benjamin Valenza’s first solo show in New York City. A large L- shaped yellow metal plate, deeply corroded by acid at four points, performs as an abstract panther in the show, or simply as an abstract painting. The work is the result of Valenza’s experiments with materials and carelessness, or rather of his love of ‘heavy duty’ materials.

One could describe Valenza’s method as working ‘ Hardcore Brancusi – ish’. From heavy duty, hardcore gestures to painstaking etching, Valenza will take his ‘trademark’ stones on legs to a new level, presenting a large black stone, engraved with a mysterious poem. The fifty-five pound heavy black alabaster rock will be presented on a large round pine tabletop and act as the center of the exhibition. Less anthropomorphic than the other stones Valenza has made, the black rock pays homage to Constantin Brancusi in its use of carving. Although Valenza does not carve the stone to let a form take shape and reveal the essence of an object or an idea. He simply carves words and leaves the shape of the stone intact.

Benjamin Valenza (b.1980 in Marseille, France) works and lives in Lausanne, Switzerland. He is a founding member of Galerie 1m3. He has exhibited at Fluxia Gallery in Milan, Castillo-Coralles in Paris, Hayward Gallery in London, Jan Winkelmann Gallery in Berlin, and Musee Cantonal Des Beaux Arts in Lausanne, among others.

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