Daniel Morgenthaler: Curating? Corating! | lecture

Curating? Corating!  

the public lecture by Swiss curator and author Daniel Morgenthaler

9th February at 6 pm at Project Room SCCA

Project Room, SCCA-Ljubljana, Metelkova 6, Ljubljana

 

image: Mediengruppe Bitnik, Delivery for Mr. Assange, Helmhaus Zürich, 2014.
Replica of Julian Assangeʼs office at the Ecuadorian embassy in London. Photo: FBM Studio.

About the lecture

It is a bit like picking up weapons in the digital architecture of an ego shooter game: Ancient Greek and Roman orators memorized their speeches by placing portions of content in different rooms of an imagined or remembered architectural structure. While giving their speeches, they would make their way through this brain architecture, gathering up contents along the way, aiming for the exit – i.e. the finale of their speech. As curators, we are – usually – not working in imagined architectures, if, then maybe in digital ones. But perhaps there are certain parallels between organizing speeches using the “method of loci” and organizing exhibitions in the chain of rooms that constitute an art space. And maybe exhibition making is also a kind of mnemotechnology: placing content in rooms, along the logic or rhetoric of a certain topic.

What can curators learn from orators, ancient or contemporary? Are exhibitions of contemporary art maybe less a tool of memory – that’s more the thing of historical museums – but of mnemory, with an n? Places of thinking art, of rethinking art, of memorizing tendencies? Literary theory is widely – and sometimes too generally – applied to arts. Could the principles of rhetoric be applied to curating, to more effect? These and other questions will be discussed in the context of future and past exhibitions at Helmhaus Zürich.

Daniel Morgenthaler (1978) has studied English, German and Philosophy in Zurich and Sheffield. Since 2011 he works as a curator at Helmhaus Zürich. Exhibitions include Talk to the Hand, 2013, !Mediengruppe Bitnik – Delivery for Mr. Assange/Christian Waldvogel – unknown, 2014, Asia Andrzejka Naveen – Mas cerca/De La Fuente Oscar De Franco – Bluecore, 2015. As a freelance author, he contributes to exhibition catalogues, magazines and newspapers like Kunstbulletin, Züritipp and Apartamento. He regularly teaches at the MAS Curating and the MFA at the Zurich University of the Arts. Together with critic and curator Aoife Rosenmeyer and supported by Pro Helvetia, he established Crritic! a workshop programme concerned with critical writing in Switzerland, in 2014.

Thomas Huber,Vanessa Billy,Sonia Kacem @ Centre Culturel Suisse| Paris

Thomas Huber, Vanessa Billy and Sonia Kacem with exhibitions @ Centre Culturel Suisse in Paris
Thomas Huber: extase (ecstasy)
January 21–April 2, 2017

 

 photocredit: Thomas Huber, Fontaines, aquarelle, 53,5 x 72 cm, 2016 / © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn

Thomas Huber: extase (ecstasy)
Nearly 30 years after his exhibition at the Centre Pompidou, Thomas Huber is literally taking possession of the large room at the Centre Culturel Suisse, where his work is wholly focused on the figure of Eros. This exhibition by the Berlin-based Swiss painter is made up of drawings, watercolours and large-scale wall paintings made on-site. “What I want to do is articulate the genius loci, that is to say, the exhibition space, by painting this Eros that connects us all.”.Protuberant and receding domes, constituted by gigantic vulva–fountains, are painted directly onto the walls. Reflectively imaged in these wall paintings, the exhibition space also houses a set of drawings and watercolours. For the artist, this manipulation by means of images offers magical possibilities: the representation of the space acts on the space itself. Huber thus transcends the image of the sexual organs, which are often considered unaesthetic, or even ugly, by giving them an aesthetic form, by making them “beautiful.”. The exhibition is accompanied by an artist’s book, also titled extase, containing a selection of 80 erotic drawings and watercolours taken from the 66 sketchbooks that the artist has used since 1972, and never previously published.
On January 25 at 7 pm, Huber will give a speech, titled Séance, in relation to the exhibition.

photocredit; Thomas Huber, Séance, 2009 / Collection privée, Genève © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn

Thomas Huber was born in Zurich in 1955. He lives and works in Berlin. The titles of his exhibitions are always carefully chosen. Of his many shows since 1982, the most recent include A l’horizon at the Kunstmuseum Bonn (2016) and Musée des Beaux-Arts de Rennes (2017); Abyss, a permanent installation for the MONA in Hobart, Tasmania (2017); the major retrospective Vous êtes ici. Thomas Huber est au Mamco, at Mamco, Geneva, in 2012; and La langueur des losanges at Carré d’Art, Nîmes, in 2008. In 1988, the Centre Pompidou hosted his show 7 lieux. Winner of the Meret Oppenheim Prize in 2013, he is represented, among others, by the Skopia gallery in Geneva and Louis Carré & Cie in Paris. His bibliography is currently approaching 50 books.







Vanessa Billy: Dear Life
January 21–February 27, 2017

Vanessa Billy: Dear Life
The works brought together in this exhibition, made mainly using recuperated junk, form an environment that suggests “dirty” liquids of one kind of other: an engine slowly leaking oil, a baby on a “sea” of waste, a net with fluids draining out of it. By getting bodies to interact with this environment, Dear Life evokes human life and its transformations, and questions the notion of life forms in a wider sense. This show by Vanessa Billy revisits what is a regular concern in her work: political ecology, doing so through the circulation and activation/deactivation of energies and resources.
Vanessa Billy (born 1978, lives in Zurich) studied at Cooper Union, New York and the Chelsea College of Arts, London. She has exhibited at the Kunsthalle Saint-Gall; BolteLang, Zurich (2016); c-o-m-p-o-s-i-t-e, Brussels; Limoncello, London (2015); Collective Gallery, Edinburgh (2014); Piano Nobile, Geneva (2013); and Kunsthaus Baselland, Muttenz (2011).
image photocredit;  Vanessa Billy;Dear Life, 2016 / Photo: Gunnar Meier
Sonia Kacem:Carcasse
March 4–April 2, 2017
Sonia Kacem: Carcasse
Structures in wood and metal delimit “a world” (as the term is understand in video games) that visitors are encouraged to explore. Carcasse is composed mainly by lines and empty spaces, humorously twisting the idea that the artist is expected to “fill” the space. Sonia Kacem plays games with our perception, shifting between abstraction and fiction. Her bare sculptures sport ambiguous, flesh-like colours and have human given names, like figures in a strange interior.
Sonia Kacem (born 1985, lives in Amsterdam) studied at HEAD in Geneva and is in residence at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten, Amsterdam, in 2016–17. She exhibited at the Centre d’Art Contemporain, Geneva, and at Galerie Gregor Staiger, Zurich, in 2016; at the Kunsthalle Saint-Gall and the T293 gallery, Naples, in 2015; and at Mamco, Geneva, in 2014. In 2016 the AHEAD foundation published a monograph about her work, Sonia Kacem - KIC.

practical information
Centre culturel suisse Paris
32-38, rue des Francs-Bourgeois
F-75003 Paris
+33 (0)1 42 71 44 50
 

Duncan Campbell @ Wiels .Brussels

Duncan Campbell @ Wiels | Brussels
26.01 - 26.03.2017
Curator: Dirk Snauwaert
Opening: 25.01.2017 at 19:30

WIELS presents the first major exhibition in Belgium by Duncan Campbell (b. 1972). Irish-born, Glasgow-based artist Campbell is best known for his documentary films. He was the recipient of the 2014 Turner Prize, to which he contributed with his seminal film It for Others, originally made for the Scottish Pavilion at Venice Biennial (2013), and which is a central work of this exhibition.
Campbell uses archival material as a tool to research subjects, biographies and histories and to reflect upon the “truth” or factual evidence of information. By mixing archival footage and new material, he questions and challenges the documentary form.

short bio 
Duncan Campbell (born 1972) is an Irish video artist, based in Glasgow. He was the winner of the 2014 Turner Prize. Campbell was born in Dublin, and studied at the University of Ulster (BA, 1996) and the Glasgow School of Art (MFA, 1998). In 2008, he was awarded the Bâloise Prize. In 2013, Campbell was one of the three artists chosen to represent Scotland at the Venice Biennale. On 1 December 2014, it was announced that he had won the 2014 Turner Prize. Campbell took the prize for his video work "It for Others" – a work that reflects on African art and includes a dance sequence inspired by Karl Marx.

Image: Duncan Campbell, It for Others, 2013. Courtesy the artist, LUX and Rodeo Gallery, London

Mare Nostrum by Paolo Vivian at [Box] Videoart Project Space , Milano

 

Mare Nostrum || Paolo Vivian 
[.BOX] Video Art Project Space || Milan. Italy
runs until 18th december 2016

curated by Dora Bulart

address:

[.BOX] Video Art Project Space

11 F. Confalonieri 11 st || 20124 Milano

Mare Nostrum by Paolo Vivian is a video impression and symbolist poetry, dedicated to the inner journey in search of the boundaries of hope. the sea as a symbol of a rich inner life. The world of shadows and dreams. Impalpable. Floating. Overwhelming. The Sea - slight, quiet, sensual, fragile, infatuated, timeless, irresistible. How it is the love. The black sea - cold, dangerous. The occult sea that it hides the memories of the trips after the hope for a meaningful life. The mare nostrum - constantly moving and constantly changing. The sea of ​​fear of pains. The sea of ​​power and ecstasy.  The work of  Vivian is the silent conversation of future memories and boundaries within us. The artist has used a banal object of everyday life and  he has created an unreal world of hypnotic beauty and spiritual metamorphosis. With the transmutation of forms with color spillover - those of the spirit and those of the passion, Vivian draws a thin borderline between life and death, between Heaven and Earth. The cubes of photographic installation shown in its memory are used by the artist for its symbolic games where the primary elements of the sea become as the tools for discovery of the secrets of the cosmos essence and inner awakening.

Dora Bulart, the project curator

 

Paolo VIVIAN (1962.Serso Pergine (Trento, Italy ) works into the field of collective memory through the languages ​​of sculpture, installation, photography and performance. His art have been presented in the program of Vilnius - European Capital of Culture 2009, on the occasion of the celebrations the 100th anniversary of the founding of the city of Differdange, Luxembourg; "heroes Corner ", Műcsarnok (Kunsthalle), Budapest; "Art & Nature" international project in Drenthe, under the auspices of the Dutch Queen, "Off-On" sculpture project , Hamburg; "Exi [s] t", Bulart gallery, Varna; "Shape Shifters", an international project by Raul Zamudio (USA); Museum of the Porziuncola, Assisi, Abbey of Neustift, Varna (Bolzano, Italy); "Mythology of Wood ", Castel Ivano Castle,  Borgo Valsugana (Trento, Italy ); Gallery" Actus Magnus ", Vilnius; Palazzo Ducale, Genoa, Italy ; Contempo - the International contemporary art festival, Varna, Bulgaria. He has more than 17 solo exhibitions in Italy , Bulgaria and Lithuania. He has won many international awards in Italy and abroad. His monumental sculptures are part of public collections in the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Italy, Germany, Poland, Austria, France, Bulgaria. It is presented by Bulart gallery (Bulgaria / Belgium). He lives and works in Palù (Trentino, Italy).

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Contemporist  is a c/o project presentation born in the result of the partnership between CONTEMPO – the international contemporary art festival  held in Varna Bulgaria since 2009 and VisualContainer – the most important Italian videoart distribution platform.  

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[.BOX] Videoart project space is a project of Visualcontainer Italian Videoart Platform

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address:

[.BOX] Video Art Project Space

11 F. Confalonieri 11 st || 20124 Milano

www.dotbox.it