Sunday, November 7, 2010

ELENA BAJO THE OBJECT OF A MOVEMENT AT D+T PROJECT BRUSSELS Nov 18, 2010



D+T PROJECT presents ELENA BAJO The Object of a Movement | Is Music the Essence of Words ?

Nov 18, 2010 – Jan 8, 2011

Opening Reception Nov 18, 2010 - 6 pm to 9 pm

Performance at 7 pm

Artist Publication with contributions by Daniel Miller, Caroline Soyez-Pettithomme, Mathieu Copeland and Tom Trevatt

D+T Project is pleased to present The Object of a Movement / Is Music the Essence of Words?, Elena Bajo’s first solo exhibition in Belgium.

Having as a point of departure art production processes, and focusing on precise moments of disrupture and change, Elena Bajo has created new site specific works that reflect on the fragmentary, ephemeral and disjointed nature of time.

The new works exhibited at D+T Project Gallery have been produced in their entirety in Brussels, with materials found in different places where the production, distribution, exchange and consumption of an art product normally takes place: the Flea Market, the Art School and the Framer Shop. These found and overlooked materials are re-arranged into complex compositions. The works are not ‘merely’ installed, but ‘performed’ using the gallery space and its different forms of memory. The works are like traces of a series of performative gestures collaged together that form a choreographed dynamic of individualized narratives.

Fundamental elements of her work are issues of power distribution and non-hierarchical forms of organization. She experiments with form and context as anarchist practice. Her works are not only deliberate rebellions against commodity culture of pure exchange value of capital but are also reflective of value in an alternative economy ruled by a non-linear logic in which reused objects are understood as agents in networks directing flows of content. These reused objects which have been discarded at the end of their lifetime, become revivified in a reconfigured symbolic universe of her own making, that constitutes her ‘revolutionary cosmology’. The objects become ’revolutionary objects’ and the act of deviating them is an act of resistance.
.
This art work made of revolutionary objects, moves away from the society of entertainment and exhibition, along with its overproduction and over consumption. Bajo resucitates the outcasts of a capitalist object oriented market system to breath new life into them according to a different logic. This is her statement and is the power of her art work. The reconfiguration of that which was and is yet to become again.

In recent shows at the Woodmill in London (April-May 2010) and at La Salle de Bains, in Lyon (June-July 2010) she presented “Is Music the Essence of Words”, a sculpture around which her pieces are staged and evolve, pieces created in Brussels, especially for this exhibition at D+T Project Art gallery.

Born in Madrid, Spain, in 1976, Bajo holds an MFA from Central Saint Martins School of Art in London and an MA in Architecture from ESARQ, Barcelona, she attended Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2006. Selected exhibitions, The Woodmill, London; La Salle de Bains, Lyon; Solyst, Skulpturenpark, Denmark; Galeria Umberto di Marino Naples (2010); Perform Now! Human Resources Gallery, Los Angeles; White Columns, New York (2009); Sculpture Center, LIC (2009); Kunstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin (2008), FAR, Fabbrica del Vapore e Careof, Milan; co-edited the issue 2 of INPUT Journal, NY and was one of the founders of the project EXHIBITION, New York (2009). Future shows include Extra City, Antwerp and ICI, New York.

D+T Project
Sebastien Delire & Gregory Thirion
Rue Bosquet 4 – B-1060 Bruxelles
+32 2 537 76 30 | +32.494 624 313 | +32 487 125 250
http://www.dt-project.com
Info@dt-project.com

Thursday, July 8, 2010

The Horizon Line is Here - Tornare per Partire - at Umberto di Marino Gallery, Naples

Elena Bajo, Ulla von Brandenburg, Runo Lagomarsino, Pedro Neves Marques, André Romão

20th May - 10th September 2010

www.galleriaumbertodimarino.com

“The Horizon line is here – tornare per partire” is a collective exhibition curated by Lorenzo Bruni and deals with the theme of travel. The exhibition features works by Elena Bajo, Ulla von Brandenburg, Runo Lagomarsino, Pedro Neves Marques and André Romão, and consists of video-installations, performances, sculptures, photographs and drawings, most of which have been made especially for the occasion and for the physical space of the Umberto Di Marino Gallery.








Wednesday, June 2, 2010

‘Plan for a Composition in 3 Movements’, Performance and Exhibition at The Woodmill, April 21 - May 23, 2010






‘Plan for a Composition in 3 Movements’, performance by Elena Bajo in collaboration with a group of London based actors: Jessica Manley, Kasha Bajor, Joyia Fitch, Lowri James, T Davar, Lucy Thanes, Irene Fuma.

Site specific works made in response to the history of the studio and gallery complex. The piece is created by Elena Bajo and focuses on the social, political and technological history of the Woodmill site. Bajo combines performance and large scale installations to investigate the material conditions of redevelopment and regeneration, the waste generated from urban renewal, the 'stuff' of social change.

Focusing on precise moments of disruption and change Elena Bajo presents new work in response to the social, political and technological histories of the Woodmill site. In it's current incarnation the building has recently been turned into artists' studios and galleries, but it has previously been, among other things, a council office building, a stables, a bus depot and a wheelwright.

In Bajo's work the material conditions of redevelopment and regeneration, the waste generated from urban renewal, the 'stuff' of social change, combine with a performative and ongoing historical document of the local urban landscape to produce dispersed sculptural assemblages and installations that open out on to an investigation of universal political forms.

www.elenabajo.com

The Woodmill
Neckinger Depot
Neckinger
London
SE16 3QN

www.woodmill.org





Thursday, February 25, 2010

Elena Bajo: Artist's Statement

Elena Bajo's concept-generated practice is concerned with the social and political dimensions of everyday spaces, the strategies to conceptualize resistance, the poetics of ideologies, and the relationship between temporalities and subjectivities. She works individually and collectively across installation, sculpture, painting, performance, participatory events, film, text and writing. She uses exhibition spaces a studio or laboratories, where an experimental, itinerant, site-specific performed work unfolds, building improvised actions and choreographed movements.
Having as a point of departure art production processes, working with places as they are given to her and limited by the materials available around them, Elena Bajo rearranges these found elements into a new composition, juxtaposing the identities of prefigured social and political spaces and dimensions, creating a sometimes cryptic but always revealing new code of signifiers. A re-staging of a space and time, of the past, into future events that uses chance, contingency and ambiguity of the moment.

Sunday, November 29, 2009

Performance at 179 Canal New York


Video documentation, Part I, Fourth repetition

Video documentation, Part II, Fourth repetition

Nothing More Than a Theatre of Fluctuating Ideas and Echoes of Future Moments (A New Refutation of Time), an experimental, itinerant, ever unfolding, site-specific performed sculpture, an abstract ensemble of philosophical texts de-coded into musical notes, improvised actions and choreographed movements.
Having as a point of departure art production processes, working with places as they are given to her and limited by the materials available around them, Elena Bajo rearranges these found elements into a new composition, juxtaposing the identities of prefigured social and political spaces and dimensions, creating a sometimes cryptic but always revealing new code of signifiers. A re-staging of a space and time, of the past, into future events that uses chance, contingency and ambiguity of the moment.

Elena Bajo is a spanish artist living and working between New York and Berlin. Her concept-generated practice is concerned with the social and political dimensions of everyday actions and common spaces, the strategies to conceptualize resistance, the poetics of ideologies, and the relationship between temporalities and subjectivities. She works individually and collectively across installation, performance, participatory events, video and writing.

She has recently participated in projects at White Columns, New York (2009), Prague Festival, Prague (2009), Sculpture Center, LIC (2009), ISCP, New York (2009), Kunstraum Kreuzberg/Bethanien, Berlin (2008) and was one of the founders of the temporary art project EXHIBITION, New York (2009). In 2005, she received an MFA from Central Saint Martins School of Art in London.

Wednesday, October 21, 2009

Performance and Installation at Freies Museum, Berlin



Elena Bajo, Nothing More Than a Theatre of Fluctuating Ideas and Echoes of Future Moments (A New Refutation of Time) II, Berlin, 2009



PERFORMANCE Oct 30th, 9pm: Nothing More Than a Theatre of Fluctuating Ideas
and Echoes of Future Moments II (A New Refutation of Time).
Elena Bajo juxtaposes
in her performance, and installation work the identities of prefigured spaces and
dimensions, creating a sometimes cryptic but always revealing new code of signifiers.


Truestories.Truesuccess explores issues of fiction -domestic, historic, intimate,
curatorial, urban, virtual and social. From abstract narration of timelessness
to direct quotations of specific moments in history, performance, photography,
mixed media on paper, sculpture, and video-art, architectures of moments
built mostly on personal experience.

truestories.truesuccess
Opening Fri Oct 30th 7-9pm
30. Oktober - 14. November

Artists: Elena Bajo, Teresa María Díaz Nerio, Linda Franke,
Katya Gardea Browne, Andrea Loux, Yvette Mattern, IngridMwangiRobertHutter,
Rachelle Mozman, Raquel Paiewonsky, Marta Mabel Pérez, Amy Stafford,
Iris Schieferstein, Gabriela Vainsencher


Curator: Alanna Lockward

Freies Museum
Potsdamer Straße 91, 10785 Tiergarten, Berlin
http://www.freies-museum.com/

Thursday, October 1, 2009

TINA B. – The Prague Contemporary Art Festival 09: A NEW ERA

Elena Bajo Nothing more than a theatre of fluctuating ideas and echoes of future moments (a new refutation of time) 2009

A NEW ERA


October 8 - October 25, 2009

Curators: BBB Johanes Deimling,
Blanca De la Torre, Paulina Kolczynska, and Greyzone

Director: Monika Burian

Exhibition Venues: Stone Bell House, Pedestrian Zone Prikopech and Ovokni TRH, Vernon Gallery, Vernon City, Park Hotel Praha, Alternative Space Delnicka

TINA B. - The Prague Contemporary Art Festival

Janovskeho 23
Prague 7, 170 00
Czech Republic
+420 774 155 591
info@tina-b.com

http://www.tina-b.eu/en

The Prague Contemporary Art Festival is an international contemporary art project, which strives to combine the creative energy of the cultural scene in Central and Eastern Europe with emerging talents and trends from around the world. TINA B. is held under the auspices and with the support of the Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic and the City of Prague.

An acronym for “This Is Not Another Biennial”, TINA B. is also the personification of a fictitious character, the festival’s enigmatic female patron.

Artists:

COM&COM, Christoph Draeger, Elena Bajo, Federico Solmi, Ivan Navarro, Jenny Marketou, Johannes Gees, Chus García Fraile, Olaf Breuning, Nina Sobell, Warren Neidich, Yves Netzhammer, Oliver Husain, Guy Ben-Ner, Ruti Sela & Maayan Amir, Edgardo Aragón Díaz, Avi Mograbi, Ronnie Bass, Roee Rosen, Hassan Sharif, Zbigniew Libera, Jiri Kovanda, Mauro Cuppone, Jacob Ouillette, Santiago Montoya, Tomas Spevak, Dita Havrankova, Marketa Hlinovska, Daniel Hanzlík, Andrea Bianconi, Valerio Beruti, Jens Becker, SEMP, Katja Loher, Selina Trepp, Franz Gratwohl, Victorine Muller, Marion Ritzmann, Enrico Centonze, Milan Houser, Ron Rocco, Lauri Lyons, Paolo Cirio, Shahar Marcus, Basim Magdy, Zoë Walke and Neil Bromwich, Petra Valentová, Dana Sederowsky, Antonio Pilade, Barbara Rosenthal.

A NEW ERA

The 4th annual Festival TINA B. will be held from October 8 till October 25 2009 and like the 2008 show will again present new and avante garde media. The premier event of the Festival will be a week of special performances and visual installations. The showcsase event of the Contemporary Art TINA B. Festival is the NEW ERA project which introduces visitors to art pieces from at least three selected countries. In 2008 Festival presented art pieces from Japan, Korea, USA and Italy. The 2009 festival highlights Israel, Switzerland and the Middle East. There will be approximately 50 artists displaying their art and also 7 curator projects.

The pivotal theme of TINA B. Festival 2009 is epitomized by the phrase NEW ERA. This conception underlines the festival´s determination to explore relations and connections between new experimental forms of artistic expression and the wider cultural and social conjunctions and contexts. The NEW ERA can be conceptualized by the fusion of ideas from our current period of seismic changes in society, nature, civilization as a consequence of human consciousness; creatively linking new modes of thinking. NEW ERA will take you by surprise by demonstrating a potenital future or, alternatively in a comletely unexpected fashion, by demonstrating a new kind of new progressive recycling of old forms and their transformations into the shapes of new world where revolution is proceeding not on the surface of the Earth but under the surface of substance itself.

The 2008 TINA B. show centered on the theme of involvement reflecting the unfortunate fatal period of the Czech history., The 2009 NEW ERA event sheds light on new aspects (perspectives) which were set in motion by the Velvet revolution in 1989. It deals not only with the topic of the overthrow of the past political regime and the return of freedom to the Czech Republic but also on a symbolic level exposes the new way of thinking and a new sensitivity connected with the possibilities of free movement, travelling, study abroad, praxis, etc.

The fourth year of TINA B. festival will shed light on the role of contemporary art and artistic activity regarded as a social-cultural component which is not only critical towards community ordering but above all it has a curative and positive effect as well. Festival TINA B. perceives art as a motive force bringing people back to a self reflective and contemplative state of mind over the direction of current world, whether on the local or global level, as a factor that strengthens the democratic society and its ability to face up the extreme political and societal phenomena; a pledge against an oppression of democratic principles and civil rights and as an indicator of a healthy society and culture at the same time.

Festival TINA B. ranks among the most prominent events introducing the contemporary art on the international scale for its focus on art in public spaces and new creative media as digital, mobile and internet technologies.

CONTACT

TINA B. Artist Coordinator
Lucie Černá
lucie.cerna@tina-b.com
+420 773 915 504

TINA B. PR Manager
Markéta Faustova
marketa.faustova@tina-b.com
+420 773 915 501








Tuesday, September 15, 2009

WHITE COLUMNS, Sept 10 - Oct 24, 2009

Gallery Registered - Elena Bajo, Margarida Correia, Gregg Evans, Claudia Weber

Curated by Ryan Evans and Amie Scally


Elena Bajo
Untitled, 2009
Mixed media (Paper, backdrop, palettes, slide projector, pedestal)
Dimensions variable
Courtesy of the artist


Using primarily found materials, Elena Bajo creates a space of potentiality for the viewer. Referencing the idea of the blank and the erased as explored in the work of John Cage and Robert Rauschenberg, the installation on view is suspended somewhere in between photography, film, sculpture, drawing, text and painting, using White Columns’ exhibition space as both inherent framework for the work and as a medium. The artist has described her interest in “the social and political dimensions of everyday spaces, the strategies to conceptualize resistance, the poetics of ideologies, and the relationship between temporalities and subjectivities.”

Elena Bajo lives and works in New York and Berlin. She has an upcoming solo exhibition at P.S.1, and recently participated in projects at Sculpture Center, LIC (2009), ISCP, New York (2009), Kunstraum Kreuzberg/Bethanien, Berlin (2008) and was one of the founders of the temporary art space EXHIBITION, Two-Eleven, NYC (2009). In 2005, she received an MFA from Central Saint Martins School of Art in London.

SEPTEMBER 10 - OCTOBER 24
TUESDAY - SATURDAY, NOON - 6PM

WHITE COLUMNS
320 WEST 13TH STREET
(ENTER ON HORATIO STREET)
NEW YORK, NY 10014
WWW.WHITECOLUMNS.ORG

Sunday, August 2, 2009

whitehot by Marco Antonini| July 9 2009, Unaddressed Circumventions: Folds from a Failed Suicide @ Gresham's Ghost


Elena Bajo, one hundred watts twelve forty seven post meridium, mixed media, courtesy Gresham's Ghost

whitehot | July 2009, Unaddressed Circumventions: Folds from a Failed Suicide @ Gresham's Ghost

Unaddressed Circumventions: Folds from a Failed Suicide at Gresham’s Ghost
Second Location
521 W 26th Street,
New York, NY,
May 14 through June 9, 2009


Ajay Kurian’s Unaddressed Circumventions: Folds from a Failed Suicide, is the second installment of his ongoing Grisham’s Ghost nomadic curatorial series. Selections from a suicide note - whose convoluted language often seems to cross the line with a dark, philosophy-heavy art criticism - function as a fragmented and jagged backbone to the show. The note is part of William Gaddis’ first novel, The Recognitions.

The ultimate uselessness of painting claimed by Gaddis’ text is translated into an extended skepticism towards, or re-evaluation of, visual representation. It looms large among the artworks. The dark, desperate tone of the missive, emphasized by Kurian’s radical text fragmentation, reverberates throughout the exhibition. Jason Fox and Matt Connors provide the only actual paintings. These stick to abstraction or quasi-abstraction and keep the immediacy and readability of their artistic intentions at an unfortunate minimum. Connor’s tiny paper and pen Untitled abstractions are way more convincing with their savvy use of variation over a set of almost imperceptible and thoroughly humble structural and formal components.

Matt Saunders’ contact prints, fashioned as Buster Keaton’s portraits via the simple and elegant use of the actor’s silhouette, provide a sort of visual summa of the exhibition. The gestural silvery strokes of the altered negatives delete and define at the same time, while representation and context are reduced to an evanescent, impossible minimum setting a tone that’s reminiscent the darkest passages in Gaddis’ text. This dark series of analogues, each different in the painterly treatment of the negative, leads to Saunder’s more lyrical Asta Nielsen (in the snow) a ghostly portrait of the famous Danish silent film diva. Asta is falling, whitened out by wide, ectoplasmic silver strokes. A pitch black background seems on the verge of consuming her liquid body substance, invading the pure boundaries of the snowy white. The connection between this piece and the apocalyptic language of Gaddis’ suicide note is quite immediate and rooted in the emotional quality of the image and its treatment.

Elena Bajo’s little installation/painting is another highlight of the show. The economical execution and pragmatic look of the piece, as well as its unceremonious title (one hundred watts, twelve forty seven, post meridium) conceal complex and intriguing ideas. Hung low on the wall, a small naive landscape on canvas, dominated by tones of gray, is obliterated by a central white rectangle, outlined in tape. A few inches from the canvas, an equally low tripod holds a spotlight close to the white area, its light filtering through the adjustable flaps and forming a geometric pattern of bright whites and shades of gray. Bajo’s negation and, to a certain degree, destruction of the underlying painting seems to be aimed at a transformation of its stale artistic values. The painting’s uniqueness (highly questionable, given its stock quality) lingers like a ghost behind the diagrammatical nature of the contraption, a whitewashed memento mori to painting and craftsmanship.

The conceptual framework of Unaddressed Circumventions is open and flexible enough to allow dissonant and border-line interpretations to whatever aspects of the original text Kurian was trying to stress by folding and editing Gaddis’ text. Several contributions do not seem to really relate to the words that should have inspired them. Anyhow, the exhibition vibrates with the letter’s hopeless tone, echoing its convoluted, pessimistic lucubrations. Death finally stands out as the only way of circumventing the unbearable weight of a failure that is assumed as a prerequisite of any art form. By Marco Antonini

Thursday, July 16, 2009

"Bread and Roses 101"at Sculpture Center -University of Trash- workshop by artists Elena Bajo and Jon Cuyson PARTICIPATE- SIGN UP for 1 hour


BREAD AND ROSES 101: Workshop / Performance / Installation by Elena Bajo and Jon Cuyson

"Bread and Roses 101" is a series of one on one discussions that seek to explore, imagine and implement new forms of protest by creating actions and strategies, while negotiating the production of space and consumption of time incorporating leisure as a way of resistance

The University of Trash at the Sculpture Center in New York will be a temporary site for this installation and performance conducted by artists Elena Bajo and Jon Cuyson. The artists will create within the University of Trash an evolving ‘stage’ composed of a diversity of found and existent materials (taken from the streets surrounding Sculpture Center) wherein the workshop will be conducted.

“Bread and Roses 101
” will be a venue for social engagement and experimentation as it becomes open to a variety of participants who will be asked to attend the workshop for one hour each. Within that hour both artists will negotiate with the participant/s his/her intentions to create (or not) within the allotted time slot, thereby testing various forms of reality and interpersonal communication. Both artists will assist and/or participate in attempting to make the proposal of each participant/s a reality. All activities will be documented. All of the participants will receive a printed Certificate of Completion that will be created by the artists after their one hour of participation in the workshop.

This collaborative project aims to explore issues of new labor and capital, while focusing on leisure and Production of Space as a strategy to articulate resistance. Notions of chance and authorship as well as mental and physical limitations by both artists and participants will manifest as they attempt to integrate ideas that will determine the success or failure of each activity.

The project title was borrowed from a slogan that was used during a women’s textile workers strike that occurred in Massachusetts in 1912 “give us bread, but give us also roses”, and serves as the starting point for this project. This workshop is suitable for those whose interests are in work that do not merely represent a political issue, nor serve as propaganda but directly confronts and transforms the issue itself. If you are interested in radically engaged practices that look neither like art nor activism but take the best of both of these worlds that sit somewhere between direct action and performance, resistance and leisure then this workshop is for you.

This workshop / performance will be conducted by Elena Bajo and Jon Cuyson at the University of Trash in Sculpture Center on the following dates:

July 17 Friday 11-6
July 19 Sunday 11-6
July 20 Monday 11-6
July 23 Thursday 11-6

If you would like to participate kindly email us your preferred date and time along with a brief description of your interest and a short bio at this email address:

Elena Bajo is an artist living and working in New York and Berlin. Her concept-generated practice is concerned with the social and political dimensions of everyday spaces, the strategies to conceptualize resistance, the poetics of ideologies, and the relationship between temporalities and subjectivities. She works across installation, sculpture, performance, participatory events, video, text and writing. http://elenabajo.com

Jon Cuyson is an artist currently living in New York. His work is informed by his interest in the complex relationship of both the natural and urban landscape in relation to social memory, everyday life and spirituality. His mixed media works employs conceptual strategies that touch on notions of impermanence and transformation.
Sculpture Center
University of Trash
44-19 Purves Street
Long Island City
New York 11101
http://www.sculpture-center.org/























































Bread and Roses 101 was a project performed on July 17,19, 20 & 23, 2009 at The University of Trash at the Sculpture Center in New York created by Michael Cataldi and Nils Norman. Elena Bajo and Jon Cuyson created and performed within The University of Trash a temporary and mobile site composed of one table and some found chairs. From 11 am to 6 pm of each of the four days of the Workshop, both artists talked, listened, imagined, negotiated and acted with the participants for one hour individually. Each one was asked to schedule ahead online and was asked to submit a description of what he or she wanted to do within the specific hour. Both artists assisted and participated in making the proposal of each participant/s a reality. All of the activities were documented and upon completion of the full hour, each of the participants received a limited edition silk printed Certificate of Completion created by the artists for the project.

Bread and Roses 101 was a series of one on one discussion that aimed to explore, imagine and implement new forms of protest by creating actions and strategies, while negotiating the production of space and consumption of time by incorporating leisure as a way of resistance. The project title was borrowed from a slogan that was used during a women’s textile workers strike that occurred in Massachusetts in 1912 “give us bread, but give us also roses”, and served as the starting point for this project. The following are the names of the participants and their self titled activities.

July 17 Mark Tribe - Conversation/ Derive

July 19 Shinsuke Aso - Situationistic Chatting

Cathy Lebowitz - Derive on Propaganda

Noam Londy - Did We Stop Time?

Lisa Sigal - Delineation

July 21 Gracie de Vito - Non-Productive Research

Quechua Couture - Being Present

Murad Mumtaz - Getting Lost & Classical Guitar Playing

July 23 Lindsay Benedict - Reorganizations of Questions

Brainard Carey - Omniscient Observer

Jordi Sanjo - Floating Concrete Conversation

Liana Gimenez - Floating Concrete Conversation

Saturday, May 23, 2009

Financial District at ISCP curated by Miguel Amado

FINANCIAL DISTRICT AT the International Studio & Curatorial Program, ISCP, New York
An exhibition curated by Miguel Amado

Works by Julieta Aranda, Olivier Babin, Elena Bajo, Beth Campbell, Alexandra do Carmo, Lotte Lindner & Till Steinbrenner, Mads Lynnerup, Rä di Martino, Isola and Norzi, Marisa Olson, Anna Ostoya, Miguel Palma, Carlos Roque, Antonio Rovaldi, Andrea Schneemeier, Nedko Solakov, Marko Tadić, Brina Thurston, Alex Villar, and Zimmerfrei
Artists’ writings and books by Michael Blum, Elmgreen & Dragset, Liam Gillick, Henrik Plenge Jakobsen, Carlos Motta, Michael Rakowitz, Lisi Raskin, Oliver Ressler, and xurban_collective
Artists’ talks by Carlos Motta, Lisi Raskin, and Hakan Topal + Alex Villar

Friday, May 8 – Monday, May 11, 2009
Press preview: Friday, May 8, 5 – 7 PM
Opening reception: Friday, May 8, 7 – 9 PM

Elena Bajo: Untitled, 1867 'But only the social act can make a
particular commodity the universal equivalent -money' (modified
text
from Karl Marx 'The Capital'). Spray paint stencil on found door

The International Studio & Curatorial Program proudly presents the exhibition Financial District, organized by Miguel Amado, curator-in-residence in 2009. FinancialDistrict brings together resident artists at ISCP as well New York-based and international artists whose works allegorically respond to, comment on, and conjecture about the relationship between the contemporary global economic climate and the US cultural landscape. Featuring media as diverse as painting, sculpture, drawing, photography, video, and performance, as well as artists’ writings, books, and talks, this exhibition provides an exclusive peek into the output of some of the most significant socially-conscious, critically-engaged practitioners of today.

The Financial District marks the urban scenery of all major American cities. However, more than an architectural trait or geographical location, the Financial Districtstands for an ideology, that of the “new spirit of capitalism,” which has developed over the past few decades and which has been recently questioned in the wake of the financial crisis that emerged last year. Therefore, although affecting all sectors, the existing situation’s consequences expand beyond the field of economy, for example changing production capacities and consumption patterns. This condition is thus altering everyday life in the manner classical sociologists have predicted when they called attention to the process of alienation in capitalist societies.

Financial District addresses these topics in various ways. On view are depictions of street scenes in Brooklyn and American territories; iconographies of the real estate boom and crash; renderings of newspapers’ statistical data and collections of New Yorker’s fears; and representations of America in film, press, or personal diaries. Other works examine the connection between money and time, systems of value, and labor trends. Quotes of Karl Marx, reflections on the market, accounts of material exchange, allusions to gold, comments on Nasdaq and visions of experimental factories evoke theoretical traditions and individual experiences of capital. This exhibition sheds light on the current state of affairs in the world economy and US culture, speculating how both are sides of the same coin.

International Studio & Curatorial Program (ISCP)
1040 Metropolitan Avenue, 3rd Fl. (subway L stops Grand Street)
Brooklyn, NY 11211

www.iscp-nyc.org
www.elenabajo.com
www.exhibition211.blogspot.com

'Unaddressed Circumventions: Folds from a failed suicide' at Gresham's Ghost

*May 14 – June 9, 2009
'Unaddressed Circumventions: Folds from a failed suicide' curated by Ajay Kurian
Artists: Elena Bajo, Matt Connors, Alyssa Pheobus, Jason Fox, Jimmy Raskin, Matt Saunders, Alex Singh, Matt Sheridan Smith

521 W 26th Street (Groundfloor)
gallery hours Tuesday - Saturday, 10 am - 6 pm
New York, NY 10001
http://www.greshamsghost.com/

Elena Bajo 'One Hundred Watts, twelve forty seven, Post Meridium', acrylic and tape on found amateur painting, halogen lamp, light stand.It is a site specific piece in which a found painting has been erased partially, thinking about how a painting can commit suicide, but painting doesn't kill painting, at the end it is still a painting. For a pinting to be killed has to transform into something else, like a sculpture. Then I added a one hundred watts halogen lamp and placed it very close to the painting, so close that the heat will slowly burn the painting, not only the erased painting but the new painting that is created with the own lamp shadow reflected on the canvas, finally a succesful suicide

Small Logois proud to present its second exhibition entitled, Unaddressed Circumventions: Folds from a Failed Suicide. The show’s primary engine is a partially revealed suicide letter taken from William Gaddis’ first novel, The Recognitions. The physical letter was folded so as to exclude certain of its sections, breaking up the already questionable flow of the text. This version of the original, dissected and partially reassembled, was then sent out to the artists involved.

The eight artists included have varying backgrounds and find themselves at different points in their careers. Though the letter does indeed deal with painting, albeit in an obscure fashion, the artists participating are not simply painters. Most, if not all of them, have a troubled, troubling, or complicated relationship to painting and its hefty legacy. The negotiations regarding the addressing and address of the artist’s work and their context determine a significant portion of the exhibition’s content. Besides inviting the artists to participate, the idea of the invitation was taken further and became the curatorial methodology: setting the parameters of the letter, choosing the artists that would perhaps most interestingly “answer” the call, and allowing them to inform the rest of the show with their responses and/or circumventions. Given no other procedure or input, the letter became their prompt and perhaps their sphinx.

The levels of mediation, borrowing, and receiving fold over one another paralleling just one process the letter has undergone. From Gaddis, through his fictional character, through the funnel of curatorial intent, to a selected group of artists results a show that equivocates between having too many bounds and not enough. One can see these forms of mediation circumscribing too small an island of creation, but if we were to examine these links of reference and repetition, we would see that there is no real beginning nor end, no definitive space delineated. One can imagine a chain descending over a still puddle of water, appearing to both descend and rise into a pile of folds.

(A final addendum. As for painting, let’s not consider it so much dead or alive, but simply as a kind of passage.)

For press and other inquiries, please contact Hikari Yokoyama

646 831 3538 or hikari@mangustacollection.com

NO POWER FOR NOBODY (Keine Macht für Niemand), Kunstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin

VON JETZT BIS DANN – goldrausch 2008
Kunstraum Kreuzberg/Bethanien
Mariannenplatz 2, 10997 Berlin-Kreuzberg
25.10.2008–7.12.2008

http://www.goldrausch-kuenstlerinnen.de/2009/ausstellungen.html

Artists: Elena Bajo, Anke Becker, Claudia Chaseling, Kerstin Gottschalk, Angela Köntje, Mareike Lee, Nicole Messenlehner, Rebecca Michaelis, Katja Pudor, Nadin Reschke, Sandra Truté, Miriam Visaczki, Ester Vonplon, Claire Waffel und Sinta Werner.

Elena Bajo Keine Macht für Niemand (No Power for Nobody), Film-Sculpture, 16mm film projector enclosed inside a found old glass vitrine placed in a hallway. Installation View, 16mm color film loop 2min 32secs, film depicting a Berlin bear walking in circles and backwards, Kunstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin, 2008





Video-Documentation of the installation at Kunstlerhaus Bethanien,
Berlin, 2008

‘No power for nobody’, borrows the title from the 1972 double album of the german band Ton Steine Scherben, which used above all social critical german-language texts in their rock music,as a request to the resistance against the existing system.
The Kunstlerhaus Bethanien building in Berlin, in which this 16mm film is projected was a hospital since 1854 and then was squatted. In 1972 the squatters occupying the building avoided demolition by lighting the building with a glow of blue light to make the public aware of the situation. As a remembrance of this gesture, the bear walking in circles backwards depicted in the film becomes an ephemeral monument to this act of resistance.
Mimicking a similar urban situation, the projected film has been placed in a transitional space, amidst the flow of the movements of the viewer in the corridor, the perception of the bear’s presence will be conditioned by the viewers presence. By altering a found urban situation, by reversing the bear’s walk, a new ‘dis-ordered space is created that questions issues of the social and the natural. “The landscape presented constitutes a mirror for a constant negotiation between order and disorder, stability and entropy “(Luca Cerizza)


Keine Macht für Niemand 'No Power for Nobody' is a 2min 32 sec loop, film sculpture projected on a hallway's wall, constructed with a 16mm film projector encased in a found glass old vitrine, and a system of mirrors, depicting the image of a captive brown beard, the mascot of the city of Berlin, walking backwards and in circles inside the bear's pit that belongs to the Museum of the city of Berlin. By contemplating and moving around the piece the viewer becomes embedded in this ephemeral monument, awkward behaviors generated by social anomalies.

Wednesday, April 8, 2009

EXPLUM 09: The Divided Line - Poetic action-

Start Time:
Friday, April 3, 2009 at 6:00pm
End Time:
Tuesday, April 21, 2009 at 9:00pm
Location:
Puerto Lumbreras and Castillo and Caves of Nogalte, Spain


Artists:
Warren Neidich, Bjorn Erik Haugen, Carl Palm, Jorge Filipe Dos Reis Santos, Marlon De Azambuja, Elisa Newman-Sau, Álvaro Gil, Carolina Silva, Cristina Martín, David Ferrando, Diana Larrea, Juan Díaz, Paloma Polo, María Amada Martínez.

Solo Projects: Elena Bajo, Javier Fresneda, Richard Rigg, Colectivo LOBAK.

The Divided Line- Poetic action-

Chance must be systematically explored,
Already ten days of happiness

Sound: water drip

THE DIVIDED LINE refers to the divided line analogy in Plato's Republic, suggests another reading of Plato's 'different degrees of reality'. It is an installation located in the Cuevas of Nogalte, a new temporality is proposed. The cave becomes a marker of time in which the pace is established by the sound of water dripping. The visitor is immersed in this time mechanism, inside an alternative narrative that tell us about what it is absent or the potentiality for something to become absent. It is an open platform in process, in which the meaning is ambiguous and elusive, and the proposed material co-exists within that time frame in the viewer's imagination.



Elena Bajo The Divided Line- Poetic action 'Chance must be systematically
explored, Already ten days of happiness' Sound: water drip. Spray paint over
several layers of continuously erased texts on found mirrors


Wednesday, February 18, 2009

HAUNTING THE CITY, Leroy Neiman Gallery, Columbia University

Haunting
the City, curated by Gabriel Martinez. The document as liaison between the artist and the urban environmen Artists: Elena Bajo, Per Billgren, Brek brunson, Bea Catanzaro, Avi Gupta, Ersan Okac, Audrey Lam, Nilay Lawson, Jared Thorne On view: Feb 13th -March 5th, 2009




Elena Bajo, From a Ruin into a Monument, video-sculpture, urban
intervention, graffiti tagging over Roma's occupied shelter,
Public
Improvisations, Fondazione Ratti, Como, Milan, 2008


PUBLIC IMPROVISATIONS, Fondazione Ratti, Milan

A WASTELAND VIEW, Fabbrica del Vapore, Milan, 2008

This piece negotiates the previous urban intervention in Como, ‘From a Ruin into a Monument’, as a fragmented situation in which nomadic elements are presented together with existent exhibition elements. The fabric acts as the surface for the moving image reflecting the landscape that surrounds the remains of the former textile factory where the Roma family lives. By using situationist strategies in both the urban and the exhibition context, and a manipulation of time/space coordinates a transitory situation in a space with ‘a wasteland view’ is suggested.








FROM A RUIN INTO A MONUMENT, Como, Milan, 2008

An object becomes a monument when is interpreted primarily as a testimony to the past. In this case a leftover building from the previous textile factory recently demolished, located in the middle of a wasteland, is a testimony to the past of the place's industrial activity. This structure from the past is at the present time occupied and used as a shelter by a family of migrants, a fact that is clearly overlooked. I approached the Roma family with the proposal of painting anew their heavily graffitied 'home'. They agreed and showed excitement about the idea. Silver was the color of choice. I used silver paint to highlight the place, to establish a relationship between this specific area of town, this architectural structure and their inhabitants, and how to point at this gap in the urban landscape. A wasteland, is a 'land of waste', filled with rejected materials. By restoring this ruin and make it to look like a monument, will highlight an illogical situation that would suggest a platform for reflexion.

Excerpt from Luca Cerizza’s text ‘Mo (nu) ments’ Elena Bajo's Ephemeral Interventions

Elena Bajo’s outdoors interventions, have an improvised, ephemeral, fragile nature to them. They are quick alterations of found situations, encountered in daily happenings, in passing the urban scenery: garbage piled in small formations (that could even be shown in a display cabinet), elements of a road construction site reassembled and rearranged in different ways (suggesting a constructive grid), sacks of sabble put on top of the other in forming a barricade, a protection, an obstacle (to what?). They are temporary shapes which alter the urban scenario: minimal gestures questioning relationships between fixed and changeable data, between stasis and change, between construction and its dissolution.
Other times Bajo literally infiltrates the interstices of the urban landscape: she builds a door in a narrow alley of a city, a gesture completely devoid of function, almost surreal: she intervenes into the gaps of a pavement walk by inserting different materials, as in making more precious and visible what are usually marginal detail; she alters the functionality of a sound barrier shield put on the side of a Madrid street, by opening a breach into that delimitation between two perceptual spaces.
In a similar way, Bajo operates with natural elements or within a natural landscape: placing lawn grass rolls and leaving them in a street, waiting for a potential usage; creating small conformations of fragments in rivers or water banks, totally ephemeral and fragile monuments; marking the rocks of a desert of silver paint, as the signals of an impossible topography. It is a discreet and responsible declination of Land Art, inherited by the most poetic of Smithson's interventions, more than from the monumental and heroic gestures of that season. Both if employed in a urban context or in a natural one, the landscape presented to us by Bajo constitutes a mirror for a constant negotiation between order and disorder, stability and entropy.
Bajo's work develops on borders, often ambiguous and slippery, between a foreground and a background, between visibility and invisibility, reality and mise en scène. It is a matter of relationship: of power relations, of force struggles; it is a question for our capability to read the signs of the bond between man and his environment. Avoiding any temptation towards the spectacle, working amid the creases and the creases of the creases, with fragments and among fragments, Elena Bajo's urban interventions are like monuments to the ephemeral, the provisional, the banal. They are brackets in the indistinct flux between reality and gestures that turn that flux into a monument. They are monuments to moments.”






Elena Bajo, From a Ruin into a Monument, Urban Intervention,
video still, silver acrylic paint over wall, Como, Milan 2008

BAD MOON RISING Special :: Review in Whitehot Magazine

whitehot | September 2008, BAD MOON RISING Special curated by Jan Van Woensel

BAD MOON RISING Special

Curated by Jan Van Woensel

Artists:
Vanessa Albury / Diana Artus / Richard Ashcroft / Elena Bajo / Kelie Bowman / Greggory Bradford / Olaf Breuning / Bettina Cohnen / Body Count / Emily Coxe / James De La Vega / Liam Everett / Lonnie Frisbee & David di Sabatino / Tony Garifalakis / Charlie Halsey / George Hennard / Annegret Hoch / Pamela Jue / Paulus Kapteyn / Richard Kern / David Matorin / Clayton Patterson / Job Piston / Luther Price / Lee Ranaldo / Max Razdow / Yoji Sakate / Jan Serych / Marie Snauwaert / Philippe Vandenberg

Music:
Glass Ghost http://www.myspace.com/glass1ghost

Friday September 12, 2008
ISCP: 1040 Metropolitan Ave
Brooklyn, NY 11211
http://www.iscp-nyc.org
Erased Charlie, Elena Bajo erasing Charlie Halsey’s graffiti (After Robert
Rauschenberg’s ‘Erased De Kooning’), Live Action, Bad Moon Rising
Special, curated by
Jan Van Woensel, New York 2008

Review by Matthew Ladd

On September 13th, the vigorous and ecumenical talents of independent curator Jan Van Woensel brought BAD MOON RISING Special to Brooklyn’s ISCP (International Studio and Curatorial Program), a one-night exhibition of works that ran the gauntlet from painting to collage to installation, video, and graffiti. The ISCP’s narrow warren of gallery spaces—carved out of a former warehouse—proved a decisive advantage for such an eclectic show; each room seemed a gallery complete in itself, and those who were intent on, say, Philippe Vandenberg’s small cluster of quietly disruptive paintings (think Francis Bacon in miniature) didn’t seem bothered by the live music down the hallway.

Incidentally, the musicians included Lee Ranaldo (who generally plays as loud as he wants). So it’s worth mentioning that BAD MOON RISING is the name of Sonic Youth’s second studio album. Of course, it’s also the name of that Creedence Clearwater Revival song in which John Fogerty warns us that the entire country is about to go to hell. All of this may or may not matter. Suffice it to say that a song about anxiety—that creepy feeling that whatever’s about to happen, it won’t be pretty—is as fitting as any for a show whose works included, among others, a line of gleaming rifle cartridges and a painting of a man getting strangled by a giant rabbit.

The graffiti performance, which took place outside, offered a surprisingly serene approach to the works in the ISCP gallery proper. Charlie Halsey, the artist, spent roughly an hour spraying a bright geometrical design onto a large slab of plywood, and swaddled it in a cartoonish white cloud, eventually stepped back and walked away. A few minutes later, artist Elena Bajo approached and within ten minutes had erased half of the piece with a roller soaked in gray paint. It was painful to watch. But the strokes with the roller seemed methodical, almost thoughtful, as if erasing the piece were just as important as creating it.

Inside, the intensity grew. Tony Garifalakis’s stark, glittering lineup of rifle cartridges, each etched with a single letter, gradually spelled out the famous statement “THAT WHICH DOES NOT KILL ME MAKES ME STRONGER,” transforming cliché into an effective (and effectively troubling) fusion of irony and sincerity. In this context (as in Nietzsche’s Twilight of the Idols, where it originally appeared) it was a sentence whose tone one simply could not pin down.

Van Woensel exhibited one of the most powerful pieces right on top of two of Garifalakis’s poster works: a small Gregory Crewdson-esque photograph by the Swiss photographer Olaf Breuning, which captured a delightfully surreal mise-en-scene of sweaty rednecks, black-denim-clad hipsters, dancers in waist-high pantyhose and face paint, an obese man in a green sweater (his head swallowed by an oversized rubber alien mask), and a few ragged children who looked like they’d just wandered off the set of The Grapes of Wrath, everyone slouching on cinder blocks or leaning up against corrugated aluminum walls like a post-apocalyptic circus troupe waiting for the bus. The photograph was set in a background of painted black paper, isolating it, as it seemed to demand.

No less surreal was Luther Price’s silent video projection, a montage of black-and-white footage that, one can only guess, was culled from the dustbins of a 1950’s B-movie soft-core studio. The projection chiefly featured a wasted Bettie Page look-alike, possibly transsexual, in various states of undress, lounging on a floral bedspread, turning to the camera with an expression of bland shock, as if rehearsing a particularly titillating—or violent—scene. Price’s video tended to veer toward the sort of faux-vintage footage that always seems to be playing behind the band at punk shows: white-faced actors scurrying like insects around the set, the camera’s foggy fish-eye. But it maintained an edge.

The exhibition was not all edge, of course. A subtler investigation of anxiety came in the form of Marie Snauwaert’s glossy photographs of women posing in wedding dresses. ‘Posing’ may not be quite the right word: Snauwaert’s brides were remarkably plain looking, the glare of the camera catching every wrinkle and vein. A few of the women frowned or scowled; others appeared merely uncertain. Most were middle-aged. Snauwaert’s take on the marriage institution may not have been overtly subversive—it didn’t seem to argue that getting married is any worse than not—but it was honest and sophisticated.

More risky was Lee Ranaldo’s installation “Paperbox,” which occupied most of the vestibule at the gallery entrance. I’m inclined to think that the piece couldn’t have worked as well on its own: the galleries of well-intentioned curators are stocked with pieces on 9/11, most of them either driven by angry political screeching or (decidedly worse) a desire to console or forgive. But “Paperbox,” a series of floor-to-ceiling columns of painted text in which the artist recalled the weeks surrounding 9/11, tried for neither and therefore succeeded. For all the contrast of cramped black words on white walls, it was a quiet piece, and every time this reviewer walked through the vestibule, there was another cluster of people reading the whole thing from start to finish. It wasn’t redemptive—who in his right mind expects good art to redeem? Its popularity at BAD MOON RISING, however, supported the notion that, as we live in an increasingly anxious age, we’re frequently drawn to art that manages, regardless of its medium, to reflect that feeling in a form that we can recognize.

Curated by Jan Van Woensel, Bad Moon Rising is an ongoing project launched at Silverman Gallery, San Francisco in December 2007. The project Bad Moon Rising Special was a one night only event organized in the framework of ISCP’s Picture Parlor series. Bad Moon Rising 3 will open in January 2009 at Boots Contemporary Art Space in St. Louis, MO.

Matthew Ladd graduated from the University of Cambridge in 2004 with an MPhil in Divinity. He has since taught classes at the University of Florida and the Columbus College of Art and Design, and he has written for such journals as The American Scholar, The Humanist and Berkeley's Threepenny Review. He lives and works in Brooklyn. mattrladd@gmail.com

NEITHER HERE OR ELSEWHERE, PEEKSKILLS, NEW YORK, 2008

Neither here or elsewhere
This landscape intervention consists in the creation of ‘a garden of displaced weeds’, by transplanting a number of weeds within an area located in an ecotone, an ecological term that defines a space between two different ecosystems, the forest and the lawn in this case, a place where ecologies are in tension, frequented by a growing number of deers, who graze the area intensively. The term ‘weeds’ in its general sense is a subjective one, without any classification value, since a "weed" is not a weed when growing where it belongs or is wanted. In a historical moment characterized overwhelmingly by war, forced displacement, and environmental 
devastation, the creation of an area of possible disruption might pinpoint the social, economical and political factors that produce these conditions. This ambiguous gesture highlights an illogical situation that might suggest a platform for reflexion.
‘Neither here or elsewhere’ was the slogan used in one of the largest demonstration in Europe, the 30th of November 2002, against the centro di permanenza temporanea (migrants detention centre) on Corso Brunelleschi in Torino. This protest was conducted under the slogan ‘Né qui, né altrove’ (Neither here, nor elsewhere), indicating that the protest was a matter of principle, a stance against the system of detention as such and not just against one particular centre. By reivindicating the creation of a ‘common’ territory, in which non-native species can proliferate, this action becomes ‘a right of resistance’, where Paolo Virno’s in his book ‘The Grammar of the Multitude’ defines as a practice belonging to a community assembled to defend either certain elements in common or its existence as such from attack by a centralized power. Resistance against the effort to control the migrants mobility, which has become the motor of the capitalist system and the contemporary detention centre appears as one in a long line of administrative mechanisms that function to this end. ‘Neither here, nor elsewhere’, registers the importance of local mobilizations, but it also signals the necessity to open such struggles to the global dimension.
Project DoDai at Galerija Škuc, Ljubljana

Project conceived and coordinated by BridA (Sendi Mango, Tom Kerševan, Jurij Pavlica) Cesare Pietroiusti & Alenka Gregorič.

Artists: Elena Bajo, Dafne Boggeri, BridA (Sendi Mango, Tom Keršvan, Jurij Pavlica), Morwenna Catt / Duncan Burnett, Beatrice Crastini, Vuk Ćosić, Emilio Fantin, Dušan Kirbiš, Warren Neidich, Luigi Negro, Sally Noall, Giancarlo Norese, Slobodan Peladić, Cesare Pietroiusti, Therese Sunngren, Miha Štrukelj, Giorgio Valvassori and Marcela Vanzo.

The project runs from December 17, 2008 to January 13, 2009 at Galerija Škuc and you can also contribute to the project at http://www.brida.si.

Irrespective of the hysteria of the last few months of the financial crisis, which is imbuing all pores of economic, political and social life, of all the guessing about how the situation which has arisen is going to impact upon the different spheres of our lives, the present exhibition provides, when speaking about art and its market orientation in the Slovenian space, the résumé, respectively, the result of the confrontation of the views of the various actors within the domain of contemporary art and its market orientation - a pressing theme also within the local space during the last few years. We have initiated the creation of the project together with the artists of the BridA group (Sendi Mango, Tom Kerševan, and Jurij Pavlica) about a year ago; however, the initial steps of the project were aiming at completely different goals. Our discussions, in which the artist of Italian origin, Cesare Pietroiusti, has been taking part upon the ulterior invitation of the artist, were most frequently focused in particular at questions focused on the marketing of the contemporary art, the advantages and weaknesses generated by the latter, and where Slovenian art has been located in this context.

In particular, the view from outside, where we can expose the point of view of Pietroiusti in the actual communication, who not only is not acquainted with the specificities of the Slovenian (non-)market of contemporary art, but is so much more acquainted with the specificities of the far more advanced Italian market, and whose practice is founded just on anti-marketing oriented artistic production, has well installed the course and implementation of the exhibit project DoDai - Add. First of all, the discussions generated questions about so-called "art" tourism, the production mechanisms, as well as the positive and negative market outcomes concerning contemporary art. We have established parallels between great international manifestations of contemporary art – biennale, triennial, document (“grand tour” - from Venice via Muenster and Kassel to Basel) to the juxta-position with art fairs, which (at least some of them) strongly parry to the spectacle of the large non-market manifestations of contemporary art. We have not searched for great answers with which we could draw a conclusion and write down what is right and what is wrong, better or worse, more or less harmful, authentically binding for contemporary art’s production. Just the opposite, the answers have launched new questions and dilemmas, which have not however been presenting any novelty in the local environment, and even less in the international environment.

Likewise the question of audience, respectively the general public, played an important part in the creation of the exhibition project, that is, the part of the system which should present to every acting subject in the public sphere one of the most important articles of our activity. If the general public does not play an important part, then we should ask ourselves why should we act in public, why should we spend public financial assets, and why should we conduct our activities in public premises? Nevertheless, the most important audience of contemporary art is the general public, who are being encouraged by artists through their works and using the means of various artistic methods and practices, to reflect, respectively, confront everyday routine. If this factor is not in the forefront of the activities of a contemporary art public institution, then quite soon we can approach the logics of commercial galleries, whose principal motivational power is capital in the hands of a handful of individuals who provide for the survival of these premises.

For some people the presentation, assuming the image of a public gallery presentation, is rather simple, perhaps even naive and non-spectacular. And this is just about it. We did not wish the seeming spectacle, which should dictate answers to pressing issues, but we were searching for the way in which we could address, respectively, encourage the general public in the best possible manner to take an active part in the project via the internet, by visiting galleries, thus contributing through the means of such general public engagement to the designed final form.

For this reason the artists of the BridA group and Cesare Pietroiusti invited about twenty artists from different countries who they have made friends with, respectively, whose artistic work they are acquainted with and respect, and consequently wish to present to the general public. For this reason the exhibited works have no conceptual framework through which we could expose questions or theses; there is only one moment uniting these works – the works in the gallery as those contained in the website are waiting for the audience to respond with comments, interpretation, critique, or any other personal effusion. There is no financial reward for writing, yet there is a possibility that the artist either from enthusiasm, or from any other personal impulse, will gift his work to the writer of text, who according to his opinion will touch the core of his work. The social capital of an individual is the only component by means of which the project operates, since it is going to be a guideline for the possibility of possessing the artistic work presented in the gallery. The writer of the best texts following the judgment of the artists, the majority of whom will participate in the closing event, will be gifted with the works of artists without ceremonies and speeches on the last day of the exhibition.

The decision, however, is the exclusive right of the artist and therefore the works might not pass to another owner and will return to the artist's ateliers, cabinets, shelves, hard discs, etc.
Project is supported by Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia and Cultural Department of the City of Ljubljana.
For further information contact Alenka Gregorič on + 386 1 251 65 40 or galerija.skuc@guest.arnes.si.

LOST IN YOUR EYES, curated by Jon Cuyson and Dominic Mangiela LeRoy Neiman Gallery, Columbia University

Exhibition: November 23 - December 13

The participating artists in the New York exhibition are:

Mayen Alcantara, Brandon Alvendia, Kate Bae, Camille Bailey, Elena Bajo, Michael Berryhill, Christi Birchfield, Ayla Bonfiglio, Byoungdu Choi, Shenjuti Chowdhury, Ernest Concepcion, Ellissa Corwin, Jennifer Covarrubias, Grayson Cox, Jon Cuyson, Arvin Flores, Read Flusser, Michael Gaillard, Eric Guerrero, Jose Guinto, Robert Gutierrez, Josephine Halvorson, Ann Marie Heal, Rafael Laurel, Jing Liu, Dominic Mangila, Abbie Manock, Teruyuki Matsuyama, Rita Mercedes, Maceo Montoya, Murad Mumtaz, John Orthwein, Jeana Poindexter, Alyssa Phoebus, Chaenee Rhee, Daniela Rivera, Ivan Sarenas, Ivor Shearer, Annie Shaw, Emily Mae Smith, Jomar Statkun, Paolo Vinluan, Mark Wade, Jessie Weiss, Nate Wolf

Lost In Your Eyes is a collaborative exhibition that aims to comment on how authorship, mutability, subjectivity and fabrication destabilize simple representation, allowing fiction to take on the appearance of fact and vice versa. The exhibition title Lost In Your Eyes is the title of a famous 80's pop song and it can also allude to a state of being when one is open to the possibilities for the creation of alternative thinking and communication. Paul Pfeiffer, Manuel Ocampo and David Medalla were invited by Jon Cuyson and Dominic Mangila to participate in this three-part traveling exhibition wherein each artist were asked to send an image, idea or an actual object that would serve as the point of entry for the curatorial direction of the exhibition. The curators then invited artists to respond to the developed ideas allowing the context of their presentations of their responses to become the explicit subject.

The accumulated works in the New York exhibition will travel to London and then Manila to interact with another group of artists who were invited to make works in response to the concepts sent by the three main artists whilst considering the works presented in New York. The resulting works from this process of regeneration and repetition will be compiled and documented which will then be presented as an artist's book, produced at the LeRoy Neiman Center for Print Studies