Alternative Art Guide – Alternative Art Guide

Anica Vučetić/Radoš Antonijević/Selman Trtovac

Anica Vučetić

Since 1999 she is working on video installations and environments, exploring unconsciousness, dreams, psychological processes as well as archetypal symbols. Experimenting with different projection-surfaces and screens she is undertaking an examination of real and virtual space locating the observers specific positions. I attempt to transform and materialize the inner theatre from mental screen to the outer space, so that the observer is provided with a complex territory to question the relationship to his own sub-consciousness.

Radoš Antonijević

Educated as a classical sculptor, re-examines the medium of sculpture and its borders through the creation of artworks which problematize the questions of function, materiality and perception. This formal research is always involved in the topics that touch neuralgic points of life, dealing with the aspects of history, politics, culture and society. His works of art which confront the function and shape have the epic nature with the ingredients of comic and tragic in the same picture. This epic nature is evident in his need for monumental and self-sufficient forms which can be seen in his tents-churches, personal museums of contemporary art or a church military barbecue trailer.

Selman Trtovac

The work of Selman Trtovac has begun to develop at a time of all well known terrible circumstances and events from the last decade of 20th century in Yugoslavia, as an indirect but undoubtedly the artist’s intimate, human, and in the final instance political reaction to those circumstances and events which he could not more effectively in reality oppose expect with artistic symbolic acting. In stead of being just the work of this artist, his work is almost a sublimation of a superindividual and common generational existential experience.

All three artists, among other, are highly contributed to the creation of a artistic micro utopia Third Belgrade.

Third Belgrade is an art group functioning upon a model of agricultural cooperative from old socialistic traditions.
TB is an applied example of the artistic expression of ethics.
TB is an event in itself, a radical attempt of practical implementation of collaborative art gathering.
TB is a building, gallery, residential space for artists, studio and an organization of visual artists.
TB is a conceptual framework for exploring of the politicization strategies of contemporary art.
TB is not trying to work within the idea of global political project, but the field of micro politics instead.
TB is a manifestation of our civic responsibility.
Third Belgrade is our art work!

Third Belgrade emerged from group of artists’ response to the many issues found in art and society today, the need to create a new micro-utopia, a new parallel world within the micro political context; to create artistic cradle network platform to connect with similar artistic initiatives; to enable artists overcome the problems of fragmentation, manipulation and instrumentation generated by political and economic power.

The name Third Belgrade derives from the urban planning denomination of the part of the city situated across the left bank of the river Danube, which is mostly rural and culturally irrelevant. This is the only artistic initiative ever to develop on the grounds best known as a working class slum on the borders of river’s swamp lands.

Third Belgrade is an initiative of eight artists: Salman Trtovac, Anica Vucetić, Radoš Antonijević, Milorad Mladenović, Oliver Parlić, Sanja Latinović, Rankop Đanković, Marina Marković and Marko Marković.

This is a group of artists with similar artistic sensibility and political inclinations. At the core of their initiative is the drive to alter the position of artists within society, by giving them the possibility to act on their convictions right now.

Third Belgrade is designed as a lively, dynamic and energetic center which brings together local artists with those from the region and the world, providing exhibition space, workshops and other educational content for general public. TB space consists of central gallery, the library, the club, as well as lounge spaces and residential premises suitable for lectures and workshops, and the garden used an open stage for various art events.

30 June 2017 / by Alternative Art Guide / in Serbia

Kiyotaka Tsurisaki

Kiyotaka Tsurisaki (born 1966) is the only corpse photographer in Japan so to speak. His carrier began in 1994 with bodies from Thailand, after he was a Tokyo-based x film maker. Then, he captured more than one thousand dead people around the world, including Colombia, Mexico, Russia, Palestine and of course Japan.

The body is bleeding from the head, the hand with a broken wrist is crushed, the skull from the man hanged in a forest, tsunami victims wrapped in shrouds and so on…

Each casting has a certain drama quality to it, as romantic paintings, the difference being that the artist who produced the image didn't touch anything on this stage, he just went to it. Paradoxically, these situations look incredibly staged, in so far as there is nothing more unnatural than the brutality of reality. All these sets are products from society.

Yuko Kamei

Yuko Kamei (born 1979) regularly works in urban and suburban environments. The line, this artificial aspect that surrounds human beings is changing with culture and era. In this context, the urban structure becomes an artistic material for the artist.

In 2009, she organized this exhibition "On concrete", where we can clearly see that each urban element turns into something like a canvas. (pattern).

In these empty spaces that are structures, the human body as an organic material, withers. The flesh withdraws and leave a formal, geometrical trace behind it. The individual disembodiment leads to some vertical and life devoid symmetrical harmony. The social dis-integration then aesthetic re-integration creates a kind of structural metamorphosis.

Hikaru Miyakawa

Hikaru Miyakawa (born 1976) myself. In 2011, "Sexe émeraude" exhibition was made of several paintings and a video. The paintings represent transsexuals; the video "AKARI" was me having sex with a Tokyo shemale. Japanese transsexuals change sex to be beautiful; I decide to have sex with one of them for my art. This isn't love for love, nor satisfying a sexual imperative, but to assert a sexual aesthetic.

Society produces modes (fashions), modes of being. The human body display is permanent, the body is showed, exhibited. The corporal structure is social, societal structure, the marginal body is marginal social structure.

This is the ambiguous structural limit that the artist reveals, between male body (male social role) and female body (female social role). These (organic) corporal and (regulated) societal structures wither together, as one.

In 2011, I still think of the body as a society component. The body as an object of projection (social, aesthetic) and the primordial embodiment of one's conscience. Today's artists act with their bodies in this globalized playground; with unparalleled mobility, the body becomes traveler, keeping its roots.

I feel that these artists are looking for their new standard, a motional aesthetic whose cultural body is the binder. Through Tsurisaki's international death scenes, Kamei's urban disembodiment, and Miyakawa's ambiguous bodies and relationships, the body remains that interdependent archetypal pattern. As Japanese artists, their weltanschauung is culturally influenced yet permeable to their constitutive international framework.

I present these artists to you because they somehow try to seize what form society is in and try to include the body as the most primitive material.

30 June 2017 / by Alternative Art Guide / in Japan

Leszek Przyjemski and Anastazy Wiśniewski, 'Individual Meetings' @ Sigma Gallery, Warsaw 1972

Leszek Przyjemski

In 1966 Jerzy Ludwiński, art historian, critic, theoretician and curator, described in the essay titled 'The Bubble with Painting' a new spontaneous and unofficial artist movement, demonstrated in the number of conventions, meetings, conferences, plein-airs and other sessions held throughout what was then called People's Republic of Poland.

However, some of the people involved were expressing a belief that the admired spontaneity was in fact pre-arrangement. Just like Anastazy Wiśniewski did through the act of establishing the Centre for Artistic Silence in the framework of Nonexistent Nodding Gallery 'YES', which he founded together with Leszek Przyjemski in 1970.

Leszek Przyjemski and Anastazy Wiśniewski, 'Individual Meetings' @ Sigma Gallery, Warsaw 1972

Two years later they organized 'Individual Meetings', in reference to the meetings for candidates for The Polish United Workers' Party. Applicants were interviewed one at time in the room covered with a fabric alike Polish national flag, and completely jammed by the sound of 'L'Internationale'.

Leszek Przyjemski — 'Private shows' — Nonexistent Nodding Gallery 'YES', 1974-75

Leszek Przyjemski — 'Shows' — Nonexistent Nodding Gallery 'YES', 1974

Leszek Przyjemski (b. 1942), one of the leading Polish artists who contested the official system of art in communist Poland in the 70s., during 1st International Nonexistenting Galleries Congress in Brzezno by Gdańsk put forward the idea of the Museum of Hysterics 1968–1975. Concept of establishing Museum was born a few years before, in June 12th, 1968 when Przyjemski graduated from the Art School, and to celebrate this fact he drowned a puppet dressed in the suit, with his MA diploma in the pocket.

Leszek Przyjemski and Anastazy Wiśniewski. 'Party proposes' — Nonexistent Nodding Gallery 'YES', 1972

Leszek Przyjemski — 'Programme' — Nonexistent Nodding Gallery 'YES', 1970

Since then Museum of Hysterics, the metamuseum in a way, is possible to explore, and visit with ones imagination, it is giving the most extreme idea for what we could recognize as an artist-run-space.

Above images courtesy of CoCA in Torun.

Janek Simon, ‘Lagos Transfer’ (fragment) @ Muzeum Sztuki, Lodz 2011

Janek Simon

In a way a follower of Przyjemskis' self-management, who devoted himself to DIY philosophy and alternative strategies is an artist born in 1977 Janek Simon. Trained in sociology, as well as psychology, an author of the 'Polish Year in Madagascar' (2006) the first exhibition of contemporary Polish art in this country, without actual works by Polish artists, but with some pieces by Romanian, Bulgarian, Czech and Slovakian creators, instead.

Janek Simon, ‘The Polish Year in Madagascar’, exhibition poster, 2006

By the act of not choosing any fellows, Simon – the self-proclaimed one-man Foreign Affairs Department – aped official cultural policy strategies based on the posh, but at the same time very poor and unproductive events. To emphasize his perverse gesture, and to bring it to another level of international competition he rented as an exhibition space a spot in the Goethe-Zentrum neighborhood.

Janek Simon, ‘The Polish Year in Madagascar’, exhibition poster @ Antananativo 2006

Janek Simon, ‘National Budget for 2010’ (fragment) @ PGS, Sopot 2011

In 2011 Simon produced in a 400 square meters gallery space the 3D visualization of the Polish 'State Budget for Year 2010'. The artist through translating national economy issues into arts language is again playing with an understanding of the boundaries between aesthetic and politic. On the one hand this act could be understood as a call for the civil society to have a closer look into what was reserved for specialized eyes only, but on the other hand is it true that contemporary arts vocabulary is easier for a average citizen then economy.

Janek Simon, ‘Entry of the Goldex Poldex delegation to city’ (modification on an illuminated manuscript), 2010

Simon is also one of the founder members of cooperative Goldex Poldex which 'acts in the Pi-sector of cultural production, in the unexplored fractional dimension with no intend to collaborate with neither public institutions nor the art market. It seeks no sponsors and no patronage.' Unlike Przyjemski, who was practicing resistance against socialism, Simon is in opposition to capitalism and what he calls grant-art.

Janek Simon, ‘Janek Was Here’(drawing on an archival print), 2010

Honza Zamojski

Honza Zamojski (b.1981) an author of drawings, video art, spatial objects including ready-mades, curator and the owner of publishing house MORAVA, represents an individualistic approach, with a perspective based on the micro rather than macro politics.

For his graduation he edited and designed book titled 'We Came From Beyond/We Go Far Beyond', which combines statements of young artists and curators on search for the answer 'Why I'm doing this, and for whom?', with an exhibition catalog format.

He is interested in the human motivation for creation, as well as exploring history thought private stories, what he demonstrates in the books 'Jak jsem potkal d’abla' (awarded in 2011 on Best Book Design from all over the World in Lipsk), and 'Rymy jak Dymy'. All mentioned publications create a kind of unusual trilogy, which as a whole tells a story of ones development as an artist, poet, and citizen.

'BOOKIE', curated by Honza Zamojski @ Piktogram/BLA, Warsaw 2011

In 2011 Zamojski curated BOOKIE – a show devoted to redefining a self-publishing practices with a printed matter never presented in Poland before, e.g. by David Horvitz and Rick Myers artbooks, conceptual fanzines of the Institute of Social Hypocrisy or books by the Slavs and Tatars. Zamojski beside being an enterprising distributor, and promoter of printed matter by artists in Poland, is also a member of Starter Association – the body which had operated the gallery under the same name from 2007 until 2011 in Poznań as an artists'-and-curators'-run-space.

For over three years of its activity, Starter held over 50 shows of 72 artists in about 200 square meters abandoned apartment in Art Nouveau building.

Honza Zamojski, 'Monumental Statues' @ KIM? Contemporary Art Centre, Riga 2011

Honza Zamojski, 'Me, Myself and I' @ LETO Gallery, Warsaw 2011

Honza Zamojski, 'Rhymes Like Dimes' @ Views 2011 Deutsche Bank Foundation Competition, Zachęta National Gallery, Warsaw 2011

Above images courtesy of Honza Zamojski and Leto Gallery.

Agnieszka Pindera

I'm interested in the socialist past influence on Polish contemporary cultural policy, the lasting for years People's Republic of Poland struggle against any independent enterprise and its, in my opinion, negative impact on the self-supported initiatives development nowadays. Tools used in this conflict were modified legislation, fines beyond ones capabilities, and corruption, as well as denying access to the higher education for craftsman's children, and finally though language (number of derogatory epithets was invented at this time).

For 'The Naked' I selected artists who present various approaches from imaginary, through activist, to intimate autobiographical narrations in the term of artist-run-spaces and mentalities.

Born in 1981 in Tarnów, Poland. Graduate in Cultural, Gender and Museum Curatorial Studies. 2008-2011 a curator at the Centre for Contemporary Art in Torun (CoCA). Selected exhibitions: 'Berlegustopol' curated with Michał Woliński, Piktogram/BLA in Warsaw, 2011, with: Yomar Augusto, Henryk Berlewi, Edward Hartwig, Fontarte, Polex-Expol, Zuo Corp; 'Tag! Base! Hide& Seek!' curated with Joanna van der Zanden, CoCA in Torun, 2010, with: Dinie Besems, Cynthia Hathaway, Guy Keulemans, Bartosz Mucha, Leonard van Munster, Eric von Robertson, Suzuki Affice; 'The Past is a Foreign Country' curated with Aleksandra Kononiuk, CoCA in Torun, 2009, with: Johanna Billing, Persijn Broersen & Margit Lukács, Banu Cennetoğlu, Šejla Kamerić, Deimantas Narkevičius, Agnieszka Polska, Jasper Rigole, Slavs and Tatars, Jutta Strohmaier, Levi van Veluw, Ingrid Wildi, Krzysztof Zieliński, Edwin Zwakman.

30 June 2017 / by Alternative Art Guide / in Poland

SERRUM

Tags: urban development, education, sociopolitical reality.

SERRUM runs an open collaborative space for artists in Jakarta and its activities ranges from organizing alternative arts educations, collaborative murals and gallery exhibitions as well as arts-based urban development critiques. The Jakarta based collective initiated in 2006 fills in a refreshing outtake in the scene of urban-artistic engagement in Indonesia, as they apply community building approaches through experimentations, organic and practice-based ways to look at the issues that it seek to problematize.

This artist-initiatives carries valuable imports to the development of models on how artists-civic participations engage with the shifting sociopolitical realities of today through everyday languages , convivial forms and local appropriations. The group’s concerns and practices (the group members are predominantly students and graduates of a university which concentrates on teaching methods and curriculum development) haven been largely transmedial, probing the possibilities of exploring non-pedantic mode as well as alternatives forms of public education.

Their most recent project includes the street visual intervention campaign named Propagraphic Movement and an exhibition series aiming at community support entitled Project_Or.

Irwan Ahmett

Irwan Ahmett has been an avid social campaigner through communicative and playful visual arts approaches. Many of his works and activities are revolving around issues of urban and environmental condition, strategic graphic design and public communication processes. Through populist and playful manners, Ahmett develops a visual-focused body of works that touches the fundamental issues of human relations in local urban settings. This is demonstrated by his mid to long term design-based campaigns which managed to attract strings of followers among Indonesian youth such as through Change Your Self, Hapiness and Urban Play.

Irwan Ahmett and his wife Tita Salina founded ahmettsalina (http://www.ahmettsalina.com), a strategic graphic design communication services in Jakarta. Irwan and Tita are both currently in their one-year nomadic travel to Europe and beyond to expose and calibrate their experiences with different fabrics of urban life as well as the practices constituting the international arts scene.

Aryo Danusiri

Aryo Danusiri is an Indonesian video artist and visual anthropologist who is currently doing his Phd. in the Media Anthropology program, with a secondary field in Critical Media Practice at Harvard University, USA. His works have been exploring the circulations of new keywords, violence and memory in the sociopolitical landscape of post-authoritarian Indonesia after 1998. The reason that I am recommending his name, despite the fact that he doesn’t define his practices under the field of visual arts, is his transdiciplinary and experimental attempts in broadening the discursive boundaries of documentary practices. His delicate and subtle treatment (via sensory ethnography which is being developed in his independently-run laboratory of moving image, called Ragam Media Network – http://www.ragam.org/) in his body of works for me has been a courageous effort in testing the fuzzy boundaries between video art, experimental film and documentary. His latest production made in Manhattan, NY, in 2011, On Broadway (http://der.org/films/on-broadway.html) testifies to the artistic imprints in dealing with complex issues of urban space formations and its relational tensions between the sacred and the profane, the collective and the individual, the everyday and the political. One of the many versions of On Broadway, entitled The Fold was presented as a single channel during ruangrupa’s OK Video festival in Jakarta and NGBK, Berlin, both held in 2011.

30 June 2017 / by Alternative Art Guide / in Indonesia

Zeta Gallery and center

Tags: public art, collaboration, painting.

Zeta's goal is to cultivate and promote public, contemporary art. We consider our goal as an inherent characteristic of emancipated societies. Through exhibitions, presentations, collaboration projects on local, as well regional and international level.

Zeta Center started its activities in 2007. It is a non-profit center focused on visual arts that promotes collaborative, professional practices between the artists and curators, critics, researchers and other art professionals, in order to contribute to the establishing of an active contemporary art scene in Albania.

Kosta Koçi

These oil paintings of Kosta Koci is realized during this period in Albania. It presents portraits of young Albanians in their passivity day life. The painting is a piece of a cycle “Waiting…”, and revels the atmosphere of that time.

Kosta Koçi, “Waiting…” oil on canvas, 70 x 100 cm, 2010

Albani Shoshi

Albana Shoshi is acknowledged by Zeta Galeri as being a contemporary painter of the realism of our time.

Her paintings portray her close and better known subjects. Through an photorealistic approach, she makes the public 'feel' the images, as if they are ready to shake, move, talk, laugh, or jump at us.

Perhaps Albana Shoshi thinks that her painted subjects are more “real” then the photographic truth. She is one of the artists that brings her images to the public along with her version of the imagination on what’s real.

Albana Shoshi, “Screaming voice”, oil on canvas, 110 X 160 cm, 2008.

Shpëtim Kërçova

Shpëtim Kërçova‘s drawings represent remaining pieces of destroyed children's playgrounds.

The artist has realized them in color pencil by connecting the subject with the technique (medium). The pieces are composed separated from the original habitat and presented as single subjects with their own history.

The reflection of Kërçova contemplates the origin of the subject and presents unique two dimensional objects with a minimal aesthetic.

Shpëtim Kërçova, “Objects”, pencil on paper, series of 9, 20 X 30 cm, 2008.

30 June 2017 / 1 Comment / by Alternative Art Guide / in Albania

Soundfair

Tags: exhibiting music, performance, (re-)contextualization.

SOUNDFAIR is an exhibition project based in Berlin that has set as its purpose the re-contextualization of music through the auditive exhibiting of music as unique artworks.

The goal of SOUNDFAIR is to establish a context for composed sound to be understood and consumed as an artwork. To exhibit music as a means of artistic expression mainly without any visual component or implied visual or spatial strategy.

A project by Ari Benjamin Meyers, Clara Meister, Thomas Mayer

www.soundfair.net

Performance "Solo" with the singer Ruth Rosenfeld, at the space "Loge" in Berlin
COPYRIGHT Concept and Sound: Soundfair
COPYRIGHT Music and Words "Solo": Ari Benjamin Meyers
COPYRIGHT Images: Douglas Gordon
Courtesy: Douglas Gordon

30 June 2017 / by Alternative Art Guide / in Germany

Contribution Fleur van Muiswinkel

Ruth Beale (UK, based in London)

Installation view “Now from Now”, “Acid Utopia / An Epoch of Rest” and “All the Libraries of London” at Cell Project Space, London, 2011

With her performances, installations and film the British artist Ruth Beale explores and draws attention to current social-political issues using cultural and historical references to create a new critical narrative. In her most recent installation shown at Cell Project Space in London, she addressed the phenomenon of the library, its social significance while acknowledging its indecisive future.

“Now from Now”, 2011, plywood, foam, fabric, headphones, audio on mp3, duration 9 min., “Acid Utopia / An Epoch of Rest”, 2011, lent library books from public libraries in London.

The narrative sound-piece “Now from Now”, the diptych “Acid Utopia / An Epoch of Rest” together with the alphabetical list of “All the Libraries in London” form a powerful, poetic utopian statement with a dystopian touch. Beale has a poetic subversive activist approach which creates a continuous tension that allows fiction and non-fiction to merge. With her intimate, unconventional, popping up “Miss B’s Salons” in private as well as public space she consciously seeks the confrontation with individuals to discuss political matters.

Installation view “Pamphlet Library – The Post Election Selection” as part of “The Mulberry Tress Press” exhibition at SE8 Gallery, London, 2010

With her ongoing project the “Pamphlet Library”, Beale creates a dialogue around contemporary social-political issues based on her selection of historical socialist and Marxist pamphlets (each one exemplifying a pressing issue and opinion of their time) enabling the reader to interpret the current debates through a historical window.

Reading performance during “The Mulberry Tress Press” exhibition at SE8 Gallery, London, 2010

As part of the project Beale invited five contemporary writers to revive the arguments made by Virginia Woolf, E.H. Foster and Graham Bell in 1939. They were published as part of the Hogarth Sixpenny Pamphlets series whose aim was to “provide thinking people with the means to consider fundamental problems in art, literature, taste and morals”.

The new texts were read during a performance, accompanying Beale’s “Pamphlet Library – Post Election Selection”. Beale responded with this selection to the British elections in 2009 in the context of the group show “The Mulberry Tree Press” at SE 8 gallery, London.

Jenny Moore (CA, based in London)

“Proposal for a Rock Opera”, performance at South London Gallery 2011

Jenny Moore is an energetic storytelling artist, musician and author whose performances, publications and sculptural work draw attention to every-day situations via a magnifying glass of small details. “Proposal for a Rock Opera” tells the story about a London based artist that is in need of money and ends up going on an artist-residency in Norway. Moore blends humour with a soft tone of criticality, that together with her poetic, playful aesthetical approach results in a dynamic complexity that highlights the subtlety of the situation and its surrounding.

“A Dialogue of Something Moving OR The 19:45 Train to Cheshunt in 5 Shapes”, documentation of the performance in the London Overground, 2012

In her most recent performances “A Dialogue of Something Moving” and “The 19:45 Train to Cheshunt in 5 Shapes”, which took place in the London Overground, Moore draws one’s attention into the actual moment via an unexpected object entering the situation. While multiple voices read out loud a chapter of a novel pointing out little details of the overlooked in the haste of the moment, subtle tones from a string instrument fill the carriage.

“A Dialogue of Something Moving OR The 19:45 Train to Cheshunt in 5 Shapes”, documentation of the performance in the London Overground, 2012

Beside her individual practice Jenny Moore is also initiator of GANDT, an artist collective that is challenging the notion of authorship, collaboration and the imaginative in their publications, performances and exhibitions.

www.gandtpresents.com

Invitation by GANDT

Preparations for the GANDT diner event “Let’s be Civil”, 2011

n.o.where run by Karen Mirza and Brad Butler (UK, based in London)

The artist-run initiative n.o.where at the heart of London, is unique in their approach. They combine being a production house for all sorts of analogue film and video while at the same time having a critical dialogue about contemporary image making through their public program. Founded by the artists and filmmakers Karen Mirza and Brad Butler in 2004, n.o.where has a dense discursive programme of critical discussions, performances, screenings, residencies that explore political and aesthetic questions around contemporary image production and systems of distribution. Recent projects include “The Free Cinema School" a contemporary film pedagogy, "Sequence" a new journal of artists writing on the moving image, "Light Reading” a platform for direct discussion between artist and audience and "Image | Event" a platform for critical discourse within the "Image Movement" exhibition at the Centre for Contemporary Art Geneva amongst others. N.o.where offers filmmakers a new platform to discuss their work in a critical, inspiring environment and has stepped into the gap that occurred after the London Filmmakers Coop lost its vibrance.

“Boundary Wall Intervention” Karen Mirza and Brad Butler, Karachi 2009

Mirza and Butler also collaborate on autonomous projects outside the realm of the initiative. “The Museum of Non Participation” is a spatial and conceptual (geo) political structure conceived by the collective Karen Mirza & Brad butler in 2008. The Museum collects and archives a body of actions, gestures, images and objects by the artists and their collaborators wherever and whenever they have found themselves confronting pivotal moments of change, protest, non-alignment and resistance in the public sphere. By bringing these together under the rubric of the museum, the artists question the choice and consequence of action/inaction in any given social space. Most importantly, the museum has developed through co-authorship, forming itself around a constituency of actors that span a divergent array of socio-cultural, economic, class and geographical boundaries.

www.no-w-here.org.uk

30 June 2017 / by Alternative Art Guide / in Netherlands

Cemeti Art House

Jompet Kuswidananto (born in Yogyakarta in 1976, lives in Yogyakarta and Bali)

detail of NEXT JAVA 2006, Video & Sound Installation.

Jompet Kuswidananto participated in our residency program ‘Landing Soon #4’. He continued his research on Javanese culture and studied about the form and practice of Java's royal soldiers as a portrayal of how Javanese syncretism try to merge divergent beliefs and cultures that come to Java.

Since the middle of the 18th century, when the Dutch had already intervened in cultural and political affairs of Javanese kingdoms, Java's royal soldiers didn't have a military function any longer. Until nowadays their existence in processions and rituals only serves symbolic prominence.

War of Java, Do You Remember #3, 2009

Restu Ratnaningtyas (born in Tangerang, in 1981, live in Yogyakarta)

Restu Ratnaningtyas, Connection no.1, 2010, 170 x 300 x 100 cm

Restu Ratnaningtyas plays in her work as a storyteller. She likes to tell the story of the everyday life by creating sceneries with question marks.

Restu Ratnaningtyas fancy-frenzy-3, 2011, 30 x 30 cm

Like her work, “The Dining Room Tragedy”, featured a figure lying under a dining table with many objects and food scattered on his side.

Restu Ratnaningtyas,The-Dining-Room-Tragedy, 2010, 400 x 250 cm

This work, made from watercolor on paper and attached to the wall, invites visitors to interact by asking them to their worst imagined scenarios based on this work.

Restu Ratnaningtyas, Connection-no.2, 2010, 180 x 120 x 40 cm

Wimo Ambala Bayang, (born in Magelang in 1976, lives in Yogyakarta, Indonesia)

Wimo Ambala Bayang, Fourteenth Troop, 2008

Wimo Ambala Bayang works mainly with photography and video. His works reflect unique perspectives towards culture that are not made under pretense to criticize, but to make us re-think the habits that seem ‘to have always been there’.

Wimo Ambala Bayang, Ninth troop, 2008

History and facts, minor and major, are important aspects that to be considered in the creative process.

Wimo Ambala Bayang, sixteenth troop, 2009

He invited selected groups to pose with plastic toy weapons. He names these groups “Troop Six”, “Troop Seven”, etc., in reference to “Troop Five”, which in its heyday, was the Communist Party of Indonesia.

Wimo Ambala Bayang, Twelfth Troop, 2008

Eko Nugroho (born in Yogyakarta in 1977, lives in Yogyakarta)Mella Jaarsma, Nindityo Adipurnomo

"Hidden Violence” , contemporary wayang performance,2009 at Cemeti Art House

Eko Nugroho collaborated in this performance with: Ki Catur Kuncoro (dalang), Ign. Sugiharto a.k.a. Pak Cling (lighting), Yenu Ariendra (music), Andi Seno Adji (stage) & Jonet Suriatmoko (script).

Eko Nugroho well known for his comics, murals, paintings, drawings, and embroideries, started to work with ‘wayang’, or the shadow play in 2009, exploring collaborations with different disciplines.

The wayang puppets for this performance are transformations of Eko Nugroho’s figures which were created before in his comics; like stone-headed man, diamond-hearted man, and pincer-handed man.

He is commenting on the social and political circumstances with a lot of ‘hidden violence’ in the past and the present.

Mella Jaarsma, Nindityo Adipurnomo
Cemeti Art House, Yogyakarta, Indonesia

30 June 2017 / by Alternative Art Guide / in Indonesia

Earth, sky and breathing

For The Naked we selected the artists Mārtiņš Ratniks, Kaspars Podnieks and Daiga Krūze who, having left a significant mark on the Latvian art scene at a tender early age, are still well and kicking today.

Mārtiņš Ratniks (1975) works in video, media art, book design and sound. His early work within the artist group F5 can be viewed as crucial to reinvigorating the Latvian contemporary art scene of the late nineties and early noughties. Their übercool stance and club culture related output attracted a considerable following, and a number of imitators, too. After representing Latvia at the 25th Sao Paolo Biennale in Brazil (2002) and the 51st Venice Biennale (2005) the group faded somewhat, but Ratniks produced a number of solo shows.

“Fields” (RIXC Media Space, Riga, 2007) featured a wall of 30 CRT television sets stuck in a flickering pause on a single apparently abstract frame, while “Land” (kim? contemporary art centre, Riga, 2010) featured an endless glide across a terra incognita reminiscent of thermal imaging, “2001: ASpace Odissey” and a falling dream. The latest, “Projections” (kim? contemporary art centre, Riga, 2011), was exactly that – geometrically reduced projected images.

In one, a fine white line described the figure 8 on its side, chosing a slightly new path with each cycle, thus in 26 minutes filling the screen with a blinding white. On the opposite wall two projections merged into one, inviting the observer to question whether the seen is two- or three-dimensional. His idiosyncratic take on technology has found a fitting habitat in RIXC, the new media culture centre in Riga. While manipulating publicly accessible data and remixing scientific visual imagery, Ratniks is in no way your contemporary research-based artist. Instead, he creates landscapes where the spectator's imagination has to travel in order to do its own fieldwork.

If you asked Kaspars Podnieks (1980) to expand a little beyond the title of his shows “Unusual Place” and “Communicating Vessels” (both at kim? contemporary art centre, Riga, 2010 and 2011, respectively), he would probably deny everything. Although the exhibited works are framed photographs, he would protest at being called a photographer.

He would also squirm at the sound of the word “performance”, even though the images have caught him and his kin levitating inexplicably at an indefinite height above ground. After expressing a distaste for being called an artist he would go on an agitated rant about a “special place”. Podnieks comes from a small rural settlement in a picturesque part of Latvia where his parents run a farm. He still works on it and his special relationship with Drusti is underlined by his becoming a local politician.

Building a precarious contraption to stand on a good half a dozen metres above ground, welding a slowly rotating crane for two monitors showing a cow grazing, or painting a meadow and a tractor in scarlet so that from a certain point across the lake a red square can be seen – all that is shoved under the modest cover of “things on the side”. What matters, is that it is in and about a particular location. “I come from there and I am there. There I gain the certainty that the work will be true and thus worthwhile to the others as well.”

At a time when an artist's birthplace is the bit that comes before “lives and works in Berlin”, Podnieks' dedication to his village is special, and so is his art.

Daiga Krūze (1980) graduated from the Art Academy of Latvia as a painter in 2004. Her works caught everyone off guard. At a time when Lavian painting seemed to be hopelessly bogged down with tired exercises in virtuosity and regurgitation of art history, the large-scale works from the series “Streets” came as a much needed breath of fresh air.

The lonely characters treading the blue perspectives feature giant heads, swollen with a mixture of half-laid philosophies, shopping lists and Mike Skinner's lyrics. Paintings like “Street as Catwalk”, “Chicks” and “Screen Saver” betray both fascination with and questioning of contemporary urban culture, but they never degrade into criticism.

Her first show “100% Disappointment” (at a vacated car dealer's, Riga, 2004) lasted for three days only, yet it won her the first art prize (“Debut of the Year”, Artists Union and Culture Capital Foundation).

With the rising critical acclaim, an increasing number of followers, and even an interest from our feeble art market, conditions were ripe for a new local star to be born. Instead of capitalising on it, Krūze surprised us again by turning her gaze to nature.

Having grown up in the country, she had never strayed too far from it. From glimpses of how one passes an involuntary spare hour every morning in the city parks (“At Seven o‘clock”, gallery Pedants, Riga, 2006) to quiet adventures during long walks to the woods (“You Are What You See”, gallery 21, Riga, 2009), to what must be one of the largest paintings in Latvia, a 5 by 6 metre canvas titled “Sounds of the Sunrise” (2011), Krūze's shows are collections of evanescent, yet profound moments.

www.vkn.lv

www.kim.lv

www.rixc.lv

www.daigakruze.com

30 June 2017 / by Alternative Art Guide / in Latvia

Hungarian Poetry

When I chose to present the following three Hungarian artists, László Csáki's, Pista Horror's and Zsolt Tibor’s works for The Naked project, I was looking for phenomenons, which were relevant about the current Hungarian issues related to visual culture, aesthetics and society. All of them have a very individual, strong and experimental visual universe, in which they create a characteristic Middle Eastern European backdrop, although the way of their attitude is not a direct, rather a poetic one.

László Csáki (1977, Mosonmagyaróvár, Hungary) is a visual artist, media designer, and filmmaker. He graduated from the Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design (MOME)’s video department in 2002.

He has been working in diverse media with various techniques, such as chalk-animation, documentary and short fiction film, staged photography, storyboarding, and marquetry inlay. He often creates a very characteristic Middle Eastern European backdrop, which is then filled with surrealist, absurd, and lyric elements.

He likes to combine images with text, and his narrative series are often based on literature or story collections (Fluxus Hair Trainer, 2003; Big Stories, Tiny Winces, 2008).

Ordinary characters or actions are the usual protagonists of his art projects; he likes to reconsider the stories from the character's point-of-view or to create an entire world around them, completing their stories in imaginative ways (Günter and Gretel, 2001).

Recently he collaborated with other artists on different film projects, rather with the method of a cultural anthropologist. He tries to explore hidden communities, socially relevant issues (Tin City, 2010), or peculiar cultural phenomena (Egerszalók, 2006; Hungarian Greyhound, 2007).

He also teaches, designs books, and directs music clips and commercial advertisements.

More about the artist:
http://www.csakilaszlo.com

The artistic work and practices of István Máriás, aka Pista Horror (1984, Sepsiszentgyörgy, Romania), are based on contradictions between form and content.

He reacts critically to consumerism, questions its values, speaks up against political oppression, and talks about a universal human need for freedom within make-believe fairy tale worlds where well-known protagonists of children's books (i.e. Little Red Riding Hood, Bambi, Gőgös Gúnár Gedeon, the main character of a well-known Hungarian storybook) meet the superheroes, robots, and dinosaurs of comics, cartoons, and science fiction.

Pista Horror takes the visual topoi of the subject of his criticism, strips them of their recognized meaning, and re-uses them in his visions set in a surreal, depressing, and absurd world.

Elements such as the stained, old, and yellowed pieces of paper and sheets torn from school notebooks, compositions created to fit battered frames, or the visual appearance of ruinous, abandoned buildings with crumbling walls intensify Horror's distinctive trash aesthetic.

The way he locks his protagonists up in a box – whether it be a cage, a courtyard surrounded by high walls, or the space of the picture itself – is an analogy to our preconceptions, which hold us back from discovering the world.

This is exactly the phenomena against which Pista Horror is fighting with a critical approach, continuously reflecting on the world around us within his strong visual universe and with a talent for experimentation.

More about the artist:
http://www.horrorpista.com/index.html

The site-specific installations of Zsolt Tibor (1973, Budapest) remind one of pieces of a puzzle to be solved. They conjure up the constructivist, futuristic designs of the avant-garde, and its often utopian, alienated spaces and edifices.

These miniature scenes are made up of pencil drawings with subtle, hardly noticeable graphite lines; smeared blotches; paper cuttings taped in position and pieces of folded paper; moving and still images; archive photos behind plexiglass or in exhibition cases, and found plastic objects.

This complex world, compiled within the framework of a classical exhibition, thus becomes the simultaneous construction and deconstruction of spaces, landscapes, fragments of buildings, and elements just remotely referring to human presence.

Tibor’s visual and aesthetic experiments are based on accumulated layers of perception (drawing, projection, still and moving images, objects), a unique use of space (occupying space in a non-traditional way), and the timefactor (seemingly unfinished works).

The clacking of the slide-projector, the bluish-grey light of the projector, the lens of the magnifying glass, or the drawings resembling the architect’s plot all reinforce the idea of a scientific approach to art.

All the same, in these works of “boundless” drawing, apart from the irony directed at the scientific approach, a covert and sensitive reference to a broader socio-political context and the nostalgia for a vanished childhood takes shape.

More about the artist:
tiborzsolt.com

About the author:

Petra Csizek is a curator and cultural manager based in Budapest, Hungary. Currently she is the programme supervisor of ACAX | Agency for Contemporary Art Exchange, an affiliate of the Ludwig Museum – Museum of Contemporary Art, Budapest. Previously she was the assistant curator at Trafó Gallery – House of Contemporary Arts, Budapest, a board member of the Studio of Young Artists Association, and a member of the Labor Gallery committee, where she played a major role in the conception and the realisation of the gallery programme.

As a curator, her interest lies primarily in collaboration and interdisciplinarity in the works of the local emerging art scene, especially that of the youngest generation. Her last curatorial project, a group show entitled No One Belongs Here More Than You at the Kunsthalle – Budapest in 2011, examined mapping and existing artistic collaborations among the young artists of the Hungarian art field. She has participated in several public art projects and festivals (Placcc Festival, Temporary City), as she is interested in initiating art projects outside of gallery spaces.

30 June 2017 / by Alternative Art Guide / in Hungary